Burial of Ghosts Page 26

  ‘Do you not think much of them, then?’ Interested despite myself. I’d have thought he’d be a supporter.

  ‘You’re not one of that bunch, are you?’ He looked at me warily.

  I shook my head. ‘What’s wrong with them?’

  ‘They’re out for themselves.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Money and ambition. What else is there? Howdon getting himself to London and mixing with the folk he’s seen on the telly. That’s what this is about.’

  ‘The Consortium’s got people talking, though.’ It seemed strange to be defending them here. I’d have thought it would be the other way about.

  ‘Rallies and marches. What good will that do?’

  ‘They always get a good turn-out.’

  ‘Of course they do. If the squire hires a coach and says take the day off and go to London, you’ll go.’ He hesitated. ‘They’ve attracted a right bad crowd. And even the decent people seem to lose their reason. They’ve had a hard time round here and they want someone to kick out at. The Consortium plays on that. It fires them up and lets them loose.’

  ‘How do you know Stuart Howdon?’

  ‘He’s a local lad.’ The old man fixed me with his tiny birdlike eyes. ‘Are you sure you’re not one of them?’

  ‘Na. Promise. It’s not my sort of thing.’

  The old man stood up and carefully set down his pint. He wore a shiny old suit and a threadbare shirt. His shoes were so highly polished that they reflected the lamps swung from the rafters. ‘Now, young lady, why don’t you take my hand. I want these people to see me with the bonniest lass in the room.’ He pulled me to my feet and swung me into the dancing.

  I’m not sure what time it was when we finished. We’d all drunk too much, but no one was sick and no one started a fight. Perhaps that’s what it means to be grown up. Ray and Jess hadn’t moved away from each other’s side all evening. I’d talked to Ray’s friends and found them to be all right. Normal, funny people with a strange taste in music. They had other lives. One was a teacher, I remember, and there was a doctor too.

  At last the music stopped and we all went outside. Jess and Ray were snogging somewhere in the shadow. It was a clear night with a full moon, and because there were no streetlights and only a scatter of house lights in the valley, the stars shone really brightly. It had been a good evening, but all at once I felt lonely again. I wanted someone to share the night and the view with. Jess and Ray emerged with bruised lips and starry eyes and I was so jealous of them I wanted to cry. I understood what the old man had been saying when he talked about the Consortium. When you’re feeling miserable you want to kick out and the target doesn’t matter much. I loved Jess to bits but I couldn’t be glad for her. Because I was feeling so miserable I couldn’t bear anyone else to be happy. I understood why Stuart Howdon felt bitter and angry, married to someone he couldn’t care about. In a mood like that you want to smash someone’s face in. You feel like committing murder.

  I hadn’t even taken my mobile to the party, but when I got in, too wired to sleep, too tactful to sit in the kitchen drinking cocoa with the middle-aged lovebirds, I checked the messages. I don’t know what I was expecting. Something from Kay perhaps. I’d given her my number and told her to call if she felt like talking. What I hadn’t expected was the child’s voice. Dickon. A bit muffled, as if he was talking from a mobile too, or was trying to speak softly so he wouldn’t be overheard.

  ‘Lizzie? Are you there, Lizzie? I want to talk to you. Don’t phone back here. That wouldn’t work. Can you come tomorrow evening? Not to the house. The wood by the old track into the estate. Dusk. I want to show you the badgers.’

  I replayed it several times but I couldn’t learn any more from it. I couldn’t get a clearer idea about whether he was scared or anxious, or just excited about showing me the badgers. I couldn’t get excited about them myself. They’re big and black, aren’t they? Like cows and electric fences, they’re best avoided. I blamed myself for not having been in when he phoned. Those thoughts and recriminations kept me awake until dawn.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Although by now I should have known my way round Wintrylaw, I stumbled onto the entrance to the wood when I’d almost given up hope of finding it. I was even considering going to the front door and asking for Dickon there. I’d been driving around the lanes, as I had that first time with Ray, and suddenly the approach was familiar: a little humpbacked bridge over a burn, wild overgrown verges, a hawthorn hedge and the wood rising up on one side. Then the stone pillars, covered with lichen and moss so they blended in with the trees, and the grassy track which led through the wood and eventually to the grand house.

