The Pure in Heart (27 page)

We were so good together but we could be so much better. I think we should be. I think you are a lonely man who has no idea of the strength of his emotions. But if you admit them, you will find that you are a free person after all,
free to be in love, free to be with me.

You mentioned in our brief meeting that there had been someone else. That stabbed into me like a blade until I realised, as I drove home, that it was not true. There was never anyone else, was there? I know you enough to know that you have never had a lover. You wanted to get rid of me, you were in a mild panic, and you invented the ‘someone’. It doesn’t
matter. So long as you know how much I love you and will see me again, nothing matters. Please, Simon, phone me, come to me, anything. But don’t ignore me. I can’t bear the silence and the distance from you.

Ever, ever with love,

Diana

Simon Serrailler held the paper as if it were alight. When he had finished reading he banged open the
kitchen pedal bin with his foot and dropped it inside.
The lid clanged shut again. He went to the sink and drank a glass of water, then took out the Laphroaig bottle. It was nine thirty and he had been with first Marilyn and then Alan Angus for several gruelling hours. He had eaten a plate of canteen fried food and come home fit for nothing but a drink, and some time sorting carefully through his portrait drawings to find three to enter for a prize.

He had not recognised Diana’s writing. If he had he would have dropped the letter into the bin before, rather than after, opening it.

It felt like an invasion of his territory, his private space, another attempt to get under his skin, like her visit. He was angry with her for disturbing him, angrier that she hadn’t believed him when he had mentioned Freya. Angry.

He hesitated, took another shot
of malt, and shoved the bottle back in the cupboard. It solved nothing and he had less time for drunkards than for most criminals.

He pulled out one of the flat portfolios from the drawer, began to undo the black ribbon ties, but then stopped. He couldn’t look at his work now. He would have no judgement. She had spoiled that for him too.

‘Fucking woman.’

He would not reply and at least now
he knew her writing he could tear up any future letters unopened. ‘If you don’t know what to do, do nothing’ had been one of the few lessons he had
learned from his father. So, no reply to the letter, no returning any telephone messages. He would do nothing and if he did nothing for long enough, she would leave him alone. He wished her no harm, he just wished her out of his life.

The cathedral
clock struck ten, the grave, measured notes sounding through the room, cleansing it from the stain left by his angry swearing. It calmed him. He lay on his back on the long sofa.

Freya Graffham was in his mind, her neat cap of hair, her fine features. So that had been love and he had been too stupid to recognise it, too slow to act upon it, too … He imagined her in this room, not as a visitor
but as a familiar part of it, her books on the shelves, the scores of whatever piece of choral music she had been learning for the St Michael’s Singers opened on the table. In his mind, it was no longer his room but theirs. ‘Have you asked yourself what she felt?’ Cat had asked him when he had told her about Diana’s visit. Now Diana had told him and it had not made him ashamed of himself or sympathetic
towards her, it had simply annoyed him.

He got up. There was a team review of the Angus case at nine the next morning, a press conference at ten. The news of Alan Angus’s suicide attempt had not yet become public knowledge and Simon was anxious to brief the media and control their reaction to it. He needed to be fresh. He locked up, put the lamps out, and stood for a few moments looking out of
the window at the floodlit cathedral. The sky was clear, the night immensely still. Gradually,
Simon felt the calm seep into him. He went to bed to read another chapter of
Hornblower
before sleep.

But he did not sleep. At two he was still turning about in bed, his peace frayed. He read more, then got up and ate a couple of biscuits. He went back to bed and still did not sleep.

Half an hour later,
he left the flat and ran down the hollow-sounding staircases past the darkened offices and out to his car. If he could not sleep and did not want to lie thinking about Diana’s letter, and least of all about Freya, then he might as well be working. The Audi slipped out of the close into the night streets.

Three days after he had left the Jaguar at the airfield, Andy Gunton had received another package in the post, a white Jiffy bag taped with FRAGILE and sent special delivery. Michelle had stood in the kitchen doorway as he came down the stairs.

‘There’s tea in the pot and there’s bread. I’m round to school, ten minutes tops, and when I get back you and me is going to sit down and
’ave breakfast and talk, OK?’

