The King of Diamonds (16 page)

‘Thank you,’ he said when he was done. ‘That was the best meal I’ve ever had.’ He wasn’t exaggerating.

She ignored the compliment. He couldn’t read her expression. She didn’t seem frightened or angry any more, but there was a distance between them that he couldn’t seem to bridge.

He looked over at the mantelpiece, from which the photographs of his mother and father on their wedding day and of him as a boy of Max’s age had long since disappeared. Consigned to the bureau, he supposed, gathering dust.

‘Do you miss him?’ he asked.

‘Who?’

‘Dad. It’s like he was never here.’

‘No,’ she said, responding to the question but not the comment.

‘Why?’

‘Because he was like you: always full of ideas, never settling to anything. Ideas don’t pay the bills,’ she said with finality.

‘Not like Ben, though. I doubt he’s had an idea in his life.’

‘He’s solid,’ she said, not taking offence.

David nodded. He understood what his mother meant. It couldn’t have been easy for her all those years, worrying about debts and eviction notices, although it had to be said that the old man had done better toward the end, with his own one-man business and a second-hand white van with
SPARKS ELECTRICS
painted on the side to prove it. Much good it did him: the van was where he’d died – a heart attack on his way to a job in Abingdon. ‘Painless,’ the doctor had told them at the hospital, ‘but lucky he was stopped in traffic at the time, now wasn’t it?’

‘Have you got a cigarette?’ David asked. His mother handed him her packet and lit one herself too. The acrid smoke felt good in his lungs, and the shared cigarettes broke down the barrier between them for a moment so that they seemed almost like old comrades, free of the bonds of their failed mother-son relationship.

‘The old man’s ideas didn’t do me much good either, you know,’ said David reflectively. ‘All those crazy plans for my future like I was going to be a university professor or something. This is the last town he should have been living in. Those bloody dreaming spires went to his head.’

‘He wanted the best for you.’

‘No, he didn’t,’ said David bitterly. ‘He wanted to live his life again through me. That’s what he wanted. It’s why he spent his last penny and yours too sending me to that posh school – so I could learn to speak like the upper classes, be one of them. And you know what they called me there, Mum? Sparky! Maybe he should have thought twice about sending me to the same place where he changed the lightbulbs, but I expect they gave him a special rate – cut price fees for Sparky Swain’s son. I never stood a bloody chance in that place – that’s the truth.’

‘You did all right in your first lot of exams.’

‘Yes, to keep him happy. But what was the point in that if he was going to die? What was the point in any of it?’

‘I don’t know, David. I’m not God. Like I said, he wanted the best for you. You’re the one who chose to throw it all away. You could have made something of yourself if you’d wanted to.’

‘So it’s all my fault, is it?’ David asked angrily.

‘You make your bed, and you lie on it,’ said his mother. The finality of the platitude infuriated him, even more so because he couldn’t think of a cutting response.

‘Why didn’t you visit me in prison?’ he asked. It was the unspoken question that had been hanging in the air between them ever since he’d arrived.

‘Because I couldn’t,’ she said simply. ‘I wanted to, but Ben wouldn’t have it, and I didn’t want to go behind his back.’

And David knew she was telling no more or less than the truth. Honesty was his mother’s great redeeming quality, and, as had happened so often in the past, his anger bounced off it and evaporated.

‘You can sleep in your old room,’ she said. ‘I’ll wake you when it’s time to go.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, getting up. And on impulse he bent over and kissed her on the cheek on his way to the door, and then left without waiting to see her reaction.

Upstairs, David washed in the tiny bathroom. Just like in the rest of the house there was not a speck of dirt anywhere – even the taps gleamed in sterile glory. David opened the medicine cabinet over the sink, looking for aspirin, and found some behind a bottle of men’s hair dye. He smiled, amused for a moment by the thought of his stepfather trying to keep his non-existent looks, and then caught sight of his own reflection in the mirror. He looked awful – haggard, with great dark circles under his staring eyes, the living image of a man on the run, a convict on his last legs. He needed to sleep.

