Mary didn’t wake when he lifted her from the bed and carried her down the stairs to the car. She was surprisingly light, no more than skin and bones. She didn’t even stir when he put her in the back seat or when he lifted her out again to carry her upstairs in Angela’s house and lay her down in one of the spare bedrooms.
Angela smoothed the girl’s hair from her brow. Her skin was pale and her face thin. She would have been pretty once, but now she looked undernourished and ill. ‘She’s absolutely exhausted. I’ll get her out of these clothes.’ She had brought one of her own nightdresses in from her room.
Adam took his cue and left her to it. Downstairs he helped himself to a Scotch and left the bottle on the kitchen table while he went to the window and stared out into the night. The stars above the fells created a sense of deceptive tranquillity. It was hard to believe that Nick was dead, and difficult to escape the suspicion that his murder was linked to the development somehow. Did that make him the fourth victim? Jesus, it hardly seemed credible that something like this could happen in a rural backwater like Castleton.
So far he hadn’t told Angela about what he’d discovered at the clinic, but he knew she would ask. He wasn’t sure what he would tell her. He thought about the way David had looked earlier. He was coming apart. At one point it had seemed he was going to hit Angela. Was it David who’d killed Nick? Obviously the police thought so if they’d questioned him for so long, though they clearly couldn’t prove it. Not yet anyway. Had it been another fight that had gotten out of hand? And why had David attacked Nick anyway?
He heard Angela come into the room, and turning he gestured with his glass. ‘I needed a drink. I hope it’s okay.’
‘Of course. I think I need one myself.’ She went to the table and poured herself a small measure.
‘Is she okay?’
‘For now. She’s sleeping.’
‘You look as if you could do with some of that yourself.’
She sat down wearily. ‘I feel as if this day has gone on for ever. Which reminds me, you didn’t tell me what happened at the clinic.’
He gave her the facts, without including any elaboration or his own interpretation. ‘Jones worked at the clinic after he left Carlisle, though he wasn’t there for long. He was sacked for attempting to pull off a little blackmail scam. I talked to the director, who confirmed that he arrived with references from Carisbrook.’
‘I’m too tired to think. What does it mean?’
‘Maybe there was more going on at Carisbrook than just a few drugs going missing.’
Angela frowned. ‘Had Jane Hanson been to the Barstock Clinic?’
‘Yes. I asked the director if she had heard of Marion Crane too. No luck though.’
‘Speaking of which, I didn’t have any luck finding her I’m afraid. I didn’t really have much time.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve got an address for Jones in Tynemouth. I’ll go there tomorrow. I think that’s where Jane got Marion Crane’s records. Something else I learned today was that Dr Webster might well have treated private patients at Carisbrook. Apparently it’s not uncommon for them to use a pseudonym, so Marion Crane may not be a real name.’
Angela looked at him questioningly. ‘Adam, do you know what this is all about?’
‘I think it’s pretty clear that Marion Crane is the key. She was at Carisbrook when Jones worked there. I think he must have known something that linked her to the development and maybe when he heard about it he realized what he knew could be valuable. Jane overheard somebody talking in a pub. Maybe that was Jones.’
‘Talking to who?’
‘I’m only guessing. But it could have been the person Jones was trying to sell information to.’
She didn’t ask who he thought that person might be.
‘When I saw David tonight…’ She faltered, groping for some way to express what she felt. ‘… it was like he was a different person. I’ve never seen him like this. I could never have imagined him this way. Perhaps I’ve been wrong. Maybe I just didn’t want to face the possibility that…’ She broke off. ‘This is such a bloody mess. I don’t know how much more I can take. Do you think he could have killed Nick?’ She searched his expression for an answer.
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you know something, don’t you? There’s something you’ve been holding back, isn’t there?’
He came to the table and sat down opposite her. She was struggling to hold herself together. Who the hell wouldn’t in her shoes? The last thing she needed was for him to make things any worse. ‘I don’t know anything for sure.’
