by Amanda Craig
From the school gates, he has learned that three current pupils at Shipcott Primary had also been taught piano by Randall. All the mothers spoke highly of him.
‘Did he come to your house for lessons, or did your kids go to him?’ Quentin asked.
‘Oh, we came to him. It was easy, with him living so close to the village – and he had that lovely piano,’ said the wife of the local GP. She had a pleasant face, albeit of the kind Quentin never remembers. ‘I wish I could have learnt from him myself.’
‘Was he a good teacher?’
‘Yes, he was, poor soul. He was always gentle, never lost his temper – you know, like some teachers do,’ said the farmer’s wife whose daughter was Rosie’s particular friend.
She blushed, faintly. Attractive, then, Quentin thought.
‘Did you stay with your daughter during lessons?’
‘Yes.’ The farmer’s wife knew exactly what his question meant, like all parents. ‘Of course, he was vetted by the police, but there was no point leaving her just to come back again. I spent many an afternoon in Home Farm.’
‘Seems a big house for a man on his own. Did he have a girlfriend?’
‘I don’t know. There’s certainly plenty would have been interested.’
‘I got the impression he was divorced,’ another mother said.
The GP’s wife said, ‘I always felt there’d been some tragedy in his life.’
‘I think there was some woman who stayed with him, sometimes.’
‘Really? Why?’
The farmer’s wife frowned. ‘I’d wait for my Lisa in the room next door, and sometimes I’d use the loo. It had a medicine cabinet on the wall, and inside there were, you know, sanitary products. No man would have those if he didn’t have a woman visiting. But I never saw her.’
Definitely interesting, Quentin thought. There had been no mention of this in the newspapers. He wondered whether the police even knew.
‘Did he teach any adults?’
Di Tore, they agreed, had been a pupil. Quentin raised an eyebrow, and the women giggled.
‘Don’t think it didn’t cross a lot of minds,’ said one. ‘She’s such a beauty.’
‘I don’t think she has eyes for anyone but Gore. You think, how can it be when he’s twice her age, but when you see them together, well …’
‘She’s kept Oliver’s dog, though.’
‘You ask me, Di Tore just has a kind heart. He loved that lurcher. So awful to think it might know who killed him. It wouldn’t leave his body.’
The dog, he thinks, as the train jiggles and squeaks its way through the darkness by the River Exe. Had it been with Randall when he was attacked? Would it have defended its master? Had it known the attacker? Had it been let out afterwards? His daughters say it’s called Blackberry. No, Bluebell. The police have found nothing, but that is insignificant. Quentin has a poor opinion of the police. Solving a crime has been helped enormously by forensics, but basically, you just have to keep asking questions. The trick is to ask the right ones. He remembers this from his early days as an investigative reporter. So what, or who, have the police not asked?
How did Randall get in a position in which his head could have been cut off is one question. After all, it wouldn’t be as if you’d kneel down as if for an executioner. Had Randall been drugged or knocked out first? If the latter, it might explain not only why he’d been decapitated but that the head had gone missing. Forensics could find out all kinds of things from a blow. If he’d been drugged, then it must have been by someone he knew, and the police were keeping that quiet. Really, though, what a strange and gruesome way of killing someone.
He trudges over to the distant station car park where he leaves his car. A text pings into his mobile: Marta caught an earlier, faster train, then a taxi, so he does not at least have to give her a lift. Such is his relief that the sight of Dartmoor undulating past the A30 fails to fill him with the usual sense of dread. The night sky is flocculent with clouds, and a moon is racing up to herd them. For a moment, thinking of log fires, he almost feels excitement.
Back at Home Farm, he immediately walks into a bauble hanging from a beam.
‘Happy Christmas Daddy!’ Rosie cries.
‘Why don’t I just give you my balls to spray too, while you’re about it?’ he shouts, clutching an eye. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’
‘Daddy, don’t swear. We couldn’t wait any longer to start decorating.’
‘We’ve cut loads and loads of ivy. If you get the straight bits growing up trees they’re best.’
