by Louise Voss
Of course I would, I thought, sliding my legs out and standing up, the joy of awakening unmolested making me feel a renewed optimism about life in general. It had just been a phase he was going through. Perhaps next week we could try co-sleeping again. I had to keep positive, count my blessings, otherwise I’d never stay sane. Work was great, the open day incident seemingly forgotten. I had good friends, a job I loved, my health, Ben and Jeanine were happy and settled … My phone calls with Adrian were massively helping me process stuff – I kept telling him he should retrain as a therapist. I was sure he was instrumental in me turning a corner in my acceptance of Ed’s disease. I could cope with it, I thought, putting on my dressing-gown. I could be positive about anything after a few good nights’ sleep.
The only blot on the landscape was my own growing feelings towards him; Adrian. We’d arranged to have lunch later, and I realised I was looking forward to it far more than I should.
My mobile rang and I reached for it, smiling at the thought it was probably Adrian. But the smile soon fell off my face. It was April.
‘Mike hasn’t come home and he’s not answering his phone,’ she said. Her voice had an accusatory edge to it that I knew was worry, but that anyone else might have thought was antagonism.
‘Oh! Where was he last night?’ I squinted at the bedside clock and blinked in shock – it was almost ten-thirty! I never slept that late. Good thing it was my day off. ‘I’ve only just woken up – can you believe it?’
April ignored me. ‘He was night fishing. But he’s always back really early the next morning, he gets so cold. At this time of year he doesn’t even wait for the sun to come up – he says that coming home for a hot breakfast is the best part of it.’
‘Can’t imagine why he’d want to do it in the first place,’ I said, suppressing a yawn and getting back under the duvet to talk to her. ‘Sorry, that’s not very helpful, is it? Could he have gone to a cafe for breakfast? Phone out of battery?’ I glanced at my closed bedroom door and gave an involuntary yelp. ‘Oh shit! Sorry April, hang on a minute, don’t go anywhere, I just have to go and…’
I couldn’t bring myself to say it: Let Ed out. As if he was a cat meowing at the back door. I leaped up, chucking the phone onto the bed and racing along the landing to the spare room. What if he’d had an accident? What if he’d been banging and shouting and was really pissed off with me? No – I’d have heard him; or he’d have rung my mobile. I wasn’t a heavy sleeper.
I took the key out of my dressing-gown pocket and unlocked the door. Ed was in bed, awake and smiling at me, scrolling through something on his iPhone screen. ‘Morning, treasure,’ he said. ‘Did you sleep well?’
Relief coursed through me. ‘Really well! Can you believe the time?’ I went over and kissed him, tasting his stale morning breath. ‘You only just woke up, too? I’ll go and make the tea. I’m on the phone to April, Mike’s not come home and she’s worried.’
Ed rubbed his head, as he always did first thing in the morning. ‘She worries too much. He’s only been, um, um, what’s the word?’ He mimed flicking a fishing rod into water and winding in the reel.
‘Fishing! Yes, that’s what I thought too. Anyway let me go and finish talking to her.’
I hurried back, the woollen hall rug slipping slightly under my bare feet as I skidded round the corner. ‘Hi April, sorry about that, I had to check that Ed was OK. Are you still there?’
I hadn’t told anyone that I locked him in at night. It felt too demeaning, for us both.
‘Yes,’ April said flatly. ‘Can you ask Ed if he’s heard from him? If not, I’m going to drive to the lake and check if his car’s there. He might have had an accident, or a heart attack, or anything. Probably froze to death, the idiot.’
‘Do you know exactly where he was? Hold on, let me ask – Ed!’
I put my hand over the phone and called out to Ed, who was now in the bathroom peeing enthusiastically with the door open. ‘Ed, did you speak to Mike last night, or get a text from him? He does sometimes call you when he’s fishing and bored, doesn’t he?’
‘No, nothing,’ Ed yelled, louder than necessary.
‘No he hasn’t, darling, I’m sorry,’ I relayed back to April. ‘So where did you say Mike was fishing?’
