The Backs (2013) (32 page)

Goodhew turned to find himself looking down on a roof and driver’s side view of Bryn’s turquoise and white Zodiac. ‘Are you spying on me, or what?’

‘No, I’m keeping my eyes open in case I ever catch you at home.’

‘Same thing. What if I’m deliberately avoiding you?’

‘No chance.’ Bryn locked up the car and crossed over. ‘Put that phone down and let me in, then.’

When Goodhew opened the front door, he found Bryn dressed in what looked like a Second World War flying jacket. ‘My dad used to have one of those,’ he remarked.

‘I love it. It means I’ll be able to drive in winter with the windows open.’

‘It’s August at the moment.’

‘Yes, I’m roasting, but I wanted you to see it before I took it off.’ He turned round. An air-brushed picture of Ava Gardner in a leopard swimsuit stretched across his back.

‘OK, it’s impressive. Is that instead of the tattoo?’

Bryn followed Goodhew up towards the former library. ‘No, I didn’t use the calendar hula girl. Instead, I went for one of the vintage pictures you have. And as the tattoo’s vintage, I thought the jacket should be too.’

‘You really had it done?’ Goodhew had no idea which picture Bryn was referring to, but he had no doubt he’d be seeing the inked-on copy at any second.

‘It’s incredible, and it took Fabio four hours. I’ll show you in a minute. It took Maya just as long to do the jacket.’

‘Maya? This is the one with the graveyard tattoo?’

‘Yeah, Maya,’ he grinned. ‘I am so out of my depth . . . Oh, well.’ He noticed all the papers lying on the floor. ‘What’s this?’

Goodhew steered him towards the settee. ‘You can’t look. It’s all confidential.’ He gathered the sheets and sat down next to Bryn. ‘It’s like one of those impossible pictures where the staircase goes upwards at every turn.’

‘They don’t work in real life, only on paper.’

‘I do know that, thanks, Bryn.’

‘No, I mean the illusion works because it’s flat. You can stare at it for ages and it’s impossible to see which bit is the trick. But if you could touch it, you’d know straight away.’

‘That’s deep.’

‘You think?’

‘Either that or you were stating the obvious. I’m actually too tired right now to know. Are you going to show me this tattoo, then?’

‘When you offer me a drink.’

‘I’ll go and get something in a minute,’ Gary promised, but neither of them moved. They both stared at the blank wall in front of them. Gary’s eyelids began to droop. Bryn gave his arm a light nudge, ‘D’you want me to leave you to it?’

Goodhew didn’t open his eyes, but shook his head. ‘Can you wake me in an hour?’

Bryn checked his watch. ‘OK, and then I’ll get the car home.’

However elusive Goodhew found sleep, there were moments when it also knocked him sideways and gave him little choice but to succumb. The impossible staircase had done it. The one he imagined ran along each side of a square parapet. He shut his eyes and ascended at each corner.

Then, in his sleep, he’d got down on his hands and knees, closed his eyes and felt the risers, making sure each one climbed to meet the tread above. He counted back and thought he’d completed seven right-angled turns without rejoining the start. Then, when he’d proved the illusion one way, he traced the steps back down.

Goodhew opened his eyes, now awake enough to think.

Maybe some theorist who could think beyond his own abilities would say differently, but the only way it made sense to him was for the stairs to follow a long square spiral. The illusion was the appearance of the stairs ever returning to the same point. How could they?

You can’t go back.

The words arose from deep in his memory. He thought maybe his father had said them when his mother had left. Goodhew ran his fingers through his hair, untidying it further, and pushed away thoughts of anything but waking up.

He checked his watch and realized that he’d been asleep now for four hours.

Bryn slouched at a crazy angle across the settee, quietly snoring. Goodhew climbed to his feet and wandered upstairs to the kitchen in his flat. He made two mugs of coffee and watched the element in the toaster glowing as the bread turned brown. He gave a start when the slices popped out, realizing he wasn’t entirely sure where his thoughts had just taken him – but he’d been somewhere.

He put Bryn’s coffee and toast on the side table at his end of the sofa, but then decided against waking him. Instead he stood in front of the blank wall, pen poised, waiting for the first words to come. For no real reason he reached out and wrote ‘LESLEY BOUGH’ in fat black marker-pen strokes. Then he drew. He drew names, arrows, circles, dates and places – anything that reached the pen. Sometimes his hands moved almost without conscious direction. He included everything he could remember writing down on the sheets of flip-chart paper, but now, on the solid wall space, they found their proper place.

