The Sick Rose (32 page)

Vicar Widow Seeks Son

The widow of Reverend Radclyffe Murray, the controversial clergyman who died in 1989, has been admitted to the Roseberry Nursing Home in Eastbourne after a series of small strokes. Theresa Murray, 69, is said to have been heartbroken after the recent disappearance of her only son, Alan, now 26, who was left brain-damaged after a hit-and-run accident soon after the Reverend’s death. Anyone with information about Alan is urged to contact the Missing Persons Bureau.

At the foot of the piece, in square brackets, was the word ‘image’, presumably pertaining to a photograph of Adam. What had he looked like, this man Louisa had loved enough to kill? Paul tried to picture him, as though if he thought hard enough the vague fuzzy image he had seen on Ben’s website would suddenly pull into sharp focus. He tried to resign himself to not knowing. Louisa had already told him that she hadn’t kept any photographs after the event, that it would have been too hard.

His connection was about to time out: he emailed the relevant documents to himself. Finally he had time to order the concatenation of conflicting realities. Twenty minutes ago, Adam had been dead, then resurrected; the most recent available intelligence suggested that he was now alive but missing. One truth shone brighter than the rest: the fact that Louisa was not a killer.

Idly he googled the Roseberry Nursing Home, Eastbourne, and called to the screen the home page of a site only slightly more professional-looking than Ben’s, with a crappy stencil-effect rose pattern bordering the frugal pages. He supposed that Adam’s mother must be long dead by now so it was with low expectations that he made the call. On a whim, he gave his name as Dan Smith; uttering the forbidden diminutive gave him an uneasy thrill, like a swearword in church. The manager who answered told him that Mrs Theresa Murray was their longest-term resident, and although very feeble was still alive. Visitors were welcome.

Goring was in West Sussex and Eastbourne in East Sussex. The paired counties were huge but the line between the towns was a direct one, snaking along the brim of the English Channel. Paul looked out of the window at the darkening sky. If the snow held off, he could be there this time tomorrow.

Chapter 42

June 1989

On the morning after, the Friday, the phone by her bed rang and rang but she didn’t answer it. In the end Miranda knocked on the door and came in without knocking.

‘It’s Elvira,’ she said. ‘She wants to know why you’re not at work.’

‘Tell her I’m not coming in,’ said Louisa, from underneath the duvet. ‘Tell her I’ve got the flu.’

‘Tell her yourself. I’m not doing your dirty work for you.’ Louisa turned her face to Miranda and must have looked pretty horrific because her sister recoiled and said, ‘Just this once, then. That’s quite some hangover you’ve got.’

Elvira came round on the Monday, sat on the edge of the bed, said, ‘That’s not flu,’ and told her that Adam wasn’t worth it, with uncharacteristic and unbearable tenderness. Louisa didn’t speak. Elvira came round again two days after that and said that if Louisa wanted to keep her job she had better be at the stall by midday or she was going to give it to a friend of Roberta’s who was over from Italy.

Louisa couldn’t stop looking at her palms. She expected them to be blistered, the skin seared where she had touched him. She felt raw. There was nothing on the radio; she flicked between the news bulletins on Capital and GLR but no one mentioned it. She was afraid to watch the television, even if she was on her own. She developed an Orwellian conviction that it was spying on her. Her parents did not take the
Fulham Chronicle
or even the
Standard
(it was unthinkable that she could venture the two hundred yards to the newsagent) and there was nothing in the
Guardian
. Murder they would report, guns or knives or fists, but not necessarily a hit-and-run death. Dozens of pedestrians were killed by drivers every year in London; the only cars the press were interested in were the ones being blown up by the IRA.

Journalists might not care, but the police would. If they caught the driver they would catch
her
, she was sure of it, and she waited for the knock on the door. The Other Man was her only witness; he could not mention her without incriminating himself, but if they did catch up with him it was only natural that he would put the police on to the girl with the blue hair and the long black dress. A problem shared is a problem halved, after all.

