by Jo Allen
‘There’s no need to get touchy with me.’
‘I’m not. I’m telling you. You’ve got someone who’s good for you. You don’t want to risk losing him because you can’t get over Scott.’
If she lost Jude, it would be nothing to do with Scott. It would be to do with Becca. ‘I’d be happy to talk about the Costa Book Prize, if only I had time to read any books.’
‘Don’t change the subject.’
‘Okay. But I don’t want to talk about Scott. I’m not interested in him. As I said before, and as you just quoted back to me.’
Lisa sat down with an exaggerated sigh. ‘For God’s sake. How is it possible that someone as sensible as you gets so stupid and irrational when it comes to Scott?’
The answer was obvious. It was because she loved him, or she had done once, and because there was no-one in life she would ever love the same way. It was no wonder she was so reluctant to let the good times go, even though they had come at the cost of his controlling toxicity. ‘Let’s just leave it. Anyway, I have work to do.’
‘Ash. You know what you’re like.’
‘Yes. Busy.’ She got to her feet and retrieved her iPad from her briefcase. Sensible and self-aware, that was what she was like. And pragmatic. No relationship lasted for ever and the one she had with Jude, which was based upon physical chemistry and friendship and yet perversely had never combined these two ingredients into love no matter what they whispered to one another in the darkness, had already endured longer than she’d expected it to. At some point, one of them would have their doubts.
Lisa followed her into the hall. ‘You work too bloody hard. Leave the work and come to the pictures. There’s a kickass action film on at the Alhambra.’
Above the irritation, Ashleigh was laughing as she headed upstairs. It was impossible to be angry with Lisa, whose good intentions always shone through. It was hard enough to be angry with Jude, who’d never tried to pretend that their relationship meant as much to him as the one he’d had with Becca and so had doomed it with his honesty. She’d always known there was no permanence to it, and for the first time she began to wonder how it would end and which of them would end it.
She laid the iPad down on the bed, sat at her dressing table and opened the drawer. She couldn’t concentrate on her work with that kind of thought rumbling about in her head, so it would be sensible to take a few moments to calm herself down and rationalise her way out of the irritation Jude had brought on her. First he’d disappeared off to see Mikey; now it was Becca. He’d made it clear she wasn’t his priority.
Guilt troubled her, nevertheless. He’d told her about it. She’d kept quiet about the occasional coffees she shared with Scott.
That was because coffee with Scott meant nothing to either of them, and so wasn’t worth mentioning. Nevertheless it niggled at her, so she had to lay it to rest. From the drawer she took out a deck of tarot cards, wrapped in purple silk. If she had a guilty secret it was the cards, not Scott. Jude knew about them, and so did Lisa, but no-one else. The two of them gave her enough good-natured abuse over it and she could barely think about the amusement she’d generate if anyone at work found out. It wouldn’t just be amusement. There would be a degree of scepticism and an inevitable loss of credibility to go along with it, and that was something she couldn’t risk.
‘Shall we talk about Scott?’ she asked the cards, keeping her voice low so Lisa didn’t hear and come racing in to tear another strip off her and strain the bounds of friendship. She dealt them out, five in a horseshoe, and this time she didn’t follow her usual routine and turn them over, one by one, asking each a question, having each one address a specific issue before she knew what would come next.
‘This time,’ she said (to the cards? To herself?) ‘I need to get a feeling for the overall.’ Some things were too important to trust entirely to the Tarot and all she wanted them to do was to offer her some breathing space. She didn’t even need to know what she had to think about. It was all there in her head — Scott and Jude and the patient, irresistible threat that was Becca Reid; love or sex or happiness — and all she had to do was find a solution.
It was for her to do it, not them. For the first time she doubted their guidance. It had been reflecting on a random draw of a card that led her to cut Scott off so completely in the first place, and now she knew how foolish that would sound if she ever confessed it.
