The Sick Rose (31 page)

‘What, and leave your mum on her own, in her condition?’ said Troy, as if she were a week overdue rather than nine weeks pregnant.

When the snow came the house was more claustrophobic than ever. It happened a couple of days after New Year’s Eve (what a miserable experience
that
had been; watching Graham Norton on television and then missing Louisa’s midnight phone call because he had been filling up a hot water bottle). The severe weather warnings were by now such a regular feature of the forecast that they had lost their power to caution, but it was still a surprise to go to sleep one evening and wake up to find the windowsills inches deep in thick snow.

Mum had brought his old laptop with her when she had left Grays Reach. It wasn’t as fast as the brand new one Carl owned but it was easy to piggyback onto a neighbour’s unsecured wifi connection. He checked the travel updates hourly, watching the animated map of England that turned pale blue in patches where the snow was falling. Trains were being cancelled across the country and in the event that all his connections were running, the roads in rural Warwickshire were evidently impassable with whole villages cut off because the council hadn’t provided enough gritters. He and Louisa had agreed to return to the Lodge on the 4th of January, as soon as the trains were running, but she called him that day to postpone their reunion.

‘I’m going to stay in Wimbledon for a couple more days, darling,’ she said in one of their whispered phone calls, made from Miranda’s landline late at night. ‘I’m being thoroughly spoilt. I’d forgotten how lovely a hot bath on a cold day can be.’

‘I miss you,’ said Paul.

‘Me too. I
ache
for you. I can’t wait to be with you again.’ The sound of her voice worked the same magic as the tips of her fingers. He wished he could say something elegant and erotic to her but he was not as good with words as she was and anyway, she always took the lead in things like that. Instead, he closed the living-room door, put a dining chair under the handle and trawled the internet for actresses who looked a bit like her doing things he wouldn’t dare to ask her to do, and if he did he wasn’t sure he’d have liked her to say yes.

Chapter 41

The streets got more treacherous as the snow was packed down into icy slides. The elderly women of West Sussex all stayed indoors. Paul considered writing to the government suggesting that the Psychic Channel be used as an instrument of non-violent torture against terrorist suspects. Mrs Ball was watching, enraptured, as a camp middle-aged man with fluorescent yellow hair ran his fingers over a gravestone with his eyes closed, evidently in deep communion with the spirit of the deceased. He thought about his own father’s memorial, a pale pink plaque in a wall of more of the same. He forced himself not to think about the memorial to Ken Hillyard but it was relatively safe to wonder where Adam Glasslake might be buried.

He had said he wouldn’t go snooping in Louisa’s past, but perhaps it would do her good to see the grave. He thought back to the bereavement counselling the school had made him have after his father died. The counsellor had been really into headstones, benches, plaques and trees. She had said that without a physical representation of your loved one you could never really complete the grieving process – that some people could never even begin it. What if Paul could find Adam Glasslake’s gravestone? He would go with her to see it, he wouldn’t mind. It was obvious to him that if they hadn’t caught her so far then they wouldn’t now. What she needed was to come to terms with the loss of him and move on.

He flipped his laptop open. If Adam had been killed today his death would have been recorded a million ways, from straightforward court reports to tabloid investigations to Facebook pages in his memory. He wasn’t sure exactly when Louisa had been eighteen but was pretty certain that the internet was still in its infancy then, judging by her reluctance to adopt it. Probably they had all still been on dial-up connections and only using the internet for sending emails. Mrs Ball looked up and Paul shielded the screen from her, even though his search had so far yielded nothing apart from several different listings for a clothing importer from Arizona. He put the name in inverted commas and tried again. He had scrolled through three pages of guff about the sale and distribution of ladies’ fashions, increasingly convinced that he was wasting his time, when he came across a music website containing the words ‘Lyrics Adam Glasslake’. Once into the site he had to search all over again. It belonged to a band called Springhead and was badly designed, with black letters superimposed over dark photographs. The pictures were arty and blurred, showing two vague pale faces that could have been either sex and any age. The music was in the same vein: ambient, abstract, electronic. It wasn’t Paul’s kind of thing and he could not imagine it had ever been Louisa’s either. Paul clicked every button with no luck until he came to one marked
Archive
. The caption read:
Back in the day! Our first band, Glasslake. Lyrics Adam Glasslake, music Ciaran Richards
.

