Some Kind of Fairy Tale (13 page)

Peter got into his car and he drove for about a mile. Then he stopped the car in a leafy lay-by, switched off the engine, and wept.

A
fter being questioned by the police that day, when Richie got out of the police station he went not to his own home but to the Martins’ household. There, Mary answered the door.

“They think it’s me,” Richie said, trembling on the threshold. “The police think it’s me.”

“What have you done to your face?” Mary said.

Dell came up behind her. “Come inside, Richie, come inside.”

He limped over the threshold. His swollen ankle was hurting badly. They sat him down at the kitchen table and they made him drink tea, though his lip had swollen so fat by now he had trouble drinking it without dribbling the tea down his chin.

“Did they give you a beating, Richie?” Dell said.

“Who did this?” Mary said. “They had no right to do that. No right.”

Dell wanted to know how things were left with the police, and Richie said that he thought he was still a suspect. Richie asked Dell if he would talk to the police, explain that they were making a mistake, and Dell said he would. It was absurd, he said. Absurd. When Richie asked where Peter was, they said he was up at the Outwoods. The official searches had stopped but he wasn’t prepared to give up on finding something.

“I should go up there and join him.”

Dell looked at Mary. “Richie,” Dell said, furrowing his brow, “is there anything that you haven’t told us? Anything at all. Any tiny thing that would give us a clue as to where she might be. Or a clue as to her state of mind.”

Richie shook his head.

There was, of course, one thing he could have said. He assumed that soon enough the police would tell the Martins that Tara had been pregnant and that she had aborted the fetus at a clinic. They would have to. He was on the edge of blurting it out himself, but he was prevented by a strong sense of self-preservation.

His reasons for not doing so were only partly selfish. He knew that the Martins would feel betrayed and that he would feel the lash of Dell’s fury and Mary’s contempt. But he felt it wasn’t the right time to tell them. Tara’s disappearance had so diminished them. They had been transformed overnight from confident, poised parents in their prime to frail, powerless, elderly, and lost individuals. The once noble architecture of their family lay in rubble. Worse than that, a hoarfrost, it seemed to Richie, had settled on their shoulders.

They talked, and they combed every fine detail with him. He admitted that he and Tara had had a dispute, but when pressed he said that it was all about whether they were going out for the evening or staying in. Richie had wanted to go out; Tara had wanted to stay in.

It was a shocking lie, given the real reasons for the argument, but it was so simple and prosaic that it seemed to convince Tara’s parents.

After a while he announced that he was going to drive back up to the Outwoods to help Peter with the search. He knew he should tell Peter about the pregnancy, knew he should break it to at least one member of the family before the police did.

“Right,” said Mary. “And I’m going up to church. It’s been a long time since I’ve been on my knees and the only thing I can think of doing right now is praying. Are you coming with me, Dell?”

“No, Mary. No.”

S
O
R
ICHIE HAD LEFT
them divided about their appeal for divine help and he had gone home. It was his intention to go up to the Outwoods, to find Peter, to keep him company in the fruitless task of searching under scrub and checking out hollows and peering behind fallen logs: everything the organized police search had already done without result.

But he didn’t. When he got home his father was out. Probably up at the Coach and Horses, soaking up glasses of foaming amber ale with his cronies. Richie inspected his fat lip in the mirror. There was still dried blood under his nose and his teeth were sore from where a huge set of knuckles had mashed his lip against his mouth. He took a shower, trying to scrub away the layer of unpleasantness picked up at the police station. He stood under the shower for a long time, leaning his bruised cheek against the cold of the ceramic tiles while the hot running water sluiced against his back.

He lost an hour or so that way.

He dressed again, limped downstairs, and slumped onto the sofa in a listless agony, the torn tendons in his foot pulsing with pain. There he fell into a fitful slumber, and when he woke up again it was way too late to entertain any idea of going back up to the Outwoods.

He watched television for a while, then went to bed, but lay awake thinking about Tara. He had to concede there was a pretty good chance that she was dead. He didn’t think—like the police—that she was up there in the woods, buried under earth and leaves, her corpse already decomposing. The chances were that
she had been dragged or persuaded into a car, driven off somewhere. That would have meant that she would have been raped; and if she had been raped then she would have either been dumped or killed, and if she’d been dumped they would have heard from her by now. The unthinkable alternative was that someone was keeping her as a prisoner.

The most hideous thing about it all was the inability to do anything. He knew he could wander through the woods like Peter, turning over every leaf and acorn. But his time would have been better spent asking people about cars seen in the area at the time of Tara’s disappearance. He was furious with the police that they’d been questioning him when they might have been doing exactly that. He would tell them in the morning: he would march into the police station and tell them how to do their job.

Sometime after midnight he was woken by the sound of someone stumbling into the house through the front door. It was his father. He heard his father shout up the stairs. “Richie! Richie!” But Richie chose not to answer. Then the house went quiet. When his father came swaying home from the pub he would just as likely fall asleep on the sofa as put himself to bed.

In the morning Richie got out of bed late. His dad had shuffled off to work and he had the house to himself. He sat around in his T-shirt and shorts, brain-dead. There was a quarter-ounce cache of cannabis belonging to him and Peter. He’d stashed it in a twist of silver foil hidden between the mattress and the base of his bed. Richie was always custodian of the dope because there was no chance of his father stumbling across it; whereas Mary was always cleaning and tidying Peter’s room as an efficient form of inspection. She’d once found a little stash of LSD microdots and wanted to know what they were. Peter told her they were breath-fresheners. She wanted to know why he needed breath-fresheners. Peter had said to keep his breath fresh. Mary said, rather indignantly, that it was to be hoped he wasn’t in the habit of kissing random girls. Peter had said no, he wasn’t.

