A Death Divided

by Clare Francis

  Dave dismissed the police with a lazy wave.

  ‘You knew Sam yourself?’

  ‘Sure. Sweet kid.’

  ‘So what happened? How did he die?’

  Dave sank back on the sofa and holding the joint between finger and thumb brought it up to a point just short of his mouth. ‘It’s the family wanna know, right?’ he asked benignly.

  ‘Right,’ Joe agreed in unconscious imitation.

  ‘It’s just… well, you might want to kind of edit the thing down, know what I mean? Sometimes there’re things family don’t need to hear. Right?’

  Joe felt a small beat of dread; perhaps there were things he didn’t need to hear either. ‘Right.’

  Dave took a pensive drag. ‘Okay, so…’ He pursed his lips, he exhaled gently, he gazed up at the ceiling. ‘I guess looking back I’d say it was kind of an accident waiting to happen. Yeah … one way and another, things were heading for trouble, looking back now. Don’t get me wrong’ - his eyes came down to meet Joe’s - ‘Sam was a sweet kid. Quiet. Intense. Sort of deep, you know? Into the meaning of life. Poetry. Drawing. Truly wicked with the sketching pencil. Flowers, trees, people - he could draw the whole damn she-i bang. He’d be there for hours, working away with his pad and his pencil, never a sound, sort of lost to the world till he looked s up and hit you with this big wide smile. I tell you, that smile was quite something. You couldn’ help but smile right back.’

  'Same when there were people around. He’d be there listening and watching and saying nice things, just finding reasons to smile, and people couldn’ help but smile right back. And if things got sort of edgy he’d just go and get one of his drawings and give it to whoever was getting steamed up and they’d loosen up and he’d be happy again. That’s all he wanted, I guess, just to be part of this big happy family. Yeah…’ Dave murmured as if the truth of this had only just come home to him. ‘That’s all he ever wanted.’

  ‘He was staying at the farm?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He’d been there a while?’

  Dave sucked idly through his teeth while he thought about this. ‘Two months? Three?’

  Joe waited silently.

  ‘Yeah, a sweet kid,’ Dave went on reminiscently. ‘But deep, you know what I mean? Under the easy-going style, under the smiles, all the stuff was going on up here.’ Dave tapped the side of his head. ‘Thinking. Watching. Listening. You could see it all churning away.’ He made a circling motion with his finger. ‘And sort of hyper-to.uchy. You had to tread real carefully sometimes. He took things to heart, know what I mean? Wars, animals, cruelty, abandoned kids - anything mean or cruel - he’d just clam up and sort of look like he’d been hit in the face.’

  Dave took another pull on the joint and, leaning over sideways so as to avoid the effort of sitting up, reached to the saucer and pinched out the end. ‘Then Chet goes away on this trip and things start to get moody. Sam’d always sort of had a thing for Jenna, right from the start. But it was kid’s stuff, know what I mean? He was nineteen, twenty, sort of young for his age, a virgin I guess, and here was Jenna, beautiful, sexy, all cosied up in the same house but safely out of reach. It was your dream-lover fantasy, right? Your classic unattainable object of desire. Jeese, we’ve all been there, right? Mine, you will never believe, was the science teacher. Huge boobs, sexy eyes and a voice that shouldn’t have been allowed out unattended.’

  He gave a dry chuckle. ‘For chrissakes, I used to get off just regulating the old Bunsen burner.’

  A quiet footfall and a swish of silk announced the arrival of a woman who walked rapidly through the room and into the kitchen. She was wearing an oriental wrap and her dark hair was cropped so close to her head you could see her skull through it.

  ‘Sure you won’ have a beer, Joe?’

  ‘Not for me, thanks.’

