Silent Children (16 page)

He was pressing one ear against the party wall, straining to hear whether she was staying at Janet's, when he heard the front door open. The footsteps it let in were Jack's. Ian might have had time to unplug the word processor and dart into his room, but he shrugged off the idea. He pulled the chair to him and sat on it, resting his folded arms on the back, and was facing the door when Jack strode whistling into the room.

"Are you lost, you poor old thing? Where are you looking for?"

"I can't go home. They've stolen my home."

"Try not to distress yourself. Try and think where it is."

"I know where. Someone's living in it. My wife sold it while I was away and I don't even know where she's moved to."

"Poor thing, have you nobody at all to care for you?"

"My wife might if she knew I was alive, but they told her I was dead."

"Then you must stay here till you find her. We've room. Some of our residents had to go back to hospital because they weren't up to something my husband got them involved in."

"Did he mean to harm them?"

"I don't know if he meant to harm anyone. It doesn't matter now. He isn't here, you are. I just need your details and then I'll show you your room and you can have a nice long peaceful bath."

"Suppose I had to tell you something about me you mightn't like?"

"It wouldn't matter. I'm meant to care for people, not judge them. Whatever it was, you'll get over it if you stay here."

"Promise you won't slam the door in my face if I tell you my secret."

"I never slam doors, it upsets my residents. You're dying to tell me. Go on."

"It's me, Adele. I had to let everyone think I was dead. I wanted to tell you, you don't know how much I did, and now I have."

He was nearly there. Walking from Cricklewood to Sudbury had taken a couple of hours, hardly worth mentioning compared to all the walking he'd done since his death, but he'd had enough of trudging and aching and starving with only the fruit and raw potatoes he'd snatched from outside shops to eat. He'd had to pull the potatoes to bits before his gums could deal with them, and he could still taste the soil from their skins, like the taste of a kiss he might have given children before he covered up their faces. In fact he couldn't kiss children, not since he'd been unable to kiss Biff. Just now he couldn't stand their noises either, couldn't distinguish cries of woe from those of pleasure. He hadn't managed since he'd found that his house was no longer his. Any high-pitched childish sound sent him crouching away from it for fear that he would be compelled to intervene. He didn't know how much time that had added to his journey, but now he was almost in sight of the single place where he could be himself, the solitary person who would let him. He was going to be calm, he told himself. Adele's residents wouldn't miss a little of their medication each, and he needed it as much as they did—he'd done a lot more to deserve it, after all.

The Haven Care Home was a wide white three-storey house beyond a curve in a side road hushed by trees. Branches toyed with branches over the solid eight-foot fence. He limped alongside the fence and made to swing into the drive. Instead he continued past, his legs trembling with the effort not to run and attract attention to himself. A police car was parked on the expanse of concrete outside the house.

It seemed more likely that one of her residents had misbehaved than that Hector was the reason the police were there. He swivelled, sending an ache up his body from his bruised feet to his gums, and crept into the drive. He assumed Adele and the police would be in the office, their discussion veiled by net curtains nervous with a breeze, and if he stood between the front door and the window he ought to be able to hear. He'd sneaked to the corner of the building so as to edge along the front when he heard the hall door squeak open.

He darted around the corner and pressed his back against the house. The rucksack hunched him forward as if the warm bricks were fending him off. He heard the front door and a voice that had to be a policewoman's. "We may need to speak to you again, particularly if any more of your husband's victims come to light."

"I want you to find them if there are any, poor little mites, but I hope to God I can be left alone soon to try and forget about him."

As soon as the car door slammed the front door shut too. When the police car backed into the road he felt as if it were withdrawing the house from him. Even more than her words, Adele's tone had made it clear how unwelcome he would be—so unwelcome she was bound to call the police. His aching gaze found the waste bin to the rear of the house, and he paced toward it in case it contained anything he could bear to eat. He only wished Adele could see the state to which she'd reduced him.

