Parallel Life (16 page)

‘Yes.' Annie tapped her nails on the desk. Since becoming an apprentice, she had started to take care of nails, hair and make-up, and she was, Lisa had decided, quite a pretty young woman. ‘What makes you think it's him, though?'

Lisa shrugged. ‘Instinct. According to Eileen, he was in camouflage – well – cammy-flow is her word for it. He wore a combat jacket, and his face was blacked up. Baseball cap, too.'

‘He does have a camouflage jacket and a black baseball cap. But so do a lot of folk.'

‘Are you defending him?'

‘Am I heck as like. I'm just trying to make you feel a bit safer, that's all.'

Lisa felt that she would never know security again until Jimmy Nuttall disappeared into the bowels of some jail, preferably one several hundred miles away from Bolton. ‘It'll be the gun, Annie.'

‘Aye, it will. If it is him, that's what it'll be about. He gets something fixed in his head, and there's no shifting him. If he used all that energy for something useful, he could do quite well in life. But no. He wants the easy way. Fit an alarm, go back months later and pinch the family silver. Or drive a couple of lunatics to Brum, get a few quid for it, end up holding the bloody gun.'

‘You believe he didn't shoot the guard.'

Annie pondered. ‘I can't see him hurting another bloke, not really, not with a gun. But he'd do the driving. And he prefers to work by himself. No, I don't think he put that man in hospital. He was dead scared, though. When he came downstairs the day after, he turned the news off. Guilty as sin, but not a killer, Lisa. Just a thief and a chancer.'

Lisa nodded in agreement.

‘I didn't think he'd be your type,' Annie said. ‘Too rough for you. What the bloody hell did you see in him? Something like Johnny Depp in
Pirates of the Caribbean
?'

‘Not really. But Johnny Depp's a great improvement on Albert Einstein and his test tubes. I married a dry stick. Even his mother can't stand him. I mean, she loves him, but she prefers to love him from afar. Except on Tuesdays. Tuesdays, she loves him at family breakfast, though she hides it very well, keeps going on about his trains and his silences.'

Both women burst out laughing. ‘We both married wrong 'uns,' said Annie, giggling, ‘and neither of their mothers is right pleased with their kid. Where did we go wrong? I mean, what's Catherine Zeta Jones got that we haven't?'

‘A wrinkly husband,' replied Lisa. ‘Come on, we've stuff to do.'

It was as if they had been working together for years. There was an easiness between them, a lack of embarrassment, no need for the usual getting-to-know-you ritual. Annie had never had time for friends; Lisa's circle of acquaintances had been ill-chosen – all bridge-players, wine buffs and plastic-surgery addicts. Yet these two women, so different on the surface, were like sisters under the skin.

Annie looked up from her dusting. ‘I'm glad I met you, Lisa,' she said.

Lisa felt exactly the same. It was an ill wind that brought no good at all with it. Annie was the good, but the ill wind was still blowing over the town.

Ben couldn't settle to anything. He didn't need to study, because the exams so far had been a walk in the park, but he wanted to calm down.

The suicide had been plastered all over national presses. Police were reputed to have a team of IT specialists working to discover the instigator of the website. If they succeeded, Ben could well be discovered as a member of the group and as a witness to the terrifying event. He found himself rocking on the edges of chairs, wanted to run, didn't know where to go. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder closed down most avenues for him, so he made a momentous decision: he was going to get the hell out of this bloody house.

Tuesday's breakfast was the usual mix of accidental humour and gritty talk from Gran. Dad was excited about his third or fourth Flying Scotsman, and he had a great deal to say about honey from New Zealand. It seemed that bees limited to feeding from just one specific flower produced honey that helped greatly in the healing of stumps after limbs had been severed. While everyone else's stomach churned, Gus spoke about MRSA and the application of said honey to sites where flesh was being eaten away.

Harrie was giggling. Only someone as gaga as Professor Gustav Compton-Milne could chomp on toast while delivering a monologue on the benefits of maggots, leeches and honey.

Hermione glared at her son. ‘Shut up,' she ordered for the second time. ‘Some of us prefer not to suffer nausea before, during and after breakfast. Your strong stomach is to be commended, but please consider the rest of us.'