  Dave seemed on the point of stirring himself but eyed the curry instead. Reaching for it with the same sideways swing of his upper body he scooped up a carton of rice and spooned some into his mouth. ‘So Sam and Jenna,’ he resumed through a slow mouthful. ‘Yeah, everyone could see it at the start, but it was no big deal, not then. He used to hang around her like a rash, helping with the chores, going to the supermarket, doing these fancy recipes with her, making her laugh. Real innocent stuff, right? Chet - he understood that. He had no problem with it. He was good to Sam, like a big brother, you know? But then…’ Dave dumped the carton on the sofa and gave a troubled sigh. ‘Chet went off to India and Jenna was seriously pissed off with him. None of us knew why. But she moped around for a couple of days in one seriously silent mood, and Sam was the only one managed to cheer her up. So then she starts to cry on his shoulder, she starts to whisper with him in corners, she starts to give him looks across the dinner table, she starts to touch his arm in passing. You get the: picture? And we’re all thinking this is not a good idea. He’s, too young, he won’t be able to handle it. But when we try and say something, Jenna gets all holier than thou, says this is ai pure and beautiful friendship and what are we saying here.; Basically tells us to mind our own business. So we sit the scene; out, we watch from the sidelines.’

  Momentarily distracted by a clatter from the kitchen, Dave; scratched the sparse stubble on his long chin. ‘So next thing, Chet doesn’t show,’ he went on. ‘He’s due back but he doesn’t!

  appear. No message, no nothing. We weren’t around for a while, me and Zoe. But the rest of the gang, they said Jenna went all sort of quiet and deadly, that if she let things go too far with Sam it was then that it happened.’ Dave shook his head slowly. ‘So Chet’s a no-show and Sam’s crazy with love, and Jenna - she’s talking about leaving, about being finished with Chet, and Sam thinks this is the start of their life together.

  He’s totally ecstatic. Totally over the moon.’ Dave made a rueful face, he said almost to himself, ‘Sort of awesome how much he loved her. When we got back, Zoe and me, we could see, like he was in real deep.’

  A low whistle sounded from the kitchen and grew to a high-pitched fever before the girl removed the kettle from the gas. Was the girl Zoe? Joe hadn’t seen her face and he wasn’t sure he could remember what she looked like anyway.

  Dave sighed, ‘And then there was all the stuff with the weir.’

  ‘Tell me about the weir.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s on the river, up near—’

  ‘I’ve seen it. I’ve been there.’

  ‘Right. So you know there’s this sort of walkway along the top? Well, Chet he went and walked the parapet once.’

  ‘Just decided? Out of the blue?’

  ‘No, no. He was on a mission.’

  For some reason this didn’t surprise Joe in the slightest.

  Dave elbowed his string-bean body up into a sitting position. ‘We stopped off at the weir late one night on the way back from somewhere. Six of us. Maybe seven. It was midsummer’s night, and warm, first warm night for ever and ever.

  We’re just sitting there, talking, watching the water when there’s this cry, like an animal in pain, from across the river. I said it was just a fox strutting its stuff, marking out its territory, whatever. But Jenna, she says no, this animal is in pain, I know it’s in pain, and she won’t hear any different. She gets all mystical about it and mournful and sad, so Chetwood says if it’ll make her happy he’ll go and take a look. There’s a bit of a moon, but the other side is seriously dark, he doesn’t have a hope in hell of finding anything, but he’s doing it, right?

  He’s crossing the river to make her happy. So he climbs over the gate and goes across by the path and he’s gone a long time.

  We call out once or twice, but either he can’t hear us over the water or he’s too busy. In the meantime, the animal’s bunked off or gone to heaven, because the cries have stopped. Half an hour, maybe longer, and suddenly we see Chet standing on the parapet in the middle of the weir, right over the water, and he walks along the parapet towards us, and we’re all scared shitless, except for Jenna who’s
sort of sighing with the magic of it all and having no doubts at all about whether he’ll make it, not a single one. So Chet walks the wall like it’s something he does every day, and when he arrives he says it was a fox in a trap and he’s set it free. I wasn’t too convinced about that myself, and the others weren’t either, except maybe for Sam.

  But Jenna - well, Chetwood’s the all-time hero. He’s set the animal free, he’s done it all for her, and then he’s walked on water. Well, a guy can’t go too wrong with a record like that, can he? So then it becomes this big thing, the way Chet walked the wall, and every time we talk about it Jenna gets all misty-eyed about her hero. So … I guess at the end of the day, Sam wanted to be a hero too. He wanted to show Jenna he was the greatest. Difference was, he didn’t make it.’