  I sat in the car, wishing that Dickon had given me a proper time for the meeting. When was dusk, for Christ’s sake? I’d stayed in Sea View all day in case he phoned, but there’d been no other messages. For someone who admitted to a hangover and said she felt like death, Jess had been annoyingly happy. She buzzed around the house with a duster, singing and humming. By early evening I’d been glad to get out, though it wasn’t dusk, nowhere near.

  I’d parked the car in exactly the same place as Ray had dropped me on the day of the funeral. There was a passing place cut out of the verge and I pulled in there so close to the hedge that a passenger would have been trapped. The car was almost hidden by cow parsley and that tall weed with the little pink flower I’ve always called ragged robin. Philip would have known its proper name. I’d brought a book and started to read, but I must have dozed. When I woke the light was starting to go and I thought it must be almost time.

  I walked between the pillars and into the wood. There was a wind, a warm, dry wind, which made the branches creak and the leaves above me murmur. I thought they sounded like a crowd of old ladies gossiping or maybe the sea, and I told myself I’d have to remember that to tell Dickon. Inside the wood it seemed much darker because the canopy blocked out what light was left. That made me jittery. I’ve never liked the dark and since Nicky took me hostage I can’t even sleep without a light. Of course, I hadn’t thought to bring a torch, or a flask of coffee, or a rug to sit on. I’d thought Dickon would be there waiting for me and I’d never been in the Girl Guides. I stumbled up the track in the gloom. It forked and I didn’t know which way to take. I’d lost all sense of direction. I tried to listen out for cars along the lane, at least to fix that in my mental map, but either there was no traffic or the sound of the wind in the trees hid it. I didn’t want to shout out for Dickon. I knew enough to realize that you had to be quiet if you wanted to see animals in the wild, and I didn’t want him to be cross with me, or think I wasn’t worth bothering with. That was illogical, of course, because my stumbling through the undergrowth would have scared off any animal in the place. It was more about knowing I’d feel really foolish, standing there and yelling, not wanting to make an exhibition of myself.

  Then I saw the torch flashing in my direction, a signal. The light was subdued and orange. Dickon must have covered the lens with coloured cellophane as he’d described. It was a relief. I’d been starting to think this was another wild-goose chase. I made my way towards the light. Occasionally the wind blew a gap in the foliage and I had a glimpse of the sky, and brown clouds blowing across a shadowy moon, and the floor of the wood was lit up. Then the gust would drop, so everything seemed darker than ever, and I had to focus hard to see the pinprick of torchlight.

  He was crouched on a bank. Earlier in the year it had been covered with bluebells, but now only the fleshy, spear-like leaves were left. I couldn’t see them at first, because I was blinded by the orange light which was directed in my face, as if he wanted to be sure it was me and not some stranger. I saw them when I looked down to protect my eyes.

  ‘Lizzie Bartholomew,’ he said. It wasn’t Dickon. It was an adult voice, gentle, halting. Ronnie Laing.

  ‘Where’s Dickon?’

  ‘Joanna wouldn’t let him out in the end. He picked up a chill. You know how it is with k
ids.’

  ‘Tell him I hope he’s better soon.’ I realized even then that Dickon had been used to set me up.

  ‘Don’t you want to see the badgers, Lizzie?’ His voice was really something, you know? The slowness which overcame the stutter was seductive, soft.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Sit down, Lizzie.’ Still slow, but not an invitation this time. More like an order. Obedience has never been my thing.

  ‘Piss off.’

  ‘Sit down.’ He sounded apologetic as he held out the knife, almost as if it was some kind of peace offering. At that moment the wind blew the branch above us, letting in the moonlight, which shone on the blade.

  I looked at him. I knew if I ran he’d catch me. He was fitter than I was and he knew the wood. If I caught him off guard, maybe I could get the knife off him. That thought really came into my head. Talk about self-delusion. One term of lessons in women’s self-defence and I thought I could take on a mercenary. But I sat. I didn’t think I had a choice. And at least at that point I was still thinking.

