The Swap (19 page)

A town can look very different when you are not staying with your parents in it. It can look even more different, and indeed better, when you are sitting in front of a full English breakfast. Even when you are preparing to meet someone you don't know who may well be going to cause you a certain amount of unhappiness or confusion, it can still look pretty good. Harvey gazed out across the wisps of mist that lay beneath them towards the wild white horses of the sea beyond. They were sitting in the conservatory-style restaurant of the hotel to which they had awarded their business the night before. Harvey had decided that a B. & B. just wasn't what a youngish couple in something very close to love really needed and anyway he had long wanted to visit this hotel again. The Atlantic Rollers was set, in an act of glorious Edwardian vandalism, actually on St Ives's principal outreach from the shoreline: Porthminster Point itself, as if all the people who travelled so far to look at this chunk of wild nature would be delighted to find that their hotel was its principal feature. And indeed it seemed they were, because in the foyer every postcard on sale featured the hotel prominently. The boy Harvey had looked up at this hotel and one or two others of the same vintage that were dotted along St Ives's bayfront and wondered at their sense of belonging to another world: like bubbles in which a different air was breathed, city air, with a taste of cigarette smoke and engines and danger in it. And the teenaged Harvey had, with Steve and Rob in particular, sometimes broken into these vast hotels – forced a fire door or found a broken window, and run down their dark, looming passageways, daring his friends to turn corners, to go further into their vast emptinesses, and then fleeing with smothered shrieks. What he remembered most was the fire-escapes that he and the boys would scale to run free on the rooftops, like football fields of white. And always he had wondered what it would be like to come not as a starstruck local boy, nor as an adolescent intruder, but as an adult, as a guest, received and welcomed at the daunting, if faded, splendour of the front door. Having failed so signally to provide Maisie with a memorable location for their first meal Harvey had sensed that this might be the opportunity to provide their relationship with the sort of romantic
mise-en-scène
that he was sure all women required.

'Pretty, isn't it?' He sipped his coffee complacently and indicated the view.

'Yes it is.' Maisie spoke across the devastation of a hearty man's breakfast table. She had had toast and coffee, Harvey had had tinned grapefruit segments, porridge, kippers, sausage, eggs, fried slice, beans and tomatoes. And toast and coffee. 'Do you feel like a good long walk before we meet Mr Simes?'

Harvey had placed both his hands on his stomach to better enjoy the feeling of being absolutely drumtight, but now he raised them in an attitude of defence.

'You are joking?'

'Perhaps walk off our breakfasts?' She twinkled sweetly and he found that he could deny her nothing.

'Um, OK.' He had thought of a little lie-down, possibly followed by a bit of unscheduled sex to fill in the time before 11.30a.m. when Simes had agreed to meet them in the hotel bar. They had got his name and telephone number from Steve. Maisie had suggested that Harvey's parents might remember him, but Harvey had said Steve would be a better bet. Steve had been excited to hear that Harvey was back and had demanded that they meet that evening 'for many beers'. This nuisance apart, Harvey was satisfied with his progress. Indeed, he was satisfied at this moment with just about everything. Had he not been a fugitive from justice he might even have whistled as they made their way out into the bracing air. The sea looked even better with the wind whipping their faces from the west. Maisie allowed him to put his arm around her shoulders and cunningly shield himself from it with her body. They walked down the path from the hotel to a gate that led out onto the headland itself. And there the grass was springy and the scent of gorse mingled with the smell of the sea.

'Oh, it's fantastic,' Maisie shouted into the wind and freeing herself from his grasp she ran down the track – distinguished only by a narrow line of more beaten grass – and on between the gorse bushes into the banks of heather beyond. The gorse was not in full flower but the odd yellow head showed itself as an irrational flash of brightness against the massing logic of deep greens and purples. While all for playfulness in its right place, Harvey was unenthusiastic about physical exercise this early in the day. He lumbered after her for a moment or two but feeling the breakfast shudder dangerously within him he slowed almost at once to a walk. There was a hint of stitch in his side and he put his hand there and puffed. Then, realising that she had turned and was watching him approach, he stopped doing both and attempted the confident, outdoorsman's stride. She came to meet him and put her arms round his neck. 'God, this place is alive! It makes me feel alive!' This last word was shouted out into the spinning air and she turned and ran again, leading him on down the path where the grass turned to shale and then up onto the rocks beyond. The rocks, black from the mist, lay like great whales beached on a foreign shore, in a reassuringly wall-like formation. Once over the whales' backs, though, they stepped onto a great disc boulder that marked the edge of the cliff and from which they could look down the spinning drop to the sea below.

