“Was this his last term over there?” Ben asked. “After Jacob had gone missing and his wife had died?”
“Yeah, I think so.” Sandra sounded more suspicious than surprised. “Why?”
“I just wondered.” He told himself he was reading too much into a few photographs. But he couldn’t shake the conviction that, whereas the early ones had been coloured by a morbid curiosity, in the last few Kale had already started looking for something.
He turned over again. There was only one photograph left. It was black-and-white and had been cut from a newspaper.
It showed two army Land Rovers, The first was on its roof. The second, behind it, had its doors open and its windscreen smashed. There were dark marks on its bodywork that looked like bullet holes.
“That was the ambush where John got shot,” Sandra told him. “He should have been in the first car, the one on its roof, because he was the corporal. But its radio wasn’t working, so he went in the other. About a mile after he’d changed the first car went over a landmine and everybody in it was killed. Then the bastards started on them with a machine gun.”
Ben closed the album.
“Don’t see many of me in there, do you?” she said.
The bitterness had given way to hurt.
“When did he start bringing the scrap metal home?” he said, to get away from it.
“Almost as soon as we came here.”
She moved away. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or not.
“He started looking for a job. I thought he’d get something in a garage, or somewhere. You know he’s a qualified mechanic? He can fix anything mechanical, he’s got a knack for it. That’s why he joined the Engineers. But he came home one day and said he’d got this job in the scrapyard. I didn’t mind, I thought it’d only be temporary. I didn’t even take any notice when he started bringing bits and pieces back with him. I supposed he wanted to mess around with them. Hammer them out for spares, or something, I don’t know. Then he started talking about this Pattern.”
She glared at Ben as if it were his fault. “It was bad enough before, but when he found out Steven” — Jacob, he thought — “was still alive he started bringing back twice as much. I told him the social services would have a fit if they saw it, but he didn’t take any notice. And they never went out back anyway. They had a look round the house, but that was all. I just drew the curtains when they came in the kitchen so they wouldn’t see it. Pricks.”
There was no heat in the insult. Her skirt tightened around her thighs as she leaned against the edge of the table. “Now John’s not got time for anything else. He could get a job in any garage and earn decent money, but he won’t. And he has to pay for everything he brings home. That fat bastard he works for takes it out of his wages, as if there’s enough of them to start with. He won’t listen to me any more. He hardly even talks to me. All he cares about now is his bloody wreckage. And the kid. Won’t let his precious little son out of his sight. He’s got this idea that he can help him see what the Pattern is, because of how he is with jigsaws and things.”
“That’s stupid! A lot of autistic children are good at puzzles. It isn’t anything unusual!”
“Try telling that to John,” she said, dryly. “He thinks it all ties in. Steven’s going to help him first, and once he has he’ll be able to make Steven better. Or something like that. It’s all part of the Pattern, isn’t it?” Her tone was loaded with sarcasm.
Ben remembered how Kale set pieces of metal in front of Jacob, as if waiting for his reaction. Waiting for him to help decipher whatever he thought they held. “Oh, Christ.”
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” Sandra said. She was smiling again, but it wasn’t a pleasant one. “He exercises until he’s sick. He tries to work himself into a state where he can ‘see’ this fucking pattern of his. I mean, he hasn’t managed it yet, obviously, so that just means he has to go at it harder. He says he’s ‘purifying’ himself. Well, that’s what he said once. He doesn’t talk about it at all now. Not to me, anyway, but you can hear him telling the boy sometimes. As if he can bloody understand him.”
“Is that why he lifts the engine over Jacob’s head? To push himself harder?”
An expression of suspicion smoothed her face, then was gone. “I suppose so,” she said, examining her nails. “I haven’t asked.”
She still hadn’t asked how he knew what Kale did in the garden, either. Ben wondered if she didn’t want to find out what else he might have seen.
“What does he do in the shed?” he asked.
The look she gave him was a mixture of fear and dislike. It was quickly replaced by resignation.
“You can see for yourself.”
She brushed past him and went to the back door. He began to follow and walked into her as she stopped suddenly.
He stepped back, blushing.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
“I forgot the key.”
There was a satisfied air about her as she took a keyring from a drawer in one of the kitchen units, as though she had somehow proved something to herself. Ben felt the advantage had been subtly taken from him. A gust of rain and icy air swept into the kitchen as she opened the door.
He clutched his coat around him as he went out, conscious that Sandra hadn’t even bothered to put hers on. The garden was muddy. Broken paving slabs had been embedded in the grassless soil like stepping stones. Through the rain Ben saw the encircling wall of metal. There was more of it than he remembered.
He skirted a jagged piece of bodywork that protruded from one side of the pile. The seat where Jacob had played while Kale suspended the engine over him looked wet and abandoned. In front of it sections of broken cars had been left like parts of a dismembered animal.
Sandra unlocked the padlock and opened the shed door. It tore out of her hand and banged against the wooden side.
Ben went in after her.
There was a pungency of bitumen, pine resin and stale sweat. It was dark and cramped, forcing him to stand close to Sandra. Her hair was flattened against her head by the rain. He could feel water from his own trickling over his face and neck. He blinked it out of his eyes, trying to work out what the object that filled most of the interior was.
At first he thought it was simply an exercise machine, a multi-gym of some sort. There was an impression of a steel frame, pulleys and ponderous weights. Then he took in the straps attached to the long wooden bench and dangling from cables, the oil-covered cogs of what appeared to be gear wheels. It looked like something designed to tear apart rather than exercise.
“This is why he comes in here,” Sandra said. She was shivering. “He built it himself.”
Ben was still trying to work out what it was. He thought he knew, but couldn’t quite believe it.
“What is it?”
“It’s a rack, what’s it look like?”
There were small straps for wrists and ankles, and a larger harness that had a forehead band and a chinstrap. Each was joined by cables to the weights, which hung like steel fruit at the head and foot of the bench, and were connected in turn to the heavy gear wheels. Sandra ran her fingers lightly over the frame. Her nails were bitten and ragged.
“He fastens himself into it and takes the brake off the weights. The gears stop them just smashing straight to the floor, but once they’ve gone past a notch you can’t pull them back. He’s worked it so the further they go the heavier they get. The only way you can stop them’s by that.” She pointed to a mechanism at the top end of the bench. It had a smaller set of weights, and was attached to the head harness. “It’s a clutch, or something. But you have to use your neck to lift those weights off the floor far enough for it to trip in.”