His old bedroom had become Max’s room, distinctively Max’s room. The bed and most of the furniture were still the same, but every surface was covered with careful arrangements of toy soldiers and Dinky cars and different species of furry animals. There was something oddly touching about this great assembly of disparate objects and creatures, and yet the room was still disturbing to David’s peace of mind. Here he’d played and read and slept, done his homework with his father, and been tended to by his mother when he had the measles. He’d had a family and a purpose and a life, and now he’d come back here a fugitive from justice, an outlaw like in those John Wayne movies he used to watch at the cinema when he was a kid. David closed his eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come. Outside a cacophony of Sunday-morning church bells pealed out, calling the faithful to worship, and he tossed and turned on the bed, tormented by the memory of Katya lying on her bed with a bloody hole in the middle of her pretty forehead and the gun shaking in his hand like it had a life of its own.

David opened his eyes and saw Max in the doorway. The boy looked worried, and his eyes behind his oversized spectacles seemed even larger than before.

‘You cried,’ he said, ‘like you were having a nightmare or something.’

‘I was,’ said David apologetically. ‘But it’s all right now. I like your room, Max.’

‘Do you?’ The boy seemed immoderately pleased, as if nobody had noticed the place before.

‘Yes, I do. All your things – it’s quite an arrangement you’ve got going. Which is your favourite?’

‘Toy or animal?’ asked Max seriously. He’d come into the room now and was standing beside the bed.

‘Both.’

‘Well, that’s easy. I like Fluff the most of the animals,’ he said, picking up a worse-for-wear black-and-white teddy bear from the top of the bookcase. ‘I like to sleep with him, but Dad says I need to stop because I’m growing up. And my best toy . . .’ – Max looked around the room, carefully weighing his decision – ‘is . . . my robot,’ he finished with a flourish, holding up a silver flat-faced, cone-headed android with an elaborate control panel in what would otherwise have been its stomach. Robbie the Robot was engraved on the back over the compartment for the batteries.

‘Yes, good choice. I think that’s the best one too,’ said David admiringly. ‘Is Robbie your favourite character?’

‘Yes, one of them.’ Max seemed distracted, like he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the right words.

‘What is it?’ asked David.

‘This was your room too, wasn’t it, when you were a kid?’

‘Yes, it was once, a long time ago. But it’s yours now. And you’ve got it looking a lot better than I ever did.’

‘Have I? Thanks,’ said Max. Once again David had that same sense that the boy was filing away what he’d just heard for later inspection. It was a funny trait, but it appealed to David for some reason.

‘I’ve got to go to sleep now,’ he said. ‘But our talk’s made me feel better, so I promise you – no more nightmares.’

Max nodded and left the room still carrying the robot and the teddy bear, and downstairs David could hear the muffled sound of the television being turned on – a new addition since he’d last been here. It was true – the conversation with his half-brother had helped – he felt calmer, easier in his mind, and, turning over, he fell into a deep dreamless sleep.

He woke with a start. His mother was shaking him. ‘You’ve got to go. Ben’s back.’

‘But I thought you said one o’clock,’ he said, looking blearily at his watch. It was only five to twelve.

‘I know I did. He’s back early. That’s all. I’ve made you some sandwiches,’ she said, holding out a plastic bag. ‘You can go out of the back door. He won’t hear you if you’re quiet.’

‘What about my gun?’ he said, pulling on his clothes.

‘Leave it. I’ll get rid of it. And I’ll tell them you haven’t got one when they come. They won’t shoot you if you haven’t got a gun.’

There was an urgent, pleading note in his mother’s voice, and it gave him some comfort in the days and weeks afterwards to know that she’d cared, but now it didn’t make any difference: he had to have the gun.

Downstairs he heard his stepfather’s barking voice mixed up with the sound of the television.

