The Burning Air (30 page)

KERRY

58

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2013

T
HE MIST WAS lifting but there were no signposts and it was impossible to know which way was east, for escape. Felix had tried to teach her how to get her bearings by the sun but she had never grasped it and anyway dawn was still hours away. The road was gently curved, its sides banked with naked branches. She walked until she found a long, straight stretch where she could see and be seen. When the low hum of the engine came, she stood in the dead center of the road, thumb up.

Twin suns punched holes in the fog, dragging behind them a large red van. It did not slow and she prepared to run into the hedgerow, realizing too late that she was almost invisible, camouflaged in the dun and midnight shades of other people’s clothes. She had thrown on Rowan’s waxed jacket from the night before and it was big enough to wrap around her twice, sleeves dangling past her fingertips.

The van jolted to a standstill. Its passenger window opened to reveal a friendly face framed with wild curly gray hair.

“Christ, are you OK, love?” said the woman. “Are you hurt?”

A strange, warm farmyard smell and a man’s voice came from inside the cabin. “Tar Barrels last night, weren’t it?”

The woman smiled. “There’s always a couple of stragglers the morning after. Bit of a heavy one?” Kerry nodded. “Where are you headed, love?”

“Anywhere I can catch a train to London,” she said.

“We’re doing all the little delis today. I think Bath’s the first big station. We can drop you there if you like?”

“Yes, please.”

The inside of the van stank, a curdled version of the pure sweet-milk smell of Edie. It made Kerry gag.

“That’s what I call a gut reaction,” said the man, laughing. “Goat’s cheese. It’s a bit much on a delicate stomach, I know. There’s nothing I can do about that, I’m afraid. Still, I’ll drive careful over the potholes.”

The couple laughed. Kerry had laughed once, with Felix. Now it was all she could do to breathe. She put her head in her hands.

“It’s like that, is it?” said the woman.

“We haven’t been to the barrels for years, have we, Jan?” said her partner. “It was a lot more informal when we were your age, less of the health-and-safety brigade. Lot of police up there now, were there?”

The faces of Sergeant Hough and PC Rayat hung in Kerry’s mind.

“I suppose so,” she said, breathing through her mouth.

The conversation petered out and left her on edge for their next question. The word “widow” fluttered inside her mouth like a crow and she was afraid that if she opened her lips, it would fly out, squawking its terrible truth. For all that, it was not the widowhood that pained her and it was not Matt she was beginning to mourn.

She had believed, at the start, that she was in love with him, but it had been the old story, like with Dean: gratitude dissolving into fear so slowly that you could only tell it was happening when they were kicking you downstairs while you were pregnant, pulling your earrings out through your flesh, making you sleep with other men. You didn’t realize that it didn’t have to be like that until someone was curling around you in bed, playing you his scratchy old records until the sun came up, telling you that he hadn’t known it could be like this, asking where you had been all his life, saying he loved you after three weeks and a day. You didn’t know sex didn’t have to be a noisy performance until someone gentle quietly coaxed from you something that was all the more powerful for its silence.

Lovely, sweet Felix with his funny eye and a whole world of tenderness and insecurity behind the clownish exterior. She had known he was different from their first conversation but hadn’t known to call it love until that morning, a few weeks in, when she had felt him reach across the bed for her in his sleep. In seeking comfort he had given it. And what had she given him in return?

After a while, the roads ceased to rise and dip and the misty night became a crisp sunny morning. As she grew accustomed to the smell in the van, another odor crept under its top note; like pennies, or meat. She looked down to see a clump of something dark in her hair, and remembered the warm porridge of brains leaking out onto her skin and soaking into her clothes. Kerry closed her eyes and tried to paint over the hideous pictures of the night before with safe and beautiful images—the upturned faces of babies from Vietnam and Sri Lanka and Malawi, but their huge dark eyes turned into trickling wounds.

