Telling Tales (16 page)

Michael thought, that there’d been a mass break out from the asylum.

Michael didn’t move. He had no wish to disturb the stranger, who seemed so preoccupied by his own thoughts that he was unaware of anything outside his direct line of vision. The young man found the headstone for which he’d been searching and stopped. Tentatively he reached out and touched it with a gentle stroking motion as if he were stroking hair from a loved one’s forehead. Then he turned abruptly and marched away.

Michael roused himself to follow, but curiosity overcame him. He walked to the grave where the young man had been standing. When he saw the name there was no surprise. It had been inevitable. Abigail Mantel.

By the time Michael reached the lane there was no sign of the disturbed young man. Perhaps he had taken the other direction, towards the river, though there was no shelter there, at this stage of the tide, nothing but an expanse of mud, a couple of stranded boats, marauding herring gulls.

Back in the middle of Elvet, a gaggle of teenagers was waiting by the church gate for the school bus. They were a scruffy and unruly lot. His Jeanie had never behaved like that. You wouldn’t have caught her wearing a skirt which showed her backside and more make-up than a pantomime dame. That was what Michael told himself as he approached. That he disapproved and their parents should know better. He specially disapproved of two girls who were standing apart from the others. One of them was smoking a cigarette and the other was talking into a mobile phone.

The way she stood, holding the phone to her ear triggered a memory and he was back in the cemetery by Peg’s grave, lost again in the past. The girl gave a shrill laugh and he was brought back to the present. He knew then he was deluding himself. He didn’t disapprove of them at all. He admired them. They had the same sort of spirit as Abigail Mantel. And they excited him too with their curly hair scrunched up to the top of their heads, their defiant eyes and their silky legs. He’d have liked to say something to them, nothing important, just a word of greeting to make a connection, but at that moment the bus came along the road, wheezing and grinding. The girls hoisted their bags onto their shoulders. One threw the cigarette end onto the pavement and stamped on it with her clumpy shoe. Just as well, Michael thought. He’d only have made a fool of himself.

As the bus pulled away he saw that he wasn’t the only person watching. Outside the Old Forge, preparing perhaps to open up the pottery, stood the ex-policeman, the one who had come with Fletcher to arrest Jeanie. Caught under the street light, the man had the same wistful expression on his face as Michael realized he probably had. What was he regretting? Sex or age. It had to be one or the other. Michael hurried on to phone Vera Stanhope.

Chapter Eighteen

When James arrived home the house was quiet. He had been working, delivering a tanker from the mouth of the river to the docks at Hull. A short shift. No complications. No visions of ghosts. He’d worked with the skipper a few times before and they got on well. As he’d waited on the Point for the launch to take him to the ship, James had looked at Wendy’s house and seen that the curtains had been drawn. There’d been a light behind them and he’d thought he’d noticed movement. Not one shadow. Two. But then Stan, the other coxswain, had called him to the launch and he couldn’t be sure. Not his business anyway.

So everything had been normal until he approached the front door of his house, his keys ready in his hand. Then he found himself shaking. He had to steady himself against the door frame. There was a sudden, irrational fear that something terrifying had happened in the house. Suddenly he was a young man again, returning home to bad news. He fumbled to unlock the door and pushed it open.

“Emma. Emma. Are you there?”

She came out into the hall to greet him.

“Of course. Whatever is the matter?”

He didn’t answer immediately. He could hear a strange woman’s voice, then realized it was coming from the radio. He tried to recover his calm.

“Nothing. I didn’t know what I’d find here. I mean what chaos Christopher might have caused.”

Emma frowned. “You don’t have to worry about him any more. He’s gone. He didn’t even bother to say goodbye.”

He followed her back into the kitchen and saw she’d been baking. A pile of buns were balanced on a wire tray to cool. She switched off the radio and screwed up her face critically.

“Not brilliant, are they? I don’t know why they didn’t rise.”

“I’m sure they’ll taste OK. They smell delicious.” He knew the cakes were for him. Not to eat specially. More a symbol. Look, I’m making the effort to be what you want. He wondered why she had felt the need to make the effort today. Something to do with Chris?

