‘We’re stealing off,’ I said eventually to Dad.
He was drinking tea with Jack’s parents, around the kitchen table. There were two horns on the table. Long and slim. They cost a fortune, no doubt. Their house was like that. No papers or handfuls of coins or biscuit packets. Just strange ornaments, huge statues, artefacts.
‘Are we?’ Jack turned to me in surprise.
He didn’t look like somebody who wanted to go out. His hair was messy and his feet were bare in his soft grey tracksuit bottoms. It was already late afternoon – he often didn’t get dressed unless he had to. He called it the freelance way.
‘Yes. To those boats in the bay,’ I said.
There were rowing boats down in the harbour, which was walking distance from his parents’ house. We’d been meaning to go out in them, but it was never usually dry enough.
‘Okay,’ he said. He was always happy to do whatever I wanted; to please me.
I should leave, I thought. Anyone else surely would have; the shot from that night in Oban ringing out behind them, chased by the fizz of the lies. But I didn’t. I stayed. I needed him to tell me what had happened. To let him have his say, and to make it real. So I could believe it. My eyes felt heavy from lack of sleep. My hips ached.
Jack’s father came out with us. The Rosses were always maintaining their house. It needed it, I was sure, but somebody seemed to be doing something every day: painting the window frames, picking apples from the orchard, jet-washing the drive. He began raking the leaves that lined the grass verge of the long, sweeping driveway.
‘That’s sociable,’ Jack said sarcastically.
He agreed that his father raking the leaves was rude when my dad was sitting just inside, feeling out of place at their table. He was like me. He read the Guardian and liked Netflix and checked his iPhone too much. He was tidy enough but not a neat freak. He did a great line in his cat’s interior monologue. He agreed that buying Starbucks was unethical and financially stupid but we both did it, anyway. He frequently didn’t get dressed at the weekends but wasn’t lazy. Did his past really matter?
But no. That wasn’t true at all, although I wanted it to be. It did matter. Of course it did. It mattered more than anything.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Jack said to me, raising an eyebrow.
It was a warm day, a pleasant start to the week, and I reached for him. His hands were always cold, but I liked that; I liked the sharpness of it. I’d talk to him in a minute, in a minute. When the time was right. We were still in love with each other, and I wanted to enjoy our relationship’s dying moments like an Indian summer in a final autumn.
For a while, I was still being the Rachel I was when I was part of Rachel and Jack, and I didn’t know how to stop cracking jokes with him, moving close to the spot between his neck and shoulder, catching his lingering gazes.
‘So, will you row?’ Jack said. ‘These limp arms don’t maintain themselves.’
He was always doing that, putting himself down, even though he was quite broad, and looked pretty muscular to me.
‘What happened to chivalry?’ I said, but I was smiling.
‘I have no upper body strength, that’s what happened.’ He pulled his Facebook photo face again, and I laughed quietly.
We walked through the woodland, our feet thumping on exposed tree roots, and I looked back at the house. Did it happen there? ‘When did you move there?’ I said.
‘Few years ago.’
‘Oh,’ I said. Maybe they moved afterwards. Because of the memories.
The harbour was horseshoe-shaped, ringed by pubs and restaurants which were pumping steam out into the crisp autumn air. The beach was pebbled, and a lone fisherman stood, taking five-pound notes in exchange for a push out to sea in a tiny, rickety wooden boat. I thought of how I could approach the question when we were in the queue.
The autumn afternoon light was slanted and amber, casting rays across the dock. I could taste the tang of salt on my lips, inside my mouth. My hair took on a coarse quality immediately; holiday hair.
I didn’t go for subtext: the kind I would use on parents whose children weren’t responding to treatment. I could have. I could have used caveats like to rule it out when I was, in fact, testing specifically for it, because I suspected it. I could have said that he could talk to me about anything; that I wanted to get to know him better; that I, too, had a past. That would have been the best.