That took him through to another photograph, this time taken onstage. It was of appalling quality, evidently a scan of a photocopy. That shape there must be Adam; it was impossible to make out any of his features; the dark hair and eyes could have been any colour in the original. The track playing was called ‘Chapter and Verse’. On this page the music was completely different, rocky and complex, the low quality of the recording failing to disguise the purity of the voice. The sound was more evocative than any image could have been. For the first time the magnitude of what he was doing hit Paul: he was listening to a ghost voice. He felt a new flare of anger at the man who had let Louisa down so badly and something else, too, a need to find out all he could about Adam’s life as well as his death. His curiosity went from idle to industrious in four bars of music. He had to know everything.

‘For the last time, will you turn that music off,’ said Mrs Ball, even though he had never before played any music through his laptop and it was the first time of asking. Paul unplugged the computer and took it upstairs, making himself as comfortable as was possible on the bed that his mother and Troy shared.

There was a message board on the Contacts page. Paul posted a message saying that he was looking to trace anyone who had known Adam Glasslake. Before he even had time to wonder what he was expecting to hear, a response was typed out.

I’m intrigued
, his correspondent wrote.
Give me a call
. He attached a mobile number. Paul knew if he hesitated even for a moment he’d never actually do it. Withholding his own number – after Carl Scatlock’s call, he took no chances – he dialled.

‘Ben speaking,’ said the voice.

‘Oh, hello. It’s Paul here, from . . . the internet,’ said Paul, immediately regretting giving his own name and having no idea what he was going to say next. He should have waited a few minutes, made some notes, devised a strategy. His flustered eye snagged on Troy’s bowl-haired, skinny-tied school photograph. ‘I was at school with Adam, and I was just trying to find out what happened after he left.’

‘Which one? He was expelled from most of them,’ said Ben but before Paul could think of an answer there was a muffled disturbance in the background and Ben said, ‘Put that down, Grace. Grace!
Grace
!’ A small child started to cry. The phone was let go and at a remove Paul heard the voice shout, ‘Angie, can you see to her?’ There was more action and a woman’s voice chimed in soothing admonishment in the background.

‘Sorry. You have my undivided attention now. There’s a name I haven’t heard for, what, twenty years? I’d almost given him up for dead.’ Ben laughed; so he didn’t know. ‘We all had a big bust-up and never saw him again. What do you want him for?’

Paul fought the urge to blurt the truth. You couldn’t just go around phoning people out of the blue and telling them their old friends were dead in any circumstances but especially not when your girlfriend was the undetected murderer. Inspiration struck just in time.

‘I’m organising a reunion, I—’

‘Hang on, how come you asked for Adam Glasslake?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Adam Glasslake wasn’t his real name, was it? That was only his stage name, he adopted it when he came to London. He got it off some gravestone at his dad’s church. At school he would have been known by his real name, Alan Murray.’

‘I, ah . . .’ stammered Paul.

‘What do you really want?’ said Ben, suddenly suspicious.

‘Thank you so much for your help, that’s brilliant, I’ll let you know if I find him,’ said Paul, and hung up, his heart hammering.

Entering Alan Murray returned millions of hits. He refined his search, combining the name with the words ‘dead’, ‘funeral’, ‘obituary’, ‘killed’ and finally, after his fingers hovered nervously over the keys for whole minutes, ‘murdered’. If he was staggered how many Alan Murrays could be alive, it was yet more astonishing how many Alan Murrays had died. For half a day he trawled obituaries of men called Alan Murray, the middle-aged, the young, a couple of children, good men, bad men, indifferent men, strokes, heart attacks and at last two murders – but one in 2001 and another in 2006, neither compatible with Louisa’s timeline and in any case both outside London.