Lisa dug an elbow into her daughter's ribs. ‘Behave yourself,' she whispered. It occurred to her that she had never before dug her daughter in the ribs. Suddenly, and at this very late stage, she was becoming interested in her children. Ben looked terrible, she noticed. He was pale and gaunt, was probably reacting to his sister's intention to move far away to the other end of the back garden. Lisa thought of Annie and her love-them-hate-them attitude to her three children. Annie adored her kids, no matter what they did. She worked just part time in order to look after her charges and to rescue her mother from Tweedledum and Tweedledee, as she had lately nominated the twin boys.

Harrie managed to stop chuckling, though her mouth twitched as she spread manuka and jelly-bush honey on her toast. The jar announced its origin as New Zealand, so her stomach should be healthy, at least.

‘I've advertised for help,' Lisa announced.

Hermione glanced at her. ‘Help? For whom?'

‘For Woebee,' said Harrie. ‘She isn't getting any younger, and this is a big house. Woebee needs to dedicate her time just to you.'

Hermione pursed her lips. ‘Because I am now such a cumbersome burden.' She sighed. ‘Yes, yes, it is getting worse. I suppose we should employ someone for the heavier work. Well done, Lisa.'

‘Are you ill, Ben?' Lisa asked.

‘Tired,' he snapped.

‘Is it the exams?'

He shook his head.

Lisa continued. ‘You should be out and about making friends. It isn't healthy, locking yourself into your own prison.' She addressed her daughter. ‘And you, madam, should be finishing university by now. We can get someone else to run the shop.'

Harrie nodded. ‘I've got a place for September. Manchester. I'm reading history, then I'll do a PGCE and teach.'

Ben dropped his knife, bent to retrieve it. He was so fed up with everything and everyone . . . He sat up, looked at all the people round the table, then jumped to his feet. ‘You aren't real,' he began loudly.

‘Sit down, dear,' said Hermione.

But the dam was crumbling. ‘I watched a man die recently. On my computer. Live. I watched a live death. I lived his death. And you sit here and . . .' He ran a hand through his hair.

Pointing to Hermione, he continued, ‘She orders us all to have breakfast together once a week. We do it because she holds the purse strings. Sorry, Gran – I have almost nothing against you, but Tuesday breakfast is a nightmare. Especially with him.' He pointed to his father.

Gus looked up from his newspaper. ‘What?'

‘Puffer trains and bacteria, Father. With the odd virus thrown in to flavour the mix. You don't listen. You've bored Mum to death for years, and she's turned into an advertisement for Harley Street—'

‘Rodney Street,' interspersed Hermione.

Ben shook his head. ‘See? I tell you someone committed suicide, and Gran corrects my geography.

‘You said he died. I didn't realize he took his own life. I'm sorry,' Hermione said.

Close to despair, Ben turned on his sister. ‘I apologize for having taken up so much of your time, Harrie. I mean that. But I needed to talk and you went all Al Anon on me. Leave him alone and he'll come to his senses, eh? I can't
find
my senses.'

‘Then you should see someone about that.' Harrie's tone was soft.

‘We are damaged,' he yelled, ‘because of him.' An accusing finger stretched in the direction of Gus. ‘You are the least real of all. You aren't a husband, you aren't a father – you're just a walking encyclopedia of irrelevances. Our mum did at least keep the family business ticking. You? Too important for us, aren't you? Did you know that your daughter sees a psychologist? You are to blame for that. Because it's all about how and who
you
are, isn't it?'

Gus tilted his head to one side. ‘What are you talking about?' he asked.

‘Me and her,' came the swift reply. ‘I am supposed to be proud to bear your name, am expected to go into medicine or research – did you know that I can't bear to be touched? That I have to live alone to make sure everything is germ-free? That I had to be treated in hospital after burning my body with bleach? Do you know anything about anyone at this table? No. Mostly because you don't want to know, but also because we've become the two-dimensional paper puppets you need us to be so that your precious, sacred work will not suffer.'

Only Ben's laboured breathing and the chime of a clock interrupted the short silence that followed. Lisa looked down at her nails, while Hermione, clearly shocked, wiped her face with a napkin. Harrie kept her eyes fixed on her brother; Gus simply stared into the near-distance, his head nodding slightly as he processed what had been said.

