All Fall Down: A gripping psychological thriller with a twist that will take your breath away (16 page)

N
o one spoke
until Rob had negotiated the exit road and rejoined the motorway. It was Evan, finally, who said, ‘Well, that was different.’

There was a dry chuckle from Josh, but Rob had the impression they were all a bit shaken by the encounter. Rob himself had no idea what to think. Definitely something unsettling about the couple, but he wasn’t inclined to dwell on them for long.

The fact that he’d ditched the trainer was of far greater significance. It was now an irrevocable decision, for better or worse. He chose to see it as a positive step: no matter that an unknown enemy was still out there, intent on setting him up for murder, Rob had just neutralised their main weapon against him. There was a sense of liberation, too, in knowing that the next ten days would be spent in a safe haven, far away from Petersfield. In their absence the house could burn to the ground for all Rob cared; they had plenty of insurance.

All he had to worry about was Josh. Upon reflection he’d struggled a little with Wendy’s assessment of their son’s criminality. Right now he was in no position to cast judgement on anyone.

Glancing in the mirror, his daughter’s expression made him frown. ‘You okay, Georgia?’

She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. ‘I think I’ve seen her before.’

‘What?’

‘That woman – Ilsa, was she called? I was in a café on Wednesday, with Amber and Paige. She was at the table behind us – only her hair was spiky, and she had more earrings and stuff. And tattoos on one arm.’

Hidden by the long-sleeved blouse
, Rob thought. But it seemed such a bizarre coincidence that he couldn’t really give it any credence.

‘It can’t have been. Are you sure?’

‘I-I don’t know.’ Georgia’s voice wobbled. ‘I didn’t see her that clearly, I suppose. . .’

‘So not a hundred per cent?’ He glanced at Wendy, who shrugged:
Makes no sense to me, either
.

‘Could they just be similar looking?’ Wendy asked.

‘I guess,’ Georgia admitted.

‘I think that’s all it was, then,’ Rob told her. ‘I really wouldn’t worry.’

A
fter that
, there was silence while the takeaway food was consumed. As they travelled north and east the terrain flattened out, though it remained pleasantly green and wooded, a gentle landscape beneath the mellow, cloud-filtered light of this changeable summer.

On the A11 the flow of traffic was disrupted by caravans, and cars towing boats; clusters of motorcycles buzzed through the queues like wasps. Fighting his irritation, Rob turned his attention back to Josh.

‘You were saying you nearly have the ten grand that Nyman wants?’

There was a typically grudging response: ‘Yes, though there’s also the issue of raising funds for my living expenses next year.’

‘Don’t worry about that for now. I’m thinking about how to make sure Nyman doesn’t see your new appearance. You’ll need the anonymity when you go back.’

‘I have that covered. Ruby’s offered to take care of the handover.’

Wendy jerked in her seat. ‘And you were going to let her? It could be dangerous.’

‘Not really. Ruby’s effect on people practically guarantees her immortality.’

‘No one’s immortal, it only feels like it at your age,’ Rob growled. ‘Now, let’s say you arrange to meet on Monday or Tuesday. Somewhere neutral – I’d suggest a car park at a big shopping mall, like Thurrock or Lakeside.’

‘But the money’s in Canterbury, and I don’t have my car—’

‘I’m gonna drive you. We’ll collect the cash and you can point Nyman out to me from a safe distance. Then I’ll take care of the handover.’

‘Dad, I appreciate the offer, but this is my problem—’

Wendy interrupted: ‘We’re your parents, Josh, and we want to help.’

‘Exactly,’ said Rob. ‘And I intend to make sure Nyman understands that this is it now. You two are quits.’

Josh gave a laugh; when Rob checked the mirror he saw the other two were smirking.

‘Very macho, Dad,’ said Evan, ‘but I doubt if he’s going to be intimidated by a middle-class plumber from Sussex.’

‘We’ll see, won’t we?’ Rob spoke with such quiet determination that no one challenged him.

It was a valid point. What they couldn’t know was that Rob planned to ask Jason Dennehy to provide back-up. The man had offered his support, after all – so what better way to see if that offer was genuine?

T
he last few
miles were slow and frustrating. The narrow road meandered through a succession of ancient villages, where clusters of parked cars or the jutting edge of a building created choke-points, the traffic backed up for what felt like an age.

