The Cruellest Game (21 page)

‘Mrs Anderson, I can assure you that no conclusions whatsoever will be drawn until our inquiries have been completed,’ he said. ‘Look, we do understand how upset you must
be.’

‘You have no idea how upset I am,’ I replied. ‘First my son dies, having apparently taken his own life – which I will never accept, by the way – then I hear
intruders in my house while I’m in bed at night, and then my home is wrecked, my belongings trashed, excrement smeared over the walls, the floors, and the furniture—’

It was DS Jarvis’s turn to interrupt me. ‘Mrs Anderson, I’m really sorry, I have assured you that everything possible is being done, and I really do have to end this call now.
The entire force is at full stretch because of the Luke Macintyre abduction, as I’m sure you can understand.’

I was bewildered. Who the heck was Luke Macintyre and what did that have to do with me and my Robbie?

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said.

‘Then you must be just about the only person in the country who doesn’t.’ He rather spat that at me, then added: ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Anderson, I didn’t mean to be
short. It’s pretty obvious you wouldn’t have been taking much interest in news of the outside world lately. When you do catch up I know you will appreciate why I’m not able to
give you the time either of us might like right now.’

He ended the call without waiting for a response.

Straight away I looked around for the remote control to switch on the TV. Only then did I remember its shattered screen. I headed for the study. There was, I was pretty sure, an old-fashioned
portable, with a built-in video player, stowed away at the back of the big cupboard in the corner. We’d kept it just in case. It was still there. I pulled it out, carried it into the kitchen
and connected it to our Sky box, intact on its purpose-built shelf tucked under a kitchen cabinet. The TV was analogue, of course, but I believed that it would still work with the Sky system. I was
right. I tuned into Sky News.

The main item, topping each bulletin and repeated again and again, was the story of a three-year-old boy, Luke Macintyre, who had been abducted from the front garden of his Exeter home. He had
now been missing for almost two days.

There was footage of his distraught parents. His tearful mother explained that she’d been with the little boy in the garden, playing ball with him, until she’d run inside the house
to answer the phone.

‘I suppose I expected Luke to follow me, he follows me everywhere, only this time he didn’t. I was only a minute or two, just a couple of minutes. But when I went outside again he
was gone. The garden gate was ajar, I thought he’d trotted off down the road, I went after him straight away. He’d disappeared, just disappeared . . .’

She could not continue. Her husband led her away and DS Jarvis made the usual sort of police statement calling for anyone who might know anything about Luke Macintyre’s whereabouts to come
forward.

I found myself quite mesmerized. I knew how those parents felt, of course. They feared losing their son, their only child it transpired, just as I had lost my only child. The only real
difference was that they still had hope. Hope that their little boy would be found alive and well.

I could understand, however, that in some ways that almost made the whole thing worse. The desperation in the eyes of little Luke’s parents had been terrible to see.

It cut me to the quick. Oh God, I thought. The whole world is falling apart.

For a moment I lost my determination not to be beaten. The strength I had somehow managed to find, the will to clear up Highrise and even to begin to rebuild my life yet again, and my resolve to
find out the truth about all that had happened evaporated.

I felt totally alone in the world. Abandoned. But was I? There was still Robert, wasn’t there? Maybe he really was all I had left. And maybe I could not get through this without him, after
all. I reached for the phone to send him a message, to share with him all that had happened, to ask him to come home to comfort me. To look after me. And he would come at once. I knew that.

Then I snatched back my hand. The Robert I wanted by my side no longer existed. Indeed, the terrible truth was that he had never really existed.

I slumped to the floor amid the wreckage of my home and the wreckage of my life. I wrapped my arms around my knees and sobbed my heart out.

Bizarrely, I was saved from myself by Tom Farley. He arrived a good two hours before the time he had given me, just before eleven o’clock. When I heard the doorbell ring
I almost didn’t respond, and may not have done so had he not shouted through the letter box.

‘It’s me, Mrs Anderson,’ he called, obviously quite certain that I would know who ‘me’ was, and I did, of course. Tom had an unmistakably resonant voice, rich in
its broad Devon vowels.

