The First Cut (21 page)

‘You know she’s an obituary writer?’

‘I tell you, if this goes bad, you’ll be reading my career obituary in
Police Review
.’

‘Want me to check if there are any other bodies poking out of the ground over there?’

Jenny tutted. ‘We need to continue to investigate Struan.’ She gazed over the lake to where the wall separated the estate from the airport. ‘Maybe Struan’s connection was through someone at the airport. Did Struan ever work at Heathrow? It’s one of the biggest employers in west London, I bet. Maybe that’s how he heard about this place, rotting away with little to protect it.’

‘It’s odd though, why burgle the place when there are people in it? Most of the time it’s empty. If you turned up and saw the shutters open and a car, wouldn’t you just come back another time?’

Jenny frowned. She walked back out to the hallway and shouted for an officer. ‘Did Struan have a bag with him? Something to carry what he wanted from the house with him? It was a long walk back to his car.’

The man shook his head. ‘Found nothing like that.’

Jenny and Sondra looked at each other and turned back to continue their tour of the house. They passed the wine-cellar and spent a moment regarding the splintered door; it had been broken in half. Jenny walked upstairs. She wanted to put herself in Nicky’s shoes, to stand at the top of the stairs and just feel the situation for a while. When she passed a first-floor window a few moments later she saw Sondra walking along the furrows, taking a look, just in case.

‘A
re you OK?’ Lawrence felt Bridget’s warm hand on his knee and he covered it with his own. She was driving, her black eyes hidden behind gigantic sunglasses. The bushes lining the country lane were a blur, impossible to focus on. He reasoned he lacked perspective: on Adam, on Hayersleigh, on the hateful and bullying Mr Barnsley, who was straining at the leash to gobble up his land in his airport expansion. Even his name gave Lawrence the shivers. Lyndon B. It was the name for some kind of pop star crossed with a footballer. He was Connie’s kind of man – a man without history, making it up as he went along, reinvention being the great and ongoing act of his life. He was like the playboys and actors Connie had known when she still had a job. Connie had actually met him. She had wanted to sell, take the money built up in the bricks and vistas of the house, and spend it on transient things. But then the tragedy hadn’t been hers, had it? Her relationship with the house would never be what his was.

Bridget grabbed his hand and bounced it up and down on his knee and he felt the terrible pressure, which left him fighting for breath whenever he got close to the house, beginning to ease as they motored away.

‘Thanks for coming.’

She smiled. ‘I would always come, you know that. Lawrence, this is not your fault, remember that.’ She squeezed his hand, then added, more insistent now: ‘I know you don’t agree, but it’s the bloody truth.’

He didn’t reply. His own son, fighting and killing a burglar in that blasted house . . . It didn’t shock him. He’d lost the capacity for shock many years ago. When the worst thing that you can ever imagine happens, the rest is only noise. He felt only a great disappointment. That children were a joy was the great con of the age. His own flesh and blood – the only thing Catherine and he had created together that had lasted – was flawed . . . as deeply flawed as she had been.

A twist of fate had robbed Adam of a mother’s love, and in this confessional age his son had ended up mourning an idealized relationship he had constructed entirely in his imagination; Lawrence had had to endure the loss of the actual thing. Cathy could be nothing but a saint to Adam, and saints weren’t real. Cathy had been vain and bored and flighty as well as charming and bright, but he had loved her all the same. He had adored her faults: the risible paintings, the snobbery, the wittering. And he would have adored them now.

At times it was as though her death had happened five minutes ago, but at other times it felt so long ago it seemed impossible she had ever existed. The time expanded and contracted like a piece of origami. She had lost her life; he had lost the person he had been. I am an exile, he thought, a refugee from my own life. He saw Adam as a baby in Andy Pandy dungarees crawling down the shallow steps that led from the terrace to the lawns beyond, falling one day as he tried to drag the duck on wheels with him, and cutting his lip. He had felt his son’s pain acutely then. The scar that had remained had been visible through Adam’s tan at the station today. Lawrence had looked and felt nothing. Their child should have sustained him, but he hadn’t. People in grief talked about losing their anchors, their lodestars. He hadn’t known it then, but realized it all too acutely now, that he had lost his future. He had suffered a break in the continuity of who he was that could never be repaired.

