The Lives She Left Behind

by James Long

  ‘He’s older than his years.’

  ‘He’s an old soul, is he?’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like a lawyer speaking.’

  ‘I’m only a lawyer in the daytime. Mornings and evenings I’m a free spirit. I meet people who seem to fit that description and I can’t think of a better one.’ She made a note on her pad and he wondered what she had written. It felt like some sort of verdict on him. ‘So at this point, the best we can hope to say is that you found you had a common interest in history, that he came here uninvited and nothing improper ever happened between you?’

  ‘Yes. You keep talking about court. Is it going to come to that?’

  ‘We should know quite soon. The police will do their stuff with everybody concerned. They’ll want to interview you under caution. After that the Crown Prosecution Service will decide whether there’s a case.’ She looked at him hard. ‘Everything you’ve told me about Luke, do you think that will match what he’ll be saying to them?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And that big question that you haven’t quite answered yet, the shouting match in the car?’

  ‘I’d say it was tiredness and a bit of shock.’

  ‘Then him turning up here?’

  ‘It’s not my fault if he doesn’t like his house or his family.’

  ‘Are you lonely here?’

  ‘Oh.’ He was about to deny it but then he thought she deserved something nearer the truth. ‘Yes.’

  ‘All the time?’

  ‘Not all the time. Not when I’m busy.’

  ‘Do you have friends in the village?’

  ‘I know people.’

  ‘But are they friends?’

  ‘Gally had loads of friends.’

  ‘Are they your friends too?’

  ‘I wave at them as I go by.’

  ‘Do you go to their houses?’

  ‘We used to.’

  ‘Do you have friends at work?’

  ‘Colleagues, yes. We talk work stuff.’

  ‘Not people you might go to the pub with.’

  ‘I’ve never been into pubs much.’

  ‘So it’s a solitary life?’

  He walked out with her to her car and as she opened the door, she paused for a moment and looked at him thoughtfully. She saw a man whose spring had unwound and thought all he needed was some joy to wind him up again and he would shed ten years.

  ‘I’ll be even more unprofessional,’ she said. ‘I think you’re a good man and I’m sorry for your loss. I know you’re keeping something back. I really hope you learn to trust me enough soon enough to tell me everything, because I would hate to see you in court still holding on to secrets I don’t understand. That way disaster lies.’

  As she drove away, he saw just how untidy the yard still looked despite his efforts. In the long, pointless afternoon that followed he picked up and discarded four or five books, switched on the television and flicked through the channels, considered catching up with the ironing and could see nothing in the immediate future that demanded ironed clothes. In the end, he took his keys and wallet with no real purpose in mind and drove away. Later, finding himself in Yeovil, he went into a cinema where he watched an American movie all the way through without following any of it.

  By the time he got home, it was dark. Exhausted by the day and by the questions it had brought, he went upstairs to turn on the bath and came back down to the bookshelves for something to read in bed. He was in search of comfort and distraction, history with no emotion, something dry about some place safely other than this at some time in the far, far past. He was still looking when the bubble of his solitude was burst by a loud knock. He stared at the door as he approached it, hoping despite the unlikely hour that it would be a charity collector or the Jehovah’s Witnesses or anybody who wouldn’t need him to do any more explaining.

  He opened the front door to find the boy standing in the porch. On his back was a stuffed rucksack.

  ‘Luke?’

  ‘Please don’t call me that. You know what to call me.’

  ‘Ferney. All right. What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘No, you can’t possibly.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You must know why not. I’m in enough trouble already.’

  ‘I’ve got nowhere else,’ said the boy. ‘I’ve left home. You have to let me in.’

  ‘No, I really don’t have to. You must go back.’

  ‘I can’t. It’s too late. It took ages. The rucksack makes my bike wobble and I haven’t got lights. I’m not going back. If you won’t let me in, I’ll find somewhere to sleep outside.’

  Mike looked past him into the darkness and saw a silver lace of finest rain glistening in the spilled light.