‘I’ll keep him in the living room. You go through the kitchen and out the back. The door’s open,’ she said from the doorway.

‘I need the gun,’ he told her again, but she’d already left.

Dressed in his prison jeans and shoes and his stepfather’s oversized shirt and cardigan, topped with the jacket he’d stolen the night before, David tiptoed down the stairs, holding the bag of sandwiches in his hand. Stopping halfway down, he listened to the voices in the living room across the hall and felt for a moment like he was a child again, eavesdropping on his parents in the half-light after he was supposed to have gone to bed, except that he was fifteen years older now and he needed the gun in his mother’s bureau. It was just behind the living room door.

Ben had been holding forth about a road closure somewhere, something to do with a change in his bus route and coming home early, but now he wasn’t talking any more, and David could hear the news summary being read on the television – more about missile tests and the election coming up in the United States –
Kennedy or Nixon; Nixon or Kennedy – who the hell cares
? thought David. But maybe Ben did; maybe he was watching up at the other end of the room; maybe there’d be time to sneak in and take the gun out of the bureau without Ben’s seeing him at all.

The door was already open, and Ben
was
watching the television, sitting in the big armchair, dressed in his bus driver’s uniform with his back to David and the window. Max was on the sofa looking at a book, and David’s mother was nowhere in sight. Slowly, stealthily, David opened the bureau drawer inch by inch, but it made no noise, and there was the gun inside, just where his mother had left it, lying on top of a bundle of old letters. It felt good to have it in his hand again; holding it made him feel empowered, safe. He straightened up, ready to go, and looked at his face staring back at him from the television.

‘. . . escaped from Oxford Prison late last night and is now wanted for a murder committed in an isolated country house outside the village of Blackwater shortly afterwards,’ intoned the impassive voice of the newsreader, talking over the blown-up photograph they’d taken of David at the police station after his arrest two years earlier.

David gasped involuntarily, and Ben turned round, getting to his feet and letting out a bellow of rage as he caught sight of his stepson standing in the corner of the room behind him, but the gun in David’s hand, pointed at his midriff, brought him to an abrupt halt.

‘What do you want?’ he asked through a deep exhalation of breath. He was obviously terrified.

‘Shut up and sit down,’ said David, ignoring the question. ‘I need to see this.’

The picture on the television had changed. Now there was some kind of press conference going on with lights flashing and a whole bunch of microphones held up toward a thin, tired-looking man with a receding hairline. He was wearing a creased, crumpled-up suit, and his tie was on crooked. David remembered him: it was the policeman who’d been in charge of his case before, the one who’d come to talk to him in Brixton Prison last year before his transfer down here. He had an unusual name – Trave, Inspector Trave. That was it. David remembered the way the man’s eyes had been sad and focused all at the same time, like he was trying to see past David, through a glass darkly, and failing in the attempt.

‘He’s armed and dangerous,’ Trave was saying. ‘Members of the public should call the police immediately if they see him, and he should not be approached under any circumstances.’

‘Where is he? Any ideas?’ asked a reporter, pushing his microphone up toward the inspector.

‘He went to Oxford Railway Station this morning and bought a ticket to London. We don’t know for certain if he was on the train, but he may well have been.’

‘What about the murder?’ asked another invisible journalist. ‘Can you give us any more detail?’

‘She’s a young woman in her early twenties who’s been shot in the head. She was killed with a single bullet,’ said Trave. He seemed uncomfortable or impatient maybe, like he wished he was somewhere else.

‘Was the victim known to the suspect?’

‘Yes, known.’

And the television cut away from the press conference to a photograph of Ethan Mendel, but now David couldn’t hear what the newsreader was saying. His mother was shouting, telling him to get out, telling Max to get behind her into the kitchen. But David stood his ground. He felt sorry, wished it hadn’t come to this with his pig of a stepfather involved, but he’d had no choice. She shouldn’t have taken away his gun.