She had yanked Otis’s scarf tighter round his neck and yelled up the stairs for Ashley, lit a cigarette and gone out leaving Andy to close the door. Pete was in bed. In the sitting room the television advertised leather sofas on interest-free credit.

The packet was on the table. She’d signed for it and no doubt turned it over and over and upside down. There was
no way he could pick it up and pretend it had never come. After the mobile phone, something else arriving for him by special delivery was going to be up for discussion.

He put the kettle back on the hob, took down a mug, got out a tea bag, found the sugar and a
teaspoon, opened the fridge and took out the milk, and between each move he either looked at the packet on the table, touched it or weighed
it in his hand. He dreaded opening it. Nothing had happened since he had been dropped at the end of the road in the middle of the night. No one had contacted him, there had been no phone messages. It might never have happened. Andy half believed it had not.

He sat down at the kitchen table with his mug of tea and picked up the packet again. It was the size and thickness of a small paperback book.
He ripped it open.

Inside the packet was a brown envelope. Inside the envelope were fifty ten-pound notes. There was no message. Just the money.

He broke out in a sweat. He was going to have to either explain five hundred pounds in cash, or lie about what had been in the packet. If he was going to lie, he needed a convincing explanation to occur to him within the next few minutes. On the other
hand, if he simply handed Michelle a couple of hundred pounds and said nothing, answered no questions, went straight out … then what?

He got up and stuck four slices of bread in the toaster. What was he frightened of Michelle for?

He knew what for.

He scooped up the packet and the money and ran upstairs to stuff it into his nylon holdall and put that back under the bed next to the box that
had contained the mobile phone.

The back door slammed.

Andy opened the bedroom window to let out the thick stench of his nephew’s trainers, and went downstairs, his heart in his mouth as if it were his mother come home and he had been nine years old and up to something.

‘What’s going on?’

Michelle stood facing him, her back to the sink. For a split second he did indeed think she was their
mother. She was starting to look like her, broom-handle thin, flat-chested and sour-faced. Only Michelle had yellow hair and a bad skin. Their mother’s skin had always been peachy, her hair mouse-turning-grey. But the way she stood was the same, and the set of her head, up and back, chin stuck forward.

He picked up his mug of tea which had cooled and tried to get past his sister to reach the
microwave but she moved forward suddenly and he sat down hard, the tea slopping down his sweatshirt and on to the floor.

Michelle swung round, picked a cloth off the draining board and threw it at him.

‘Did you hear me?’

‘I heard.’

‘And are you going to tell me? Don’t you bloody wind me up, Andy Gunton, don’t you bloody start lyin’. I wanna know. What was in that envelope for starters?’

‘Mind your own fuckin’ business.’

‘It is my business if you’re up to your old tricks. You get out of my house if you’re into anything dodgy, anything, I don’t care what it is. Out.’

Andy finished wiping his shirt, then bent to the floor and swirled the cloth vaguely round the spilled tea at his feet. Then he got up, threw the cloth in the direction of the sink, and went upstairs two at a time,
not bothered if he woke Pete or not. He could hear snoring like a road drill from the front bedroom.

He got the packet of money out from under his bed, removed a hundred pounds and slipped it into his back pocket, then went back down to the kitchen. Michelle had not moved. She was waiting for him.

Andy put the money on the kitchen table.

‘Can I have my tea now?’

‘Where’d you get that?’

‘You
wanted to know what came in the post. That came in the post.’

He stood in front of her until she moved slightly to let him get by. Andy put the kettle back on and more bread in the toaster. He started to whistle.

‘I knew it.’

‘You don’t know nothing.’

‘You find that lying in the gutter then?’

‘It’s wages. You wanted me to pay my way, I’m paying my way. There’s four hundred.’

‘You nicked
it.’

‘I did not. I told you, it’s wages. I did a job. I got paid.’

‘Job. Oh yeah, right. What sort of job? Picking peas?’

He almost said it. ‘Driving a car.’ The kettle boiling and the toast burning together saved him.

