Accidents Happen (19 page)

As she marched away, she saw the dog and its owner climbing into a car. She smiled inwardly. What would Jack say if he knew what his mum had just done? It had been like a student prank – silly but also a little fun. How long was it since she had been silly?

As she walked along, Kate opened Jago’s bag. His book was inside.

Touched, she realized he’d done what he promised, kept the book for her if she ever needed it.

Well, did she?

She took it out and felt the weight of it in her hands.

It was all here. Everything she needed to satisfy her – if she wanted to carry on being a complete lunatic with no life and no son.

Shutting it determinedly, Kate put it back in Jago’s bag. No. This was going straight in the shed. She was locking it away.

This obsession with numbers had to end.

Kate marched on, knowing that however crazy Jago’s methods were, they were the answer to her imaginary fears.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The football still sat in the middle of the trampoline, waiting for the blond boy to come home and kick it.

Spoilt brat, Magnus thought, looking out of the window onto the gardens at the back of Hubert Street. All these toys, in the garden and in the bedroom. And a scooter too.

He rubbed the red, open pores of his nose, and clicked one more button on the laptop in front of him. ‘Installation five minutes’, said a message popping up. Magnus glanced at the clock.

He sat back on Kate’s swivel chair and pushed his long legs against the wall of the study under her desk.

It had been thirty-five minutes since he’d seen her race off towards Cowley Road, and two minutes less than that since he’d squeezed himself through the ragged brick hole behind her son’s wardrobe. Five more minutes was all he needed.

Magnus looked around Kate’s study, inhaling the faint leftover fragrance of her vanilla hand lotion. He liked it. So much, in fact, that he’d taken some in a little saucer to keep in his room. ‘Brrr, brrr, brrr,’ he parped like a trumpet, clicking his fingers on the table as the installation symbol on her new laptop in front of him read ‘Four minutes and thirty-nine seconds.’ He opened the drawer and took out the photo of her and a man. He’d seen that one before.

‘Brr, brr, brr,’ he sang through his closed lips. Four minutes and three seconds. He stood up and wandered out of the study into the hall, noting that the cage at the far end, across the stairs was open for the first time. That was interesting. He smirked. Silly woman.

Trying to stay one step ahead of him with her new alarm and this cage.

The cage he was right inside.

He turned right and entered Kate’s bedroom.

It wasn’t as tidy as usual today. The bed was made more roughly, a duvet chucked on top, its four corners sprawled randomly, like the limbs of a gunshot victim. Her nightclothes lay strewn on the pillow. Not the usual flimsy nightie with the holes, he noted with interest, but a new long grey T-shirt. He lifted it and pushed his nose into it, inhaling. It didn’t have the same soft silkiness of the other nightie against his bristles, but still. Interesting.

‘Brrr, brrr, brrr,’ he sang, rolling the ‘r’ with his tongue. The fitted wardrobe door was open, with two pairs of jeans hanging over them. Idly, he took a pair down and held them up to his crotch at the mirror. Yup. Too skinny. He placed one hand inside the top of the jeans, and pushed his arm all the way down one leg. Nearly fitted his arm.

As he put them back, the photo by the bed caught his eye. That was new. A black-and-white image of a man and a woman in their fifties looked back at him. The man was handsome, not unlike Magnus, with dark blond hair and glasses, and a small nose. The woman not so much. Her nose was sharp, and she was almost as skinny as Kate. Magnus took out his camera and photographed it. Then he snapped the grey T-shirt on the pillow.

Sighing, he sat on the bed and pulled his long legs up onto the duvet, turning his head to sniff the pillow. He pushed his buttocks and thighs into the duvet and wriggled a little. ‘Brr, brr, brr’ he sang, the tone of his voice becoming falsetto.

Suddenly, there was a click of a key in a lock downstairs.

He sat up abruptly.

No way. The skinny woman was back? That quick?

Standing up quickly, trying to stop his weight creaking the floorboards, Magnus paused to listen. He heard her go to the hall cupboard.
Beep beep beep
the alarm went as she turned it off.

Have to be quick now.