  ‘You’ve got no right to do this. I’ll drive you home.’

  ‘I can’t go back there. Barry punched me. He asked if I’d been here again.’

  ‘Where did he hit you?’

  ‘In the chest.’

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘It did. It’s getting better.’

  ‘Oh, come in then. You really can’t stay but I need to think.’

  The boy sat down on the sofa and Mike went to put the kettle on. When he came back, he saw the sovereigns were still on the table where he had left them.

  ‘Take those with you,’ he said. They felt like a trap, a bargain with teeth.

  ‘There’s a man in Shaftesbury. He’s a jeweller. He knows me. You can take them there.’

  ‘You’ve sold him sovereigns?’

  ‘Loads of times.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Not lately.’

  ‘You mean not since last time, don’t you? He wouldn’t know you, would he? Maybe he’d know an old man called Ferney, but he wouldn’t know you at all. In fact he might be dead for all you know.’

  ‘There’ll be others. You can always find coin dealers. I told you, it’s rent.’

  ‘It’s only rent if I let you stay and I’m not going to, so put them back wherever you dug them up.’

  The boy stood up abruptly. ‘You have no right to throw me out.’

  Mike found himself confronted, almost nose-to-nose. He felt acutely uncomfortable. ‘It’s my house. I have a perfect right.’

  ‘Listen to me,’ said the boy quietly and deliberately. ‘We always got this house back. Always. You bought it but that’s not the point. You bought it with her. This house has always been ours, hers and mine.’

  ‘It’s not yours now, all right? It’s mine and what I say goes. I’m not going to argue.’

  ‘Gally owned half of it, didn’t she? You’d let her stay if she came back.’

  Of course I would, Mike very nearly answered, it’s our house – but he choked off the words. The boy still stood defiantly close to him, hands on hips, staking his claim. The kettle shrieked and Mike spun round and strode to the kitchen, relieved at the excuse. He took his time, trying to get his breathing back under control. He made the boy a mug of sweet tea but by the time he went back to the sitting room, the confrontation was past. The boy had tilted over, lifted his feet on to the sofa and was fast asleep. Mike stared at him, tried to find it somewhere in himself to shake him awake and turn him out into the rain but he was too kind to do it. He stood undecided, then he drank the mug of tea himself, spread a rug over the boy and went upstairs where he found the bathroom full of steam, the hot tap still on and water pouring out of the overflow.

  He was so deeply asleep at midnight that the hammering on the door went no further than diverting his dreams a little. It was Ferney who let them in and they kept him downstairs while they came to the bedroom, so the first Mike knew of it was a hand shaking his shoulder and three large forms around him in the dim moonlight.

  He reared up, terrified by their presence, adrenalin flooding in preparation for a hopeless fight.

  ‘Mr Martin, wake up, please. We’re police officers. Mr Martin, wake up.’

  �
��What? What’s wrong?’ he said around a slow, thick tongue. ‘Has something happened?’ Then he was fully awake, sitting up, and one of the men switched the ceiling light on. He screwed up his eyes. Three men – two in plain clothes, one in uniform. The older of the plain-clothes men spoke to him while his eyes searched the room. The intrusion appalled him. Their confidence in their power swamped him.

  ‘We need to talk to you. Get dressed, please. We have a warrant to search this house.’

  ‘What about? What’s happened?’ Then he remembered the boy downstairs and put two and two together. ‘It’s about . . .’ He stopped himself saying Ferney. ‘It’s about Luke, is it?’

  ‘Save that until you’ve got up.’

  They watched him as he sat up in bed.

  ‘Do you mind?’ he said. ‘Just while I dress?’

  ‘Starkers, are you?’ said the younger of the plain-clothes men. ‘That how you sleep, starkers?’

  ‘Just give me a moment.’

  ‘We’ll be on the landing. Right outside.’

