Night Music (45 page)

Perhaps now they could talk.

He did not notice the water level in the cast-iron bath, which had continued to climb after Kitty had fled. He did not hear the creaking of the depleted floor joists, subjected to unexpected pressure from the weight of the water.

Matt McCarthy climbed back through the hole, walked slowly into the master bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed and—

Byron walked slowly up the stairs, glancing into every room he passed in case the boy was there. Years of tracking had made his movements near-silent, and few of the stairs creaked now that the wooden boards had been relaid.

He reached the landing, and heard taps running. The bathroom door was ajar, the room apparently empty. He pushed on the door of the master bedroom, and there was Matt, sitting on the bed. He was staring straight in front of him at the hole. Matt looked up and blinked.

He had been expecting someone else, Byron realised. He stood in the doorway. He was no longer frightened of anything Matt McCarthy could do.

‘Where’s Isabel?’ Matt asked. His skin was grey beneath the tan, apart from two spots of colour in his cheeks.

‘You need to leave,’ said Byron, his voice low and steady. But the thumping of his blood as it pumped through his body was so loud he was sure it must be audible.

‘Where’s Isabel?’ Matt repeated. ‘She’s meant to come up and talk to me.’

‘You’ve just scared Kitty half to death,’ Byron said. ‘Get out. Now.’

‘Leave this house? Who are you to tell me to leave it?’

‘You bully everyone, don’t you?’ Byron could feel an old anger now, an anger he had spent years keeping under wraps. ‘You’d bully a young girl if it meant you got this house. Well, I’m telling you, it’s over, Matt.’

As Byron spoke, Matt had returned to staring through the hole, watching the water as it gushed to the rim of the bath and then brimmed over the edges. It was as if he hadn’t heard him.

‘Get out,’ said Byron, shoulders braced for the force he would require to eject Matt. ‘I’m telling you—’

Matt looked at him. ‘Or what? You’ll make me? One word, Byron.’ Matt laughed, as if at some private joke. ‘One word. If you can spell it. P-A-R-O-L-E . . .’

The thumping in Byron’s ears became unbearable. He saw Matt’s mocking smile, the deadness behind his eyes, and discovered he no longer cared about the consequences. All that mattered was stopping this man, showing him he could no longer frighten and cheat people, exploit Isabel. He lifted his fist, drew it back—

And his breath was sucked from him as, with a terrible cracking, wrenching sound, the bathroom floor began to give way—

Byron, thought Isabel, picking up her violin and trying to think of something cheerful and diverting to play. Everything would be okay because he was here. He would make sure nothing happened— At a splintering, tearing noise she dropped the instrument and spun round—

The noise broke into the still air like a gunshot, a terrible noise, filled with dread; it sucked the atmosphere into a vacuum, and then came a low rumble, a groan, a deafening crash of timbers and tiles all undercut by a terrifying timpani of breaking glass. The Spanish House was collapsing from its centre, as if some great crack had opened in the earth between the two wings. The earth trembled, ducks rose shrieking from the reeds, as the two sides crumbled. As Isabel, Kitty and the guests stared, their gasps of shock stalled in their lungs, the whole thing was gone, folded in on itself, a great plume of dust rising to fill the space where a house had once been. And then it cleared, and there, against the sky, were two half-standing ends of a house, its splintered joists rising like broken bones, its floors, its walls so many piles of rubble, a thin stream of water trickling from a broken pipe, like a celebratory fountain, in the centre.

No one said anything. Sound and time had been sucked away. Isabel let out a little ‘uh’ of shock, her hands clapped to her mouth, and after a brief pause, Kitty began to wail, a high-pitched, unearthly sound. Her body shook violently and her eyes were fixed on the place where her home had been. Then, when she could finally form the words: ‘Where is Thierry?’

Laura stared through the windscreen, unable to believe what she had just witnessed. The sheer magnitude, the unlikeliness, had pinned her to the passenger seat. There was no house where, moments earlier, a house had been, just this terrible skeleton, two sides rising up, the innards of the rooms exposed – wallpaper, a picture still hanging, knocked to a jaunty angle. Half a bedroom, posters still pinned to the wall.

Behind her, in the back seat, her old dog whined.

Fingers fumbling, she managed to open the door, and got out. From there, on the drive, teenagers huddled together in shock, still clutching towels. Isabel was staring at the house, her hands pressed to her mouth. Then the Cousins were behind her, Henry’s mobile phone pressed to his ear as he shouted instructions. Pottisworth, she thought absently, feeling his malevolent presence in this, hearing his unpleasant wheezy cackle in the splintering of wood, the delayed smash of a pane.

