Singled Out (17 page)

‘Which hostage situation?’ Jane wailed plaintively.

*   *   *

Later that night, refreshed by a jolly good blood-letting, I decided to try my hand at a haiku before retiring to my blameless bed:

Spring flushes out new life.

How green the frogs that gaily leap

into the white bowl.

And that was my
best
shot.

Writing them is much more difficult than I expected, and I now realise that every three-line poem is not automatically a haiku.

I’m not going to give Jane any credit, though. She just naturally has a brain that takes a perceived view and turns it on its head in seventeen concise syllables.

She does much the same with gossip.

Doesn’t syllable sound like something delicious made with sugar and cream?

*   *   *

… Keturah smiled like a fanged angel. ‘But I am not the innocent, trusting creature you left behind you, Sylvanus,’ she said softly. ‘Look again!’

My personal fanged angel woke me up at some gruesome hour of the morning from a brief and inadequate slumber in order to drive her to the train, but she wasn’t smiling, especially when she discovered that she had to pour mug after mug of strong coffee down me before I could even hoist my eyelids more than halfway.

As the sky grew slowly lighter beyond the kitchen window she got impatient. ‘Come on, Cassy!’ she said at last, twitching the curtains aside to peer out. ‘I’m going to miss the—’

She stopped and gasped: ‘Cass, there’s a disgusting old van parked right next to your car at the bottom of the garden, all painted up with big daisies like one of those New Age Traveller things! Before you know it, the whole lane will be jammed with them – hordes of noisy children, dogs, loud music, rubbish, crap behind every hedge…’

Yawning, I got up and looked blearily over her shoulder. ‘Don’t panic, it’s only Eddie.’

‘Eddie?’ she said blankly.

‘Your youngest brother, remember?’

‘You mean my brother actually lives in that – that
heap?
’

‘Yes, didn’t you know?’

‘No, I thought he was living in some sort of commune. I haven’t seen him for ages, because last time he stayed Gerald found him stark naked at dawn in the garden, playing his flute, and he won’t have him any more. The neighbours all complained.’

‘He still does that, winter or summer. He must be must tougher than he looks – or perhaps the demon weed makes you impervious.’

‘Perhaps he’s grown out of doing it now,’ she said hopefully.

‘What, the nude flute playing, or the weed?’

‘Both.’

The van looked deserted as we made our way down the path towards the car, but at the rumbling of Jane’s suitcase wheels Eddie stuck his head of flaxen dreadlocks and naked shoulders out of the window and said cheerily: ‘Hi, Cass! Hi Sister Immaculata! Long time, no see. Did you get your Christmas present?’

‘If you mean a bundle of twigs with knitting wool wrapped round it, then yes,’ she said icily. ‘Excuse us: I’ve got a train to catch.’

She edged past and wedged her suitcase into the car with some difficulty.

‘Eddie, I’m just taking Jane to catch a train to Cornwall, but I won’t be long. You know where the key is – help yourself to anything you want. See you later.’

I drove off, the corner of Jane’s suitcase sharply nudging my back through the seat, and Jane’s disparaging commentary about Eddie and his mode of life buzzing around me.

At least Mrs Bridges enjoys a naked Eddie in my garden. She says he’s a lovely boy, and if he wants to mend her washer taps next time in the rude nude, she’s no objections.

Were it not for Mr Fowkes, I expect Chrissie would say the same.

*   *   *

While Jane and the Giant Suitcase pursued the road less well travelled to a destination that might not be quite what she was imagining, her car remained parked on the verge at the front of the cottage, solid metal proof that she is in residence, should anyone care to come and do a visual check.

She has dispatched two long missives to Gerald and the parents giving the Gospel according to St Jane, so I expect they will swallow it down like they usually do, and Gerald at least will be beating a penitent path to my door before we know where we are.

If she is still away exploring Clint’s possibilities I am instructed to say that Jane is deeply hurt, stressed and incommunicado, but am just as likely to impart the information that she is deeply warped, selfish and a plausible liar.

I told Eddie all about it when I got back from the station, but he just smiled vaguely and then wandered off down the garden to his van in a cloud of wonderweed.