‘I managed to get away early, couldn’t leave ’ee in the state you be in, could I?’

‘Oh, Tom, you’re a saint,’ I called back, fighting to keep my voice steady and wiping away my tears with the back of one hand. ‘I won’t be a minute.’

I picked myself up from the floor, quickly splashed my face with cold water from the sink, blew my nose in a piece of kitchen paper, did my best to straighten my hair and my apparel, and hurried
along the hallway to let him in.

I knew I must look almost as much of a wreck as my house. But Tom made no mention of my appearance. He was a good practical Devon man, just the person, I felt sure, to bring order back to
Highrise. But not all that hot, probably, on coping with an overly emotional woman in a state of significant distress. If I wanted his help, and by God I did, I was just going to have to pull
myself together again. And that was, of course, probably the very best thing for me.

As I opened the door the first thing Tom saw was our smashed grandfather clock lying in shattered pieces on the flagstoned floor.

‘Oh, my good Lord,’ he said. ‘Now, who on earth would do that to such a lovely thing?’

‘I have no idea,’ I told him. ‘But I intend to find out.’

And as I spoke I realized I did still intend to do just that. My emotions were all over the place. But I would not weaken again. I must not weaken again. There would be no more sobbing and
breaking down. That was not helping anything or anybody – not Robbie and his desecrated memory, and certainly not me.

And if the police weren’t going to offer any assistance, then somehow or other I had to get on with it alone. They may think that the case of the missing child completely overshadowed all
else, but dreadful though that was, I had lost my child too. And I was damned well going to find out why.

However, first I had to work with Tom to restore at least some order to Highrise. The house could not be lived in as it was.

‘Our Eddie’s finishing t’other job,’ Tom told me. ‘Missus’ll bring him up dinner time.’

Tom had been a manual worker of some sort all his life and had ended up with shoulders so wide he was almost as broad as he was long. His face, beneath still abundant white hair, had been well
weathered by Dartmoor and could only have been the face of a countryman. He was able to lift large pieces of furniture alone and with animal grace. When Tom was about you knew you were in safe
hands.

He suggested I continued to sort out the kitchen. He wouldn’t let me near the sitting room where excrement clung to the walls, the carpet and the soft furnishings.

At about one o’clock Eddie arrived. His mother did not come into the house, merely dropping her son in the yard and driving away again immediately. I was relieved. I certainly didn’t
want visitors, and Ellen Farley, although the most kindly of women, was known to be one of Blackstone’s premier gossips.

Eddie was now a strapping fifteen-year-old, the same age as my Robbie had been, but I knew I mustn’t dwell on that. He was at least a couple of inches taller, surely, than when I’d
last met him a year or so ago. Having said that, it suddenly dawned on me that he was the young man who had rescued my hat at the funeral, though, unsurprisingly I suppose, I hadn’t
recognized him at the time. I thanked him for doing so. He smiled awkwardly. A shy boy, but, as his father had promised, every bit as good a worker as any man.

Eddie brought with him a professional-standard upholstery and carpet cleaner and a couple of tins of antique white emulsion paint. Tom took his son, the equipment and the paint into the sitting
room and shut the door on me.

I assumed they would wash the walls and then cover the nasty amendments with paint, but I could not imagine that they would be able to clean the upholstery or the carpet properly. Both had
looked permanently defiled to me.

I was, however, proven wrong.

When I was eventually allowed back into the sitting room it really didn’t look bad at all. The walls needed a second coat and I could still see a bit of a shadow on the part of the settee
that had been most badly affected, but I didn’t suppose I would even have noticed it had I not known what had occurred. The room was without a television, of course. The Samsung Smart, which
Robert and Robbie had been so fond of, had been damaged beyond any hope of repair and now lay, its once super-shiny screen smashed to pieces, in the back of the Farley van, to be delivered later to
the local recycling centre.

