The Chorister at the Abbey (6 page)

10

Thou shalt not be afraid of any terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day.
Psalm 91:5

Six days later, the only spot of nightlife in Norbridge which was still rocking in the New Year at two in the morning was Strumpets on Fletchergate. Chloe Clifford pulled a reluctant Poppy Robinson after her and they sidled down the alley beside the club.

‘Go on, Poppy, try it.’ Chloe was giggling and trying to light up a badly made joint. She succeeded in starting a small fire at the end of the paper but after a minute the shreds which had flared up calmed down. Chloe had already spilt bits of grass and tobacco down her new black silk-effect jacket. She’d dropped the grinder and Rizla papers a few times because she’d already drunk six shots of vodka in an hour after meeting Poppy in the Crown and Thistle.

‘I don’t think it’s for me,’ Poppy said nervously.

‘Oh, go on, twit. Everyone does it in Leeds.’ Chloe took a huge drag and then poked the mangled bit of paper and vegetation towards her.

‘All right.’ Poppy put the soggy end in her mouth and inhaled. But nothing happened except that a badly ground bit of hot grass detached itself and stuck at the back of her throat. She coughed and spluttered so much, the joint fell out of her mouth, hit her ample bosom in its lurid top, and dropped into the muck around their stiletto heels.

‘Oh, fuck you!’ shouted Chloe angrily.

‘I’m sorry, Chloe. I couldn’t help it,’ Poppy whined.

‘You should have watched what you were doing with your fat fingers.’

‘That’s not fair!’

‘Not fair, not fair. Christ, Pops, what a baby you are!’ Chloe put out her own plump fingers and jabbed Poppy in the chest.

Poppy squawked. ‘Stop it,’ she said weakly.

‘Well, you’ve cost me good money wasting that spliff. You deserve a bit of a slap.’ Chloe advanced on her friend, her eyes narrowed and her bright varnished fingernails at Poppy’s eye level. Poppy’s eyes crossed dramatically.

‘Well, fuck off yourself!’ Poppy suddenly yelled. ‘I’m sick of the way you’re behaving. You’ve been foul since Christmas. You’re a slag, Chloe Clifford.’

Chloe was taken aback for a second. Poppy had never dared to speak back to her. What was happening? She felt a tight band round her head and was unsure whether it was anger or shock. She opted for anger, but for once she couldn’t find what she wanted to say.

‘Who d’you fuckin’ fink you is …?’ she heard herself screaming, all the words coming out wrongly.

But Poppy had backed away and slid past her out of the alleyway and into the street. Chloe realized she had been left. She called after her: ‘Sowwy, Pops. Reeely sowwy now . . .’ But Poppy’s silhouette hardly paused before, plump legs wobbling, she disappeared.

Fuck, thought Chloe. The ground was swaying a lot and her head felt as if it would burst. All she wanted to do was sit down, but the ground was filthy, she knew that. She leant back against the wall and felt a huge lump of sick rising in her stomach. Then it went down again, which was worse than coming up. The weed was making her really nauseous. She had tried a few pills before now and the effect had been great – dreamy, weird, and maybe headachy in the morning – but not this awful tidal sickness.

I have to get back into the club, she thought. Suddenly she felt cold and then scared, out there in the dark alley by herself. How could Poppy do this? Chloe tried to walk, but her high heels stuck in the cobbles. She was concentrating on her feet, so at first she didn’t see another figure at the end of the alley. When she looked up, she noticed the outline of a man. She couldn’t go back because the alley was blocked off at the far end. She could only go forward and even then very slowly.

‘It’s Chloe Clifford, isn’t it?’ said the man, who spoke very softly and seemed to be all dressed in black, and very big. ‘I’ve just seen Poppy running away. Let me help you walk.’

