Flesh And Blood (41 page)

‘Joanne…’

‘And what happened to her, Frank? You know what. It’s your fault.’

‘That’s not…’

‘Why do you think he went for her, Frank? Why Katherine?’

Elder turned his face away.

‘You nearly killed her, Frank. You. Not him. Because you had to get involved, you couldn’t let things be. You always knew better than anybody else, that’s why.’

‘Joanne…’

‘And you know what, Frank, you’ll get over this. You’ll come to terms, find a way. But Katherine, she never will.’

Elder remained there, not moving, long after the door had closed and the sound of Joanne’s footsteps had faded to silence along the corridor, her words reverberating loud inside his head.

♦

They kept Elder in overnight: despite careful work by the doctor on duty, his forehead would always bear a scar some seven centimetres long. The longer of the two bones in the forearm was chipped but not broken and he was given a sling and paracetamol for the pain.

Katherine would stay for ten days in intensive care, after which she would be transferred to the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham and begin a course of physiotherapy before being allowed home. She was young and fit and given time her body would mend; even her internal injuries would heal. As for the rest…

When Elder came to see her she found it difficult to look him in the eye: whether, like her mother, this was because she held him to blame, or because, in some way, she was embarrassed by his knowledge of what had happened to her, he was never sure.

He couldn’t ask; she couldn’t say.

When they talked, if they talked at all, they stuck to safer things – though for Katherine, who had been snatched off the street and put through days of purgatory and hell, what could be safe again?

‘What’s happened to him?’ Katherine asked one day.

‘Who?’ Elder asked, though of course he knew.

Both he and Joanne had tried to keep the papers from her, but this was an open ward.

‘He’s in Rampton.’

‘The mental hospital?’

‘Secure, yes.’

‘They’re saying he’s insane.’

‘He’ll be given tests, to see if he’s fit to plead.’

‘To stand trial, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘And if he’s not?’

‘They’ll keep him there, I suppose. Rampton. Broadmoor.’

‘He’ll get off.’

‘Not exactly.’

‘That other poor girl he killed.’

Elder sought and held her hand. He knew all too well what it would be like for her if Keach were brought to trial; one way or another she would have to give evidence, face cross-examination, he did this and then he did that.

‘When are you going back to Cornwall?’ Katherine asked.

‘Not yet.’

‘But you will go?’

‘I expect so.’

Katherine smiled. ‘What about this girlfriend of yours?’

‘What girlfriend’s this?’

‘Mum told me about her.’

‘Past fifty,’ Elder said, ‘there’s got to be a better word.’

‘Lover,’ Katherine suggested. ‘Floozy. Bit of stuff.’

‘Helen,’ Elder said. ‘Her name’s Helen.’

‘And is it serious?’

‘I don’t know.’

Elder and Helen had spent a day in Sheffield, another in York, anonymous places and convenient, easy enough to pass the time in each other’s company, drink coffee, eat lunch, take in the sights. Sometimes she took his arm, less frequently he held her hand. Neither broached what had come between them: the daughter he had found and saved had been his own, not hers.

‘You can’t still be reading that book,’ Katherine said, looking at the thick and curling copy of
David Copperfield
.

‘I’ve had other things on my mind.’

‘Like me.’

‘Like you. Plus I keep forgetting what’s happened and having to go back.’

‘Why don’t you just give it up? Find something shorter?’

‘I hate doing that once I’ve started. Besides, I want to know what happened.’

‘Who did it.’

‘Not exactly.’

‘I should hate him, shouldn’t I?’

‘I don’t know. Probably. No one’d blame you if you did.’

‘Do you?’

‘Hate him?’

‘Mm.’

‘Oh, yes. With every bone of my body,’ Elder said.

‘Even the injured one?’

‘Especially that.’

As she smiled, tears flooded her eyes.

♦

At first, Katherine had refused to see the psychotherapist at all. Then, when she did, she would deny her flashbacks and her dreams and say, when pushed, that she remembered nothing, nothing: she had shut it out.

‘Why do you want to make me think about it?’ she all but screamed. ‘Why make me go through it all again?’