  Mike found pants in the chest of drawers, pulled on the clothes he had heaped on the chair and struggled to find two clean socks of roughly the same colour, feeling that somehow mattered. He heard raised voices downstairs, Ferney’s voice loud but calm.

  ‘I’m sixteen years old. I can do what I want.’

  The response was muffled but then Ferney’s voice was clear again. ‘They’re not telling you the truth. I’ve left home of my own free will. I’m only here because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Mr Martin didn’t even know I was coming. He just let me sleep here.’

  ‘Keep it quieter down there,’ called the older policeman from the landing. Ferney wants me to hear all that, Mike realised, but they don’t.

  ‘I’m ready,’ he said as he pulled a sweater over his head. Dressed, he felt more able to stand up to them. ‘I want to know what’s going on. Who are you?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Wilson, from Yeovil,’ said the older man, coming in. ‘We’d like to ask you some questions at the police station, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Do I have a choice?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir. You have a choice. You’re not under arrest.’ The man’s voice said he soon might be if he took that line.

  ‘Do you normally come asking questions at this time of night?’

  ‘Only when we have to.’

  Once upon a time, in what now seemed the far past, Mike had been used to assuming the police were on his side – that they weren’t there to doubt him but to protect him. The long investigation sixteen years earlier had changed that.

  ‘I don’t think it is all right,’ he said. ‘I think you could make an appointment for a slightly more reasonable time. I don’t want to come with you, not in the middle of the night.’

  ‘Well, in that case, Mr Michael Martin,’ said the sergeant, ‘I’m arresting you on suspicion of downloading indecent images. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which . . .’

  Mike was so startled that his mind went off to wander somewhere far away. He looked past the sergeant and all he could see was the other man staring at him with mild curiosity on his face.

  ‘I haven’t downloaded any indecent images,’ he said. ‘I can hardly download anything at all on that computer. It’s too old, or I’m doing something wrong – I don’t know. I keep trying but it doesn’t help.’ He saw the younger man was taking rapid notes. ‘Oh, I don’t mean indecent stuff – of course I don’t.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Castles mostly. Pictures of castles.’

  ‘Bouncy castles?’ the man suggested. ‘Kids jumping up and down?’

  ‘Norman castles,’ said Mike. ‘Motte and baileys.’ He saw the younger man struggling to write that down. It was almost funny.

  He was taken downstairs and straight outside to a police car. He didn’t see the boy. On the way to Yeovil he had to suffer the suppressed hostility of the younger detective which showed itself in brief, sharp glances, loud sniffs and an unnecessarily tight grip on his arm as they got him in and out of the car. They told him he was entitled to a lawyer and that seemed absurd. It didn’t occur to him that he knew any lawyers. They went through their procedures at the desk and then he lay meekly down on the hard bench in the cell as if he was some compliant guest in the world’s worst bed and breakfast.

  He hardly moved until dawn chilled the cell walls. It was a measure of his state of mind that he had entirely forgotten about Rachel Palmer’s existence until he heard her raised voice outside in the corridor and the door opened to reveal her haranguing a stony-faced man with sergeant’s stripes on his uniform.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’re going.’

  ‘Are we?’

  ‘You’re released on police bail.’

  ‘How did you know I was here?’

  ‘I’ll tell you over breakfast.’

  She drove him to a small cafe that kept early hours, where she ordered coffee and bacon sandwiches for both of them. She said, ‘Give me a moment,’ and tapped out a long text on her mobile. Only when the coffee arrived did she put it away and look at him.

  ‘Okay. That was what I would call a disgraceful fishing trip by a policeman who’s easily old enough to know better. On the very doubtful justification of some sort of hysterical phone call from Luke’s family, they’ve seized your computer and they’re checking it for paedophile images. They tell me they’ve taken a box of photos too. They’re not going to find anything, are they? Please tell me they’re not.’

  ‘What box of photos?’

  ‘I have no idea, but that’s not quite the indignant denial I’d been hoping for.’

