I Saw a Man (24 page)

On reaching Highgate Gate they dropped down through the trees into the grounds of Kenwood, then rose again onto the gravel path that traversed the façade of the house. As they passed its shuttered windows they heard the attendants preparing for the day inside. Opening the shop, stocking the tills. Somewhere in the gardens a strimmer worked at a hedge. In the last window Michael caught a glimpse of them both—Josh walking with his head down, as if following a guideline just in front of his feet. Michael, tall beside him, his amputated stride arriving in his shoulder as an awkward jerk. At the end of the house they followed a stream down between the layers of Bagshot Sand and Clayton Beds, then crossed a footbridge over Wood Pond and on up into the South Woods itself. They began jogging without any communication, picking up their pace exactly where they always did, at the edge of the Duelling Ground, crossing its oval of scotched turf to join the path leading down towards Hampstead Gate. Their route remained unchanged, undisturbed. And everything else about their run, too, was the same as it always had been. Except for the air they bore with them, polluted as it was with the unspoken knowledge of Lucy’s death, partly known in each man, but only completely between them both.

On reaching Parliament Hill they slowed up the slope, walking the last few metres to the scattering of benches on its summit sitting in salute to London below. Michael sat on their usual bench, then felt the wood beneath him give as Josh added his weight beside him.

The heat wave had broken. Armadas of high cumulus were patching the city’s mosaic with shadow. A cool breeze spoke of rain, approaching from the north behind them. A flock of starlings rose and fell on the sports fields below, like a sheet shaken over a bed.

Michael looked across at Josh. Apart from his tiredness, he looked unchanged. Although his eyes, he saw, had lost the distance of their focus, as if they could no longer bear the promise of a horizon.

“I’m sorry,” Michael said, and he meant it, in the full scope of the word, more than he’d ever meant it before.

Josh didn’t look at him. “How did you hear?” he said.

“The policewoman. She came to the flat.”

Josh was already shaking his head, biting his lower lip. A vein, like a sudden worm, appeared across his forehead.

“That bitch,” he said. “Treating me like a fucking criminal. A suspect!”

Josh turned to face him, anger enlivening his eyes. Michael saw how deeply it was rooted, below his heart, his stomach. “I mean can you imagine if after Caroline…someone had come along and pointed a finger and—” He broke off. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking away again. “It’s just…”

“I know,” Michael said. “It’s okay. Really.”

Josh leant back against the bench. “At least that’s done with now, anyway. The DCI, or whatever he’s called. Her boss. He said there was no case.” He let out a breath in disbelief. “No case? Of course there’s no fucking case!”

“I’m sure it was just procedure,” Michael offered. “Standard stuff.”

“Yeah?” Josh said more quietly. “Well, then they should take a hard look at their fucking procedures.”

There was no case. Michael leant forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he took in what Josh had said. For the last two days he’d been sure he would see her again. Detective Sergeant Slater. He’d waited, each morning, for the intercom to buzz, to hear the taps of her footsteps in the stairwell. To watch as she drew out her notebook and pen once more. He was sure his false day would have been tested and found untrue, his deleted minutes resurrected.

“The coroner gives his judgement today,” Josh said from beside him. “They did the autopsy—” His voice broke over the word, the images it conjured. The smallness of her body. Silently, he began to cry.

Michael reached out and laid a hand on his back. It was the first time the equation of their contact had been reversed. He felt the muscles of Josh’s shoulder blades spasm under his palm; the physicality of his pain.

“Christ, Mike,” Josh said, when he could speak again. “I’m telling you. When you have kids. No one tells you…I mean, they do, but…” He rubbed his hands roughly across his face, then looked at them, as if expecting to see a stain of his grief. “The love,” he said. “It’s…it’s…” He couldn’t find the word, and when he did it came in a whisper. “Cruel.”

Michael took his hand away. To feel Josh’s fragility, to touch it, was too much. “How’s Sam?”

Josh took a breath, gathering himself. “Not good,” he said, frowning at the constellation of cigarette butts at their feet.

“She’s beating herself up over the gate. The child gate.” He sighed and began shaking his head again. “We took it away. I don’t understand. She was always fine. Careful, like we’d taught her.” He shrugged. “I…I just didn’t hear her. Nothing. Only when she…” He trailed off again, unable to say what had killed his daughter.

