Cold in the Earth (8 page)

It had no effect. Sitting down, he said as if she hadn’t spoken, ‘It’s kind of weird looking at you.’ He had the irritating mannerism of making a statement sound like a question. ‘It’s like something’s gone out of focus. The eyes, a bit bluer, the nose – yeah, sure. But . . .’

He was fixing his gaze on the different areas of her face in turn, as if calculating proportions. ‘A tad too much chin, not quite enough cheek—’

The disregard for social conventions might be entirely innocent – or not. Laura didn’t know whether to feel angry, amused or threatened.

‘Talking of cheek . . .’ she said lightly, and saw his face change on the instant. The corners of his mouth turned down in a rueful grimace and he slapped the back of his left hand. ‘Sorry. Rude. Naughty. Let me buy you a nice lunch and I’ll be good and mind my manners. We’ve got lots to talk about.’

Laura chose a salad more or less at random. While he queued at the bar she stared out into the courtyard, biting her lip, conscious of having been out-manoeuvred. It was unnerving that her attempts to keep him at a safe psychological distance had been so ineffective; she couldn’t read him and it piqued her professional pride. He must have been in his thirties yet his behaviour was almost childlike. Was that calculated, an act put on for his own purposes, or was it really some curious kind of naïvety?

There was money there, or at least there had been at one time, but somehow Laura suspected he wasn’t making it himself. A spoiled child, perhaps, who had never seen the need to grow up? The manner of his apology, as if his charm could broker forgiveness for any misdemeanour, suggested he’d been accustomed to indulgence.

But she hadn’t been charmed, had she? He’d left her feeling uneasy, so it hadn’t worked. Perhaps it never did; perhaps he was just a poor little rich kid with hang-ups that condemned him to go on repeating the mistakes of the past. She’d met a lot of those, become almost a connoisseur of the variety of fronts which could be constructed to suggest a non-existent confidence – one of which, of course, was undermining the confidence of the other person.

That made some sort of sense: after all, she’d been considering how to shield herself too. At least it was a working hypothesis.

Like a karate expert making use of his opponent’s body weight, she turned his own technique of surprise against him when he returned. ‘The Minotaur,’ she said without preamble as Max sat down again. ‘Tell me about the Minotaur.’

She could be confident, this time, that his response wasn’t calculated. It was ludicrously transparent: his face darkened, his mouth became a thin line and his hands clenched involuntarily into fists.

‘Jake Mason. My father – he’s a bastard.’

How many times had Laura heard this tone of raw anger – even this phrase – during therapy? It had been her practice to say nothing in response, only to look an enquiry and she did that now.

As if she had opened a sluice gate, the disjointed story came pouring out. His affectations of speech vanished as he painted an emotional picture of a tyrant, a darkly powerful man with a towering temper, obsessive about the bulls he bred and his own money and importance, indifferent to the feelings of his wife and son.

‘He – he drove her away, my mother.’ Max’s voice was thick with rage and hatred. ‘She just vanished one day, when I was seventeen. I’ve never heard from her since. And he did the same to Di too, when I was eighteen. When she left I walked out and I’ve never spoken to him since.’

Laura drew a shaky breath. ‘How – how did my sister come into all this?’

The waiter brought the food. Max had ordered a beef stew which he ate absent-mindedly as he talked. Laura toyed with her salad, too tense to eat more than a few mouthfuls as she listened.

They’d met, apparently, at the Sanfermines Festival in Pamplona the summer before Dizzy vanished, at the famous running of the bulls when the half-dozen selected for bullfights that night are loosed into barricaded streets leading to the bullring; young men historically display their courage by running with the dangerous, volatile creatures.

Max’s eyes were dreamy as he talked. ‘Di was amazing. Braver than most of the men – braver than me or my father, come to that, for all he always talked big. She actually touched one of the bulls, do you know that? It’s the craziest thing you can do. People die that way. I can still see her – the white shirt with the red scarf and the red sash round her waist, blonde hair flying . . .’

Laura’s eyes prickled with tears. Dizzy had told her about it when she came home, talked of the strange madness that seized you, the terror, the absolute joy.