She surveyed the cards. The Four of Pentacles, indicating that she was holding on too tightly — but to what? The Emperor, inhabiting his world of self-discipline, always sticking to the right road. She stopped and frowned at him, the card she always associated with Jude yet which had never come up in any reading since she’d met him. Usually the card that came up was the Three of Swords, the one that reminded her of Scott and his incurable infidelity. Auspicious? Inauspicious? Then the next one, the Empress, domestic and content, thoughtful, emotional and loving. Definitely not me, Ashleigh said to herself.
The last card, not remotely to her surprise, was the Hanged Man. Sometimes she thought that whatever she was thinking influenced the cards she drew rather than the other way round. She might have subconsciously identified this card of the dead as she’d cut the deck, shuffling it to the top and keeping it there, just the way the series of suicides in the Eden Valley kept shuffling to the forefront of her mind.
She looked at the card, deep in thought. There he was, the Hanged Man, suspended by his feet yet with the ghost of a smile on his face. It wasn’t a card of death, but a card of sacrifice. There was a lot of food for thought in that.
When it came to her heart, she had nothing to fear; she knew that. Nothing to fear from anyone but herself.
When the doorbell rang, late on in the evening, Jude was standing in his stockinged feet in the kitchen with his fist clenched around a can of decaffeinated diet Coke, a joyless end to a thought-provoking evening. Late alerts like this weren’t unusual and were rarely welcome. He made his way to the front door with care, and opened it to find Ashleigh on the doorstep.
‘Well, this is an unexpected pleasure. Come on in.’ He leaned in to kiss her. She smelled of cider and Chanel. So, after he’d cancelled their evening out in fruitless search of reassurance about Mikey, she’d gone out anyway. He could hardly hold that against her. ‘What brings you over here at the time of night? Had an epiphany?’
‘Yes.’ She stepped inside but she kept her jacket on and made no move to follow him through to the living room. ‘But probably not the sort you want to hear. I won’t stop.’
‘Right.’ Consciously defensive, he stuck both hands in his pockets and looked at her as she stood on the mat just inside the open door. Adam Fleetwood, strolling past, peered in at them and laughed. ‘Close the door, then. Whatever you have to say I don’t imagine you want the whole street hearing it.’
‘No.’ She closed the door behind her. ‘I’ve just been for a drink with Scott.’
‘For old times’ sake, as usual.’
‘Yes.’ For once she didn’t look at him but instead peered beyond him to the heavy mirror fixed on the wall. Jude wasn’t a man for mirrors and this one had been there when he moved in, so firmly screwed to the wall that it was too much of an effort to move it. Now it was perished round the edges where the silvered paint had begun to tarnish, so that when he saw Ashleigh’s timeless yet expressive face in it he was briefly reminded of the faded photograph Becca had described to him of Nick Chester, fixed forever at the age of sixteen.
Something, some sense of foreboding that had crept into the house with the mention of Scott, warned him that this might be the last time Ashleigh looked at herself in that mirror, that she’d never tweak her hair straight or apply her lipstick in it again in the morning after a night with him.
‘I hope he didn’t drive home,’ he said, to break the silence, waiting for her to say that he’d gone back to her house, or was waiting outside, or whatever else she had to say that would bring official notification of the inevitable.
‘It’s good to see you’re getting on so well with him.’ He wasn’t a mean-spirited man, but he didn’t see why he should make this easy for her.
‘I always have done. That’s the thing, Jude. Don’t you see? I always will get on well with him. I like him.’
To Jude, it was evident Scott Kirby was controlling, self-absorbed and manipulative. That Ashleigh, who had always understood that, should claim still to like him was telling. ‘As I’ll always get on well with Becca. It’s always good to be civilised with your ex-partner.’
‘It’s more than just civilised, though. You know it. It’s because deep down I still love him.’
In the mirror he saw her close her eyes for a second as if she couldn’t bear to hear herself speak the truth. ‘Right.’
‘You knew this was going to happen, Jude. Don’t deny it. We both always knew this wasn’t long term. We knew it wasn’t love.’
