by Harper Fox
“Not if they discharge you. Mackie said Longshanks Len would take my shifts in that case. He told Mackie he felt like he owed me one, for some reason.”
Echoes of snarling voices, bouncing off concrete walls. A brick sailing through the air, and a nation suddenly awash with legitimised fear and hate. “Kaz,” I said softly, taking the napkin from him and beginning to unfold it. “Why did you talk to your dad about Vishram?”
“Because of what you told me.”
“Okay. But when did I...”
“Hello? Excuse me. I’m looking for a Robert Jackson?”
A small man in his sixties was waiting in the doorway. He was dressed in a business suit, and looked exhausted in the harsh neon lights. I hitched myself up against the pillows. “You’ve found one. Can I help you?”
“Er... I don’t know. It’s all rather a puzzle, and such a sad one. My name’s George Jones.”
Karan got to his feet. “Oh. Are you Queenie Jones’s son?”
“That’s right. I’ve spent most of today talking to the police and air-crash investigators, and—well, I wanted to see Mr Jackson, if he’s all right to talk.”
“As long as it’s not for too long.” Karan pulled a chair up to the bed and gestured to the new arrival to sit down. Then he resumed his place on my bed, carefully avoiding the cage. “Robbie, you were pretty confused when we first brought you in. You were making a fuss about somebody called Queenie, who’d once lived in a cottage near where we crashed. The police thought they’d better try and trace her relatives, just in case you knew something we didn’t.”
I rubbed my eyes in disbelief. Then I stretched out a hand. “George, who works in the bank now?” A right boring bugger these days, my brain supplied in Queenie’s voice, but I managed to keep my mouth shut.
“That was a long time ago,” George said, shaking my hand. “In fact all of this was such a long time ago that I never thought I’d have to think about any of it again.”
“I don’t understand. Why have you been talking to air-crash investigators?”
“You lads are too young to remember. It was 1988, just a few days before Christmas. I was driving up with my wife and kids to see my mum. She had a cottage on the edge of Kielder Forest, just where the old road used to end.”
He’d gone very pale. I passed him my cup of mulled wine. “Please go on.”
“Thanks. The thing is, when we got there, something terrible had happened. When I look back on it, it still feels like some kind of nightmare or dream, something you’d see on TV. The house was on fire. At least... the remains of it were, the old stone porch and a few bits of wall.”
I felt suddenly sick. I leaned back against the pillows, and Karan took hold of my wrist. “I don’t understand. I thought... I had a kind of dream that your mum had made a 999 call. That’s why we went out there. And the house was intact.”
“That’s not possible, Mr Jackson. Queenie died twenty eight years ago, on the 21st of December. A plane crashed that night, a jet on its way from Heathrow to New York. It was blown up in midair by terrorists, and some of the pieces fell on a little place called Lockerbie.”
I knew about Lockerbie. It might have happened a couple of years before I’d been born, but everyone growing up in Northumberland and southern Scotland at some point learned the story of that night. Lockerbie was one of those eerie echo-words, no longer just a place but a synonym for disaster, like Dunblane or Columbine. My mum had once showed me some newspaper cuttings she’d kept: policemen from the tiny local force stretchering covered remains away from a ruined cockpit. Their heads were down, their shock palpable. “What... What has this got to do with your mum?”
“The plane broke up when the bomb went off. The main part hit the village, but bits of it fell all across Kielder as it went down. A section of the fuselage hit my mum’s house and skidded off into the trees.”
“Oh, Christ. Is that when she was killed?”
“Weirdly, no. We thought so. But once I’d driven back into Greystead to call for help, and teams of emergency people and investigators arrived, they eventually found her in the woods. She was sitting—looking quite comfortable and peaceful, so I suppose she’d died of the cold—inside a piece of the wreckage. Wearing her best Christmas sweater.” He took an unsteady breath. “She was a tough old girl, and she was bloody nosy, too. My guess is that she somehow survived the impact and the fire, and she went out to look around afterwards. Anyway, there she was. And she had this poor burned-up photograph album in her hands.”
“Catherine and Ron.”
George glanced helplessly at Karan. “Er...”
“It’s okay.” He stepped in, as he always did, calm and kind and unfazed. “Robbie, mate, it’s okay. Those were the names you kept saying after we brought you in—Queenie, and Catherine and Ron, and how you had to find them. And one of the coppers remembered there’d been two passengers on that Lockerbie flight unaccounted for, even after all the forensic work was done. He made a call to the guy on the Dumfries and Galloway force who’d coordinated the original search. He was pretty interested.”
“Shit. Why haven’t I had teams of crash investigators lining up by my bed?”
“Oh, they want to talk to you, believe me. But you weren’t well enough, and they’ve been fended off for now.”
I could guess who’d been doing the fending. Karan’s eyes were dark, a glimmer of ferocious watchfulness just below the surface. George cleared his throat. “The thing is, Mr Jackson, I had a call a couple of hours ago from the police. Because of you knowing those names—which I understand were never listed in the press over here, what with the young couple being from the States—some officers from Dumfries who know the area well went to have a look around near my mother’s cottage, or where it used to be. And they found...” He paused to take off his glasses and dab at his eyes. “Goodness, this is difficult, even after all these years. They found some human remains.”
I closed a grip around Karan’s hand, grateful when he laced his fingers between mine and held tight. “Was it them?”
“It’s very hard to say. There isn’t much left. But given the location and the age of the—the bodies, it seems likely. So now the last of those poor souls can be laid to rest. I don’t know how you found out about them, Mr Jackson, or how you come to be talking about my mum as if you knew her, but she always said to me there were more things in heaven and earth than we can hope to understand. She liked her own company, did Queenie. That’s why she lived where she did. A lot of people used to think she was a witch.” He got up, tugging his jacket straight. “That’s all nonsense, of course. I’d better leave you to get well, Mr Jackson.” He nodded politely at Karan. “Very best of the festive season to you both.”