Partway through, he stopped and drank Bryn’s cold coffee. From across the room he could now detect the first signs of order. It didn’t look at all like a staircase – no risers or treads. There was information missing, but in his mind’s eye its shape was forming. There were two strands in there, twisting and inseparable, like a double helix of facts.

He returned to the wall, finally checking against the flip-chart sheets to ensure nothing had been missed out, and satisfied that now he’d found one solid place to start.

He checked his watch: it was almost 6 a.m. and he remembered Bryn’s Zodiac outside. He checked it from the window, relieved to see that the car, although damp from morning dew, remained in one piece. He wouldn’t want to be the one to tell his friend if anything bad had happened to it. He looked back at Bryn whose hanging-out-the-window arm was draped over one side of the settee, lying at an unnatural angle, so that the very bottom of his new tattoo protruded from the shirtsleeve. Goodhew leant closer and tilted one arm over so that he could see the full image. His brow puckered at first, then his eyes widened and gradually his expression changed. Bryn had been right: as tattoos went, it was stunning.

He grinned to himself, then grabbed a clean sheet of paper and wrote Bryn a note, leaving it under the sleeping man’s car keys. He then slipped out of the front door and headed across to Park-side, phoning Bryn as he went.

Bryn’s mobile buzzed in his jeans pocket and, when he finally woke enough to retrieve it, he discovered one arm too numb to even move. The display announced ‘Gary’.

‘What’s happening?’

‘I overslept.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Just after six. Your car’s fine. Help yourself to breakfast. Can we catch up for a proper drink in a few days?’

‘Sure, Gary. I’m knackered, can I crash here a bit longer?’

‘No worries. Great tattoo, by the way.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Got to go, but there’s a note by your keys. See you later.’

Bryn dozed again, then made his own toast and coffee before he remembered the note. He slid it out from under the keys, even though they weren’t actually obscuring the words. ‘Have a look at the leather-bound photo album. It’s in the bookcase where you found the hula girl.’

He located it immediately, about three inches thick with a sand-coloured cover and a palm tree painted on the spine. The first page showed a beach and a pink hotel behind it. Then Gary’s grandparents’ wedding . . . Then the honeymoon . . . Then . . . oh, fuck.

I’ve got a tattoo of Gary’s grandmother.

When Goodhew had left home, the air had been fresher than on previous mornings, and the short path between his front steps and the pavement glistened. Bryn’s Zodiac wasn’t the only car that sparkled in the pale sunshine and, between them, they cast a row of dank shadows on to the tarmac. Autumn wouldn’t be long now, and he didn’t feel ready for it.

But, even as he crossed the very centre of Parker’s Piece, he noticed that the sheen of dew on the grass had begun to dry. The day would be at a perfect temperature by ten but unbearable by eleven, and he didn’t want that either. No doubt there’d come a point in winter when he’d be wishing for this moment to return, but right now he felt unusually discontented. Unsettled even.

After phoning Bryn, he tried to contact Jane Osborne three times, and felt rising irritation when she failed to pick up. Arriving at the station, he went straight to his desk, throwing his jacket across one end of it and dropping into his chair before powering up his PC. His home screen appeared just as Gully entered the room.

‘You’ve just stormed straight past me, Gary. What’s up?’

Goodhew held up his hands in a don’t-panic gesture. ‘I’m sorry. Maybe I was distracted. I’ve tried phoning Jane Osborne three times this morning: the first two times it rang out, then the third time it went straight to voicemail. She’s avoiding me.’

‘Maybe you woke her up and she finally switched it off.’

‘She would have seen my number.’

‘You called her when, six a.m.? If that was me, I’d have gone for the off switch without even opening my eyes.’

Perhaps Gully had a point. ‘I’ll give her half an hour and try again.’ He then continued, speaking to himself as much as to Gully. ‘I need her to get hold of her ex-boyfriend, in any case. And I need to email Marks.’

‘He’s been in already.’

‘Really?’

‘He wanted Jackson in for questioning last night, but he wasn’t home. There’s still no sign of him this morning and, because it’s Jackson, Marks is getting agitated.’