'Shit.' Harvey stepped back and put his hand to the great blue-whale rock that reared up beside him. 'I haven't been up here for ages. I'd forgotten how high it was.' Dreams of falling, of rolling down the sides of cliffs, clutching onto tufts of grass that slipped from between his fingers, returned to him. That was the advantage of London, of course: you only had muggers and skinheads infesting your sleeping hours, and the likelihood of being blown into the sea was virtually nil. Maisie did not share his concern and stepping right to the edge of the great disc, looked down for a long time at the waves boiling against the base of the cliff below. She breathed deeply the stinging salt water in the air and it scoured her lungs, cleaning away the residue of the last few days in London. Harvey stayed back on the whale's flank, patting its smooth, cold, damp sides for reassurance with one hand and feeling for his cigarettes with the other. Before he could locate them, she turned back to him, her hair flying in the wind, a blizzard of curls. Striding forward she looked at him as she had looked at the sea and he felt it carried in her eyes, the green of the deep water washed over him and made him gasp. She pulled up his jumper and ran her hands, icy soft from the wind, over his chest.

'Fuck me, Harvey,' she said in a voice he had not heard before. 'I need you, right now.' And Harvey, wide-eyed with fear at what sex on the edge of a cliff might entail, but also suddenly consumed by the desire to be desired in this all-consuming sort of way, turned her and pushed her back against the whale's side. Then with a passion that he would later characterise as 'a bit D.H. Lawrence', he scrabbled the buttons of her jeans undone, tore them down and, kneeling on the wet rock buried his face in her crotch before standing and having what he would also later refer to as 'an old-fashioned knee-trembler'. The wind beat their bodies but they felt no chill, indeed Harvey was sweating like a racehorse by the time they finished. As they ended she gave a great howl into the wind and listened to it as it was whipped away from her, over the whale's soaring flanks and off inland. Harvey too cried out, though with a more grunting intonation that wasn't carried at all but seemed to stay for ages as a sort of echoed, animal noise under the rocks. She clung to him for a bit and then with a little laugh found her knickers round her left ankle and restored them and her jeans. Harvey turned from her and putting his back against the whale, dragged in great gouts of air. He really wouldn't have eaten that breakfast if he'd had any idea . . . He groped in the pocket of his unbuttoned denim jacket, found his cigarettes, somewhat crushed, and then spent several cursing moments attempting to light one in the swirling eddies of the wind.

'That was amazing, Harvey.' They had returned to the hotel and were now, red-faced from the sting of salt in the air and from their exertions, sitting in the bar drinking hot chocolates. Still breathing rather heavily, Harvey nodded his agreement. He was already busy writing up the memory in his mind for future repetition to several of his friends. Much of his teenage years had been spent attempting to orchestrate knee-tremblers on headlands, and mostly it had been a history of terrible failure and shame. But now when his mates played that 'strangest place' game and someone came up with 'in a hammock on a catamaran' or whatever, at least Harvey could provide a half-decent riposte. He grinned at the warm place that he had prepared to keep the memory; it was already part of the new bit of himself that he was calling the Maisie'd bit. It was a part of himself that he wanted to see a lot of.

'You seem to bring something out in me,' she went on, making it better and better. 'I'm not usually like this, I assure you. I was never like this with Jeff. In fact, he always did all the work, if you know what I mean. But with you . . . I can't keep my hands off you!' She laughed out loud, perhaps slightly longer and louder than Harvey would have chosen, but at least she was smiling, not always a certainty after sex, in his experience. He sipped meditatively of his chocolate and considered whether he should have a doughnut to go with it but realised that a woman who has only recently watched a man eat a breakfast of frankly heroic proportions might baulk at elevenses. So with a little sigh, no more than a breath really, he did his best to take sustenance from the warm thick drink while he watched for Simes. They had never met, and when the old teacher came nodding, birdlike and punctual, into his sight, Harvey considered him with a cool eye. He must be seventy, he thought, and was showing signs of the development of a naturally fit man who has spent too many years sitting down. He stooped and bobbed round the tables, his eyes seeking an ex-pupil that he had never taught, an irritability and potential excitability combined in his darting glance. With the air of one putting another out of their misery, Harvey stood up, startling Maisie slightly as she was telling him about Bristol, and waved his hand.

'Mr Simes?'

'Yes. Mr Briscow?'

Harvey got him settled in one of the low green armchairs with battered gold arms and then fetched him a hot chocolate from the bar. When he returned, the old man was telling Maisie about the headland outside and how in past times a hewer would sit in a little hut among the rocks and watch out for the schools of pilchards as they swam into the bay.