‘I didn’t say.’ April was getting testier by the minute. ‘He told me he was going to his usual place, Colly Lake. He’s been after this one particular carp for ages and he books a peg near where someone else caught it recently. Will you come with me to see if he’s OK, Lynn? You don’t work on Fridays, do you?’
I paused, dropping my voice. Ed had flushed the loo so could easily be within earshot. ‘I can’t. I don’t like leaving Ed on his own more often than I have to.’
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ April said, and even under the circumstances I felt slightly hurt at my friend’s lack of empathy for our situation. ‘Ask your neighbour – that’s what you do when you go to work, isn’t it?’
‘Suzan’s away. And I’m already having lunch with … someone from work.’
‘Well, bring him with you then!’
‘Um … all right. We’ll need half an hour to get breakfast and so on, we’ve only just woken up.’
‘That’s fine,’ April said. ‘It’ll take me that long to get over to you. If he calls in the meantime I’ll let you know. I’ll leave him a note here in case he comes back while we’re out.’
25
April was a terrible driver, her technique not enhanced by her current stress levels. I’d barely closed the rear passenger door before she screeched off, scraping the car’s silver flanks along the bare bramble bushes at the side of the lane.
Ed was in the front seat, compliant when I’d clipped in his seatbelt, but looking slightly bemused – as well he might, I thought, he’d been in bed twenty minutes earlier. Breakfast was a piece of toast and Marmite that was still clutched in his fist. From my position behind April, I could see him glance down like he was wondering what to do with it.
April was driving with one hand on the steering wheel and the other running through her hair, making it stand up on end. Seeing her black roots exposed made me feel somehow more protective of her.
‘Want me to drive?’ I asked, as April veered far too sharply to avoid a pothole in the lane.
‘No, I know the way. Easier if I do,’ April replied. Her voice softened. ‘Thanks for coming with me, guys.’
‘Where are we going?’ Ed asked. His voice sounded thin and reedy, like a little boy’s.
I leaned forward into the gap between the front seats. ‘We’re going to find Mike, remember? He didn’t come home last night.’
Ed laughed. ‘Dirty doorstop!’
April didn’t smile. ‘It’s serious, Ed, I’m really worried. He’s always home for breakfast after fishing.’
She tailed off, focussing – mercifully – on the T-junction of the busy road at the end of the lane. I swivelled my head left, right and left again, not trusting April to find a suitably large gap in the traffic. ‘Now!’ I said, and April accelerated out.
Ed chuckled again. ‘Back-seat driver,’ he chided.
‘I don’t know why you think it’s so funny,’ April said, once we were whizzing along the main road. She was setting off all the SLOW DOWN! 30MPH ZONE warnings we passed, their jangling neon seeming to leap out at us.
‘He doesn’t,’ I said.
‘Don’t speak for me,’ Ed snapped.
‘Sorry, darling. Look, can we all just relax a bit? I’m sure Mike will be fine, April. If his car’s not there then we’ll know he hasn’t had an accident.’
‘Not at the lake, maybe, but what if he’s had a crash on the way back?’
April’s voice was rising again, so I tried to make mine as soothing as possible. ‘He’d have come back on this road so if he’d had a crash, we’d see the police cordon or whatever. If there’s no sign of him we’ll call the hospitals.’
April’s mobile rang in her handbag on the back seat next to me
and she actually pressed the brake, in the middle of a busy road, causing us all to shoot forward painfully against our seatbelts.
‘April!’ we both shouted.
‘Sorry. Lynn, get that, will you, it might be him!’
I fished around in the expensive buttery-soft leather bag and found April’s iPhone. It was flashing ‘Unknown Number’.
‘Hello, April Greening’s phone. Who is this? No – sorry, she’s driving at the moment … I’m her friend, can I help?’
I listened for a few moments longer, fear and nausea rising in me. April and Ed were silent in the front of the car, April slowing down instinctively, as if she knew, causing a stream of cars behind us to hoot and flash their lights.
