A Poison Tree (Time, Blood and Karma Book 3) (15 page)

“Sure. Help yourself. The glasses are in the cupboard over the kitchen sink. If you don’t fancy tap water, there is some bottled in the fridge. I don’t trust the stuff out of the tap, despite what the water companies say.”

He padded through to her kitchen.

“Is this your little boy?” He pointed at the picture on the refrigerator door.

“Yes. That’s Jamie.”

“He’s a handsome chap. He’s going to break a few hearts when he’s older.”

Adele
made no comment and went through to the living room.

David followed. After a moment he said, “I’m sorry. Have I said something wrong?”

“No. It’s just that I prefer to keep my family life separate from what I do here.”

“I understand,” he replied. “Insensitive of me.” He drank from the glass and put it down. “Well, I’d better get dressed.” He kissed her lightly on the forehead.

Outside there was the rumble of autumnal thunder and seconds afterwards the rain began. It cascaded out of the broken drainpipe from the roof of the apartment building where it flecked and streaked the windows of Adele’s flat like bitter tears of loss.

20

DAVID

The day after I saw Adele was a Saturday. It was also Daniel’s birthday.

After the rain of the previous day, the air felt washed clean. Summer
was over, yet the trees still clutched their leaves, as a parent might hang onto a departing child. The green was succumbing in silence to the red – a subtle and melancholic tribute to the universality of decay.  

I asked Claire if she wanted to come with me, but she
refused, shaking her head tersely. She had things to do. Unspecified, but important. My wife was not in a talkative vein.

I drove the twelve miles to the small village church in a sombre mood, stopping en route to pick up some flowers.

There was no one in the churchyard when I arrived. That suited me. I was pleased to see the graves and grounds were being well-maintained.

I walked slowly to a plot near the west wall, where a small grey headstone bore the inscription:

Forever in our Thoughts and Prayers

Daniel Braddock

1997

Beloved Son of David and Claire

We had not known what to put on the headstone. Neither Claire nor I was religious, and my father had had to pull some strings so that Daniel could be buried in this alien churchyard. So we ended up with this half-hearted, clumsy expression of grief and helplessness. Our son was dead. Or rather he had never been. Stillborn. Nothing anyone could have done. Move on.

Claire
’s reaction had been to go into denial, although her version of it was couched in fatalistic pragmatism. It was something we needed to put behind us. What was the point in mourning Daniel? He had never drawn breath. He had never suffered. He was just some ‘thing’ that had happened.

A month afterwards, Claire
and I went on holiday to the Greek island of Skiathos to ‘get away’ for a while. We left Katie with Claire’s mother. I thought it would be an opportunity for us to grieve together, but that never happened. Instead, we pretended we were coping, even though we both knew it was a lie.

I have a photograph of Claire, taken without her knowledge, of her sitting
with her back to me on a wooden jetty and gazing down at the water. It is the saddest thing I own. A picture of desolation. My lost wife.

There is a term for someone whose spouse dies. A widow or widower, we call them. A child whose parent
s die is an orphan. Yet there is no word – at least not in the English language – for a parent who loses a child. It is as if the blow is too awful to bear, too much against nature, too painful to grant recognition, to give it a name.

The Zen Buddhis
t’s definition of good luck – at least according to the monk Bodhidharma – is, ‘Father dies, son dies.’ The motif has the ring of profundity to it. We should not outlive our children. It is not the natural order of things.

Claire and I
should have taken up the offer of counselling. But we did not. We thought we were strong enough. Therein lies the folly of the weak.

Such
research as exists on the marriages of bereaved parents, indicates they are especially vulnerable to failure owing to the feelings and pressures associated with the child’s death. One study suggests that divorce rates may be as much as eight times the norm. Guilt, painful associations, and loss of purpose and cohesion are among the reasons cited for it becoming impossible for the couple to stay together.

With Claire and m
e, I reflected, it was a minor miracle we had survived the last two years. The unpalatable fact was that, in spite of the love between us, we had been unable to help each other through the trauma of Daniel’s death, at least in any meaningful way. Claire began to close down, while superficially remaining unchanged. I baulked at the idea of seeking a psychiatrist, preferring instead a do-it-yourself route to healing. I took courses on hypnotherapy and neuro-linguistic programming. Along the way, I learned a lot about myself. But it didn’t change anything.

Six months after Daniel’s death, I found myself unaccountably outside a brothel in Leicester, and I went in.
That’s where I met Adele.

I had no idea how Claire coped. I tried to get her to open up to me but she wouldn’t. Perhaps she was worried that if the dam burst she would be washed away, forever.
Whatever the truth of the matter, I didn’t help her. I didn’t know how to. And neither did she know how to reach out to me.

Perhaps that was why she had reached out to Jack.

I knelt in front of Daniel’s grave and arranged the flowers. I wanted to talk to him, but in my mind there was no image of my son I could attach myself to, no conversation we could ever have. The picture of his pale, helpless body filled my vision. He had never existed. He had never so much as cried.

