Nick’s own story seemed painless and unaffecting compared with hers, but she wanted to know it. Eventually he told her, ashamed of his weaknesses. She dried her eyes, sat up, listened.
They talked on through that long night, holding and touching each other, finding out what had happened, what, in fact, had brought them together again. Sometimes they lay still and in silence, but they never slept. He began to feel, perhaps wrongly, that only by being with Amy would he recover something of what he had lost.
Amy moved in to live with him the following day, arriving back at the hotel after midday, carrying a suitcase of clothes. Then, in the days and weeks that followed, she brought over more of her belongings and furniture from her flat in Sealand Place, as gradually she became a permanent part of his life.
They soon got over the surprise of their reunion, and settled into daily routines. When they talked about the past at all, the furthest back they went was to the Gerry Grove shooting, the only unfinished business that mattered.
That was then, this was now. While he watched over the top of his newspaper as Amy undressed, he noticed she was smiling. He loved the way maturity had filled out her body: strong and well-shaped legs, a long and handsome back, breasts that were much fuller than before but without any sign of sag, a strong face and a crown of dark hair. She was no longer pretty, but he could imagine no woman more attractive.
‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What are you smiling at?’
‘You, lying there looking at me.’
She was naked, and stood directly before him.
‘I look at you every night. That’s what you like, isn’t it?’
‘Shall I put on my nightie?’
‘No…get straight in.’
He tossed the newspaper aside and took her in his arms as she climbed into the bed beside him. Her skin was cold, and when she turned her buttocks against him and pressed them into his groin she felt like a chill vastness. With the hand stretching under her body he cupped one of her breasts, with the other he reached around and pressed his hand against her sex, pushing that lovely chill vastness of buttocks harder against him. He loved to feel the soft weight, the hairy moistness, together.
They never hurried their lovemaking, and rarely fell asleep straight away afterwards. They liked to lie together, arms holding around, playing affectionately with each other’s body. Sometimes it led to more lovemaking, but at other times they simply dozed together or talked inconsequentially about the day. That night Amy was not sleepy, and after a few minutes of cuddling she sat up, pulled on her nightie and switched on the bedside lamp.
‘Are you going to read?’ Nick said, blinking in the sudden glare.
‘No. I want to ask you something. Do you think Mrs Simons is a reporter?’
‘The American woman?’
‘Yes.’
‘I hadn’t given it a thought.’
‘Well, think about it now.’
‘What’s given you that idea?’ he said. ‘And what does it matter if she is?’
‘I ran into Dave today. He said she was.’
‘You know what Dave’s like better than I do.’
‘It doesn’t matter, of course, not really. But I’ve been thinking. She hasn’t said anything about it to us, and when the other reporters came around asking questions, they never made a secret of it. They weren’t too popular and they knew it, but they didn’t try to hide what they wanted.’
‘Then she probably isn’t,’ Nick said. ‘Not every stranger who comes to town is trying to get a story.’
‘I wondered if, because she’s an American, maybe she works differently.’
‘Why don’t you ask her?’
‘All right.’ Amy yawned, but showed no sign of being about to turn off the light and lie down. ‘She told me she’s British. Born over here, anyway. One of her parents was British.’
‘Why are you interested in her?’
‘I thought you might be.’
‘I’d hardly noticed her,’ he said, with complete truth.
‘That wasn’t the impression I got.’
Amy had an expression he had only recently learned to recognize, in which she smiled with her mouth but not with her eyes. It usually meant trouble for him, because of something he was thought to have done, or to have omitted doing. Now she was staring down into her lap, scooped into shape by her crossed legs. He reached out to touch her hand, but found it unyielding.
‘What’s up, Amy?’
‘I saw you with her in your office, laughing and that.’
‘What…?’ He could hardly remember it. ‘When was that?’
‘This morning. I saw her in there with you.’
‘That’s right,’ Nick said, and glanced at an imaginary wristwatch on his arm. ‘I was setting myself up for a visit to her bedroom later this evening. Do you mind if I go to her now?’
‘Shut up, Nick!’
‘Look, just because a single woman checks into my hotel doesn’t mean—’ He couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence, so ludicrous was the idea.
‘She’s not single, she’s married,’ Amy said.
‘Let’s turn out the light,’ he said. ‘This is getting silly and pedantic.’
‘Not to me it’s not.’
‘Suit yourself.’
He tried to make himself comfortable, bashing the pillow and pulling up his side of the bedclothes, but Amy sat in rigid anger beside him. Her lovemaking had given no clue of the mood she had been working herself into. He turned to and fro, trying to settle, and all the while Amy sat beside him, her eyes glinting, her mouth in a thin rictus of irritation. He fell asleep in the end.
CHAPTER 8
The next morning Teresa took her rental car for a drive around the Sussex countryside, but the sky was shrouded in low clouds, which were dark and fast-moving, bringing in squalls of heavy rain from the sea and obscuring the views she had come out to look at. She gained only the barest impression of the trees and hills and pretty villages she passed through. She was still ill at ease with driving on the left and before lunchtime she had done enough exploring to satisfy her curiosity.
