It was always going to be me, Justin thought. He knew that now.
Mr Gregory found out he was dying when he was still at Bart’s. Justin’s last year of school. He was kind to me, Justin remembered, when I came back after Dad’s funeral. Those terrible months, the nightmares, the long stumps of teeth. And his mother’s sobbing, late at night, her grief so unexpectedly powerful that Justin felt the walls were pulsating around him.
Practicality. Who would have thought it could be such a deadly characteristic?
Mr Gregory was a practical man. He outlived the most optimistic prognosis. The holidays with his sister in Glasgow turned out to be multiple surgeries at the new hospital two hundred miles south of here. Treatment, after all.
But the cancer was unstoppable. He was skilled, after those years in the camp, in gauging just how much more his body could take. He timed it to perfection. But he could not act alone.
‘Gone now.’ The small photograph in the ebony frame. ‘Is that your father?’ Peter had asked. Justin remembered Mr Gregory rubbing his shoulders in the overheated room.
Mr Gregory’s father did not, as they say, have a good war. When Singapore fell, he was imprisoned, starved, beaten. Like the rest. He escaped, narrowly missing the beheadings that came to most of his recaptured comrades. But unlike so many, the Gregorys were reunited after the surrender of the Japanese. Sick and weak, but free once more, they sailed for England to begin again, seemingly intact. But they were each disintegrating in their own reserved way, his father most of all.
‘Everyone had expected the invasion to come by sea, Fenton,’ Mr Gregory told Justin. ‘That was the disaster.’
Nobody had dreamed the Japanese would slash their way to Singapore through supposedly impenetrable jungle.
‘Bicycles, Fenton,’ Mr Gregory said, his face still slack with disbelief at the memory. ‘They even came on bicycles.’
One Saturday morning, in the Gregorys’ cosy English house, his father hanged himself above his workbench. Mr Gregory, still a teenager, found him dangling above the toy cars he had worked on to calm his mind. His mother buckled at the horror that came to her, at last, in an unremarkable red-brick street. She became obsessed with suicide, convinced that her son was planning it, the neighbours, the teachers, the Welsh woman at the library.
One hard winter she ran the length of the road in her nightdress, beating on the door of the post office, convinced someone inside needed saving. On her deathbed, in a delirium of cancer and morphine, she begged her son not to do it, not to do it, over and over.
And he could not do it.
Could not, fearless as he was, go to the edge and jump. Could not wilfully slide, still hearing his mother’s anguished call. Nor could he ride out, alone, the last horrors of an illness that had taken his mother before him.
Mr Gregory needed someone practical. Someone like him, only young and strong. Someone already damaged enough to be able to push a man off a cliff in cold-blooded murder. Someone who wouldn’t flinch when his own brother, finally knowing all, scattered the chess pieces across the table and sobbed like a child lost.
Someone like me, Justin thought. A fixer, a sorter.
They never spoke of it, but Justin felt certain that Mr Gregory did not fall on Braxman’s Hill that first day, when Peter passed him in the van. He had been waiting. Waiting for the sound of the old van, and the broken boy within it. He almost missed it, not listening for a new van, not bargaining on the fact that his saviour and killer was at home watching Richard and Judy in a neck brace.
Like us all, Justin thought, he did not bargain on complication. He did not expect to find a tongue-tied boy, an innocent, who could never, no matter what, push a man in the back and topple him into the sea.
But a practical man thinks on his feet, and Mr Gregory saw, quickly enough, that the route to Justin was through Peter. That where Peter’s needs were, Justin would always be found close by. It was a long game, Justin thought. He did not see it coming.
The return was good, you might say. Mr Gregory left a surprisingly large amount, for a teacher. He specified that Wren Cottage went to Justin. He knew it would be me in the end, Justin thought. Up there on the cliff.
The house is a comfortable place. Justin’s wife, who thinks a practical man is a wondrous thing, loves its neat rooms, its solid, dependable walls.
There were no suspicious circumstances. Mr Gregory left everything in order: a letter on the mantelpiece, tucked behind the cars, a copy posted to his solicitor the night before.
To Peter and Justin Fenton, for their kindness in my final, difficult years.
Mr Gregory’s older sister, whose existence they’d privately questioned, arrived on the overnight train that very day, as invited. Justin and his brother came to the cottage for lunch, as instructed, to find an old woman with the same flared nose, holiday baggage slumped on the path. Together they stirred their tea in his good cups, and listened as the search helicopter was buffeted high above them along the sea’s edge.
She read at the funeral a few days later, her own teacher’s voice confident in her dead brother’s draughty school chapel. She spoke of the family’s suffering, how the English boarding school she’d dreaded had saved her from a similar fate. It was a dignified ceremony. Father Morrison talked a lot about mercy.
And life goes on, Justin thought.
Peter is a good businessman, and together they’ve built the place into a thriving concern. The local paper ran Peter’s engagement photo last year. He’s just been asked to join the council.
Justin thought he might walk tomorrow. Up on the cliffs. He’d started doing it a while back, to keep fit, to clear his head. He climbs the long swathe of green behind his house, takes the deep path up to the ridge. The same wind tugs at his sleeves. At the top, the seat has never been repaired; one gangling leg still threatens escape.
Sometimes, not often, he sits there.
On certain days, the days when anger rises in him like a tide, the broken seat feels crowded, as if all the drowned ghosts have joined him to mourn what can’t be undone. What can’t be saved.
They flit in the clean space before him, riding the thermal currents like glinting sea birds. They’re beautiful. Mesmerising.
On these days, Justin wishes for things. He wishes they would carry away the touch of dark gabardine. How smooth it was. He wishes he could forget the thin, hard spine beneath, yielding.
The water thunders far below. He never looks down.
The Canals Of Anguilar / Legacy Page 5