Walking swiftly, he re-entered the study. ‘Thirty-nine seconds’, the message on the screen said. ‘No problem,’ he murmured in English.

He heard the woman unlocking the door into the kitchen at the back of the house. That meant she’d be walking right under his feet in a second, so he’d have to be careful not to creak the floorboards.

Calmly, he counted down with the computer: ‘three, two, one . . .’, then ejected the disk he had put in the side of her computer. He tiptoed heavily to the door and peered out of the study.

Damn. She had come back out of the kitchen and was running up the stairs.

It was too late now. He wouldn’t make it back to the boy’s room.

Before she reached the top of the stairs, Magnus slipped into Kate’s room. Checking he’d put the photograph back on the table, he laid himself down on the floor, put his hands under her bed frame and pulled himself carefully under Kate’s bed.

A pair of ankle boots with worn-down heels got in his way. He shoved them and pulled his big feet in, away from the edges.

The air was different under here. Warmer, and stale.

Never mind. It wasn’t a big deal. He’d done it before, twice. He’d just stay for a while. He heard her reach the top of the stairs then walk up the corridor. Her humming was interrupted by a mobile phone ringing in her hand.

‘Hello . . . Oh, hi, David. . . I’m so sorry. Give me another twenty minutes. I’ve had a difficult week with Richard and Helen. I’ll tell you when I see you.’

Magnus listened, interested. He didn’t get to hear the skinny woman’s voice that often.

‘When I see you,’ Magnus mouthed under the bed, trying to copy her vowel sounds.

Magnus lay back on the carpet under the bed and stretched out among dusty boxes, and relaxed, holding his nose tight so he didn’t sneeze. It was only twenty minutes.

Of course, ultimately, it was his choice. He could pop out right now and give her a right old fright.

But no.

It wasn’t time for that yet. There was a lot more to do first.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Kate sat down at the computer, typed in the last few figures and sent David the document twenty minutes later. Relieved it was done, she wandered back out of the study to go downstairs.

A whiff of something drifted into her nostrils. A male smell. Hormonal. Cloying and unfresh. It wasn’t the first time she’d smelt it, but Jack wasn’t here right now. She poked her head inside the boy’s bedroom. His deodorant was lying on the shelf as normal.

She looked around for discarded sports clothes to see if that was what was causing the smell, but there was nothing there. Compared to most boys his age, Jack was tidy, she guessed. Bed made, toys in boxes. The only thing that was out of place was his wardrobe door, which had fallen open again, pushing the guitar to the floor. She walked over and closed the door, resting the guitar against the handle this time, to keep it shut. She picked up the deodorant and shook it. No. Still some in there. Maybe his teenage hormones were just going into overdrive right now. She sighed. If only Hugo was here to guide him through the secrets of male puberty.

A pang of guilt stopped her. If she started something with Jago, how or when would she even begin to broach it with Jack? How would it affect her efforts to bring them closer again?

But without Jago, would it even happen?

She rubbed her lips together. They were dry from biting them in concentration as she wrote the proposal earlier. It was too early to think about all that. She’d only just met him. Briskly, she walked out of Jack’s bedroom, and entered her own to find some lip salve.

She paused mid-step. That was strange. The smell was in here, too. Kate wandered to the dressing table and slicked some salve across her lips, looking round for the source again.

As she turned to go out, something caught her eye. The ankle boots she’d meant to have re-heeled ages ago, were sticking out of the bottom of the bed.

Humming, Kate leaned over and picked them up.

As she headed back downstairs to place them by the front door, she realized there was a new bounce in her step. And then she knew why. For the first time in a long time, she was looking forward to something. Eight o’clock tomorrow night at the Hanley Arms.

Back in the kitchen, she saw Jago’s bag on the floor, and felt a new resolve take over. Before she could change her mind, she marched out of the back door and locked the bag in the shed. Back in the kitchen, she grabbed the kettle, pleased with herself. As she waited for the water to fill it, her eyes focused on the magnolia tree outside, the only plant she had brought from their Highgate home. The tree was so much taller than when Hugo had last seen it. Its trunk and branches were thickened and matured. They had grown up and away, in different directions.