Michael looked towards the city, the dome of Saint Paul’s dwarfed by cranes, shafts of sunlight bursting against glass towers. He didn’t understand, either. Had Josh been there? Is that what he was saying? Did he know? Michael swallowed, trying to naturalise his voice. “You were downstairs?” he asked.

For a moment Josh said nothing. When he looked back at Michael, his expression was defensive. “Of course I was downstairs.” The vein was proud across his forehead again. “Where else would I be?”

“I just meant if you were in the garden,” Michael said. “When it happened. Then you couldn’t be…”

Josh looked away from him. “No,” he said, as if this was an answer he’d given too many times before. “I wasn’t in the garden.”

A woman walking two pugs came and sat down on a bench to their left. Rummaging in her handbag, she took out a pack of cigarettes, drew one out and lit it, the lighter cupped in her palm. The pugs at her feet breathed short and heavy from the climb.

For a few minutes neither of them spoke. Josh stared at the ground again. Michael sat beside him, still processing what he’d said. Josh must have told Slater he’d been in the house. Sam, too. Without knowing it, the two of them had conspired to make each other’s versions of those minutes true. Josh in the house, Michael not. So where had Josh been? He’d never know and he could never ask him.

Michael felt a flush of desperate anger. If only Josh hadn’t left the house—but he had, so it no longer mattered. All that did, and all that would now, over the coming months and years, is whatever Michael might do to help heal the wound they’d both made. This is all he had left to place in the scales against what had happened on that landing, on those stairs. His actions would have to be many, countless. But it was all he had to offer.

“If there’s anything,” Michael said eventually, “I can do. To help.”

Josh didn’t seem to hear him, and Michael was about to repeat himself, when he finally spoke. “It’s because I moved her,” Josh said, more to himself than to Michael. He was nodding, as if he’d worked out the answer to a puzzle. “That’s why they questioned me.”

From nowhere Michael saw Lucy fall again. Slowly, a bare foot searching, her blonde hair, her hand opening. And he always would. He knew that now. She would always be with him. She would never leave him. Just as the sight of his daughter lying in that turn on the stairs would never leave Josh.

“But, who wouldn’t?” Josh said. “I mean, for fuck’s sake, she’s my daughter…”

“It’s more likely,” Michael said softly. “They were just following procedure. Honestly Josh. Going by the book.”

Josh nodded, but with less conviction. Suddenly, he stood up. “I need to go home,” he said.

Michael rose from the bench, too. The woman with the pugs looked over at them, blowing smoke from the corner of her mouth.

“On my own, Mike,” Josh said, holding up a hand.

He looked as if he might cry again. Like a man at odds with the world, a man who was losing. “Sure,” Michael said. “Of course. Give my love to Sam,” he added, as Josh turned from him. “And I meant what I said. If there’s anything…”

But Josh was already walking away down the path. Michael watched him go, this man whose life, in less than a second, he’d torn apart. A man who, like him, had chosen to save himself, and who in making that choice had unknowingly brothered them, bonded as they now were by their lies and the false minutes they’d conjured.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“THAT’S IT. NOW
walk away. Slowly now. Just walk away. Take it easy.”

Daniel lowered the lunging whip, turned from the horse, an old bay mare, and walked towards where Sally leant, against a fence at the far end of the scrubby field.

“Don’t look back,” she called to him. Her two dogs, lying at her feet, raised their heads at his approach. “That’s it,” she said. “Nice and steady. Keep coming.”

After five months at West Valley this was the first time Daniel had let Sally give him a lesson. Up until now he’d preferred to stay away from the horses and occupy himself with his maintenance jobs instead. But this morning, when she’d offered again, he’d accepted. He couldn’t say why, but he was glad he had. In the role of teacher Sally seemed more settled than usual. As if everything else in her life was a distraction or a disturbance. As she spoke to him now her voice was coaxing, more gentle than Daniel had ever heard it before. And she was smiling too. So it must be working, he thought, as he neared her. The horse must be following him.