Bridget said it made him a better judge. He feared it made him the worst kind: he was emotional, when the law worked only because it was entirely without emotion. He saw so many sides to grief every day in his calling – the blank faces of the victims’ relatives, their hands, whether bony or fat, rigid with a tissue crumpled inside them. He heard their shouts of rage when the legal system tied his hands and he couldn’t deliver them the justice they deserved. But success was often no better: if he sent someone down for many years their faces would crumple with exhaustion. What now, they silently said. And he could provide them with no answer.

The car sped up as Bridget turned onto an A road heading for the motorway. Lawrence rolled up the window to stop the wind. ‘Maybe it’s a good thing that he called you,’ Bridget ventured. ‘Maybe this is his way of reaching out to you, of beginning something new.’

Lawrence and his son had lived together since Adam left university and began to dabble in this and that. They had been together through Connie’s illness and her deterioration. He tried to think positively. Adam couldn’t be bothered to get a job or do training (that circus course surely didn’t count), but he spent hours with Connie, making her last months more comfortable, talking to her, keeping her company. He had shown great patience – love, even – to her. He hadn’t expected that, because he and his son were strangers who didn’t understand one another. They were civil, even perfectly pleasant to each other, and they put on a show for visitors and relatives, but the hard truth was that his son was unknown to him. Bridget was right. The phone call had come as a shock; what he heard when he got to the station was even worse.

Who
really
was Nicky Ayers? When he’d met the two of them the previous week their attraction to each other was obvious, his son and the older woman. She brazenly walked around with her wedding ring on. When they had left Bridget had done that thing with her eyebrow that he liked – raised it to her forehead like the curl of a question mark. They had both thought they had known where that was going, but they had both been wrong. Something dramatic and unpleasant had happened out at the house, but he didn’t know what it was.

He looked out at the trucks roaring past in the opposite direction. Bridget’s words struck a chord. Why had Adam phoned him? Was it a cry for help, or to rub his nose in the shame and discomfort? Lawrence didn’t know, and that, he realized, was his answer. I’ve raised a stranger, he thought. Another tear for his lost son dropped into the lake of disappointment.

N
icky’s life began to return to something approaching normal when Sondra appeared about seven in the evening with her handbag, car key and shoes, which had been retrieved from the house. She greeted them like old friends. Sondra stood by the door swinging a car key in her hand. ‘There’s nothing more we need from you today. You’re probably keen to get home.’ Nicky nodded. ‘I can give you a lift to the station, if you want. Your leg still looks sore.’

Sondra watched Nicky out of the corner of her eye as they drove down the high street. She was preoccupied, or maybe just shattered.

‘Have you been out to the house?’ she asked. Sondra nodded. ‘Did you find anything unusual?’

Sondra turned to her as they stopped at a red light. ‘Nothing I haven’t seen before.’

‘Does Adam have a criminal record?’

‘I’m not allowed to disclose that.’ Sondra waited while Nicky picked dried mud from under her nails. She was searching for clues, doing her own investigation.

‘What
was
he looking for under the lawn?’

‘I have no idea,’ Nicky said.

‘You really don’t know him at all, do you?’ Nicky didn’t reply and there the conversation ended. Sondra drove away, watching Nicky limp into the ticket office from her rear view mirror.

Two hours later Nicky was back home. She locked the door behind her, turned on the alarm, drew the curtains and then dragged herself up the stairs, shedding her filthy clothes and shoes as she went. She spent half an hour under a scalding shower, scrubbing viciously at her skin. Lurid images of what she had been through over the past few days were impossible to block out. She sat on her bed in a bathrobe and tried to think rationally about what had happened, but her hands were shaking and she was crying. She was having some kind of low-level panic attack, her thoughts a crazy jumble that jumped with no direction or reason between the present and the past.