She ate lunch in the bar of the White Dragon: Amy Colwyn served her in what seemed to be unfriendly silence, but on request microwaved a quiche for her and produced some boiled rice. Teresa sat at one of the tables closest to the fire, forking the stodgy food into her mouth with one hand and writing a letter to Joanna, Andy’s mother, with the other. Amy meanwhile sat on a stool behind the counter, flicking through the pages of a magazine and not taking any notice of her. Teresa inevitably wondered what she might have said or done, but was not too concerned. A little later, when more customers came in from outside, the oppressively silent atmosphere in the room lifted noticeably.
After lunch she drove along the coast to Eastbourne, and found the editorial offices of the Courier. She saw this as a preliminary trip, expecting that a trawl through the back issues of the paper would take two or three days, but to her surprise the newspaper stored its archives digitally. In a small but comfortably appointed room set aside for the purpose she accessed the archive from the terminal she found there, and in under half an hour had identified and downloaded everything she wanted about Grove, including brief court reports of his earlier minor offences as well as detailed accounts of the day of the massacre, and the aftermath. On her way out she paid for the floppy disk she had used, thanked the woman on the reception desk, and by mid-afternoon she was back in Bulverton. If she had known, or had thought to enquire, she could have used the internet and downloaded the same information from home. Or perhaps even from the hotel, if there was a modem she could use.
She returned briefly to the hotel and put away the disk for future study. Consulting her town map she located Brampton Road. It was one small street amongst many others like it, on the north-eastern edge of the town. She worked out the simplest route that would take her there, then found her tape recorder. She slipped in the new batteries she had bought that morning and briefly te
sted the recording level. All seemed well.
Brampton Road was part of an ugly postwar housing estate, whose best feature was that its position on one of the hills surrounding the town gave it an impressive distant view of the English Channel. The thick clouds of the morning were starting to disperse, and the sea was brilliantly illuminated by shafts of silver sunlight. Otherwise, the estate itself was a bleak and dispiriting place.
The terraced houses and three- and four-storey apartment blocks were built in a uniform pale-brown brick, and had been positioned unimaginatively in parallel rows, reminding Teresa of the Air Force camps of her childhood. There were not many mature trees to soften the harsh outlines of the buildings, and gardens were few. Much of the ground appeared to be covered in concrete: paths, hard-standings, driveways, alleys. All the roads were lined by rows of vehicles parked with two wheels up on the kerbs. A short row of shops included a convenience store, a satellite-TV supplier, a betting shop, a video rental store and a pub. A main road ran along the crest of the hill, and through the line of trees up there she could glimpse the high sides of trucks moving quickly along. There was a smell of traffic everywhere.
When she had found a place to park her car, and had climbed out to walk the rest of the way, Teresa felt the sharp edge of the cold wind. It had not been too noticeable in the lower parts of the town; here the uneven dips in the rising land created natural funnels when the wind came in from the direction of the sea. From the angle at which some of the more exposed trees were growing, she presumed it must do so most of the time.
The house she was looking for was not difficult to find. In this most unappealing of neighbourhoods it presented an even harsher aspect than the others. It was clearly unoccupied: all the windows in the front were broken, and the ones at street level had been boarded up, as had the door. Remains of an orange police-line tape still straggled on the concrete step and round the corner into the alley alongside. The grass in front of the house had not been trimmed for several weeks or months, and in spite of the winter season it was long and untidy.
It was the end house of one of the long terraces. The number 24 on the visible part of the door confirmed that this was the house Gerry Grove had been living in during the weeks leading up to the massacre. Apart from its recent decrepitude—it had obviously been neglected since its moment of notoriety—there was little to distinguish the house from any of the others. Teresa found her compact camera in her shoulder-bag, and took photographs from a couple of angles. Two women, trudging wearily up the hill and leaning low over the child strollers they were pushing, paid no attention to her.
She worked her way round to the rear, but here an old wooden fence, several feet high, blocked her access. A garden door had been sealed with a wooden hasp nailed across it. She peered through the loose slats of the fence, and could see an overgrown garden and more boarded-up windows. If she had really wanted to she could have forced her way through the battered fence, but she wasn’t sure of the rules. The police had once sealed this place; was it still protected by them from intruders? Why should anyone, other than the curious, like Teresa herself, want to look round this unexceptional house?
She stepped back and took some more photographs of the windows of the upper storey, wondering even as she did it why she was bothering. It was just one more lousy house in a street full of identically lousy houses; she might as well take pictures of any of them.
Except, of course, for the fact that this was the actual one.
Feeling depressed about the whole thing, Teresa put her camera away and again consulted her map. Taunton Avenue was two streets away, parallel to Brampton Road and higher up the hill. She left the car where she had parked it and walked up.
The women pushing their children were still ahead of her. It was not a steep hill, but it was a long one. When she paused for breath and turned to look back, Teresa could see the road trailing down and away towards the main part of the town for at least a mile. She could imagine all too easily what it must be like to slog up and down this long hill with small children to push, or when laden with shopping bags.