  ‘But he went and tried it alone?’

  ‘Seems so, yeah.’

  ‘Hard to be a hero if there’s no one there to see you do it.’ Dave gave a pensive nod. ‘I guess. Did he tell anyone he was going to attempt it?’

  ‘Hey. You’re asking me? At the inquest Jenna said he just disappeared from the house and she didn’t know where he’d gone.’

  ‘What was the inquest verdict?’

  ‘It was …’ He half-turned his head towards the kitchen door. ‘What was it, babe?’

  A pause then the girl’s voice responded, ‘Open verdict.’

  ‘Yeah. An open verdict.’

  ‘And what did everyone think about that?’

  Dave lifted his coat-hanger shoulders. ‘Nothing to think. We didn’t know anything for sure.'

  ‘Anyone unhappy about it?’

  ‘Everyone was unhappy about the whole damn thing. But Sam was dead. That was the end of the story, right? Nothing was gonna bring him back.’

  ‘Did anyone take it up with the police? Or the coroner?’

  ‘You mean, complain?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I heard that the family made a few waves. But then they were never gonna be happy, right?’

  ‘Anyone else who felt…’ Joe made a gesture that was deliberately vague.

  ‘There were things that hadn’t been said?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Dave was beginning to shake his head when a swish of silk heralded the girl again. She had a mug in one hand, and an elfin face which Joe recognised from his visit to the farm. She crossed the room without acknowledging either man.

  Joe assumed she’d gone until her voice sounded from over his shoulder. ‘The sister was seriously hacked off.’ Joe spun round to look at her, but she’d already vanished.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Dave exclaimed in a tone of enlightenment. He called after her, ‘Yeah, you’re right, babe.’ Then to Joe: ‘Yeah, Chet’s sister, she was in a serious rage.’

  For an instant, Joe couldn’t make the leap, he kept matching the idea to the facts he’d been assembling so studiously in his head and stumbling at every turn. ‘His sisterf There was no link, no logic. ‘You mean …’ And still he hesitated. ‘You mean Kate?’

  Dave pointed a slow finger of agreement. ‘Yeah - Kate. She came up around the time of the inquest. She started throwing a few heavy ideas about. Like Jenna was to blame. Like Jenna wasn’t saying all she knew. That kind of thing. She and Chet had a huge barney. At least that’s what we heard. Zoe and me, we sort of ducked out pretty quick, you know what I mean?

  We didn’t stick around.’

  And still part of Joe was in revolt. ‘You’re saying Kate knew Sam?’

  Dave was examining the remains of his joint. He looked up with his characteristic expression of benevolence. ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘They were friends?’

  ‘Sure they were friends. It was Kate who brought Sam up to the farm. It was her who brought him for a weekend. Then he came back another time on his own, and then he sort of stayed on. Oh yeah, Kate brought him. That was how he came to be there.’

  Joe drove south through darkness and rain. At the point where the motorway forked, where it was either London or the southwest, he took the road to the southwest. He told himself.the decision could have gone either way, that it had been very finely balanced indeed, but in his heart he knew there had been; no contest,

  At first he drove too fast and too wildly, earning himself a flash of headlights and an aggrieved horn-blast. Slowing down,’ he listening to music, he tried to empty his mind, he resisted all; temptation to reconstruct the story, he concentrated instead on the single basic fact: Kate had known Sam. Beyond that, he made no judgements, no assumptions, nothing that might get in the way. ‘

  As he came into the web of lanes near Coin Rogers and; prepared to get lost, his phone signalled the receipt of ai; message, but he gave it no thought until he’d negotiated, with a couple of hopelessly wrong turns and at least fifteen wasted minutes, the last two miles to Weston Manor Farm. He finally arrived at eight thirty. Several cars were parked on the rough grass at the side of the stable block and there were more inside the yard. The lights of another car had followed him up the track and gone on towards the front of the, house, which looked jam-packed. Parking on the rough, Joe was halfway out of the car before he remembered the message and dropped back inside.

  Bringing the message up on the screen, starting to read it, Joe realised immediately who must have sent it, yet disbelief made him scroll rapidly through to the end to check.