Marta, Lottie and the girls have indeed been busy. There’s a smell of cloves, oranges and woodsmoke. For a moment, despite his smarting eye, he feels a rush of strong emotion. All through parenthood the boredom, anxiety and horror have been cross-hatched by a sense of wonder at his daughters’ beauty, and watching their delicate fingers unhook the remaining decorations floods him with this sensation. He can’t remember when, in his own past, Christmas stopped being magical, but the moment Stella was born, it had returned in all its force. It won’t last: one day they’ll lose it, just as he had done himself. Yet while it remains, he can’t bear to reject that feeling that all might be well in the best of possible worlds.
‘Drink?’ he says to Marta.
‘Oh, I’ll just have whatever is open,’ she says, as always.
‘I’m offering because nothing is open.’
‘I’ve brought you a bottle of Riesling.’
Quentin draws himself up, appalled. ‘That is the ONE wine no drinker touches.’
‘Please, Quentin,’ Lottie says, in a martyred tone.
To venture into the wilderness Marta has donned tweed trousers, a cerise cashmere twinset, pearls, and a brilliant pink silk scarf that matches her dog’s collar. Her thick white hair is immaculately styled, and her feet shod in lace-up leather brogues as shiny as conkers.
‘Are you warm enough?’ Lottie asks.
‘Darling, I am in mint condition, but perhaps, more wood on the fire? Aha, the piano. How did a Bösendorfer come to this place?’
‘It belonged to the previous tenant. I’m giving the girls lessons.’
‘Well …’ She tries an experimental chord or two, and says, ‘Fortunately, not too out of tune. You know, this can be almost as good as a Steinway?’
Marta, with an expression of rapturous concentration, begins to ripple out some chords. Quentin longs to laugh, but if it keeps the old bat occupied he’s not complaining.
Lottie turns to him. ‘You’re just in time to collect the turkey from Trelorn.’
‘But we always have goose,’ Quentin says.
‘Too expensive. My mother finds turkey easier to digest, anyway.’
At least he can retreat to his room. He goes upstairs to discover Marta is already in occupation, her suitcase unpacked and reeking of Je Reviens.
‘Where am I supposed to sleep?’ Quentin asks, returning in a fury.
Marta gives him an old-fashioned look. ‘With your wife.’
‘I’ll ask Xan to sleep on the sofa, then,’ he says.
‘I don’t think so, he’s too tall. No, if anyone sleeps on the sofa, it will be you,’ Marta retorts.
‘Christ, I only moved to the country to escape that.’
Trelorn is heaving with cars. He’s never seen so many vehicles or people; he even glimpses Janet and her daughter emerging from Asda. What a lumpen pair they are, he thinks. Their supermarket trolley is piled high with cat food, nappies, vodka, crisps, tinned ham and plastic bottles of some kind of fizzy drink. Is this what they’re having for Christmas?
His mobile rings. It’s Lottie on the landline.
‘I think you should fetch Xan. He’s done a day-shift which ends now. It may start snowing, and he shouldn’t have to cycle back in the dark if you have the car.’
Lottie rings off before he can protest.
Quentin hasn’t thought too much about what Xan’s job involves, but when he sees his stepson emerge from the factory gates
, wheeling his bicycle in the shredding white snow, there’s something forlorn about him.
He flashes his headlights, hooting, and Xan looks up, puzzled.
‘Get in.’
‘Fuck off, Dud,’ Xan says. He’s wearing a black woollen hat that bulges out at the back. Quentin takes a deep breath to control his temper.
‘It’s freezing, and I can drive you back.’
Xan is too tired to argue. Quentin gets out, folds the back seat down, and puts the bike in.
‘Interesting headgear,’ he says. ‘Makes you look as if you’re growing a brain tumour.’
‘That’s why I like it.’
Quentin smiles. ‘How’s the girlfriend situation?’
‘Butt out,’ Xan snaps. Then he sighs. ‘Katya has gone home for a month. Christmas is a big deal for Poles.’
‘Ah. We’re in the same boat, then,’ Quentin says.
‘Don’t kid yourself, Dud. I’m not like you, I’m a—’
‘One-man Taliban,’ Quentin finishes. ‘I know.’
Back in the house, the Rayburn is out. Disaster. They ring the estate agent, the landlord, the emergency number for repairs: everyone is away or not answering.
