The Heart Broke In (29 page)

It was easy for Ritchie to pretend that time was not moving him closer to disgrace when all he had to ignore was the quiet count of the calendar. When the snowdrops turned up, and the crocuses began to congregate around the tree roots in their tawdry purples and yellows, he managed not to see them. When the daffodils arrived, it was more difficult. By the time he woke up early one morning to find it was already light outside, that a fuzz of buds and blossom was softening the outline of the branches and that the birds were not so much singing as cheering in his white, unshaven face, he had to accept that spring had arrived. It seemed to him at that moment, standing in his pyjamas in the kitchen doorway, that this dawn was the beginning of one long, terrible day that would last three months, and that with the evening would come eternal shame.

The change of season coincided with his awareness of a change affecting his sister. She was growing into a more flamboyant and ubiquitous condition, dangerously close to fame. At the end of March he heard from his mother that Bec and Alex were moving house. Stephanie was surprised that he didn’t know. When she told him about the big house in Islington, how Alex’s uncle had left the house to the
institute when he died, to be lived in by the incumbent director and his family, which was Alex and Bec, Ritchie envied their luck. It seemed unjust that he should have had to work like the Devil to secure his rich man’s estate in Hampshire, only to have his sister end up in metropolitan splendour without really trying. Ritchie didn’t get in touch with Alex and Bec. He didn’t see why he should. It was up to them to tell him their news. He shouldn’t have to solicit it. If they didn’t want to speak to him, even to send him an email, he would leave them alone, in their pretentious new digs, never letting them guess how good he was being to refuse to betray Bec.

And yet, to Ritchie’s indignation, they couldn’t leave him alone. His sister was all over the media one day on account of her malaria vaccine. The jab had been a success, apparently. To Ritchie, it seemed undignified for a scientist to be posing and pontificating all over TV, radio, the Internet, the papers. First it was Alex with his cancer, now Bec with her malaria. Humility became the wise, Ritchie felt. They’d worked hard in their dingy labs, sweating over tedious calculations and test tubes and formulas or whatever, and they’d done well. To be flaunting themselves in public as they were was inappropriate. Did Bec realise, Ritchie wondered sadly, how ephemeral fame was? Did she realise that her picture only appeared on the front of so many papers because she was pretty? It put him out that on the day the news broke the BBC website gave the malaria story more prominence than the drama of
Teen Makeover
, where they were down to the last three contestants. It seemed odd to him that none of the stories about Bec mentioned that she was Ritchie Shepherd’s sister.

Ritchie sent Bec a bunch of flowers with a card that read
You’re more famous than me!!!
She called to thank him. He was glad to hear from her. It seemed that he was as fond of her as he’d ever been. He became sentimental and nostalgic, and they talked about the first holiday they’d taken with their mother after their father died, and how strange it had been on the beach without him, how brave the two of them had been to charge into the waves and swim in the cold North Sea. Ritchie remembered what a relief it had been to his fifteen-year-old self to hide from the adulthood that was pressing in on him and partake of his little sister’s childhood, to play with her in the water as if he were a young boy her age. He felt so warm now towards Bec, such a sense of refuge, that he dared to ask her whether she’d think again about her opposition to his film.

‘What was it like when you met him?’ asked Bec. ‘O’Donabháin.’

‘In the beginning I hated him,’ said Ritchie. ‘But when I forgave him I felt better. More whole.’

‘Whole?’

‘Yes.’

‘The closure you talked about.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think that’s what I should do? Forgive the man who murdered Dad?’

‘Forgiveness doesn’t justify him. I think it hurt him to be forgiven by me.’

‘You’re saying that I should forgive him to punish him. That doesn’t sound forgiving.’

Ritchie held the phone away from his mouth, swore under his breath and said to Bec: ‘If you can find it in yourself to forgive him in any way, it would be a good thing to do.’