A band of pain tightened around her chest so fiercely, so unexpectedly, Kate gasped.

Hugo.

Oh God.

Tears welled in her eyes.

Was this it?

After five years, was she going finally to leave him behind and move on?

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘But I think this man will help me. Please, don’t be cross. It’s for Jack, too.’

Just at that minute a bird flew off a branch, the bounce shedding two dark green leaves onto the soil below.

Kate watched, startled. Was Hugo watching her? Trying to tell her not to do it?

Resolutely, she turned and plugged the kettle in. No. It was time to stop exhausting herself looking for imagined signs. There had been a time when she thought she would never let Hugo go. She would die old and lonely, holding onto the shirt he wore that night, splattered with the blood that spilled onto the floorboards, covered the table, the half-eaten food, the table runner. Now, she knew she would go insane if she didn’t let him go, and take Jack with her into the future. Whatever this thing with Jago was, it was time to at least try . . .

A thud from upstairs made Kate recoil.

She stood stock-still. The sound had come from the front of the house. From Jack’s room.

Ice entered her veins.

Her mind shot back to the break-in of two weeks ago. The sickening terror of seeing the dining room lying open, shattered glass on the floor. Was there someone in here again?

She glanced terrified at the alarm box in the hall. It had definitely been on when she came home. How could they have broken through this one?

Then common sense returned.

Kate felt colour return to her face.

Jack’s wardrobe door. The guitar must have fallen over.

Calm, she thought. Calm. She shut her eyes and tried to summon the sensation she’d had on the riverbank on Tuesday night.

She inhaled deeply.

One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand . . .

Tumbling down, into a never-ending void.

Her arms and legs free, with nothing to fight against.

Everything falling away.

Kate opened her eyes, and felt better.

Pleased, she realized she had done it again. Wrestled back a little control.

Pouring boiling water into a cup, she wondered what Jago had planned for tomorrow night. As she did, an impulse came to reach out and take a flapjack from a plate on the worktop. She bit into it, surprised at how sweet it was. The sticky oats felt chewy between her teeth. The sugar exploded into her mouth, into each crevice, making her jaw ache for more.

She looked at the flapjack with surprise. That was
delicious
. She chewed, thinking.

This thing Jago kept saying – that the statistics were just exacerbating her anxiety – was interesting. That they were making her feel even more unsafe than she did already.

She took another bite, and nibbled it, a touch of optimism flushing through her.

Things were going to get better.

Then she remembered about Jack going to the shop in Richard and Helen’s village tomorrow morning.

She looked up at the kitchen clock.

‘Don’t panic,’ she whispered to herself. There were still ten more hours to decide what to do.

The sun appeared through the clouds at lunchtime, caressing the house, trailing its golden fingers from room to room. The child sat on the bedroom floor at the far end of the house, fitting pieces into a jigsaw of a seascape, tensing each time Mother came near, to the bathroom or to empty the laundry basket outside in the hall. If there was a creak of floorboard or a heavy sigh that sounded perilously close, the child gently knocked on the floor to alert Father to be quiet down below. At least Mother was doing the laundry now, far up at the other end of the house in the kitchen. You could tell by the slam of the washing machine door, then the metallic clank and hiss of the iron, slammed across shirts and trousers, back and forwards.

Father grunted. Through the tiny crack the child could see he was still turning the metal pole. His face was red. Sweat drops were pouring down his face.

The child crawled to the door to check Mother was still in the kitchen down the hall, then turned back to the pile of jigsaw pieces to look for the puffin’s beak. If Father killed the snake, then maybe that would be it. The house would be quiet again, maybe even forever this time.

The child saw the puffin’s beak in the pile of jigsaw pieces and grabbed it, distracted.

Then there was a thud.

A door was flung open.

The child jumped up and peeked out of the bedroom door.

Mother was emerging from the kitchen with a basket of wet washing under her arm. Her face was the colour of a week-old potato.

The child jumped back, dropping the puffin’s beak on the floor, and whispering loudly.