by Jo Allen
‘But there has to be room for compromise in other areas. That’s how you get people to talk. You show you understand them.’ She put the compact back in her bag and flicked a quick, knowing look towards him. ‘Just like you do with your colleagues.’
Was he that transparently unnerved by her? ‘I don’t know who’s been talking about me, Ashleigh, or what they’ve said.’
‘No one ever says anything. They hint. You have to be able to interpret the hints. I expect you think I’m very forward, but you just asked me about my private life and if I’m going to be working with you, I want to know what I’m getting into.’
He’d hardly interrogated her, but she had a point. Thank God it was only ten minutes or so to Castletown. He wasn’t used to being on the receiving end of this type of questioning. When he was challenged, his instinct was to slam down the shutters and deny everything, but something about Ashleigh was tempting him to talk. If she could get him to open up so easily, surely she could make the hardest criminal crack with this threat of what she might think, her subtle suggestion that the truth was much the easiest way out. And it was. If he got his version of the truth out before she pressed him any further, it could only be to his advantage. ‘Don’t waste time interpreting hints when you can go straight to the horse’s mouth. The reason so many people don’t like me is fairly straightforward.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. I have a kid brother, who’s fifteen years younger than me. Three years ago, when he was still at school, he got into some very messy company. When I discovered he had drugs in the house, I took him straight along to the police station and handed him in.’ Which was surely exactly what his father would have done, had he been around to care.
‘Oh.’ Ashleigh, he could see from the glance he snatched as they sat at the lights outside M&S, was staring out of the window, pretending not to pay too much attention to what he was saying and how important it was, but he’d lay a bet that she knew. ‘That sounds reasonable enough.’
‘I thought so. But actions have consequences. If I’d been the officer in charge I’d have slapped his wrist, spoken to a few of his friends and let him go. But no. One of my esteemed colleagues – now retired – decided to follow it up and throw the book at everyone involved.’
‘It must have been a quiet day at the office.’
He almost laughed. ‘Either that, or he saw it as an easy case to solve, a good way to improve his statistics. He was assiduous in tracking down the suppliers of the drugs, and it came rather closer than I liked to someone I knew. My best mate from school, in fact.’ And Adam, being Adam, had only made it worse for himself. ‘Obviously I didn’t know he was involved. He compounded his problems by resisting arrest, leaving a policewoman hospitalised with a broken collarbone. He got six years. Since then, half of my former friends haven’t spoken to me and the other half would die in a ditch for me, or they say they would.’
‘That’s all?’
‘Yes.’
Morrisons slid past on the right hand side. With relief, he turned up into Castletown.
‘That’s hardly your fault.’
‘That’s how I see it. My kid brother’s never forgiven me for it, but on the plus side he’s never got himself in the kind of mess he’s capable of.’ Not that Mikey ever stopped threatening to do so, and not that Jude would ever stop worrying that he might. ‘I didn’t want it to go the way it did, but it was out of my hands the moment I turned him in.’
‘You can drop me off. Anywhere along here will do. The question is, would you do it again?’
He pulled the car up at the kerb, breathed deeply as she unclipped her seat belt and opened the car door. Did he regret it? Even knowing the outcome, was it better or worse for Mikey? ‘It’s a difficult one. Yes. I think I would. Because the bottom line is that if Adam – my friend – hadn’t done anything wrong in the first place, he wouldn’t be inside.’
‘Six years,’ she said, getting out. ‘That’s tough for everyone. I do understand.’
It would be even tougher when Adam came out. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ He slid the car away from the kerb, annoyed and impressed in equal measure with how easily she’d opened up his heart and extracted his confession. Plenty of people had asked him before and always been rebuffed. Ashleigh wouldn’t be a comfortable woman to have around, but he knew that the team would end up depending on her.
