The Moth Catcher (22 page)

‘I’m scared too,’ Annie said. ‘That we’ll get it wrong again and she’ll storm away and get mixed up with all those dreadful people. That she’ll get bored and cause bother for you. She was always a nightmare as soon as she was bored.’

‘Maybe she’s just grown up a bit.’

‘I do hope so.’ But Annie couldn’t bring herself to believe that people ever changed that much. ‘We won’t be hosting drinks next Friday,’ she said. ‘I know it’s our turn, but we thought it’d be a bit much for Lizzie. First weekend out.’

‘Well, she’s a bit young for the retired hedonists!’ Jan laughed. ‘Anyway, of course you’ll want to be on your own for a bit. Nigel and Lorraine can come here. I can’t imagine Nigel wanting a Friday night without a bit of a party. And we’ll all be getting together as usual tonight.’ She was still stroking the Labrador at her feet. ‘Do you want me to tell next door about Lizzie?’

‘Nah.’ Annie was feeling more confident now. She was thinking how lucky they were to have chosen to live at Valley Farm, where they’d made such good friends. ‘I’ll go round now.’

‘Have you heard any more about the murders?’ Janet threw that out just as Annie was at the door.

Annie shook her head. It occurred to her that she hadn’t thought about the dead men all day.

Nigel let her into the farmhouse. ‘Hiya!’

He always sounded just a little bit too jolly. He tried too hard to fit in. Perhaps that was because he and Lorraine didn’t come from the North-East. Jan had a Scottish voice, but she’d lived and worked in Newcastle for years.

‘Can I get you something? One of my famous coffees? A cup of tea?’ He had a fancy coffee machine. One of his toys.

‘A cappuccino would be lovely, Nige.’ Because that was what he wanted to hear. ‘Is Lorraine in?’ Annie thought it would be easier talking to them both.

‘She’s working upstairs. I’ll give her a shout.’

Left alone in this part of the house, Annie looked around. This was by far the grandest home of the development. She wouldn’t want to live here. She thought Nigel had furnished to impress rather than because he liked each of the items. Another sign that he lacked confidence, she thought. He’d obviously been terrific at running a business because he was minted, but once he’d given that up he didn’t have anything to define him. A bit like Sam, who still baked bread in their tiny galley kitchen. She did love some of the paintings, though. There was a tiny one of a door leading through a wall into a garden. It held the promise of adventure. Once you walked through the door anything might happen. She’d stood up to get a closer look when Nigel came back with the coffee.

‘That’s one of Lorraine’s,’ he said. ‘I tell her she should sell them.’

‘I’d buy this!’

‘You can have it.’ Lorraine had been following and Annie hadn’t noticed. ‘As a present, of course.’

‘Oh no, I wasn’t hinting.’

But the watercolour was taken from the wall and Annie sat with it beside her, feeling awkward, but still delighted to have it in her grasp.

‘I’ve come to tell you that we won’t be having drinks at ours next Friday.’ Pause. Big breath. ‘Lizzie’s coming out of prison this weekend. We’ll want her to ourselves for a bit.’

Lorraine was still standing, holding a mug in both hands. ‘She’s coming to live with you?’

‘Of course she will be.’ This was Nigel, hearty and kind. ‘And of course we understand, don’t we, Lorrie? We wouldn’t want to intrude on your first couple of weeks together. It’ll be very special for you all. We’ve never had kiddies, but we can see how important it must be for you and Sam to be a family again.’

‘Thank you.’ Annie realized she was close to crying. She looked at Lorraine, expecting something more from her too. She’d thought that Lorraine, with her arty clothes and her easy laughter, would be the least fazed to hear that a convicted criminal would be moving in next door. But Lorraine said nothing. She drank her coffee with her eyes half-closed as if the taste and the smell of it were the most important things in the world. Annie wondered if her friend might once have been the victim of a crime. That might explain her wariness. She saw that it wouldn’t be so easy to forgive, if you were the person who’d been scarred after a drunken encounter in a bar. Annie had never heard what had happened to Lizzie’s victim and didn’t like to think about that.

The silence stretched and grew uneasy. At last Lorraine set her coffee mug on a slate coaster on the table. ‘Aren’t you a bit nervous? About Lizzie offending again? I mean, when she’s living with you.’