Eddie is well-meaning but not terribly bright (traits he shares with Jamie), so you never know whether he has taken in what you are saying. His eyes don’t register anything: the lights are on but there’s nobody home. He beams a lot though, having a happy and uncomplicated nature, and he is strangely practical and good with his hands.

I wonder if he is inhabiting a parallel universe, and so only appears to us on those brief occasions when there is a kink in the vortex of time?

He did wander back in later, to watch the video I’d recorded about rock climbing. Not that I’m interested in that sort of thing, but it was pretty gripping watching my brother Francis swing under a mountain ledge like an insecurely attached spider.

We already knew he’d survived the experience, because he’s currently up in his little Scottish climbing shop regaling his customers with the tale.

Eddie laughed whenever it looked like Francis might lose his grip as though he was watching a cartoon, which was disconcerting; but he does love us all, even Jane, in his way.

And he’d found time to change the leaky washer on the bath tap and mend a wonky kitchen chair while I was out.

*   *   *

Later, I discovered some folded papers in the side pocket of my bag: the printouts of articles about Dante.

Orla must have pushed them in there at the pub, then forgotten to tell me.

FIVE MISSING AFTER COLOMBIAN HOSTAGE RAID. Five men, including British journalist Dante Chase (on right in photograph), American TV cameraman Paul Vance (left), and three German agricultural advisers, were kidnapped yesterday while travelling to Bogota in the same vehicle.

It is feared left-wing guerrilla group FARC are responsible …

The photo of Dante showed a younger, less gaunt version of the man I’d met, leaning against a car in the middle of what looked like a desert. The one taken on his release showed a hollow-eyed, thin man with a haunted expression and hair even longer and shaggier than it was now – plus rather Che Guevara facial hair.

BRITON FREED IN COLOMBIAN HOSTAGE RAID SHOOT-OUT. Hundreds of soldiers yesterday took part in a raid on a former FARC safe haven, after the lack of progress towards peace talks …

There were several articles, but most repeated the same facts: Dante and Paul had accepted a lift from the German agricultural advisors, who were there to encourage the growing of crops other than those for the lucrative cocaine and heroin trade. The left-wing guerrilla group, FARC, who derived a considerable income from drug production, promptly kidnapped them, and the other two men with them.

From what I read, someone gets kidnapped and held to ransom by FARC practically every day there. Dante and Paul were just unlucky – in the wrong place at the wrong time – and Paul was doubly unlucky because he was killed, along with three soldiers and one of the Germans, in the raid.

WIFE OF BRITISH HOSTAGE IN COLOMBIA DIES AFTER TV APPEAL FOR HIS RELEASE.

A fuzzy picture of a pretty, dark-haired woman: Dante’s wife Emma. So far as I could tell she didn’t look a bit like me, which was somehow a relief. After that, the last hostage story was a short piece in a Sunday paper written by Dante himself, giving a brief description of the conditions they were held in, and a glowing tribute to the two hostages who had been killed. The paper disclosed that he had received an advance to write his autobiography, and it would be serialised before publication.

I thought that was it, but there was one more sheet with two small news items about Dante: in the first, police and an ambulance had apparently been called by neighbours after a fracas at his London flat. A Mrs Dufferin, the mother of his dead wife, was later released from hospital after being treated for a suspected heart attack.

In the second Dante appeared to have been involved in a fight with his sister’s boyfriend, who seemed to have got the worst of it, although no charges were made.

That was it, the tantalising bones of Dante’s past, already picked over in public and now on the internet, for anyone to see.

I studied the before and after pictures for a while, but they didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.

Chapter 12: Rover’s Return

I have recently learned, to my complete surprise, that the sister of the accomplished poet Jane Leigh is none other than Cass Leigh, author of such extreme examples of the horror genre as
Grave Concerns
and the very disturbing
Twisted Sister.

No greater contrast could exist between the exquisitely honed haiku of the former and the dark, warped fiction of the latter …

Wordplay Magazine

No word from Max saying whether he was definitely going to come and see me, let alone what time and for how long. As usual he just took it for granted that I would hang about the house all day waiting for him.

Clearly nature intended him to be a delivery man, not a university lecturer.