He found a couple of sites that offered tantalising glimpses of reports that could only be accessed in full by subscribers. A further search turned up a site where you could, using a credit card, buy yourself some time to look through the archives of every newspaper in English. From his wallet he drew out the credit card pressed upon him by the building society and so far unused, and bought himself two hours’ access. Three decades of British newsprint were soon available at the click of a mouse. Paul was thrilled, never having known such a thing existed. He had expected to find facsimile pictures of actual printed pages but the format was just the bare facts delivered in generic plain font, like a no-frills email. This made concentration all the harder and he was soon sweating with the effort of it, completely lost in the process. He felt like a detective or a private eye, like he had been given a passport into a secret world of intelligence. Excitement turned to stress as the clock in the corner of the screen ticked down and still he found no record of Alan Murray’s death. He allowed himself to wonder briefly if Louisa was telling the truth at all, if she hadn’t made the whole thing up for a joke or as some kind of test of his loyalty.

His eyes were dry and so was his mouth. As quickly as he could, he went downstairs to make himself a cup of tea. He looked around the tiny kitchen and reflected that at least it was a haemophobic’s paradise; the only blade in there was an ancient breadknife that was butter-blunt. While the kettle boiled, he tried to recall exactly his conversation with Louisa. Hadn’t she told him the street where it had happened? It had rung a bell, had something to do with Kelstice . . . Leamington, Conventry, Warwickshire . . . Warwick Gardens, that was it. Back upstairs he entered the address and Alan Murray and was rewarded with a positive hit. Suddenly Paul was breathless, as though he was physically chasing the man himself through the streets.

The report that came up was dated 19th October 1989. So, Louisa had been eighteen in 1989 which meant that now she was . . .
Christ
. . . He filed his reaction away to be dwelt upon later. That revelation shrank into the background in the light of the report that followed. It was only a few lines long but it changed everything.

Mystery Coma Man Rev’s Son

The previously unidentified man who spent three months in a coma in St Mary’s Hospital following a hit-and-run on Warwick Gardens in June has been named as Alan Murray, 21, of Haywards Heath, East Sussex. Mr Murray, who regained consciousness last month with no memory of his accident, is the only son of controversial Anglican clergyman Reverend Radclyffe Murray, who died in the spring.

Mr Murray is still recovering from a serious head injury and will complete his convalescence at home with his mother, Mrs Theresa Murray.

Louisa, who had spent the last twenty years living as a murderer, had not killed Adam. Everything she thought she knew about herself was wrong. His heart swelled at the thought of being able to give her such amazing news. If he had felt like a secret agent before, now he felt like a god, able to resurrect the dead and pardon the guilty. He would tell her in person when they were together again; he could not wait to see the look on her face. He would have to choose his words carefully. He had never had such huge news to break. If Louisa had been religious, he would have been announcing the difference between her soul being saved or damned, which was as big as news got.

With twenty minutes of his search still left, Paul tried to find out where he might be now. Alan Murray might be a common name but, as far as Paul could detect, the world had only ever played host to one Reverend Radclyffe Murray, which was just as well as he did not sound like a very nice man; he had evidently spent the last years of his life campaigning hard for gay clergy to be banned from the Church. He had died of heart disease in May 1989, just weeks before Adam had been hit by the car. He had a fleeting image of Louisa comforting him after his father’s death; it was far more disturbing than the idea of them in bed together. Radclyffe’s controversial opinions hadn’t stopped over six hundred parishioners attending the memorial service, which was held by the Bishop in Chichester Cathedral. Obituaries mentioned him being survived by a widow, Theresa Murray, who was sixty-four, and their only son Alan, twenty-one. Paul sipped at his tea, found it had gone cold and spat it back into the mug. He turned his attention to Mrs Theresa Murray, combining her name with her son’s. The archive presented the search results chronologically. The rest of 1989 and the early nineties yielded nothing but there was a 1994 report from the
Brighton
Evening Argus
.