Annie remembered then that Lorraine had run art classes for people in trouble. Of course she wouldn’t necessarily have a rosy opinion of offenders. All the same, Lorraine seemed so upset that Annie wondered if she’d had a more personal encounter with crime.

‘We’ll get help.’ Annie realized her voice was a bit desperate. ‘She’ll have a probation officer and a woman from Hope North-East, a charity, will be visiting. We won’t have to do it all ourselves.’

‘I’m sure you’ll be fine.’ Lorraine seemed to have recovered her composure. She smiled. ‘With you and Sam to support her, what could possibly go wrong?’

Lizzie Redhead lay in bed. Her head was exploding with the prospect of leaving prison. The space beyond this place seemed to stretch forever. Scary, and dizzying with its possibilities. Plans fizzed and jolted like she was wired to a power supply. She knew she wouldn’t sleep at all. It was because she was so freaked out, and she was frightened of the dreams that seeped into her mind when she was half-awake.
Sodding Jason Crow. You won’t leave me alone even here.

She shared her room with three other women. There was one set of bunks and two single beds. All with flowery duvets, as if pretty linen could turn them into civilized people, good wives and mothers. Lizzie had a bed, the one closest to the window, which was an odd shape because it had been cut in half when the grand house had been turned into an institution and extra partition walls had been built. Outside there was a big tree. When Lizzie had first come to Sittingwell it had been bare and when the wind blew the branches creaked, making her think of an old-fashioned ship in a storm. In moonlight the tree threw strange shapes on the ceiling. It was as if outside had come into the prison.

Now the women were all asking her what she’d do when she first got out. Two were recent arrivals and she hadn’t got to know them well, so she ignored their suggestions.

‘You’ll go into toon, man. A night on the lash. That club in the Bigg Market, where they do cocktails. A lass like you will pull a fit bloke in seconds.’ The two were cousins and had been charged together with a series of thefts from stores. After so many convictions the court had described prison as the only option left, even though they both had babies. The kids were being cared for by grandparents. Lizzie had seen them at visiting time.

The cousins went on to throw out a menu of drinks that they’d go for, when they got let out: lethal cocktails that got crazier and crazier. Lizzie thought she’d moved beyond that. There was more to life than getting pissed. Prison had given her a different perspective. Her world was bigger. She lay on her bed and pulled the curtain aside to see the stars. An owl called somewhere in the garden, and immediately Lizzie was back in the place where she’d lived as a child. The valley at Gilswick. Then it had seemed to her a community of old people. A strict social hierarchy, with the major in the Hall at the top. The only other kids had lived at the big house. Lizzie had been at school with them, until they’d been sent off to private prep schools. She hadn’t thought much of Catherine, who’d been dainty and girly, but she’d got on okay with Nicholas. He hadn’t boarded until he was older and she’d still played with him at weekends. They’d built dens in the woods and dammed the burn. It should have been idyllic, but it had never been enough for her. She’d still been bored.

The cousins saw that she wasn’t listening to their plans for a big night out and they shut up. The other room-mate was older. She had school-age kids. She’d worked in a care home and had started nicking things from the old people. Money and jewellery. In one room she’d found a credit card, the PIN jotted down on a scrap of paper in the same drawer. The man she’d stolen from had been dying. ‘He wasn’t going to use it, was he?’ Rose had said. ‘And his relatives never visited, and they only lived south of the river. Why did they have more right to his cash than me? I wiped his bum and washed his face. I made him smile.’

Lizzie hadn’t had an answer to that. She wondered whether she’d visit
her
parents if they didn’t recognize her any more.

The room fell quiet then, so she supposed the others were sleeping. She started thinking about Shirley Hewarth. When they’d first met, Lizzie had thought Shirley was as tough as her. There was something steely about her, a refusal to be conned. Lizzie had tried to lie about the offence and her relationship with Jason, and Shirley had tilted her head to one side and said, ‘Well, I don’t think that’s
entirely
true, is it?’ She’d peeled back Lizzie’s pretences until Lizzie felt raw, exposed. She’d found herself confiding in Shirley. Making herself vulnerable. She hadn’t even allowed herself that luxury with Jason.