‘You’re a liar, you done a job – and I don’t mean job as in honest day’s work and you bloody know I don’t.’

There was a crash upstairs as the bedroom door was flung back against
the wall. Pete Tait came heavily downstairs and appeared in the kitchen doorway, wearing a vest and tracksuit bottoms.

‘What the fuckin’ hell is going on? Am I going to be allowed any sleep or what? You both yelling. I’ll have some of that tea. What you think you’re on at, Michelle? Worse than the kids, you two.’

Andy wondered if he might break the spindly kitchen chair as he crashed down into
it. The money was in front of him on the table. Pete reached out a finger gingerly and flicked at it.

‘You can leave that where it is, that’s dirty money, ask him.’

Pete ignored her. He pulled the notes towards him and shuffled them about a bit. Andy put a mug of tea in front of his brother-in-law and sat down opposite him with his own. He spread margarine and jam on his toast and began to munch
it, paying Pete no attention. Michelle watched.

But Andy didn’t need to look. He knew Pete and money. There was the sound of tea being slurped down Pete’s throat. Under his eyelids, Andy saw the fingers slide back towards the cash again.

‘I told him, he can bloody get out if he’s started his tricks again. We don’t want him here. I got kids. I ent having them mixed with criminals.’

Pete slurped
his tea again. ‘Where’d you get three hundred quid?’

‘Four,’ Andy said through his toast. ‘Four hundred.’

‘Four hundred?’ He almost laughed at the oily tone of his brother-in-law’s voice.

‘Don’t matter if it’s four grand, it’s not stopping here, it’s dirty money. Next thing we’ll have the police at the door, that stuck-up Nathan Coates.’

‘Now hang on, just hang on.’

‘What?’

‘Give him a chance
to tell us where he got it.’

‘Working, he said. Wages. Job. Ha bloody ha.’

‘Now hang on …’

Andy lifted his head and stared straight at Pete for the first time. ‘I said it was a job and it was a job. I said it was legit and it was. I just never said what and I don’t have to say what. Do I?’

‘Well … no, no, I don’t think you have to, And. No.’

‘I offered it to Michelle. Rent and that. She wouldn’t
touch it.’

‘Now hang on.’

‘So you have it, Pete. Go on, stuff it in your vest.’

Andy stood up. He scooped up the money, rolled it together and leaned over. Pete grabbed his wrist and stopped the money from going down between
his underwear and his skin. He was laughing. Andy leaned away from his breath.

‘You want me to have it? Four hundred?’

‘Four hundred. I told you. Rent.’ He slapped Pete
on his spotty shoulder. ‘Good on you, Pete,’ he said, and walked out grinning, leaving them to it.

Upstairs he put on his shoes and jacket, folded his own hundred pounds up, still grinning. He’d be staying here until he chose to leave now, not until his sister chose to sling him out. It had been worth it. In the kitchen they were arguing. In the sitting room the television was playing host to
Richard and Judy.

As he reached the gate, the mobile phone beeped receipt of a text message from Andy Gunton’s pocket.

Diana was stalking him and he was beginning to know why unrequited love made people violent. He shot too fast round a corner and headed for the Old Town. He needed to look at Freya’s house.

The street was quiet. It was two thirty. Not a single light shone from any of the terraced houses. He slowed. But as he did so, he thought, And I am stalking the dead. Is that possible? What in God’s
name was he doing? If he had discovered that one of his team was behaving in this way he would have signed him off and recommended he see the FME.

At the top of the road, he noticed that the petrol gauge was below red. There was one all-night garage, on the bypass going towards Bevham. He filled the car and got a coffee from the machine. The man at the till wore a strange red woollen hat that
made him look like a gnome and was half asleep. The coffee tasted foul but it acted like an intravenous shot of adrenalin, so that as Simon pulled out of the forecourt and saw the silver Jaguar XKV ahead of him, he was alert. He clicked on the hands-free and called in to the station.

He kept the Jaguar a hundred yards ahead. There was nothing else on the bypass. Then the Jaguar took a right
turn and another, and was heading out into the country. The roads narrowed quite soon. Simon called up again, gave his location and requested a patrol car.