And besides, he consoled himself, he hadn’t told her everything. He still had that secret that no one really knew, though Doddsy, for one, might have guessed. The last question had been straightforward. Would he do it again knowing that his relationship with Mikey would be permanently strained, that Adam Fleetwood would end up in prison and that half of his circle of friends would come to regard him as Judas? Yes. But on the day the whole affair had broken he’d come back from a bad day at the office not wanting to think about the things he’d had to listen to, only to find Becca so inflamed by the injustice of what had happened that she didn’t stop to listen to his justification of what he’d done. That injustice was so minor by comparison with other things he dealt with on a day-to-day basis that he hadn’t had the sympathy she’d sought, hadn’t wanted to meet her halfway. He’d thought she understood him as no one else ever had, but would he have handled Mikey differently if he’d known that she’d take the other side and fail to comprehend why he’d done what he’d done?
That was a whole lot harder to answer.
He drove down through the streets of Penrith and up to his house in Wordsworth Street with reluctance. That meeting with Becca had preyed on his mind since Sunday in the minutes he’d had to spare, as if every time he tried to do good it rebounded on him. Mikey, too, who would surely thank him for it one day, resisted him at every step when he tried to take on the role of their absent father. But there was nothing he could do just then, for either Becca or Mikey.
Home wasn’t welcoming, either. That walk with Mikey had been a spur-of-the-moment thing, when he should have been at home unpacking boxes in the house he’d moved into, to escape the memories of Becca. She’d never moved into his last house, but they’d spent so long together in it that he couldn’t exorcise the ghost of her, standing in the garden, beside him when he woke in the morning. If he hadn’t been so wedded to whatever was right, and if he hadn’t feared so much for Mikey that he’d had to take direct action, he’d have been married to Becca by now, and probably a whole lot less sour about life.
But you couldn’t go back. With a sigh, he sidestepped the boxes of stuff that blocked the hallway and the living room while he waited for time to unpack them, and made his way through to the kitchen to see what he could find to eat.
*
Lisa wasn’t home, so Ashleigh had to be satisfied with drinking alone, a long tall glass of soda water poured over a shot of lime juice and a tower of ice cubes. She left it on the kitchen unit and ran upstairs to shed the skin of a working day, the suit and the shirt that buttoned up too tightly, and slid into a cool cotton shift so that she could enjoy the summer and the sun in comfort.
She took a moment to stare out of the window. Her room looked west to the fells of the northern Lakes, where the sun was beginning to settle into the thick haze, and the hum of traffic on the M6 rose above the shouting of a blackbird below. Her conversation with Jude had reminded her of things she hadn’t had a moment to think about since she’d arrived in Penrith just a few days before. In the house she’d shared with Scott there had been a blackbird, just as noisy, singing the same song. It was reassuring to know some things stayed the same, that the ominous rumble of change was underpinned by the eternal cycles of nature.
Everyone had a guilty pleasure. Crossing to the dressing table, she took a pack of cards wrapped in a purple silk scarf, from the top drawer of her dressing table and held it for a moment, focussing on its energy as she’d taught herself to do. The tarot was something she’d come to later in life, when her grandmother had left her a deck of well-used cards and learning how to read them had s
eemed a suitable memorial. She made a face at the sentimentality and issued herself with a warning. Jude’s stern eye and robust approach to facts warned her, if she hadn’t already known, that it would be a good idea to keep this particular hobby a secret in her new job.
She took the cards downstairs, picked up her drink from the kitchen and installed herself in a sunny corner of the tiny garden, with one ear open for Lisa, whose flippancy was worse than scepticism and whose return would doom the whole exercise to disaster. Slipping the pack out from its shimmering shroud of silk, she paused before cutting it. These days she never had time for a full reading, but it was always useful to catch up with her feelings, to stop and make herself think. One card would do, a pause in the rush of time and information, a moment of stillness amid life’s challenges.
It was a pity they didn’t tell you the future. Since the break-up with Scott, her life had been all uncertainty, and uncertainty was something she hated. There was nothing she’d like more than to have someone – or something – map out her life for her, tell her that the leap into the unknown she’d made when she applied for a transfer to Cumbria was the right move.