  It was signed Sarah.

  And before this: Love you.

  He stared, he felt a rush of feeling. Then, just as rapidly, a stab of doubt. What did she mean? Was it a declaration? A quick sign-off? A wistful token towards what might have been?

  He dismissed the sign-off immediately: in messaging you didn’t waste extraneous words on your friends; they got plain luv or xxx, or more often than not nothing at all. A nostalgic gesture then? A recognition that they’d had some good times together?

  But in that case surely she would have made it loved, past tense. In fact, been exceptionally careful to make it past tense.

  You didn’t mess with the word love.

  Which left a declaration. He hesitated to believe it; he was longing to believe it. He smiled in the darkness, he felt a squeeze of absurd happiness as he scrolled back to the beginning of the message. Here surely was confirmation, an offering of love if there ever was one, for at the risk of God only knew what, Sarah had found him the name and address of Sam Raynor’s family.

  Walking through the stable yard, the two small words kept ringing in his brain. Love you. By the time he reached the back of the house, they had lost any lingering capacity to torment him. Whether or not it was a declaration of intent, or a tribute to the past, she had said it, and’ somehow that was enough.

  Though even as he persuaded himself of this, he couldn’t rid himself of the quietly electrifying conviction that the words had come straight from her heart.

  A caterers’ van was parked close to the back door. In the kitchen he found two uniformed staff working on platters of food, while a couple of waiters sped in and out of an adjoining scullery. From the body of the house came the babble of voices and the occasional shriek of laughter.

  One of the waiters agreed to go and look for Kate. He was gone for no more than fifteen seconds before Kate swept in through the pass-door.

  ‘Joe! What on earth - ?’ Her look of surprise was rapidly overtaken by alarm. She clutched at his wrist. ‘It’s not Jamie, is it? Nothing awful’s happened?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The police haven’t arrested him again?’

  ‘No.’

  She closed her eyes, she spread her hands against her chest, in an extravagant gesture of relief, and cried, ‘Thank God!

  Thank God!’ Another sigh and she looked at Joe again. ‘What are you doing here, Joe?’

  ‘Sorry to interrupt your party.’

  ‘It’s not my party, it’s Mummy’s, for her birthday.’

  Kate was wearing a strapless dress with a full knee-length skirt in a shade of baby-blue that matched her eyes and set off t
he golden brilliance of her bouncy girlish hair. She was wearing more eye-makeup than he’d seen on her before, and lipstick that appeared too strong for her full upturned mouth.

  Joe said, ‘I’ve come to talk about Sam.’

  They were standing in the passage, close against the wall, to avoid the procession of trays going through into the body of the house. With a twitch of her lips and a swing of her skirt, Kate turned abruptly and led the way past her father’s study to , a door which opened into a small storage room, unheated, with a single overhead light and a wooden chair drawn up in , front an industrial sewing-machine.

  Kate took a couple of steps inside and, turning to face him,, hugged her arms close against her chest as if to guard against the cold.

  ‘So?’ she demanded.

  ‘Sam was a friend of yours.’

  ‘Yes,’ she declared defiantly, with a lift of her pretty head.

  ‘He was a friend of mine.’

  ‘You took him up to Pawsey Farm?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything? What’s that got to do with Jamie and getting him help?’

  Sensing that the strange undirected panic of their last meeting wasn’t far away, Joe waited a moment before saying very calmly, ‘It seems Jenna got some angry letters after Sam’s death. Someone who thought she was responsible—’

  ‘She was responsible!’

  Joe bowed solemnly to this. ‘Well, perhaps this person actually came and killed her.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’

  ‘Well, somebody killed her, didn’t they?’

  Her eyelids fluttered in sudden agitation, she said bitterly, ‘The worst thing I ever did in my whole life, taking Sam to the farm. The very worst. The single most stupid thing. In my whole life.’

  Again, Joe gave it a moment before asking, ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  ‘What was the point? You were Jenna’s friend. You were in love with her.’ Before he could object, she insisted petulantly, ‘That was what Jamie always said. That was what he always told me. I knew you’d never believe anything bad about Jenna, so I didn’t bother to tell you.’