The Half Sister Page 27

  At the front door, Edmund is grateful for the fresh air. He watches John getting into his van, then suddenly he calls out, like a child about to jump off the top diving board. ‘You really think I can do it?’

  With the driver’s door half open, John nods. ‘I did it,’ he says. ‘Rock bottom as well, I was. Bankrupt, lost the pub, on the point of losing Grace because I was such a drunken, violent shit to her, would have lost the kids as well. I retrained, didn’t I? And I don’t just mean the job. And not everybody would have employed me, but you gave me a chance, I haven’t forgotten that.’ The headlights light up the bright colours of the dahlias in the long border, moonshine on rubies. ‘Best thing I ever did, rescuing this garden, bringing it back to life after all those years. If I can find a silver lining, Edmund, so can you. If you want to.’ He closes the van door and lowers the window. ‘Thanks for the whisky. Sorry about, well, you know. And by the way, a wash and a shave always helps.’

  Leaning into the van, Edmund has one last question. ‘Do you think Grace would help me? Paid. You could even move back into the lodge when I get it repaired.’

  ‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ John turns on the engine. ‘We’re never moving back to be your staff or your tenants. We’ve got our independence, our family. I got a lot of work out of this earthquake. Winners and losers. Grace is her own woman, but I reckon if you ask her, she’d jump at the chance of helping the kid. She was heartbroken leaving him. And I almost forgot, I was meant to give you this.’

  And then he’s gone.

  An envelope. It is starting to drizzle again, the soft pattering of raindrops falling on old tiled roofs, the drip of the gutters and the chime of water in an empty tin bucket, it plays like a xylophone in the night, and Edmund turns the envelope over and over in his hands as he listens to the night orchestra.

  Inside, a card, a picture of mountains and black birds, a river and two stick people fishing under a huge yellow sun.

  Dear Edmund,

  I am sorry you are not very well. I hope you get better soon. I am looking forward to seeing you and Monty again.

  I am not feeling very well either.

  Love Mikey

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Did the sunrise mean nothing to her? Or did it mean too much? The dressing-room window, Mikey’s bedroom, the back windows of the nursery, they all face northeast over the agricultural fields behind the house rather than over the landscaped park. The architect designed it that way so that the smiling face of the front looked south and invited the sun in through its elegant windows, turning its back on the cold winds and slanting rain which sweep in from the hills. But for all the glamour of the sundowner lawns, it is these windows which frame the sunrise; luminous clouds, mottled and flecked and ribbed like salmon, awaken in Edmund the aching passion he feels for his home, whereas only yesterday he was besotted with his whore: distance. In the space between, he feels the need for guidance.

  Outside, it is cold for the end of September, the spice of autumn bringing back the feeling of a new term, stiff shoes, blank pages in the exercise books, write about what you did in your holidays. The iron railings which encircle the park are laced with silver cobwebs. As he walks he checks the saplings he has planted and tended and with his hand he measures the length of this year’s growth, new life on old wood. These trees won’t make much difference in his lifetime, but in the next century the landscape will be changed because of this commitment and he is proud of that. Further on, a large branch has recently split from the trunk. He lets dying trees stand as a rule; they provide lookout posts for owls, hollows for nests, homes for scavenging beetles and false scorpions, crevices for fungi and parasites and millipedes and mites – so much life vested in one decaying host.

  The chapel is dark. The old candles have burned out and the new ones have the waxy shine of feverish flesh. There are not enough left in the box to mark everything that has been lost, but he lights three of them anyway and then plays with a fourth before putting it back. Light for the dead, darkness for the living, none of it really made sense. Sitting in his pew, Edmund fixes on the space where the crucifix once hung. Even if it was still there, he would not be able to think of anything to say to the man hanging from the tree, nor did he imagine that man would have much to say to him. As restless as the rook stamping and scratching on the beams above him, Edmund pecks at his usual routines but finds little nourishment. It strikes him that he has constructed his own religion in this chapel and that prayers offered here are nothing more than introspection. Aimlessly, he deciphers the inscriptions to his forefathers carved on the flagstones beneath his feet and on the war memorial above his head: ‘Greater love hath no man than he lay down his life for his friends.’ Heroes all of them. At the font, he dips his fingers in the deconsecrated dryness of the bowl. He’s never paid much attention to the verse that the stonemasons chose to carve onto the rim in the twelfth century.

  ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me.’

  He feels it as he reads it. The words speak to him.

  When he parks outside Grace’s house, he does not get out immediately. People walk past, pushchairs and shopping bags and scooters and skateboards, it must be the end of school. His visit to the hospital has exhausted him. What the nurses made of his recent absence, he had no idea; they live too close to death to be in the position of making judgements on the living, but they did comment that it was helpful for her to have visitors, and there had only been one or two. He was advised to set up a rota to take the pressure off him, but he doubted it was needed. Diana must have been lonely after the first few months at Wynhope. She’d always seemed so busy, with lots of invitations on the mantelpiece to start with, but there’s no queue now at the door to Intensive Care. He should have paid more attention.

  There appeared to be no change in Diana’s condition since his last visit, but it was hard to know for certain. Edmund explained to her how he’d been tidying up at home, how the sweet peas were still flowering, that the private health insurance covers rehabilitation . . . As he talked to her, he could feel her coming back to him, the old Diana coming home through the dusk and settling down beside him until it was a shock to remember where he was and everything that had happened and then, and only then, did he realise how sad it all was, what was lost. Because, regardless of the medical terminology and the guarded use of the future tense, it was clear that a lot was lost. He always was a poor mathematician and his accounting in recent days had been faulty, but if he did the figures, surely they had spent more time in love than out of it? When the nurse appeared with a bowl, he took it from her and washed Diana’s hands with the warm water, gently, so gently there was barely a ripple on the surface. He sponged her palms, her fingers, one by one, and then the delicate flesh between one finger and the next until the whole hand was cared for. That is such an intimate part of someone’s body, the spaces in between and the webbing. To bathe all of her, that would be something, to massage her feet with oils, to stand and raise her arms high above her head and let the water trickle down between her shoulder blades, to sponge her softly underneath each breast and lie her down and tend to the most private parts of her, for her. When her hands were dry, he laid them back on the soft, rolled towels, loosely curled around nothing but the air, as if there was no need to worry about a thing, everything was going to be all right. Even if he could not envisage loving her back at Wynhope, he could at least love her here, where it was just the two of them, where it was safe enough to love.

  With a jolt, in the wing mirror Edmund notices Louisa getting her keys out of her school bag and letting herself into the house. She has not spotted him. He can’t see Mikey at the window, but he’s probably there watching, behind the net curtains.

  He hadn’t mentioned bringing Mikey home to Diana, but he did tell one of the nurses.

  ‘I’m on my way to collect our nephew,’ he said.

  She asked if he was going to bring him to visit and he queried if there was an age limit, li
ke a film, a point at which the nightmare merited a 15 or an 18, death being mistakenly thought of as a matter for adults.

  ‘For a lot of children the fear of what they’ll see is worse than the reality,’ advised the nurse. ‘Are they very close, your wife and the little boy?’

  They are not easily separated, Edmund is sure of that. They are enmeshed, like when you try to unroll barbed wire and all the spikes get caught up with each other.

  This time Edmund is invited into the kitchen where he sits with his coffee at the table opposite Mikey with his milk, Grace doing this and that at the cooker. No recriminations, he doesn’t think she is a woman who holds tight to hard feelings or past injustices. Everyone else is out doing things, Grace explains. John is on a rebuild job at the health centre, Naomi does afternoons at Brean & Walters – the solicitors are busy, there’s been quite a surge of claims since the earthquake, most of them trying their luck, she reckons – and her son-in-law and Liam are on lates, and Louisa’s just got in from school. Edmund is painfully conscious that he does nothing useful. Other people have phrases that are not really part of his vocabulary. He overhears them at the hospital: take a morning off, what with work and one thing and another, no holidays left for the year. If he owned those words, then he might have been part of it all, propped up by the pillars which keep everyone else in a state of mutual support; as it is he has his own language in his own castle in his own country, some distance away and the court interpreters have long fled. He is as good as unemployed, he just doesn’t need to sign on.

