by Sam Hayes
Conduct investigations, he muttered incredulously in his head. He was reminded of Louisa and their early-morning run out of Martock last weekend. He wondered whether to call her, to apologise, but what good would that do? Theirs wasn’t the kind of relationship where regret and apology had a place. From one point of contact to the next, anything tense or questionable that had gone before was always forgotten. A clean slate each time. He wondered if Louisa could help obtain a birth certificate for Ruby. She was a private investigator, after all. She had contacts.
Robert watched as Ruby locked the box, replaced the key under the rug and carefully slipped the tin back into the void behind the desk’s drawer. He didn’t like himself for planning to sneak back later to take a proper look at the contents, even though he had satisfied himself that there was no birth certificate for Ruby and the remaining documents were obviously personal, judging by their covert location.
‘How about a cold drink and a pastry down at Luigi’s? My treat.’ Robert stared at the ceiling, disgusted with himself.
Ruby grinned and Robert guided her down the stairs and out into the street. Luigi’s was only a block away. She had homework but it could wait.
Robert found them a table on the street and ordered strawberry smoothies and Danish pastries. He was overly aware that he reeked of whisky although Ruby didn’t appear to have noticed.
The sun, still intense even through the layer of visible pollution, baked the guilt deeper into Robert’s consciousness and gave him a glaring headache right across his forehead. Knowing that he would be prying through Erin’s personal papers at the first opportunity tasted too much like how it had all begun last time. If he were to confide his feelings to Louisa, well, he wasn’t sure their friendship would hold out. Robert blinked heavily and sipped his strawberry smoothie.
‘Guess what?’ Ruby said, perched on the edge of the metal bistro chair. She stirred her straw through her drink, staring down coyly.
‘What?’ Robert grinned into the glare, the pain in his head cutting through his temples.
‘A boy at school fancies me. He’s asked me out.’
Robert knew that those words were as hard for her to say as him confessing to Erin that he’d been prying on her computer.
‘That’s nice, love. What’s his name?’ He tried to appear casual although he suspected that it would end in heartbreak in a couple of months. Briefly recalling his own awkward teenage romances, he touched her hand. The contact caused him to wonder who her father was, what he would think of this adolescent development.
‘He’s called Art,’ she said. ‘He’s two years above me and plays in a rock band.’ Ruby slurped her smoothie, noisily draining the tall glass. ‘Art’s on a scholarship because he’s really clever. His dad wouldn’t be able to afford Greywood otherwise.’
Robert noticed her cheeks flush with colour. This is healthy, he told himself. This is fine. He struggled to keep back the barrage of warnings about staying out late and walking alone at night and kissing and things way worse than that. But hearing Ruby tell him that someone actually liked her was precious enough to make him contain his fatherly instincts. Besides, Erin could talk to her about boys and going on dates and all the cautions that would stem from that discussion. So instead of deflating Ruby’s enthusiasm for the boy, Robert asked more about Art.
‘That’s a funny name, Art. Where does he come from?’
‘It’s not funny. He told me it means stone. It’s Gaelic.’ The bright sun was swallowed up in Ruby’s fathomless eyes and absorbed by her long dark hair which flowed over her shoulders. She collected flakes of Danish pastry on the tip of her moist finger before scattering them on the pavement. A couple of pigeons hopped over and fought for the crumbs.
When several more birds gathered, Robert shooed them away with his foot. He dabbed at his forehead with a paper napkin. His head still thumped just beneath his skull, and the sun wasn’t helping. He opened the parasol over their table.
‘Which part of London is he from?’
‘They’re originally from Wales.’
‘That’s nice. By the sea or in the countryside?’ Robert was about to drop the subject of Art. Ruby wasn’t giving much away, least of all where he lived.
‘They used to be travellers but settled down when Art got the music scholarship. His dad thinks he’ll be famous.’
Robert accidentally sent his plate and knife clattering to the pavement as he raised his hand to wipe the sweat from his face again. Pigeons flapped away from the tables and Robert felt the blood drain from his head. Nausea and a sense of not being quite real replaced the pain and a voice banged about between his ears, insisting that traveller was OK, hippy was fine, gypsies were great.
‘Travellers, huh?’ Robert tried to sound cool about it.
‘Yeah, like caravans and trailers except they’ve left those in Wales while Art studies. They’re living in a squat at the moment.’
‘Squat?’ Robert’s mouth went dry. He needed a glass of iced water.
‘Art says it’s really nice. They’ve got electricity now and everything. He’s asked me round for the summer solstice. They’re having a party.’
‘Party?’ Robert waved at the waitress, used sign language to get the bill and pay, and then escorted Ruby home. He was only half listening as his stepdaughter babbled on about Art. He had heard about as much as he could bear already.
Erin was avoiding him. The only sign that his wife was actually home was her electric-blue Mazda parked in the street and the collection of orange gerberas dumped on the hall table. Robert had called out a greeting from the living room when he heard the front door bang shut but perhaps over the volume of Ruby’s resounding new composition, it had gone unnoticed.