She heaved again, this time an instinctive reaction from a place too deep inside to control. The cheese people exchanged worried looks and both the windows slid down. Felix had shown her a film that claimed the weight of the human soul was twenty-one grams, and that at the point of death the body became lighter by exactly that amount, but she had felt the moment the life had gone out of Matt, and his body had seemed to double, treble in weight as he left the world, as though he would crush her to death. Perhaps it would have been better for everyone if he had.

They passed signposts, service stations, villages gone as soon as glimpsed. She didn’t know what was going to happen—she could barely process what
had
happened—but instinct told her that the thing to do now was to survive this journey out of Devon and back to civilization. Wait it out. How much easier it had been to wait with Edie in her arms, how much patience she had had with a sleeping baby, how the time had passed differently then.

She pictured the inside of the barn, how it must be looking, where they would all be. She felt bad for the position she would have put them in when they realized she was gone. If she were them, she would assume that as Matt’s wife she had gone to raise the alarm. She had promised them she wouldn’t, but they didn’t believe her. Felix was probably parked up on some country lane, trying to call her on the phone she had thrown on the fire. She cursed herself for not making a note of Felix’s number, but the only place it was stored was in her own mobile and of course the landline would be no good even if she had the number. She had to get word to Felix, one last conversation, to reassure him that whatever else was going through his mind, he need not worry that she would betray him. She would take Matt’s death to her own grave.

At Bath they parked on a short-stay single yellow line and asked her to mind the van while they went out to make their deliveries, offering to pick her up a coffee on their way back. Through the windshield she saw a sign for the station and she got out and ran, hoping she had not left anything to identify herself, hoping that if they remembered her at all it would just be as the girl with the hangover.

She had enough cash for her train ticket and, in London, for her Tube fare from Paddington to Ealing Broadway. On the short walk to the flat, she caught sight of herself in a full-length shop window. The clothes that had been all wrong for the country were no longer right for the city. Underneath her borrowed coat, her expensive outfit was streaked with blood and earth.

The flat was clean and silent and she had the ridiculous notion that no one had broken the news to it. In the kitchen she drank from the tap, then tore her clothes off, leaving them in a pile at the bottom of the washing machine. She showered, leaving her hair to dry wavy the way he hated it.

Writing Felix a letter seemed both the safest way of reaching him and the surest way of putting her point across without interruption or misunderstanding. If she did not give her address and maybe went into the West End to send it, there would be little chance of him finding her. She would send a copy to his flat above the shop.

She entered Matt’s office, sat at the desk, drew a blank sheet of paper from the printer and a pen from the desk drawer. The task was intimidating; apart from job-seeking exercises at the hostel, Kerry had never written a letter.

The pen didn’t work. She turned to rummage in the filing cabinet. In it, documents swung in foolscap files—bank statements, letters, demands, and receipts from the Inland Revenue. Darcy Kellaway and Matt Rider existed side by side in there as though they were business partners. There was money stuff, house stuff, Matt Rider Ltd. stuff—

Kerry froze. She had known for months now the true extent of Matt’s wealth. She had once overheard him tell Rikesh that she couldn’t even turn on a computer and so his desktop was the equivalent of an unlocked door. She had filled countless empty days by rifling through documents real and virtual, staring at Matt’s spreadsheets and his boxed and annotated documents for so long that the numbers had begun to make sense. There was no mortgage with this property, she had never been able to spend all of her allowance, and she was a co-signatory on Matt’s current account, swollen after the sale of his business. She could live like a queen for years on the money she knew how to access, and like an empress with the money that was locked into the other accounts and bonds. Perhaps she would get in touch with that Rikesh and tell him that Matt had done a runner. She knew they had parted on bitter terms. With enough money she could afford to adopt a baby on her own. Not here, but abroad—she had watched enough documentaries on the Home & Health Channel before it stopped broadcasting to be an expert on the subject. It was a torturously drawn-out process, you had to leave the UK for months, but that might be a good thing. The people in those orphanages in Pakistan or China would not know about the mess she had made of her life. They would be dazzled by the love she had to offer and the cash she had in her purse.