But instead I said, ‘I wanted to read your Douglas articles.’
We were in the boat. The seats were wet, the cold water seeping through the bottom of my jeans.
‘My politics?’ he said with a raise of his eyebrows.
He was correct in presuming I wasn’t interested in politics; that I would never normally feel the need to google him or read his articles. I had barely read his Jack Ross travel articles. They weren’t him; they weren’t memoirs or funny columns. They weren’t living and breathing in front of me. They were summaries of bars, restaurants, with the occasional flash of Jack’s wry humour, like seeing an incredible likeness in a portrait only for it to disappear again a few seconds later. They were facsimiles of him. I thought that it was plausible enough that I would one day read his columns, but that eyebrow raise said it wasn’t.
‘Yeah, just a bit of cyber stalking,’ I said; a sentence that was much closer to the truth.
The fisherman pushed us, and we became weightless.
Jack reached for an oar, not looking at me. The rowlocks that the oars rested in had started rusting at the edges.
‘Did you like what you saw?’ he said, but his voice was strained.
‘I saw some other things, actually –’ I began.
And that was all it took. I never even finished the sentence.
His entire body language changed, sitting bolt upright like a rabbit that had heard gunshots.
25
‘I told you I use two writing aliases,’ he said, ignoring my murmuring and talking over me.
His tone was apologetic; sheepish. He knew he’d been found out. He was game-playing.
‘I’ve seen an article about you on the internet.’
‘Charity events?’ he asked. ‘I said, for my writing about politics –’
‘No. About something else.’
‘Oh, yes, wait – maybe …’
It wasn’t his tone this time; that he was pretending to remember when he knew. I didn’t like that, but no. It was the backtracking that did it. He didn’t look me straight in the eye and say, ‘You’ve read about the shooting, haven’t you?’ He drip-fed it. And that made it much worse.
‘Oh?’ I said, sounding like an idiot.
A particularly fierce wave broke, and the boat lurched unpleasantly. Spray arced over us.
‘That’s Balliemore,’ Jack said, pointing to a mound across the sea.
‘Right,’ I said. That’s Balliemore. ‘What is your actual full name?’ I continued. ‘On your birth certificate.’
He avoided my eyes. ‘John Ross,’ he said.
‘And Douglas is your mum’s maiden name?’
He looked straight at me. ‘Yes.’
‘I think your name’s John Douglas.’
A pause.
‘You got me,’ he said. ‘It is. Mum’s maiden name is Ross. Does it matter?’
‘Yes,’ I said quietly.
He said nothing. His name wasn’t Jack Ross. He had lied to me right from when we met. I tried to look past it.
‘The thing I saw. It was a trial. It was about a trial,’ I said. I was embarrassed by my lack of anger, by my tentativeness. Why did I care what he thought, at this stage? But, oh, I did.
There was a metallic taste in my mouth. This was it. The conversation was unfolding in front of us and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
‘What?’ he said.
I frowned and wrinkled my nose, trying to look like I was comically confused, not desperate – absolutely desperate – for him to tell me.
He took his e
yes off mine. He was looking all around us. Behind me, at the shops and pubs, flitting up to the sky, down to the oars. He pulled a loose thread on his gloves, but it wouldn’t come.
‘It said … it said you were … that you shot someone.’
The water was lapping all around us, steel grey with slices of reflected blue sky marbled throughout it like sudden shards of glass. I could smell the scents of the restaurants pumping out into the ocean from the shore: fresh, fried fish, vinegar, the kiss of butter in a pan. I could smell the tang of the salt on the shells that lined the beach and the cut of Jack’s deodorant and the mildew, the rotting wood, of the boat.
‘Was that you?’ I continued.
He was looking straight at me.
I thought I could feel his fear like it had been taken out of his chest and placed right in front of us.
No. I couldn’t. I was imagining that, too. I was wrong. Please let me be wrong.
It was another John Douglas, maybe.
It was something he’d reported on, and that’s why his name was on it.
