A Line of Blood (34 page)

There was nothing in the outhouse, as far as I could tell, and nothing in any of the drawers in the front room. I found nothing in Millicent’s office. I opened books, riffled through stacks, even opened the paper drawer of her printer. Nothing. What was I expecting to find that the police hadn’t found? I didn’t know.

I stared at the sofa bed, made up for Arla, and wondered for a moment whether Millicent might have slipped something in there; it seemed unlikely. A lustful, greed-driven voice deep within me whispered that I should search Arla’s bed, run my hands across her possessions, delve into her bags the better to know her, but I silenced the voice. Arla was a mistake. Arla must not happen again.

A low chirrup. The cat was on the banister outside Max’s room, looking up at me, eyes full of adoration. I hesitated at the door, wondered for a moment whether Millicent might have hidden something there. But to use her son to shield herself? Whatever she had done, I could not see Millicent deliberately betraying Max. And Max was organised enough himself that he would notice the slightest object out of place. We had long since stopped tidying his room for him.

The cat tapped gently at my elbow with her paw. I held out my hand to her, and she rubbed one cheek against me, then the other. She did not follow me downstairs, but sat chirruping on the banister, watching me go.

It occurred to me that Millicent might have buried something in the garden, but I could not think what. I looked around, wondering if I could spot newly dug earth – surely it would be darker? – but nothing seemed out of place. Our lawn, what there was of it, was yellowed and scorched from the remorseless London summer. The garden was uniformly unkempt. I looked under a few bushes, but felt foolish, and decided that Millicent would have felt foolish too. And besides, who knew who was watching?

For the third time in recent days I trailed the stepladder after me up the stairs.

The loft was dark as the grave, the heat oppressive.

An impression of shadows as I flicked the switch; something out of place; then nothing. The lightbulb had glowed orange for some small fraction of a second. Then it had failed. I retained the shapes, the moment stretching out through my brain. Persistence of vision. Something had changed. Something was out of place.

I stood in the dark for a moment. I was certain that Max had at least one torch, but I didn’t want to give myself away by taking something from his room. I would be sure to replace it wrongly. I went downstairs and found my phone.

The flashlight on the telephone was useless up here, really, if you didn’t know what you were looking for. But something was definitely out of place. I had seen it at once, in that first orange flash, some change in the silhouette of one of the piles. It was small, but I was sure of it. An edge that seemed to have hardened and shifted.

She had moved a box. There, on the right, near the bottom of a formless pile near the hatch. It was close enough to the ladder that she could reach it without stepping into the loft. I tracked the light beam across the floor, saw only my own footprints. She must have assumed that I wouldn’t look up here, or that if I did, I would find nothing. If she stood on the ladder, she could come and go without leaving a trace.

I shone the light around the edges of the box. A ream of budget paper. The box was made of stiff cardboard, bright blue and white.
VALUE PACK
. I ran the light around the top edge of it. There were boxes above it, but they didn’t fully cover it. I put the torch in my left hand and I reached out with my right. I hooked my fingers around the furthest edge of the box, and nudged it gently. It moved easily. It did not seem to be carrying the weight of the boxes above it. I shone the torch in front of the box, and saw from the path in the dust that it had recently been moved.

I drew the box towards me; the boxes above it teetered, like a child’s tower. Perhaps it was part of this pile. Perhaps it had always been a part of this pile. But my hands were shaking, and I guessed that I had knocked it slightly against the boxes above as I pulled against it.

I stood at the top of the ladder, swaying slightly, holding the box in two hands, my phone clamped in my left; I hoped the tower of boxes in front of me would not fall. I didn’t want Max to find me surrounded by debris on the landing below; I didn’t want to have to explain myself.

After ten seconds I decided that the boxes would not fall. With my left hand I slid my phone up the side of the box I was holding and on to the top of it. Something inside clinked. Glass?

I climbed carefully down, put the box on the bed in our room. Then I went back up the ladder and carefully fetched the envelope from on top of the beam. I closed the hatch on the way down, and carried the ladder out to the back garden.

