‘Adam.’ She heard herself repeat his name again as he moved within her. She held him tighter, and closed her eyes tightly to shut out the tiny troubled voice that struggled to be heard. But she would not let it. She closed her mind and immersed herself in feeling. Nothing but feeling.
She was sleeping. They lay together in the darkness. He thought it must be early in the morning. Her breathing was deep and regular. His eyes had grown used to the dark, softened by the light of the stars outside the window so that he could see her profile. Carefully, so as not to disturb her, he lifted himself and leaned on one elbow so that he could watch her. Her skin was smooth. He touched her hair, marvelling at the feel of it, or perhaps it wasn’t so much that, but the fact that it was her hair, and she was lying here beside him. He replayed making love to her, trying to hold onto the feelings he’d experienced. Their bodies touching, moving, her breath on his cheek, her hand against his back, her whispering as they had moved together.
He remembered opening his eyes and seeing hers closed. Just for an instant he’d experienced a faint regret. All of his life he had wanted this to happen. He had never forgotten her and yet in the midst of the very act he’d dreamed of, of being close to her, he’d realized that, in fact, his dream was flawed. She might as well have been a million miles from him. He couldn’t look into her mind and know what she was thinking, what she was feeling. He couldn’t feel what she felt. Perhaps this is what is meant, Adam thought, by philosophers who muse on the fact that in the end we are all, each of us, alone, contained within ourselves. With sudden insight he understood that it was true that we enter the world alone as we leave it, and in between the only way to alleviate that sense is through a spiritual belief or by loving another. By being so close over a long enough time that two people become, as much as it is possible to be, inextricably immersed in one another. In reality time had made them strangers. He’d imagined this moment as fulfilment, but in the realization of his dream there was the acrid taste of ashes.
The sheet that covered her had slipped when he moved, exposing her breasts. He followed the line from her throat to the swell of her flesh and the dark tips of her nipples. Then he gently covered her again. She stirred and reached for him, and he lay down beside her and closed his eyes.
In the room along the passage Mary shifted in her sleep. She was locked in a dream, tossing her head as sweat broke on her brow and she murmured something frightened and unintelligible.
She was back in her room in the cottage where the Shapeshifter had come for her. When she was a child she had accidentally put her favourite teddy bear in with the laundry and when her mother found it and gave it back the bear hadn’t looked the same any more. The Shapeshifter reminded her of the bear.
In her dream it had emptied her pills onto the table.
Take these, Mary. They’ll make you feel better.
The voice in her head was lying. But the voice had changed. She didn’t know if it was from inside her head or if it was the Shapeshifter. She was afraid. She looked at the pills and doubt tugged at her mind. Perhaps they really would make her feel better. Perhaps there were no such thing as Shapeshifters, it was all in her mind. Sometimes she didn’t know what was a dream and what was real any more. In her dream she looked at the face before her.
‘Nick?’ she murmured in her sleep.
He smiled and held out the pills.
Take them, Mary.
She dreamed she heard the sound of a car, and saw lights as they swept across the window. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them he was gone and the pills were on the table beside her and then somebody was holding her, stroking her forehead, talking quietly.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Unable to sleep Adam finally rose at five and gathered his clothes in the darkness. He made his way to the door where he paused and looked back towards the bed where Angela was still sleeping. Part of him wanted to go back and wake her, to climb back beneath the covers and hold her. He imagined her drowsy awakening, her murmured voice as she turned towards him and pressed her body against his. Yet he didn’t move. There was something unreal about the scene he’d imagined. It had the quality of a fragile dream that he preferred to leave intact, at least for now. Instead, he slipped quietly out of the door and along the passage. He checked on Mary, who also appeared still to be sleeping, then went down the stairs and through the darkened house to the kitchen.
Half an hour later he quietly closed the front door behind him and went outside. It was pitch black. During the early morning cloud had gathered, stealing the light of the stars. It was cold and there was a feeling of snow in the air. Adam started the car and drove slowly to the gate with the lights off. He looked back at the house, half hoping to see a light come on upstairs, and yet glad in a resigned sort of way when it didn’t. He had left a note for Angela in the kitchen explaining that he’d made an early start for Tynemouth and that he would see her later. He had deliberated for a long time about whether or not he should add some line of endearment at the end, but he didn’t know what to write. Everything he thought of either seemed corny or false. In the end he’d written simply: Adam.
He turned on the lights at the end of the lane and headed for the A69 that would take him all the way to Newcastle.
The address Geraldine Hope had given him turned out to be a nondescript street of Victorian brick semis in a rundown area of Tynemouth. The house that he was looking for turned out, in fact, to be two houses that had been knocked together to form a hotel. A sign outside advertised budget rooms and special long-term rates. It seemed that Jones hadn’t progressed much during the years since he had left Carlisle. The Park Hotel was depressingly ugly from the outside. Two empty beer bottles that stood on the pavement by the gate seemed to eloquently say it all. It looked like the kind of place that might be a staging post on the slide downhill for life’s perpetual failures. A brief stop before life on the streets.
