The Sick Rose (15 page)

Daniel listened to Paul’s lecture, but with bad grace. When they got back to Grays Reach, he waited until Paul had got out of the car then swung the passenger door closed so swiftly and violently that his fingers were almost crushed. Paul instinctively recoiled and crossed his arms in front of his body, as though bracing himself for a blow. As he cowered, he felt that the facade of friendship had been torn away to reveal the true balance of power in their relationship. It was like ripping off a sticking plaster and being confronted with the wound beneath.

‘Don’t shit yourself!’ Daniel was laughing at him. ‘Did you really think I was gonna hit you?’

‘No,’ lied Paul.

‘I wouldn’t hurt you, anyway, not even if you fucked me over,’ said Daniel. Paul felt himself relax and allowed himself a little smile. But Daniel had stopped laughing. ‘No, I wouldn’t hurt you. I’d hurt your mum.’

Chapter 19

October 2009

Paul made his second discovery a few days after he had found the caravan. He was working alone, hacking down brambles to the left of the ride, then clearing the soil that was matted with the roots of murdered plants. It was hard to concentrate; he kept breaking off to stare at the Lodge. It looked different every day, depending on the angle of your approach, the time and the weather conditions. From today’s vantage point, with the low sun silhouetting the structure, it looked like the jutting lower jaw of a half-buried beast. He was digging deep when he hit something hard beneath the loam. Using the tip of his shovel as a chisel and then a lever, he exposed a bed of compacted gravel six inches deep. He called Ross over and the two of them rolled back the earth like peeling a carpet away from floorboards. It made a faint road leading from the gatehouse to the Lodge, parallel with the dirt track they currently used as a guide. When Ingram and Louisa saw it they literally danced with excitement. You’d think he had uncovered a Roman mosaic rather than a gravel driveway.

A fortnight later a new ride had been established, one that swept to the left of the gatehouse rather than the right of it. It changed the whole feel of the estate, gave it a framework. The gardens might still be an abstract mess and the Mere a stinking quagmire, but here was a pathway from which people had approached the Lodge in centuries gone by. Paul had helped Louisa to plant oak saplings on either side. They looked puny now but Louisa said that the beauty of gardening was that it made you think about time and life in a completely different way. ‘Oak trees take three hundred years to grow, three hundred years to live, three hundred years to die,’ she said. ‘Humbling, isn’t it?’ She had a way of explaining things that made you see the point.

Paul was slowly falling in love with his life at the Lodge. Sometimes he forgot the circumstances that had brought him there for hours at a time. He forgot about Daniel and the impending trial, he forgot about Ken Hillyard and what they had done to him because he was lost in his work, so perfectly suspended between history and the future that he was able to live genuinely in the present. He wouldn’t have dreamt of telling the others, who either really didn’t care, like Dilan, or who secretly cared, like Jodie and Ross, but were too busy being ironic or cool to admit to it.

Dilan reminded Paul of Daniel. He had that same street confidence with an undertow of violence. ‘I hate the countryside, man. Shit clothes and no reception,’ he said, looking from his wellingtons to his phone, which he shook like a maraca in an attempt to attract a signal. ‘You know, my girl doesn’t believe I can’t get bars out here. She thinks I’m hiding from her.’

‘That’s because you usually are,’ said Jodie.

‘So would you if she was your girlfriend.’

‘If you don’t like her, why are you going out with her?’ said Paul.

‘You’ve got to have a woman, innit? Anyway, no one else can get my hair the way I like it.’ Patterns as elaborate as any Tudor parterre had been shaved into his short black hair. Stiff black bristles were filling the gaps between the furrows. ‘You seeing anyone?’

He thought of Emily, and then of Gemma. ‘Not at the moment.’

‘I’m up to here in pussy,’ said Dilan, saluting five inches above his head. ‘Want me to send some your way?’

‘No need,’ said Ross. ‘Louisa fancies him.’ Paul cringed. Ross had got it into his head that Louisa had some kind of crush on him. It was a ridiculous idea; all they’d done was plant a few trees together, and besides—

‘She’s
well
old!’ interjected Jodie.