Her common sense reasserted itself after the moment of doubt. Rather than let other people’s whims drive her, it was up to her to make sure that her choice worked out. There were very many positives to singledom, and the biggest of them was being rid of the distrust and betrayal that had dragged behind her throughout her marriage. She’d loved Scott for his charm and his laughter and his spontaneity, but in the end his dark side had proved unmanageable. She still regretted leaving him, wondered if a day might come when she’d weaken and want him back, but she knew she’d had no choice but to leave. She cut the cards and turned the top one over.
The Hanged Man. The one everyone knew. Ashleigh smiled down on it. Everyone assumed it was a bad card, but there were no bad cards in the deck, only those that were more or less auspicious. The Hanged Man, hinting at the death of the old and the birth of the new, fitted perfectly with her situation.
Nevertheless she thought she might offer the cards one more chance to tell her something. She drew another, unusually light-hearted about it. What were they? Just cards. You took control over your own destiny and you approached everything with reason and sound common sense. Intuition, if you had it, was only a gift for understanding others. And she flipped it over.
It was Death, but the card in front of her, depicting an armoured skeleton on a white horse, trampling dead bodies beneath the dark hooves, was nothing to some of the things she’d seen. Another card you could put a positive spin on if you tried hard enough. ‘Out with the old and on with the new,’ she said aloud. ‘That’s a good reading. I’m happy with it.’ And she began to gather the cards up and shuffle them together, burying Death deeper and deeper in the pack.
Death was never a good card to draw but, she told herself, everything it signified – the loss of a relationship, a friendship, a life – was in the past. What more could it offer her in her future?
12
Max Sumner sat on the sofa in the living room of his summer home, leaning forward and holding the remote control in his hand. His body was tense. Through the window, the garden sloped down to where the blue waters of Lake Windermere shone like the Mediterranean under the late August heat. In front of him, the frozen television screen shivered with an image of smoke rising over Haweswater.
He stood up, crossed to the window and stared out, then paced the room a couple more times before, with a tiny shake of the head, he went to the door of the living room and called up the stairs. ‘Dawn! Come down! You’ve been asleep for hours!’
Silence, for a second, but for the muffled thumps that passed for music emanating from Sophie’s bedroom. Max brushed a hand across his forehead, wiping away a bead of sweat.
‘Dawn!’ he called again, suddenly impatient. ‘Come downstairs, or you won’t sleep tonight!’ But she probably wouldn’t be sleeping, just lying on the bed staring up at the ceiling as worry and fear ate away at her, gnawing into her heart.
‘Coming.’ It took her a moment, shuffling down the stairs and into the room, rubbing at tired eyes. She’d slept, if she had slept, in her clothes, and now as she stood in the doorway some instinct for neatness seemed to kick in as she tugged at her rumpled tee shirt and passed a hand over her pale brown hair in a fruitless attempt to smooth it down. ‘Sorry, darling. I drifted off. Sorry.’
Dawn was beautiful. Of course, beauty was subjective and much more than skin deep, but, to Max, his wife represented everything he’d ever wanted. She had skin that was pink like the perfect English rose, hair that had swung like the smoothest curtain until she’d deemed it too long and cut it, so that now it sat in an enticing bob on the nape of her graceful neck. She was slender and elegant, a woman who walked like a model and turned her blue eyes on him like a teasing, modern Monroe. Even today, wrecked by worry and exhaustion, bereft of make-up and with deep, dark furrows of dread beneath her eyes, she attracted him in a way that he couldn’t control. If he hadn’t loved her so much, he’d have hated her for that.
‘Come and sit down.’ He waved her to the armchair and resumed his earlier seat on the couch. ‘Let me get you a cup of coffee, to wake you up? Or something stronger.’
‘What I want,’ she said, half to herself, ‘is a triple vodka. And then another triple vodka. And then I want to go to sleep and not wake up until this nightmare is over.’
