Knightley and Son (9781619631540) (4 page)

“I know, Mom,” said Darkus, hoping this awkward conversation was drawing to a close.

“And I’m always here for you, Doc,” she said, using his father’s nickname. Her eyes unexpectedly welled up. “Always.”

“Thanks, Mom,” replied Darkus sincerely.

She stood up and gave him a brief hug. “Don’t stay up here all evening, okay?”

“Okay.”

Jackie smiled and closed the door behind her.

Darkus watched the door for a moment, then rolled his office chair toward the filing cabinet. He took a key from his vest pocket and unlocked one of the metal drawers. He slid it open and reached inside.

His fingers found a small leather case, secured with a strap. He took it out, unfastened the buckle, and slid out a computer hard drive. He rolled back over to the desk, opened his laptop, connected the hard drive with a USB cable, then clicked on the icon that appeared and opened a series of files.

He began to scroll through hundreds of pages of text, images, and diagrams, all heavily annotated, with time stamps dating back to the 1980s. The file headings bore names like
The Haverstock Hill Murders
and
The Salamander Incident
. Photographs showed streets and buildings, and blurred faces that were obviously captured covertly. From the changing appearance of the buildings’ facades and the style and dress of the characters, the hard drive contained well over twenty years of detective work. Strangely, Darkus found that reading his father’s macabre case studies made him feel closer to him, even if he didn’t fully understand everything he was reading about.

Darkus clicked through the pages, past detailed drawings of a lock barrel and the blueprint of a building, arriving at a sketch of an open hand with its palm up, and another with an extended fist.

The bluish glow of the computer screen cast a reflection of him in the front window. He glanced at his image, then peered through it to the outside. The fog was still rolling in around the neighboring houses. The single lamppost produced a small circle of light in the murk, illuminating what Darkus realized was a shape standing beneath it. He drew closer to the windowpane, looking out.

A massive, bulky man in a long coat and a homburg hat stood under the lamppost, watching their house. A tiny red ember flashed from under the brim of his hat and a plume of cigar smoke billowed up, commingling with the fog.

Darkus closed his laptop in order to watch unobserved. But the man had already seen him, for he turned and walked away from the circle of light with a heavy, waddling gait. Darkus quickly opened the window, letting in the cold, and poked his head out for a better look.

But the stranger had already vanished into the gloom.

Chapter 4

Uncle Bill

The following day proceeded without incident, but Darkus couldn’t shake the feeling that all was not as it should be. He did not have the empirical data to know whether the massive man in the homburg hat was in fact staking out the house, or there was a more innocent explanation for what he’d seen.

Darkus had a tendency to filter everything he saw through what he called his “catastrophizer.” It was a mental device that had announced itself quite out of the blue, at the exact moment he first heard his father had entered the coma. For Darkus, the catastrophizer was both a gift and a burden, his protector and his enemy. In the absence of certainty, the world provided only signs of what might be: signs that indicated a possible explanation for a particular question. Every sign the world provided him with, whether visual, aural, or otherwise, was fed into the catastrophizer, which always produced the worst-case scenario. Of course, the worst-case scenario was often
not
the case, but on the occasion that it was, the catastrophizer gave Darkus an almost clairvoyant ability to detect trouble. For the rest of the time, the catastrophizer was a nagging machine running in the background of his mind, giving
him little chance to be an ordinary child.

For example, on his customary walk to the corner store, Darkus observed the local assembly of hoodies waiting across the road. Their leader always had his hands buried in the pockets of his sweatshirt, and sometimes Darkus thought he saw an angular shape through the fabric. The catastrophizer said it was a knife. Rationally, based on the statistics of his quiet neighborhood, Darkus knew it was more likely to be a cell phone. But when the catastrophizer spoke, Darkus had to listen. He knew it wasn’t exactly a positive device, but he couldn’t seem to switch it off.

He never spoke to anyone about the engine running in his head—except his dad, who, in his current state, was a great listener, but clearly wasn’t in a position to give much advice. He visited his dad every Saturday, traveling by bus to the hospice and spending several hours with him, telling him details of his life in no particular order. At first it had felt sad and forced, but after a few visits Darkus overcame his embarrassment and found himself having better conversations with his dad while he was unconscious than he’d ever managed to have with him when he was awake. Then, after discovering the hard drive, the conversation had progressed to a more professional level, with Darkus commenting on each case as he read it, often in great detail, harboring the secret hope that some key word or phrase might dislodge something in his father’s mind and wake him from his coma.

Today, although it was Sunday and Darkus had been at the hospice just the previous day, he felt an especially strong urge to see his dad again. Something about the bulky man’s surveillance of the house unnerved him, and his father was the only one he could talk to about it. Darkus felt that if he didn’t see him, something bad might happen.

As he returned home from the store, his train of thought was interrupted by a familiar figure in a black leather jacket with a backpack, blocking his path. Only now her hair was a violent shade of pink.

“Hey, Darkus,” Tilly announced.

“Hello, Tilly—”

“You
cheated
. You knew the spelling of abalone.”

“There’s no way you could possibly prove that.”

“Miss Khan videotaped the whole contest and uploaded it to YouTube,” she declared victoriously. “I saw your lips moving.”

“Ah.” Darkus fell silent, finding himself caught red-handed.

“If you’re lying about that, what else are you lying about? Huh? What’ve you got to hide?”

Darkus blinked. “I’m flattered you think I have anything worth hiding. But I can assure you, I’m an open book.” He sidestepped her. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—” Then he stopped in his tracks, seeing a massive figure farther down the road, approaching them slowly but steadily, with a waddling gait: the man in the homburg hat. “I really must go now,” he added quickly, then ducked down a side street in the opposite direction.