Later, Ritchie’s assistant brought him a copy of Val’s newspaper and drew his attention to a two-page spread under the headline SCIENCE’S GOLDEN COUPLE. There was a large photograph of his sister and Alex, made over, styled and primped, grinning smugly on what appeared to be a velvet chaise-longue. They looked almost regal, Ritchie thought. He couldn’t bear to read the text. The smaller photos, scattered across the pages, told him all he wanted to know about the kind of bollocks Val’s reporter had written. There was Saint Rebecca, in white, of course, bending over a big-eyed African child. There was Saint Alex, in a lab coat of the inevitable angelic colour, standing over a patient who was gazing up at him as if Alex was going to save his life, which perhaps he was, but still. Saints, Ritchie felt, should be obscure and humble until their day of martyrdom. And Bec and Alex weren’t saints. Ritchie would only have to do a little digging, he was sure, and he would find their other side. The way Val was setting his sister up for a fall was diabolical, and yet there was something about it that made him want to laugh, her innocence, her ignorance that her brother was to thank for this celebrity. Once Val’s paper had established the legend of Bec and Alex, others followed.

Ritchie thought about suicide as a way out. But he had always flinched at the proximity of possible harm, the edges of train platforms, the mere presence of razor blades in the same room. He was afraid of pain; he feared mess, he feared fear, how he’d feel if he’d sliced open his wrists and watched the blood well out of them into the bath or how the belt would feel when it tightened round his throat. He thought about confessing everything to Karin and asking her to forgive him, for the sake of the children and for the memory of their
happiness together, the good things they had done. But these weren’t plans. Ritchie didn’t imagine killing himself or confessing what he’d done because he thought he would do these things. It was a personal art, a way to dilute his intentions in a nobler current, to make himself feel better about whatever it was that he was actually going to do. But he didn’t know what he was going to do, and the deadline Val had given him was only a couple of months away.

At the beginning of May, Ritchie heard that Val had gone mad. At first it was gossip in pubs and clubs. Then there were snatches on the Internet and paragraphs in
Private Eye
. Val had, it was alleged, sent an email to every member of the paper’s staff, to the entire board of directors and to the proprietor, saying, ‘When was the last time you cunts prayed to almighty God?’ Another story was that he’d gobbed on the news editor in a meeting and ranted about how his myrmidons were hypocrites who whored and lied and cheated on their expenses. The trigger for his rage was an edition of the paper that featured a denunciation of the government’s lax attitude towards fiends who preyed sexually on children, opposite an unrelated article speculating over how much money a fifteen-year-old tennis player would make as a professional model. The story was accompanied by a picture that could only have been taken by the photographer lying on the ground and shooting up between the girl’s legs. There were stories saying that Val had left the paper ‘by mutual agreement’. Then the stories dried up. Ritchie asked around, masking his raging hunger to know, and found out that Val’s behaviour had crossed the line into clinical insanity. He’d been sectioned. He’d been put away.

Val’s physical attack on him, which Ritchie had managed to
put out of his mind, was now safe to mull over. It made sense as the act of a madman, as did Val’s peculiar referral to himself in the third person. ‘Mr Oatman does get carried away sometimes,’ Val had said. The sense of reprieve made Ritchie weak and weepy. He’d woken up into this nightmare for so many mornings, and now it turned out that it had been a sick man’s dream. Ritchie knew that whoever had betrayed him – perhaps Nicole herself, perhaps Louise – might betray him again. He supposed that Val had confided in others. Yet because he wanted it so much he began to hope that he would not be exposed. He bumped into the new editor, who seemed decent, at a party. You could never tell with journalists, of course, but he was friendly, normal. It was as if Val had never existed. Ritchie began to drink less and had dinner with Bec and Alex at a nice restaurant in Clerkenwell. He kept his cool. He made them laugh. He didn’t mention the O’Donabháin film, and began to think that, over time, he could wear Bec down about it merely by being pleasant.

The season finale of
Teen Makeover
was a wonderful night; the winner was a sweet fourteen-year-old boy they’d put in a beautifully tailored suit, a short-arsed chap with red lips, huge cow-eyes and a voice like caramel. The studio audience, it seemed to Ritchie, was superbly picked for brightness, enthusiasm and prettiness, and the new guidelines he’d set for what they should wear gave the cheering, jumping mass of teeth and hair and slim bodies a vibe of hysterical wholesomeness the BBC was sure to like. Five million people watched. A million voted. At the party afterwards Ritchie hardly left Karin’s side. He stood at the innermost of concentric rings of power and celebrity, where people came up to them as if they were king and queen, and Ruby and Dan played with
Lazz and Riggsy around them like princes and princesses of the blood.