It was made up.
The theories piled up, none of them seeming plausible. But, like a patient about to get a biopsy result, I was praying.
‘Rach,’ he said. ‘What’ve you seen?’
Maybe I had got it all wrong; had taken small pieces of information and added them all up together incorrectly, like a conspiracy theorist convinced we didn’t land on the moon or that aliens lived in Area 51. There would be a logical explanation, like the time I treated a patient for repeated bruises and we were sure her family was abusing her but she actually had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which was causing the skin marks.
I couldn’t see an obvious, easy solution that explained everything, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. I looked at him, waiting. But I also couldn’t stop the tears collecting behind my eyes, the hot wetness, the tightness in my throat.
‘Did you – did you kill somebody?’ I said.
And, standing in the wings, against the backdrop to it all, was another me, the past me, who had never met Jack and certainly had not got pregnant by him. She was standing at the shore and screaming: how has this happened to you? How are you having to ask this question? And then she was gesturing frantically. Stop, she was crying. You’ll ruin things again with your paranoia. You can never take this question back.
I opened my mouth, ready to speak, to retract it. So he had two names. So someone – maybe – with a similar name had killed someone, ages ago. It wasn’t the same person. It wasn’t. I knew he was good.
But, as I went to speak, Jack looked at me. His eyes were red-rimmed.
‘Yes,’ he said.
Part 2
* * *
WHAT?
26
‘It was December,’ he said, the Oban afternoon light blanching his features.
A mist had descended and had bleached the orange light to white; less like the sun and more like a blinding floodlight, the full-beam headlight of an oncoming car.
‘We’d been burgled three times before. They’d taken Mum’s laptop. She lost all her photos. And Davey’s stuff, too. His toys …’ Jack paused, then added, ‘gadgets,’ with a self-aware laugh. It was very him. He knew that most teenagers didn’t have toys worth stealing.
‘We weren’t … where we are now. We moved, afterwards. It was up on the hills, out in the countryside. You probably know,’ he said. ‘The press made a really big deal out of the fact it was a mansion. We should let ourselves be burgled because we’re rich.’ His mouth twisted, one side up, one side down, into an annoyed smile.
‘I’ve hardly read anything,’ I said. I didn’t say that I’d tried to, that I’d trawled the Internet, tried to excavate it.
‘How did you find it?’
‘The Internet.’
He frowned and, to my disappointment, pursued it. ‘There shouldn’t be any,’ he said tightly.
‘There is. One. Some. Bits and pieces.’
‘Right.’ He paused, looking out at the water, then spoke again. ‘Well, it was our house, called Thornfield. I was in with Davey. I was twenty-five. And I was … I don’t know, Rach. I was nervy. You ever been burgled?’
‘No.’
‘Well, it’s like – they’re right, what they say. It does feel like a violation. It feels worse than it actually is. I’d happily hand over my goods. But it’s the other stuff. The second time, Mum’s underwear drawers were open. Nothing taken. Just looked through. Stuff had moved in the bathroom. The bloody bathroom. We suspected who they were. There was this family who were always in court when I was reporting. We suspected them. And then, the next time, Mum found them. She memorized the guy’s face. Aldridge. So the third time, she knew it was him again.’
I frowned. I could see why a burglar would go through their entire house: there were artefacts in almost every dusty room: items from travelling; heirlooms; bows and arrows hung on the walls. I didn’t say so, though; of course I didn’t.
‘Aldridge was like –’ Jack mimed, his hand out over the sea, hovering just a foot above the water ‘– distinctive. Really little and wiry. We didn’t just see them around – we knew them. Oban’s small. We saw them along the high street. They used to laugh about it. Take the piss.’
I shook my head, confused. It was hard to follow his train of thought. I needed Audrey with me: she’d make him give us a straight timeline of events. Oh, how I wanted Audrey with me. I drew my coat around myself, around Wally, feeling utterly alone with this stranger – Jack? John? – on the boat. The air was getting colder.