Chloe wanted to ask him how he knew her, but she couldn’t look at him and concentrate on her feet at the same time. She felt his strong arm under her shoulders, but no other part of his body touched her, which was all right, really. She realized he smelt of masculine sweat, overlaid with deodorant. It was a nice smell but at the same time it seemed to attack the pit of her stomach like a punch in the gut. She was going to say, ‘I’m OK, leave me alone,’ when the vomit really did come up. It shot out in a stream of white liquid, catching the light from a street lamp on the main road. It looked like slime and it was all down his coat. She retched even more and caught the acrid smell of sick in her nostrils. The shame was as bad as the smell. She had to shut her eyes.

‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘I think it’s time someone got you home. Come with me to the car.’

No, she wanted to shout, I don’t know you . . . where’s Poppy? But the strong arm was propelling her into the main street, and then she felt her legs give way and all she could do was keep her eyes shut and pray that her feet kept moving.

At the rectory Lynn Clifford couldn’t sleep because of the night sweat from hell. She grabbed her dressing gown. She couldn’t get back into the bed: it was soaking. She could see the outline of her own body in the dark damp blotches on the sheet. Like the Turin shroud, she thought.

Neil rolled away from the wet patches and pulled the double duvet round himself. There was an easy chair in the bedroom, with Lynn’s clothes on it ready for New Year’s Day. She perched on the edge of it.

They were going to Edwin’s for New Year’s lunch, with her father and stepmother. Lynn was dreading it. She found her father’s constant digs about religion very trying. Once an easy- going, soft-hearted man, he had become bitchy in old age, as if being over eighty gave him a licence to be rude. Lynn was no fan of her stepmother, but she found herself sympathizing. The old man was very hard work. Marriage! You never knew how it would end up.

Was that why Edwin had never married? It was something Lynn had asked herself a hundred times. But she had never asked
him.
Although they were close, Edwin rarely talked about his emotions, and after the disastrous relationship with Marilyn Frost he had become much more reserved. Even now, with the Frost brothers in custody, Edwin had never referred to his intense affair with their older sister. His involvement with the Frost family was never mentioned.

‘You really loved Marilyn, didn’t you?’ she had said to him once, years before. Edwin had looked back at her blankly.

‘Loved her?’ he had said, astonished at the question. And Lynn had thought – no, it was almost worship. Marilyn had been a strange girl, not like the other Frosts. Her mother and uncles were local ne’er-do-wells, and one cousin was a notorious drunk. Her younger brothers probably had different fathers and she was the eldest by a long way, born when her mother was in her early teens. Jason and Wayne had come along a few years later and maintained the family tradition, but Marilyn was quiet and very pretty, with the most beautiful long auburn hair like something out of Burne-Jones. Edwin had been older than her but she had always seemed mature. They had been inseparable – and then Marilyn had left him, just like that.

Afterwards, a little bit of the light had gone from Edwin’s eyes.

New Year’s Eve always makes me morose, Lynn thought. She padded out across the landing to the bathroom. After the Watch Night service at the church, she and Neil had been out ‘first footing’. It could go on for hours, with people visiting houses, byres and barns, having a dram at every one. There was something quite pagan about it. The hooded figures mooching down the dark lanes often had a medieval look as they skulked past, mumbling ‘How do, Rector?’

So when they’d come home, much later than planned, she and Neil had hurried upstairs, shattered. She had presumed that Chloe was in bed, as she’d been under strict instructions to get a taxi home before it was too late. But Lynn hadn’t wished her only child ‘Happy New Year’.

Lynn tiptoed to her daughter’s room, knocked softly on the door and then pushed it. It swung open. Chloe’s bed was empty. Lynn Clifford screamed.

Suzy Spencer had a miserable New Year. Her mum had stayed with them at The Briars until they left to go to Nigel’s in Newcastle. It felt odd leaving Robert. And it was a tight squeeze in Nigel’s flat, with Suzy and her mum and Molly in one bedroom and Nigel and Jake in the other. Nigel had spent his Christmas drinking armagnac, and now he was concentrating on his family with manic intensity.

He was in denial. He looked on Suzy’s stay at The Briars as if it was a sort of lodgers’ arrangement that had no emotional significance. He ignored Robert’s existence, treated Suzy like a naughty girl, fussed over her mother and arranged a breakneck schedule of fun for the kids that left Molly sobbing and overtired in the Metro Centre, and Jake wildly bright-eyed, clutching more new gadgets than he could possibly deal with.