When she reached Taunton Avenue the two women ahead of her continued slowly upwards, and Teresa felt a guilty relief that she would not have to catch them up and perhaps speak to them. She was still acutely conscious of her status as an outsider in this shattered place, deserving nothing much from anyone. She was having enough difficulty explaining even to herself why she had made this expensive trip to England, and was not yet ready to explain herself to strangers.
Number 15 Taunton Avenue was a mid-terrace house, maintained to a reasonable standard of neatness with flowery curtains, a recently painted door and a tidy approach up the concrete path. She went to the door without glancing at the windows, as if to do so would give away the purpose of her visit, then rang the bell. After a wait the door was opened by a middle-aged, stoutly built woman wearing a clean but faded housecoat. She had a tired expression, and a fatalistic manner. She stared at Teresa without saying anything.
‘Hi,’ said Teresa, and immediately regretted the casual way she had brought with her from the US. ‘Good afternoon. I’m looking for Mrs Ripon.’
‘What do you want her for?’ the woman said. A boy toddler came out from one of the rooms and lurched up to her. He clung to her legs, peering round them and up at Teresa. His face was filthy around the mouth, and his skin was pale. He sucked on a rubber comforter.
‘Are you Mrs Ripon? Mrs Ellie Ripon?’
‘What do you want?’
‘I’m visiting England from the United States. I wondered if you would be willing to answer a few questions.’
‘No, I wouldn’t.’
Teresa said, ‘Is this the house where Mr Steve Ripon lives?’
‘Who wants to know?’
‘I do,’ Teresa said, knowing it was an inadequate and irritating answer and that she wasn’t doing this well. She was out of her depth in this country, without the usual back-up. She was used to holding out the badge, and getting her way at once. Her name alone wouldn’t mean anything to Steve Ripon himself, any more than to anyone else in the town. Come to that, neither would the badge. ‘He won’t know me, but—’
‘Are you from the benefit office? He’s out now.’
‘Could you say when you think he’ll be back?’ Teresa said, knowing she was getting nowhere with this woman, who she was now certain was Steve’s mother.
‘He never says where he’s going nor how long he’ll be. What do you want? You still haven’t said.’
‘Just to talk to him.’
Something was cooking inside the house, and its smell was reaching her. Teresa found it appetizing and repellent, all at once. Home cooking, the sort of food she hadn’t eaten in years, with all its implicit pluses and minuses if you were someone like her who had to watch what she ate.
‘No you don’t,’ Mrs Ripon said. ‘It’s never just talking, what people want with Stevie. If you’re not from the benefit office it’s something to do with Gerry Grove, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘He doesn’t talk about that any more. And no one else does, see?’
‘Well, I had hoped he might speak with me.’ She could not help but be aware of the woman’s deliberately blank expression, which had barely changed since she opened the door. ‘All right. Would you tell Steve I called? My name is Mrs Simons, and I’m staying at the White Dragon, in Eastbourne Road—’
‘Stevie knows where it is. You from a newspaper?’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘TV, then? All right, I’ll tell him you were here. But don’t expect him to talk to you about anything. He’s all clammed up these days—and if you want my opinion, that’s how it should be.’
‘I know,’ Teresa said. ‘I feel that way too.’
‘I don’t know why you people can’t leave him alone. He wasn’t involved with the shooting.’
‘I know,’ Teresa said again.
She was suddenly taken by a tremendous compas
sion for this woman, imagining what she must have been through over the last few months. Steve Ripon was one of the last people to see Gerry Grove before the shooting began. At first he was assumed to be an accomplice, and had been arrested the day after the massacre, when he drove back into town in his battered old van. He claimed he had been visiting a friend in Brighton overnight. Although this alibi was checked out by the police, a search of his van and this house in Taunton Avenue had been ordered anyway. In the van they had found a small supply of the same ammunition Grove had used, but Ripon had vehemently denied knowledge of it. When it was forensically examined the only fingerprints found on the box or its contents were Grove’s. By this time a sufficient number of eyewitness accounts had been assembled for it to be certain not only that Grove had acted alone but that any plans he might have made in advance had also been his alone. Steve Ripon had not been charged with an offence for having the bullets, but they got him anyway: for not having insurance or a test certificate for the van.
Throughout this period, the world’s press had camped out in Taunton Avenue, trying to find out what anyone who lived there might have known about Steve’s relationship with Grove, or indeed about Grove himself. This woman, Steve’s mother, would have borne the brunt of all that.
Having been through something very like it herself back home, Teresa had only sympathy for her.
When she reached the end of the concrete path, she turned to glance back. Mrs Ripon was still standing at the door, watching to see that she left. Teresa felt an impulse to go back to her and try to explain, to say that what she was probably thinking wasn’t true. But she had been trained never to explain unnecessarily, always to ask, wait for answers, evaluate carefully afterwards. Every situation with a member of the public had a procedure that had to be followed. Do it by the book.
The Extremes Page 8