'He would have a huge horn,' said Simes, 'and he would blow the horn when he saw the fish.'

Harvey, who was behind Simes at this moment as he returned to sit down, caught Maisie's eye.

'So, he had the horn at the end of the headland?' she said with great interest and Harvey returned to the bar. Once in control he sat and smiled at the testy but eager expression on Simes's face.

'So, thanks for coming,' he said politely and Simes nodded. Harvey explained the purpose of their visit. When he had done so Simes regarded him with his head on one side, like a bird considering a brazil nut.

'You want to know about Charles Odd. Well, that was a long time ago, of course. Although I do remember him well. And I saw him recently at the reunion. He was in the maths club that I used to run, and that was what he spoke to me about. He was very animated, telling me about how much the club had meant to him, as if he felt it necessary to thank me. But it was strange, like he was talking about something else altogether in a way.' He paused and looked thoughtful at that.

Harvey was thoughtful too. He couldn't remember ever being invited to join the maths club, or in fact any club at all. Where was his club? He ignored the impulse to ask and instead said vaguely: 'Right, so a good student, yeah? But a bit knocked about, no? I mean, Bleeder Odd and all that.'

Simes considered this illiterate response with a little grimace of distaste. 'If you mean Charles was badly bullied at school, then yes, I am inclined to agree with you. But I'm still not clear what your interest is. And . . .' he turned his attention suddenly to Maisie, 'I'm afraid I don't even know your name.'

'Oh sorry. I thought you might have introduced yourselves. Maisie, this is Mr Simes, Mr Simes, Maisie Cooper.'

'Cooper?' Simes jumped a little at the name and narrowed his eyes. 'You are Jeffrey Cooper's wife?'

'Yes I am.' It was Maisie's turn to be surprised. 'Do you know Jeff?'

It was a simple enough question but it seemed to stir Simes up to a great extent. He made as if to stand up and then stopped and perched himself on the edge of his chair, glaring at them both. 'I feel that I am here under false pretences, Briscow. You did not tell me that Jeffrey Cooper's wife would be here. I do not understand what you have come here to ask me, nor do I understand what interest you have in this murder.' White patches formed in his reddening cheeks, giving him, to Harvey's eye, something of the rosetted guinea-pig. Maisie glanced, for a moment uncertain, at Harvey and then she too sat forward so that her face was quite close to Simes's.

'What do you know about Jeff?' she asked softly.

The rosettes began to fade a little as Simes sat back and regarded her, then he said: 'It is history, of course. Old history. Hardly the need to dredge it all up now.' He looked at her for a while and Maisie had the good sense to sit quietly and let him think.

Harvey sighed. If only he had ignored his probably imaginary concerns about Maisie's attitude and got a doughnut earlier it might be easier to concentrate. There was a bowl of them on the bar, fresh-baked and smothered in icing sugar. Shame to waste them. But as he was about to get up Simes spoke again.

'But perhaps it is right that this story should be told. Perhaps to the police . . . well, I will tell you.' So Harvey sat back again and bit his fingernails instead.

'It was in 1982,' said Simes, 'the year Trehendricks won the junior rugby cup, and your husband was one of the best young players we had, Mrs Cooper.' Maisie nodded with, Harvey was pleased to note, a long-suffering air. 'He was a bit of a rogue, I think, and he was a bit of a bully. All the rugby lads tended to be high-spirited. They played tricks and could be cruel, but he was the worst by some distance. He had, as I remember, a very domineering father . . .' He glanced at Maisie again and she did the nod with the same air and Simes copied it. 'Yes, very domineering, and Jeffrey brought the home into the school. He was unkind to a lot of the smaller, weaker boys and I was aware of that. For some reason mathematics seems to attract a disproportionate amount of such boys.' His eyes gleamed and Harvey and Maisie smiled on cue. 'Perhaps it is nature's way of compensating . . . Anyway, several of my boys were treated unkindly by Mr Cooper, but none as unkindly as Charles Odd. It was as if he had done something personally to enrage Cooper and he was brutally treated.'

'Yes, I can believe that,' Maisie said quietly.

'Well, one did what one could,' Simes went on. 'Although, looking back, I think we might have done more to protect poor Charles because Jeff Cooper seemed intent on bringing him misery. He would follow him home, ride up and down outside his house on his bicycle shouting out obscenities, singing cruel songs . . .' Harvey felt his bladder tighten and he gulped audibly. 'And then Mrs Odd would come out and chase him away down the road, no mean employer of obscenity herself, by all accounts. We knew of all this because there were complaints to the school, lots of them. From Mrs Odd herself, although these were somewhat confused and difficult to grasp, but also from other residents in the area. The pursuit of Charles Odd was known about and abhorred by many local people. But still it continued for some time until Cooper was caught.' Simes looked round impressively and Harvey realised just how much the old man enjoyed telling stories. He was aware also of the fact, felt instinctively, that he had not told this one before, that this was its maiden voyage.