―

When Daniel had first come to work for Sally he hadn’t been sure what to make of her. She was gruff, short-tempered, fiercely independent. Years of living on her own had made her terse, as hard-worn as her sun-leathered skin. How she’d managed to run a guesthouse all these years he couldn’t tell. But she had. And not just any guesthouse, but one of the most highly regarded in all Sonoma County.

At some point there’d been a husband, but he’d left her, years ago. Daniel still didn’t know the circumstances, only that because of his leaving, Sally, now in her seventies, needed help through the high season—with the garden, the maintenance, and all the other jobs she’d rather leave to someone else while she worked with her horses.

“No, it ain’t fucking horse whispering,” she’d said to him when he’d first asked her about it. “Just common sense, that’s all. Listening, looking. Just taking some goddamn time to stop thinking all human for once. Realise ours isn’t the only way of being, of talking.”

Daniel had driven down her track from the nearby town of Sebastopol just a few days before. A simple handwritten sign had prompted him to turn off the road.
HELP WANTED
, written in red-marker capitals. Above it was another sign, painted and faded—
West Valley Guesthouse & Equine Harmony Centre.
It was early in the season, February. Which is why, Sally had been quick to tell him, she’d taken him on. Because he’d been the first one to drive down that track. One mistake, she’d told him as she’d led him to his quarters—a spare room with a single bed and a hotplate—and he could drive right back up it again.

But Daniel hadn’t made any mistakes. Not anymore. So now, five months later, in July, as Sally guided him through her techniques, he felt secure in his position. Over the months the two of them had got into a rhythm. He thought they understood each other. Maybe, even, that they were growing to like each other.

―

“Okay, that’s far enough,” Sally said, raising her hand. “Now turn back around. Nice and slow.”

Daniel followed her instructions and turned to find the mare close behind him, her head low, her flanks shivering under the touch of morning flies.

“Now walk to your left,” Sally said from the fence. “Still nice and steady, now. That’s it.”

Daniel did as she said, slowly walking up the slope of the field. The mare turned with him and walked on beside him as if tethered, nodding into the incline. He went to say something, but at his intake of breath Sally cut him off.

“Don’t talk,” she commanded. “Just walk. Walk and feel her beside you. That’s it. She’s with you now. She’s with you.”

As Daniel walked on with the mare he thought how much Sarah and Kayce would have loved to have seen this. And Cathy, too. But they were all still in Las Vegas. It was one of the things he’d found hardest to get used to. Not being able to turn to his wife or his daughters and share a sight, a thought. But for the last year, apart from one single day, that’s how it had been, ever since he’d reversed out of their drive in Centennial Hills and driven west to leave them.

―

After those first few days on the Sonoma coastline Daniel had decided to stay. To keep the sea close. But at the same time he’d had to keep moving, too, so he’d carried on driving. He couldn’t go any farther west so he’d travelled the coast road instead, as far north as Florence, Oregon, and as far south as San Diego. As he’d travelled he’d avoided newspaper stands, bars with TVs, radio stations with regular bulletins. He soon realised, however, there was no need to be so careful. In a matter of weeks the story that had so ruptured his life had already slipped from the media’s interest, surfacing again only when the inquiry reached its conclusion. “Accidental killing”—that’s what they called what he’d done. It had been an accident. People had died. She had died. A couple of columns on page three or four. An item on the occasional news channel. Even in Australia and Britain the Pentagon statement had been little more than acknowledged. The world had moved on. To other stories, other deaths, feeding its hunger for now, not then.

Through it all they’d managed to keep his name out of the press. Whether Agent Munroe had deployed suppressing tactics or the juggernaut of military protocol had just taken over, in the eyes of the world the drone had remained unmanned.

But so had he. In those first months travelling the coast, tracing its cliffs and fishing towns, Daniel had been unable to settle. His nerves were raw and his sleep, unless he drank enough, was cursory and restless. He’d known he couldn’t return to Las Vegas while he was like that. But he also couldn’t bear stopping anywhere for long. He was still getting by on his discharge pay, so with no job to root him, he’d drifted the Californian coast like a sixties throwback, exiled from his vocation, in possession of a home, but unable to return there. That home was, though, still his final destination. He was sure of that. Not the house in Centennial Hills itself, but Cathy and the girls. They were his home, and why he was staying away from them now, so that one day in the future they might continue to be so.