She would have to siphon the money gradually, without attracting attention. Legitimately to claim Matt’s money as an inheritance would mean to declare him a dead man, or at least a missing one. It would mean going to the police. And what could she tell them? She thought again of the police officers and the grilling they had given Will even when there was no longer an emergency. What if they put her under that kind of scrutiny? She was not educated like the MacBrides, she did not have that kind of inbred confidence that would allow her to talk herself out of situations. She could be sneaky when she had time and space to think, but face-to-face confrontations had always terrified her. Even in the barn, when she had saved the day by presenting Felix to the police as Matt, she had known how easily they could have caught her out. She wouldn’t trust herself not to leak some detail that might incriminate Felix and his family. She could not run that risk. She located a ballpoint in the bottom of the filing cabinet and returned to her blank page.

“Dear Felix,” she wrote. And then what?

The pen skittered in her hand and her stomach growled. The fridge was empty apart from a half-drunk liter bottle of Diet Coke. She drank it down in one, belched brown foam, retrieved a pizza from the freezer, and switched on the oven.

She smelled her clothes before she saw them, waiting in a pile in front of the washing machine. There was the coat belonging to Rowan, there were her jeans all stiff with mud, the cotton vest that had begun the weekend white. She would never wear any of these clothes again and for a while toyed with the idea of throwing them all in a bin in the street, but what if someone
was
watching her? The sooner she got everything clean, the better. She pulled her coin purse from the pockets of her jeans. The jacket had half a dozen pouches, some hidden so deep inside the garment that she had to pull apart the lining to retrieve scraps of paper, a tissue, a penny, crumbs of soil, tiny stones, blades of grass.

Denim, cashmere, and waxed linen shared the same hot wash. Kerry tried not to think about what the detergent was scouring from the fabric. When the garments became a spinning blur she turned her attention back to the spoils of her clothes and Rowan’s jacket. She stacked the coins and smoothed the receipts. A little dun knobble unfurled to reveal itself as a Scottish twenty-pound note, brown with age. The crisper of the larger papers was her own provisional driver’s license. She had packed it along with the rest of her stuff the first time she had gone to the flat in Saxby, something to remind her of who she really was, but had never thought to take it out of the bag. She had no idea how it had wound up here. The third she smoothed to reveal four pages of handwriting, faded cornflower ink on duck-egg paper.

17th January, 2013

Guilt eats one away like a cancer. Maybe that’s why I’m ill. Perhaps if I had made my confession beforehand, I would be well now. I’ll never know.

It takes superhuman strength to form the words, but I can’t put it off any longer.

He first came into our lives

To begin with we actually had sympathy for Darcy

The name Darcy K

It wasn’t until

It all changed when

Felix was in his last year at the prep when

The first time I heard the name Darcy Kellaway was the day the scholarship letters went out.

When Kerry realized what she was holding, the paper seemed to grow hot under her fingertips and her hands began to shake. Dean had given her a gun to hold once, for a laugh, and she had hated it, felt its terrible power and known she was not equal to it. These pages made her feel as she had then, burdened by a responsibility she had not asked for and did not want.

59

Of course Rowan was used to distraught parents calling at the school, but it was the first time a child had turned up on our doorstep. The boy had come to demand his place in the school, Rowan said. “Confrontational” was how he described him.

“Did he threaten you?” I asked.

“Not as such, but there’s definitely something a bit . . . wrong with him. Not intellectually, he was very articulate, quite able. A sort of . . . lack. It’s hard to define.”

A few weeks later, Rowan said, “He’s been hanging around the house.” It was funny, I didn’t have to ask who he meant. “In that alleyway. Outside the school gates. He was in the bloody tree opposite the house yesterday. It’s really unsettling.”

“How unsettling?” I said. “Draw-the-curtains unsettling or call-the-police unsettling?”