I burned Caroline’s letter and the non-molestation order in the grate in the living room. I went back upstairs. I was no longer the one with something to hide.

Baubles. Hand-blown baubles that my mother had given Millicent shortly after we had married. Edwardian glass for our little Edwardian house. They had belonged to her own mother. I had been sceptical, but Millicent had treasured them, had seen in them a transmission of something important, a contract between my mother and her. We had never hung them on a tree – people like us don’t decorate like that at Christmas – and I had never given them a thought, never wondered what had happened to them. They were carefully arranged in even rows, with little balls of red tissue paper separating them from each other. I lifted each one carefully out on to the duvet of our bed. It was the imperfections that made them beautiful; they refracted tiny rainbows across the room, splitting the sunlight. If you held them to your eye, you could see tiny bubbles, minute variations in the thickness of the walls. They were far too exquisite for people like us.

Fifteen of them, then a layer of red tissue paper, then another fifteen. I lifted out the second row of tissue paper. There, underneath, was what Millicent had hidden from me.

I shook the box out on to the bed. Envelopes: some were curled, their hard edges frayed, their creams and whites softened and greyed by the years; the addresses seemed to dissolve a little where the old ink had edged imperceptibly outwards from the crisp clean strokes of the fountain pen. Others were stiff, bowed outwards by the paper inside, full of the promise of news and love.

We had that in common, then. We had each kept a stack of letters from our past.

Except. I looked at the names and addresses.

Paul Weitzman

Vera Weitzman

Arla Weitzman

Thaddeus Ackerman

All in Millicent’s beautiful, flowing copperplate. Letters to the people she loved. I wondered for a moment why they had given the letters back to her, before realising that I wasn’t thinking clearly. The letters were stamped, but not one of them had been sent. I turned over a few of the envelopes. They were sealed.

Sarah Mercer

She had written to our unborn child. This envelope did not carry an address. Write a letter, they tell you. OK, you say, I will
try
to write what I think. No, not what you think, what you
feel,
they tell you. What would you say if you could speak without consequence?

I turned the letter over, wondering when Millicent had written it, wondering what she had said to our little daughter, to little Sarah who never was. I wondered if opening the envelope would teach me anything I didn’t know, whether to know what she had written – believing that it would never be read – would bring me closer to my wife. Or would it just leave me empty and full of regret, knowing once and for all that Sarah’s death had opened up a gulf that could not be bridged? Two parents, divided from each other by grief.

Bryce

Two letters to Bryce. I turned them over. These were different from the others. They had been torn open, and doubtless read by Bryce. Funny that he hadn’t used a letter knife. I put them on the pillow on Millicent’s side of the bed, then began slowly to repack the box.

Rosie

I hadn’t noticed the card at first. It had been trapped in a corner seam, and hadn’t fallen out when I had shaken the box. The envelope was stiff, smaller and lighter than the others. It looked new: the ink on the front was crisp and dark. I turned the card over. It had not been opened. I put it with the letters to Bryce and repacked the box. I took great care with the placement of the baubles; I didn’t want them to break, and my hands were shaking.

I thought about fetching the ladder and replacing the box at the bottom of the pile, but Max would be home soon. Instead I put the box at the back of my wardrobe. I could worry about what to do with it later. Then I put the three envelopes into the inner pocket of my rucksack, and began to pack for Edinburgh.

Max accepted without question that the police were extending Millicent’s custody, that she would not make it to the funeral. I didn’t tell him that I had pressed charges. He didn’t need to know.

The staff on the sleeper had unlocked the door between the two tiny compartments for us. ‘Do I get my own room, Dad?’ said Max.

‘Yes, if you want it.’

‘Cool.’ He pushed open the door between the compartments till it clicked into place, then threw himself down on the lower bunk. I sat on the lower bunk in my own compartment.

‘Can I choose which one I want to sleep in?’

‘Of course, Max.’

He stood up and pulled the aluminium ladder away from the wall. For a moment he disappeared out of sight, and then he was sitting there on the top bunk, smiling down at me.

‘If Mum was here, would she have had one room for herself, so you and I had the other one?’