‘Is there no other cooking source?’ Marta asks, and Lottie shakes her head.
‘There’s the microwave, but otherwise only the top of the wood-burner. We can’t roast anything. Oh, Mutti, I am so sorry! You’ve come all this way and I can’t even give you Christmas dinner.’
‘Nonsense,’ Marta says briskly. ‘Quentin, you must prostrate yourself on your tummy, which I see is getting far too big, and fix it.’
‘But I don’t know a thing about Rayburns.’
Marta fixes him with a look. ‘Are you a man or a mouse? You will do it. Meanwhile, we prepare a meal. We had far worse than this in Berlin.’
When Lottie’s mother invokes her post-war childhood, there is no arguing with her. For the next hour, Quentin lies prone on the cold quarry tiles, inhaling the dust as he fiddles with plugs and oil feeds. Marta turns up the radio. A boy’s pure voice rings out with unearthly purity: Once in Royal David’s city
Stood a lowly cattle shed …
Tell me about it, Quentin thinks. The wood-burner next door is cracking like a whip, and Lottie is in her element: Christmas is a control freak’s heaven.
She hadn’t bargained with sharing her bed for the night, however. They have whispered arguments about this.
‘Why didn’t you think before inviting your mother?’
‘I somehow thought that as there are four bedrooms we’d be able to put up six people.’
‘The girls can’t sleep double up, you know how restless they get, and Marta certainly can’t be moved.’
In Quentin’s view, the girls would probably be fine sleeping top to toe, but of course the children must come first. He finds himself thinking, she used to be such fun before she had them. He has a brief memory of Lottie laughing, dazzling as a fish jumping out of a deep pool. How much easier it would be if she were dead, he thinks. No division of the assets, no more rows, just freedom. No, he doesn’t really think that. He’s just so weary of the fighting …
‘Well, Xan can’t sleep with me.’
‘No, that’d be altogether too much like Hamlet. Jesus, Lottie! Am I going to have to go back to my parents’ and sleep at The Hovel?’
‘Why not? You’re driving over to fetch them for Boxing Day and you’ve slept there before.’
Despair clutches at him. He wants to be here on Christmas Eve, with his daughters, not his aged, dying father.
‘I am prepared to sleep in your bed, if you are prepared to have me.’
Lottie glares at him. ‘Dream on.’
Eventually a meal is made, with microwaved baked potatoes finished on the embers and stuffed with grated cheese. The children sit huddled together under a blanket on the sofa with their plates balanced on their laps, watching It’s a Wonderful Life.
‘Do you believe in angels, Daddy?’
‘If only I could get one to make the Rayburn work, I would.’
‘Dexter and Tiger have an Aga. Why don’t we have an Aga?’
‘Because we’re poor, and they’re rich.’
‘You can do it, Daddy,’ says Rosie. He smiles at her, then looks down at an odd flicker of movement.
Beside his mother-in-law’s immaculately shod feet is a large rat. It must have crawled out to die from the poison he’d put down. Beside him, Lottie tenses, too. The terrier, fortunately, is fast asleep.
‘Mutti, there’s a rat – a ratty old pile of sheet music that I found in the piano stool, maybe we can all sing some carols round the piano before we go to bed?’
Xan raises an eyebrow at this, but Marta nods and says,
‘Of course, my darling.’
He offers her his hand to aid her rise in a show of gallantry, which she accepts without looking down. Once at the piano, she loses all interest in anything but making music. The girls follow her, skipping, and even Xan comes too.
Quentin and Lottie exchange a single glance, then he seizes a sheet of newspaper and she a plastic bag. The rat is definitely dead. Its yellow teeth show slightly in a grimace, and its little paws look weirdly human. The long, hairy, greasy-looking tail flops down. He can see the nausea in Lottie’s face, and takes the bag from her at once, deftly rolling up the limp lump. How many more are there? Clearly, the poison is working; now he must go round to check it’s nowhere that Marta’s wretched dog can find it.
‘What will you do with it?’ Lottie murmurs.
‘Take it to the bin outside.’
He puts on his wellingtons.
‘Just getting more logs for the fire,’ he says, not that anyone pays any attention.