A few days later Ritchie had Midge over. They kicked a football around with Dan and went upstairs. Ritchie wanted to play Midge some rare Willie McTell but Midge couldn’t sit still. He kept reaching inside his t-shirt sleeve and scratching his shoulder. He wrinkled his nose and flexed his forehead as if he was wearing glasses that didn’t fit.

‘Ever heard of the Moral Foundation?’ he asked Ritchie.

‘Eighties electro-pop,’ said Ritchie. He was sitting on the floor by the record player, surrounded by sleeves and vinyl discs. ‘Here’s one he recorded as Red Hot Willie Glaze.’

‘The Moral Foundation,’ said Midge. ‘It’s a website. It’s the fucking celebrity secret police online. Are you sure you haven’t heard of it? They run a scandal every Sunday at six a.m. They’ve been going for weeks now. Every Sunday morning somewhere in the country some poor cunt’s up before dawn, pressing refresh on his browser, waiting to see his life destroyed.’

Ritchie stuck out his lower lip and tilted the record, watching the light break up in the grooves etched by Blind Willie’s voice. He didn’t want to listen to Midge. He wanted to listen to the scratchy howl of a long-dead alcoholic guitarist who’d sung his sorrows and his sins into a microphone and then died. He wanted hard-luck stories with endings, sealed by death. But Midge wouldn’t stop talking.

‘It’s your sister’s ex who’s behind it. Val Oatman. He’s the grey eminence.’

‘I thought he was in the loony bin,’ said Ritchie.

‘You don’t go there now,’ said Midge. ‘It comes in a bottle. You don’t go into the loony bin. It goes into you, three times
a day before meals. I don’t know if he ever really lost his marbles. Have you honestly not heard about this? Everyone’s talking about it. That’s how that ManU player got nailed last week.’

The Foundation’s modus operandi, Midge told him, was to contact its target and tell them that a particular day had been set aside for a revelation ‘concerning you or someone close to you’.

‘That’s what they say,’ he said. ‘“Concerning you or someone close to you.” But they don’t tell you what the revelation is, or who it is, whether it’s you, or your partner, or your kid, God forbid. And they say, “Do you wish to supply information?” They’ve got a whole fucking system. One of my client’s had the treatment.’

‘Lazz?’

‘I’m not going to tell you. The less you know the better. But yeah, one of my clients got the call. He, or she, has a skeleton in his closet. Who doesn’t? They were fucking clever. They wouldn’t say exactly what they knew, but they gave enough hints that he, or she, thought they couldn’t risk it. D’you mind if I smoke in here?’

‘Yes,’ said Ritchie. ‘Have another beer. What did he do?’

‘Or she.’

‘Or she.’

‘What did he do? He shopped someone else, what d’you think?’

‘It sounds like blackmail.’

‘It’s a grey area, apparently. It’s all to do with how specific they are.’

‘He didn’t shop another one of your clients?’

‘Do I seem like a fucking doormat to you? No, of course not.’

Two weeks later Ritchie was alone in his office early in the morning when his mobile rang with a call from a blocked number.

‘Mr Shepherd?’ The woman had a slight Essex accent. She spoke with great confidence. ‘This is Maggie calling from the Moral Foundation. Is it convenient to talk now?’

‘No,’ said Ritchie.

‘We’ll continue to call you, Mr Shepherd, until you have time.’ The woman paused, then went on. ‘Are you aware of the Foundation’s work, Mr Shepherd?’

‘No.’

‘We’re a not-for-profit organisation, set up to make the public aware of immoral behaviour by prominent people.’ She spoke quickly and without any dramatic inflection, like a cabin assistant making a safety announcement.

‘You’re a sanctimonious, holier-than-thou, dustbin-rummaging scandal sheet.’

‘So you are aware of our work.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Do you have a pen and paper handy, Mr Shepherd? I’d like you to write some things down for me. The first thing is a date. It’s the twenty-eighth of February next year. Do you have a note of that, Mr Shepherd?’

‘Why the hell should I? Who do you think you are?’

‘It’s important that you know the date, Mr Shepherd. On that day, at six a.m., we shall be publishing, on our website, information about immoral behaviour, concerning you or someone close to you. It will concern one or the other, but not both. Do you understand?’