The front door was open and led into a small tiled reception area. Behind a plain wooden counter a number of keys hung from hooks screwed into a yellowing pegboard. To the right a door with a sign identifying it as the guest lounge was closed, and straight ahead a staircase led to the upper floors. The whole place smelt strongly of fried food underlain with a general unpleasant mustiness.
The counter was deserted, though behind it a door led to what he assumed was an office. Adam hit an old-fashioned bell on the counter and in response a heavy-set middle-aged man wearing a greyish-white open-necked shirt eventually appeared from the office.
‘Yes?’ he said guardedly. His accent was indeterminate, but maybe central European.
‘I’m looking for somebody who may live here. His name is Chris Jones.’
The man regarded him calculatedly as he used a toothpick to clean his teeth. ‘What you want with him?’
‘He’s a friend of mine.’
The man’s narrowed eyes betrayed his scepticism. Perhaps he’d decided that Adam didn’t look like most of the people who crossed the threshold of the Park Hotel. ‘You a friend of his you say? I never seen you before, and Mr Jones, he live here a long time.’
‘Is he in?’ Adam said.
‘No. He’s not.’ The man watched Adam with slightly amused interest as if waiting to see what he would say next.
‘When will he back, do you know?’
‘I thought you said you were his friend. If you his friend how come you don’t know when he will be back?’
‘Listen, just tell me when you expect him, alright.’
The man shrugged. ‘I don’t expect him.’
‘What do you mean? You’re not expecting him back at all, or you don’t know when?’
The man simply shrugged again. He made no move to go back to his office, however. Instead he seemed to be waiting for Adam to make the next move. Getting the drift Adam dug in his pocket for his wallet. He put a ten-pound note on the counter.
‘So, when do you think would be a good time to catch him?’
Brig
ht dark eyes glinted greedily and the note vanished. ‘Maybe you try again in a couple a weeks.’
‘A couple of weeks? You mean he’s gone away?’ The man didn’t answer, so Adam took another ten out and put it down.
‘For somebody who is your friend you don’t know him so good, I think,’ the man said, as the note vanished.
‘You haven’t answered my question.’
‘Mr Jones, he works on the ships. A sailor you know? The last time I see him was in August.’
Adam remembered what Dr Hope had said about Jones keeping in touch with the gardener at the clinic who was an ex-merchant seaman. Something they had in common. ‘When in August?’
The man looked pointedly at Adam’s wallet so he took out everything he had left, which was about fifty-five pounds. ‘You answer my questions, alright?’
‘Okay.’ He shoved the notes in his pocket. ‘Beginning of the month some time. I don’t remember exactly.’
Which had to be before Jane Hanson had turned up, Adam thought. His eye strayed to the open office door behind the counter. Against the wall was a photocopier.
‘Did somebody else come here looking for Jones? It would have been some time later in August. A girl?’
‘Sure.’
‘You showed her Jones’s room, didn’t you? She used that photocopier there afterwards.’
‘How you know that?’ the man asked in surprise.
‘Never mind. I want you to show me the room too.’
The man hesitated, then again the shrug. ‘Okay.’ He grabbed a key off the board. ‘Follow me.’
The room was in keeping with the rest of the hotel. That is to say it was furnished cheaply and simply and the carpet was so old and worn it was hard to distinguish the pattern any more. A single window overlooked a car park at the back. Apart from a double bed the room contained a set of drawers and a large wardrobe, a small table and two chairs and a TV set. It turned out the man behind the counter, whose name was Nicos, was the proud owner of the Park Hotel. He leaned casually against the door as Adam looked around and seemed happy enough to answer his questions now that he knew there was no more money.
‘He’s not a very sociable man, Mr Jones. Not very happy, you know? Doesn’t like to talk much. When he’s here he spend most of his time in the pub along the road.’
‘How often is he away?’
‘Seven, eight months in a year. Depends.’
Adam opened the wardrobe door. It contained a few shirts and some jackets and a coat but not much else. Nicos was from Selonika. He kept up a nonstop commentary, partly about himself and partly careless observations about Jones. He described Jones as being taciturn and a heavy drinker.
‘I never see him with a woman. Maybe his face put them off …’ He shrugged, which was a gesture he used to complete many of his thoughts.
It turned out that Jones had worked on the ships ever since he’d arrived at the hotel five years earlier. The Park Hotel rented rooms to half a dozen or so sailors who were away for more of the year than they were at home, and when they were at home they just wanted a place to sleep.
‘Where’s he gone, do you know?’ Adam asked.
‘Who knows? I don’t ask, he doesn’t tell me.’
Adam fetched a chair so that he could reach to the top of the wardrobe. He lifted down the suitcase that was up there and put it on the bed. When he snapped open the catches he found it contained some more clothes, a pair of old shoes and half a bottle of whisky. There was also a large thick yellowing envelope.
‘Did the girl who came here look in this case?’
‘Yes.’
