The Yeare's Midnight (35 page)

The baby started to cry and she stroked his brow softly. When Arthur had died she had come to believe that there was no God. However, her logical schoolteacher’s mind quickly argued her out of that position. If there was no God then all life was meaningless – Arthur’s existence and death had been meaningless. But she knew that in the happiness they had shared, there was meaning. There had to be meaning here too, she reasoned as she stared down at her grandson. Perhaps she hadn’t been tested enough. Perhaps this was another test of will and belief. She would fight again. She would defy her interfering God.

She thought of her daughter, dead and gone. No way to say sorry, no way to say goodbye. They had grown apart. Violet had got married some nine years previously. It had proved to be a mixed blessing: an arrangement born more of necessity and mutual convenience than affection. Elizabeth had hated her new father, his coarseness and the smell of alcohol that followed him around the house, his rages and his brooding, his alternating gentleness and violence. A week after her eighteenth birthday, Elizabeth had left home and started work at the Bolden library. Violet felt a sudden rush of guilt and loneliness. Elizabeth was gone.

Violet carried the baby into the kitchen and rested him in his cot. She could hear her husband snoring in the lounge. She imagined the newspapers and the mess of food and dirty plates. Bill Gowers had been a merchant seaman during the war. She had met him at a Remembrance Day service in Bolden. They had become friendly and started meeting for drinks. Bill had worked on the Atlantic convoys during the war, just as Arthur had done. Violet sat quietly and listened while Bill drank whisky and told his stories: of U-boat attacks, of black Atlantic skies strewn with glittering stars, of storms and of waves that smashed down upon the decks as if they were the wrath of God Himself, of burned and lost ships, of friends with daft nicknames, of fear and resolution.

She realized years later, lying in the darknesses of their marriage, that Bill’s stories had made her feel closer to Arthur;
for a while, they closed the gap that his death had opened. They had allowed her to enter an imagined world, where she could seek out the only man she had truly loved. When she finally realized that Arthur wasn’t hiding behind Bill’s reminiscences, the stories became a horror to her and she punished her new husband with a coldness that he couldn’t understand.

A name. The baby had to be given a name. The reality dawned on her out of the blue. It was her first responsibility. She sat on a hard kitchen chair and rocked the cradle as she thought. ‘Arthur’ was her first choice but Bill would not appreciate that. He knew a little about Arthur. There was no point turning her husband instinctively against the baby.

Violet considered the names of some English kings: Richard, Henry, George. They were all possibilities but none of them appealed particularly. Then an idea dropped into her head. Arthur’s surname had been ‘Crowan’: Able Seaman Arthur Crowan. She had never told this to Bill. She had been half worried that Bill might actually have known him personally: Violet hadn’t wanted Bill intruding on her imagined world. Arthur’s blood was in the baby, it was only right that his name was used. ‘Crowan Frayne’: she liked that. It fused her with Arthur.

Once she was dead, Crowan Frayne would be the only proof that her happiness with Arthur had meant anything, or had even taken place at all. She decided that Crowan was the meaning, the purpose that was hidden in her sadness. She resolved to throw her heart, mind and soul into the child. His success would be her revenge on a vengeful universe.

Marty Farrell, the New Bolden scene-of-crime officer, approached the front desk of the library and asked for Sergeant Dexter. He carried a standard police fingerprinting kit and water ran off his waterproof jacket onto the floor. The young female
librarian looked at him blankly for a second and then remembered.

‘Oh, you’ve come about the computer terminal.’

‘That’s right. Is Sergeant Dexter around?’

‘You should speak to Dan, really – he was dealing with her.’ Dan was standing guard over the newly covered keyboard and computer screen. Farrell nodded and walked over.

‘I’m Marty Farrell from New Bolden police.’ He waved his ID at Dan, ‘I understand you’ve been dealing with my sergeant.’

‘Alison,’ said Dan. ‘Yes, although I don’t know where she’s got to. She told me to isolate this terminal and keep it covered up. Does that make sense?’

‘Probably.’