And then Nicholas was striding towards her, his face ashen, his folder still clasped to his chest.

‘What the hell?’ he was saying. ‘I was in the garage. What the hell?’

And all she could do was shake her head. They began to make their way to the garden.

‘Thierry!’

They rounded the corner and Laura’s heart leaped into her mouth.

‘Thierry!’ Isabel stood on the grass a few yards away. Her hair was wild and when she tried to move forward her legs gave way and she sank to the ground.

‘Oh . . . oh, no,’ Laura breathed. ‘Not the child . . .’

Nicholas reached for her hand but, suffused with dread, she could not take it.

‘It’s Matt,’ Nicholas was saying. ‘He must have weakened the structure. I’d swear it was sound the first time I saw it.’

Laura could not take her eyes off the Delancey woman. She was white with fear, her eyes blank with catastrophe.

Behind her, her daughter was sobbing.

‘Mum?’ someone called. And again: ‘Mum?’ Isabel turned, and Laura thought she would never forget the look on her face. The boy was coming through the trees, his puppy at his heels. ‘Mum?’

She was on her feet and running barefoot as fast as she could across the grass, past them all, and then she had him in her arms, and she was sobbing so hard that Laura found she too had begun to cry. Laura watched her, heard her sobs. Saw grief and pain, brought about in part by her own desire.

She felt suddenly like a voyeur and turned to the house, a great splintered hole in the middle of the woods. The frontage was now a red-brick mask, two blank windows for eyes, its doorway an open mouth of despair.

It was through this that she saw her husband stumble out, his head bloodied, one arm hanging awkwardly at his side. He seemed no more troubled than if he had been sizing up a job.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Nicholas muttered.

She saw suddenly the depth of Matt’s insanity.

‘Laura?’ Matt said, tramping over the bricks, and she realised that, only a few hundred feet from his home, Matt McCarthy was completely lost.

‘Thank you,’ Isabel was saying, to some unknown deity, unable to let go of her son. ‘Oh, thank you. Oh, God, I thought . . . I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear it.’ She breathed in Thierry’s scent, refused to let him pull away from her, her tears on his skin.

‘We’ve counted everyone, all the kids,’ Henry said. ‘They’re okay.’

‘Keep them back,’ Asad said. He broke off to use his inhaler. ‘We should make them stand by the lake.’

There was another low rumble. ‘What’s that?’ said Kitty.

As they stared in horror, the back wall of the west wing, the remaining half of the master bedroom, teetered and then, as if in slow motion, collapsed in a shower of bricks and glass, prompting a shout from the young people on the lawn, some of whom were running towards the lake. Isabel clamped her arms round her two children, trying to shield their faces with her hands. ‘It’s okay,’ she was murmuring. ‘It’s okay. You’re safe.’

‘But where’s Byron?’ Kitty asked.

‘Byron?’ Thierry said blankly.

‘He went to find Thierry,’ Kitty said dully, and turned towards where the boiler room had been.

‘Oh, sweet Lord,’ said Henry.

Isabel was across the grass, then on her knees hurling pieces of brick behind her. ‘Not again,’ she was murmuring, her voice thick with fear. ‘Not again. Not you too.’ And then, as word spread, they were all beside her, pulling at timbers, the teenagers’ slim limbs red with brick dust, Isabel’s hands raw and scraped. ‘Byron!’ she was yelling. ‘Byron!’

The Cousins had Kitty and Thierry, wrapping them in towels despite the warmth of the sun. Thierry was shaking, his face bleached with shock. Henry poured him a sweet drink. ‘Is it my fault?’ Isabel heard her son ask, and felt her own face crumple in response.

Six of them were hauling at a roof timber and gasped as it finally came free. Kitty’s friends were shouting at each other, warning of glass or protruding nails. Two girls were weeping, and one stood a short distance away, talking on a mobile phone.

‘They’ll be here soon,’ Henry was saying, as if to reassure himself. ‘The fire brigade and the ambulance. They’ll find him.’

Isabel ploughed on, her movements settling into a rhythm. She chucked bricks behind her, one, two, three, try to see if there’s a gap below, one, two, three, shout again. Her breath was uneven, heart pounding against her ribcage.

