‘Not mad enough to go round to his house and strangle him,’ Kath said.
Armstrong shrugged. ‘I can’t think of anyone else who’d want to kill him.’
‘Did Luke ever talk to you about the accident?’
‘Not the accident itself,’ Kath said. ‘He came here soon after it happened. He talked about all the flowers that had been thrown into the river afterwards. How pretty they were. He’d gone with Julie and seemed really moved by it. There was a picture on the front page of the Chronicle. He brought it for me to see.’
Rebecca appeared at the kitchen door. She stood shyly, curious about the stranger.
‘Do you mind starting on the tea, Geoff?’ Kath said. ‘I need to get ready for work.’
She followed Vera towards the front door. In the kitchen Geoff had switched on the radio and he and Rebecca were singing along to a pop song.
Vera had dozens of questions. She wanted to know how Kath and Geoff had met. What had she seen in him? How had she seen the potential doting father under the loutishness and the anger? But that was probably just prying and none of her business and she contented herself with a single comment. ‘I was told your man had a bit of a temper,’ she said. ‘No sign of that now.’
Kath paused for a moment, reaching out towards the door handle. ‘He’s happy,’ she said. ‘There’s no reason for him to get angry any more.’
Vera thought that sounded a bit glib. Too good to be true. But she didn’t push it. She had an appointment, someone else to see.
Chapter Eight
Lying in the bath, the window open a crack, the water deep and very hot, Felicity found herself brooding on the past. She wasn’t given much to introspection and wondered what might be the cause of it. Peter’s sixtieth birthday perhaps. Anniversaries occasionally had that effect. Or a menopausal moodiness. Meeting Lily Marsh had unsettled her. She was jealous of the young woman’s youth and vitality, the firm skin and flat stomach, and she had envied her independence.
Felicity had married too early. She’d met Peter at a party. She was an undergraduate, only six weeks into her degree. Her parents had tried to persuade her to apply to a university a bit further from home, but she’d been daunted enough at the prospect of a hall of residence. She needed the security of the vicarage only an hour away, an escape route. Her father was a priest, mild, relaxed about theology, but strict on kindness. In fact, she’d taken to university life, the friendships and the late nights and especially the men. She saw that she might be attractive to them. They quite liked her shyness, perhaps they even saw her demure demeanour as a challenge. But she wasn’t sure how she should respond to them. She wandered around, bewildered and a little lost. Alice in an academic wonderland.
So, she was at this party in a student house in Heaton. There were bare floorboards and Indian cotton pinned on the walls, unfamiliar music and the heavy smell of dope which registered without her knowing what it was. It was very cold, she remembered, despite all the people crowded into the room. They’d had the first severe frost of the autumn and there was no form of heating. Outside, the soggy fallen leaves were frozen in heaps on the pavement.
Whatever had Peter been doing there? It really wasn’t his thing at all and beneath his dignity anyway to fraternize with undergraduates. But he was there, dressed in corduroy trousers and a hand-knitted woollen jumper, completely anachronistic, as if he’d wandered out of a Kingsley Amis novel. He was drinking beer from a can and looking miserable. Although he’d been out of place in the student party, he had been a familiar figure to Felicity, a familiar type at least. There had been lonely men in the parish, attracted to the church because, surely, there they would not be rejected. The last curate had been terribly shy. Her mother had made fun of him behind his back, and the middle-aged spinsters in the village had taken to competing for his affection with lamb casseroles and spicy gingerbread.
But when she started talking to Peter, Felicity had discovered that he was nothing like the weedy young Christians she’d met at summer camp, or the amiable curate. He was abrupt and arrogant and quite sure of himself despite the bizarre clothes.
‘I’d arranged to meet someone,’ he said angrily. ‘But they’ve not turned up. A complete waste of time.’
Felicity wasn’t sure whether the person who’d failed to materialize was male or female.
‘I’ve papers to mark.’
Then she realized that he wasn’t a mature student. He hadn’t looked thirteen years her senior. She was immensely dazzled by his status. She had always been attracted to men in authority, liking the idea of someone else taking control, of educating and informing her. She had so little experience of men and was convinced she would do everything wrong. Better let someone who knew what they were about lead the way.
She asked haltingly about his work and he began to talk about it with such energy and fire that she was enthralled, though she didn’t understand a word. They moved into the hall where the music wasn’t so loud, and sat on the stairs. They couldn’t sit side by side because they had to leave room for the people stumbling up to the bathroom, so he sat above her and she took a place at his feet.
The conversation wasn’t all one way. He asked about her and listened when she described her home and her parents. ‘I’m an only child. I suppose I’ve been very sheltered.’
‘This must all come as rather a shock,’ he said. ‘Student life, I mean.’ She didn’t like to say that actually she was enjoying the noise, the chaos and the freedom of university. He seemed taken with the idea that she was vulnerable and it seemed rude to contradict him. He was even tolerant of her religious faith, as if it was appropriate for someone at her stage of experience. As if she were a six-year-old who had confided a belief in the tooth fairy. ‘Even I agree that not everything can be explained by science,’ he said and that was when he first touched her, stroking her hair as if he wanted to reassure her that she wasn’t making a fool of herself. Not really. And she was grateful for his understanding.
They left when the party was in full swing. He offered to walk her back to the hall of residence. They took the bus into town and then walked over the Town Moor. It was bitterly cold, everything white and silver, mist caught in the hollows and coming from their mouths. There was a swollen white moon. ‘It looks too heavy,’ she said. ‘As if it should crash to earth.’
She expected then a brief sermon on gravity and the planets, but he stopped and turned towards her, taking her face in his gloved hands. ‘You are delightful,’ he said. ‘I’ve never met anyone like you.’
Later she realized that was probably true. He had been to a boys’ school, then straight to university and all his energies had been taken up with his academic work. Perhaps he had dreamed of women, perhaps they had haunted him, diving into his consciousness once every six minutes. Certainly he must have had sexual encounters. But he hadn’t allowed himself to be distracted. Until now. When they walked on he put his arm around her shoulders.
Outside her hall he pulled her to him and kissed her, and he stroked her hair, not gently this time, but with a violent, rubbing motion which made her feel how frustrated he must be. This pressure on her hair and scalp was the only expression of desire he allowed himself. She felt the contained passion stinging and fizzing inside him like electricity.
‘Can we meet for lunch?’ he asked. ‘Tomorrow?’
When she agreed she felt as if she was in control. She was the one with the power.
As he walked off, a friend wandered up. ‘Who was that?’