She shook her head. ‘No. You do. I’ve been thinking about it. Please, Adam. I want you to tell me. I don’t have any right really I suppose, do I? I haven’t believed much you’ve said so far.’
‘You had no reason to.’
‘No, you’re right. I didn’t. There was nothing to make me suddenly think my husband is a murderer. But you had a reason. And it’s nothing to do with the past, is it? I suppose I thought you just wanted revenge or something like that. But it isn’t that, is it? It’s something else. Please, Adam, tell me. I need to know.’
And he knew he couldn’t refuse. Maybe he should even have told her before. ‘It is about what happened in the past, though not what you think,’ he said. And then he told her everything. As best he could anyway. About Meg and David, and all the suspicions he’d once had but had kept to himself. But the more he talked the more it became apparent that it was all feeling and undercurrent as much as anything, and as she struggled to absorb it all, her brow deeply furrowed, he saw that she understood that. But she didn’t dismiss any of it, she listened and she thought about it. She thought hard.
‘It’s incredible,’ she said at length.
‘You mean you don’t believe it?’
‘No. I mean, Christ I don’t know what to think.’ She stood up to pace the room. ‘I need to get this straight. You’re saying David knew that girl, and you never told anyone. But that doesn’t mean anything even if he did know her. You don’t even know if it’s her that they found in the lake.’
‘It’s her, Angela. It’s Meg. The police might not actually have said as much yet, but the jewellery pretty well clinches it. And I was thinking about this long before they found her. That was just one of life’s strange coincidences. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was fate.’
‘Fate?’
‘I don’t want to sound like a crank, but I’ve felt guilty about Meg all my life. I have dreams about her. She has this look in her eye. Kind of a plea and an accusation at the same time. Look at the kind of work I ended up doing. I’ve spent the better part of my working life looking for missing people, children mostly. I’ve always felt I was doing it because of Meg, out of guilt, or that she was driving me, haunting me in a way. It was like she wanted me to make up for what happened. It was even as if she wanted me to come back here.’ He saw the way Angela was looking at him. ‘You’re beginning to think I’m a lunatic.’
‘No. No I’m not.’ She shook her head. ‘I just don’t know what to think.’
‘Do you know that it was me that told Shields where to fish?’
‘Shields?’
‘The man that found her. Did I do that deliberately, albeit subconsciously?’
‘But you didn’t know she was there.’
‘Didn’t I? I saw David once standing on the shore where she was found, not long after it was all over, after James Allen was killed. He was going to throw something in the lake but then he changed his mind.’
‘What are you saying? What was it?’
‘I don’t know. But something struck me about the moment. I can’t explain what it was. Maybe his expression, something about him. It wasn’t a rational thing, more of a feeling.’
‘Like how you felt when you thought he knew her.’
‘He did know her, Angela. That much I’m certain of. It was David she was waiting for when I saw her in those trees across from the sawmill. You eve
n saw her there yourself one day. We’d been walking along the river.’
‘Yes, I remember that. But she was alone.’
‘I saw her there the day she vanished and she was with David.’
‘You weren’t sure of that. You couldn’t have been. You would have said something.’
‘I was sure. I just didn’t want to be. Why didn’t he admit it himself? What was he hiding? And what did David and Nick put in Allen’s van that day?’
‘Alright, I see what you’re saying,’ Angela said. ‘But if you were so certain that he knew something, why didn’t you tell somebody? Or at least confront him? I don’t understand that.’
‘Because he was my friend, Angela. Because I was trying to prove something to him. That I trusted him. That he could trust me. I think Nick knew. I almost asked David outright the day I heard Meg was missing, but Nick was there and somehow I felt like I had to prove I was as good a friend as Nick was.’
He couldn’t keep the bitterness from his tone. That was really it in a nutshell. He had kept quiet to demonstrate his loyalty. To show he was as good as Nick.
They stared at each other across the table. He wondered what she saw. Was it anger? Pain? Guilt? Maybe all of those things. Eventually she nodded her head, a small movement that signalled her understanding.
