infinities (13 page)

Trying, without much hope, to gather himself, he swallowed and then pressed the three nines.

~

Driving back to the Strand seemed so much quicker—the way back never takes as long. He knew where he was going now, it was simply a matter of retracing his route.

He had waited a long time in that deserted pub car park. He had wanted to cry, but tears are never easy when you need them the most.

Back left out of the car park, on a short distance to the unmarked junction, then left again over the level crossing, still clear. He took the lane steadily, trying to convince himself that he was being sensible and not merely delaying his return.

The lane was single track, unsurfaced, with grass growing along its spine. Ahead, through the breaks in the trees, he could see the estuary again: lights on the water, and a dark grey smudge he knew to be the exposed mud-flats of Copperas Bay.

His rearview mirror suddenly flashed urgent blue at him and harsh headlights winked on and off impatiently. He pulled over into a gateway and waited as two blue-lighting police cars scrambled past, followed by a third unmarked Astra. They were in more of a hurry than he was. It was all in their hands now. He should be relieved, but all he could feel was the tiredness dragging at his every movement.

When he reached the Strand, he had to drive on past the police cars by Ronnie's chalet in order to park. There was a row of maybe twenty A-frames here, on the western lip of Copperas Bay. All the same triangular profile—timber roofs right down to the ground on either side—they backed onto a raised earth bank and the muddy track which the Strand Lane had become. At the front, the bank dropped away and the chalets were supported on stilts which plunged into the grassed-over ooze of the estuary. About halfway along, there was a gap between the cabins, and here a ramshackle jetty of roped-together pontoons snaked out across the mud. Years ago this development had been the start of something bigger but, in the Bathside way, it had never been completed.

Nick Redpath left the car and headed back to the chalet. There were already four or five uniformed men at the scene, and two officers in shabby, plain suits. Another car pulled up as Nick approached. He heard raised voices, lowered voices, Mandy Kemp whimpering again from the neighbouring chalet. Engines grumbled, tinny robot monotones came from two-way radios in the open cars and attached to heavy belts. Torches leapt along the path that led into the wood, then they clustered partway along. Lights around a moth, he kept thinking, irrationally. Lights around a beautiful, fragile moth.

But the moth was dead.

He leaned back against a tree, straightening the weary curve of his spine. He liked the solidity, the coolness against the spreading stiffness of his body. He shouldn't have tried to drink tonight, it always made him feel like this: instantly hungover and miserable. He had never been able to gain pleasure from alcohol or drugs, no matter how hard he tried to educate himself. Pints with the lads were always, for him, orange juice or Coke, and driving duties afterwards.

Slowly, his body slid down the trunk, snagging on the bark. He crouched, elbows on knees, face pressed into his hands.

Time passed, during which he was dimly aware of the buzz of activity around him, the occasional rush of air as someone passed nearby. He started to lose track of what was happening.

He rubbed his eyes, looked up.

Caroline Betts was pointing at him, talking to a stout man who looked like he dressed by mail order. "That's him," she said, her tone unusually low. "Over there. Against the tree." Beyond her, Betsy—Marcus—was dividing his attention between Caroline and a policeman who was trying to question him. He was trying to catch Caroline's eye, but she wouldn't respond.

"Nicholas Redpath?" A controlled, neutral tone.

Nick looked up at the officer, who had left Caroline and come to stand looming over him, cutting out the light. He was a tall man as well as broad, his shaggy black hair haloed by a car's headlights somewhere behind him.

Nick nodded and tried to work some spit into his dried up mouth so that he could speak.

"Nicholas Redpath," the officer repeated. "My name's Detective Sergeant Cooper. I'm arresting you on suspicion of the unlawful killing of Mrs Geraldine Louise Wyse. You're not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but anything you do say may be put in writing and used in evidence. Do you understand?" The forced neutrality of Cooper's tone never faltered.

Nick looked across to where Betsy and his wife were being questioned. Ronnie and Trev and Mandy were with officers in the chalets, he was sure. Why him?

