I had come to depend on Vivien with a weight I could only just acknowledge, now, as I set that weight down. Daddy had built me a home — for me and for him and for Cathy. He had built shelter, arranged wood and stone over our heads in such a way that kept off the wind and the snow and the rain. He had given us safety and warmth. But, for me, in a way that I could not quite fathom let alone describe, Vivien had built a home for me too. A nest. It was a different kind from the one by the copse on the top of the hill. There was nothing tangible about the home I felt in Vivien. There were no bricks, no mortar, no rivets, no joints. It kept off no weather. It sank slowly into no mud. But it had a kind of hearth and a kind of fire. It was a place with a future. A place of possibility.
‘Vivien!’ I shouted. I knocked again. And waited. ‘Vivien!’
There was no use in it. I gave up. I turned for the last time and walked back down the path towards the gate and the lane that led home.
As I turned onto the track, Vivien’s front door was flung open, and the woman who I had met the year before, so composed, ran from her house towards me. Unkempt hair was tossed by a sudden gust. Her eyes were red.
‘If you want to talk, Daniel, you’d better come in!’
At first I remained motionless. I stood for a while to take in the scene. Then I followed her inside and she shut the door, but we didn’t make it past the hall. ‘He’s gone, Daniel. And no, I don’t know where. That he wouldn’t say.’
‘But he came to see you.’
‘Yes, he did. You’ve only missed him by half an hour or so.’
‘I should have come here first. I knew I should have come here first. But that means he might still be near.’
‘You won’t find him. When he moves, he moves quickly. And he doesn’t want you to chase him.’
‘He said he would stay.’
‘How could he. There are men after him. Men and dogs. Men that want to kill him. Really kill him, this time. Catch him alive, if possible, drag him back to Price and kill him slowly. This isn’t business, any more, he killed that boy.’
‘He dindt,’ I said.
‘Of course he did.’
‘Is that what he said? Is that what he told you?’
‘Well, he didn’t deny it.’
‘But did he tell you that, really? Did you ask him directly and did he tell you directly?’
‘He didn’t have to. Word spreads fast. I had a phone call from Ewart first thing this morning. He wanted to warn me. He said that your Daddy had killed the Price boy, strangled him to death, nearly took his head off with the force of his fists, then he’d gone to Ewart and Martha’s at dawn and stolen some money.’
‘But still you let him in when he came?’
‘Well, your father had always been wild. I always knew he was no angel.’
‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘But he dindt kill Charlie Price.’
‘Whatever he did. Whatever he did or didn’t do, Price’s men are certain. They found your Daddy’s coat draped over the boy’s body, you know? Like a blanket. Like a shroud.’
‘I believe you.’
‘John’s a marked man. If they catch him, there’s no telling what they’ll do to him. I know he’s tough. We all know that. But this is different. Running was the only chance he had.’
I nodded. ‘Perhaps.’
I looked through an open door into the front room. Vivien did not invite me further into the house. It was cold to me.
‘Did he come here to say goodbye to you?’ I asked.
‘In part.’
‘What was the other part?’
‘He asked me—’ She stopped speaking.
‘He asked you what?’
‘It was a big ask. Beyond what most people would ask of each other.’
‘What did he ask you?’
‘I don’t know if I should say.’
‘Vivien! My father disappeared from me this morning and there are men and dogs hunting him, to kill! Tell me!’
‘He wanted you and Cathy to come here. He wanted me to look after you for a little while until he could find somewhere safe. Then he would come and get you.’
I did not say anything just then. I wanted her to finish.
‘Only it’s a lot to ask,’ she continued. ‘I’ve got my own life, and yes I feel sorry for you, but it’s a lot. And besides, you and Cathy are fairly self-sufficient. You two wouldn’t want to move in here with me. You’re your own family. You’ve got each other. And I’m not one to share my space. I’m too old and too used to living alone, now. Perhaps years ago it would have worked. There was a time in my life when it might have been a lovely thing. But not now. It’s too late.’
‘Daddy asked you to do that?’
‘Yes, he asked that.’
I thought about it for a moment. A scene in which somebody who is running for their life asks an old friend to care for their children, and that old friend refuses. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I suppose you’re right. Cathy and I can make do at the house.’
‘That’s what I thought. You be careful though.’
She seemed to want me to leave.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, we will.’
‘Because Price and his men might come for you, you see. To get to Daddy.’
‘I suppose they might.’
‘So don’t open the door to any strangers.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We won’t.’
I took a step back. ‘Thank you for letting me in.’
For a moment she had forgotten that initially she had not. She looked taken aback. ‘Oh, no, I mean, of course. Of course I was going to let you in. I was upstairs with the vacuum on, that’s all. You’re always welcome here. To visit.’
‘Thank you, that’s kind.’
I opened the front door and stepped out into the sun. I closed the door behind myself, thinking that the right thing to do but it was stiff in its frame and I had to shunt it a couple of times, and Vivien, saying something muffled that I did not hear, pushed it from within.
The walk home was slow.
We hid in the trees when Price’s men came to search the house. It was mid-morning and we heard the dirty, claggy exhausts of their vans long before they got to the top of our hill. Cathy suggested that we stay in the house and confront them. She said we should show them we were not cowards. I persuaded her to leave off on this idea and instead we let ourselves out the back and ducked and skipped as quietly as we could until we hit the cover of the copse. There was no sign of Jess or Becky. I looked for them out on the horizon as we skulked across the open ground but caught no sight.
The soft, wet moss on the woodland floor and the sallow bark of the ash smelt more familiar this morning than ever before. Birds in the branches and the small mammals in the undergrowth kept the silence with us, though I saw shining eyes and flickering indigo feathers through apertures in the leaves.
I breathed slowly and deliberately and felt Cathy do the same. The vans parked on the stony earth outside our front door, and the men in the front seats got out. One rushed to the back to unstick the big double doors of both vehicles and five men climbed from the galley of each. Fourteen there were in total. I squinted to see if any were recognisable, feeling sick at the thought that it might be anyone we knew here, and, clearly, something had shifted. At least four were farm labourers who had come up to our bonfire on that night, weeks ago now. And all the men looked set on work like they were climbing out of the backs of vans to pick strawberries or sort potatoes. A couple even had spades, though to be put to a different use. Others gripped baseball bats and crowbars.
The men started circling the house. No one wanted to knock on the front door but a few — the bravest — went up to the windows, stuck an eyeball against the glass and shielded it from glare with a cupped hand. They paced for the best part of a minute before a smallish man with bulldog shoulders shuffled his crowbar to his right hand then swung it at the door, by way of a knock. I heard the sound briefly resonate within the house, like he had thumped an empty oil-drum.