‘Are you all right?’ Daniel asked as he looked into her tired eyes.
‘I dunno,’ she said with a strange smile. ‘I feel weird. Probably just exhausted.’
‘You won,’ he said.
‘We won,’ she said, putting a hand on his lapel. He enjoyed the weight of her hand on his chest. For a second he thought about pulling her to him, kissing her.
He inhaled, preparing to tell her what Sebastian had told him, but stopped himself. She was the only person he wanted to tell; the only person who would understand. He would tell her, but not now; they had both been through enough for one day.
‘How did you get on?’ she said, motioning towards the crowd of journalists in the distance.
‘Fine. You know how it is – they’ve moved on to the Stokeses already.’
Irene looked away. ‘My heart breaks for them. They have absolutely no resolution now. Their son’s dead and no one has been blamed.’
Daniel shuddered in the damp cold, trying to shake off the memory of Sebastian’s whispered words. He put his hands in his pockets and looked up at the dark sky.
‘We’re a good team, though,’ she said.
He met her eye and nodded. She put a hand on his lapel again.
Suddenly he felt the weight of her tilt towards him. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his lips.
Her lips were cold. He felt the first drops of rain on his head. He was too jolted to return the kiss, but he stayed close to her, until she backed away.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, turning from him, a flush on her cheek, allowing her hair to fall over her eyes.
He ran his hand up her neck and his thumb across her chin. He didn’t know what would happen now, but it felt significant.
EPILOGUE
The rain had just stopped when Daniel pulled into Brampton. He felt a rare calm settle on him. Until he reached Cumbria, the trial had been on his mind.
He was not sure if he had ever thought Sebastian innocent. It had never mattered to him beyond the case. But now that the little boy was free and had admitted his guilt, Daniel felt responsible. He thought again about Paul and Madeline Stokes, their grief adrift without the rudder of conviction. The child needed help, but Daniel’s role in that was now over. He could only hope that the case conference members and the professionals who had been involved with Sebastian so far would realise what he needed.
If the verdict had been different, Daniel knew that he would not feel better. His experience of secure units, juvenile detention centres and prisons had shown him that however damaged juveniles had been in the past, however desperate their problems, they would only be made worse in the places they would be sent for punishment and rehabilitation.
Now that he was in Brampton, Sebastian seemed far away: painfully faint, like a note he had to strain to hear. It was nearly winter now, and Brampton’s trees had been blown free of their leaves. The naked trees stood stark against the sky, like lungs. He heard the rain splash against the tyres of his car as he drove into the village. He took a breath and held it, wondering what rare change would have been possible if Sebastian had known a Minnie.
He tried to push aside thoughts of the boy. He remembered the taste of Irene’s lips from the evening before and smiled.
He pulled up outside the farm. The yard had been tidied and the old shed had been removed. The garden had been dug and the grass at the front cut. Daniel inhaled the clean smell of the earth. The air was cold and so he took out his key and stepped inside the farmhouse, for the last time.
It was different from before. There was almost no trace of her now. The floors were spotlessly clean and the bathroom and kitchen smelled of bleach. He had never seen the old electric cooker shining so white. He ran his forefinger along it, remembering the meals she had cooked for him: shepherd’s pie, fish and chips, roast beef and Yorkshire puddings.
The windows had been painted. The table was clear and the fridge open and clean. He would meet Cunningham later to exchange the contracts and hand over the keys. He remembered coming to the empty house a few months before, still angry with her, aching but not acknowledging her loss – asking for all her things to be thrown away, professionally cleared. Now he wished to see the newspaper she had been reading, her jars of odd buttons, her old clothes, her vinyl records which had not to be marked with fingerprints, the animals that had shared her life while he had scorned her.
Daniel’s throat hurt. He opened the door to the living room. It was empty: gone her old couch, gone her old-fashioned television and video recorder, gone her photographs and pictures, gone the footstool on which she would rest her thick-skinned, hard-nailed feet.
The floorboards were scuffed from the feet of the piano, the wood darker where the body of the instrument had shaded the floor from the light. Daniel covered his eyes with both hands. I’m sorry, Mam, he whispered in the quiet empty farmhouse, his throat tight as hot tears flashed across his cheeks. Forgive me.
Her bare feet pumped the pedals, her knees apart and the material of her skirt falling in between her thighs. She straightened her shoulders and leaned back with a laugh as she struck the keys.
‘When did you learn to play the piano?’ he asked her. He was lying on the couch watching her with his hands behind his head.
‘When I was a child. My father liked to play and he taught both us girls … and he would take us to concerts … and make us sit still with our fingers on our lips listening to his records. Some of those records in there belonged to him, and I listened to them when I was a little girl.’ Minnie leaned towards Daniel as she spoke, right hand tinkling up the keys, her left forefinger pressed against her lips. ‘Would you like me to teach you?’
He shook his head. ‘Did your daughter play the piano?’
She didn’t answer.
He still didn’t understand about the little girl whose butterfly he had tried to steal, but each time he saw the butterfly he thought of her.
‘She could play a little,’ was all she said, and then she started to play again, loudly, so that he could feel the vibrations through the couch. It made his scalp itch. He watched her, as her cheeks reddened and her eyes misted with tears. But then, like always, she threw back her head and laughed. She looked out of the window, her strong hands heavy on the keys.
‘Ach, come on will you now, Danny. Sit down here beside me and let me see what you can do.’
Again he shook his head.
‘I heard you playing the other week, you know. You thought I was outside but I heard you try. It won’t break, you know. I can teach you how to play a tune, or you can just do your thing. It doesn’t matter. It just feels nice to make a noise sometimes. It stops the noise in your head. You’ll see. Come and sit beside me …’
She moved over on the long piano stool, and patted the spot beside her. It was only a fortnight since he had been beaten up and run away to his mother’s. His nose still felt funny and he sniffed as he sat down beside her and looked at the keys. He could smell the damp wool of her and feel the soft cushion of her hip against his.
‘Do you want me to teach you a wee easy song, or do you just want to make a noise, like? Both are fine with me.’
‘Teach me something, then,’ he said quietly, letting his fingers fall on the keys. He listened to the lonely, hollow notes that sounded.
‘Right, well, if you look at the keyboard, you have your black and you have your white keys. What do you notice about the way the black keys are grouped?’