Slowly, he shook his head. "What's going on?" he said, his mind in freefall.
What was going on?

~

Nick Redpath stared at the tape machine, not really seeing it. He was in an interview room at the Bathside police station, only a couple of streets from the damp prefab where he had spent his first fourteen years. He'd already been passed fit for questioning by the police doctor, but he was still struggling, desperately, to understand.

The interview room had grey, scabbed walls, no windows, a glaring striplight stuck to the ceiling. Nick sat in a stiff plastic chair, a table in front of him bearing the tape machine and the elbows of a thin-haired man who had introduced himself as Detective Inspector Langley. The officer's jutting ears made Nick think of Prince Charles, except they were smaller. Ian Rush, maybe. Their scooped forward interior shone greasily, reflecting the single light of the room.

"Describe your feelings towards Mrs Wyse," said Langley. "When you were at school. When you met her again last week. Tell me again: what sort of relationship did you have with her?"

Nick stared at the blank face of the tape machine, struggling to shape a response.

"Answer me, Nick. Come on. You've already told me you were friends. Is there something more?"

He thought he'd always been discreet. He'd been in Jerry's registration class for three years, before they'd taken him away from Bathside. He'd sat behind and across from her. Even now he could picture her short, streaked, blonde bob, from behind and across—the way it moved with her head as she talked and laughed. Adolescent days spent watching her, studying her in secret, as an entomologist studies some rare and exquisite butterfly or moth, mentally logging every detail, every nuance of movement or mannerism. Nights spent in recollection.

"Were you attracted to her, Nick? Was that it?"

How did this DI Langley know? He'd always been subtle, he thought. Had everyone seen through him from his first lustful thought?

"What about tonight? What was it that you said to her? What were you hoping to achieve when you came back to Bathside?" Langley was suddenly animated. "Why did you go to the Strand? Did you want to give her one, like you should have done twelve years ago? Is that it?"

There was a cough from behind, which reminded Nick of the presence of a solicitor they had told him to hire. Langley caught himself, nodded, said more calmly, "What happened, Nick? When the two of you were alone in the woods."

He remembered her lips, moist against his own for that briefest of moments. Her hands against him. "Please, Nicky." Her voice had hardly changed after all this time. "Take me away from all this. I'd be grateful." Her meaning had been clear enough.

His own hands, rising quickly, forcing her away. Breaking contact. He remembered the suddenness of that movement, and then again, he remembered her lips against his own.

He shuddered violently, put his hands to his face.

"Tell me about it, Nick. Tell me all about it." Langley's voice was closer now. He was leaning forward, pressing his attack home. "You've told me already: you confronted her, you argued—a lovers' tiff? What did you do next? There's a gap: one moment you're arguing, then you skip ahead to being with the others and nobody knowing where Mrs Wyse has got to. There's a gap there, Nick. What happened?"

Nick shook his head. "I told you. I went for a walk. Try and clear my skull."

"Somebody tried to clear Mrs Wyse's skull. Did you strike her?"

"I went for a walk."

"In the woods? At one in the morning? Come on. You can do better than that. Did you strike Mrs Wyse?"

At last, he was crying, and he hated himself for it.

"Did you hit her?"

"I don't know," said Nick. "I don't know what happened. I just ... don't ... know."

The way back nearly always seems quicker: retracing the outward journey, following the trail back to source. Yet here he was: taken away from Bathside when he was barely fourteen, and now a man of twenty-six.

It had taken him twelve years to find his way back.

Nick Redpath took his old VW Golf gently around the twists and turns of the Ipswich Road. He passed the first turning to the Strand Lane and Copperas Bay. As a boy he'd trekked out there to watch the birds that gathered on the mud-flats: black-tailed godwits, brent geese, flickering carpets of widgeon and teal.

He found that the familiar sights were triggering old memories. Copperas Wood, a nature reserve now, but back then it had been unmanaged, criss-crossed with muddy paths used by gatherers of sweet chestnuts every autumn.