‘I don’t know, Max. Maybe.’

‘Do you hate her?’

‘No, Max. This is just a very difficult time for your mother and me right now.’

‘And for me.’ An abject, dejected look clouded his features, then was gone. ‘It’s like, now it’s you and me against Mum.’

‘I’m sorry, Max. I do know it’s very hard for you. But I want you to try not to take sides.’

‘OK,’ said Max. ‘But did you tell the police what was in my book? Is that why they arrested her?’

‘No, Max, and the police don’t arrest people for having sex.’

‘I know that really. They probably should, though.’ He laughed a sad little laugh, then brightened a little. ‘Did you think my pictures were funny, Dad?’

The train lurched; metal ground against metal. Old rolling stock. I looked around the cabin. First class, they called this. Dirt in the windows, and fading purple decor. Still, the bed linen was clean, and Max seemed pleased to have his own cabin. He was standing on the ladder now, looking around.

‘Max,’ I said, ‘why did you make those pictures?’

‘I don’t know. Like, I thought it would be better if he wasn’t really doing Mum when he said those things. Because I didn’t want him to do her. It was horrible, Dad. So I thought what it would be like if he wasn’t doing her when he said those things.’

‘I can see that makes sense. But don’t say doing her.’
Not about your mother, at least.

‘OK,’ said Max. He jumped to the floor of his compartment and disappeared from view again.

‘Is it better if I say boning?’

‘Max, what are you doing?’

‘Opening the blind.’ He reappeared in the door opening. ‘Do you want me to open your blind, Dad?’

‘No thanks, Max.’

‘Dad, please? Can I?’

‘All right,’ I said. He carefully drew the bottom of the blind down, then guided it upwards. Warehouses and pumping stations, canals and brown-field sites, high-rise blocks and low-slung housing schemes.

‘Will we see our house?’ said Max.

‘I don’t think so.’

We sat on the bunk, looking out of the window. After a while we hit the suburbs. Order and planning, red brick and green space, two cars on every drive.

Max got up and went back into his compartment. Something creaked, then clicked into position. I could hear Max brushing his teeth. ‘You found the sink, then?’ I called.

‘Yeah, and the toothbrush. And the soap. Dad, do I have to wash my face?’

‘You can choose, Max.’

‘Do I have to wear pyjamas? Or can I wear my pants?’

‘Pants is fine, Max.’

His skinny angularity on the ladder. Red pants. Narrow shoulders. He pulled the sheets aside and got carefully into bed. Then he found the light switch and the night light came on in his compartment. I got up to kiss him good night.

‘Good night, my beautiful boy.’

‘Do I have to go straight to sleep? I mean, I might not be able to.’

He was excited. This funeral trip was an adventure to him.

I held him to me. ‘Just lie quietly,’ I said. ‘Enjoy the journey.’

I turned off my own light, lay back on my bunk.

‘Dad,’ said Max after a while, ‘Dad, did you like my pictures?’

‘Just rest, Max.’

‘No, but did you?’ He turned round in his bunk, put his head over the side, stared down at me through the narrow doorway. ‘Did you like the last one?’

‘The one in the bedroom? I mean, it was well-drawn, and everything, Max, and you know I really like the way you draw, but it’s hard for me to say that I
like
any of those pictures. It was upsetting for me to know what you’d heard, you know?’

‘But Dad, that’s not the last picture. You stopped before you got to the end.’ He sighed heavily, then said, ‘Can you give me my bag please, Dad?’

‘I don’t think I need to see any more pictures, Max.’ I didn’t want to go back into that world. ‘And it’s night time.’

‘Please, Dad. I won’t be able to sleep if you don’t. Please?’

‘OK,’ I said, exasperated. ‘All right.’

I stood up, handed him his rucksack through the door, leaned back against the top bunk in my own compartment. Max turned on his reading light, then he unzipped the top pocket of the rucksack and took out his book. He flicked through until it was open at the double page of Bryce, hanged, in the bedroom. ‘There,’ he said, and handed it back through the door to me. Then he carefully lowered his rucksack as far as he could and let it drop to the floor.