***
Karan unfolded the napkin. He spread it out on the table. I wondered if I’d spilled something: my hands hadn’t been too steady after George Jones’s departure. Then I realised that he was examining the pattern.
I examined it too. The last time I’d seen one with a reindeer design had been in Queenie’s living room. “That came out of your pocket,” I said flatly. “Where did you get it?”
He looked at me from under his eyelashes. “Who knows? So many parties over the last few days.”
“Karan.”
“I know how sorry you are you crashed the van, Rob.”
“I know you know.”
“Yep. So I wasn’t gonna mention it again. Thought I’d just leave Mackie to mention it...”
“Day in, day out, until I retire or die.”
“I should think so. But I wanted to say something.”
“Say what you like. You’ve got a far better right than Mackie.”
Karan turned the napkin so that the reindeers were the right way up for him. He leaned his elbows on the table. “I’ve looked at our callout log for that night. We arrived in Kielder around seven. The Lockerbie plane hit the ground at eight minutes past.”
“Sweetheart, I can’t explain any of that. I�
��”
“No, I know. It’s okay. I’m trying to work out what happened to us. Because we crashed in the early evening, and when we didn’t report in, Mackie sent another van out to find us. The police followed on. They all drove straight past us and didn’t see a thing.”
“They drove past? How could they? The road ended there.”
“Apparently not. It wasn’t till the sun came up that a passing farmer saw us and made the call.”
“So... we were there all night?”
“Seems that way. You were trapped, and I was out cold, and we should’ve both died of hypothermia, if anything about this made sense.” Suddenly he crumpled the napkin and pitched it accurately into a bin beside the empty bed next door, as if he didn’t want to see it again. “But it doesn’t. It doesn’t make sense. And I had the strangest dream.”
I shunted my backside over on the mattress. I was the side ward’s sole occupant for now, although doubtless that would change as the wonderful night unfolded. The nursing staff were used to us, and even if they hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have cared. “Come here,” I said, and wrapped my arms around him as he crumpled down beside me. “I’ve got a really good idea.”
“If you’re trying to change the subject or distract me, feel free.”
“It’s this. How about if we put the house on the market after New Year? It’s too big for us, and we’re struggling to afford it. We only need a flat.”
“You love the house, Rob.”
“No, I don’t. I loved the idea of having something so different from the rotten little hole I grew up in that I’d never have to think about the past again.”
He pushed his brow against my shoulder like a tired cat. “All right. I have an idea, too. How about if we forget our big fat wedding, get married in the Civic Centre and run the hell off to Thailand for a month instead?”
“Oh, Kaz. You wanted it so much.”
“No, I didn’t. What I wanted was to show every snooty aunt, uncle and cousin of mine that I could marry a boy—a white boy—and be just as good as they were. And to show that damn brother of mine that I wasn’t scared.”
I kissed the top of his head. “We’ll send them all postcards from Thailand.”
A relative silence descended. It was the kind we were both very used to: background noise of voices, trundling wheels of trolleys, the song of the havens of saved lives. I broke it eventually—carefully, aware of it like new-baked bread in my hands. “If you... had the same dream as I did, my sweet Karanji—if you saw all that...”
“Please don’t.”
“All right, but—why did you put up with me for so long?”
“Didn’t we put up with each other?”
“Oh, yeah, you’re hard to live with. A tantrum once a year or so over the toothpaste tube.”
“Well, is it so hard to squeeze it from the bottom?” He chuckled briefly, then looked up, deadly serious. “I love you, Rob. I’ll marry you anywhere, anyhow.”
“But something was too much for you. Something broke you down.”
He ran a hand across my chest, careful to avoid the bruises. “How did you feel when you found out I’d gone to rant and rage and weep on Vishram’s shoulder, not yours?”
There was no point in asking how he knew I’d found out. I was certain that this would be our last conversation about the house in the woods. “Gutted. Like I’d failed you in every way I could.”
“Okay. So imagine how I felt when I went to comfort you after that crash on the bypass—our last callout before Queenie—and you shoved me away. Jesus, Rob. You were sitting crying in the snow.”
I drew breath to defend myself. That was my reflex: I was a stubborn git, I supposed, and I didn’t like to be wrong. I was fine. I wasn’t crying. But those would have been outright lies, and it wasn’t what he’d minded. Not what had made him get back in the van and say he’d had enough. “I’m so sorry.”
“I wonder if I can ever make you understand that I... I’ll put up with anything you do. That I want your struggles, your dark side. I just can’t cope if you shut me out.”
I did understand. “I want your ranting and raging, too. I want to earn it back.” Suddenly that felt like a huge task, and a pulse of fear went through me. “Do you think there’s time?”
“There will be if I have anything to do with it.” He sat up, and wriggled a little way up the bed: put an arm around my shoulders so I could lean on him. “Listen. I don’t know what happened to that old lady all those years ago, or who Catherine and Ron were. All I can think is that... if she found a photo album from the crash, and it was theirs, then maybe she was telling us that there isn’t always time. No matter how many pictures you take, or how much video you shoot, you can’t freeze a moment, not really.”
“So you have to take them as they come.” I took the next one and the next, closing my eyes, breathing in his dear scent. I would take every heartbeat of my life with him, all the rough and smooth, and forever be grateful for the chance. “Oh, Kaz. Do we have our own Christmas ghost story now?”
“Yes, love. Our own winter’s tale.”