Miranda was amazing: sympathetic to the heartbreak it was impossible to conceal, ignorant of the horror it was necessary to hide, and discretion itself when it came to protecting her from their parents. When Louisa hacked into her hair, cutting out the blue streaks and losing five inches of length, it was Miranda who sat with her in the utility room, patiently giving her a damage-limitation haircut that would last until she felt well enough to go to a stylist. Later that day, Louisa took all her clothes, including the ones she had been wearing on the night, to the housing charity shop at Notting Hill Gate. She was astonished by the bustle and traffic on Kensington Church Street. So many cars, each one a killing machine. So many people, each one of them a killing machine too, although none of them would believe it of themselves if you told them.

The knock on the door came after two weeks. It was not the expected uniformed duo, but it
was
a good-cop-bad-cop, black-clad couple. Miranda ushered Angie and Ben into Louisa’s room with a puzzled, concerned expression on her face that said, Do you want me to stay? Louisa shook her head and closed the door, hanging onto the knob as though the harder she pulled it, the greater the soundproofing.

Everyone was upstairs, so she did not offer them a drink although she would have liked one for herself. They sat on the bed. Underneath it were their videotapes, their flyers and the book she had made them. She was terrified that they would somehow sense the proximity of their own captured images, that they would delve under the bed and in looking at her stash of memorabilia somehow divine what she had done. There was a scab on Angie’s cheekbone but it didn’t look like the kind that would leave a scar. Louisa was flooded with a surge of remorse for lashing out at her and wondered why she did not yet feel something similar for her more terrible transgression. Shockingly, shamingly, it was Angie who apologised.

‘I’m sorry for the way I dealt with that, the way I sent you up there. It was really nasty of me.’

‘I’m mortified by what I said to you,’ said Louisa, meaning it. ‘I was just upset. I thought it was you.’

‘You had every right to be,’ said Angie. Her dignity was admirable and deepened Louisa’s regret. ‘I don’t think either of us exactly covered ourselves in glory, did we?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘Your hair looks nice.’

‘Thanks.’

She fiddled with the drawstring of her trousers while she waited for them to do away with the small talk and tell her that Adam was dead, that his mother had been informed, that someone had turned up in the small hours with his wallet.

‘He’s not here, then?’ said Angie.

‘What? Why would he . . . ?’

Ben and Angie’s eyes clicked together for a second.

‘When he didn’t come back, we just assumed he’d gone to you. That’s what he told us when he went after you. He said he was glad the Ciaran thing was out in the open, and he was going to go and be with you. It was like, you could see Ciaran’s heart breaking in front of you.’

He had been telling her the truth; he had chosen her, and what had her response been? ‘I just don’t believe you any more,’ followed by that final, fatal connection between her body and his. That his ultimate choice had been her seemed to cancel all his previous crimes and withdraw from her the motive, the already flimsy justification, for her own. Louisa drew on all her reserves of discipline to disguise the impact of the revelation, tried to focus on the fizzing sound in her ears, like the noise after the music at the end of a record or cassette, but Angie was still talking.

‘. . . so he goes to Adam, I don’t believe it, you’ll never go to her, but Adam just walked off. I was convinced he’d be here, but when Ciaran went to look for him, I said to Ben we’d better go and check.’

Not trusting herself to talk, Louisa raised her eyebrows. It felt like lifting a weight.

‘Ciaran’s gone to Hamburg,’ said Ben. ‘He’s convinced that that’s where he is. And if he isn’t here, I think he’s probably right.’

‘You really haven’t seen him since that night?’ said Angie. ‘I’m sorry we’re just blurting it all out like this, it must be awful for you.’

Louisa shook her head. Another spike of guilt prodded, but failed to penetrate, the rubbery cocoon of disbelief in which she seemed to have shrouded herself; it was a strange, puzzling reaction inconsistent with what she had done. She felt guilty because she was lying to Angie, not because of what she had done to Adam.