He raised the plastic lid and rested it against the house. Under a newspaper he found a mushy mass of leftovers spilling out of an imperfectly sealed bin-bag. A sick bitter taste filled his mouth, and he was about to lurch away when he read two words of a headline in the paper Adele must have brought from wherever she was living now. MURDER HOUSE, they said.

The underside of the paper was sodden with rot. He wiped his hand on the house and tore off the front page. A photograph showed a man on the stairs of the house where Hector had come closest to bringing a child peace. Above the man doors were dripping with graffiti, and perhaps he'd been chosen to point them out because he was a horror writer as well as the new lodger.

Hector folded the page small and pressed it against his heart until he was able to fit it into the album, where it joined the other newspaper photograph. He listened to be sure there were no sounds from the front of the Haven, then he limped fast and stealthily down the drive and went in search of a phone booth.

He found one on Whitton Avenue. As he looked up the address of the nearest overnight refuge, a couple of pensioners taking their extravagantly long-haired dog for a walk stared at him and murmured and stared over their shoulders as well. Apparently people who looked like him weren't supposed to use phone directories, or perhaps the couple thought he was planning to rob the coin box. He shouldn't have to suffer their contempt or another night in a refuge; he deserved better—he'd earned a little of the peace he had brought to all the children he'd taken responsibility for, the kind of responsibility no one else dared take. The word on all the doors in the photograph was supposed to mean him, and however unfair it was, it made him part of the house. It made him feel as though the man in the picture was trying to take his place.

Janet had just called her in from the back garden when Leslie saw Jack's car in the road. She made herself sip coffee that seemed unusually and unhelpfully hot while she chatted to Janet about how Ian was doing better at school, showing more interest in studying English, not seeing so much of his friends she disapproved of. Of course she was really talking about Jack, and hoping that he didn't regret last night any more than she did.

They'd slept in their own rooms overnight, and confined themselves to smiles and pleasantries this morning, and been wary of touching each other too much. Before he'd gone out, supposedly to research his new book, she had sensed there was something he wanted to tell her. She sipped Janet's coffee and eventually saw off enough to feel justified in abandoning it. "Will you have another?" Janet immediately said.

"Thanks, but I'd better start seeing to the things one does on Sundays."

"I understand. You've another hungry chap to take care of."

As Leslie let herself out of Janet's house, sunlight on the driver's window of Jack's Nova caught her like a flashbulb, and she heard a shiver pass through a series of trucks on the distant railway; otherwise the suburb might have been holding its breath on her behalf. She unlocked her door, all her keys jangling, and stepped across the threshold. "I'm—"

It was the sight of Ian that caused her to falter. Despite all her problems with him she had never wished him away, but at that moment she almost did. "Want some coffee?" he said along the hall.

Before she could wonder aloud if he shouldn't be somewhere else, at least getting some fresh air, Jack came out of his room. His face was so guarded that her own stiffened in response. "Ian?" she called.

"Want some?"

"Not right now. I forgot to get a Sunday paper. Could you run down to the shops, no need to run, I shouldn't think?"

"Leslie?"

"Just a second, Jack," she said, but his expression wouldn't let her wait that long. "What is it?"

"Can we talk?"

"That's what I—if you can just let me—"

"I should talk to both of you."

"Should you?" The proposal seemed so unrelated to anything she had tried to prepare herself for that she didn't know how to feel. "Well, if you think..."

As he left the stairs he stretched out a hand but didn't quite touch her, instead indicating the front room. "Care to join us, Ian?"

"Anybody having coffee?"

"Go on since you've made some," Leslie said, apparently the quickest way to move him.

"In that case I'll take some too," Jack said.

She could tell he wanted it no more than she did. They both glanced at the couch before taking a chair each. Having taken turns to risk a smile, they concentrated on the doorway. By the time Ian appeared in it, bearing two mugs of coffee and a glass of the cranberry juice he'd taken to liking since Jack had arrived, she'd begun to feel coated with static. She took yet another sip of coffee, one that tasted like a preamble to bitterness. "So, Jack."

