The Sick Rose (40 page)

Today the Witness Service were taking him on a guided tour of the court, designed to put nervous witnesses at their ease. The police had sent him a copy of his statement to review before his appearance. She had read it, of course. The words were Paul’s own but something about the language did not flow, as though it were a document translated from another language. It took two or three reads to understand that the statement had been stripped of the nuances and justifications of emotion; just the bare bones of who, what, where, when, with none of the why. She wondered how the statement she had never had to make would have looked on paper.

The policewoman Christine, the one who was friends with Demetra and had sent Paul to Kelstice in the first place, had also put him in touch with a prosecution lawyer, who had given him examples of how the defence would try to trip him up and shown him how to be on his guard. Afterwards Paul said, ‘There’s nothing he told me that I hadn’t heard Carl say a million times. Ironic, isn’t it? Carl taught me how to behave in court and the one time I go there it’s to put his son away.’ He had given a sad little smile then. ‘Still, I suppose he taught Daniel, too, so it’s a level playing field.’

She had only in the last couple of weeks come to understand the depth of the boys’ relationship and what it had meant to Paul. Apart from his parents and Louisa herself, it was the only deep bond he had ever made in his life. She wished that she could convince him of the confidence she felt in the future. She had not felt this kind of positivity since before she had met Adam – and she wasn’t sure she had felt it then. She could not help but interpret Carl’s death as a sign that someone up there did not want her to kill. Her sense of reprieve was so strong that it finally granted her absolution for her earlier crime. And as a result, her preoccupation with Adam was fading; it was not a precise or easy thing, like letting go of a balloon, but rather a gradual lifting of a weight she had been carrying for so long it felt like part of her body. She would never be able to think about him without guilt, but to her astonishment she could now do so without longing. Sometimes she even felt a kind of nostalgia for the girl she had been then.

Of course she still wondered where he was, or what had become of him, but without urgency or real fear. Paul had been right; if Adam presented a threat, she would know by now. No matter how long Paul spent online, the trail always stopped in the mid-nineties. The clues pointed to dissolution, vagrancy, death. Further release from the clutches of his ghost had come when Paul had repeated the manager of the nursing home’s assertion that Adam had lost his looks. Perhaps she had even passed him in the street somewhere, just another pisshead in a sleeping bag or on a park bench, bearded, bloated, ugly. How could a man like that be a menace to her now?

She wanted to mark this letting-go, not because she was still dependent on the ritual but to formalise the difference between her old life and the new. What she had now – her garden, her boy – were real, and she didn’t have hours in her day or room in her heart for ghosts.

And this really would be the final catharsis, for afterwards she would burn the scrapbook that was the only one of its kind, destroy the cassette, unwind it and thread it through the trees, wipe it clean, start again. In her hands it was nothing but a lump of plastic and stretched magnetic ribbon. The only power it had now lay in its potential discovery by Paul. It would be disastrous if he were ever to spot the likeness that had drawn her to him in the first place. He might understand – he could surprise her like that – but it was not worth the risk. She marvelled that Paul had not stumbled across the tape or the scrapbook before. As far as he knew, the bags in her overhead cupboard contained clothes, and the television under its throw he had taken for a side table, balancing his mug on it.

Her watch told her that she had three hours before Paul came back to her; time enough to perform the basic elements of her secret ceremony one last time. She opened up the scrapbook. The glue that stuck the pictures to the pages had shrivelled and dried. Photographs and flyers peeled away from their backing. She spread them on the counterpane before her as she had done on a midsummer evening a lifetime ago. Here was a picture of him onstage, another of the band together, there was the Polaroid taken on the Roof Gardens. The image had almost completely faded, only a soft chiaroscuro remaining, the square returning slowly to its original black void. She held the only professional photograph he had ever posed for, a black-and-white, eyes-to-camera shot the size of a paperback novel. She was astonished to find that his face had lost the power to haunt her. The image remained but not the substance. It was an illusion, like light from a dead star.