The air is sharp with woodsmoke. Frost gleams in the garden, its thin crust crunching underfoot. At the end of the garden, the line-up of overgrown ash trees scratch their black nibs against the sky. All this stuff I have in my head from a country childhood, he thinks; I can name every tree and plant I see, and who gives a damn?
He trudges to the bin shed. The tomcat and his pregnant wife are snuggled up there together for warmth in some old hay bales, their eyes reflecting in his torchlight. He looks at the little feline family, guiltily.
‘No room at the ruddy inn, moggies.’
Still, they are probably happier than the human beings at Home Farm. He pours them some kibble from a bag, and fresh water.
‘Turkey tomorrow,’ he promises. Absurd, to be talking to cats because he can’t talk to his family!
The voices of Marta, Lottie, Xan and the children come to him through the curtained windows.
Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,
Alles schläft; einsam wacht
Nur das traute hochheilige Paar.
His eyes stinging, he re-enters, stamping his feet, then lowers himself back onto the cold kitchen floor and lights another match for the Rayburn. Lottie stands over him.
There’s a long pause.
‘Thank you for not letting my mother see it,’ she says, stiffly.
‘That’s all right.’
It’s the first nice thing she’s said to him for years.
‘Quentin?’
‘Mmm?’
‘I was thinking … you’ve given up your bed so … if you like, you could share mine.’
Quentin jerks his head up, and bangs it on the Rayburn door.
‘What?’
It’s lucky she has no sense of humour.
‘Unless you’d rather not.’
‘Well, I—’
But at that moment, there is a faint tingling sound, and the Rayburn catches.
13
The Deep Midwinter
By now, Lottie is so knackered from writing a hundred Christmas cards, battling through shops to buy special food, peeling vegetables, wrapping oddly shaped presents, searching for the Christmas decorations she carefully packed six months ago in London, putting up fairy lights, taking down fairy lights, replacing several b
ulbs on the fairy lights, cutting boughs of holly and ivy, making a wreath for the door and another wreath for the table, sewing angel costumes for the girls, forcing hyacinths and making up the bed for her mother in Quentin’s room that she is not sure whether she is drunk on gin or exhaustion. Ever since she was told about the murder, she has been sleeping with a poker by her bed, just in case, so sharing a bed for the night with her husband is the least of her worries.
The Rayburn roars into life. Within seconds, heat and normality are creeping back into the room.
‘Of course.’
Her mother is right: he is thickening at the waist, and his ears are getting that tufty look of a middle-aged man infrequently acquainted with a barber. Yet he’s still handsome. Had he not been, maybe he wouldn’t have been ruined.
Few handsome men, she reflects, have the moral fibre to withstand their own good looks. They are accustomed to getting away with all kinds of bad behaviour, and Quentin still has the kind of profile that makes her understand why barbarians liked smashing the noses off Greek statues.
He is not, in fairness, all bad. He isn’t a spendthrift or wholly irresponsible. He might one day choose to be better, to be kinder, to be less faithless and philandering, if he could only realise that it was a choice. Like most of his tribe, he will never restrain himself from saying or writing something cruel if it’s funny, whereas to Lottie, malice is the lowest form of wit. If only I had not idealised him, she thinks. If only I’d known then that there’s a window of two years when a man will do anything you want. I got him to give up smoking; he could have given up spite. Though what I should have said to him is that, if he ever strayed, I’d leave. But it never even crossed my mind, back then.
Much of this has flooded over her on seeing Marta again. They know each other too well for words, and by the merest flick of her eyebrow, Marta dismisses country life.
‘After Christmas, you and the girls are coming back to London with me for a week. This is my present to you. I have tickets to see The Marriage of Figaro, and I am taking the girls to see The Nutcracker.’
‘How generous, Mutti.’
Lottie is cheered to think of a holiday in the city, even if it feels like an odd reversal. To see her closest friends and some culture will fill the festive void and have the added benefit of annoying Quentin enormously. Meanwhile, there is Christmas to be got through. She sets her alarm clock to start the turkey at 6 a.m., and the girls bounce into her bedroom to read ‘The Night before Christmas’, followed, shyly, by Xan, who is far too old for this but likes the tradition.