Max was going on. ‘They fire a rocket, you know, when the first bull leaves the corral, then another when the last one goes. If there’s a long gap it’s a danger signal – probably means one’s got left behind the herd and it’ll be panicky, getting spooked by everything. This was on the third morning and there was a long, long break before the second rocket.

‘I’d done the run along with the first bulls and reached the barricades at the bullring end. The other five were inside by the time the last one appeared and it was going crazy, pawing the ground, charging everything. You ever seen a fighting bull? No?

‘They’re – well, fantastic. Black, wicked creatures, all bunched muscles and power and cunning. Every one thinks differently and you’ve got to get inside their heads to stay alive – that’s what makes a great matador. When he kills the bull – the moment of truth – it’s an act of homage to the most amazing animal in the world.’

‘Hmm.’ Laura wasn’t entirely sure the bull would see it that way.

‘That day, there was a group of about thirty running around the last one – ahead, alongside. One guy had fallen – there’d been rain that night and the cobbles were slippery – but he’d the sense to lie still and the bull ignored him. He’d got the scent of his mates ahead, probably, and he was heading for the bullring pens.

‘Then suddenly this girl appeared out of the group. The rest were all men. She dodged to one side till the bull passed, then darted round behind and touched its flank. Everyone gasped. The bull wheeled on its haunches and charged in one movement, the way they do – so fast you can’t believe it. If she’d lost her footing on the cobbles he’d have gored her to death, but she vaulted over the barricade and the crowd caught her.’ His face was alight with remembered excitement. ‘God, you should have heard the cheers!’

That hadn’t been when he’d met her, though. That had happened later, when with the rest of Pamplona he’d gone after the evening bullfight to the Plaza del Castillo. Max described it as if it had happened yesterday: the seething crowd inside the famous Café Iruña with its mirrors, its glass chandeliers and its nicotine-darkened walls where Hemingway had got drunk on absinthe along with, Max claimed, his own grandfather.

‘They’ve kept it the way it was, you know, very Thirties with the marble bar and the bentwood chairs. I saw Di at a table in the middle with all these guys around, everyone a bit drunk, talking and laughing. My father was at the bar with a lot of old bores he met up with every year – still does, probably. I haven’t been back.

‘I sort of drifted to the edge of the group round Di but I couldn’t get near her. I was only a kid and they elbowed me out.’

It still rankled. ‘How old were you?’ Laura asked gently.

‘Seventeen – eighteen, almost.’

Seventeen, and Dizzy would have been twenty. He had clearly thought himself in love with her, with that first fervour of a boy worshipping at the goddess’s shrine.

Max barely noticed the waiter taking the plates away. ‘It got a bit late and eventually she left with some of the young men. I followed her out. They were all a bit drunk – she probably was too. The roads out of the square are quite narrow, alleyways really, and by now most people had gone home. She was on her own with about four of them. I followed, a bit behind. They went out of sight round a bend and when I heard her call out I started to run.

‘She wasn’t laughing now. They were all very lairy and they’d probably just wanted a kiss to start with, but it was getting out of hand. She was struggling and lashing out at them, but one was behind her pinning her arms and the others were laughing and grabbing at her feet as she tried to kick them.

‘I put my head down and charged them like one of the bulls. They were pretty drunk and I must have looked pretty scary coming out of the darkness. I landed a few punches and then they scattered.’

‘Pretty impressive!’

Laura hadn’t meant to betray her scepticism, but he flushed. ‘Well, my father came up just at the end and they probably thought there were more of us coming. She was certainly grateful. We sort of acted as bodyguards for her for the rest of the festival.

‘My father said if she ever wanted a job to let him know – we were always needing people after my mother left. None of them lasted long. When he discovered you only got a slave by marrying one he’d lose it with them and then they’d leave.’

The tables around them had emptied and the waiter had brought them coffee. At last they were getting to the point where he might have useful information for her.

‘So when Dizzy – Di – got fed up with living at home, she called your father to ask for a job?’

‘That’s right. She came in – oh, October, November, was it? I know she left in January.’

In her eagerness, Laura leaned forward across the table. ‘Look, I need to know every single tiny detail. There may be something you saw, something you don’t even know you know, but that might give me a lead to follow on what she did next.’