A small group of curious onlookers had gathered to watch. Farrell looked around for Dexter.
Where
the
hell
was
she?
The
useless
tart.
Doing
her
bloody
make-up,
most
likely.
He couldn’t work under these conditions. Besides, it was boiling hot in there. He made a quick decision.

‘I’ll need to take this terminal back to the station with me.’

Dan looked surprised. ‘Is it evidence? Has there been a crime?’

Farrell ignored him. ‘Is there a back entrance to this building? Like a delivery entrance?’

‘Absolutely. Access is from the car park.’

‘OK. I’ll bring my van right up to that entrance. I don’t want to compromise the computer by getting it wet – and it is pissing down out there. I’m going to disconnect the terminal and then bag each component part individually. Then we’ll take them to the delivery door and we’ll put the bags straight into my van. Understood?’

‘No problemo.’

Farrell knelt and opened his box of equipment. He took out four large plastic evidence bags and put them on the table next to the computer. ‘Did Sergeant Dexter say when she would be back?’

‘No, she just ran out with her mobile about forty minutes ago. I haven’t seen her since. She’s like that, isn’t she? Impulsive, I mean.’

Farrell ignored the question and handed Dan a typewritten
form. ‘This is your receipt. I fill out the top section but you’ll need to sign it before I leave. We’ll contact you when we’ve finished with the item.’

‘I’ll have to get the chief librarian. I’m not an official signatory,’ said Dan sadly.

Farrell took a deep breath and turned his attention to the computer. It took him fifteen minutes to secure each of the major items: the screen, the keyboard and the hard drive. He also bagged the mouse and the mouse mat. Dan helped him carry the bags to the back of the library and Farrell made a dash for his van across the rainswept car park. Backing up to the entrance, he saw Dexter’s car parked opposite the back wall of the library. The driver’s door was open.

Farrell quickly loaded the evidence bags into the airtight containers inside his van and then jogged over to the car. It was definitely Dexter’s. Blue Mondeo. T69 MPF. He always remembered her licence plate as its initials were MPF, like his own: Martin Peter Farrell. Farrell looked in the driver’s door and then looked around; Dexter was nowhere to be seen. ‘Dozy bird,’ he muttered to himself and was about to slam the door shut when he noticed blood on the driver’s seat and on the inside of the door.

June 1978

He was an intelligent child; a quick learner. He had an aptitude for language and music that Violet knew had come from the Fraynes. He had a shock of dark hair that shone when it was brushed and furious eyes that constantly sought connections and explanations. Crowan received good school reports, although some teachers expressed a concern that his quiet nature had made him something of an outsider. Violet wasn’t concerned. Her grandson was intelligent and healthy: he had ideas and
interests that were beyond his years. They would sit together reading at night, while Bill Gowers watched television and drunk himself to sleep. They would read Shakespeare, each taking different parts and performing to each other.

Crowan liked the ‘seven ages of man’ speech from
As
You
Like
It.
He particularly relished the infant ‘mewling and puking’ in his nurse’s arms. Crowan spat the words out with such venomous clarity that Violet couldn’t help but smile. She taught Crowan to play the piano that she had inherited from Rose and gradually guided him through her sister’s book collection. He was too young to enjoy Dickens and Hardy and his sallies into
Nicholas
Nickleby
and
Jude
the
Obscure
never lasted longer than a couple of chapters. However, he enjoyed the rhythms and colour of poetry: the rhymes made the poems easier to remember.
Old
Possum’s
Book
of
Practical
Cats
was his favourite, although Violet steered him gently but insistently towards Wordsworth and Donne.

Donne grabbed his attention. The language often confused him but he liked the simple images at the centre of some of the poems. He could recreate the picture in his mind and then work the language around it. Violet understood this and deliberately chose poems with a vivid conceit at their heart to help her grandson understand more rapidly. Crowan especially liked ‘The Flea’. Its simple, colourful images became rooted in his mind and he listened rapt as Violet explained the poem to him. ‘The poet is annoyed with his girlfriend because she won’t kiss him. So he points out a flea to her and says that she let the flea bite her so she should at least allow him to kiss her! Like this.’ Crowan giggled and retracted as Violet pursed her lips and tried to kiss him.
‘Marke
but
this
flea,
and
mark
in
this/How
little
that
which
thou
deny’st
me
is/
Mee
it
suck’d
first,
and
now
it
sucks
theel
And
in
this
flea
our
two
bloods
mingled
be
.’

