Bed of Roses (25 page)

It’s exactly a fortnight after the Fiddleford fire before the police come calling at Uncle Russell Guppy’s bungalow again. They find him in his wheelchair, surrounded by breathing kit and cigarettes, staring morosely out of his front-room window. The telly, he complains between gasps of air, has been broken for almost three weeks. He’s keen to know if they can fix it.

But they’ve come to talk about Dane. They want to take him to Lamsbury police station for questioning.

‘Well…he’s in his…bedroom, I expect,’ says Uncle Russell, bored and sour.

‘Yes, sir. An officer is with him now…As you know, Mr Guppy, Dane insists he was with you when he first spotted the fire. Last time we were here you were unwilling to confirm that. But you didn’t deny it, either. Do you have anything to say about it now?’

Uncle Russell sends him a surly, sideways look. ‘Nothing to do with me,’ he says, just as he said before. ‘I’ve got enough…trouble. Keep me out of this.’

‘So you’re unwilling to substantiate Dane Guppy’s alibi. Am I correct?’

‘No bloody…comment.’

‘Is there someone,’ asks the plod with a patient sigh, ‘who might be able to accompany him to the station?’

‘Not…me,’ says Uncle Russell. ‘I ain’t going…nowhere. Can you do anything with that…telly, then?…Or can’t you?’

‘Not really, sir. No. His mum and dad—’

‘
Them!
’

‘Suggested there was a sister. Tracey, I think.’ He glances at his notebook.

‘Dunno where Tracey is…Probably at…Macklan Creasey’s place. Little…tart.’ Slowly he turns his head from the window, looks at the policeman for the first time, his grey face a map of pain, isolation, anger. ‘Tell my…brother,’ he says, ‘the ruddy TV’s broke, will you?…Tell Tracey to tell him. Can’t…do nothing without…the telly.’

‘I’ll do that, Mr Guppy,’ the policeman says kindly, flicking his notebook closed. ‘Many thanks for your time, Mr Guppy. I’ll certainly pass that message on.’

Kitty Mozely is driving back from the supermarket in Lamsbury just as the police car, with Dane in the back, is parking up outside the Old Alms Cottages. She slams on the brakes – utterly brazen, in the middle of the street – keeps the engine running, and waits to see what happens next.

A few minutes later Tracey emerges from Macklan’s front door, and from the jumbled look of her, she’s come straight from bed. She is followed by an equally tousled-looking Macklan.

Tracey snarls something at the policeman (something, annoyingly, that Kitty can’t quite hear). Then she notices Kitty staring at her, and something snaps. ‘What are you staring at, Kitty Mozely?’ she yells. ‘Haven’t you got a daughter to look after? Fuck off and mind your own business.’

Kitty, slightly put out, offers Tracey a defiant smirk and stays put.

‘
I asked you what you’re staring at, Kitty Mozely
.’ Tracey ducks under the policeman’s arm and starts charging the car.

With a throaty chuckle, Kitty flicks her a finger and quickly accelerates away.

Back at Laurel Cottage she dumps her groceries on the kitchen table and shouts out to Scarlett to come and unload. She’s distracted. Dane’s face in the back of the police car has reminded her of the contact sheet Louis put through her door, with the peculiar photographs of Fanny and the young boy, rolling about in a heap in front of a bonfire. She’d forgotten all about them. Where the hell did she put them?

She rummages around in the mess on her kitchen dresser, among the neglected bills on her desk, in the cupboard under her bathroom sink – and eventually finds them, folded and scrumpled, in the pocket of a skirt at the bottom of a pile of dirty laundry.

‘Scarlett!’ she yells. ‘How many times do I have to ask you?
Check
the bloody pockets before putting things in the laundry pile!’ (Scarlett doesn’t respond, and nor does Kitty expect her to. The quiet harmony at Laurel Cottage is routinely punctured by Kitty’s bad-tempered exclamations, bellowed from different corners of the house. Kitty, if she thought about it at all, would have been quite disconcerted were her daughter to respond to any of them.) ‘I’m going round to Geraldine’s,’ she shouts, thumping down the stairs. ‘I bought us a chicken for lunch. Do you want to put it in the oven? I’ll be back in about an hour.’

Scarlett is in the kitchen, watching
Breakfast with Frost
, tutting quietly at the Member for Kensington and Chelsea’s approach to monetary union, and already sorting out the
shopping. Her television screen flickers as the front door slams.