It was a mistake. She could see his withdrawal immediately. He had been facing her squarely, meeting her eyes as he talked; now he shifted to sit sideways at the table and he looked past her as if his attention had been caught by something in the empty courtyard.

‘Well, hey, that’s a pretty tall order. We’re talking fifteen years ago here.’ His voice was once more rising at the end of the sentence. ‘Glad to be of service, like they say, but total recall’s a bit off the scale.’

He’d slipped behind the shield again, as uncertain people, too directly challenged, tend to do. Laura tried to regain lost ground.

‘Was she a good Girl Friday?’ she asked, smiling. ‘I don’t remember her being very domesticated.’

‘OK, I guess. She got across my aunt, though – they’d a couple of up-and-downers. She’s always sticking her nose in.’

‘Does your aunt live with your father?’

‘Not exactly. It’s kind of weird – there’s the farm office and the study and the main kitchen and so on, then the rest of the ground floor is our flat – my father’s, I should say – and my aunt and my meathead cousin live upstairs. Enough to drive anyone to leave home, don’t you reckon?’

Laura had spent enough time listening to his family problems. ‘If you can’t remember anything, do you think your father would?’

Max laughed, shortly. ‘You’d better give him a miss. Women seem to have a habit of disappearing around him.’

But his father, perhaps, might have a different version of the story Max had told her. Laura persisted. ‘Can you give me his phone number?’

‘I think it’s changed since I left home. I could try and get it for you, I suppose. Give me yours and I’ll call you.’

She’d be moving shortly anyway; with only slight misgiving, Laura gave it to him, then got up to go. He was staring at her again. ‘So like Di,’ he murmured. ‘Really takes me back.’

They climbed the steps from the pub together. He was going back to work; he did something vague as a broker, putting companies and investors together. He went on to the Tube station while Laura walked more slowly along the rows of shops. There was something comforting about the brightly lit windows, the scent of toiletries, the elegant, expensive nothings on display. She felt she had walked long enough with the ghosts of her sister’s past today; she needed to escape that twilight world.

The temperature had dropped overnight, low enough to bring a powdering of snow to Chapelton, three hundred feet above sea-level on the exposed uplands where stunted trees grew with flattened tops as if they had been trimmed by the cutting edge of the wind. The wide arch of the sky was still cold and clear but over in the east a red winter dawn was firing clouds massing on the horizon with a muddy, sullen glare.

Conrad Mason pulled the collar of his thick navy pea-jacket closer about him as he came down the front steps of the big Victorian house. He was theoretically on the early shift today but before he checked in he would be making a couple of calls on one or two people who wouldn’t be expecting a personalised waking-up service. They weren’t early risers and he wasn’t in any hurry.

He lit up a cigarette – the first of the day was always the best – and on an impulse strolled off down the gravel drive which led to the fields, the smoke and his breath making clouds of vapour on the chill air. It was a habit with all the Mason men when they had something on their mind to go and – well, if not exactly talk to the animals, then contemplate their problems in their presence. And he had a lot on his mind.

He ought to have been feeling pretty good. The Super had been seriously chuffed with him and even Big Marge had been forced to grit her teeth and give him a pat on the head for his triumph over the burglaries. It had cost him, of course – there was no way his ‘squeak’ would have coughed for the measly £50 he was authorised to offer – and he’d had to find another £50 to get himself off the hook.

That was all it had done, though, and the euphoria had quickly worn off. Even though he’d shown them what a good man could do, even if he slogged his guts out passing exams, promoted posts as DI were few and far between. Big Marge had the job he wanted, and she wouldn’t be going anywhere. He drew fiercely on his cigarette and expelled the smoke through tightened nostrils. Women! He was balked at every turn by bloody women.

And this foot-and-mouth business – it was a crisis rapidly being converted to a major catastrophe by the bungling idiots in charge. Well, ‘in charge’, as long as you’d use the term to describe someone clinging to a juggernaut. He had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach about it: the epidemic was spreading like wildfire and the Chief Constable, no less, was pulling in police from all over the district to address them on it this afternoon.