  ‘Did Howdon set you up to this?’ I asked.

  He didn’t answer. His eyes were fixed on the knife blade. He tilted it, backwards and forwards, so the reflected torchlight moved. He seemed mesmerized, as if this were a strange form of self-hypnosis. I was mesmerized too, but I continued to talk.

  ‘Howdon must be behind all this. He forged the papers for me to sign. But why did he want Thomas dead? Why did he let me think Philip was the boy’s natural father?’

  I was talking to fight off the panic, the old helplessness which had started to insinuate itself into my brain as soon as I sat down. I was a hostage again, squatting on the floor, held at knifepoint by a lunatic I’d thought I understood, I’d felt some sympathy for. I imagined Jess raising her eyes to the ceiling. Don’t you ever learn, Lizzie Bartholomew? Won’t you ever look after yourself?

  Nicky moves me to the floor when they gather outside his door. They talk to him all night. They’ve cleared the other kids off the corridor and they negotiate with him to open the door, just a crack.

  Their voices are soft and reassuring, but I can’t take in the words, and I don’t think Nicky’s listening either. He’s still whispering, saying where he’s going to cut me, how he’s going to hurt me. Then he says, ‘They can kill me, but I’ll take you with me. Are you ready to die, Miss?’ That’s when I wet myself.

  Occasionally he shouts back to them, but it’s never anything that makes sense. It’s not like he’s having a real conversation with them.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been there. It could be days.

  Suddenly my eyes are seared by a bright light. Phosphorescent white. Brighter than anything I’ve ever known. A voice commands, ‘Run, Lizzie, run.’ But I don’t run. My brain’s too sluggish. The message gets slowly to my legs and I stagger to my feet. Nicky’s responses are quicker. He lifts the knife above his head. I see it through eyes half shut against the light and wait for it to strike.

  There’s an explosion, so loud I expect the windows to shatter. Framed in the door is a man I don’t recognize, a thug in dark clothes and a baseball cap. He holds a gun, which now is pointing to the floor. And when I turn round Nicky is lying in a heap in the corner with blood seeping through his clothes. Then I lose it. I crouch beside the boy and stroke his hair away from his face and say it was all my fault and I never meant him to die.

  In the wood I hadn’t lost it. I was still in control, still talking. Shaking perhaps, but holding myself together. ‘There was something going on within the Countryside Consortium. Was that it? Did Thomas find out?’

  My mind was racing. Ronnie must have done the killing. Howdon would be too squeamish, too soft. He’d not want blood on his suit or his hands or his fat belly. Had Ronnie taken money to kill his own stepson? When I’d seen them together in Whitley Bay, was Howdon paying Ronnie to get rid of me? Was this the result? Another nuisance disposed of?

  Ronnie looked up suddenly from the knife. His face was underlit by the torch. His eyes were in shadow. The sockets looked hollow. ‘Did you sleep with Philip?’ he asked.

  ‘What the fuck has that got to do with you?’

  ‘I’d understand if you had.’ His voice was a dreamy whisper. It was as if he’d had sex with Philip and was running the pictures in his head. ‘He was a wonderful man.’

  ‘What would you know about that?’ I couldn’t just sit there any more, passive. I had to put up a challenge, provoke a response. Perhaps then Ronnie would lose concentration and forget about the knife.

  ‘He was famous, a celebrity, on the television. But he still had time for his friends. He had time for me. I’d have gone under if it hadn’t been for him. He believed the best in everyone.’

  ‘Why did he get mixed up in the Consortium?’ The more I’d learned about the organization, the more I’d regretted Philip’s involvement with it. They were a bunch of self-seeking whingers. Philip hadn’t been like that.

  ‘He believed in the dream,’ Ronnie said. Then he paused and the voice slowed and softened again, slurring over the start of a stutter. ‘At least he believed in Joanna and she believed in the dream.’

  ‘What dream would that be, Ronnie? The countryside for country people? It’s a bit fascist that, for me.’

  He obviously didn’t like the question or the tone. He ignored it.