Suzy felt destabilized. She had tried really hard to help her son acclimatize to a new home, but now Jake was being seduced by his own father.

‘Come on, Jakey, try this crazy ride.’

‘Look, Jake, more e-games!’

‘Want to try extreme skate-boarding, Jake?’

The worst of it was that Suzy felt desperately sorry for Nigel. She no longer loved him, but she had loved him once and she was ashamed to admit that his bravado had been part of the attraction. But to feed it, he had needed the admiration of women. So Suzy had turned a blind eye to his affairs. It was a vicious circle and she had been a link in it, reinforcing Nigel’s image as a ladies’ man. She had assumed that even if his current girlfriend didn’t last, Nigel would find a more glamorous bet and disappear from her emotional life for good. Didn’t men always want younger, more beautiful women? But now, astonishingly, Nigel’s supply had dried up.

Her mother had enjoyed Christmas at The Briars but had been unable to conceal her delight at seeing Suzy and Nigel together again as a family. Suzy had driven them all down to her mum’s house for New Year’s Day with Nigel beside her, advising her when to use the windscreen wipers. His dominating behaviour had infuriated her in the past, but this time she accepted it. She was beginning to think all men wanted control. Surely Robert’s sudden misguided marriage proposal was about establishing himself as head of the household? But if she was going to gratify any paterfamilias, shouldn’t it be Nigel?

Suzy felt parcelled up, unable to talk to anyone, except when she called her longstanding London friend Rachel Cohen on the phone.

‘Jesus, Rachel, this is awful.’

‘Jesus who? Shalom to you too.’

‘Oh, stop joking! I feel so muddled up. Robert’s been acting like a moral force and Nigel is mooning round wanting to be a family man again.’

‘So you’ve got a new guy who wants to marry you and a husband already. You should be so lucky!’

‘You’re joking. I mean, Nigel is so pathetic that I feel really sorry for him.’

‘Well, it’s classic. When Nigel was behaving like a bastard it was easy to move on. But now he’s suffering, you treat him like your third child.’

‘But it makes me so sad. I don’t know what to do. Look I’d better go. Mum’s making cocoa for everyone and Molly will probably chuck it up, the way Nigel throws her around. Come to Tarnfield and stay with us soon.’

‘Will do. But who is us?’

The thought stayed with Suzy as she crept into the narrow bed in the room she’d had as a child. As always, Rachel had put her finger on the problem. Just who was ‘us’?

11

Thou hast shewed the people heavy things; thou hast given us a drink of deadly wine.
Psalm 60:3

On the evening of New Year’s Day, Edwin Armstrong waved goodbye to his parents. His mother was still talking at him through the driver’s window of their ancient car as she manoeuvred out of the tiny driveway in front of his cottage. The car groaned and took a rasping breath before finally moving. Thank goodness they’re off, Edwin thought. He was desperate for some time to himself.

It had been a very odd New Year’s Day. He had been expecting the Clifford family to join him and his parents for lunch, but when they arrived Lynn had looked absolutely exhausted. Even Neil had seemed distracted. And Chloe had been pale and quiet, dressed in a long dark skirt, flat boots and a baggy jumper discarded by Lynn. He had hardly recognized her.

They had arrived early, and after one gin and tonic his sister had followed him into the kitchen. ‘We’ve had a really weird night,’ she said to Edwin’s back as he basted the roast potatoes. ‘Chloe didn’t come home till six o’clock in the morning!’

‘Really? Was she having fun?’

‘Fun? Well, it’s hard to say. I was absolutely terrified. She hadn’t phoned although we bought her that state-of-the-art mobile, and she hadn’t said anything about staying out all night.’

‘So how did she get back home?’ he asked.

