The Discourtesy of Death (Father Anselm Novels) (28 page)

Timothy seemed not to move. He was suspended between light and dark, happiness and misery and – Anselm sensed – doubt and certainty. Doubt about whether he should reply; certainty about what he’d say if he did. Finally, coming to his feet, he snatched the
Sunday Times
off the table. In almost the same action, he quickly rolled it up and then smacked it against an open palm, hovering between the coffee table and the chair as if he were trapped. There was no room to manoeuvre; he couldn’t pace back and forth; all he could do was shuffle on the spot.

‘These people who lie all the time,’ he blurted out. ‘They say he killed my mother. Not to me, of course, and probably not to each other. They’ve all got their reasons to blame him. So they say he’s a broken man. Did you know that?’

Anselm made no admissions. He watched the boy’s erratic feet movements.

‘They
tell
me it’s grief but they
think
he feels guilty,’ said Timothy, whacking the
Sunday Times
against his hand. ‘Well, I know he’s unhappy and I know he’s got nothing to be guilty about.’

Anselm looked at the white knuckles.

‘It’s why you’re here’ – Timothy slowed his arm motion as if the rolled newspaper were a piece of wood; he tapped his hand lightly, glaring at the Monk who’d Left it All for a Life of Crime – ‘it’s why you came to see my aunt and uncle. You’ve got a theory. Are you going to tell me what it is?’

‘No, Timothy, I am not,’ replied Anselm, very calmly. ‘Because I do not have a theory. I’ve had several and they’ve all turned out to be wrong.’ Imprudently, he added, ‘How about you? Do you have one?’

‘No.’

‘I’m surprised.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, like I said, you don’t behave like someone who’s
really
in the dark or lost in the fog … you remind me of your father. You both know something you don’t want to talk about.’

This was the moment of enquiry that should have been left to Nigel, but what could Anselm do? The Prior always said that the truth reveals itself in the concrete circumstances of our lives. You have to respond, as if to a voice. And this moment of opening mutual sincerity could not be slowed, postponed or avoided. It was happening. Timothy was sitting down. He’d thrown the newspaper on the floor. His voice, no longer splintering high and low with adolescence, became quiet and even.

‘They buy me books to make me laugh. They suggest I climb trees. Sky-dive. Would you believe that? Learn some tricks. They talk to me as if they were scared I might speak. And they’re right there, only they don’t know why they should be worried. They haven’t got a clue what I might say.’

‘Because they think you’re in the dark.’

Timothy nodded, one arm massaging the muscle of the other, his nails leaving white scratch lines on his skin. ‘They tell me all these lies when I could tell them I know the truth. And I look at them all, one by one, and I keep thinking…’

Anselm couldn’t help but frown slightly. Timothy was crouching forward, feet bobbing, hands rubbing his forearms.

‘Thinking about what, Timothy?’ asked Anselm, quietly.

‘About the night my mother died. I was there. I know it wasn’t cancer.’

Anselm held his plate still as if a bird had landed on the rim.

‘I know she was killed,’ said Timothy.

Anselm didn’t even nod.

‘It’s not what you think … it wasn’t one person, not
really
… it was a team thing.’

A team.
Anselm felt the blood slow in his veins.

‘Friends and family … you know, acting together.’

Peter, Michael, Emma, Helen, Cooper, Ingleby?
It simply wasn’t possible … unless this was some incredible attempt to share responsibility. To share the strain, equally. Had there been another, wider agreement … unknown to Jenny? Decided upon during the planning of her final party? They’d had a meeting; everyone had decided to bring something.

‘I know how it was done,’ said Timothy, seeing Anselm’s disbelief. ‘I was there…’

Michael took the call in his room at the Southcliff Guest House. He’d sat there waiting all day. Immobile, as if he’d been asleep; alert, as if he’d been waiting for Liam to knock on the door. At intervals he’d let his eyes scan the three photographs of Jenny: child, girl and woman. She was healthy in all of them. It was as though there’d been no fall. No illness. He was looking at the woman, the dancer, as he listened and spoke.

‘He’s back home,’ said Emma. ‘And he likes the book.’

‘Good. Did you make the fire?’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s kerosene in the shed?’

‘Yes.’

‘He called Timothy?’

‘Told him everything’s going to change for the better. “For you and for me.”’ Emma breathed so much tension into the receiver it almost burned Michael’s ear. ‘Bring Jenny with you.’