He was rowing us in a circle as he spoke, idly twiddling with one of the oars. And he was taking me round in circles as he told me what had happened.
‘We reported them. In 2008 and 2009. Twice in 2009. We didn’t know who it was the first time, so we couldn’t prosecute. The second time, Mum did know, and identified him at a line-up. I helped her. I showed her a photo from the newspaper. It was wrong but I did it, anyway. He – Lee Aldridge, but everyone just called him Aldridge – got charged but he got off because he had an alibi. Then later in 2009, after the third burglary, the day after they were arrested, they asked Mum in the street if she was missing any of her ornaments. But they used each other as alibis. There were loads of them, on this estate. They all said they were with each other. We’d even got CCTV ready for the third time. But they couldn’t be sure beyond reasonable doubt. It was grainy, they said, and he had an alibi. They still got off. They always do. Not that I’m one to talk,’ he said, the ghost of a rueful smile playing on his lips.
‘What happened next?’ I said, though what I actually wanted to ask was: how did any of this result in you putting a gun to his head? I didn’t, though. It was funny – and would’ve been fascinating, if it wasn’t happening to me – how we all had our own take on things. How the story, for Jack, began back in 2008, and for me it was just beginning then, on that little boat in the sea. Or rather, how it began with that email I saw in the night.
Jack paused before answering. ‘Yeah. Everyone was away. Davey was asleep upstairs. He was up there, and he was terrified by it all. Kept checking the locks. We got the dogs. To guard the house. But they were soppy. Useless.’
It was starting to get dark. The man at the shore was waving to us to come back, but Jack ignored him, picking up both oars and rowing further out. The moon had come out, looking grubby and pockmarked in the clear sky.
‘They bloody let themselves in, Rach. I knew who it was when I heard any noise at all. It was only ever them. The house was the only one for miles. Totally isolated, which they knew. Lee Aldridge – and Dominic Hull. He was just a teenager.’
The image brought goosebumps out over my shoulders. I couldn’t imagine two men letting themselves into my house as if they were merely bringing home the shopping; how menacing that would be. How desperate I would feel if it was the fourth time it had happened; how hunted.
‘And they were the same men?’
‘Yes.’
We were far from the shore in our little boat. The sea underneath us was iron grey, the lights of the shore getting smaller and fading.
And then I thought about what I had done. My brain was trying to draw a comparison, but I stopped it, snatched the pen away. No. No.
‘I told them where to go. I yelled at them. They threw something at me. This statue of Mum’s. From Thailand.’
He said it easily, as if one might always have statues lying around, but I didn’t take the mickey. He didn’t raise his eyebrows or smirk at me, either. His skin looked pale and his hair too dark. He looked tired.
‘Was there a struggle?’ I said, so unfamiliar with these situations that I started using words I had only ever heard on the news. Struggle. Suspicious. Accused.
‘Yeah,’ Jack said. He was staring down at the oars, then blinked, puffed air into his cheeks and glanced back up at me. ‘Our gun was on the top of the bookcase in the study. Just an air rifle. I always put it there after practising. There’s a tree in that garden with hundreds of holes in it from all that. The press got in and took a photo. Training, they called it.’
‘God,’ I said, but I was thinking that there was something strange about his tone. Everything sounded too practised. Rehearsed.
‘I did it without thinking. That’s how right it was.’
I didn’t say what I was thinking: that I wasn’t sure anything like that could ever feel right, that I didn’t understand how an air rifle could do so much damage, that I was still reeling from the transformation my lovely boyfriend had undergone in front of me. The longer I stayed silent, the more questions I had. If Jack had such good aim, how did he accidentally hit the intruder in the head? How did he have the time to get the rifle from the top of the bookcase in a struggle? Jack was tall, but not overly so. The questions crowded into my mind like people arriving in A&E on a Saturday night.
Everything but the Truth Page 15