‘Well, that’s just it! I was nearly hysterical when I realized she wasn’t in bed, and I shouted for Neil and we tried the mobile but there was no answer. We were just wondering about ringing the Robinsons or even the police and then . . .’ Lynn paused, her eyes round and pink at the rims with her sleepless night. ‘. . . the phone went and Chloe called us! She said she was fine, but she’d been sick and that someone had rescued her. She said she’d be back at six o’clock in the morning. And rang off. We sat there for two hours, scared witless. Then, bang on the dot, we heard her key in the lock.’

‘You must have been relieved. But you know at that age a lot of them stay out all night.’

‘But transport is such a nightmare! The kids with cars drive like madmen on New Year’s Eve. We’d given her money for a cab and told her to be home by three.’

‘So how did she get back?’

‘She said she’d been very silly but that someone had looked after her, then given her a lift home!’

‘Who? One of her mates?’

‘No, Edwin, that’s what was odd. She wouldn’t say who it was.’

‘That’s strange. Were you annoyed?’

Lynn looked shocked. ‘No! I hate even the thought of rowing with Chloe; you know that, Edwin . . .’

Her eyeline drifted away as she remembered the early hours of the morning, sitting there in the kitchen waiting for dawn, with her daughter slumped in front of her, drinking hot chocolate.

‘I’ve been really stupid, Mum,’ Chloe had said. ‘And I’m sorry. If I hadn’t been rescued I don’t know what would have happened to me. I was really sick in the lane by Strumpets club.’

But when Lynn had asked her who had taken care of her, she had shaken her head.

‘Just some bloke I know. He was really kind.’

Then, suddenly, Chloe had begun to cry, huge gasping sobs of relief. And it had all come out. How uni was scary and lonely and how the only boy she had fancied there just ignored her, and how the other girls in her hall were all so much prettier, and how people who’d done gap years all seemed so much more sophisticated. Chloe had been wretched.

So she’d come home, to find that her mum was absorbed in Christmas preparations or hot flushes – and her dad was always out. She’d been so homesick. But home had just gone on without her.

‘Edwin, she isn’t even doing very well with the academic work. She was always such a star at Norbridge High. Since she came home, she’s just been showing off – to pretend it was all fine at university.’ Lynn’s tired eyes filled with tears and self-reproach.

Edwin looked past Lynn to the living room where Chloe was leaning forward, smiling with enormous concentration at her grandfather.

‘Well,’ he said softly, ‘whatever happened certainly seems to have had an effect. She’s behaving angelically now!’

‘I know! She’s been totally different this morning. Look how good she’s being with Dad.’

Even so, the dinner had gone on to be the usual stressful affair, dominated by the old man making heavy-handed jokes about priests, rabbis and vicars with endings he couldn’t remember. Edwin almost longed for Chloe’s old-style comments like, ‘Oh, belt up, Gramps,’ or, ‘I wish I’d hidden your dentures.’

When at last he shut the door behind them all, Edwin went up the stairs two at a time to the tiny spare room at the front of the cottage where he did his work. He’d had enough reality for one day. He was studying the Psalms. One of the local clergy in Victorian times, who rejoiced in the name of Cecil Quaile Woods, had reportedly written some interesting psalm settings, but most of them had been lost. While Edwin was not particularly interested in the man, he was fascinated by the idea of renewing the interest in psalmody – if only locally at first. It wasn’t a project which would get much support from his new boss. But on New Year’s Day, now his family had all gone, he would give himself a treat and settle down to some work.

He needed to find out where the Quaile Woods psalter editions might be. It was the sort of totally absorbing activity which would keep Edwin busy for hours. And then there would be no time to think about Marilyn Frost.

Or Morris Little.

Alex Gibson had succumbed to her sister’s invitation to go for dinner on New Year’s Day, although the cold she had incubated since before Christmas was threatening to explode into her head, and she felt dazed and fuzzy. During the day she had managed to stick to just half a bottle of wine, but it had made her feel unusually dizzy. Her brother-in-law had offered to pick her up.

Reg held her arm as she walked to the car. ‘There’s no need for that, Reg; I can manage.’ But she felt even more breathless than usual, getting her scarf tangled around her knees, and stumbling.