‘That’s it, then,’ said Ben. ‘We’ll either see him on
Top of the Pops
or he’ll end up some bitter old man drinking in a bar on the Reeperbahn telling people he could have been a contender. My money’s on failure. Music’s changing. No one wants a histrionic pretty boy in leather trousers any more. They want jeans and T-shirts, sweat and beats. I’m glad to be rid of him, to be honest. He would only have held us back, musically.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Carry on as a two-piece, I suppose. Ciaran’s left all his kit, he said we could have it. After he’d set fire to all Adam’s stuff, that is. Almost burned the studio down.’

‘Jesus, what a mess,’ said Angie. She linked her fingers and stretched her arms out before her. ‘You know how they say about someone, “He always has to have the last word”? Adam is the opposite of that. He always lets you have the last word. It’s much more powerful, because then he knows you’ll be waiting for him to answer.’

‘God, you’re right,’ said Louisa. ‘I suppose you knew him better than anyone.’ She felt a rush of blood to her cheeks as she realised that she had used the past tense, but Angie didn’t pick up on it, just gave an embarrassed shrug.

‘I can’t tell you how many times she wanted to tell you about Ciaran,’ said Ben, nodding at his bandmate. ‘She was all for clearing the air but she couldn’t bear to do it to either of you.’

‘Really?’ said Louisa.

‘Yeah,’ said Angie. ‘You were nice. He was
better
with you.’

‘So
why
, then?’ she said. ‘Why did he do it?’

‘Adam just can’t resist the idea of someone being in love with him, man, woman, whoever. It’s a drug to him, like being onstage. He’s a spoilt brat, and gets away with it because of how he looks and how he sounds. Ciaran was mad about him, he worshipped him. I know you wouldn’t think that to see them together but that was just Ciaran being defensive. I mean, look what he put up with. Not just you, but loads of girls over the last couple of years. He knew what Adam’s like, and he let it carry on because the alternative was to lose him.’

‘I loved him too, you know,’ said Louisa.

‘I like the way you’re already talking in the past tense,’ said Ben. ‘Shows that you can move on.’

What was left of Glasslake stood up to leave.

‘Keep in touch,’ said Ben.

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea, do you?’ she replied. ‘Good luck and everything, but let’s agree that we should break the chain here. I’m serious. Don’t come here again.’

‘Charming!’ said Angie.

‘It’s nothing personal. All we had, all we’ve got in common is Adam, and if he’s gone . . . I think I should just let it all go, you know?’

Angie looked a little mollified.

‘What, even if he ends up dead in a ditch?’ joked Ben.

‘Even then,’ said Louisa, trying not to throw up.

She saw them to the door. Upstairs, her father was listening to the
War Requiem
on his Bang and Olufsen, innocently layering an already wretched situation with unbearable pathos.

‘Listen, Angie, I have to know. Honestly. You weren’t sleeping with him as well, were you? If he’s gone, there’s nothing to lose by telling me. It’s not like you and I are going to see each other again.’ She held up her hands and then put them in her pockets to show that she wasn’t going to hit her. Angie took a step back in mock self-defence, then grew serious.

‘It happened once. Just the once. It was years ago, not long after we’d met. We were both hammered. I think he had to do it to get it out of the way, burst the tension, you know? It would never have gone anywhere. Adam needs complete and utter devotion, passion, adoration, all that truly, madly, deeply stuff. It’s not really my style.’

Louisa watched them disappear through the mews gate, Angie’s last words turning over and over in her head. She didn’t understand. Was there any other way to love?

Chapter 43

January 2010

Roseberry Nursing Home didn’t look like the photograph on the website. Online, clever angling and soft focus around the edges had connived to portray it as a long, low mansion set in rolling parkland. In fact, it was a row of six post-war, bay-fronted semis that had been run together with little walkways and then painted a dirty red colour. The forecourt had been swept clear of snow to reveal parking spaces so close to the building that cars were parked with their bumpers grazing the front wall. Perhaps that was the reason for the drab net curtains. Louisa had taught him to despise paved front gardens and driveways and he saw the place through her eyes, thinking how they’d have been better off with shingle. And those yuccas in
plastic pots
, what were they thinking? Underneath their topping of snow they were already brittle and yellowing; they needed a thick horticultural fleece if they were to survive another night.