Under the circumstances it hardly seemed worth getting his stuff out of the attic, which would have felt like dressing a stage set where the main actor might or might not turn up and there was, unfortunately, no understudy.

Not that I didn’t understand that he’d had the funeral and its attendant rites to contend with, but I needed to see him too. And you’d think, after so long apart, that he’d be pretty desperate to see me.

I’m sure all this worry and stress is subconsciously affecting my book, because it seems to be developing strangely: Sylvanus is turning into a blonde, blue-eyed monster, while Vladimir, the supposed villain of the piece, is evil but darkly attractive, with a clever if warped logic and moral code.

Keturah is fighting the bad in both of them at the moment, but since her near-vampire experience she seems to find a little evil quite sexy, so she has to fight herself too. She’s not sure what effect biting either of them would have, if any … and I might just let her go for broke and find out.

It’s all getting quite complicated, but I’m sure she’ll sort something out in the end, now she’s got over being such a wimp. I can’t think what got into her, apart from Vlad, and that was just a Lite Bite.

It will be interesting to see which way she jumps.

*   *   *

Jason popped in during his lunch hour to confess that he’d been flirting with Jane the night before in the hope of making me jealous. He didn’t confess that he’d also quite fancied her too, but then, the poor old thing doesn’t realise he’s as transparent as a jellyfish.

He’d been mulling things over among his bits of antique tat, and what he really wanted was for me to swear I would end the Max affair on Friday and take up with him instead, but I managed to smooth him down a trifle and send him off in a happier frame of mind without actually promising anything at all.

Later I phoned Orla up for a chat, during the course of which I managed to ask her casually if she’d ever really, really fancied a man while realising that he was not only infinitely alien in all ways to her, but dangerously scary somehow with it.

‘All the time,’ she said promptly. ‘Hell’s Angels, mostly.’

‘Hell’s Angels? Orla!’

‘Middle-aged ones, with pony-tails and all that black leather … and maybe sunglasses. You know?’

‘Well yes, but—’

‘And Lemmy, out of Motorhead. Part of me wouldn’t mind meeting him down a dark alley!’

‘You can’t be serious?’ I said incredulously.

‘Yes I can, and you did ask! Dante’s got a touch of the dark, intense, scary side about him too, don’t you think? I don’t know what it is, but he’s got it, while Jason, who has
terrific
rages, hasn’t. Were you thinking of Dante?’

‘No, of course not! I wasn’t thinking of anyone in particular, just struggling with the villain-vampire in my book, Vladimir.’

‘Yeah, right,’ she said.

‘Perhaps I
was
thinking about him a bit,’ I admitted. ‘Objectively – some aspects of his character have interesting possibilities.’

‘They certainly do,’ she enthused. ‘I’d like to research them for you.’

‘I think I’ll invent some, thanks, but go ahead and research on your own account.’

‘I wish!’

There was no sign of Dante at the pub that evening, which I was extremely glad about, because I do not want him glowering disapprovingly at me on a nightly basis. (I
think
it was disapproval.) He seems very moody, and most of the moods are shades of deepest gloom, but I expect a lot of it is due to his awful experiences.

Jason was back in a sulk, after all my hard work too, but whether that was because he felt his nose had been put out of joint by Dante’s arrival on the scene, or because he was still jealous of Max’s (putative) visit, I don’t know.

It was a hot night for the Barbie phone: Orla booked two Marilyn Monroes and a Gorillagram.

*   *   *

On the Friday I arose mid-morning after a hard night’s work and, feeling surprisingly nervous, attired myself in Festive Springtime Black to await the return of the rover.

And waited … and waited … and waited.

I’d eaten a mushroom and black olive pizza, two apples, and a small bunch of green grapes before Max’s BMW sports car finally pulled up outside the cottage – or as near to it as he could get, seeing Jane’s car was taking up the whole verge in front, and my car and Eddie’s van were occupying the parking space at the end of the garden.

I wasn’t sure where Eddie’d got to, unless Mrs Bridges was measuring him again for the rainbow Rasta hat and matching jumper she was knitting for him, but he had briefly met Max once and they could not be said to have clicked, so I expect he will keep out of the way.