When he stopped screaming he heard the foot steps over his head, and then Ian’s narrow slender legs appeared on the ladder-stairs.
His stepson watched him dispassionately, like a fisherman eyeing a float.
John Joe went to speak but the pain made the urge to scream again so insistent he swallowed back the words.
Ian raised a hand, as if asking for time in a polite conversation. It was an oddly civilized mannerism, coldly frightening in its intense self-possession.
‘Let me,’ he said. ‘You must have questions.’
John Joe pulled with his right hand until he felt the skin part at the wrist. He felt his guts turn to water, heavy water, like mercury that wanted to fall through his body and wash out to sea.
‘Kath Robinson saw you,’ said Ian, momentarily troubled by the congestion of blood in his stepfather’s face, the strange mottling, the stress which had tightened his skin and made him look younger, less dissolute.
‘The night they buried Grandma. Dad came into the bar to talk to Mum — and Kath didn’t want to see that, did she?’ He smiled, and despite his terror John Joe was reminded of the boy’s father — that same cynicism, almost older than it could be in one so young, as if he’d inherited a distrust of life along with the colour of his skin. The casual use of the word ‘Dad’ was a calculated cruelty and Ian looked pleased with the effect: John Joe’s feet had jerked together, making the rope creak.
‘Christ,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’
‘I want — wanted — to see you dead. I tried — we tried — to make sure you died with the others, with Fletcher and Venn. But actually, this is better. Much better, because I get to ask you questions, and you get to answer them. We’ve got one last chance to find out the one thing we don’t know: who struck the killing blow? Mum said we didn’t need to know. That you were all guilty, all cowards. And I’d have been happy if you’d died with them. But now we’ve got this time. And maybe — maybe — I’ll let you walk away from this when I know. But I need the truth, and I’ll know it when I hear it. And if you lie, you surely won’t walk away. They’ll find you one day. But it won’t be this winter. Or next.’
He sat on the stone steps, the movement of his limbs as fluid and unhurried as always.
‘I know you were there when he died, because the billhook was from Grandad’s chest. And you’d taken the key from behind the bar. But not alone, right? Kath said the three of you went together. And she’d added fuel to the fire, because she’d told Freddie about the baby coming. About me. Stupid, timid girl. If she’d told us then …But we can’t change the past.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said John Joe.
Ian’s temper snapped and he threw the piece of timber he was holding so that it cartwheeled, hitting the stone wall. Then he walked slowly back up the stairs.
He didn’t return for twenty minutes. At first the water only came in once every few minutes, swirling, but no worse, no deeper. But the tide didn’t work like that. It surged after falling back, gathering its strength. John Joe had surfed as a teenager, and he’d taught Ian, out on the windswept sands at Holkham. He knew all about the seventh wave. So there was a lull, and then a sudden curtain of white water at the door, and the room was full of the sea: not white this time but a livid green, a foot deep all around him, so that he had to jerk his neck up off the stone step. And cold, just above freezing. The first time he got his breathing just right, but the second time he swallowed a mouthful of seawater and he choked, spewing up over his chin and chest. This time, when the sea sucked out, it left kelp behind, and the white, dirty foam.
Then he heard the question again, although he hadn’t heard Ian’s footsteps on the stone stairs. Tears welled in his eyes and he shook his head, believing still perhaps that there was a way out, a stratagem that avoided confession. The next wave washed in, and this time when it ebbed there remained a foot of water in the room, a darker green this time, a hint of the pitch blackness of the deeper sea. John Joe could suck in air only if he held his head up, straining the neck muscles so that his body shook with the effort. Darkness was gathering outside the door, as if the bitter cold was extinguishing the light.
Ian came down the steps and with a knife from his back pocket cut the rope at his stepfather’s left wrist so that he could roll on to one side, lifting his head slightly.
‘There,’ he said. ‘A reprieve of sorts. For a while. A thank you — if you like, for bringing me up, for the kindnesses; and there’s been love — hasn’t there? I can’t deny that. But that’s all over, gone.’ He looked out of the open door at the sea. ‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘It was Fletcher’s idea,’ said John Joe, and he said it quickly, because he believed now; believed his stepson would do this, leave him twisting here, roped down, so that he’d drown, sucking down mouthfuls of brine.
‘He asked one of the waitresses for Pat’s address; I heard him. So I knew he was planning something. That night — the night of the wake — we talked, out on the stoop. I loved Lizzie. I could see what was happening; I knew what was going on. I saw her once — when she thought no one was looking. She just reached forward and took something from the corner of his eye. It was a kiss — but with her fingertips. So I said to Fletcher we should teach Pat a lesson — scare him off. That was the plan.’
‘And Venn?’
‘He’d sent Pat those pictures — the hangman. Fletcher knew that. He said he didn’t have the guts to actually do something, because the church was all talk — all sermon. It was all very well reading Leviticus, but what about living the book — Fletcher had picked that up, see? The phrase. He could play Sam like a fish on a line. So Sam came too.’
The sea washed in, round the room, funnelling out, but each time now leaving enough behind to lift John Joe’s body, so that he was beginning to feel his weight seep away with his life.
‘We were waiting for Pat in the cemetery — I could see him coming, walking: that walk of his, that swagger.’ He looked at Ian, desperate to see if his confession was softening the young man’s eyes. ‘Then he stopped. He didn’t see us — it wasn’t that. He’d got to the open grave, Nora’s grave. There’s a box tomb there, in stone. He sat there like it was a park bench.
‘There was moonlight. But we were in shadows, by a cypress tree. The choir was singing and you could hear that, so the night wasn’t silent.’ He used his free hand to pat down the imaginary earth. ‘We got down, on the grass. Fletcher said it was up to me and Sam to start it — to strike the first blow. We’d get him down, kick him. Freddie said he knew how to break a few bones, make him bleed, once he was down.’
Until that moment, Ian thought, John Joe had a life in front of him.
‘But Sam said Fletcher should start it, because he knew the words: we’d heard him on the corner with his mates, calling at the blacks. How they should go home, how they weren’t like us, how they were scum. So he should start — because it was important that Pat should know why we wanted him to go.’
John Joe heard laughter and realized it was his own, and how inappropriate it was.
‘But Freddie wouldn’t start it. He said I’d got the billhook — it was down to me. And it wasn’t just about Pat’s skin, was it? That wasn’t why Sam was there. So why should it be him to start it? And the weird thing was, he was crying — Freddie — weeping. He said he’d do time if he got caught. He’d been rounded up the year before with some skinheads, for kicking this Indian kid down by the docks. He’d got a fine, community service, and if he was caught doing it again there’d be time to do — eighteen months. He didn’t fancy that. That’s what he said — but I didn’t believe it, I still don’t. I think he just lost his nerve, and so he was ashamed.
‘When he stopped crying he said to me not to hit Pat on the head — to go for an arm or a leg or the shoulder — that was good because the collarbone would snap like a chicken wing. Then he just walked away — through the gravestones, towards the east gate. We couldn’t believe it. All that talk. All that hate.’