  ‘Busy people,’ he acknowledges to Grace.

  ‘And that’s an understatement.’ She laughs.

  Mikey is staring at him. Edmund has forgotten how the child unsettles everything around him, wobbling the kitchen table until the milk spills from the cup and a clementine rolls onto the floor. A couple of minutes later and he has his rucksack on his back and is waiting in the doorway. Edmund thanks Grace, says he can’t find the words to express how grateful he is that she’ll be coming to Wynhope to help out and Grace says she’s thrilled to be asked.

  ‘It isn’t that I didn’t enjoy it before, it’s just that Diana . . . Never mind, that’s all in the past now, isn’t it? Bye!’ She waves. ‘Bye, Mikey, you be good!’

  In the supermarket on the way home, they go a little mad, both of them overexcited and silly: vanilla sponge cake with jam and cream in the middle, sugar cereal, fizzy drinks, sausages, baked beans, tubs of chocolate-coated flapjacks. Comfort is chucked into the trolley and piled high, with Edmund adding some bananas and natural yoghurt as a responsible father should. At the burger place next door, Edmund explains that tea is not going to be like this every day so Mikey shouldn’t get his hopes up, but he admits it feels like a bit of a treat, squeezing the mayonnaise out of its plastic pouch, dipping his chips in it and tasting Mikey’s strawberry milk shake, sucking from the same straw.

  When they get home, Mikey is pulling on the door handle, but Edmund keeps the child lock on. He has rehearsed this. ‘You know I told you my mother and father died. Well, I thought I’d never be able to walk back in here again, I thought it would be horrible, but do you know, it isn’t. It’s home. Wynhope is home.’ Sometimes with an audience this inscrutable, it is difficult to know how well your speech is going down. ‘And horrible things have happened here. I don’t understand them, but maybe one day you’ll be able to tell me about them.’ Not a flicker, Edmund ploughs on. ‘But this is your forever home now, Mikey. Nothing will change that. This is where you belong.’

  It would have been nice if there was a hug, a smile, even a nod, but as soon as the door is released, Mikey slides to the ground and is gone. Edmund knows he is going to have to get used to small rewards.

  ‘Monty!’

  Such a warm welcome for the dog. Words, apart from anything else.

  ‘It’s me. Mikey.’

  ‘So, you talk to Monty and not me,’ says Edmund.

  ‘Yes.’ In the Jekyll and Hyde way the boy operates, the smile drops and he disappears to his room.

  ‘It’s only the cleaners who’ve been in here,’ Edmund reassures him as the door is shut in his face.

  Only Monty is allowed in. It is noticeable how the dog seems to feel responsible for the child; Edmund can speculate on the reasons, but has no answers. In his study, he can’t concentrate. He is writing emails with an eighth of his brain, he isn’t quite sure what they will do next; Mikey has a strange way of contorting time so that it feels urgent and endless simultaneously. If this is what one evening is like, what the hell is going to happen seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year? What did he do at that age, all day every day, between one death and the next? He was packed off to some obscure relations in Salcombe, dispatched to cricket camp – generally the solutions seemed to have involved being sent somewhere some distance away – but when he was at Wynhope, he hung around on his own, painting his model army and setting up battles between the Orgs and the Undead (and whose side is he on now?), fishing, of course, and mucking around down at the river. And he waited for his father to come home from the hospital. And he counted the days for school to start again and when he got there, he counted the days until he could come home again.

  Diana was meant to be arranging that while he was away.