Violet made some unpleasant sucking noises for dramatic impact.

‘So do fleas suck blood?’ Crowan asked.

‘Yes. It’s their food.’

‘Like chips?’

‘Just like chips. So, you see, because the flea has bitten both
Donne and his girlfriend, their two bloods are mingled together inside it.’

‘Like a baby.’

Not for the first time, Violet Frayne was surprised at her grandson’s perceptiveness. His mind was so quick to make connections, to find the meaning behind text and ideas.

‘That’s right,’ she said softly, ‘and Donne says to the girl that if she kills the flea by crushing it, then she will actually be killing the three of them:
Though
use
make
thee
apt
to
kill
mee/Let
not
to
this
selfe
murder
added
bee/And
sacrilege,
three
sinnes
in
killing
three.’

Bill Gowers appeared at the kitchen door. ‘You’ll make a poofter out of that boy,’ he hiccoughed and opened the fridge.

Violet tensed. ‘Don’t you dare speak like that in front of him.’

‘What’s a poofter?’ asked Crowan Frayne.

‘A pansy. A shirt-lifter. Where’s the bleeding cheese?’ Gowers rummaged in the fridge and eventually found some Cheddar. He cut a hunk of bread from a half-loaf and slapped on some margarine.

‘A pansy’s a flower, isn’t it, Granny? Like a violet.’ Crowan was confused.

‘That’s right, darling,’ Violet replied. ‘It’s a little flower.’ She fired a withering look at Gowers as he added a slab of cheese to his doorstep of bread.

Gowers snorted with derision. ‘Hah! Flowers! That’s right. Little flowers they are. We had a load of them in the Navy and didn’t they smell pretty?’ He bumped into Crowan Frayne as he turned. ‘Get out of my fucking way, you’re always cluttering.’

‘Don’t you touch him, you drunken oaf,’ Violet snarled, ‘or, God help me, I’ll—’

‘What?’ shouted Gowers. ‘What will you do? I’ve been blown up and sunk. Splashing about in the Atlantic in the middle of the bleeding night with the skin burned off me hands. There’s not much you can do that’d scare me.’

‘Just go away.’ Violet felt a cold fury at the man. ‘Let us be.’

Gowers showed his hands to Frayne. The boy had seen the burns before but they still made him shiver. ‘See these, nancy? Adolf Hitler did that and he didn’t bloody scare me either.’
Gowers returned to the lounge and slammed the door behind him. Violet shuddered as she heard the television volume increase.

‘Don’t cry, Granny,’ said Crowan Frayne. He wondered why she only seemed to cry out of one eye.

‘I’m all right, darling.’ Violet brushed the tears from her face and swallowed her pain. ‘Right, then. Where did we get up to?’

‘The second stanza,’ said Crowan helpfully, looking again at his book of poems, beautifully bound in black leather. ‘He’s just told her not to crush the flea.’

‘Thank you. Let’s finish this one off, then.’ Violet continued explaining the poem to Crowan but by now he was only half listening. He was thinking of ways to kill Bill Gowers.

That night Crowan Frayne dreamed that he was trapped inside a flea – swimming in different kinds of blood. Ladies’ blood smelled of pansies: men’s blood smelled of whisky and feet. It washed over him, pouring into his throat. His hands banged against the walls of the flea’s stomach;
cloistered
in
these
living
walls
of
jet.
He was like a baby, floating in blood. Nancy baby. But he couldn’t be born because he didn’t have a mummy. He felt a great force lift the flea in the air. Blood and fluid swilled against him and his head smashed against the flea’s stomach lining. The flea was being crushed – he couldn’t breathe. The sides of the flea ruptured and a great pressure bore down on him.
Cruel
and
sodaine
hast
thou
since
purpled
thy
nail
in
blood
of
innocence?
He had been crushed, he had lost his shape. Now he was just blood falling through the air. And he didn’t smell of anything.