‘Could I have dreamt up my whole reason for being there?’ I asked suddenly. ‘I mean, could it be a symptom of the illness? Like the dreams and the flashbacks.’
‘You’ve not been hearing voices too?’ Jokey, but she really wanted to know. ‘Instructions down the telephone wire? Over the radio?’
I shook my head impatiently.
‘Nah,’ she said. ‘You’ve a perfectly sound grasp on reality. You’ve enough on your plate without going down that road. Trust your own judgement, Lizzie. I believe you.’ Then her pager bleeped and she said she was off to see someone more ill and less stubborn than me.
So I wasn’t mad. Lisa said it, so it must be true. But if I wasn’t mad, Stuart Howdon must be lying. Why would he do that? Did it mean he had killed Thomas? And that idea, that someone as fat and respectable as Stuart Howdon might have stabbed a teenage lad to death, was the craziest thought I’d had all day.
We ate in the kitchen. Soup cooked the day before and heated through. One of Jess’s specials, made from neck of lamb and pearl barley, so thick a spoon would stand upright in it. Jess wanted to ask what Lisa had said and thought she was being tactful for not asking. In fact the silence was as dense as the broth, suffocating, so at last I said, ‘Lisa doesn’t think I’m mad.’
‘Of course she doesn’t, pet.’
It sounded as if she was humouring me. Like I was a kid. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she meant it. But I lost my temper. All the tension of that day in the police station came streaming out of my mouth, all the crap of the last six months. I shouted as loud as I could, filth, words that I hadn’t used since the kids’ home because I knew Jess hated them, because I’d wanted to be different from the dumb-arse morons who couldn’t speak without swearing. She sat there and took it, a gesture as active as her sitting and waiting in the police station. She didn’t move. She just waited for me to stop. It took a long time, minutes that seemed like days, but at last the screams turned to sobs and she gathered me up in her arms and stroked my hair, pushing it behind my ear, away from my forehead.
‘I’ll be good,’ I said. So who was the kid, then? ‘I’ll do what Lisa says.’
Then we opened a bottle of wine and sat together on the sofa, watching a soppy film, just as I’d imagined in the police station.
It must have been midnight when I went up to bed. It was comfortable on the sofa, dozing in front of the story with its impossible happy ending, and I couldn’t quite face being on my own. Jess would have stayed up all night with me, but I knew she’d be tired. One of the lodgers had a New Deal job and she got up every morning to make sure he left the house in time for the bus.
In my room I’d gone beyond the need for sleep. I opened the window wide and looked out over the sea. There was a moon, not quite full, not quite perfectly round. I thought of Philip. Listening to the water stirring up the shingle, I allowed myself a self-indulgent rerun of the last night in Marrakech. At least he would never know how his son had died. I didn’t believe in God and couldn’t imagine them meeting up for a cosy chat in heaven.
I went over the events of the day, trying to make sense of them. Had Philip asked me to trace Thomas because he knew his son was in danger? Had he expected me to protect him? If so, I’d failed him big time.
Come on, Lizzie, dump the guilt. It was something Lisa would say in the sessions when we talked through the mistakes I’d made in the past. I could hear her voice now, persuasive, in my head.
But today I had more to be guilty about, another death on my conscience.
You can’t take responsibility for all the crimes in the world. Another of Lisa’s sayings. If I wasn’t responsible for Thomas’s death, who was? Who had stabbed and cut at him, then slipped into the street just before I’d arrived? Did it really matter? Why should I care?
I did care. I’d let Philip down. I couldn’t let it go.
On the window-sill was a pile of papers, my unofficial in-tray: a tax return form still to be completed, bank statements, something complicated about the local authority pension, the latest sick note. And the letters Dan Meech had given me to deliver to Thomas. I’d forgotten to put them in my bag when I set out that morning. There were three of them. I lay them on the bed and tried to divine from the envelopes what they might contain.
The first was easy. It was a bank statement. I used the same bank and recognized the long white envelope and the return address on the back. The second was postmarked in Whitley Bay. The address was handwritten in spiky italics using a real fountain pen. The third had been typed, but it didn’t look like a circular or junk mail. The address wasn’t printed on one of those labels which spew out of a computer. Then I turned it over and saw a portcullis and a House of Commons stamp on the back. A letter from an MP. Most likely a response to an enquiry Thomas had raised. About what? Homelessness? Dysfunctional families?
I knew exactly what I should do with those letters. I should put them back on the window-sill and in the morning I should phone Mr Farrier and tell him about them. But I left them on the bed and stared at them, as if with enough concentration and willpower I could develop X-ray vision and see what they contained. I found myself calculating the chances that Dan Meech would tell Farrier he’d given them to me. Practically nil. Farrier would talk to Dan, of course. If I hadn’t killed Thomas, the most likely suspect would be one of the kids from the hostel. They’re unstable, the homeless. According to the cops. Capable of anything. But Dan has a memory like a sieve. He’s famous for it. I’m surprised he recognized me that day in the street.
Then I thought, Well, I can give Farrier the bank statement. How interesting can that be? If Dan does remember giving me letters to deliver he won’t remember how many. And at the same time I was thinking again, Why am I doing this? Why interfere? I promised Jess I’d be sensible. The only answer I could come up with was that I wanted to take some control. I hated the sensation of things happening to me.
I opened the handwritten note first. The envelope wasn’t very firmly stuck. I slid my thumb under the flap and separated the gummed paper carefully, managing not to rip the envelope at all. If need be I could restick it and no one would ever know. Inside was a square of red card. Written on it in the same italics were a couple of lines:
I’m really sorry to have given you that grief. Can’t we still be friends? I hope they forward this. Please forgive me.
No name at the top and no signature, but I thought it must be Nell, Thomas’s girlfriend. There was no address for her, which was a bummer, but Dan Meech had mentioned her surname: Ravendale. The family might be in the phone book and it wasn’t a common name. I scribbled Ravendale on the back of the card so I wouldn’t forget it, then realized what I’d done. It would be impossible to hand the thing back to Farrier now without explaining that I’d opened it. Stupid. And why would I want to trace the girl anyway?
I opened the letter from the House of Commons without any attempt to keep the envelope intact. It was from our MP, a woman called Shona Murray, newly elected in a by-election. She had a reputation for being radical and honest, but then she was very new. I’d seen her once on Question Time. I remembered a lot of hair, wild in an untidy, untamed way, not as if some designer had spent hours with a comb and the mousse. I’m not sure what she’d said – pretty much the party line, I think – but she’d impressed me with her humour. She, or more probably her secretary, had written:
Dear Thomas
Thanks so much for the information. I do need of course to be certain of its accuracy before I can use it. I’m sure you understand the responsibility of an MP in a situation like this.