She smiled and he thought she was like a little girl playing house, with the tea towel tied round her waist as an apron and the smudge of flour on her cheek. That was just what he liked.

“It’s true,” she said. “Chris has disappeared.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’d already gone when I got up. Did you see him this morning?”

James shook his head. He was concentrating on making tea. He liked leaf tea, the ritual of the strainer and the warmed pot. “I expect he’s at Springhead.”

“He hasn’t even spoken to Mum and Dad. They didn’t know he was coming.”

“I suppose that’s it, then. He ran away before he had to face them.”

“There are times,” Emma said, ‘when I know just how he feels.” She pulled off the tea towel and wiped her face with it. He thought at first she was just cleaning away the flour, then saw there were tears too. Not grief, he thought. Anger. Frustration. “Dad called in today. He brought some tickets for the fireworks at the Old Chapel tonight. He thinks I should go. It would do me good. Help me come to terms with Abigail’s death, Jeanie’s suicide. He’s fixed everything up, even arranged for an old biddy from the church to babysit, so you can come too. I said you were on duty, but he realized if you were working this morning you were unlikely to get called out again. I mean, the nerve of it. He didn’t even ask. Just assumed that he knew best, that all I need is a jolly family party and I’ll forget all about it.”

She had run out of breath, inhaled in a sort of sob.

James’s first reaction was one of panic. He had spent his time in Elvet avoiding Keith Mantel, not making a big show of it, just keeping away from the places Mantel liked to be seen. More a superstition than a real feeling of danger. After all this time and all this planning, he had thought Mantel couldn’t touch him.

“What exactly is going on at Mantel’s?”

“A fundraiser for the RNLI. They want to get a new inflatable for the river.”

A good cause.” James poured out the tea. The cups were porcelain, so delicate you could see the line of liquid rise through the china, as if it was opaque glass. He’d bought the tea service from an antiques fair before he’d married. Another of the possessions which defined him.

“You don’t want to go!”

He thought about that. Perhaps Robert’s assessment of Emma’s situation applied equally to him. He had blown Mantel up in his mind as a monster, an agent of destruction with the power to wreck everything he had created here. It was probably time to face the nightmare, banish the ghosts.

“I’d like to spend an evening with you without worrying about the baby.”

“But I would worry about him. What if he woke, needed feeding.”

“He won’t. You know him. Regular as the tide.”

“But an event like this… All the village there… Everyone talking about Abigail… Just snooping around so they can see the house where she lived…”

“If it’s dreadful we can always come home. Or go into the pub for a drink. At least it’ll be quiet in there.”

He wondered why he was making so much effort to persuade her and realized that he was desperate now to see Mantel again. He was overcome with curiosity, and he wanted to see if the tragedy of his daughter’s death had changed the developer at all. Now, on the anniversary of her death, how could he throw open his house for a celebration, however good the cause?

“You think Dad’s right then? You see this evening as therapy?” Her voice was bitter. “In that case it’s a pity Chris didn’t stick around to benefit from it too.”

James pulled her to him. He sensed he would get his way. “I don’t want you to do anything you wouldn’t be comfortable with. I’m not trying to manipulate you.”

“It happened,” she said. “It was horrible, but it happened. Reality. Perhaps my father’s right and it’s time to come to terms with it.”

Robert picked them up and drove them to the Old Chapel, though James said that as he was on call he wouldn’t be able to have much to drink anyway. It seemed to him that Robert was treating Emma as an invalid. He asked her if she had a warm enough coat, opened the car door for her, waited until she’d slid into the back besides Mary before shutting it. The tickets he’d given them said Open House but when they arrived they found very little of the Old Chapel open. They parked behind a line of cars in the lane, then a boy James recognized as the son of one of the lifeboat crew directed them to the back of the property. He had loomed out of the mist grinning at them, dressed in yellow oilskins and waving a torch, like something out of a teenage horror movie. It was colder, the low cloud pierced in places so stars showed through. The trees were still dripping but the rain had stopped. James thought later it might freeze. He’d listened to the shipping forecast which had mentioned high pressure, a cold front coming in from the east.