He clicked the dining-room door shut, muting Ruby’s music enough to hear the bath running upstairs, and climbed the stairs wearily. He stopped in their bedroom doorway to see a pile of discarded clothes on the floor. He inhaled a dose of his wife’s end-of-day scent before deciding not to bother her in the bathroom but carry on up to the solitude of his study.
The air thickened as he went up the flight of stairs to the attic rooms. It was always hot up there in summer. Robert paused on the small landing between his study and his wife’s. He stared into Erin’s work space, noticing that she had already been up and dropped her briefcase beside her desk. She had also booted up her computer, probably in readiness for a couple of hours’ work after dinner. He wondered if she had noticed that anything was disturbed. He nodded, thankful he’d remembered to plug her computer back into the power outlet.
Robert sighed, suddenly realising how long it was since they had spent an evening alone without worrying about deadlines or paperwork or Ruby’s troubles at school. They’d only been married a couple of months and already life had disintegrated into routine and responsibility.
Robert reluctantly thought of Jenna. They’d never had enough time for things to turn stale. It was all over way before that. Briefly, he considered that perhaps solid routine actually gave rise to a familiar kind of trust and had his marriage to Jenna been allowed to drizzle into the mundane, then she might not have died.
He tried to shut out the feelings but like sunlight creeping under a door, he was filled with the same suspicion that had caused the initial thread of paranoia when he was married to Jenna. It wasn’t anything tangible yet and, really, wasn’t anything his already stimulated immune system shouldn’t be able to handle. But a series of doubts, little nagging pointers were leading him to believe that Erin was hiding something. It was the lack of transparency that drove him wild.
Robert went into his study, stretching up to open the skylight. It was stifling. A couple of angry wasps shot out above the rooftops as he secured the window open. He fell back into his chair, unable to think about doing any work until he could iron out the messy thoughts in his head.
‘Ask her,’ he said quietly. ‘Just damn well ask her.’ Robert banged his fist down on the edge of his desk, causing his key
board to rattle. With Jenna, he had dissected their relationship into a million irreparable pieces so that had she survived the crash, their marriage would have been taken to the wreckers anyway.
Maybe it was his job that made him wary, mistrustful and suspicious. Surely he had met enough dubious characters in his work to know if his wife, who was dissimilar in every way to the unsavoury clients he usually dealt with, wasn’t being entirely honest. It should be easy. He knew he should treat Erin on an innocent until proven guilty basis – if it wasn’t for that feeling he had that all was not right. He didn’t like these hunches but he wasn’t comfortable ignoring them either. He decided to call Louisa before the evening was over.
Robert reached into the filing cabinet for his emergency bottle of Scotch.
For the first time ever, he felt as if his career and home life were blending at the edges. He had always been adept at separating the two, even though he often brought files home. It was the emotion that was leaking – suspicion, fear and a natural instinct to mistrust. The promise he’d made to himself, to handle his second marriage with dignity and respect, was already losing its significance. And the ethical rules by which he conducted his business life, on which Mason & Knight had built their reputation, appeared tarnished now in the light of Mary Bowman’s story. A small part of Robert’s life was beginning to sag and he didn’t like it one bit. It reminded him too much of last time.
Erin, having finished her bath, called out that she was going down to the local shop to pick up a few provisions. They still hadn’t seen each other face to face since she arrived home. Ruby’s music fluttered its way to the top of the house. She was composing a song for Art and was obviously lost in her task.
Robert’s stomach lurched when he remembered Ruby’s news. How would he break it to Erin that her daughter wanted to go to a party in a squat? She was so protective of Ruby, he didn’t think she’d allow it. Then his belly flipped even more when it occurred to him that he now had an opportunity to look in Erin’s secret box. He’d have to hurry. The shop was only a short walk away.
Robert’s head still buzzed and banged from the heat and guilt as he rose from his chair, not to mention the second dose of Scotch that swilled inside him, curdling the strawberry smoothie on which it sat. As he went into Erin’s study, he reassured himself by promising that it was just this once; that today was an anomaly, a blip in an otherwise spotless relationship, that there was a reasonable explanation for Ruby’s untraceable birth certificate. Somehow, these thoughts made it acceptable.
Robert took a quick glance behind him and knelt down to remove the cash box from the secret compartment underneath Erin’s desk. Again, that spillage of feelings, from work to home, from past to present. Detaching himself from grim clients and their low acts, ironing out their guilt with the weight of heavy circumstance and persuasive talk was second nature in the office and court. Convincing himself that it was reasonable to pry through his wife’s personal belongings, truly believing that if he found any evidence – of what? – it would make everything all right, should have been impossible.
Instead, he moved swiftly, dimly aware that the anxiety he was experiencing was more a marker indicating that it was happening again, like the way saliva pools on the tongue before vomiting. The droplets of sweat on his face weren’t due to the shame he would suffer if Erin ever found out he’d been snooping but rather a sign that his rational side was fighting his instincts.
Robert felt for the tin and pulled it out, just as Ruby had done a few hours earlier. He paused, listening for anything other than Ruby’s piano music. He reached for the key that Ruby had replaced under the small rug and inserted it into the metal box. His heart beat in time with the vibrant tune that Ruby was composing.