He couldn’t argue with that. It had lasted longer than he’d ever expected, especially once he’d met Scott and seen for himself both how keen she was to get away from a man who was persistent and churlish but never violent and how difficult it was for her to let him go. He’d once heard Lisa spell it out in a way he never would; Ashleigh was drawn towards Scott, the one man she’d loved, like the moth to the flame, knowing she’d be burned.
He didn’t know Scott well but he guessed it would happen again. A brief smile crossed his face as he thought of Geri Foster and her philosophy of life, love and sex. It was a simple enough solution if you could stick to it, but Ashleigh’s continued flirtation with the ghost of her marriage showed how hard it was to love inclusively. If you loved, you wanted to be the only person. That was why his resentment towards Ashleigh as she returned to Scott was so much less than it had been towards Becca when she’d taken up with the allegedly-reformed returning hero, Adam Fleetwood.
That was over now. Becca was single. ‘I hope you’re happy,’ he said, to fill the gap.
She turned away from the mirror. ‘I don’t expect I will be. I’ve already tried to change him and failed. But I got to the stage when I have to try, just one more time. You have to make sacrifices.’
A strange choice of word. He might have understood it better if she’d said take risks. ‘And I’m the sacrifice? I see.’
‘I don’t know if you are. Maybe it’s me. I’m sorry Jude, and I don’t want to hurt you, but you know what? I don’t think you will hurt.’
His pride would, perhaps, but that was all. His heart wasn’t hers to damage. ‘I don’t imagine I will.’
‘And do you know something else? There’s a silver lining to every cloud. Don’t pretend you haven’t already thought of it. Because now you’re free and single, and so is Becca.’ The deed done, face to face, she turned her back on him and placed a hand on the door.
Not that long before, at Mikey’s twenty first birthday party, Becca had kissed him and avoided him for weeks afterwards, turning scarlet when they finally did meet. Later, in a moment of stress she’d thrown her arms around him for comfort and there had been hell to pay from Adam Fleetwood, her boyfriend at the time. But now? ‘That ship sailed long ago.’
‘Of course it didn’t. Do you know what? Before I came out I read the cards.’
‘You and your bloody cards,’ he said, unable to resist the temptation to tease her even in these most serious of circumstances. ‘Did they tell you I was the wrong man for you?’
‘You know that isn’t how it works. But I turned over two cards, the Emperor and the Empress, together. That’s unusual.’
There were seventy two cards in a tarot deck. He did the maths as he had done for the roll of the die, for the suicides. The odds of any one coming up were one in seventy two. The odds of those two coming up one after the other would be very much more — less than one in five thousand by his rusty mental maths. ‘How many cards in a spread?’
‘Five in the one I did.’
That changed the odds again. ‘What were the others?’
‘I can’t remember.’
He didn’t press her, moving to open the door for her. ‘I know you’re right. It was always going to happen. But I admit I wasn’t expecting it tonight.’
‘Lisa will tear me limb from limb,’ she said, dipping her head as if in apology, ‘when I get home and break it to her. She could never stand him. But I have to try again. I have to give him just one more chance.’
‘I see,’ he said, though he didn’t.
‘We’ll still be friends, won’t we?’
‘We’ll always be friends.’ When she stepped over the doorstep he followed her and gave a huge hug in the street, but he was acutely conscious that for all the closeness, all the intimacy, the touch of her cheek against his and the trailing golden hair she left on his shirt, there was no kiss at the end of it.
‘I’m so fond of you, Jude. You know that.’
‘Shall I walk you home?’
‘It’s okay. I’ll be fine.’
He watched her down the street and there was no sign that Scott was lurking in the corner to take her back to his digs in Pooley Bridge or to take on the challenge of Lisa at the house in Norfolk Road. Over the road and a few doors down he could see, as so often, Adam sitting in his living room in his habitual pose — beer in one hand, tv remote in the other.