“There’s nothing the police could do. Possessive as I am about Saxby, it’s all public land, he wasn’t trespassing. I’ll ignore him. I’m sure he’ll get bored of it soon.”

“What does he look like?” I said. I wanted to be on my guard. Rowan tried not to smile.

“You’ll see the teeth about twenty minutes before you see him. Poor little sod.”

It was another month before he struck. When Rowan saw Kellaway run past the house he was about to confront him, but before he could, Felix crawled from the passage with his face bloodied.

Kerry couldn’t call the way she was feeling shock, or even surprise. It was too numb for that. If anything, she felt stupid, as though she should have somehow known that Matt had been the one to attack Felix. She felt a lovers’ anger refracted through the prism of a mother’s. With each line that Kerry read, Lydia MacBride ceased to be the prejudiced magistrate of her own recollection or the murderous bitch of Matt’s, and became the tender, loving mother of Felix’s.

Rowan cried my name in a voice that summoned half the street. I maintained an outward calm while we waited for the ambulance to come. I tried to cradle Felix but could not tell from the soup of his face whether and how I should touch or hold his head so I lay on the ground and curled into his back while he shivered. He was so brave.

At the Wellhouse I waited outside the operating theater confident that the police, under Rowan’s instruction, would find Kellaway, arrest him, charge him.

“Insufficient evidence” are the two most frustrating words in the English language. The police didn’t doubt Rowan, but his testimony placed Kellaway not at the scene of the crime but only in its vicinity. Kellaway’s mother provided his alibi, and the onus of proof was on Felix. But when he started talking again, he could not even name his assailant’s gender. He refused to talk about the attack except in the most grotesque terms. His sense of humor turned in on itself and he became defensive and sarcastic.

If I had detested Kellaway before, now he became my obsession.

Since Felix’s attack, we had naturally been campaigning for closed circuit television in Cathedral Passage. There had in fact been a spate of muggings in that blind spot—half a dozen teenagers, one elderly gentleman, a small party of tourists who’d wandered off the beaten track and paid with their cameras and their wallets at knifepoint. I was becoming accustomed, though not desensitized, to the sight of police cars ringing the Green, often parking across our drive.

That night, I was alone in the house; Sophie was away at Durham, Rowan had gone to collect Tara and Felix from the cinema. I heard a shout from behind the house, hurried footsteps outside and made it to the window just in time to see a hooded figure run between the planes, dropping something on the ground. I recognised the black sweatshirt with its neon orange piping as belonging to Ricky Jinks, a persistent offender and drug addict depressingly familiar to me from the bench. Like most addicts, he had a habit of turning up in court in his work clothes. I made for the front door to tell the police what I had seen, and as I descended the steps, a second figure emerged from between the trees.

I recognized Kellaway from a distance and on a single sighting. His face conjured Felix’s, both as it had been and as it was. I had the strangest feeling at that second that I could pick up a car, or push over one of those plane trees with my finger. By the time I was outside and down, Jon Slingsby, PC Slingsby as he was then, was talking to the boy. It was the easiest thing in the world to say that I had seen him run from the scene of the crime. The roar of revenge drowned out the voice of reason, the voice that said I ought to point them toward Jinks before he struck again. Kellaway protested and was, I think, on the verge of confessing his earlier crime, but stopped himself. He was bundled into the police car shouting nonsense about salmon, saying, with great melodrama, that his mother would die if he couldn’t go home.

I returned home to wait for my family. Here is the curious thing. It did not feel like a lie at the time. I told myself that I was not wrongfully labelling him but simply doing what the police could not all those years ago when he attacked Felix. Put simply, I played God. Or I played judge. One night in the cells was if anything too scant punishment for ruining my son’s face. Did I mean to let them charge him? Would I really have sworn an oath? Incriminated a child? It’s hard to say, for it never came to that. I do know that that night I went to sleep surprisingly easily. I blocked Jinks from my thoughts entirely.

