The letter was laser-printed, but Shona Murray had signed it. The use of Thomas’s first name seemed significant. Had there been a regular correspondence? Had they met?
I felt suddenly exhausted. It was too much to take in. I returned the letters and the unopened bank statement to the window-sill. A container ship was moving slowly towards Blyth docks. I didn’t expect to sleep but lost consciousness immediately.
Chapter Sixteen
It’s evening. I’m pacing a long corridor. There are pools of shadow where the security lights don’t reach. No sound. The children are asleep.
Then, ahead of me, I see a boy. He seems to have appeared from nowhere. It’s Nicky, a fifteen-year-old with a fine, drawn face and the pallor of a pensioner. I think of him as one of my successes and approach him without any sense of danger.
‘Miss!’ His voice is urgent. His eyes burn as if he’s just woken up from a nightmare.
‘Back to bed, Nicky. It’s all right. We’ll talk in the morning.’
I’m close enough to touch him. Nicky killed his grandmother. Recently I’ve persuaded him to speak about it. Everyone here has to confront their offending behaviour. The necessity of doing that is a fundamental belief, as essential as the belief in God in a monastery.
‘Just a few words, Miss.’
That’s when I see the knife. Was he holding it all the time? Behind his back perhaps? Through the white fingers I see the yellow handle.
‘Nicky…’
But his arm is round my neck, choking me to silence, and the knife is pointed at my stomach.
He kicks open the door into his room and pulls me inside. We fall onto his bed like lovers, our legs tangled, his arm still around me.
He squirms free and sits over me. The point of the knife is held at my throat. He makes a sound, a bubble of excitement. In my head I scream to the mother I have never met to save me.
I woke with a start to a knock on the bedroom door. I knew immediately it wasn’t going to be a good day, but it took a moment to remember why. Jess was standing in the doorway with a mug of tea in one hand. She’d never done that before, not even when I was ill. I’m not much of a tea drinker but it was a kind thought. She was looking harassed. She’d woken me up to talk. I hope she didn’t notice the opened letters on the window-sill.
‘The phone hasn’t stopped ringing.’
‘Farrier?’ I knew he’d want to talk again.
‘The press. Not just the Journal. Some from London.’
‘Put on the answerphone.’
‘But that’d make things worse, pet, wouldn’t it? They’d just come round, camp out on the doorstep.’
‘They’ll do that anyway.’
‘I don’t think they will. Not now.’
She waited for me to sit up and handed me the mug. I took a sip. The tea was strong. I thought I could taste the enamel dissolving from my teeth.
‘I lied,’ she said. ‘I told them you’d been trouble ever since you’d got here and I’d thrown you out. This was the last straw.’ She paused so I could tell her how clever she’d been.
I obliged. ‘You didn’t!’
‘Do you know, everyone believed me. Every single one.’ She was indignant. ‘As if I’d do a thing like that.’
I didn’t tell her she was different from most landladies. I was miserable, ungracious and not in the mood for giving compliments. ‘What else did you tell them?’
‘That I thought you’d gone to stay in Heaton with an old friend from college.’
Heaton. Where Philip had grown up. Did his family still live there? Was there another set of grandparents for Thomas?
Jess must have said something, but I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that I didn’t hear her. When I came round she was looking at me, concerned. She’s not a daydreamer, doesn’t understand it. I made a show of reaching over to the bedside table, shaking a couple of pills from a little brown bottle and taking them with the last of the tea. She didn’t say anything but she left the room beaming.
I started phoning Stuart Howdon’s office at nine o’clock. The woman who answered wasn’t the receptionist I’d met there after Philip’s funeral. This person was older and she had a Scottish accent.
‘Oh, he isn’t in the office yet,’ she said, as if I was mad to expect it.
He must have arrived by the time I rang at ten, because the response was different, if just as chilly.
‘Who should I say is calling?’
I gave my name without thinking. A mistake. ‘I’m sorry, Ms Bartholomew, he’ll be in a meeting all day.’
I wanted to go to Morpeth and drag him out of his meeting, but Jess persuaded me not to.
‘Leave it to Mr Farrier, pet. It’s his job. He knows what he’s doing.’
I wished I could believe her, but Farrier was convinced I was guilty. He just didn’t have enough evidence to keep me in custody.
At lunchtime Dan Meech turned up on the doorstep. He’d tried to phone, but Jess had given him the same story. He hadn’t been taken in by it. He was carrying a bunch of flowers, as if I was an invalid or the one who had died. As if there’d been an accident and he wanted to mark the spot.
‘The press have been to Absalom House too,’ he said. ‘Daft bastards. They’ve been handing out money to the residents in return for a story about Thomas. Of course they’ll get a story that way. It’ll probably be a fairy tale, but what do they care? I shouldn’t stay long. Ellen’s on her own there, fighting them off.’
I waited for him to mention the mail he’d asked me to deliver to Thomas, but he didn’t bring it up. Not then or later. Unless the police specifically asked him, I didn’t think he would.
‘It was kind of you to come,’ I said.
It was kind, but it was weird too. We’d been close at one time but not recently, and he’d never much cared about my feelings. I wondered if a ghoulish curiosity had brought him. Like the readers of the journalists who were pestering us both, perhaps he wanted the details. To know just how much blood there’d been. A description of the scene in close up and Technicolor. He looked awkward and embarrassed when I repeated ‘very kind’, so I thought I was right.
But he added quickly, ‘It’s Nell.’
‘What about her?’
‘She wants to speak to you.’
‘Why?’
‘She’s got it into her head that you spoke to Thomas before he died.’
I couldn’t take it in. It was as if he were accusing me of murder. I felt I had to defend myself. ‘He was dead when I arrived at the house. There was someone with me who can confirm…’
‘No.’ He almost shouted the interruption, realizing too late how I’d taken the words. ‘Not like that. Of course not. She thinks you might have phoned him to make an appointment to visit. Or met him on a previous occasion.’
‘Well, I didn’t.’
‘Could you tell her that?’
‘What?’ The question was pitched louder than his interruption.
‘She’s out of her mind. She won’t take it from me.’
‘She’s a bit young for you, Dan, isn’t she?’ It was a snide remark, intended only to hurt, but he coloured, twisted the flowers in his hands, scattering petals. I took them from him, set them on the kitchen bench and invited him in.
‘Is that what the row between Nell and Thomas was about?’ I asked carefully. ‘You?’
‘He didn’t know it was me. Nell told him she’d met another man. Someone older. He didn’t take it very well.’
‘I wonder why.’ I was amazed that Dan could be so crass. Thomas had been dumped by everyone he’d ever cared about. ‘Is that why he moved up to Delaval?’
‘One of the reasons. If he’d still been going out with Nell he’d probably have hung around.’
He looked up and saw my face, gave a melodramatic shrug, a gesture to slide off any trace of responsibility. ‘I thought he’d get over it. People do. How was I to know that he’d die when he was still angry, before Nell had a chance to make things up with him?’