‘All right, all right, I was only trying to help.’ He sighed with great patience. ‘You know David and Pat Johnstone from Uplands Golf Club, don’t you?’

Reg cheerily signalled a couple in the back of the car. Alex twisted round to say ‘Hi’, but suddenly thought that her breath might smell of alcohol so instead she just grimaced at them. The man was in his sixties, with thick grey hair and a smooth, padded look. His wife was stringy and tired-looking, with thin crispy curls. She gave a sort of cackling laugh.

Yet another black mark, Alex thought. Well, if I’m being flaunted as the dysfunctional female of the family, I might as well enjoy it.

Reg said, ‘David is the very successful estate agent. You’ll have seen his boards: “Johnstone – sign of success”.’

‘Not just real estate, Reg,’ Johnstone boomed. ‘I’ve got thumbs in lots of pies!’

Reg laughed uncomfortably. ‘But you’ll have seen David’s posters, Alex.’

‘Oh, yes . . .’ The Johnstone logo, in orange and fuchsia, littered local villages. But in Fellside, the signs were up for so long they faded to the same brownish-grey colour as everything else in the village.

‘I might be able to help you with the bungalow . . .’ David Johnstone leant forward; Alex could smell the toothpaste on his breath.

‘Oh?’ she snapped. ‘Good at hoovering, are you?’

Reg squirmed, and Alex turned to stare angrily out of the window. Reg and Christine frequently made remarks about ‘capitalizing’ on the bungalow, which she resented. She didn’t like the house and had no intention of staying in Fellside, but this was all too soon.

The wrinkly Pat Johnstone, who looked older than her well-upholstered husband, laughed in her irritating, cackling way. ‘Dave means he could help you sell it.’

‘She knows what I mean, thank you very much,’ David Johnstone snapped at his wife. Alex felt guilty for giving him the opportunity.

‘Oh, don’t mind me!’ Pat Johnstone laughed her coarse laugh. Then she started to sneeze. ‘It’s your scarf,’ she said wheezily to Alex. ‘I’ve got an allergy to cheap man-made fibres.’

‘I’ll take it off.’ Alex stuffed it in her bag, but when she leant forward to do it she felt suddenly nauseous. I’m really not very well, she thought.

The rest of the journey passed in silence.

Reg and Christine Prout lived in a smart detached house on the main road between Fellside and Uplands. Reginald Prout was in his early fifties and worked for the council, counting the days until retirement and endless afternoons on the golf course. He had been handsome as a young man, but he had gone bald in middle age; his face, without his dated chestnut bob, was pale and weak. He had a nervous habit of stroking his head as if hoping to find more hair to cover his pate. Alex’s sister Christine was plump and motherly, missing her two daughters, who had both left home for London. Her house was too neat and tidy without them.

There was no chat until they were all installed in Reg and Chris’s front room, each with a very small whisky. Alex had said nothing to her sister and brother-in-law about Morris Little’s murder, but it was inevitable the conversation would turn to it.

Eventually Reg said with his usual lack of originality, ‘Well, let’s hope we have a better year next year!’

‘Oh yes,’ cackled Pat Johnstone.

‘Spot on, Reg, old son.’ David Johnstone had warmed up over his whisky.

‘It couldn’t get much worse where we live!’ Pat said. ‘You’ll have heard about the chap from the off-licence? Murdered!’

The conversation galloped to the next stage. Alex listened, and drank another whisky – it took some flaunting of her glass to get Reg to fill it. She heard how it was disgusting the way teenagers were out of control, the Chapterhouse estate was a sewer that should be cleaned out, they should bring back corporal punishment . . .

‘I was just saying, the way these girls behave,’ David Johnstone ranted, ‘I mean, well, with boys you expect it, but girls! Yelling their mouths off, skirts up round their bottoms, boobs hanging out . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if girls egged these Frost lads on! Everyone knows they did it, little bastards.’

Alex swallowed any response she might have made. She said brusquely, ‘I found your shopkeeper. I found his body in the college. I’d like another whisky, please. Fill it right up.’