'He was caught?' Maisie spoke as if she was grasping something that she had missed and was needing to ensure that she heard correctly this time. 'Caught by the school, you mean?'

'Oh no. We'd caught him lots of times, but a bit of bullying in those days, especially by the star of the rugby team, was not a very serious offence. No, this time he was caught by Mrs Odd.'

'Oh right.' Harvey, who had had his head down, looked up sharply at him and then his eyes went very far away. 'Caught by Mrs Odd?'

'Yes. Mrs Odd got hold of him. Perhaps she was lying in wait. She could be a rather frightening woman I found. Anyway she got him – knocked him off his bicycle. The bicycle was badly damaged. I remember that because it seemed to be the only thing his father was really concerned about. But she got him and took him inside her house. Charles was there too, of course. And she beat them. Both of them. Took them into a basement of the house, stripped them and beat them with a length of plastic tubing.'

'She beat them?' Maisie's voice was clear and sharp now. 'These were children, twelve-year-olds?'

'Yes, just children and she whipped them.' Simes nodded, more birdlike than ever. 'When he got home, Jeffrey Cooper's back was ripped to shreds. He had to go to the doctor, I believe. The school was appalled: it was about this same time of the year, early spring perhaps, and the rugby season was up and running. But of course the school did everything it could to help cover things up. That was what schools did in those days. Still do perhaps . . . Certainly, the Coopers were only too keen to participate in smoothing everything over. They didn't want any scandal in their family, though as I say Cooper senior was concerned about the bicycle.' He stopped and smiled without pleasure. 'Why some people have children I don't understand. But there we are. Jeffrey went into hospital but Charles was at school the very next day, business as usual for him. I only discovered the details of his beating because I found him crying outside the maths club. I made him lift up his shirt at the back. I'd never seen anything like it in all the time I was a teacher. I wanted to call the police, call social services, call someone. But the headmaster opposed it. Bad for the school. Not the done thing. So we did nothing and Jeffrey came back to school and nobody said a word. Even when it happened again a few weeks later, when someone else was caught by her and Charles was beaten again. Still, we didn't speak. All these years we didn't speak . . . And Jeffrey came back and the school won the Junior Cup. Glory days indeed. But the bullying stopped from that quarter at least. I don't think Charles Odd ever had to worry about Jeffrey Cooper again . . .'

Simes turned again to Maisie. 'You didn't know of this, Mrs Cooper?'

'No.' Maisie was seeing into another picture than the hunting scene on the hotel wall. 'No, I knew nothing about this. Jeff never told me. I wish he had.'

'Well, of course, it is not an easy thing to speak of. For a proud, rather arrogant boy like that, and with those parents of his . . . very difficult.'

'Yes, yes it would be.' Maisie nodded, as though solving a crossword puzzle clue.

'Well now, was that what you expected to hear, Mr Briscow?' Mr Simes, kindly now, and touched by his own narrative, turned his eyes across the table to where Harvey was slumped. There was a silence for a moment and then Harvey roused himself as if slapped.

'Er, yeah,' he said, 'good one. Thanks. Fast Times at Trehendricks High really. I don't remember that about Jeff, don't think I ever knew. I guess it makes sense of what he was saying in the shop, eh? And of course it gives him a great motive for murder.' He laughed loudly and then realised that he was doing it solo.

'You know, really I think that is a dangerous thing to say.' Simes shook his head and Maisie joined him.

'Yes, Harvey, please don't say that. This makes everything different somehow. Poor Jeff. And his God-awful father . . .'

Simes's kindliness got even kindlier and while he was patting Maisie's hand Harvey snuck swiftly to the bar. He returned with a large white plate with two doughnuts on it and placed it with a little ceremony in the middle of the table. 'Anyone?' he said.

Maisie gazed at him. 'I don't believe you're eating again, Harvey, and now of all times . . .'

'Er, no, no, I'm not.' Harvey sought to clarify this point. 'I just thought Mr Simes might be hungry. He is our guest.'

'Yes. Yes of course he is. Please do have some, Mr Simes.'

'Oh, thank you kindly. Very nice.' So Harvey had to watch Mr Simes eat the two doughnuts.