Richie pasted cigarette papers together and heated the cannabis before crumbling it onto a slim stick of tobacco. Then he lit up and grabbed his Gibson. It was a handsome guitar with a deep tone and glittering strings, something he had managed to buy only through
great sacrifice. He strummed a few chords, trying to put into words his anguish about Tara, but it was all too raw, too immediate. At least the dope diminished the pain of his ankle. He stuck the roach end of the burning joint between the strings at the head of his guitar, copying some famous musician he’d seen at a concert.

The morning rolled away on a cloud. He put together another joint. He was strumming a chord when he happened to look up to see a face at the window. The face glared in at him. It made him shiver. It should have been a friendly face.

It was Peter glowering at Richie through the glass.

Richie took the joint out of his guitar head, got up, and limped to the door.

Peter brushed past him and came inside.

When Richie followed him back into the living room he said, “Good morning to you, too.”

“Been smoking our dope?” Peter said.

Richie held out the joint in his hand. “Want some?”

“Not in the mood. My sister’s been abducted or killed and I’m not really in the mood to skin up and smoke dope, Richie.”

“Right.” Richie held the smoking joint in his hand, not knowing if the correct thing to do in light of that remark was to put it out or to leave it to burn away to nothing. He took a drag and then left it smoking in an ashtray. “You going to sit down?”

Peter relaxed. He sat down and picked up Richie’s Gibson, thumbing the strings very lightly.

“I’m not stopping.”

“Okay.”

“Mum and Dad said you’d promised to come up to the Outwoods yesterday. Promised to come and help me keep on looking.”

“I was going to, Pete. I didn’t make it.”

Pete was gripping the neck of the guitar very tightly. “They said you’d promised.”

“I was planning to come.”

“There’s only me up there now, Richie. Only me. No more police. No more volunteers. No you. Only me.”

“The police crushed my foot. Seriously. It’s hard for me to get around. I had to—”

“Gets lonely up there, Richie. On your own. Only the wind blowing. Lonely and cold.”

“I should have come. I can hardly move, mate.”

“But you’re blowing dope and strumming the guitar.”

“What is it? You want to say something to me? You’re just like the fuzz, are you? Think I did it?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“Thanks a fuckin’ bunch, mate. My best pal. Here, why don’t you try to beat a confession out of me, just like they did yesterday? Want to stamp on my other foot?”

“Didn’t get a confession, though, did they?”

“Why would they?”

“They’ve told us. Tara was pregnant. You’d got Tara pregnant.”

Richie put his head in his hands. “Bastards,” he said softly.

“She had an abortion. Know what she did? There was a school trip she was supposed to go on. Instead of going on the school trip she went to a clinic. The police found it all out.”

“I didn’t even know that. I didn’t know she’d done that.”

“Why didn’t you tell us, Richie?”

“Not your business, was it? Even so, I was going to tell you. Honestly, I was. I was waiting for the right time.”

“Makes all the difference. Thing like that. You could have told us. Now, on top of one terrible shock, my mum has had another kick in the teeth.”

“They haven’t told her, have they?”

Peter nodded grimly.

“I have to go round to talk to them.”

Gently thumbing another chord on the guitar, Peter said, “No. You’d better stay away. They don’t want to see you now.”

“You don’t think I hurt Tara, do you? Tell me you don’t think that.”

“Doesn’t look good, does it? You got her pregnant. She had an abortion. You had an argument. You say you left her up there in the Outwoods. Even if you didn’t hurt her, you are responsible for what’s happened, aren’t you?”

“I can’t deny that.”

“You don’t leave a girl on her own in the Outwoods.”

“She ran away from me, Peter! Ran away! And she didn’t go missing that day, anyway. You’re not making sense!”

“Then you go and keep this thing a secret. Why would you do that, Richie? That’s what the police were asking me. Why would he go and do that? Then I started thinking about the afternoon I spent up there searching on my own, after you’d promised my folks that you would come and join me. I thought about why you would stay away.”

“Shit, you really do think I did something to her! Why don’t you just come out and say it?”

“Then I come here this morning. And what do I find? You’re smoking a nice, sweet little joint, playing the guitar. Chilling out. All relaxed. Doesn’t look good, Richie.”

“Peter.”

Peter stood up. “I’m going now,” he said. “I’m going back up to the Outwoods.” He held the Gibson by the neck and offered it back to Richie.

But when Richie reached out for it, Peter took the neck of the Gibson with both hands and swung it against the wall. It cracked and splintered. Peter swung it again, this time dangerously near Richie’s head, and smashed it a second time against the wall. Richie shrank back into his seat as Peter smashed the guitar over and over against the wall, until all he was holding was the neck of the thing and the broken strings.

“You’re to blame, Richie! Whatever happened, you’re to blame!” He bunched his fist in Richie’s face. “I should break your teeth like I broke that guitar! I could! I could break your fucking strings!”

Peter left Richie cowering and hurried outside. He must have left the front door open, because moments later, while Richie was staring down at the broken fragments of his treasured Gibson, another figure appeared. It was the fat DC who had beaten him at the police station.

The DC surveyed the smashed guitar. “Gonna give us a
wittle
song wi’ that,
Wichie
?” he squeaked in his high-pitched voice. “Come along, son, you’re wanted back down at the station. Hang on a minute: what’s that I can smell? I do believe you’ve been on the potty,
Wichie
.”