The Ties That Bind (12 page)

Luke wanted to seize on this flash of insight into the old lady’s personality but Belinda talked fast and trying to get a word in edgeways was like darting through a gap in motorway traffic. ‘Yeah, so for a while she let me borrow her clothes, look at how they were put together, make patterns from them. I mended a couple things for her as a thank you. She was pretty far gone with arthritis and she couldn’t do much for herself. I’ll show you some of my stuff, you’ll love it.’

Belinda’s assumption that he was interested in fashion rankled Luke until he remembered he was dressed head to toe in clothes Jem had bought him, still current. Give it another couple of seasons and he’d be back to his usual clueless self. Belinda wheeled out a sagging clothes rail, shook free a canary-yellow mini dress – not one of Mrs Duffy’s apparently, but a copy of a 1965 Mary Quant original – and started lecturing him about the importance of bust darts. Luke’s cheeks began to ache with the effort of supporting his smile.

‘Now, this is from one of Mrs D’s,’ said Belinda, wrestling with a hanger. When she turned back to Luke, she was holding a red belted trench coat. Luke’s heart threw itself against his ribcage. ‘She’d had it for something like fifty years but it was so well made that she could still wear it every day. It’s all in the detail. This lining here, it’s done with a flat-felled seam to hide the join. You’d never get that today. You do a normal seam with running stitch—’

Caleb cut her off. ‘Belinda, Luke’s just being polite.’

‘Not at all,’ said Luke. ‘I like old things.’

‘It’s a perfect copy, stitch for stitch,’ said a mollified Belinda, opening it to reveal a red satin inlay. ‘Look, these buttons are covered in the same fabric as the rest of the coat. I had to do it by hand. Sixty hours, start to finish.’

‘Can I touch it?’ Luke held it gingerly, as he would a holy relic. ‘This is
amazing
.’ Too late, he heard the squeak in his voice.

‘Hey, man,’ said Caleb drily. ‘Don’t get too excited there, I don’t think it’s your size.’

‘Ha ha,’ said Luke, covering his embarrassment with deadpan and handing the coat back to Belinda. ‘I suppose I’m just intrigued by her. You know, the way it still feels a bit like her house in there.’

‘Uh huh,’ said Belinda. ‘I’ve got a picture of her wearing it somewhere. Wanna see?’

Luke tried to look cool as Belinda peeled from a scrapbook a small black and white square. There was Kathleen Duffy standing outside his own front door. Luke was pleased with the accuracy of his mental image of her: she was a tiny dark-eyed bird dwarfed by the huge Silver Cross pram at her side from which a tiny starfish hand emerged. He could see why small, wiry Grand had fallen for her; she was dainty and girlish enough to make him seem like a big man. He turned it over. Someone had written on the back in rough, uneven letters:
Home Sweet Home. Kathleen in Temperance Place, April 1968
. Luke made a mental note to check when her rent books began.

Caleb rose to clear the plates and as Belinda tidied up her clothes rail, Luke muted the clicker on his camera phone and surreptitiously photographed the picture.

‘So the other day this bloke came knocking for Mrs Duffy in a big black car,’ said Luke. ‘I had to break the news to him.’

‘Oh,
him
,’ said Belinda above the rattle and clang of coat hangers. ‘We always used to call him her gentleman caller. What was his name again? She said they hadn’t missed their weekly afternoon tea in nearly five decades. So old-school. So
sweet
.’

‘What was their history? Did you ever ask her whether they were a couple?’

‘You’re kidding? She was so fuckin’ prim, I could never have broached something like that. She didn’t talk to me for a
month
when she found out that me and Caleb were living in sin.’

‘She’d have loved me, then, wouldn’t she?’ said Luke with a smile.

Belinda started on about Mrs Duffy’s wedding outfit, a two-piece white suit that had gone all yellow in the wardrobe but had been put together so beautifully that she hadn’t had the heart to take it apart. Luke felt he had hit a wall on the subject of the gentleman caller and couldn’t push it without saying why. When Caleb rolled a joint, he decided to let it go for the night and the next couple of hours passed in a pleasant fug.

He floated back to his own house a few minutes shy of midnight. His eye fell upon Kathleen Duffy’s rent books, stacked on the mantlepiece in date order.