‘Och, she’s mum old rather than nan old, perfectly respectable,’ said Ross. ‘I know
I
would.’ He checked the time. ‘I don’t know about you guys but I make it beer o’clock.’

In fact it was not yet five, but still they filed into the boot room to wash up and change, Dilan replacing the offending wellingtons with box-fresh white trainers. The rest of them slipped into clothes that were barely distinguishable from their uniforms.

‘There’s a pint behind that bar with my name on it,’ said Ross. ‘It’s payday today. I’m gonna get
twatted
. You never know, Yummy Mummy might be there.’

‘Piss off,’ said Paul. Ross winked.

Paul could not understand where the people who drank in the Kelstice Arms came from. The village was like a ghost town: you only saw people on foot if they were walking to or from their cars. Perhaps they came in their cars from surrounding villages or even from Leamington or Coventry and stuck to soft drinks, or perhaps they just drove home drunk. The pub was as unlike the Warrant Officer as the Lodge was unlike the precinct. It was crooked with age but decorated in those colours that posh people liked to see in pubs, muted greeny blues that came out of the tin genteelly faded. The pictures on the walls hung on hooks so that anyone could nick them. His favourite was a watercolour, some artist’s impression of Kelstice Lodge at the height of its glory. Paul looked at the six towering chimneys, the haughty house, the elaborate order of the gardens and the symmetry of the trees flanking the ride. It was unsettling, unfair somehow, like seeing a picture of someone now old when they were young and beautiful. He wondered how the collection of misfits currently rammed into the snug would ever restore it to anything like that.

A debate was raging among his colleagues, the subject being that if you
had
to be locked in one room of the house which room would be best? Ross was chairing the dispute with his usual good humour. Paul was in awe of Ross; whatever he said, people always took it the way he had meant them to. Paul wondered what he had been thinking when he had decided to sell drugs, and what his own life would have been like with him for a friend instead of Daniel.

He was four pints down and on the cusp of drunkenness by the time the people he still thought of as the adults – Demetra, Ingram, Nathaniel and Louisa – turned up. Ross got them all pushing the tables together so that nobody was left out. The tables were the old-fashioned sewing-machine kind with smooth wooden tops and wrought-iron legs with
Singer
woven into the pattern, and they didn’t sit comfortably on the uneven flagstones of the pub floor. Paul dropped to his knees and got to work with folded beermats, identifying the wobbly legs and righting them. He found himself at eye level with Louisa’s knees in their jeans and from nowhere he was all but overwhelmed by the compulsion to cling to her legs and bury his face in her lap. He could have killed Ross; ever since he had started making his insinuations, Paul had started having weird Pavlovian erections whenever he got close to her. He stayed crouching, pretending to fiddle with the table legs, until cramp in his knees distracted his body’s attention away from his penis. When he looked up, Louisa was staring right through him, nursing a glass of cloudy juice. If she had noticed the nudging and the name calling, she showed no sign of it. He hoped that his face was as inscrutable as hers.

Paul stood a round, served by Kylie this time, who virtually threw the drinks in his face.

‘What’s the matter with her?’ he asked, when he had distributed the contents of his tray and started on his fifth pint.

‘Ross was caught
in flagrante
,’ said Jodie.

‘In who?’ said Dilan. You had to hand it to him; he wasn’t afraid of looking ignorant. In that respect at least he differed from Daniel.

Ingram sighed. ‘
In flagrante delicto
, Dilan. It’s Latin.’ His voice was heavy with the weight of the explanation. Paul hated the way Ingram thought a poor education was a character flaw and not an accident of circumstance, as though anyone from anywhere could waltz into Eton if only they bucked their ideas up. That kind of thinking was the reason people like Daniel were able to fall through the cracks in the system. ‘In the blazing offence. Blazing being a metaphor for vigorous, highly visible action.’

‘Say that in English, man?’ said Dilan.

‘Caught with your pants down,’ said Jodie. ‘Kylie saw Ross trying to get off with one of the conservation volunteers.’

Dilan’s eyes widened and he slapped the palm of his left hand with the back of his right one. ‘Oh my days!’ he said.

‘Kylie
thinks
she caught me trying to get off with one of the conservation volunteers,’ corrected Ross. ‘When in fact she saw me making innocent conversation with a fellow student.’