Angela went upstairs to look in on Mary. She’d guessed that the scarf over the lamp in the cottage meant something to Mary and so she’d brought it with her when they’d left. Now the room was suffused with a red glow. She hoped that if Mary woke in the night having something familiar would be a comfort. For now she appeared to be sleeping soundly, her breathing regular and even.
In her own room after she had washed and changed into a nightdress, Angela lay down on her bed in the darkness, but though her body was weary and she tried to sleep her mind wouldn’t shut down. She kept running over everything Adam had told her. She didn’t know what to make of it all. She was confused. In the end she gave up trying to sleep and turned on the lamp. She sat up in bed and hugged her knees. She felt alone. Cut off from the normal world. She glanced at the phone beside the bed and considered calling Kate, but dismissed the idea immediately. It was past one a.m. and Kate would be safely asleep. Apart from anything else she ought to let her daughter have one last relatively untroubled night. Come the morning she would start to realize that nothing would ever be the same again in her own home. Angela wished there was some way to protect Kate from all of this, but she knew deep down it was a futile hope.
She got out of bed and paced to the window, unable to stay still. It dawned on her that she would have to tell Kate everything. Better that she heard it from her than from anyone else. But what was she going to tell her? She ought not to try and hide the truth because kids have a sixth sense for picking up when adults are hiding something from them. But what was the truth? She wished she knew. For both their sakes.
It came to her then, very clearly. Kate would never believe that her father was capable of killing anybody. Of murder. But Adam thought he was. He hadn’t said it in as many words, but he thought David had killed Meg Coucesco. She found herself shaking her head in denial. It couldn’t be. But her conviction felt false.
She saw with sudden clarity that the answers to everything lay in the past. She’d always thought she knew David, but perhaps she really didn’t know him at all. He had never mentioned Meg Coucesco, and yet she felt he must have known her. That much at least was true. What if Adam was right? What if David really had killed her, impossible as that seemed? If he was capable of that, then he was capable of anything.
Suddenly she went to the door and down the stairs. The door to the study was partly open. Barely pausing she went inside and switched on the light. She gazed around the room, her eye lighting on a chair, a picture, the bookcase against the wall that was mostly full of books about fishing or hunting or sports. On the desk were some letter trays full of mail-outs and paperwork relating to the sawmill. She wasn’t even sure what she was looking for, but she was looking for something.
She opened a filing cabinet drawer and it was bulging with household accounts. A desk drawer was full of accumulated office junk: a packet of spilled staples, some paperclips and Post-it notes, several pens and coloured markers. She rifled among them then closed the drawer and opened the one below it. This contained a mass of manuals and disks for the various programs loaded onto the computer that sat on the desk. The next one she tried contained fishing paraphernalia: line and hooks, lead weights, a small coil of wire and a pair of pliers and some feathers and coloured cotton.
Often in the winter David would sit in here making his own lures and flies. He had his favourites, guaranteed to tempt the wariest of fish. She took one out and turned it over in her hand. This was the one he swore by, a tiny delicate thing with bright yellow and purple cotton attached to a tiny reddish-coloured feather with bands of pale cream. It was a thing of beauty. A work of art really. And yet sometimes appearances can be fatally deceptive. The feathers with their fine markings masked the barbed hook underneath. The fly even had a name. It was called a Pretty Deadly. Perhaps like this, nothing about David was really what it seemed to be. As if to underscore this idea the hook pricked her skin as she turned it over in her fingers.
‘Shit!’
A drop of bright red blood welled on the end of her thumb. She stared at it in fascination.
As she sucked the blood from her thumb she looked around the office, and then suddenly fuelled by an urgency she barely understood she began searching again. She gave up being careful to replace things as she found them. Instead she pulled drawers from the desk and tipped their contents onto the floor. Her attention fixed on the bookcase and she began pulling out the volumes one by one to check if anything was hidden behind, and each book ended up on the floor with everything else until the shelves were bare. She frowned, her restless eyes skipping over the room. She emptied the filing cabinet and went through the papers on the desk again, sweeping everything to the floor when she was done. Eventually there was nowhere left, and she stared around in frustration until her gaze came to rest on the old leather shotgun case in the corner.