Now Lizzie wasn’t sure that Shirley was as hard as she seemed. They might share the same secret, but they had different interests. The thought worried her. It was one of the reasons she was scared about leaving prison: that Shirley might land her in the shit, big time.

Friday evening. Friday was party night for the retired hedonists at Valley Farm and usually at this time Annie would be getting ready to be social. She’d be lying in a deep bath and deciding what she was going to wear. She wasn’t usually competitive about how she looked, but Lorraine formed a kind of challenge. Annie had seen the way John O’Kane looked at Lorraine Lucas and wondered if Sam was attracted to the woman too.

This evening, though, she was in the spare room preparing it for Lizzie’s return. Lizzie had never spent very long in the house. She’d stayed a couple of days when they’d first moved in, but she’d made it clear that she was bored out of her skull and soon moved back to the town, to the flat they’d rented for her. And soon after Lizzie had been charged with assault and remanded in custody. Even when she’d got bail she’d preferred to keep away.

Annie opened the window to air the place. It was almost dark, but still unseasonably warm. No wind at all. She heard a car drive up the valley and watched as it pulled up outside the farmhouse. Nigel and Lorraine, obviously already in party mood. They could see the light in the bedroom and the open window, and Nigel shouted up to her.

‘See you soon! We just popped into The Lamb for a quick one, but we’ll be ready in half an hour or so.’

Now the last thing Annie wanted was to go into the big house, to drink too much wine. She knew exactly how it would be: John O’Kane, brooding but somehow predatory. Janet, who became girlish and giggly after a few drinks, so the age seemed to fall away from her and she was an irresponsible student again. Nigel full of good cheer, bad jokes and stories from his past. Lorraine dreamy and distant as if her mind was somewhere else altogether. Annie wondered sometimes if Lorraine had a lover. Not the professor – that would be too obvious – but a younger man outside the valley, to distract her when Nigel became too boring.

‘I’m not sure. We might give it a miss this evening. You know what Sam is like, and we’re not feeling very sociable.’ Annie was thinking of Lorraine’s chilly response to the news that Lizzie would be coming home. She wasn’t sure they’d really be welcome.

‘Come on! Don’t be a spoilsport.’ Lorraine was right under the window now, her eyes glittering like a cat’s in the light that spilled out from the bedroom. ‘Come out to play. It’s Friday night.’

Annie couldn’t say no. She’d never been very good at saying no, and Lorraine’s personality was so fierce and she seemed so used to getting her own way that Annie couldn’t stand up to her. ‘Give us half an hour. I need to jump into the shower, and Sam has been in the garden most of the day.’ It occurred to her that Lorraine was almost as manipulative as Lizzie.

In the end Sam didn’t take too much persuading. ‘We’ve all been a bit uptight,’ he said. ‘These murders on the doorstep. Lizzie coming home. Perhaps it’d do us good. And it is Friday night.’ He fetched a bottle of wine from the pantry and a flan that he’d made the day before. Annie went upstairs again to have a shower. The water on her body seemed to clear her mind, but later, sitting at her dressing table to do her make-up, she found her hand was shaking as she tried to apply the mascara. She saw that she was as tense and nervous as she’d been all day. Perhaps Sam was right and they needed an evening with their friends to unwind. Perhaps she needed a couple of drinks too.

They could hear the music from the farmhouse as soon as they went out of their door. The Who singing about their generation. Inside Lorraine was moving across the room with a glass in her hand. She’d thrown her shoes into a corner and was barefoot, dancing with an invisible partner. Nigel had pushed the table back against the wall and was setting out plates, a cheeseboard and glasses. It seemed to Annie now that he never dressed like someone from
their
generation, but as someone much older. He could be a character in a Noël Coward play in his blazer. All he needed was a cravat.

Sam stepped aside to let Annie in first. They’d tapped at the door and then gone straight in. Lorraine came up to greet them, hugging them and kissing them on both cheeks. Sam, who was usually very careful about his personal space, didn’t seem to mind the hug. And almost immediately Jan and John were there too, appearing through the back door as if by magic. Jan wore a white cotton tunic over wide linen trousers, long silver earrings and actually looked rather glamorous. John was in a collarless shirt over jeans. Today these details seemed very clear and sharp. The background music, the clothes, the food on the table were all branded into her mind. Tonight, Annie thought, they’d all become caricatures of themselves.