  ‘Didn’t you go to visit the school?’ he asks Mikey.

  Shake of the head. Apparent intense concentration on Lego.

  ‘Why not?’

  Shrug.

  ‘What did you do while I was away?’

  Second shrug. Lego back in box. Grabs the remote. Television on. Inappropriate programme. Taking a leaf out of John’s book, Edmund takes control and turns the television off.

  ‘No, don’t argue. Listen to me. I’ve no idea what went on here, but I wish you could tell me. It might help. But if you won’t tell me, you’ll have to tell the police. They’re coming round. Will you talk to them or at least write something down? Shall I find your whiteboard?’

  ‘No,’ says Michael.

  It is a start.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  It was bad enough knowing they were going to try to talk to Mikey, but Edmund had not anticipated them wanting to interrogate the computer. Just when the pressure is off on the pool and the planning permission, now this. Watching the police car head off down the drive, he wonders if they are going to ‘take things further’ as they hinted. He is not surprised they are concerned. So is he.

  The state of things in the house when he got back from his fishing trip was disturbing enough, but nothing compared to the state of the search history on his computer. It was a strange and perverted list; when Edmund read it he was glad he had been in Mongolia because it was the sort of browsing which could get you into trouble.

  Someone had visited a range of sites – online newspaper reports, Wikipedia, YouTube and strange image searches – and what they had in common was that they were all about prisoners: solitary confinement, Stockholm syndrome, confession, torture, how long it took to starve to death.

  Someone.

  Your wife or the child, sir? The thought that it was either of them was ridiculous. Kids nowadays might get ideas from violent games but how would Mikey have even understood half of it, and as for Diana, why would she have looked at sites like that?

  ‘Besides, she never made spelling mistakes,’ he added. ‘She was’ – he caught himself – ‘is a very precise woman.’

  Maybe Diana wasn’t well, D.I. Penn suggested; he remembered her from his first visit, concerning the death of her sister. It’s as though they can both hear Diana standing in the doorway to the study, correcting him.

  Edmund speaks for her. ‘Half-sister,’ he says.

  ‘Narrative verdict, wasn’t it? Well, it’s what I say to my colleagues in the force: we can close a case if we want to, but it’s never the end of the story for the family after a trauma like that.’

  And D.I. Penn didn’t even know the half of it: her temper, how manic she could be
, her increasing obsession with keys, the terrible rows they had when all sense deserted her. How she’d turned him into the sort of man who shouted at women. But he also felt some sense of loyalty to Diana.

  ‘I wouldn’t say she was mentally ill.’ Not out loud, anyway. Not to you.

  People jump from windows usually for one of three reasons, according to the police: they are attempting to commit suicide, they are attempting to escape from someone or something, a fire for instance, or they are suffering from hallucinations, often drug-induced.

  ‘For Diana, drink, yes. Drugs, no, never.’

  ‘So we come back to the question of whether there can have been anyone else.’

  ‘If anything, Diana seemed to be keeping people away from Wynhope, not inviting them in. Even the cleaners were cancelled apparently. You’ve seen the phone.’

  That was when D.I. Penn consulted his notebook and referred to an incident with one Solomon Namutebi. He was at Wynhope some days before the incident apparently, and there was an allegation of harassment, an arrest.

  ‘Solomon? Valerie’s boyfriend?’

  ‘Fiancé, I believe.’

  For reasons which were all too obvious now, Diana didn’t follow up the complaint. She wasn’t in when the officer called to get a more detailed statement and she failed to contact them afterwards. They hadn’t been able to hold Mr Namutebi any longer so he appeared before the magistrates and got three months, suspended for a year. More important, they imposed conditions of no further contact with Michael and that he could not come within ten miles of Wynhope. That included direct or indirect contact, online, social media, pigeons, the lot.

  ‘Have you ever met this man?’

  ‘No. I mean I heard about him from the social worker and I think Valerie must have spoken about him to Diana, but beyond that, I don’t know anything about him.’