Tilly watched him, baffled, then continued on her way.

Darkus turned back to see the man in the homburg hat crossing the street, now clearly zeroing in on him with ghoulish determination.

Darkus increased his pace to a fast walk, not wanting to betray his fear by actually running. Although the man in the homburg had a lumbering step, his legs were long enough to effortlessly reduce the distance between them with each stride.

On reaching the main road, Darkus found cars barreling past in both directions. He pressed the “Wait” button at the traffic lights, but the signals weren’t changing. Seeing no other option, he turned to face his pursuer, who was by this time towering over him.

“Darkus? Darkus Knightley?” his pursuer wheezed in a thick Scottish accent, clutching at his chest. Under the hat was a heavyset man in his fifties, the remains of a lit cigar balanced in the corner of his mouth, his plump cheeks puffing smoke, his eyes concealed behind them. His florid complexion and the billowing fumes gave the impression that he was almost on fire.

“What do you want?” demanded Darkus.

“Just a wee chat,” said the man, gasping for breath.

“I don’t talk to strangers,” answered Darkus. The traffic lights finally changed, and as the pedestrian tone started beeping he prepared to cross, until the man said something that stopped him.

“I’m a friend of yer father, a’right?” he blurted in his near-incomprehensible accent. Surely no one, not even the oldest Scottish Highland clans, could have such heavy intonation.

Darkus turned to face him. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Uncle Bill,” the man said, doffing his hat.

His face seemed familiar somewhere in the deep recesses of Darkus’s memory, but beyond that he had no reference. “I don’t have an uncle,” he said suspiciously.

“Not technically, no, laddie. But I’ve known yer father since our university days. Been through a lot together, him and me. Seen a lot of exciting and sometimes unbelievable things. And if you’re anything like Alan used to describe ye, well, I’m sure you’ve grown to be a rather special lad yerself.”

Darkus examined him skeptically. “What do you want?” he repeated.

Bill looked around. “This is not the sort of place for this sort of conversation. If ye’d feel more comfortable, we could gab at Jackie and Clive’s place?”

Darkus examined the mountain of a man once more, then reluctantly nodded. “If we keep to the main road, where everyone can see us.”

“Auld ah th’ horn choice,” said Bill.

Darkus had no idea what that meant. But his catastrophizer had stopped whirring for the first time that day, so he decided to trust his instincts.

The unlikely pair made their way to Wolseley Close in plain view, and when Jackie saw the bulky figure beside her son on the doorstep, she retreated in surprise.

“Uncle Bill . . . ?” she faltered, her eyes flicking between him and Darkus.

“Thought I’d drop in for a cuppa,” he announced. “If you’re not too busy of course.”

“Of course. But it’s been . . . ,” she stammered.

“How long
has
it been? Four years, nearly five?” he mumbled, doffing his hat and bowing his head a little to enter the house. Once inside, the full size of the man became apparent. “Now, how about that tea,” he said cheerfully, attaching his heavy coat and homburg hat to a hanger in the hallway.

She forced a smile and headed for the kitchen. “I’ll go and put the kettle on.”

Clive emerged from another part of the house. “Jackie . . . ? Where’s all that smoke coming from . . . ?” Then he also recognized the visitor. “Oh . . .”

“A’right, Clive.”

“Uncle Bill,” recited Clive, looking a bit pale. “Er . . . what can we do for you?”

“Just a social call,” Bill explained, and followed Jackie through the house, trailing cigar smoke. He took a seat at the head of the table while Jackie took up position by the kettle.

“Milk and sugar?” she asked.

“Swit ’n Law, if ye have it,” replied Bill. “I’m watchin’ mah weight.”

Jackie wasn’t exactly sure what he’d said, but dug around in the cupboard for a sweetener.

Clive shifted on his feet near the corner of the room, his hands thrust into his pockets. Darkus couldn’t remember seeing either of them like this. He’d never known Clive to tolerate even the slightest inconvenience, let alone an impromptu visit from a giant Scotsman; and Jackie guarded her territory fiercely. And yet, for some reason, they couldn’t seem to refuse this “Uncle Bill.”

Darkus took a seat opposite their visitor, wasting no time. “
Where
exactly did you meet my father?”

“Freshers’ week at Oxford,” mused Bill. “Course, I was a lot younger, and lighter, than I am now. Would ye be so kind . . . ?” He extended his cigar in Clive’s direction, caked in ash.

Clive located an ashtray and placed it in front of him.

“Happier days, better days,” Bill said, ashing his cigar.

Jackie and Clive exchanged a worried glance.

“Do ye have any snacks by chance?” Bill asked. Clive sighed and reached into another cupboard. Bill waited patiently for what he would find. Clive set a jar on the table grimly. Bill shrugged. “Ginger snaps—that’ll do.”

“Darkus, maybe you should go upstairs,” Jackie suggested. “I’m worried about the second-hand smoke.”

Bill stubbed out his cigar. “On the contrary, I’d like him to hear this.”

Clive looked at Jackie, confused.

“Hear what?” said Darkus.

“What d’ye know about yer father, Darkus?” Bill inquired.

Darkus thought about it for a moment. “He was the most caring and generous dad anyone could ask for . . .” He paused, then added, “And he solved problems for people.”

Jackie swallowed hard.

“Aye, that’s the Alan I know,” said Bill.

Jackie and Clive remained tactfully silent.

Bill took his time, then continued. “He also solved problems for people who . . . shall we say, people with . . . less-than-ordinary problems.”

“Meaning?” asked Darkus.

“Yer father was a detective. A private detective. The best there is.”

Darkus listened, impassive. He knew full well what his father did for a living, but this was the first time he’d had it independently confirmed.

“It was his blessing and his curse,” Bill went on.