The scream came just after midnight. I knew it was Tara’s before I was even awake, the way I did when they were babies. Lights went on all over the house, all along the terrace. We ran through the courtyard in nightclothes. In Cathedral Passage we found our daughter keening like a banshee, kneeling on the flagstones over the blood-let body of a boyfriend we had no idea she had.

For the second time that day I watched as the emergency services thronged Cathedral Passage, only this time the ambulance had no siren. Louis’s body was bagged and stretchered into the floodlit interior and driven to the mortuary. It took Rowan, me, and an overalled scene-of-crime officer to stop Tara lying down in the pool he had left behind.

A sergeant was bawling Slingsby out.

“Second attack in the same place in as many hours. Didn’t you take someone in for it? Well, you’d better let him go because I’d bet my mortgage that this is the same guy. It’s the same location, same stab wound, I’d bet anything it’s the same bloody knife. Only this poor sod wasn’t as lucky as the earlier one.” T
he sergeant held a crackling radio to his ear for a moment. “They’ve just nicked someone on the other side of the Green,” he told Slingsby. “There’s still blood on the knife. You’d better let your man go.” I took a call two hours later telling me that Ricky Jinks was being held on suspicion of murder. As well as the knife, in his possession they had found Louis’s cash card and another credit card belonging to the earlier victim.

The realization of what I had done was a vise around my heart. Had I not lashed out in spite, Jinks would have been arrested and Louis would never have been attacked. I may as well have wielded the knife myself. At the time, of course, I didn’t know Louis was the father of my unborn grandson. If I had done, I might not have had the strength to bear it.

My darling Jake, of course, is another matter. I see him almost every day and his face, which animates photographs of his late father, is a daily reminder of my shame. I robbed my own grandchild of a father. I, who value family more than anything else, tore a hole in the heart of my own.

Poor Tara, poor Jake, poor all of them. Matt had never mentioned Jake’s father at all and certainly not by name. Kerry was sure he had not known about this. He discussed every detail of his obsession with the family manically, repetitively. If he had known, she would never have heard the end of it, she would be bored of it. Matt had been so sure that Tara had told him everything, that he had burrowed his way into the center of her heart. Well, she hadn’t told him
this
. Kerry experienced the first cool creeping of contempt, and she was thrilled by her own daring at feeling this.

If Matt had had these pages on Friday night, how different the whole weekend would have been! It would still have been awful, but that stupid plan involving Edie would never have been made. Matt would still be alive. And what would that mean for her, for her and Felix? Of course Felix would still hate her but for himself, not his sisters, and she thought she knew him well enough to guess that he could forgive on his own behalf what he could never forgive on theirs.

Kerry took the pages over to the sofa and read on.

20th January, 2013

How exhausting that last entry was. After setting down my pen I slept for fifteen hours, feigning a migraine. Following the initial euphoria of confession, I felt only a partial release, and it has taken me the weekend to realize that that is because it is only a partial confession. This statement is not the whole truth unless I include what happened next to Darcy Kellaway.

I had no time in the days that followed Louis’s death to reflect on where the boy might have ended up. The school and the house were suddenly full of bereft Ghanaians, their quiet, dignified grief undercutting my assumptions about ululating Africans. I held a silent, shaking Tara throughout the memorial service in the school chapel before his body was flown home for burial. The head boy delivered Louis’s eulogy, making much of his prowess on the sports field, his gift for cricket, and his determination to live a full life despite the limitations of his illness, what an inspiration he was, what a hard worker, what a good boy.

Caring for Tara in the days that followed was like looking after a newborn; consuming, exhausting, relentless. (At the time I thought that grief had made her ill, that the nausea and the exhaustion were her body’s interpretation of her violent bereavement.) Everything else, including Kellaway, was relegated to the periphery of my consciousness. Of course there were flashes of nervous curiosity, and I half expected him to engineer another of his doorstep confrontations. When I found out where he had really been and why, I almost wished he had.

Jon Slingsby was at our door again the day that the Owusu-Josephs flew back to Accra.