‘Well?' shouted Ben at last.

Gus steepled his fingers and rested his chin on them. ‘I do know what goes on, Benjamin. I have disappointed your mother, you and your sister. My own mother, too, believes that I have been an inadequate father. For these and all my other sins, I beg forgiveness.' He stood up and left the room.

Ben pursued his father, screaming and cursing, the sound of his voice fading as the pair left the house.

Lisa rose from the table, but Harrie grabbed her arm. ‘Don't go,' she pleaded. ‘It needs to happen. Ben is working something out, and it's pretty horrible because I stepped aside and left him to it. If he has to take it out on Dad, so be it.'

Lisa shivered. ‘But he won't kill him, will he?'

‘Of course he won't.' This answer came from Hermione. ‘Benjamin couldn't hurt anyone; it isn't in his nature.'

Lisa continued to tremble. What a mess. She and Annie spent their working hours worrying about Jimmy turning up, and now trouble that had simmered for years at home was about to cover everything in boiling magma. ‘God, Harriet, I am so sorry.'

Hermione snorted. ‘Never mind sorry, Lisa. You did your best within your own capabilities. He has not been an easy man to live with – nor was his father. My husband was an arrogant fool, and Gus has grown up to be very like him.'

Lisa burst into tears and ran from the room.

Harrie looked at her grandmother. ‘I'll just . . . er . . . I'll be back soon.' She left the room and made her way to the front of the house. Ben was sitting in the driver's seat of that ridiculous camper van. He was weeping. Their father's Mini was just turning left into the lane. So, however close their encounter had become, each had survived it. She looked at her brother, saw that he was engrossed in his sorrow. ‘I can do nothing,' she told herself. And she should do nothing. For now, it was best to leave the cauldron to cool.

Had Harrie been possessed of X-ray vision strong enough to penetrate walls and bushes, she might have beheld a mind-altering sight. Halfway along Weaver's Weft, a Mini was parked. The man inside the car suffered the usual discomfort that resulted from squeezing six feet of body into a space suitable for a much smaller man. This nuisance he had tolerated for years, as he was determined not to leave a large footprint on the planet.

He was sobbing into a handkerchief. The man who owned several half-answers to questions pertaining to life and death, the respected professor who used to be a doctor, the red-carpet visitor welcomed in all continents, had finally met his match. His own son had ripped away at him and laid him bare. If only Benjamin knew. If only any of them knew . . .

But they couldn't know. No one could know. Each man had an Achilles heel, and Gus's lay deep inside, buried beneath years of hope, despair, joy and sorrow. His secret. His burden. And he had a terrible pain in his stomach.

The welt on Jimmy's face looked as if it might take days to heal, and it threatened to leave a scar. Although Sal pleaded with him repeatedly, he would not see a doctor, and he refused point blank to go to outpatients.

Sal bathed it and treated it with antiseptics. He told her that he was undercover as a representative for Apollo alarms; that he was working with police to discover why some alarms did not do a proper job. She was angry with the police, but she believed every word that came out of her lover's mouth. At one point, she asked why the crime had never been reported in the papers, and he told her that everything had to remain a secret while the matter was investigated. ‘And you're the one with the wound,' she concluded sadly. ‘It's not fair. Still, I'll do my best to stop it turning into a scar.'

He needed to test her even further by manufacturing a story credible enough to push her in the direction he needed her to take. ‘You have to help me, Sal,' he pleaded. ‘I'm in a lot of trouble, but it's none of my doing. The wife is trying to control me.'

She put down the lint with which she had bathed his face. ‘She never deserved you, that Annie. You wanted looking after proper, didn't you? She didn't value you, love.'

He shrugged lightly. ‘Aye, but my children needed me. That's why I stayed as long as I did. If it hadn't been for the boys and Daisy, I'd have slung my hook years back.'

Sal sat next to him on the sofa. ‘So she's friends with this Compton-Milne lot?'

‘Yes. Well, she knows them.'

‘And you want to find out where a gun is, even though it's not your gun, like. How did all that come about?'