Having noticed that Evan was periodically checking the road behind them, Rob turned into the service station in Branham, explaining that it made sense to refuel now, as well as buying the fresh food they hadn’t been able to bring in the car.

The other reason was to see if the red Qashqai came past, but of course there was no sign of it. He drove on, and a couple of minutes later he turned right into the imaginatively named Sea Lane. The cottage was about two hundred yards from the main road, a two-storey building of flint with patterned brick edging and a pitched roof of terracotta tiles. It stood in a slightly elevated position on a quarter-acre plot that was more meadow than garden, busy with wild flowers and framed by avenues of beech, ash and white willow trees.

The lane was barely wide enough for the Land Rover, but theirs was the only property along here, so Rob didn’t expect to encounter any other vehicles. A sudden flash of movement up ahead caused him to jerk the steering wheel.

‘Did you see that?’

‘What?’ Wendy craned to look, before turning to examine him.

‘It was—’ Rob wanted to laugh, it was so absurd. ‘Someone just crossed the lane.’

‘A cyclist, wasn’t it?’ said Josh.

‘Wouldn’t it be too marshy to ride along there?’ Wendy, like Josh, sounded mystified by Rob’s reaction. ‘They’ll be back in a minute, I expect.’

Perhaps she was right, though no one appeared as they drew up outside the cottage. Rob’s mind was in turmoil but he didn’t want to say why, for fear of scaring them, or sounding ridiculous. Or both.

Was he losing his mind?

E
van opened
the gates and stood back as Rob drove in and parked on the drive. While Wendy unlocked the front door, Rob wandered out to the lane and turned towards the coast. An old farm building had once stood at the bottom of the lane; now it ended in a clump of bushes and a muddy footpath through the saltmarsh.

Did I see a cyclist
? he asked himself.
Well, yes: Josh verified it.

Could it be who I thought it was?
Unconsciously, he shook his head.
Of course not.

Inside, there were cupboards opening and closing, a kettle being filled, a burst of music as Georgia switched on the TV. Rob helped Wendy open all the windows to clear the fusty air.

The house had three double bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs; a living room and dining room downstairs, along with a good-sized kitchen and a smaller room that was alternatively an office or an extra bedroom. After carrying the cases up, Rob lingered in the back bedroom, which was the one he and Wendy tended to use. It offered a stunning view of fields and trees to left and right, reed beds and tidal marshes straight ahead, and beyond that a narrow strip of flat blue sea.

Not that Rob was admiring the scenery. He was scouring the network of inlets and paths, trying to find the cyclist amidst the palette of greens and browns.

Movement in the doorway made him jump: studying him carefully, Wendy asked, ‘What’s wrong?’

He snorted. ‘Where do I start?’

‘
Touché
.’ Drifting towards him, she said, ‘I just asked Josh about the missing laptop. He doesn’t have it.’

‘Oh. Pity.’

He sounded far too neutral, but fortunately Wendy didn’t push him. Instead she changed tack: ‘Going back to Jason Dennehy – does he know about this place?’

‘Not as far as I can recall, no.’ He turned to face her. ‘Of all the things we need to worry about, I don’t think Jason’s one of them.’

‘But what about his friends? You’ve always said they’re a murky bunch.’

‘Have I?’ He shrugged, but it was a poor attempt at insouciance.

‘I’ve been thinking. . . that time you employed the private detective—’

‘Enquiry agent.’

‘Whatever. Didn’t he say that Iain had disguised his trail quite well, but that he still wasn’t particularly hard to find, if you knew what you were doing?’

Rob nodded irritably. He’d hired the agent to trace Kelly, in the hope of taking legal action, but soon realised he was throwing good money after bad.

‘So Jason – or one of the others – they could have done the same thing and tracked Iain down in Spain?’

‘It’s possible, but there’s no evidence for that. Look, I don’t think there’s any link to what’s happened this week, so can we just leave it?’

She flinched at his tone. ‘I’m only trying to—’

‘I know. But the point of coming here was to get away from all that.’ A glance at the window, while the voice of his conscience said,
Don’t take it out on her, just because you removed evidence of a crime; because you lied and you’re lying now
. . .

Wendy regarded him with an enigmatic but disturbing expression. He waited out an awkward silence, and wasn’t expecting the quiet, regretful way that she said, ‘Once we’ve sorted out here, I think you and I should go for a walk.’