‘I will.’

Michael put the phone down.

It had been decided weeks back that Timothy wouldn’t go home immediately. That way his routine and schooling wouldn’t be disrupted and Peter would have time to settle down in Polstead. With Timothy away from home on the night of his father’s release, Michael was free to … do his stuff.

So everything was now in place.

After killing Peter, Michael would wrap the body in the tarpaulin, fold the edges over and fix them down with the stapler. He’d take the body to the Citroën using the wheelbarrow by the back door. He’d then set fire to the house with the kerosene … a wild act of vandalism, destroying all trace of Peter’s life and Jenny’s death. Nothing of their time together would remain. Within an hour, Michael would be on the lonely quay at Slaughden, hauling Peter onto
Margot
. After dumping him far out to sea, beyond the tug of the tide, Michael would drive to Harwich, cross to the Hoek as a Canadian, head north to Harlingen and come home as a Briton in a Volvo hatchback. He’d leave the gunman exiled on the continent, never to return to England. That whole other persona, the ruined FRU man who’d made the difficult decisions, would simply evaporate, like mist off a window. The police would come to Morning Light and find Peter’s second act of uncontrollable violence and self-destruction: the razing of his own home. But they wouldn’t find Peter. Peter, like the mist, will have simply disappeared, leaving behind words that now made sense: ‘Everything’s going to change for the better. For you and for me.’

The room was completely silent.

Michael found himself listening … listening to his own heartbeat.

It pumped gently … soft-hard, soft-hard, soft-hard…

How did I come to this? he thought, with a sudden last-minute gasp from his soul. And for one grisly moment, Michael thought he was going to hear a still, small voice. But he turned away, taking his mind to the last time he’d seen his daughter. She, too, had a voice … and it had been still and small…

There was to be a party at Morning Light on Jenny’s birthday. It had been Peter’s idea. After a long, tense discussion, it had been decided that everyone was to bring something. So Michael made two lemon drizzle cakes: a small one for Jenny and a big one for everyone else. When Emma came home, they set off, arriving at Polstead just after Nigel and Helen.

‘What’s that?’ asked Emma, lightly, pointing at a small paper bag in Helen’s hand.

‘Herb tea. My own. Jenny loves it.’

Nobody else did. Her hands were trembling. Michael noticed that kind of thing.

‘And you?’ ventured Nigel, rocking on his heels, hands in his pockets.

‘Cake,’ said Michael, simply. ‘Lemon drizzle.’

‘Ah, that’s the business,’ enthused Nigel. ‘Lots of tang. But, if I’m honest, you can’t taste the sponge, can you?’

He really had
no idea.
The distance between them was vast.

‘It’s the lemon that counts,’ replied Michael. ‘Jenny loves the lemon.’

They all looked at each other, frozen, except for Nigel, bobbing back and forth.

‘Well, let’s get going, then,’ sang Emma, smiling brightly. ‘We’re here for a party, aren’t we?’

They all trooped inside, hale and hearty, greeting Peter woodenly, embracing Jenny warmly, and roughing up Timothy’s hair. Poor boy, he’d no idea either. Thankfully, Peter put on some music to fill the void.

‘Let me see her on my own for a moment,’ said Michael, with weak entreaty. ‘I’d just like to have a…’

‘You don’t have to explain yourself, darling,’ said Emma, bright and stiff. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

Michael tiptoed into the sitting room. A wood fire rustled with contentment. The lights were low. He simply followed suit, coming quietly to the chair by the bed near the darkened window.

‘Happy birthday, darling,’ said Michael.

Jenny was smiling, looking at her father with affection. A deep affection. The affection of travellers on the road.

‘I made this for you,’ he said, quietly.

‘Oh thanks, Dad.’

‘It’s the nearest I could get to a lemon drop.’

She took the cake and bit it, wincing suddenly at the tang. ‘That’s what I call sharp.’

Michael nodded. She loved the taste; always had done; ever since she was a child.

‘Don’t try and persuade me to go back to hospital,’ said Jenny in a forestalling voice. ‘I’ve had the last tests and now I’m home. I want to stay here, surrounded by what I know and those I love … I don’t want to be visited.’

Michael nodded again, unhappily. Why wasn’t there a medicine? He’d pottered about the garden all afternoon handling plant food and fertiliser. Chemicals that kept plants alive. And he’d thought it awful: there’s nothing for Jenny.

The fire murmured.

