Julie shook her head, though something was picking away at her brain, some memory.
‘They brought flowers to the place where Thomas was killed. They threw them onto the river. The people who lived on the estate where his mam stayed. I mean, even people who didn’t know him or knew him and didn’t like him. To say they were sorry, like. To say they understood what a waste it was. Him losing his life because of a few lads horsing about. Luke went too. I bought some daffs for him from Morrisons.’
‘Flowers for remembrance and sorrow,’ Vera said. ‘Universal.’
Julie wasn’t sure what she meant by that.
‘Are you saying whoever murdered Luke was sorry for it?’
‘Maybe.’
‘But if you were sorry – sorry in advance, like, if that’s what the flowers were for – why kill him? It’s not like anyone forced him to break into my house and kill my son.’
‘No one did break in,’ Vera said.
‘What?’
‘There’s no sign of a forced entry. No broken window. Nothing like that. It looks as if Luke let him in. Or Laura.’
‘It will have been Luke,’ Julie said sadly. ‘He’d be taken in by anyone. He’d give to every lad begging on the street if he had the money. Anyone coming to the door with a story, he’d let them in. Laura has more sense.’
‘Did Laura and Luke get on?’
‘What are you saying?’ She was angrier than she’d been when she thought the detective was accusing her of murder. ‘Laura’s a lassie, just fourteen.’
‘There are questions that have to be asked,’ Vera said. ‘You’re not daft. You understand that.’ She paused for a moment. ‘You realize I’ll have to talk to her. She’s not in a fit state yet, but when she’s ready. It’s better that I know how things were between them before I start. Is it possible, for example, that Luke confided in her? If he was worried about anything, would she know?’
‘They weren’t that close,’ Julie said. ‘It wasn’t easy for her having a brother like that. He always got all the attention, didn’t he? I tried to make her feel special too, but he was the one I worried about. It must have been embarrassing for her when she got to the high school. Everyone knew he got into bother. Everyone calling him names. That didn’t mean she’d have wished him any harm.’
‘No,’ Vera said. ‘Of course not.’
Two teenage lads ran down the dunes onto the beach. They were scallies, you could tell just by looking at them, kicking sand at each other and swearing. They were about the same age as Luke, probably bunking off school. Julie pressed her lips together hard to stop herself from wailing.
‘Which taxi did you use from town last night?’ The question came out of the blue. Julie knew Vera was trying to distract her and was grateful.
‘Foxhunters, Whitley Bay. We booked it in advance. The driver dropped Lisa and Jan off first. I was last stop.’ She paused. ‘He’ll confirm my story. I was only in the house minutes before I was banging on Sal’s door. If he went to the end of the road to turn round, he might even have seen me on the doorstep.’
‘I’m more interested in whether he saw someone else in the street. Did you see anyone?’
Julie shook her head.
‘Take a bit of time,’ Vera said. ‘There might be something. See if you can rerun it in your head like a film. Talk me through it. From the taxi pulling up.’
So there on the wide and empty beach, with the gulls screaming over her head and the tide sucking at her feet, Julie shut her eyes and felt the dizziness that had hit her when she first stepped out of the taxi. ‘I was drunk,’ she said. ‘Not fall-in-the-gutter drunk, but not really with it. Everything spinning. You know how it is?’ Because she was sure that Vera had been drunk in her time. She’d be a good person to get drunk with.
‘I know.’ She gave Julie a minute. ‘Did you hear anything unusual?’
‘Nothing at all. I noticed how quiet it was. Usually there’s traffic on the main road through the village. It’s always there so you don’t hear it. Last night there was nothing. Not when I was opening the door’ She frowned.
‘But later? When the door was open?’
‘A car started up in the street.’
‘Could it have been the taxi, turning round?’
‘No. This was the ignition being switched on, the engine revving. It’s a different sound, isn’t it, from a car that’s already running?’
‘Quite different,’ Vera said.
‘It must have been parked down the street, near the junction with the road into town. That’s the direction the sound came from.’
‘So you’d have passed it in the taxi on your way in?’
‘Must have done.’
‘Don’t suppose you noticed it? A strange car? Not belonging to one of the usual residents?’ Her voice was so studied and casual that Julie knew it was important.
‘Nah,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have done.’ But she shut her eyes again and concentrated. They’d come over the humped-back bridge and she’d leaned forward to tell the driver to slow down because they were nearly there. There’s a nasty right-hand turn just on the corner And at the same time she was pulling her purse out of her bag, so there wouldn’t be that embarrassing last-minute fumble for payment. Lisa and Jan had already given her more than their share so she knew she had the cash. There’d been nothing coming in the opposite direction and the taxi driver had pulled into her street without having to stop. And there had been a car. Almost on the corner. Parked outside the bungalow where Mr Grey lived. She’d wondered about that because Mr Grey hadn’t driven since he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and everyone knew his only son lived in Australia. She remembered because she’d wondered if the car might belong to the doctor, if there was some emergency. And she’d looked to see if there were any lights on, thinking of the gossip she could pass on to Sal. But the house had been dark. And anyway it had been a small car. Not the sort a doctor would drive.
All this she told Vera.
‘I don’t know what make it was.’
‘Never mind, pet. It gives us something to work on. One of your neighbours might have seen it.’
The scally boys were throwing a football around, bouncing it hard in the wet sand, so muddy spray flew all over their clothes. Their mothers will kill them, Julie thought.
‘Home,’ Vera said. ‘Are you ready?’
Julie almost said she never wanted to go home.
‘Laura will be awake. She’ll be needing you.’ Vera stamped away towards the sand hills, leaving Julie no option but to follow.
Arriving back in the street, it was as if she was seeing it for the first time. Part of her was still on the beach with the sound of the gulls and all that space. Hard to think of this as home. A cul-de-sac ending in reclaimed farmland. Once there’d been the slag heap from the pit, but now there were fields all the way to the coast. Old folks’ bungalows on one side of the street, each with a ramp to the pavement and a hand rail. A row of semis on the other, council once but all privately owned now. Julie thought: Would this still have happened if we lived somewhere else?
Vera asked her to point out the exact place where she’d seen the car the night before. She tried her best but her heart wasn’t in it. All the time she was thinking of things she might have done to avoid the loss of her son. She could have moved, or not gone out with the girls, or had Luke put into a special school, a boarding school where he’d have been properly looked after.
Vera pulled up carefully right outside the house. There was still a policeman on the doorstep, but Julie knew that Luke had gone.
Chapter Six
When Vera arrived home that evening, there was a buzzard sailing over her house. The rounded wings were tilted to catch the thermals and the last of the sun caught it, so it shone like polished wood, carved in a totem. The buzzards were only just returning to this part of Northumberland. Common in the west of the county, the keepers here had shot them to buggery, stamped on eggs, put out poisoned bait. Vera knew there was a keeper on a neighbouring estate with murdering tendencies. Let him try, she thought. Just let him try.