T
he Announcement
, that was how Wendy had come to think of it. Leaving the house, she noticed Rob’s hand trembling as he reached for the gate. Wendy felt jittery, too. After all the grisly distractions of the past week, the decision she’d made about her future was at the forefront of her mind once again.

She’d gnawed at the issue for a long time before saying a word to Rob; and ever since that first conversation she had worked on the Announcement in her head, shaping what would be the most difficult speech of her life; testing the logic of her arguments, anticipating questions and formulating responses until finally she felt confident that she could deal with any number of objections. She could handle confusion, anger, even grief.

The reaction she feared most was pain. There was no rehearsing a scenario to cope with raw, honest pain. And now the Announcement was horribly close; perhaps only a matter of hours away.

Rob had set off at a marching pace, but Wendy was determined not to speed up. Gradually he adjusted his stride until she was alongside him, their shoulders sometimes bumping as they avoided the brambles and nettles bursting from the hedgerows.

The early evening was mild rather than warm, the sky a shade of cream too subtle even for a paint catalogue. The air held the rich aromas of salt and mud, and the only sounds were the trilling of birds on land and the far-off hoot of birds over the sea; the wet trickle of water in unseen ditches and channels; the ever-singing grasses.

I’ll come here again
, she thought, reacting to a sudden, irrational fear that this would be her last visit.

They’d spent a couple of hours unpacking, unwinding, mostly in different parts of the house. Wendy had taken a shower, while Rob mooched round the garden and spent a suspicious amount of time at the bedroom window. Evan had gone for a run, and Josh and Georgia had taken themselves off to the garage to set up an old table tennis table. A whoop of celebration from Georgia had offered Wendy a glimmer of hope: maybe the next ten days wouldn’t be so terrible after all.

We’re all grown-ups now, practically. Sensible, mature people.

A thought to savour, all too briefly, as Rob turned and muttered: ‘That person I saw as we turned in here. . .’

‘On the bike?’

‘Yep. Well, the kid riding it. . .’ He blew out a breath. ‘He looked just like the lad on Sunday.’

‘You’re not serious?’

‘Same sort of hair, same build – even his clothes looked similar.’ Rob waited a second, then gave a snort. ‘Go on, say it.’

‘Well. . .’ She spread her hands. ‘It can’t be.’

‘I know. But what if it is? That’s all I have going round in my head.
It can’t be – but what if it is?
’

‘It was only a glimpse,’ she pointed out.

‘Oh yeah, fraction of a second. But sometimes you just know, don’t you?’

‘I suppose so.’ Wendy sighed. This explained why he’d been so antsy: it wasn’t the Announcement at all. But he couldn’t be right. He couldn’t be.

The most comfortable walking route took them to the village, about a mile away. The only person they encountered was an elderly woman wrapped up as if for winter, herding a couple of excitable terriers. She gave them a quick nod and made the indeterminate guttural noise that seemed to represent a greeting in rural Norfolk. Shortly after that, they passed through a kissing gate, climbed a low rise and fell so closely in step that Rob, in spite of the purpose of their walk, somehow reached for her hand, and Wendy somehow took it.

She said, ‘You know what we discussed earlier, about how some people never experience as much as a burglary, while others run into all kinds of grief?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Well, something I’ve noticed over the years is that when people have a lot of things going wrong at once, they seem to lose the ability to make clear decisions. It’s as though, faced with an overload of stress, the brain simply shuts down. It doesn’t want to know.’

‘And you think that’s us?’

‘Isn’t it? Since last Sunday, what have we really done except bury our heads in the sand?’

He seemed about to disagree, only to say, ‘No, you’re right.’

A kink in the path meant they had to break apart, and in the instant of separation she was reminded –
the Announcement, the Announcement
– but after threading through the gap Rob took her hand again, and said, ‘God, we need a drink!’

F
or Rob
, the bombshell had come in late December, in that endless, stultifying period between Christmas and New Year. During an innocuous stroll around Heath Pond, Wendy had revealed that she felt their relationship had run its course, and thought they should separate.

Rob had been flabbergasted. His automatic response –
Is there someone else?
– had offended her. She claimed there wasn’t.

‘So why break up the family just for. . . what? A fantasy of what single life might be like?’