So I cried for him. I cried for Daniel and for all the things that would never be.
Neither for him, nor for me.

21

DAVID

About two weeks after I had called Jim Fosse, Claire and I received an invitation to dinner at his house. Of course, by that time, the surge of anger following my meeting with the detective, Cumberbatch, had abated. It was replaced with feelings of sheepishness and regret that I had phoned Jim.

His request to dine with him and his wife was couched in the most
polite, innocuous terms. Two other couples would be joining us for the dinner party, and he would be most honoured if we could attend. It was high time Monique met some of his business associates in a convivial atmosphere.

I hesitated to accept. Yet a voice inside me told me Jim had been joking about the whole ‘let’s-murder-
our-wives’ scenario, and he was looking to set the record straight, to put an end to an inappropriate levity that had gone too far. In addition, I reasoned a dinner party might help rebuild some – unacknowledged – broken fences between myself and my wife, and dissipate recent tensions. I must confess I also had a prickle of curiosity about Jim’s wife, Monique. I wanted to see what sort of woman would want to be married to that perplexing American whose intentions crouched behind a wall of enigma. So we said, “Yes.”

Claire and I were the first to arrive. We had to park on the road because the Fosses’ drive was piled high with paving slabs.

“Sorry about the builder’s yard,” said Jim, ushering us inside. “That’s all for my new patio out back.”

“
That stone has been lying around there for weeks,” called out a female voice from the kitchen. “My husband won’t pay anyone to sort out the patio. He has to do it himself. In his own sweet time, of course.”

Jim winked at me. “You can’t rush perfection. I need to be in
the right frame of mind before I start digging. Plus the weather forecast needs to be right. Which, of course, it never is. Do you know, by the way,” he went on, ”the people of Bolivia bury a llama foetus under the foundations of new buildings to ward off evil spirits? If it’s a particularly grand house, they bury an adult llama.”

“Jim has threatened to put me under there if I don’t behave with his credit card,” the disembodied voice added.

The party started with a setback. One of the couples – identity unspecified – had called off at the last minute, so that left Claire and me, Jim and Monique, and our mutual acquaintance Mat Hoggard and his wife Rebecca, to make up the table. The six of us sat in his large living room drinking wine from Jim’s extensive cellar while we waited for the declaration that dinner was ready. The room was furnished with taste, and when Claire commented on this, our host was at pains to praise his wife’s good eye for interior décor. He squeezed her hand and she gave him a peck on the cheek.

Monique was an attractive woman with the pneumatically-enhanced breasts to which Jim had previously alluded. Her brown hair was cut in a bob, and she had dark eyes and a sensuous mouth. Her accent had a slight twang of the capital about it, and I gathered during the course of the evening that the two of them had met in London. She worked as a management consultant and seemed sparky and intelligent, if a little lacking in
the sense of humour department. Were Jim indeed planning her imminent demise, she was patently unaware of it. They
looked
happy together.

For c
ertain, they were more contented than Mat and Rebecca. The Hoggards hardly spoke to each other, and the rest of us had to work hard to maintain an atmosphere of jollity. I wondered what Mat and his wife were doing there. The prospect of a row between them hung over the room like the promise of winter. You knew it was coming sooner or later, you just didn’t know when.

“This classical music is depressing, James,” said Monique.

“We have cultured guests, my darling,” her husband responded. “They appreciate Mahler.”

“Well, I’m putting on something a little more upbeat. Otherwise you’ll turn this dinner party into a wake. And not an Irish one.” She went to the music system and ejected Jim’s CD.

“So what are you doing to celebrate the Millennium, Jim?” asked Rebecca.

“I’m taking Monique to New York as a surprise.” Jim laughed. “Oh, whoops, she heard.
Scrub that. Now I’ll have to take her somewhere else. Perhaps Coventry. What about you?”

“Maybe we’ll go down to London,” Mat said, stirring from his lethargy.
“See a show at the Millennium Dome, now that we know the damn thing is finished. We might as well get something back from all our taxes that have been thrown at the ruddy eyesore.”

“That’s the spirit, darling,” Rebecca said. “Start the next thousand years in the same generous spirit that you’re ending this year.”

Bryan Ferry’s ‘Slave to Love’ started playing on the sound system.

To need a woman

You’ve got to know

How the strong get weak

And the rich get poor

Once we had taken our places at the dinner table, the
Hoggards decided to make more of an effort at getting along. With Jim playing the cheery host, it was difficult not to wring some enjoyment from the evening. Monique’s nouvelle cuisine was delicious. Fresh bottles of wine kept appearing on the table, and in the end I had to put my hand over my glass, otherwise our drive home might have become perilous.

The conversation lingered on the Millennium theme. Would life be any different on the first of January 2000? Would the world’s computers crash? Was anyone making any special resolutions? Had we stocked up on tinned food for the Apocalypse?