The first entry was for the 30th October 1968, ten days after Jacky Nye’s murder. It couldn’t be a coincidence, but Luke could not fathom what it meant. The picture showed her outside the cottage in April of the same year. Had she been a sitting tenant, or was there a missing rent book somewhere showing that Joss Grand had been her landlord back in the spring of that year? And if so, which came first? Their affair – or whatever it was – or their relationship as landlord and tenant? Luke could not get his fuzzy head around it.

He lumbered up the stairs, wondering if there were any other untapped sources of information about Kathleen Duffy. Upstairs, the imprinted cross over his bed looked more defined than usual and Luke realised it was days since he’d even noticed it. In the seconds before sleep, the answer suggested itself. Reaching for his phone, he performed a quick search, then set the alarm for half past nine the following morning.

Chapter 18

The Roman Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart was a Gothic limestone building whose grey turrets and pointed arches rudely interrupted the refined stuccoes of the Hove suburbs. Luke hesitated on the threshold; he had not been into a church since his grandmother’s funeral over a decade before and he was arrested not by a spiritual awakening but by the lump in his throat that rose at her memory. It took him by surprise, as did the automatic genuflection he made before taking his seat in a pew at the back. Bright stained glass painted colours on the backs of his hands.

The priest was disappointing on two counts: too young and too Irish to have much stored in the way of old Brighton memories. After communion, which Luke sat out, they sang by coincidence his grandmother’s favourite hymn, ‘The King of Love My Shepherd Is’; he had always liked the line about ransomed souls. With no need for the hymnsheet, he found himself singing along despite himself.

Still, he caught the priest in the nave after the service.

‘Hello Father,’ said Luke. ‘I believe you buried my late great-aunt. Kathleen Duffy? She passed away about three weeks ago. I couldn’t make the funeral, and I just wanted to . . . I don’t know, feel close to her again. We’d lost touch, and I’ve only just found out that she passed.’

Lying in church! Lying to a priest! He waited for the thunderbolt to strike.

‘Ah, Mrs Duffy,’ said the priest. ‘We miss her very much. She was very devout. Mass every Sunday and Wednesday and she never missed a holy day of obligation. Wait there.’

He came back with a little Rest In Peace memorial card with Kathleen’s picture on it, her dates and a prayer Luke didn’t know. That lovely dark hair had faded and thinned but her eyes remained deep black wells. Luke thanked the priest and put it in his pocket.

‘You don’t know where I might find her son, Michael Duffy, do you?’

‘I can’t give out his address without his permission,’ said the priest pedantically, as though he were being asked to break the confidentiality of the confessional. ‘Surely if you’re related it can’t be too hard?’

Now Luke cursed himself for playing the family card. If the priest let the family know that he had been here asking questions, it would put them on their guard before he had even spoken to them. Michael Duffy might have been sympathetic to a stranger enquiring but his suspicions would be instantly raised by someone claiming kinship where there was none.

‘We’d lost touch. Maybe I’ll write a letter that you can forward on to him. Could you tell me where she’s buried? I’d like to pay my respects.’

The cemetery sprawled across a heavily wooded valley out on the Lewes Road. The approach road split into three avenues that ran between the tombs. Luke stood at the intersection, only now appreciating that graveyards did not come with indexes. Identifying Kathleen’s resting place would be a question of narrowing it down to the plots with freshly dug earth, and then of reading individual headstones. Luke ignored the crumbling stone angels whose bases were overgrown with years of grass and ivy and turned his attention instead to the newer headstones, the simple slabs of granite and marble. In fact, he found her in seconds, a familiar colour a flare in the corner of his peripheral vision. A fresh bunch of violets were bright against the wilting wreaths that still leaned against the pink and gold stone.

Kathleen Duffy was not alone. Her new inscription on the old headstone was sharp and gleaming beneath the moss-grown lettering of her late husband’s epitaph. Joseph Patrick Duffy, forever thirty-five years old, had been waiting for his wife since August 1968. Kathleen’s husband had died just two months before she became Joss Grand’s tenant.

It was still only noon and Sunday yawned before him as it had when he was a little boy. Luke headed back into Brighton. As he crossed the permanently gridlocked Seven Dials roundabout, a street name caught his eye and on a whim he followed it.