The Adams family is still perched at the breakfast bar when Kitty breezes in. They’re not even dressed. Clive and Geraldine are bent over their newspapers, munching toast and organic marmalade and frowning with concentration, perfectly engrossed in the vital task of remaining
au courant
with the big bad world beyond their own small patch of oblivion. Ollie sits between them, a pile of toasted waffles in front of him, untouched and swimming in organic maple syrup. Apart from the adults’ methodical crunching, and the occasional broadsheet rustle-and-fold, the only sound emanating from the Old Rectory breakfast table is the
blip-blip-crrr
of Ollie’s computer game.

‘Morning all!’ Kitty bawls. ‘Only me!’ She halts at the kitchen door. ‘Good God! Not even dressed! I’d have thought you’d be out campaigning for a Fiddleford bus route or something by now. What’s the matter with you? Are you ill?’

With a guilty start, Geraldine jumps up and begins to clear the plates.

‘Kitty!’ she says shrilly. ‘How lovely to see you! No, no, no. Not ill! Certainly not. It’s just that now the school governor issue’s been settled it’s the first Sunday we’ve had a chance to sit round
as a family
for weeks. Isn’t it, Clive?’ She glances at him nervously. ‘
For once
we felt we didn’t have to go to church.’

‘For once?’ scoffs Kitty. ‘You only went twice altogether.’

‘Four times, actually, Kitty,’ Geraldine reminds her. ‘You may remember, we went without you on the first week. And we went again, last week. Out of courtesy.’

Kitty turns to Clive, sensing his lack of pleasure at her arrival, vaguely noting that he hasn’t yet bothered to look
up. ‘How’s life, Clive?’ she barks at him. ‘Business
thriving
?’

Clive doesn’t smile at Kitty. He’s been feeling increasingly irritated, recently, by her presumption of free and apparently absolute access to his house at any time of the day or night, and he’s complained about it to Geraldine.

‘Kitty,’ he says, nodding at her sullenly, then returning to his newspaper.

‘
Clive
,’ mimics Kitty.

Clive ignores her.

The problem, as even Geraldine agrees, has grown significantly worse since Kitty signed her megabuck book contract, because now when she turns up unannounced, she’s taken to bringing the drink with her – and it’s almost always champagne, as if each and every one of her interminable arrivals demanded celebrating. Neither he nor Geraldine particularly likes champagne but Geraldine insists on accepting each new bottle with dutiful whoops of gratitude and excitement. After which, of course, they’re more or less obliged to drink the thing together, which makes it doubly hard to get rid of her.

‘Oh, I say!’ exclaims Kitty, eyeing up a three-quarter-full cafetière. ‘Is there any of that coffee left?’

‘It’s a bit cold,’ Geraldine says.

‘Not to worry. I’ll heat up some milk…If that’s all right?’ No words of reassurance from Clive or Geraldine, who are engaged in a silent warfare, exchanging shrugs of nonresponsibility behind her. But Kitty is unabashed. She’s already pulling at a small green Le Creuset saucepan which hangs, beside its matching brethren, from a meat hook above the green Aga.

‘You’ll never guess the excitement,’ Kitty continues cheerfully.

‘Ollie!’ snaps Geraldine. Because she has to take it out on someone. ‘Switch off that wretched machine and say good morning to Kitty.’

‘Morning,’ he says drearily, over the blips.

‘By the way,’ says Geraldine, trying to sound a bit more friendly, ‘when’re you going to give us a glimpse of the Great Novel, eh, Kitty? Clive and I were just saying – you’re being awfully secretive about it. And I know you’ve got the proofs back, because Scarlett told Ollie. Didn’t she, Ollie, sweetheart? Scarlett told Ollie she couldn’t wait for Ollie to read it. Which was rather sweet, I thought.’

‘Did she?’ says Kitty nervously. ‘Well, I shouldn’t pay any attention to what Scarlett says.’

‘Oh, Kit,’ Geraldine says, looking disapproving. ‘That’s not fair, now is it?’

‘Anyway, never mind Scarlett. Forget about the book.’ Kitty waves it aside impatiently.

‘I shall have to call the publisher myself, if you don’t hand it over,’ Geraldine says skittishly. ‘Seriously, Kitty. I can’t wait!’

‘I wouldn’t waste your time doing that because they won’t give it to you,’ Kitty snaps. ‘Anyway,
much
more interestingly, guess who I saw being taken away in the back of a police car this morning! The boy! I’ve forgotten his name. You know, the horrible Guppy boy! Who barged into church the other week – who called the fire brigade. What’s his name again? Tracey Guppy’s brother—’

‘Dane?’ says Geraldine sharply (skittishness gone). ‘They’ve arrested him? Gosh! I thought they never would…’ Geraldine can never quite hear Dane Guppy’s name without a tiny, secret, gush of shame; a rush of bubbling hostility. She has never again asked to have a ‘reading session’ with him, not since he took her head like that, and shouted that he loved her. ‘Well. And about bloody time, frankly,’ she mutters.