“Well,” said Jim, “if Jesus is coming, we’d better look busy. And send that Oxfam donation we’ve been promising.”

“In the last two months we’ve had a total solar eclipse, earthquakes in Athens and Taiwan and an F2 tornado in Salt Lake City,” piped in Mat. “Sounds
to me like we’re warming up for the End of Days. What do you say, David?”

“Just so long as no idiot cancels the Rugby World Cup next month,” I replied. “I’ve already bought my tickets.”

The Hoggards left just after ten, citing the need to relieve their babysitter. It felt more like they wanted to get out of each other’s company and the best way to achieve that was to go home and retire to their – presumably – separate bedrooms. But perhaps I had read them wrong. For some couples, squabbling is as natural as breathing. One of these fine days, spouse baiting may become an Olympic sport. To my mind, synchronised swimming’s admission has opened the flood gates to all sorts of weirdness.

“Let’s leave the ladies for a few minutes,” said Jim. “I have a couple of special cigars I’ve been saving. Monique won’t let me smoke indoors, so let’s go out back.”

“Yes, take those filthy cheroots outside,” chimed his wife, before returning to her conversation with Claire.

I was glad to puff on a quality cigar. I hadn’t had a Marlboro in over three hours.

The night air was cool, but not enough to make us shiver. No breeze stirred the trees and, beyond the end of Jim’s garden, the fields were black. The headlights of a car poked over a rise in the distance, then disappeared. Nearby, a barn owl hooted. A sense of stillness prevailed.

Jim closed the patio
doors behind us. We sat down on large wooden chairs with deep cushions, and lit the cigars. They were huge. It would take some enthusiastic puffing to keep them burning.

“What’s wrong with this patio you already have
here, Jim? It looks fine to me.”

“There’s a problem with the foundations.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Monique isn’t under them.”

In the darkness I couldn’t read his expression, but as his cigar glowed I could see his eyes watching me.

“Very funny.”

He reached into a trouser pocket and handed me a folded sheet of paper.

“What’s this? I can’t read it. It’s too dark.”

“Oh, wait. I’ve given you the wrong paper.” He grabbed it back from me and passed me a small white envelope in its place. “Don’t open it now, David. Just put it away. Read it when you’re alone.”

“What is it?”

“It’s my schedule for when I’ll be out of the country over the next couple of months. Also some information about Monique. Where she works, the places she goes to, and some other snippets you may find useful.”

My mouth felt dry. And it wasn’t
just the effect of the cigar. “Why would I need to know these things?”

Jim didn’t answer. He
just dangled his arms over the side of the chair. After a few moments he said, “Why did you call me, David?”

“I just
considered it had been a while since we’d had a drink.” I chose my words with care. “We are friends, after all.”

The smoke from his cigar curled upwards. Through the glass I could see Claire and Monique in
a smiling tête-à-tête.

“I don’t have any friends,” Jim said. “I don’t need them. Friends are an unnecessary burden. I only have accomplices.”

“I think we’ve taken this joke far enough, Jim.” Even to my ears, my voice sounded stiff and priggish.

He took a puff on his cigar.

“What did you make of Mat and Rebecca tonight?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, would you say they were happy together, for instance?”

“Obviously not. But what’s your point?”

“Mat is the sort of guy who would like his wife dead. But he lacks the will. You would also like rid of your wife. The only question is whether you have the will.”

“What makes you think I want rid of my wife? That’s absurd.”

Jim gave a deep sigh. “I am a student of human nature, David. I make my living from observing people. Finding the chinks in their armour. Sniffing out their weaknesses, their desires, their fears. That’s why I am in such demand in negotiations. You might describe me as a connoisseur of corruption. I know for a fact that you and Claire are not happy. I can read you like a book.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You see?” He waved his cigar. “The extent of your indignation is itself revealing. If I hadn’t touched a nerve, you would have simply laughed at the absurdity of my assertion.” He paused. “But you didn’t.”

I stood up. “Well, Jim, it’s been a
n entertaining evening. But I think it’s time we were going.”

“I see you have pocketed the envelope I gave you, nonetheless.”

“That’s just –”

“Never mind. We don’t need to discuss this now. Think it over. You know the terms of my offer. An ‘aye’ for an ‘aye’
. A wife for a wife.” He chuckled. “We don’t even need to speak again. In fact, it’s better if we don’t. The details are up to you. Just make sure it happens when I’m out of the country. After that, I’ll do the same for you.”

“Just like that, huh?”

“Just like that. We often overcomplicate life, don’t you think? Death, on the other hand, is best kept simple.”

I stubbed out my cigar. “You are insane, Jim.”

He laughed. “It has been said. I blame the Millennium. It neutralises our sense of right and wrong, gives us permission to contemplate all sorts of unspeakable actions. That’s my take on it, anyway.” He stood up and clapped me on the shoulder. “Now, how about a nightcap for you and the lovely Claire before you go?”