The envelope contained Marion Crane’s original file that Jane had photocopied. A brief scan of the first page revealed things he hadn’t been able to decipher from the distorted remnants he’d recovered from the wreck. Adam frowned as he flicked through the pages. There was still no clue to Marion Crane’s real identity, or why Jones would have kept these records. When he came to the last page, however, something fluttered free, a single sheet that turned out to be a photocopy. When he picked it up he realized it was the third document he’d found, only the copy Jane had made had been too far gone to make any sense of beyond the fact that it was some kind of official-looking certificate. Now as he read it, everything started to make sense.
He compared the certificate against Marion Crane’s file, checking the dates on one against the other. Something stirred in his memory and a vague unease settled over him. He turned to Nicos.
‘The young woman who came here before me, can you remember exactly when that was? I mean the exact day?’
‘Sure. It was the day my nephew he have his birthday.’
It was mid-afternoon by the time a car pulled up outside the house where Adam had been waiting for the past two hours. He watched the driver get out and open the garage door before putting his car away and going to the front door. Adam switched off his mobile phone and crossed the street as the man put his key in the lock. Hearing footsteps behind him the man turned and the slightly surprised smile he wore faded when he saw who it was.
‘I suppose I’ve been expecting you,’ Councillor Hunt said. ‘You better come in.’
They went through to the kitchen where they had talked the last time Adam had been there. Hunt took off his coat and carelessly dropped it over the back of chair. He rubbed his hands together as he filled the kettle.
‘Would you like a cup of tea? Mr Turner isn’t it?’
‘Adam, yes. And thanks, tea would be good.’
‘I always come in here if I’m home early. It heats up faster than the rest of the house,’ Hunt said, as he looked out of the window at the heavy sky. ‘I think it’ll snow later.’ He got some mugs from a cupboard, pausing for a moment. ‘Do you mind these or do you prefer a cup? I like a mug myself.’
‘A mug’s fine.’
The kettle boiled and Hunt poured hot water into a teapot in a routine Adam thought he probably went through every day. This time he suspected there was some comfort in the familiarity of the task, no doubt while he tried to order his thoughts. When he finally brought the tea to the table he seemed quite composed, like a man who had reconciled himself to what was about to come. As he sat down Adam noticed he glanced at the photographs of his wife and daughter on the fridge door. What had he said? A holiday in Spain? Now Adam looked with new eyes. He remembered Hunt’s wife rushing out the door the first time he’d come, and her slightly over-frenetic manner. A symptom of a highly strung nature he now guessed.
‘Councillor Hunt,’ Adam said. ‘When you voted in favour of the Forest Havens development, were you being subjected to some kind of pressure?’
A small smile touched the corners of Hunt’s mouth. ‘Do you mean was I being blackmailed?’
‘Yes.’
‘I suppose you already know the answer to that.’
‘I think I do.’ Adam took the documents he’d found in Jones’s room out of his pocket and laid them on the table. ‘These are the records for somebody called Marion Crane who was a patient at Carisbrook Hall in 1985. According to these she was admitted in April of that year suffering from acute depression after suffering a miscarriage in the thirtieth week of pregnancy.’ He paused. ‘Marion Crane was your wife?’
Hunt nodded. ‘She used the name of a second cousin who lives in Devon.’ He sighed wearily. ‘My wife has never been what you would call a strong person. Mentally I mean. She was forty years old when she suffered that miscarriage. It was the fourth time, though all the others happened much earlier. We had given up hope of ever having a child, and then as sometimes happens, when we least expected it Anne fell pregnant.’
Hunt picked up his tea, and was silent while he drank a little. He looked tired, the evidence of a long-held secret scored in the heavy lines around his eyes.
‘How did you know from this that Marion Crane was my wife?’ he asked.
In reply Adam laid down a copy of an original birth certificate. The child named was Judith Hunt, born on 19
May 1985 to parents George and Anne Hunt.
‘My guess is that Dr Webster arranged for this,’ Adam said.
He had put it together during the drive back from Tynemouth earlier. His theory was that Anne Hunt, under the name of Marion Crane, had been admitted to Carisbrook under Webster’s care as a private patient. Somehow or other Webster had found a way to switch somebody else’s baby for the one Anne Hunt had lost, then he had signed the official birth documents and nobody was any the wiser. What Adam hadn’t been able to figure out at first was how the Hunts had managed to explain the sudden presence of a baby daughter. Anne Hunt had suffered a miscarriage, at which a doctor must have been present, most likely at the local hospital. The answer he’d come up with was simple, and he put it to Hunt now.
‘Your wife was admitted to Carisbrook before her miscarriage,’ he guessed.
‘Anne became depressed a month after she fell pregnant. Her condition became worse as time went on. You see, she was convinced that she would lose the child as she had all the others. With every week that passed her mental state deteriorated. Ironic really. It was the impending loss, as Anne viewed it, of what was rapidly becoming a fully developed child that was so hard for her to cope with. She was given more drugs, and it was probably those that did the damage in the end. A kind of perverse Catch 22. When she did eventually lose the baby she went completely to pieces.’
Hunt looked like somebody who was if not exactly making a plea for Adam to condone what happened next, then at least to understand it.
Lost Summer Page 36