There was a new bypass, branching off from a roundabout just before the first build-up of houses. Where to? Bathside occupied the end of the north-east Essex peninsula, beyond the town was only the mouth of the estuary and the North Sea: the road had nowhere to go. To the first of the docks at Westquay, he supposed, or even across the mud-flats to Eastquay.

He drove on into the fringe of the town. There were new houses here, filling in what had been open spaces: the old School for Troubled Adolescents, as they had been told to call it, had closed, replaced by a retirement complex; a fistful of neat little bungalows had been scattered across its playing field.

He drove past All Saints' Church and a cluster of shops, then took a right turn at the war memorial. Down Upper Bay Road, then right again into Hill Lane to cruise slowly past his old school. The regimented grey blocks were no different, except maybe a little more shabby. A chip van was pulled up onto the grass, quiet after the lunchtime rush.

The Prom had been transformed, a vista of crisp concrete sea defences yet to be browned and dulled with age. He tried to picture how it had been before, but he couldn't, he only knew that all this was new. He drove slowly along the front, bleak in its mid-September greyness, almost deserted now that the summer season was over and the kids back in school. A few dogs—To Be Kept Strictly Under Control, the signs said—and their owners. Some gulls, lifting into the air and then settling again, each time someone passed too close.

He parked in Third Avenue and set out on foot to find himself somewhere to stay. There had always been plenty of guesthouses and bed and breakfast places in this part of town.

~

The man who answered Nick's knock introduced himself as Jim McClennan. He was a dried-up shell of a man. His face was pink and stubbly, creased like an elephant's legs; his thin white hair was stained nicotine-yellow.

"Tenner a night, off-season rate," he said. "Full cooked breakfast with the trimmings, if the wife's well enough. Key's on a string in the letterbox if you're coming in late." McClennan tongued his moustache. "If you have anybody stopping over, you pay me another tenner, you hear?"

Left alone, Nick surveyed his room. It was clean and tidy, but it looked as if it had been furnished from a jumble sale. Nothing matched, and everything was worn or marked in some way or another. He pulled the velveteen curtains as wide as they would go, and parted the lace curtains. He could see the white roof of his car in the street below and if he craned his neck a little he could see a tiny corner of the bay, dull and lifeless under a flat Essex sky. This would be the best room, he supposed, with its sea view.

He left the house. Sometimes he just had to be outside. He hated the walls gathered all around him, the ceiling so low. He straightened, breathed deeply, collected himself.

He slipped into his scuffed, brown, leather jacket and pulled it tight. All he had was what he was wearing and what was in his car and the room he had just taken. He had never needed much in the way of possessions. You learn that, shunted from one institution to another: value anything and it's a weakness. Someone always exploits your weaknesses.

He crossed over Coastguards' Parade, glancing along at the Minesweepers' Memorial, a monument to the men who had kept the estuary and bay navigable during the wars. He had a great uncle on there somewhere but now he chose not to go and look for his name, as he had done so often as a boy.

Instead, he stood at the railings at the top of Cliff Gardens. Below him, grass and a few trees slid away towards the Promenade. Farther along, near to Queen Victoria's statue, there would be a tunnel under the road. Once, he'd been part of a gang that had ginger-knocked an entire street, then sprinted away through that tunnel, losing themselves in the Gardens before even the first door had been opened.

He didn't know why he had come back to Bathside. It should have been behind him, the twelve years a welcome buffer. The place was a bad memory for him, ashes he had no reason to rake over again.

He walked.

He was kidding himself. He couldn't simply forget Bathside. He had needed to make this trip. He had roots which could not be denied. The place was in his blood, much as he hated to acknowledge that: it was a weakness, a hold.

He headed into town to find himself a meal and see what else had changed.

~

He kept thinking that he should bump into people, spot a face in the crowd, be recognised by an apparent stranger: "Hey, Nick! My man! Remember
me?
" The struggle to fit a name to those half-remembered features, that familiar voice. But nearly half his life had passed in other towns, with other people. What would his fourteen year-old friends look like now? They'd have jobs, if they were lucky. They might be in suits or work clothes. They'd probably have kids of their own, for God's sake!