At home, she spent much of her time in her room. A few friends visited, brought flowers, selections of chocolates from Thornton’s, boxed and tied with ribbon, magazines. But conversation was awkward, what to ask, what to avoid, and after a while they came less often. Katherine didn’t seem to mind. Martyn bought her a new television and a DVD player for her room and she watched movies endlessly, back to back.
Spider-Man
. The new
Star Wars
. Anything with Johnny Depp. Ethan Hawke.

One evening Elder sat with her and watched
Hamlet
, a modern version set in New York, Ethan Hawke as the young prince feigning madness, a schoolgirl Ophelia driven to take her own life by circumstances she could not control.

Knowing what happened, he found it compulsive nonetheless, sitting in a chair alongside Katherine’s bed, his eyes drawn to her almost as much as the screen, the action played out in images reflected on her face.

As the denouement approached, Joanne quietly opened the door, looked in, and quietly went away.

Some half an hour later, order restored and Katherine sleeping, Elder rose and just went downstairs; Joanne was in the kitchen, mixing a gin and tonic.

‘You want one, Frank?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘You’re being careful, aren’t you?’

‘I hope so.’

He watched her as she sliced a lemon and forked one segment into a tall glass.

‘This Helen woman,’ Joanne said, ‘she still just a friend?’

‘She’s a friend, yes.’

‘A friend you fuck, Frank?’

‘Aren’t they the best kind?’ he might have said, smiling, trying for some lightness of tone, or, more caustically, ‘You’d know more about that than me.’ Instead he said none of these things.

‘Cat got your tongue, Frank?’

‘It’s time,’ he said, ‘I was leaving.’

Joanne tasted her drink, allowing it to linger a moment on the back of her tongue. ‘I’m sorry about what I said. That first day at the hospital. I was upset.’

‘I know. And it’s all right.’

‘Even so.’ She touched his arm, his hand. ‘We should be friends, Frank. Especially now.’

‘We are.’

She kissed him close alongside the mouth and he could smell the gin, this glass not her first.

‘He’s leaving me, Frank. Just as soon as Katherine’s over the worst. Leaving me just like I left you.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Are you? I’d have thought you might be pleased.’

‘No.’

‘No more than I deserve.’ She laughed. ‘He’s running off to London for some model with no hips and no tits and a mouth like the London drain.’

Elder took a pace away.

‘Generous though. Letting me stay here in the house as long as I want. Half the proceeds when it goes up for sale.’

‘I’d better go,’ Elder said.

‘Why don’t you stay?’

‘No.’

‘We were a family,’ Joanne said, as he reached the door.

‘Yes,’ Elder said. ‘I remember.’

With barely a hesitation he carried on through, closing the door at his back.

♦

It was one of those strange and sudden days when the beginnings of winter seem to fall away and everything is blue and clear. Sunlight sparkled off the water of the canal and made the brickwork glow. The new Nottingham magistrates court building, glass and steel, shone like a palace in a fairy tale. Adam Keach had already been formally charged and remanded into custody. Some time in the next few weeks, after exhaustive tests, two out of three psychiatrists would find him fit to plead, the date of his trial in the Crown Court still some months in the future.

Before that, however, it was Shane Donald’s turn to stand before the magistrate, scrawny in grey, face pale, a plaster over his eye from some incident or other, forever picking at the shredded skin raw around his nails. He had seen Angel when he was led into the court and refused to look in her direction since. His licence already revoked, he was remanded on one charge of robbery and one of assault occasioning actual bodily harm. Aside from confirming his name and that he understood the charges, there was little more for him to say.

Angel stood as he was taken down and his name came faint from her lips but if he heard or cared Shane gave no sign. Watching, Elder wanted to go to her and apologise, explain, tell her that it would all turn out for the best, but he thought one betrayal was enough.

The Air Malaysia flight left Heathrow Airport, terminal three, at ten-thirty in the evening; at five-thirty the following evening it touched down in Kuala Lumpur and took off again two hours later, finally arriving in Auckland at eleven-fifteen the next morning.

