‘Robbie had so much to look forward to all round,’ I went on. ‘You know his coach was trying to get him trialled for England youth? He was on cloud nine about that.’
And we had been so proud. Had we pushed him too much? No, I was sure we hadn’t. Yet something had pushed him over the edge.
‘He had his GCSE exams looming, though,’ Robert countered. ‘He’d already started his mocks, hadn’t he? Was he worried about the results? Was he having problems?’
‘Not that I knew of. And why would he have been worried? He was clever. You came to the college open day last time you were home. Don’t you remember how all the teachers said Robbie would sail through?’
‘Yes I do.’ Robert was thoughtful.
‘Robbie always seemed to find everything so easy, didn’t he?’ I continued. ‘He was an athlete and an academic. The tote double. I’m sure he didn’t have any problems at Kelly. I know he didn’t seem to make many close friends, if any, but that’s how he was, wasn’t it? That’s how we’ve always been as a family, I suppose.’
‘Yes. And maybe that’s what was wrong. I blame myself for this, Marion. The life I forced him to lead. I will always blame myself.’
I sighed. ‘You didn’t force him do anything. Robbie was a happy boy. He liked his life, I’m quite sure he did.’
‘Apparently not,’ said Robert grimly.
We kept going over the same ground. And always we came to the same conclusion. Robbie could not have taken his own life. It wasn’t possible. He had no reason to. No reason at all. And yet he had. There could be no rational alternative to that. Could there?
I felt as if all my insides were tied in one big knot. And the more we talked, the more I had to accept that it wasn’t just Robbie’s death that had shocked and bewildered me so. I was also anxious about my husband and the manner of his homecoming. I had uncertainties. I couldn’t help it. There were concerns I needed him to satisfy, but feared to raise. In the end I could not stop myself.
‘Robert, which rig have you been on?’
‘Jocelyn. Why?’ Robert sounded puzzled, as he might. A rig had always been a rig to me. It had never mattered which one he was on, only that he was away from home.
‘It’s just that when I called Amaco and they couldn’t find you on the list, well, they mentioned a man called Rob Anderton. And he was on Jocelyn.’
Robert made no comment. Did I feel him stiffen as he lay by my side? Or did I imagine it?
‘So who’s Rob Anderton?’ I went on.
‘He’s a derrickman, I barely know him,’ said Robert evenly.
‘Yes, they told me he was a derrickman. That’s a crewman, isn’t it? Someone who helps maintain the drill—’
‘A senior crewman, yes,’ Robert interrupted, his tone indicating that he had no wish to continue with this topic.
‘Quite a coincidence, isn’t it?’ I carried on doggedly. ‘Rob Anderton and Rob Anderson on the same small platform in the North Sea?’
‘Is it? I suppose so. I don’t know. And aren’t I Robert? Since when did you ever call me Rob? I don’t want to talk about Rob Anderton, Marion. Actually I don’t want to talk about anything more tonight. I just can’t. We really need to try to get some sleep. I don’t know if it’s possible, but if we’re even going to begin to get through this, we must try.’
He turned away, wrapping his arms around his pillow instead of me. I lay on my back staring at the ceiling. I had slept before, but I feared sleep was not going to come again that night.
Robert tossed and turned by my side. Eventually he began to snore intermittently, so I knew that he at least had finally managed to find some brief respite. Or had he? Once or twice he cried out as if in torment. I hoped his dreams were not as bad as mine had been earlier.
At about five o’clock in the morning I crept out of bed and groped my way from our bedroom without switching on the light. My burned feet had stopped throbbing while I lay in bed but started to hurt again as soon as I put weight on them. Moving cautiously, I closed the door as softly as possible behind me and, on tiptoe, or as near to tiptoe as my damaged feet would allow, climbed the second staircase to Robbie’s room.
It was the first time I had been in it since the police and the ambulance crew had left and Robbie’s body had been removed. The nylon noose had thankfully also been removed from the central beam.
Other than that nothing much had been touched, or at any rate altered, from how I had seen it when I had kicked open the door, clutching those two mugs of tea, to be confronted by my son’s body hanging before me.
The desk was still in the middle of the room where I’d presumed Robbie had dragged it. The shattered computer screen still lay on the floor. I picked out the shards of glass and put them in the bin. There were sheets of paper, pens and pencils, and a couple of books on the floor too. I picked them up and piled them neatly on the desk. Unusually for a teenage boy, Robbie had always been tidy. So I set about tidying his room, making it look, as much as I could, the way it had always been before.
I didn’t move the desk, though. I was afraid that dragging it across the wooden floor would wake Robert. And although I had been so desperate for his return, and thankful that he’d arrived so much earlier than either of us had expected, I just wanted to be alone for a bit in my boy’s room with all his things around me.
I did move the chair, carrying it across the room from where it had been left by the chimney breast, and placing it carefully in front of the desk so that I could sit there, just as Robbie had spent so much of his time sitting before that same desk.
I ran my hands over the smoothly finished wood in front of me.
I wondered what sort of things the police looked for when they checked out a death like Robbie’s. I found, now that I was confronted by such an unimaginable situation, that I had little or no idea. I had no experience of these matters other than watching the odd detective show on TV.
This was different. This was for real.
I supposed that in a case like Robbie’s they would routinely look for anything that might indicate that his death was not as it first seemed. Anything which indicated that there was something suspicious about it. That another person might be involved, presumably. Although DS Jarvis had more or less suggested that they weren’t considering that option very seriously. ‘Routine, just routine, Mrs Anderson.’
I slid open the top drawer on the right-hand side of Robbie’s desk. I knew he’d always kept his diary there. I was mildly surprised to see that it was still there. I’d somehow expected the police to have taken it away.
Perhaps they’d read it on the spot and decided it wasn’t relevant. I’d never read Robbie’s diary. I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing such a thing. Even though Robbie and I were so close.
Things were different now, though. Very different.
I lifted the diary from the drawer. It was a rather smart shiny black leather job, with Robbie’s initials on it, which Robert and I had bought off the Net for him the previous Christmas. I suppose a lot of young people nowadays kept an electronic diary, if they did so at all. But there’d been an old-fashioned side to Robbie. He’d said he much preferred the traditional version, a bound book.
I opened the diary towards the back, and turned to the most recent entries. The dates of his mock GCSEs had all been neatly entered. I flipped backwards. Our birthdays were marked, Robert’s and mine, and the date of his own late spring birthday, the 28th of May.
He’d indicated it with a cross and added a comment. ‘Mum and Dad arranged for me to have a flight over the moors in a glider. FANTASTIC!’