‘Don’t let them walk over anything,’ Asad called. ‘If he’s underneath it might cause something else to fall on him.’ As if to confirm what he had said, two teenagers squealed as a piece of wood gave way beneath them, and they were pulled to safety by their friends.

‘Get them away,’ Asad shouted. ‘Everyone, move away. The other side might still come down.’

It was hopeless, Isabel thought, sitting back. She glanced at her watch and saw it had been almost twenty minutes now but they still had no idea where he was. A sense of chaos had begun to build, of delayed hysteria. Behind her, two people were arguing about the best way to lift a joist. Henry and Asad were telling the teenagers to stop what they were doing and move away. Underlying everything, she could hear her daughter’s attempts to reassure Thierry that it would be okay.

But it was not okay. Byron was somewhere in the remains of the house. And every minute that passed might count. Help me, she told him silently, sweat pooling between her shoulder-blades as she dragged at another piece of rubble. Help me find you. I can’t bear to lose you too. Then she sat back on her heels, the balls of her hands pressed to her eyes.

She sat like that, completely still, for a minute. Then she looked behind her. ‘Be quiet!’ she yelled. ‘Everyone, be quiet!’

And it was then she heard it: the distant sound of frantic barking. ‘Thierry!’ she cried. ‘Where are Byron’s dogs? Get his dogs!’

Briefly his face lit up. As the bemused onlookers watched, Thierry raced round the lake to Byron’s car and let out Meg and Elsie. They flew across the lawn, heading straight for the far end of the house.

‘Quiet! No one make a sound!’ Isabel called, and there was silence, a stillness more portentous than the crash that had preceded it. Kitty, held by Henry, stifled her sobs, as Isabel threw herself down beside the dogs and shouted again: ‘Byron!’ she cried out, and her voice was imperious, terrible, strange even to herself. ‘Byron!’

The silence seemed to last a thousand years, long enough for Isabel’s heart to become still with fear, acute enough for her to hear the chatter of her daughter’s teeth. Even the birds were quiet, the whisper of the pines absent. In a tiny corner of the countryside, time contracted, and stood still.

And then, as the noise of the siren broke into the far distance, the dogs barked again, at first whimpering, and then with growing hysteria, their paws scraping at a heap of fallen timber, they heard it.

His shout.

Her name.

The sweetest music Isabel had ever heard.

He had got off lightly, all things considered, the paramedics said. A suspected collarbone fracture, a gash in his leg and severe bruising. They would keep him in hospital overnight, check that there were no internal injuries. As he lay on the stretcher, in the midst of the paramedics’ discussions, the abrupt hiss and halt of the police radios, Laura McCarthy had watched the Delancey boy walk up to him. Wordlessly, unnoticed by the adults around him, he had laid his head on Byron’s hand, his own resting on the man’s blanketed torso. Byron had lifted his head at the unexpected weight, and then, blinking, reached out a battered hand to touch the boy’s cheek. ‘It’s okay, Thierry,’ he said, so quietly that Laura almost didn’t hear him. ‘I’m still here.’

It was then, as he was loaded into the ambulance, that she had stepped forward. She reached into her handbag and pulled out the letter, placing it in Byron’s bandaged fingers. ‘I’m not sure what this is worth now, but you might as well have it,’ she said briskly, then turned away before he could say anything.

‘Laura?’ Matt said. Heavily bandaged and flanked by policemen, a blanket round his shoulders, he was like a child, helpless, vulnerable. There’s nothing left of him, she thought. He’s been demolished, like the house.

In the end, it was so simple. She turned to Nicholas and lifted a hand to his cheek, feeling his skin under her fingertips, the hidden strength of his jawbone. A good man. A man who had rebuilt himself. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said softly. Then she took her stunned husband’s arm and walked with him to the police car.

Twenty-five

They had spent the first night in Byron’s hospital room. Thierry didn’t want to leave him, and there was nowhere else for them to go. The nurses, hearing what had happened, had given them a small side-ward to themselves, and while Kitty and Thierry climbed into the two spare beds there and slept, their faces shadowed from the day’s events, Isabel sat between them, and tried not to think of what might have been.

Around her, she listened to the timeless sounds of a hospital at night – soft shoes squeaking on linoleum floors, murmured conversations, a sporadic beeping that heralded a cry for help. In the hours when she drifted off, a wrenching, crashing noise echoed through her dreams, with her daughter’s thin wail and Thierry’s bemused ‘Mum?’ forcing her into jumpy wakefulness.