Plenty of time, between surprisingly tasty meals and gobbets of God-awful films, to finish
David Copperfield
. Established as a successful writer and, after an overlong and ill-judged marriage, together with a good woman, Dickens’s hero finally enjoyed his quiet triumph. His happiness. Yet Elder couldn’t help but wonder if a man whose reading of character had been so woefully wrong and whose choices had been so palpably foolish, could be said to deserve happiness at all.

He wondered about himself.

He set the book aside but found his attention being pulled back to chapter thirty-one, ‘A Greater Loss’, and the letter young Emily wrote when she fled with her lover, her seducer – ‘
When you, who love me so much better than I have ever deserved, even when my mind was innocent, see this, I shall be far away
.’

The letter Susan Blacklock perhaps wrote but never sent.

At Auckland, Elder checked his baggage, such as it was, through customs, showed his passport to the officer at immigration.

‘Business or pleasure?’

Elder wasn’t sure: he suspected the truth might be neither.

Karori, Helen Blacklock had told him, when he’d asked if she knew where Susan’s father was living. Wherever that is. It was a suburb of Wellington, Elder had discovered, west of the city. The likelihood that Ulney was still at the same address was not great, but tracking people down was one of the things Elder was trained to do.

The road from the airport soon gave way to narrow streets that rose through a series of sharp twists and turns as they skirted the centre of the city. The taxi let him down beside a small parade of shops, a garage, banks, a library. Elder checked the map he had bought to get his bearings.

The wooden exteriors of the houses were mostly painted white or cream beneath terracotta tiles, with patches of lawn shielded by shrubs and small trees from the wind. The people he spoke to were friendly, not over-suspicious, happy to talk. David Ulney had moved on but not far, exchanged one address in Karori for another, before moving out of the city altogether.

The man sat in front of a partly demolished garage, chipping mortar from one of a haphazard pile of bricks, white dust thick on his shirt and arms and streaked across his face and hair. ‘Paekakariki they moved to. Less than an hour’s drive up Highway 1. Or you could take the train. We used to have an address for them but not any more. You’ll not find it difficult to find them, though. I doubt there’s more than a hundred or so places all told and most of them holiday homes. Not too many live there all year round.’

Elder thanked him. ‘If you do see him,’ the man said, ‘ask him why he built this garage the wrong side of the house, the daft bugger, blocking out the light.’

♦

He was woken by rain slashing against the window. The clock at his bedside read 4:27. He pummelled his pillow a little, pulled up the covers and closed his eyes. When they next opened it was 9:23 and the rain had ceased. A quick shower, coffee and toast and he was on his way to the railway station. By the time the train drew into Paekakariki, most of the clouds had dispersed leaving sun and blue sky.

As the train pulled away, the crossing gates swung high and traffic coming off the highway, two dusty trucks and a shiny black four-by-four, rolled along the broad road that led from the rail tracks towards the beach.

Elder asked a woman clearing tables outside a small café if she knew where the Ulneys lived.

Balancing plates and cups, she shook her head. ‘Ask Michael over at the book store. He knows everybody.’

Michael O’Leary was a bearded man with long grey hair, wearing a black T-shirt with the words ‘
Which Way?
’ in white across his chest.

Elder introduced himself and held out his hand.

‘Ulney,’ O’Leary said in response to Elder’s question. ‘Yes, I might.’

‘I’m a friend of the family,’ Elder said. ‘Lost touch, you know how it can be.’

‘And you’re visiting?’

‘That’s right.’

O’Leary took his time, no call to rush. ‘You’ll find them along the coast road, the Parade. The far corner of Ocean Drive. Small place set back. The woman there, she stops by once in a while, likes to read.’

‘That’d be Susan,’ Elder said.

The bookseller nodded. ‘Susan Ulney, that’s right.’

By the door, Elder noticed, amongst a stack of paperbacks, several by Katherine Mansfield, slightly dog-eared and well-thumbed.
D. H. Lawrence, you know, he lived there with Frieda, his wife. One of the cottages. Katherine Mansfield, too, for a while.
His landlady’s words when he first rented the house in Cornwall. The one he chose, more or less at random, had a faded picture on the front, a woman seated at a mirror, muted blues and greys.
Bliss and Other Stories.
Six New Zealand dollars.