‘Dad,’ said Jenny, quietly, finishing the cake. ‘Will you call me Nimblefoot again?’

‘What?’ He reached for her hand, but Jenny didn’t need any of that understated support, those many gestures of understanding that had taken the place of words and tears. She almost seemed to push him away, but then took his hand, as if asserting herself.

‘You haven’t used that name since the accident,’ she said, smiling again, a tone of reproach in her voice. ‘We both know why. It would make us both sad. But every time you’ve spoken to me, I’ve expected to hear it … and it never came. Only now’ – her smile seemed to spill over from her mouth, lighting up her face, like one of Timothy’s sudden flashes of feeling … only Jenny’s wasn’t a rush of emotion, it was
deep
, something more than a sentiment or sensation. She seemed profoundly
contented
– ‘only now, I want to hear the name again. Because it’s me. It’s me in relation to you. Say it, please … now.’

Involuntarily, Michael cast an eye over his daughter, taking in the prostrate figure covered by blankets, her toes raising two small mountains at the base of the bed.

‘Nimblefoot,’ he said.

‘Again.’

‘Nimblefoot,’ stammered Michael, feeling emotion wrench his throat, the throat that had been wrenched so often that he was staggered he could still feel anything at all; stunned that the grip to his neck always felt like an awful, new experience. ‘Happy birthday, Nimblefoot.’

‘Thanks, Dad,’ replied Jenny. She was nodding, as if to remove doubts he hadn’t expressed. ‘From now on, you think of me as Nimblefoot … like in the old days.’

Michael held his daughter’s hand in both of his, struck by an alarming, foreign wonder. ‘Why, Nimblefoot … why?’

‘Because the tide has come in.’

Michael blinked uncertainly, remembering the stranded boats on the Orwell at Pin Mill. The red sails. The ropes drooping towards the ochre sand. The green rumpled sheets of algae.
You asked me to untie your laces … to let you go …

‘You said the tide always comes in,’ repeated Jenny, ‘and it has done. The tide, at last, has come in.’

Emma’s heels echoed on the tiling outside the kitchen.

‘How’s my birthday girl?’ she sang, an ache in her voice. And before Jenny could reply, Emma pulled up a chair, talking ten to the dozen about a male Rottweiler with a urinary tract problem. She’d carried out a radical surgical procedure corresponding to a sex change. His many problems were over. Before the story was out, Bryan arrived with his old leather doctor’s bag that he never opened. Except this time he did, pulling out some party poppers. After a quick medical examination, they all trooped back into the room and everyone stood around the bed, all of them firing the multi-coloured streamers over Jenny’s blinking, radiant face. It was like a send-off. Folk yelling and waving from the quayside after the champagne had been smashed on the prow. Michael watched her from afar, as if he’d walked to the end of a lonely pier. He ate a slice of cake slowly, his eyes smarting from the bite of zest and syrup. They welled up with a deep and secret relief: the tide had come in. At long last, the tide had come in for his girl.

Helen had eventually made a herb tea for Jenny and she sipped it appreciatively, though Michael was convinced that she – like everyone else – hated the stuff, and would have preferred to pour it down the sink. An hour or so later, Nigel and Helen left, followed by Doctor Ingleby.

‘I’ll speak to Jenny on my own, now,’ said Emma. Her eyes were heavy with summoned cheer, the sparkle she’d once brought to the officers’ mess.

‘I’ll wait outside,’ replied Michael.

He kissed Jenny on the forehead and then went outside and looked up at the stars. But he saw the sandy mouth of a river. A wind was blowing life into the red sails. The ropes were lifting on the tide.

Michael packed, paid his bill and set off for Polstead. The Browning and silencer were in the glove box, the Billingham camera bag in the boot, along with the tarpaulin and the stapler. On the passenger seat, fitted with new batteries, lay Father Doyle’s tape recorder.

When Michael had first come to Southwold he’d learned pretty quickly that if he was to shoot Peter, he would have to follow Jenny’s story all the way from her accident to the night of her death. It was the only way to summon the anger he felt at Peter for his treatment of Jenny, throughout her life. No party could make up for what she’d lost.

That painful journey was now complete.

Similarly, if he was actually to pull the trigger with a steady hand, he’d realised that he’d have to go back to Belfast and the interrogation of Eugene; he’d have to cross the border and face everything that he’d never told Danny Carpenter, the joiner who put people back together. That second journey was almost over. He was almost there.