  ‘What’s the plan here, Ronnie? Are we going to sit on our bums all night like a couple of turds, or are you going to let me go back to the car and we’ll forget all about it. I know what it’s like to get carried away, after all. Is that a deal, eh, Ronnie? One lunatic to another.’

  ‘I can’t let you go,’ he said. It was as if he was sorry. Just following orders. Is that how it had been in his African jungle?

  ‘Howdon need never know. I’ll say I ran away.’

  ‘I can’t let you go,’ he said again.

  ‘Yes, you can, Ronnie.’ Her voice was clear and loud. I hadn’t heard footsteps, any movement at all to make me aware of her presence. Perhaps she’d been there all the time, listening to our conversation. She came closer and then it was as if she was talking to a child. ‘That’s quite enough now. Quite enough killing.’

  He swung round the torch and we stared at Joanna. She had style. It was as if she’d dressed just for the effect she created in this moment, as if she knew this would be how we’d first see her. She wore boots, tight trousers like jodhpurs and a loose white shirt. Her hair was down and blown by the wind. Lara Croft’s mother would look like this. She was unreal.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Ronnie said. The stutter had returned.

  ‘No? Let her go. Come to me, Lizzie. Walk away from him. He won’t hurt you.’

  It was like when they’d shouted at me to run that night at the unit. But this time I did what she said. I stood up and walked towards her, and Ronnie sat where he was, fiddling impotently with his knife.

  ‘Go home,’ she said more gently. ‘Go home to Kay and the girls. Your car’s in the drive.’

  And he just got up and scarpered, bounding down the bank and away from us. It was as if we were two performing dogs in a circus and she was the ringmaster standing there with her long boots and her white shirt. All she needed was the whip.

  ‘You can’t let him get away. He’s a lunatic, a killer.’

  ‘The police will know where to find him,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t got the brains or the guts to run away.’ She sounded exhausted. ‘Come to the house. I need a drink and so do you.’

  Chapter Thirty-six

  When did I work it all out? Not in logical steps, and it didn’t come in a flash like moonlight breaking through a gap in the trees. It was more like a fairy tale that you hear once when you’re a child, then forget about, until you hear a snatch of it again and the whole lot comes back. Perhaps I’d known all along but couldn’t face the truth. The implications were too much for me to cope with.

  I followed Joanna down the bank towards the house. She was sure-footed
but I slithered and tripped, and she stopped every now and again for me to catch her up. She took me in through a back door. It wasn’t as if it were the tradesman’s entrance and she wanted to put me down; it was the way the family used and she wanted to make me feel included. That’s how I saw it, at least. There was a scruffy hall with a narrow staircase ahead of us. I suppose once servants would have used it, but tonight Flora was there, dressed in pink pyjamas, sitting on the top stair and looking down anxiously. She must have been waiting for her mother’s return.

  ‘It’s all right, darling,’ Joanna said with a mixture of exasperation and affection. ‘I’m back and I’m fine. You can go to bed now. I’ll come up once I’ve had a drink.’

  The pale figure disappeared without a word.

  ‘She’s such a worrier.’ Joanna was pulling her boots off. She dumped them with a pile of others in a wicker basket next to the back door. There was a row of hooks with waxed jackets and green padded anoraks. ‘She misses her father of course. He spoilt her rotten. I should try to make more time for her. Things should be easier now.’

  Her feet must have been sweating, because her socks left damp footprints on the stained quarry tiles. I followed them down a long, dimly lit corridor past sacks of potatoes, empty Calor Gas canisters and a couple of ancient hoovers. Then we were in the kitchen and it was another Swallows and Amazons moment. It was just the sort of kitchen I’d read about in the musty, rather worthy children’s books that got donated to the kids’ homes. A scrubbed pine table. A huge bowl of fruit you could help yourself from. An Aga. A wooden frame for drying washing suspended from the ceiling with a rope to lower it. A fat ginger cat in a basket. Paintings which Flora and Dickon must have done years before at playgroup, but which were still stuck to the walls with brittle ancient Sello-tape. A rocking chair, with a patchwork cushion, next to the stove. I had time to take in the details before Joanna lit candles and turned off the central light.