He closed the door and went into the living room. In a drawer of the sideboard he kept the deck of tarot cards Ashleigh had brought him back from a holiday in Sri Lanka. Jude was a tarot sceptic and the gift had been a joke, but he got them out nevertheless and sorted through them for the Emperor and the Empress. The deck was cheap and gaudy, made of thin card with the ink already fading on it, and she’d bought it because each card had a different representation of a tiny grey cat, yawning, hunting or sleeping. In the two cards in his hand the cat adopted an almost identical, pose, curled on the lap of the Empress, fast asleep, but on the lap of the Emperor one eye was open in an exaggerated, meaningful wink.
He stared at the cards for a while, thinking of the serenity of Becca and the knowingness of Holmes, before he tucked them away back in the pack, wiped the smears of cheap ink off his fingers and then, turning out the lights one by one, headed upstairs to bed.
Sixteen
‘Did we find out anything more about Geri Foster?’ Jude had strolled into the open office where Ashleigh and Chris had their desks and stood between the two of them, his question addressed to both. Ashleigh, who wasn’t as good as he was at keeping her personal and professional lives separate, looked away from him, but not before he’d seen that her face was a flustered shade of pink.
‘Nothing more than she’s told us.’ Chris looked vaguely regretful, as if he’d let them all down. ‘Sorry. I got called on for something else. Is it important?’
‘I’ve no idea.’ Jude thought of Geri, resistant to some of his questions but choosing to answer others in enormous and irrelevant detail. If he hadn’t deduced it from what he knew of her background, he’d have guessed she liked to keep control of the situation and that control, in her case as in so many others, meant keeping secrets for their own sake. Some, like the timing of her arrival in Cumbria, would be harmless. Others might not be. ‘She wasn’t straight with us. That’s all. That always makes me wonder what else people are capable of.’
‘I always think that about her folks.’
For all his innate scepticism, Jude remained convinced of Storm and Raven’s general innocence. ‘Do we know anything about her son? Mikey said he fell out with some of the kids down at the gym in town the other day.’
‘A lot of the young lads hang out down there.’ Chris was a fitness fanatic, outdoors in the daylight, indoors in the dark. ‘They’re always trying to outmuscle one another. Too much testosterone. That’s the problem.’
It often was, but testo
sterone didn’t usually manifest itself in anything other than a brief surge of violence, in Jude’s experience. Young Josh Foster might not be a cold and calculating killer or an assistant in suicide, but according to Mikey he’d put a lot of people’s backs up. That was always worth exploring. ‘I don’t imagine it’s anything, but I think I’d like to take a closer look at the Fosters. Both of them.’
‘Shall I go down there and talk to her?’ Chris offered. ‘I don’t mind popping down after work.’
‘I’ll go.’ Ashleigh looked up from her laptop and her expression, at last, mirrored him in neutrality. ‘From what I’ve heard about her, she’d eat you alive. Raven’s terrified of her.’
‘And you think she won’t eat you?’
‘Not in quite the same way. Don’t worry. I’ll go along this evening. I’m not doing anything else.’
So, she wasn’t out with Scott, then, he thought, but pulled himself up. They’d all become engaged with the suicides. Jude had briefed Faye on developments earlier that day and she clearly regarded it as less of a problem now Vanessa Wood had become more involved, looking over the press releases and issuing soothing statements. Vanessa’s open sessions in the evenings had, Faye informed him, been mobbed with the curious and the concerned, and her school sessions were also full. Everything that could be done was in hand and there was no need to spend precious resources on it.
In the meantime, Jude drove past the New Agers’ camp to Long Meg and back most evenings, in the forlorn hope of finding someone suspicious or intervening at the right time to save a life. He saw nothing, and took comfort from the fact that no other deaths were reported. It was possible — just possible — that Vanessa’s extra hours and expertise, along with the community’s vigilance and every parent’s concerns, were drawing the incident to a close.
‘One other thing.’ Chris sat back. ‘I did a little digging last night, off my own bat. I thought I’d see if I could track down the owner of Eden Whispers.’