She had never understood why he kept the gun in here. He never used it because the guns he used were locked in the garage outside. She picked it up and took it to the desk. The clasps popped easily, which surprised her, as did the lid when it opened smoothly. She’d expected it to be stiff and unyielding the way something would be if it hadn’t been opened for a long time. When she saw the gun that lay inside she thought she knew what it was. She touched the wooden stock. Intuitively she guessed that this was the gun that David had shot Adam with. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did. All these years David had kept it. She wondered why. Was it guilt?
She lifted it out and saw there was something lying underneath. It was a dulled golden band, a simple bracelet. She picked it up and turned it over in her hand, staring at it. There were markings inside. She felt numb. A sound behind her startled her and when she turned she saw that it was Adam.
‘I heard a noise,’ he said. He looked at the bracelet and the gun and whatever doubts she had been clinging to were swept away.
For a little while neither of them moved. His arms were around her but she couldn’t remember how they had come together. Her mind was strangely empty. What she wanted now was a safe refuge, a place where she could be free of all of this, just for a little while so that she could gather herself together again.
She could feel his heartbeat, she thought, but in fact it was her own. She wondered why it was beating at such a heady rhythm, why she could feel the blood rushing through her veins. He was murmuring softly, words of comfort, and she remembered that she had been crying, unable to stop the tears that had welled up in her eyes. But she was no longer crying. His fingers were at the nape of her neck, stroking her skin, sliding through her hair.
She felt a change in him. What had been words and gestures of comfort subtly altered. She could feel his desir
e, and the fingers at her neck stilled as he fought to resist the temptation. In response she pressed her body against him. What am I doing? The voice was her own, inside her head, loud and almost startling in its clarity. She put her head against his shoulder and pressed her palms against his back. She didn’t want to think. He held her tighter and she heard him breathe out, almost a sigh, almost a sound of anguish.
‘Adam.’
She spoke his name quietly and he let her go and looked questioningly into her eyes. She saw a tangle of hope and desire, love and need, all colliding together like gaseous clouds of light and dark. There was a sense of utter inevitability about what was happening. Though their reasons might be different their need was equally felt. She leaned towards him and parting her mouth she placed her lips on his. She tasted whisky. His saliva. Him. His lips were fuller than David’s, his mouth yielding, more pliant. She had never slept with another man. A clamouring voice in the back of her mind urged restraint. This was all wrong. How could she think like this when her world was falling apart? But maybe that was it. She needed this. She needed to be held. The hell with reason, with morals, with anything. She felt his need. She thought she’d sensed it the first day they’d met again. The sensation of kissing him took her back through the years to a sunny day by the river.
She couldn’t think any more. He kissed her throat and she arched her neck. His hands slid across her body, caressing her hips, her breasts.
‘Not here,’ she murmured.
She led him by the hand through the darkened house, up the stairs. At her bedroom door she hesitated and then went on to the room he was using. Inside she turned towards him. When he guided her to the bed she lay down and watched his face as he undressed her, pausing when her breasts were naked, eyes greedily devouring her. Almost literally. As if he wanted to absorb every minute fragment of her, every cell. She was conscious of her power over him. It produced a heady feeling that mingled with her own physical need.
She saw his lips move and heard his voice as he told her that he loved her, that he had always loved her, that he had never stopped thinking about her all through the years, and she knew that it was true, that he had held a part of her inside himself, and she felt a sudden overwhelming sorrow for him, and it was accompanied by guilt because she had once loved David so powerfully it had rocked her to the core and she couldn’t deny that. She drew him down and they kissed again. His hands were on her breasts, on her belly, between her thighs. When she reached for the button to his jeans he shuddered at her touch, and trembled as he entered her.
Lost Summer Page 35