During the early part of the afternoon Dad phoned, and so did Bella, coincidentally within minutes of each other. I didn’t feel up to taking either call, but I did listen to their
messages. Dad wanted to know how I was and asked again if I’d like him to pop over and maybe stay overnight. I managed a wry chuckle. He’d be lucky to find a bed in one piece. Bella,
returning my call of the previous evening, suggested the following morning, Sunday, for that dog walk. I told myself I would get back to both of them sometime the next day. But I certainly no
longer felt like a walk on the beach with Bella.

The Farleys continued to load everything else that was irretrievable into their white van. Everything that could be saved they set to work cleaning and restoring. I helped as much as I
could.

We concentrated on the ground floor first, making it as ready as possible for the alarm people, who arrived, as promised, promptly at four. There were two of them, both male, wearing pale-grey
overalls proclaiming the initials of their company, TAS, in fluorescent yellow. One was young, thin, bespectacled and clever-looking, the other older, plumper and with that air of a man who’s
seen it all before. Or thinks he has, anyway. After tut-tutting at the state of Highrise and the state of the world in general, as Tom Farley had done, they began at once to fit alarms to the
external doors on the ground floor and a beam system inside, as I had arranged with their head office.

While they worked Tom and Eddie and I disappeared upstairs to give them a clear field. They took just over three hours to equip the front and back doors and install motion sensors in each of the
downstairs rooms. The control box was set up in a hall cupboard. Modern electronics, it was explained to me, meant that little wiring was called for and that speeded up the installation process.
They would come back the following week, if I wished, to fit alarms upstairs.

After they had gone the Farleys and I just kept on working. While they painted, cleaned and repaired what they could, I swept and washed all the uncarpeted floors including the flagstones on the
ground floor, which rewarded me by glowing even more than ever. Nothing could destroy those floors, I thought, and surely nothing could ever totally destroy Highrise.

I told myself firmly that the old house had badly needed decluttering. And my further needs were going to be few. I would have to acquire some new crockery and a few glasses, but I wasn’t
about to be doing any entertaining. Other than that I could manage with Highrise just how it was.

Once all the wreckage had been removed from the house, including the furniture from Robbie’s devastated room, Highrise looked surprisingly clean and in order again, if a lot emptier than
before. There was too much to be taken in one vanload, so Tom and Eddie piled the rest of the broken furniture and other debris in the yard. I would just have to try not to look at it until they
could dispose of that too. They refused to leave ‘till you’m straight, near as dammit’, as Tom put it, and finally departed just before 10 p.m.

‘Us’ll be back in the morning to give the sitting room a second coat, and take away the rest of the ruined stuff,’ Tom said. ‘But at least you’m on the way to being
straight again.’

I thanked them with all my heart. They’d been quite wonderful and done an amazing job, to a higher standard than I had imagined possible. I was cheered to be no longer surrounded by
wreckage, and by the restoration of some degree of order.

But as I watched them trundle off up the lane, their van weighed down with the smashed remains of a life that had once seemed so perfect, the sadness of it all was overwhelming. I had lost so
much. And the loss of so many treasured possessions, though, of course, totally overshadowed by the death of my son and the realization that my husband was not the man I had thought him to be, was
another devastating blow. Indeed, very nearly the straw that broke the camel’s back, I thought to myself unoriginally. But I was not going to let my back be broken. Absolutely not.

I closed the front door on the Farleys’ retreating van and a cold and damp Dartmoor night and retreated to the kitchen with Florrie. Then I sat down at the table, with my chipped mug full
of hot chocolate and a tooth mug full of malt whisky, and made myself think.

Someone out there was persecuting me. Or maybe trying to get to Robert through me.

I still did not intend to tell Robert about either of the break-ins. Or that I had suspected him of the first one. I don’t think I ever seriously considered that he might have played a
part in the second horrific violation of Highrise. I was pretty sure he was still in the North Sea and I could not imagine he would be capable of such desecration of the home he had so loved; there
was surely no motive for him to have done so. It was almost as if he already was no longer part of my life nor of our home together. More than anything, I suppose I felt that I didn’t trust
him any more. He really wasn’t my Robert. For a start, I had absolutely no idea whether or not I could believe anything he said.