Crrr-blip-blip. Crrrrr beeeep.

‘They had the police car parked outside Macklan
Creasey’s, and they both came tumbling out of the house. Tracey was screaming like a fishwife. It was quite funny…’ Kitty pictures her, and pauses. ‘Poor little thing. She was weeping…’ Anyway,’ she adds quickly, pulling her merry old self together. ‘Imagine – what a stroke of luck. There was I, up with the lark, on my way back from Safeways,
jus
t as they were carting the little sod off to jail.’

GAME OVER – GAME OVER – GAME OVER.

‘Ollie, I told you to switch off that machine.’

‘And it’s the best place for him, the stupid little sod,’ Kitty adds approvingly. ‘Too many out-of-control children in this bloody country. They get away with murder.’

‘Since, Kitty, you have difficulty even remembering the boy’s name, and you weren’t, so far as I know, actually present when the match was struck,’ snaps Clive, though he’d been intending to ignore her, ‘it’s somewhat contrary of you to be so bloody confident that he’s guilty.’

Kitty looks at him, mouths a silent ‘
oooh
’. ‘Who’s rattled your cage this morning?’ she asks mildly. ‘I say, I don’t suppose you’ve got any more of those waffles, Geraldine? And anyway,’ she turns back to Clive, ‘I do know he’s guilty, Clive, actually. If you want to know. Because I’ve got photographic evidence…I’ve been meaning to show it to you for ages, Geraldine. I’ve actually got photographic evidence that the boy is a pyromaniac. If you can believe it! It was only when I saw him this morning in the back of that police car that I finally put the two faces together.’

‘What does pyromaniac mean?’ asks Ollie, in a burst of unprecedented curiosity.

Nobody answers. Kitty produces Louis’s folded, crumpled contact sheet and with a flick of the wrist, sends it spinning across the breakfast bar.

‘Oh,’ says Geraldine, catching it before it spins on to the floor, bending over to have a look. ‘Oh, they’re rather
nice…
Lovely
one of Scarlett, there. You’d hardly notice—’

‘Yes, yes, never mind that. Look at the top row…See? The exploding bonfire?’

‘OH!’

‘Isn’t that Dane Guppy there, being sat on by Miss Flynn?’

‘Well…
goodness
!’ exclaims Geraldine, picking it up and holding it to the window. ‘How
extraordinary
! Clive, do look.’

‘Can I see?’ says Ollie.

‘Good God!’ Geraldine cries. ‘It’s outside the school! It’s in the playground. It’s actually—Kitty! It’s outside the girls’ cloakroom, where the fire began.’

‘Is it?’ says Kitty happily. She hadn’t noticed that.

‘When do you suppose this happened?’

‘Well, if you look at the numbers, it was obviously on the same reel of film as the press conference, which means—’

‘I know when that happened,’ says Ollie. ‘Can I see? It was when you were doing your press thing, and Miss Flynn sent him up to her office. Where I was. Remember? He told me all about it. He put a dead bird on the fire with rockets attached, and—’

‘Pretty damning, aren’t they?’ interrupts Kitty smugly. ‘What do you suppose the police would make of
them
? There’s bound to be a legal term. Clive, you’ll know. Proven Predisposition or something? Being an Obvious Pyromaniac. Who cares, anyway? He’s as guilty as sin.’

Finally, Clive can control his curiosity no longer. He lays down his paper and leans to look over his wife’s shoulder. He frowns, moves closer, puts on his spectacles and studies the series of photographs long and hard.

‘Is this the boy,’ he asks, ‘who was playing truant most of the term, Geraldine, whom you felt you made some connection with during one of your reading seminars?’

‘Mmm. Yessss,’ says Geraldine, still examining the
pictures. ‘Yes, I’m afraid it is. He was at school very much against his will, I think. Poor little thing.’

The comment hangs. Kitty ferrets in the bread bin in search of waffles and Ollie stands behind his parents, straining to be allowed a glance, until Clive breaks the silence with a cold, clear, ‘But what we’re looking at here doesn’t constitute evidence, Geraldine. I don’t need to tell you that.’

She laughs. ‘No,’ she says quickly. ‘Of course not. But I mean, seriously, Clive. You can’t honestly think…’

Clive turns his cold clear eyes on to Kitty. ‘How long ago was it you saw the boy being driven off?’

‘Well, just a second ago!’ she exclaims. ‘Literally! Dumped the shopping, grabbed the pictures and came straight over. Because really I thought,’ she adds, delighted by the weighty turn her snippet of gossip has taken, ‘well, I was sure that
you
, Clive, with your
brilliant
legal mind, would want to be versed…’