‘Stop the car,’ I said eventually, but April was already pulling over, oblivious to the angry gestures from passing drivers. I could tell from the set of her shoulders that she feared the worst.
‘That was the police. They want you to go home, now.’
April moaned. ‘Have they found him?’
‘I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell me.’
‘Oh God. That means they have and he’s dead. If he was safe, they’d have told me, wouldn’t they? If he was injured or ill, they’d send us to the hospital. He’s dead, Lynn, Mike’s dead!’ Her voice rose to a wail and Ed patted her shoulder awkwardly.
I got out of the back and opened the driver’s door, turning off the engine and pulling out the keys. ‘We don’t know that. I’m going to drive. You get in the back.’
April snatched them back, her eyes wild, mascara streaked all down her cheeks. ‘It’ll take forty minutes to get back to my place in this traffic. We’re only about a mile from the lake – I’m going there first. If the police are there, then I’ll know, sooner.’
‘No, April, I don’t think that’s…’ I tried to wrestle the keys out of her hands but April batted me away.
‘If you want to come, get back in the car, Lynn, or I swear to God I’m going to drive off and leave you here.’
I didn’t want to be abandoned by the side of the road – especially since it would mean that Ed would be on his own in a badly driven car with the distraught April, so I climbed obediently back into the back seat and April pulled out into the traffic with barely a glance in the rearview mirror. ‘Just drive carefully, April,’ I begged. ‘It’s not going to help anything if we crash.’
Within minutes April reached the turning for Colly Lake. We drove in silence down the narrow road to the car park but even before we reached the metal height barrier at the car park’s entrance, we saw the stark white of police cars and vans through the bare trees surrounding the lake.
I glanced at April. Her hands were clenched on the wheel, and her jaw set.
Crime scene tape fluttered a cordon around the trees nearest the lake and people in white paper suits and plastic overshoes silently milled around. The only non-police vehicles in the car park were Mike’s Volvo – and a black private ambulance.
‘He’s dead,’ April whispered. ‘I knew it.’
I closed my eyes in horror as a wave of dizziness swept over me.
26
Two detectives came over and officially broke the news to us once we’d got April back to our house.
Someone had slit Mike’s throat as he sat night fishing on one of the lakeside docks, and then tipped his body into the lake, where it had been found by a traumatised dog-walker that morning, washed up on the shore. There was no trace of the intruder; and there were no security cameras anywhere around the lake, not even in the car park. Mike had had the misfortune of being there on his own.
Had it been a random dispute with another fisherman, or had it been premeditated, someone who’d followed him out there, lurking behind trees and flexing the wire – for that had been the weapon – between their gloved hands? There were no witnesses, nobody who’d even seen Mike arrive, let alone his assailant.
I texted Adrian with shaking fingers: SOMETHING’S COME UP, CAN’T DO LUNCH TODAY. WILL CALL WHEN I CAN XX
Six hours later, the two detectives who had been quizzing us all day finally departed, leaving a vacuum of silence into which we all sank, exhausted and reeling not only from the devastating news but from the barrage of – albeit kindly-put – questions: had Mike had any enemies, could he have gone to meet anyone, who did he usually see when he went fishing? Where had we been last night? On and on. I’d had to admit that Ed had been locked in, but I was glad, even when the detectives looked askance at me.
‘It’s to stop him wandering,’ I said, not wanting to admit anything about the nocturnal violence. April had given the detectives the name of one of Mike’s business associates, an ex-partner in his firm who been ousted in a boardroom coup before the company was sold, and had apparently had a serious grudge ever since but, other than that, none of us had been able to provide any useful information.
Ed was devastated. We all were. He’d never been one to cry in front of people, but his eyes were red-rimmed and swollen and I guessed that he’d been weeping in the bathroom. I was almost as concerned about him as I was about April – he was taking it so badly that I was scared that it was causing his condition to deteriorate. He suddenly seemed a lot weaker – I’d just had to open a jar of coffee for him. He’d been wrestling with it for minutes but when he eventually shoved it at me and demanded that I did it, the lid twisted off in one easy turn in my hand. He had no energy, and seemed to be exhausted after walking even a few paces. Mr Deshmukh had warned us that this was a symptom, too – but of course it might have just been the shock of the news.