“I thought the press might be here,” Robert said. “Wherever I went yesterday there was a gang of them. Very intimidating. Perhaps it’s not the weather for door-stepping. Or by now the Mantel case is already old news. It’s a relief anyway.”

James thought it more likely that Mantel had warned the reporters off. He had that sort of power.

A bonfire had been built in a paddock which was separated from the garden by a low fence. It had not yet been lit but a group of shadowy figures stood looking at it, as if debating whether the moment was right.

Emma followed his gaze. “Abigail kept a pony there,” she said. She was standing close beside him. Mary and

Robert had already been accosted by people from the church. “But that was before we moved to Elvet. By the time I knew her she thought she’d grown out of ponies. She still talked about the horse though. It was called Magic. That was the stable.”

And the stable, open on one side now, with the stalls removed, had been turned into a cook house A couple of barbecues had been built from stacked breeze blocks and long metal grills. The charcoals smouldered and spat as sausage fat dripped onto them. The sparks lit up the faces of the big, beer-drinking men who flipped burgers.

“Are you OK?” James asked.

She took his hand and in the darkness he smiled.

The bar was in the large conservatory which ran along the back of the house and they could see beyond that into a room with tables arranged around the walls. A few elderly people had escaped there from the cold. The rest of the Old Chapel was in darkness.

“The piano’s gone,” Emma said.

“Sorry?” James had just glimpsed Mantel. His thoughts were elsewhere.

“In that room there was a grand piano. Jeanie used to play it. Abigail’s father must have got rid of it…”

James thought she had said something more but her words were drowned by a surge of rock music from ai sound system outside, then the cheers of the crowd as the bonfire went up in flames. The music was switched to a less painful level but by then she had stopped talking.

Mantel was standing just inside the conservatory welcoming people as they came in. He had a politician’s knack of greeting them as if they were old friends, though he spent so little time in the village that it was impossible that he could know them all. A tall blonde who was dressed in jeans and a white linen shirt stood at his side. Her boots had heels and made her taller than him. Very nice, Keith. Much classier than the women you used to knock around with. But then you always had taste… James thought for a moment that he must have spoken the words out loud because Emma clutched suddenly at his arm. There was a shot of anxiety when he thought Mantel might have heard, then he saw that the scene was playing out quite normally around him, and then all that remained was a mixture of exhilaration and fear. It had always been like that with Keith. The couple ahead of them in the short queue moved on and he was face to face with Mantel. He took a quick breath, but it was Emma whom Mantel recognized and turned to. He pulled her towards him in a hug. James sensed her awkwardness but there was little he could do.

“Emma, my dear. How brave of you to come here at a time like this! I’ve been thinking of you. All this dreadful publicity.” His voice was quiet.

“It’s a good cause.” James thought he heard the irony in his repeated words but Mantel accepted them straight.

“Oh, I do agree. I’ve always been a supporter. Even when I lived in the town.”

“This is James,” she said. “My husband.”

Mantel, with his eyes still on Emma, still clasping her hand in his, hardly looked up.

“You’re back in Elvet, I hear. In the Captain’s House.”

“James is one of the Humber pilots. It’s very convenient.”

Then Mantel did turn to James with a small frown. James didn’t think it was a frown of recognition but a gesture he had seen before: Mantel was fixing the bit of information in his mind because one day it might become useful. It disappeared almost immediately.

“Now what would you like to drink? Debs will get you something. This is Debs, the new woman in my life.” Another frown to show he wasn’t oblivious to the sensitivities of the situation. It had only been a matter of days since a former young lover had hanged herself after all. A certain tact was called for. Are your parents still at Springhead, Emma? And didn’t you have a brother? A clever lad who went away to university. He was sweet on Abigail at one time I remember.”

It was the first time he’d mentioned his daughter. He paused and James thought he was like an actor waiting for applause. He expected some acknowledgement of his courage. And Debs, well trained, squeezed his shoulders sympathetically. Emma had been more moved by the words, but Mantel did not wait to see their effect on her. He turned away quickly and had already passed on to greet the next person in the queue.