Goodhew reached for the spare chair and rolled it towards her. ‘Why does he want to question Jackson now?’

She pushed the chair back to him. ‘It’s not that complicated . . . just strange. It turns out he works for Karen and Andrew Dalton.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Why are you smiling?’

He opened up the gallery on his phone, then passed it to Gully. ‘I photographed my wall, look.’

‘I can’t believe you wrote over it again, Gary.’ She picked on the centre of the shot and enlarged it. ‘Is this what you were about to email Marks?’

‘Yes, but now I’ll print it instead, and add a line connecting Jackson to the Daltons.’

‘It looks like a mess of spaghetti to me.’ She offered the phone back to him but, instead of taking it, he pointed to the screen.

‘Look, two main strands here: the Osborne family and Marshall’s murder, running on a timeline. The lines crossing them are the connections, and somewhere back here . . .’

‘. . . Is the mystery single starting point. Yes, I get that.’ Gully looked unimpressed. ‘I’m not thick, Gary, but I still don’t understand what that proves.’

‘Unless all these links are just coincidence – which is highly unlikely – there has to be a logical way of fitting them together. So therefore they’re in a sequence apart from merely chronological, and they’ve triggered each other.’

‘Cause and effect, then?’

‘Exactly. Now, recent events include Andie being spotted up on the Gogs, Marshall being murdered, Jackson following Genevieve Barnes, and Jane being brought back from Leeds. I’ve tried different scenarios to connect them, but nothing that triggers Jane coming back to Cambridge.’

Gully shrugged. ‘She was arrested, therefore the timing is a coincidence.’

‘I don’t think so. She’d left her boyfriend and she was arrested at one of the major stations used for trains going south. I think she was coming home, anyway. She either lied when she said that no one knew she was there, or something she learnt gave her a reason to come back. There’s only one event on this wall that is timed right.’

‘Marshall’s murder?’

‘Yep – and it made the national news. She found out he was dead and that’s what made her decide to come home.’

‘So Marshall’s murder was significant to her?’

‘Precisely. She knew him. I’m waiting now for a call back from her ex-boyfriend, then I’ll visit her.’

Goodhew left Parkside fifteen minutes later, knowing that if he walked quickly he’d reach Pound Hill in fifteen more. On a congested day, without sirens, it took longer than that to drive through East Road alone. Across much of town the traffic was at a crawling pace; all it had taken was the combination of a minor collision at the top of Lensfield Road and a water-main repairs in Trumpington Street for the backed-up traffic and gridlocked junctions to ensue. From open car windows, drivers cast dirty glances at pedestrians who dared to outpace them.

No one would have known from his expression alone, but Goodhew’s mood matched theirs. The two things he thought he hated most in life were spite and lies. Jane Osborne had lied to him, and his disappointment was illogical and surprisingly intense.

When he arrived at Pound Hill, she opened the front door just a few inches. Jane wore jeans and a baggy sweater that looked as though they’d been doubling as pyjamas. She gripped the blue-painted edge of the door and demanded, ‘What?’ White-knuckled, red-eyed, and clearly in a similar sleep-deprived state as Goodhew himself.

He pushed on through to the hallway, before turning on her. ‘You knew who Paul Marshall was, didn’t you?’

She shook her head in denial, but he could see he was right.

‘You’ve been a liar in the past, Jane – a compulsive liar – and now you’re lying again. I can see it on your face.’ He stepped away from her, to lean up against the balusters. ‘How many times have you been back in Cambridge, and watching your family without them knowing?’

Indecision was written on her face. ‘I haven’t.’

He’d known from the start that Jane was a survivor and survivors made the best liars, but it also took more than just lies to make someone a bad person.
I’m taking this too personally.
No one could be expected to suddenly stop lying after ten years of living that way. Telling the truth had to come one answer at a time, until it became the natural instinct. He softened his tone to sound less confrontational then. ‘Forget the past for one minute, Jane. I need to be able to believe what you tell me now.’

‘You’ll think whatever you want to think,’ she said stubbornly.

‘Jane, listen to me. In the last few weeks, Jackson started following Genevieve, also Marshall dies, and you come back to town. All three are somehow related, and you are possibly the only person who knew that fact before us. I need to know what it was that pulled you back home, Jane.’