  ‘No. Of course they’re not.’

  ‘So what is on the computer? Any images at all?’

  ‘I told them. Somerset castles for a project I’m doing. Other school stuff. Just things for lessons.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘Nothing at all. How did you know I was there?’

  ‘You’re an idiot, Mike. You don’t mind me calling you Mike?’

  ‘It’s better than calling me an idiot.’

  ‘Why didn’t you ring me?’

  ‘You didn’t seem like that sort of lawyer. I don’t know you well enough to call you in the middle of the night.’

  ‘Luke doesn’t know me at all. He called me without a second thought.’

  ‘Luke called you?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘How did he know your number?’

  ‘My card was on your dresser. When they took you off, he refused to go with them. They couldn’t arrest him. He had the sense to ring my mobile.’

  ‘I’m sorry. He must have woken you up.’

  ‘Of course he did. I do go to sleep at night.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘So come on, Mike. You’d better tell me why was he there. Why on earth did you let him stay at your house after all this? Okay, he’s over sixteen now, but you must be completely daft.’

  ‘He turned up in the dark, in the rain. He said his mother’s boyfriend hit him and he had nowhere else to go. He was asleep before I could get rid of him.’

  ‘That’s what he said to me. He said something else too.’

  ‘What was it?’

  She took the bill. He realised he had no money on him.

  ‘He said – let me get this right – he said that if you wanted to tell me the whole story, it was okay by him. He said if you decided there really wasn’t any other way then you could do it, but he said it was up to you and it probably wouldn’t help. Now, what do you think he meant by that?’

  Her mobile phone beeped twice with the arrival of a text message. She read it and frowned. ‘I’ve got to get back to Wincanton. Can we talk as we go? I’ll drop you off.’

  She was preoccupied as she got in the car, silent as they drove out of town.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ he asked her in the end.

&nbs
p; ‘Just domestic stuff,’ she said. ‘I texted a friend to see if she could do the school run instead of me. It was my turn. Trouble is, her car’s in being serviced.’ She glanced at the clock on the dash. ‘I don’t want Lulie to be late.’

  ‘Lulie’s your daughter?’ He felt unreasonably glad that she had trusted him with the name.

  ‘Yes. Oh, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Come off it. There are daughters everywhere. I teach people’s daughters every day – or at least I did. I’m quite used to the idea of daughters.’

  ‘So, are you going to tell me?’

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘What this thing is you’ve been keeping to yourself, which I guess is the same thing Luke says you can tell me.’

  There was a silence lasting a mile or two.

  ‘Well?’ she said in the end. “Now I know it exists, you really must tell me what it is.’

  ‘I don’t know how I can,’ he said. ‘It will make no sense to you and it will take more time than we’ve got.’

  ‘Just try. It’s obviously central to all this, so I’m not going to be much good to you otherwise.’

  ‘Couldn’t your husband take Lulie to school?’

  ‘That’s a very bad attempt to change the subject, and of course he could if I rang him, but as he now lives in Vancouver, I suspect he might not get here in time.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t know what for. Now stop testing my patience and tell me.’

  ‘Even if that was a good idea, you wouldn’t believe me.’

  ‘Try me. You haven’t got much choice. I know there’s something to tell and I’m a good lawyer. I don’t let go.’

  She turned off into the lane to Pen Selwood and stopped the car.

  ‘If you don’t mind walking home from here, we’ve got five minutes. I’m going to sit here and if you make Lulie late for school, then on your own conscience be it.’

  There was a tantalising sense of liberation in telling her what could not be told.

  ‘This is strictly between you and me, right?’

  ‘I’m your lawyer. That does mean I keep your secrets.’ She looked at the clock again. ‘Lulie’s waiting.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll do my best.’ He glanced out of the car window and took a deep breath. ‘When we first came here, Gally and I, we met an old man at the cottage. We got to know him well. He was called Ferney. He died on the day Rosie was born.’