"Sure." The word seemed to imply anything but certainty, and he took a gulp of coffee that must have hurt. "I wish I knew how bad..."

When he pressed his lips together hard enough to pull up the flesh of his chin she said "However bad it is we're used to coping, aren't we, Ian?"

Ian shrugged and thought better of it. "Sure."

"So give us a chance, Jack. If we can help, tell us how."

"You already have. That's kind of the problem. You've helped with my book."

"Which—" Leslie said, and realised aloud "Your next one."

"You got it, the one I want to write next. I think—okay, I think it ought to be about this guy Hector Woollie and what he did."

"Including here."

"I couldn't very well not deal with that, I guess. Tell me, or maybe you'll need time to study it, would that be a problem?"

"I imagine you'd get closer to the truth than the paper bothered to."

"I could include something about how the paper treated you if you like."

"I think we might, do you, Ian?"

"Reckon so," he said as if he wanted to sound even more American than Jack.

"Then if you've been waiting for permission you can stop, Jack."

"Well, okay. Thanks. Only..." He raised the mug toward his face but lowered it, refusing its concealment. "I have to say I didn't wait. I already started researching."

"We forgive you." She gathered that was what he wanted, so much that she had to say "When did you begin to plan it?"

"Maybe the first time I saw your house."

So this was the secret that had been making him anxious, or his fear that she would feel betrayed had. "I suppose that comes with what you are," she said.

"You're saying I'm..."

"A writer, what else? You have to take ideas where you find them, I can understand that. You can't feel as guilty about that day as I do, or you shouldn't. I wouldn't expect you to have told me as soon as you got the idea for a book, but I should have told you the kind of place I was bringing you to."

"The kind of place that may change my career, and I never felt more at home."

If Ian hadn't been present she would at the very least have taken Jack's hands. Instead she ensured there wasn't too awkward a pause by saying "What would you have written otherwise?"

"More horror, I guess. That's how I used to get the dark stuff out of me. True crime is a whole different area. I don't know yet how it's going to work."

"I'm just a reader, but if there's anything I can do..."

"One thing maybe you both can. Did you ever meet the guy?"

"Mr. Woollie, you mean."

"Hector Woollie, right. Did you meet him?"

"A few times. Most of the time we were staying with my parents," Leslie said, and was ambushed by a shiver.

"Don't talk about it unless you want to."

"I'm not sure I can tell you anything useful. He seemed just like a builder. He took me in, and I wouldn't say I'm stupid. I did think he was a bit too eager to make you laugh."

"How about you, Ian? What did you make of him?"

"Never met him. I was at mum's parents' or at school."

"Hey, no need to be disappointed. I guarantee you wouldn't want to meet him. Listen, Leslie, if you figure I'll be reviving anything I shouldn't, I can still back off."

"I wouldn't want to be the girl who killed a book."

Perhaps that was too coy for Ian, who grabbed his glass and the empty mugs. Once he'd escaped to the kitchen Leslie held Jack's gaze with hers. "Was last night another kind of research?"

"Are you serious?" he murmured, even quieter than her. "Only the best kind. Only finding out how good we were together."

"We were, weren't we." She leaned forward and squeezed his hands. "I'll try and remember more to tell you," she said. "I'll just have to keep reminding myself Woollie's dead and can't touch us."

"I'll vote for that," said Jack.

"It is you, isn't it, son? You've been so quiet I thought you'd gone for good."

"It's me and nobody else, dad."

"Where have you been all this time?"

"Far away. Maybe I should take you there. Maybe that's where we both ought to go."

"Are you content, son? Are you happy?"

"If I was any happier I'd burst."

"We wouldn't want that, would we, son? Your mother wouldn't like the mess. It'd be a laugh though, wouldn't it?"

"There's nothing like a laugh to make things right, dad. You taught me that and a lot more."

"So long as things are right for you, son. That's all I ever wanted. I always had you in mind."