Brighton city centre soon gave way to the usual villas and mansion blocks, which themselves became large houses behind high gates and walls. The street seemed never-ending. He checked the map on his phone and was dismayed to see that Dyke Road seemed to be as long as the town itself. But he had nothing better to do, and the simple human motion of one foot in front of the other felt good after days hunched over screens and pages. He peered over every fence and through every gate.

A mile or so along Dyke Road, through wrought-iron curlicues, he saw the Bentley. It was parked on a concrete driveway that horseshoed around a fountain spouting symmetrical arches of water into a shallow pond. The house behind it declared its wealth and status not to the modern world, but to one that was long gone. Like the clothes Grand wore, it epitomised sixties grandeur, with its stone-clad exterior and its Doric columns, its stripy lawn planted with conifers and pampas. It reminded Luke of Graceland, which he had visited on holiday. Why had Grand never thought to update his house? There was only one addition to the exterior that looked new, a railing at waist height that ran parallel to the shallow ramp to the right of the front steps. A silver SUV painted with the logo of a private healthcare company was parked beside it. As Luke watched, a young black man wearing nurse’s whites came out of the front door carrying what looked like a crate of tiny fire extinguishers, silver canisters with green tips. He placed them in the boot of his car before going back inside and closing the front door behind him.

Luke turned back to the street. At first, he did not recognise the hulking figure in sweats jogging along the pavement towards him, sparring with the air. He had only ever seen Grand’s chauffeur once before and then he had been wearing a suit. Luke pressed himself against the cold aluminium of the bus shelter as Vaughan pounded past him, so close that Luke could feel the other man’s body heat. If he noticed Luke he did not acknowledge it. His attention was caught by a pretty blonde runner in full make-up and no sports bra coming in the opposite direction. He didn’t disguise his leer and Luke was reminded of Jacky Nye, a big man ruled by his appetites. The blonde pretended not to notice she was being ogled but once she was out of Vaughan’s eyeline, she shuddered.

Vaughan pointed a fob at the mansion gateway. As he waited for it to open he dropped to the floor and did a couple of press-ups on his fists, bare knuckles knocking on the hard grey pavement. He must be twice Luke’s weight. No wonder Grand had delegated his own wasted muscle to him. You saw those men in clubs, vests cut low to show chests like brick walls and arms the size of babies. They didn’t do much for Luke, but they never went short of attention. If Vaughan ever wanted to cross over, he’d be fighting them off.

As the gates buzzed closed behind Vaughan, Luke wondered again what Vaughan knew that he did not.

Luke spent the rest of the day wandering the city alone. On weekdays he could easily carve out space to read or work in a cafe or pub, but on Sundays one was a conspicuously lonely number. He realised that this was the first time he had been faced with the prospect of making new friends without the framework of a place of work or education, and he had no clue how to begin. Belinda and Caleb were at home maybe one day in seven. They had packed up their individual cars early that morning and gone their separate ways for the working week, she on location in Wales and he in a London studio. Charlene’s weekends, of course, were not hers to share. He had been in Brighton for ten days now and while he was making the streets his own, he had no one to walk them with. Viggo, with his gift for instant camaraderie, would have had a raft of new friends by now. He would have known how to insinuate himself into any of the well-dressed cliques that presented their collective backs to Luke.

Footsore and morose, he found a pub near the Town Hall that was serving roast beef with all the trimmings. While he waited for the microwaved food to cool, he pulled up the National Archive site on his phone and looked up Joseph Duffy’s death by the date. The stated cause was ‘construction accident’, which raised as many questions as it answered.

He noticed with a jolt that for the first day since arriving in Brighton there were no DON’T ANSWER numbers cluttering his screen and hope flickered within that Jem had finally got the message. After long consideration he switched his voicemail back on. No freelance work had come his way since he moved to Brighton: all the more reason to make himself as available as possible. Newspaper editors on deadline did not like to chase. He was damned if he was going to let Jem damage his prospects or control his behaviour even from this distance.

As his fork broke the Yorkshire pudding in two, he felt suddenly homesick for his family. The Considines might have abandoned all pretence of faith but each Sunday they still gathered for family lunches, his mother gamely cooking a traditional roast for ten of them even in forty-degree heat. He waited until late evening, when he knew they would be gathering to drink in the garden before their meal, then texted his brother Shane to let him know there was an incoming Skype call.