He opened the box and lifted out the entire pile of papers carefully. He had to make sure that he replaced everything in exactly the same order. Briefly, he visualised Erin. She would have reached the shop by now, would perhaps be choosing a bottle of wine or searching for black olives or a bag of lettuce. About another ten or twelve minutes, he reckoned.
The box contained old birthday cards, a couple of folded piano examination certificates with Ruby’s name neatly written in black ink, some photographs of Ruby on a pebbled beach when, he guessed, she was about three years old – there was no mistaking her chocolate-sauce eyes and dimpled chin.
Robert flicked through several school reports, an unfinished letter that Erin had begun writing over a decade ago according to the date, which began, strangely, Dear Erin . . . Robert assumed that she must have been writing to herself as a cathartic exercise because at first glance he could see it was filled with painful words, although most of the handwriting was impossible to read and barely made any sense. And, finally, he separated a thick bundle of letters bound up with purple ribbon. In the short time he had, Robert didn’t know what to look at first. He opened a birthday card.
‘To my dear little Ruby on your fifth birthday. Love you forever. Mummy xxx.’
Robert smiled, opened another. This time it was Ruby’s seventh birthday card, again signed ‘Mummy’.
‘No daddy?’ Robert shrugged and slotted the cards inside each other again as he had found them. They were inconsequential. Everyone kept their kids’ birthday cards. He couldn’t remember exactly when Erin said she had split from Ruby’s father, not that it mattered – he didn’t want to dwell on such facts – but he was beginning to suspect that Ruby was very young when the separation happened.
He shuffled through the letters instead. Most of them had been sent to Erin at her previous address in London, where she’d been living when he’d first met her, but half a dozen or so, he noticed, were addressed to Fresh As A Daisy. Some were brief notes on postcards and others were several pages long, neatly folded into small envelopes. All the correspondence was scrawled in red or green Biro from someone who signed themselves floridly as ‘BK’. The writing was barely decipherable and on the first letter Robert removed from its envelope, the script cascaded across a printed letterhead.
He studied the address – King’s Flowers, Market Street, Brighton. The knot of guilt in his throat didn’t deter him from reading what BK had to say.
My darling Erin,
Missing you madly. Everyone’s asking where you’ve run to. So pleased to hear it’s working out in the big city this time. Watch out for all those nasty men. You don’t have me to protect you now, you know. Possibly coming to town in a month or two. Will call you before. Get the bed ready, darling.
Flowers all wilting since you’ve been gone.
Love forever,
B.K. xxx
Robert felt his stomach knot as he read that someone loved Erin forever. That was his job now, wasn’t it? He replaced the letter carefully and scanned another. Again, talk of coming to stay, how much Erin was missed in Brighton, several mentions of Ruby and what a credit to her mother she was. One letter was signed ‘Uncle Baxter’.
If he was Erin’s uncle then Robert could hardly accuse Erin of having an affair with him. But strange, he thought, that she’d never mentioned an uncle before. Having discovered early in their relationship that Erin’s parents were dead, that she had no brothers or sisters, that her parents had left behind no other living relatives, Robert had never bothered to question Erin further about family. She simply didn’t have any. She and Ruby were the family, a neat little package. Uncle, he therefore assumed, must be in the familiar form rather than blood sense of the word.
There were two letters in the bundle that Erin herself had penned in reply to Baxter and evidently never posted. She talked of her new life in London, about how guilty she’d felt for leaving Brighton after the fire and that it was one of the hardest things she’d ever done, about how Ruby had started a new school and how grateful she was to him for everything he’d done for her. She wrote how good it was to see him last weekend and how she had found a new job that allowed her to specialise in wedding flowers. Robert recognised this as the shop where she was wor
king when they had met.
Fleetingly, the first image he’d ever had of Erin flashed through his head but anger and guilt made quick work of sweeping that aside. Rifling through his wife’s personal belongings, discovering that she could be having an affair was not the time to cherish happy memories.
Robert put the letter down and stared at the ceiling, trying desperately to fight the prickling in his eyes. He hadn’t even known that Erin had once lived in Brighton and she’d certainly never mentioned a previous lover there or anything about a fire. She had always implied that there had been no other relationships since her separation, although it struck Robert that that was the version he preferred to believe – a convenient, no-risk synopsis that posed zero threat.
Could his scant knowledge of his wife’s life, perhaps construed by her as lack of interest and therefore leading to an affair, be a direct result of him not being able to bear the pain of acknowledging previous lovers? It was Jenna’s first love that had driven the fatal wedge through his first marriage, after all. And he really knew surprisingly little about Erin’s past – a protection mechanism, he decided, that would have to be changed.
Then, as he swiftly scanned the other papers, stopping briefly to decipher the peculiar letter that began ‘Dear Erin’ although the writing was too scratchy to unravel in the short amount of time he had left, the truth occurred to Robert like a slow sunrise.
Of course Erin had never sketched Baxter King into her former life. He was no former lover. He was a current lover. It was obvious that she was still seeing him.