Crossly, she’d said, ‘Don’t belittle the strength of my feelings.’

‘All right, but it’s not as though we’re fighting all the time. We don’t hate each other.’

‘Do you want to wait till it gets that bad?’

‘Who says it will? I mean, is it inevitable?’

After throwing out a few examples from among their friends and colleagues, she said, ‘Even if it’s not as terrible as that, the best we can probably hope for after thirty, forty years together is indifference. And as I said when we’ve covered this ground in the past, I don’t want the final stage of my life to be notable only for indifference.’

‘I know. And I’ve always agreed.’

‘But nothing’s really changed, has it? We’re still not making the effort to spend more quality time together, and we don’t
do
anything with the time that we have. I want to
live
, Rob. And I know this sounds selfish, but I want to be able to please
myself
– for practically the first time as an adult.’

Try as he might, he’d been unable to break her conviction that a spell of independent living would rejuvenate them both – and possibly even spark a reconciliation.

‘I see us living a few miles apart, meeting up occasionally – sharing custody of Georgia, of course. And who knows, maybe one day you could ask me out on a date?’

‘What if you meet someone else first? Or if I do?’

‘Then I’d be glad for you, and I hope you’d be glad for me.’

The news had left him reeling, but Rob was encouraged to hear Wendy say there was no desperate hurry: seeing Georgia through her GCSEs was the absolute priority for the coming year. But after that, perhaps once their daughter was safely installed at her sixth-form college, they could begin to make the arrangements.

Then the subject was put aside, and for weeks Rob had been able to persuade himself that this was merely another mid-life wobble, rather than a full-blown crisis, and that a better solution could be found – some foreign travel, perhaps?

‘No,’ she said simply, when Rob floated the idea of saving up to take a few months off and see the world. ‘Even if we could afford it, which I doubt, there’s no way you’d be able to leave the business for that long. You’d drive us both crazy within the first week.’

‘Not if we can wait till it’s really thriving. . .’

‘And who can say when that will be? I’m sorry, Rob. That’s not the answer.’ She said she wanted to tell the children well in advance. ‘We should make the announcement when we’re all together, somewhere we can discuss it calmly. Let’s take a week in June, once all their exams are done, and go to Norfolk together.’

Here
, in other words.

Now.

T
here were
two pubs in the village; one renowned for its cuisine, the other less fashionable but a more relaxing place to drink, so that was where they went. Tonight there were several patrons who knew them well enough to exchange pleasantries. One of the bar staff had recently had a baby – delightful news, albeit something of a shock, given that the girl had enjoyed a brief summer romance with Evan just a few years before.

‘They’re old enough to be starting families of their own,’ Wendy reflected, and Rob’s mournful expression was another reminder that the Announcement was close. . . so close.

‘And yet they still need us, don’t they? Georgia’s moody as hell, always in and out of friendships. Evan’ll be pining for Livvy in a day or two, and as for Josh. . .’

Wendy nodded. ‘I’m glad you suggested trying to meet this Nyman on his behalf.’

‘It’s got to be resolved, for
our
peace of mind as much as his – not that he seemed bothered about taking up my offer.’ Rob took a sip of his dark, reddish bitter. ‘It’s high time he started living in the real world, and saw what a mess he’s making—’

‘Peas in a pod, my dear,’ she said, and if he heard the fondness in her voice, his tiny shudder seemed a strange way to acknowledge it.

‘Don’t say that.’

‘Well, you are, I’m afraid. It’s why he infuriates you so much.’

Glowering at the pub’s ancient hearth, cold and unused in the summer, he said, ‘To be honest, I’ve been dreading this holiday. And I know it’s probably the same for you, and you just want to get it over with, but after everything that’s gone on lately, I don’t think it’s a good idea to say anything to them now. In a situation like this, when we’ve only got each other to rely on, the risk of driving a wedge into that. . .’ He shrugged, and seemed furious that what was clearly a prepared speech had fizzled out rather than ending on the powerful note he must have intended.

‘I’m sorry, Rob.’

‘I’m not asking you to change your decision, but just to—’

‘Delay, I know. But I don’t think I can. I’ve carried it inside me for so long.’ She dabbed at a tear. ‘It feels like it’s eating away at me, and if I put it off now. . .’

‘No, all right.’ He sat back heavily, like a man who has just staked everything on the very last throw of the dice – and lost.