He judged that to be a joke. Deep down, she must know that her nightmare would never end. ‘I’ll go and get you some fresh orange juice. There’s some in the fridge. It’s a nice afternoon. Maybe we could sit outside with a glass of Pimm’s later, when it’s a bit cooler.’
‘A glass of Pimm’s?’ She sounded appalled. ‘How could we possibly—?’
He raised a hand in contrition. ‘Sorry. I got that wrong. I was trying to pretend that everything’s normal.’ But it wasn’t normal, and nothing would ever be normal again.
‘Oh, darling.’ Dawn subsided into remorse. ‘I didn’t mean to snap.’
‘That’s okay.’ He fiddled with the remote again, not normally someone to put off a difficult task. ‘Where’s Sophie?’
‘She’s in her room. Can’t you hear?’
‘I can hear. But did you actually see her?’
‘Yes. I put my head round the door on the way down. I think she’s okay at the moment. And when Greg comes back, it’ll all be fine. We can pretend it never happened.’ She hesitated. ‘We were right not to tell her. Weren’t we?’
‘Of course we were.’ He tried to be gentle with her, but secrets weighed as heavily on him as they did on her, and tension had stripped him of any capacity for sympathy. He and his wife were walking side by side in a nightmare, but they weren’t companions on the trail. How could they be? They dreamed differently, and always had. Dawn’s fears were about flight and he, in his nightmares, fought and fought, even if he finally lost. He dealt with trauma alone, whereas she looked to him for support he couldn’t give her. ‘But I wonder, my love. Perhaps it’s time for us to rethink.’
‘No. I don’t want her alarmed and I don’t want her upset.’
Ten year old Sophie was mercifully self-obsessed and equally mercifully not so fond of her brother as to care too much about his absence. She was ready enough to believe that it was the relentless heat that made her mother unwell and her father so terse, and she’d merely tossed her head when they’d told her that Greg had gone to stay with a friend. But even Sophie, eventually, would emerge from her bedroom for long enough to notice that something was wrong. ‘I’m afraid we may not have any option. There’s something I want to show you.’
Dawn covered her eyes with her hands. ‘I don’t want to see anything.’
‘You have to see this. I recorded it off the telly yesterday evening, after you’d gone to sleep.’
‘I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t.’
‘After you’d gone to bed,’ he corrected, fighting his impatience. ‘I
’ve been putting off showing it to you, but I can’t do that any longer. You need to see it, and when you’ve seen it, we have to make a decision.’
She sat up, her hands on her knees, bare toes spread out on the slate floor. Normally Dawn was a strong, vibrant woman, so much so that it had surprised him how easily the stuffing had been knocked out of her. ‘I can’t make a decision.’
‘Then I’ll make it for both of us. But I’d rather we made it together.’ Despite her protests, he flicked the button on the remote so that the frozen screen juddered into life. ‘Now watch. And listen.’
Dawn put her hands back over her eyes, but she listened as Max replayed the clip from the previous night’s television news. ‘Police are appealing for help in establishing the identity of a body found in a burned out building on the shores of Haweswater on Sunday night. Firemen tackling the blaze near the village of Burnbanks uncovered the body, believed to be that of a young male, once the fire had been extinguished. Police are seeking the public’s help.’
She moaned. Max turned his attention back to the television and the saturnine detective whose message he’d watched so many times that he knew it almost word for word. ‘I can confirm that a badly burned body was found on the shores of Haweswater yesterday evening, and that preliminary post-mortem results have indicated that it’s the body of a young boy, aged around twelve years old… At the moment the identity of this child is unknown. We’re appealing for information about any missing persons who might fit the description of this child, and anyone who was walking in the Haweswater area, particularly on Wether Hill, High Kop or Bampton Common yesterday afternoon. We are keen to identify this child as soon as possible so that the relatives can be informed.’
Max snapped the telly off. He knew without asking that she wouldn’t want to see it again. ‘Dawny. Darling. I know you don’t want to. But we’re going to have to go to the police.’
‘No. They said not to. They said we weren’t to tell anyone. And it might not be him.’