“I’ve got some bad news, Lydia,” he said. “Darcy Kellaway’s been making some threats, serious ones, against you and your family. We’ve had to formally charge him.”

I felt sick and dizzy: I ought to have known I wouldn’t have been able to get away with it for that long. I had to brazen it out, to stick by my original claim.

“Obviously it was a mistake,” said Slingsby, preempting the denial on my lips. He was so deadpan that for a second I wondered if he was trying to trip me up. “It was dark, it was an easy mistake to make. Unfortunately Kellaway doesn’t think that way.” There wasn’t a flicker of suspicion in him. He was an old-fashioned sort of bobby even then, with a belief in good and evil, something that teeters between naïveté and prejudice, that years on the force had yet to quite erode.

“He’s got it into his head that you killed his mother.”

That threw me. “He’s
what
?” I said.

“His mother died on the night of his arrest and he’s decided somehow that you’re responsible. I know, I know, it’s ridiculous. Hence the threats.”

I had visions of him storming home and killing her in one of his tempers.

“How did she die?” I said.

“Heart attack. Hardly something you could have engineered, even up close.” Slingsby laughed, but my blood ran cold. I felt a strange, secondary guilt about Heather Kellaway; the end of a middle-aged life felt like less of a tragedy than the violent murder of a schoolboy, but still it was impossible to escape the notion that had her son not been arrested, her heart might yet be beating. By abusing my own power I had tipped the balance of it in his favor. Jon Slingsby was still talking. It was hard to concentrate on what he was saying.

“Look, the point is, we’re going to charge him with threatening behavior and get a protection order out so you can rest easy. He’s pretty far gone, from what I gather. You’ve got a while yet before you need to worry. And I’ll personally tell you when he’s out, and protect your property.”

True to his word, Slingsby kept watch over our house on the day of Kellaway’s discharge from the Wellhouse, but as far as we know he left Saxby, never apparently to return. Wherever he is now, I hope he has forgotten all about us, for his own sake as much as ours.

Keeping Lydia’s secret would be Kerry’s undisclosed atonement, the last and best thing she would ever do for Felix. But she could and must reassure him that the family’s shared secret was safe. A letter, she now saw, was all wrong; the written word could survive and be intercepted.

She went back into the study; Felix’s mobile number was in the file Matt kept on the MacBrides, the one she wasn’t supposed to know about. Withholding her own number, she dialed his. She was relieved and disappointed when it went straight to voice mail.

“It’s me,” she said. “Oh, shit, I don’t know what to say. I thought you’d got me over that, being lost for words. This is the last time I’ll talk to you. I want to make it perfect but I don’t know how.”

She took a deep breath. “I’m just ringing to tell you, it’s going to be all right. I mean, you know . . . just that you don’t need to worry about me making trouble for you. I know you won’t have anything to do with me anyway. And I don’t blame you. It was bad enough lying to you, but I saw your face, the way you were angry with me for what we did to your sisters . . .”

It wasn’t going well. She held the phone away from her mouth and tried to swallow the rock in her throat.

“What I’m ringing for, what you need to understand, right, is that I wasn’t taking Edie from Sophie. I was keeping her away from Matt. It’s really important that you know the difference. I planned all along to hide her from Matt and bring her back to the rest of you. It was like”—she scanned the office for the right words, saw some leaflets from the building society, and was inspired—“an insurance policy. I know I should’ve just come and told you but I didn’t know, I couldn’t’ve known what he . . .” She gathered herself. “I had no reason not to believe him at first, and by the time I realized what he was really like, it was too late. I don’t want you to be worried. You won’t hear from me again. You have to tell your dad and your sisters that I won’t ever tell on you.” She had gone from not knowing what to say to not being able to stop. “They won’t believe me, but you will, and you can talk them ’round. I
know
you know me Felix, you know me better than anyone. It started off as a lie but it got true, I promise it did.” She couldn’t go on without losing it. “I really do love you, Felix, and I’m so, so, sorry.”