‘Innocent conversation with your hand on her arse,’ said Jodie.

‘It’s very easy for these things to be misunderstood,’ slurred Paul. ‘It’s not always as straightforward as it seems.’

‘Get you, man of the world,’ said Dilan.

‘I’m serious. I was caught at it. It wasn’t nice.’ He had their attention now. They weren’t to know his entire sex life could be condensed into a few minutes.

‘Who found you? Your mum?’ said Jodie.

‘No, it was his mum he was in bed with,’ said Dilan, to much laughter.

‘My girlfriend,’ said Paul. The word still felt funny in his mouth. ‘Ex, now, obviously.’

‘That’s
harsh
, man,’ said Dilan, with great respect.

Across the table, Paul saw a change come over Louisa’s face; the tussle for control of the lips that usually precedes tears. He understood in a flash that it had happened to her.

At the bar, Kylie rang the bell for last orders. There was a corresponding vibration somewhere near his hip. He frisked himself for his mobile and pulled out a screen displaying unfamiliar digits. The thought fluttered within him that Emily had somehow found his number and was reaching out to him in spite of what had happened. He climbed over his friends, pressing the answer button as he went so that the call would not be diverted to voicemail. At the doorway, he elbowed his way past a shivering smoker who was trying to light the wrong end of her cigarette. Even as he raised the phone to his ear he could tell that it was a male voice, although reception scrambled the sound. Trepidation replaced his foolish hope.

‘Sorry, who is this?’ he said, walking into the car park.

‘It’s me,’ said a voice that was like a fist to the face.

‘Carl . . .’ He wheeled around and peered into the darkness behind him, as though expecting the voice to embody itself. How the hell had he got this number?

‘Where the bloody hell have you got to? You’ve left my boy in a right state.’

‘I’m sorry,’ croaked Paul.

‘I don’t know what you think you’re playing at. Listen, no one wants this to get nasty, but you’ve got to change your statement otherwise Daniel’s gonna go down for this. Listen. You come back to Grays Reach tomorrow, I’ll drive you down the station and you can tell them you made a mistake first time, all right?’

‘I’m not coming back to Essex,’ said Paul.

‘Don’t make me come and beat it out of you.’ He was bluffing. He must be bluffing. But if he had the phone number, maybe he had the address too . . .

‘I only told the truth.’

‘Fucking hell, Paul. I’ve spent all day visiting my boy. He’s in bits. He’s sharing a cell with some nonce. I know he fucked up, but he doesn’t deserve
this
. You don’t deserve him as a friend . . .’

No, thought Paul, I don’t. He cut Carl off. He stood alone in the car park, charged and hot with fear and shock. A gust sent leaves scurrying across the road. The phone rang again, same number. He switched it off but still it seemed to buzz and hum with missed calls and threatening messages. He could handle the threats, he reflected; it was hearing about Daniel he couldn’t bear. He took comfort only in the fact that Carl had not seemed to know where he was; if he had known, he wouldn’t have called, he’d have turned up. Procrastination was not his style.

What if Carl had not found his number, but it had been given to him? Carl’s contact details were on his case notes, printed just above his mother’s. It would be easy for someone with access to his folder to work out the relationship and play a spiteful cat-and-mouse game with him. But who, and why? He returned to the emptying pub to retrieve his coat. Ross was at the bar talking to Kylie, who had a wet rag in one hand. She was supposed to be wiping the tables but some kind of reconciliation was evidently on the cards: Ross was tracing her palm with his fingertip, making out that he could read her fortune, and she was letting him. Dilan was rolling a spliff under the table and Jodie was texting furiously. All of them had his number, as did Ingram, Demetra, Louisa and anyone else with access to the Lodge records. What was I thinking? he wondered. Kelstice was such a microcosm that it was easy to forget that half the staff were there because they were in trouble at home, or were undergoing some kind of rehabilitation. He looked at Dilan (driving and taking away), Jodie (aggravated burglary) and even Ross (possession with intent to supply). He had been naive, he now saw, not to assume the worst about everyone. He should have learned that by now. He would have to change his number for the second time in two months. He did not understand how they had found Carl Scatlock’s number or why they would want to do this to him.