The tape slid into the mouth of the machine. This time she didn’t reach for the whiskey bottle, nor the vodka. She wanted to be in control, to remember. Neither did she dress up. She wanted to do this as her current self. She slackened into those familiar opening frames, that first surge of music, but the electricity died before he began to sing, leaving her alone in the struggling light. Pulling on boots and jacket, she checked the plug on the outside of the van and found the cable to be securely attached, which could only mean that the bloody thing had disconnected itself back at the mains. The thought of traipsing back through the chattering trees dismayed her, but the need to make her peace and say her goodbye won out. Less urgently, more prosaically, she wanted the kettle to work. She smiled to herself; who would ever have thought that the greatest contentment of her life would have been found drinking tea in bed with a naked teenage boy? Taking care to pull down the trip switch so that there wouldn’t be a surge when she plugged back into the main power supply, she began the fifteen-minute hike back to the Lodge. Paul could easily have connected the cable on his way home, but there was no way of alerting him. If I had a mobile, she thought, I could call him and ask him to do it for me. On Monday I will go and buy a mobile phone, I’ll charge it and we’ll always be able to reach one another.

It was the first time that day that she had been outside the caravan, but Paul had been up early and she noticed that he had left the gate wide open. She made a point of pulling it closed behind her and a mental note to remind him again of the importance of hiding her home. With Scatlock out of the way and Ingram onto them, they had both become lax, and he in particular was absent-minded with the stress of the looming trial, but there was still no reason to invite discovery.

Halfway there, with the ruin in sight – she had grown so used to its shrug of snow that its bare brickwork looked naked – she stopped in her tracks, experienced a brief, excruciating vision of the ensuing mess if Paul were to return to the caravan before she did, if he saw the pictures she had left on the bed or, worse still, if he turned the power back on and the machine started to play and he saw his double singing only for him. But her watch told her that his train was not even due to leave London for another hour, and she walked on.

The cable had loosened itself by less than a millimetre but that had been enough to break the connection. She thumped it back into place with the heel of her hand. There was a little buzz as the current came. Since she was back at the cabins anyway, she opened up the canteen, made herself a cup of tea and drank it on the steps, looking down at the ride. She thought about having a tidy-up of the office before Ingram and the others got back on Monday morning. At one point she saw a figure walk past the gatehouse and her heart gave a little kick of panic. She tipped her drink onto the earth and made to run back to the cabin and hide the evidence before Paul could catch up with her. But the figure, although male, was accompanied by a dog and did not turn into the ride. It took a while for her pulse to return to its resting rate.

I’m getting too old for this, she thought, I’m tired. She had had enough of power cuts and gas canisters and chemical toilets. Paul had awakened a part of her that craved the comforts she had shunned for years. She laughed out loud to find that she wanted to live with him in a house with pictures on the walls and Persian rugs and a kitchen and a bathroom, a sofa from Heal’s, arguments about what to watch on television, the lot. She checked her watch again, then made herself another cup of tea. Her goodbye to Adam could wait a while longer.

Chapter 53

January 2010

The trial was to be held not at the Old Bailey but at the Crown Court in Chelmsford, which wasn’t the intimidating gargoyled structure of Paul’s nightmares but rather a bland, redbrick block in the town centre that could have been an office. Only the coat of arms above the door gave it away. He had been cynical when the Witness Service officer – another professional do-gooder, like Demetra – had told him that a tour of the building would prepare him for taking the stand, but he soon had to admit that she had known what she was talking about after all. The courtroom itself was smaller than he had thought and again, its neutral modernity was reassuring. Of course he wasn’t looking forward to seeing Daniel but the knowledge that he would be behind glass made him feel somehow safer. The only pity was that Louisa could not be there in the public gallery to support him, but his mother and Troy had pledged their presence and perhaps his courtroom debut was not the best place for them to meet for the first time.