She tried to concentrate on the strictly practical and dared to take a look at herself naked in the bedroom mirror. She looked pulverized. Bruises and scratches covered her torso, arms and legs from her barefoot run through the forest; she had a nasty graze down her shin from falling on the cellar step; the gash in her hand still throbbed; her biceps were ringed with yellow and purple bruises and weeping rope burns, and she was sunburned. She got out the first-aid kit and dabbed antiseptic on her wounds, redressing them as best she could, then rubbed moisturizer into her leathery skin and drank lots of water. She cooked a hot meal and forced herself to eat it.

The phone rang but she hardly noticed. At past midnight she finally crawled into bed, but not before she’d taken her largest kitchen knife and put it under the bed. She was asleep before her head sank fully into the pillow and she didn’t wake till a car skidding in the street dragged her from sleep at ten the next morning.

She sat in her kitchen listening to the kettle reach boiling point. The fridge hummed, a laptop light blinked. She revelled for a moment in the pleasure of pulling energy from the National Grid. A shaft of hatred for Adam bolted through her but she pushed it away. She’d made a choice yesterday and she was going to have to stick to it. Because of what she’d said Adam wasn’t facing serious charges of kidnap and assault; he was probably being portrayed this morning as an upstanding, have-a-go hero valiantly defending his property from a vicious intruder, someone so shocked at what he had been forced to do that he didn’t report the death for two days. He would be out of custody soon, and who knew where.

She picked up the photo from Struan’s car and turned it over slowly in her battered hands. Why was her picture in a burglar’s glove box? Was Adam right, and protecting her, rather than trying to do her harm? The rings round her biceps throbbed at the thought. He had said he was going to tell her something, but she had not believed him. She had seized her chance for escape instead and that had been the right choice. She felt a headache coming on and reached for the Nurofen. The kettle clicked off with a sharpness that made her jump. But Adam had said other things. That maybe Grace’s killer was after her: the assassin that had never been unmasked. Was it really a case of first Grace and now her? And if so, why?

She moved the photo, its shiny surface reflecting the light, obscuring her face and then the building beyond. Why had she not shown this picture to the police? Why hadn’t she told them what Adam had said about Grace?

Greg distrusted the police. In fact, that wasn’t strong enough to describe his feelings. He hated them. They were corrupt, stupid, lazy, racist and incompetent, and he had thought that before Grace had died. Their treatment of him after her murder, the circle of suspicion tightening ever closer round him, as they could find no other suspects, had deepened that enmity still further. Nicky had thought Greg’s manias endearing when she first knew him, but, inevitably, close proximity to them meant that some of his feelings had rubbed off on her. And what evidence could she actually show them of someone trying to do her harm? A picture in a glove box? She made a cup of tea as her headache began its rhythmic bashing against the inside of her skull. No, as things stood, she had nothing, even though what had happened to her was far from nothing.

She picked up her filthy dress in a fit of useless energy and threw it and her shoes in the outside bin. She’d never wear them again without being reminded of things she would rather forget. She slammed the bin lid down. She had better be right – her gamble had better pay off – because if she was wrong she’d let a dangerous psycho roam free.

Nicky checked her watch. She should be at work, but there was somewhere she needed to go first.

W
hen Liz opened the door the smell of burning toast wafted out behind her in a cloud. ‘This is unexpected,’ she said, folding her arms across her ample chest and leaning on the doorframe.

‘Can I come in?’

‘Of course.’ She paused. ‘Are you all right? You look like all hell.’

Liz had such a way with words, thought Nicky. The searing heat was showing no sign of breaking and she was uncomfortable in a long-sleeved top with a high neck and jeans. She wanted to hide her injuries from the world, but the scratches on her hands she could do nothing about. ‘I fell and hurt my leg, but it’s getting better,’ Nicky said, making light of her wounds.

‘Come through. Dan’s being “creative” in the kitchen.’ Liz waved her hand in a sarcastic flourish down the narrow corridor. ‘The way he’s going we’ll need the fire brigade.’

Nicky followed her sister-in-law down to the back of the house and said hello to Dan, who grunted and wandered off with his plate of toast, a pile of burned toast shavings, like coal dust, scattered on the surfaces.