April howled most of the day, curled into a ball on the sofa surrounded by crumpled tissues. I didn’t leave her side, apart from to check on Ed and talk to those who needed to know. I wasn’t sure how good I was for her though. I couldn’t stop crying either. My recent flare of optimism seemed long forgotten. Now it felt as if everything was falling apart and I was back in the shadowy land of full-on paranoia. Mike had been murdered, as had Shelagh, all those years before. How could two people so close to Ed lose their lives? What were the chances? And what with Ed’s illness, it felt like we were being stalked by tragedy. In this grim frame of mind, I couldn’t stop my thoughts turning once again to all those worrying incidents: people creeping around our house. Someone standing smoking outside at 4am. Ed’s increasingly strange behaviour…
I shook myself. I’d dreamt those things, hadn’t I? And if Ed was behaving oddly, it was just because of his illness. It was the shock of Mike’s death getting to me and making me irrational. I was seeing ghosts and demons where there were none…
The dark day dragged on into darker evening and eventually petered out altogether into an exhausted silence. I was desperate to speak to Adrian, but didn’t want to leave Ed or April on their own. I thought it inadvisable to turn on the TV, since the brief snippet of local radio news bulletins I’d heard had contained newsflashes of Mike’s murder. Watching anything else – a comedy, or a movie – seemed inappropriate and none of us could concentrate anyway.
The phone finally stopped ringing – once the police left, I’d been making and fielding calls all afternoon to and from stunned friends, including Maddie and Naveeta, both in floods of tears. Even though I lit a roaring fire, the house still felt chilly and silent. I rang Ben and broke the news to him and we decided it would be best under the circumstances if he didn’t, as planned, bring Jeanine over for dinner. It had been her twenty-sixth birthday the previous week and this was meant to be a belated celebration.
Ben sounded shocked, of course, but not as upset as I feared. Mike had known Ben since Ben was in nappies, but they hadn’t had any more connection than Mike having been a friend of the family. He had been more concerned about Ed; how he was in general, and how he was coping with the news of Mike’s death.
Before he hung up he said, ‘Now probably isn’t the time to mention it but – I assume you didn’t know how much you and Dad gave Jeanine for her birthday?’
‘Yeah I do.
Thirty quid, wasn’t it?’ I had got her a card last week and asked Ed to go to the local Marks and Spencer to buy her a thirty-pound gift voucher, which I had tucked inside the envelope after we’d both signed it.
He laughed hollowly. ‘It was three hundred, Lynn. We thought it was a mistake. Don’t worry, she’s not going to spend it. Take it back when you get a chance.’
I groaned. Ed’s inability to remember the value of money seemed to be the latest development in the unpleasant, downward-hurtling roller coaster of dementia – it wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. He insisted on trying to pay for a twenty-six-pound Chinese takeaway we got a few days before with a ten-pound note, and almost got into a fight with the delivery man over it. Then, last week I’d found myself locked out of our joint bank account when I’d tried to pay a bill online. At first I thought Ed had done something – tried the wrong password too many times – but when I asked him he shook his head, a blank look on his face. The next day, when I tried again, I managed to access the account fine, so it was probably just a software error, but now this £300 gift to Jeanine. I sighed into the phone. Ben was right, we had more important things to worry about at the moment, but it only added to my sense of unease. I chewed at the inside of my cheek, and I decided I’d check our other bank accounts as soon as I could face doing any of that admin-type stuff. Ed had obviously managed to get back into his computer so God forbid he might be rootling around causing havoc in them. Three hundred quid! Perhaps I should change the passwords and keep them from him from now on.
Although the thought of his reaction if I did that and he realised made me blanch.
‘Thanks Ben,’ I said, tears welling again. He was such a good person really. He and Jeanine both – it would have been easy as anything to say nothing and spend the voucher.