He was almost looking forward to it now: not to the trial, of course, but clearing the last hurdle on the way to the other side. They had told him that he could stay at the court for as long as he liked but one ten-minute recce was all he needed. He would leave Essex now while he still felt strong; stay too long and memories of his home county might pollute his new-found confidence. The train he caught was much earlier than the one originally intended, scattered with shoppers rather than crammed with commuters. In the carriage he had room to chill out, put his feet up on the seat opposite (meekly taking them down when the buffet trolley came round). Returning to Warwickshire felt more like going home than travelling to Essex had. He popped back into his flat to pick up a change of clothes for the morning, bought a cheese and onion pasty and a bottle of Coke from the corner shop and had them at the bus stop. The joke shop was no longer showing its Christmas windows but was back to its default display of fancy dress costumes and feather boas. In a month it would be Valentine’s Day and doubtless they would go in for more creative window dressing then. Paul wondered what exquisite tableau they had in mind for that festival; vicars and tarts was about their level.

The bus set him down at the village stop. He checked the time: two hours early. He vacillated between surprising her at the caravan and sneaking a swift pint at the Kelstice Arms. Before he could decide which of these warm welcomes he was most in the mood for, he was winded by a blow to the abdomen, a crouching demon coming out of nowhere that threw him inside the bus shelter. If the wall hadn’t broken his trajectory, he would have been thrown to the ground. He struggled to get his breath, aware that there was a solid, moving ball of heat somewhere around his knees and moisture on his hands that felt like blood but couldn’t be.

He looked down. Through his fingers he saw the slobbering, happy face of Diesel the dog. Behind the Alsatian, red hair escaping from a big black hood, was a shivering Hash. The dog, who was chained to the lamp-post just outside the shelter, bounced excitedly between the two youths. His panting was the only sound. There was a time when Paul would have been confident of Diesel’s protection against anyone apart from a Scatlock but something about the way he was with Hash said that man and animal had been spending a lot of time in each other’s company lately.

Nothing made sense. Paul knew if he thought hard enough he would figure out how Hash had got here and what he was doing. He could tell the truth was there, dancing around in the shadows like a goblin, and on some level he knew that he wouldn’t want to believe it when he heard it. Adrenaline is conducive to action, not recollection, and Paul did not have the luxury of contemplation; Hash was bristling with violence. Swiftly he concluded that it was better to take a kicking in the street than here in the murky green recess of the bus shelter. If he survived whatever Hash had in store for him, at least on the pavement there was a chance someone would see his body and rescue him, a passing car or someone from the pub or, if he was left lying in his own blood for long enough, Louisa herself. When the blow came it wasn’t the expected punch in the guts but a girlish, two-handed shove and the noise that Hash let out was not a fierce battle-cry but something closer to a sob. This vulnerable state was almost more disarming than violence.

‘It wasn’t enough for you to get Daniel sent down, you had to kill Carl, too.’

Paul began to inch sideways, towards the freedom of the street.

‘Carl? He died in an accident, it was nothing to do with me. What’s any of this got to do with
you
?’

‘I was living with him.’ All the inexplicable things slotted into place, like a series of heavy bolts closing on a door. Paul felt sick, as though he had cut off Carl’s head and Hash’s had grown back in its place, younger, thicker, even angrier. Diesel, sensing conflict, began to growl; Paul could not tell who the dog was defending and who he was attacking. ‘He should have killed you when he come up here.’

‘How did you even know about this place?’

‘Gavin gave me your fleece to give back to you and it had that receipt thingy in the pocket. It took us straight to you. You’d even signed it.’

Two memories rebounded on Paul, both now loaded with new and terrible meaning. He recalled crumpling up the delivery docket for a tray of saplings and his visit to Gavin’s yard, how insistent Gavin had been that Paul’s mate was still coming to see him. ‘Mate’ had only ever meant one person to Paul, and that was Daniel.