Killing a Stranger (19 page)

Ernst felt shaken to the core.

Patrick had returned to the files from Rob's computer but, frankly, he was bored. Nothing exceptional had yet appeared and nothing terribly interesting either. Patrick could remember doing a lot of these essays himself and the fact that Rob had completed the tasks at greater length and with more accomplished spelling really didn't add to their attractiveness.

Tenacious though, he continued to work methodically through the files. Slowly, he began to realize that not all was as it seemed. Rob, as Charlie had commented earlier, certainly was in need of a good clear out. The GCSE syllabus had been roughly the same when he had taken it as when Patrick had the following year. From Patrick's point of view, one of the saving graces of the exam board the college used was that it allowed a percentage of the marks to be derived from coursework. A folder of work was marked alongside the formal exam and it was this that had enabled Patrick to just scrape a bare pass. His folder, written and rewritten under Naomi's guidance, had been better than he either expected or deserved. He'd actually been quite proud of it and, clearing his own computer ready for the new academic year, it had been one of the few things he had chosen to keep.

Rob's folder, of course, was there alongside all the other detritus and Patrick, who had struggled to make the minimum word count with his own compositions, was surprised at how much Rob had crammed inside. Then he looked more closely, examining the titles of the individual compositions, and he knew he was on to something.

True, the syllabus and demands for the work in the folder changed a little year on year, but the basic framework remained the same: the Shakespeare essay, the one comparing poets, the free composition about a place you'd visited … Patrick was familiar with these and the random assortment of other work he'd polished up as makeweights. Rob, even allowing for the fact that he found this easy and generally wrote more than Patrick ever could, nevertheless had articles in his folder that had no logical right to be there.

Patrick began to open the unfamiliar ones. One began:

A girl called Jennifer lived until she was seventeen never knowing that she had a brother. They had been separated soon after birth, just like the characters in the fairy tales, and brought up in different parts of the tiny kingdom. Jennifer was rich while her brother was poor and the woman who raised him as her son worked all hours to scrape a living. And all the time they were growing up, although they didn't know about each other, each one had the strangest feeling that there was something missing. It was like knowing you should have an extra hand, even though everyone else told you how stupid that would be when you mentioned anything about it.

Patrick stared, understanding what Rob had been about in writing this. What Rob did with words Patrick did with his drawings: he tried hard to make some kind of sense of the world; to beat it into submission with paint or pen and make it manageable. Solvable.

Patrick checked the date this had been written, closing the file and holding his mouse over it. July. Rob had added this to the folder in July.

I
t had been agreed that Jennifer should go home. The atmosphere in the house that morning when Ernst had visited his daughter was such that a rime of frost covered the dust free furniture. But she was calming down. Ernst had told her the full story as he knew it, of Rob and Clara and the circumstances of Jennifer's meeting.

He left, feeling that she was likely to be quicker forgiving Jennifer than him. Jennifer, she could classify as young and stupid – and with plentiful evidence, in Beth's eyes, to support that belief – and she would be more likely to blame herself for her daughter's mistakes than Jennifer herself. Ernst had no illusions that this was a healthy state of affairs, but he figured it was inevitable and therefore neither worth his time nor effort to fight.

Ernst himself, she would treat with icy disdain far beyond the spring thaw. He calculated it might well be midsummer before the chill lessened and in his heart, he couldn't blame her. It weighed heavy on him that he might be the bearer of still more bad news, that the winter of the soul could only deepen should he reveal what he had found on Adam's computer.

He had been up all night thinking but the dawn had brought no clarity and his conversation with Beth only deepened his indecision. For all their differences, Beth had adored her elder brother and he was loath to deliver more pain to her door. He thought about confronting his granddaughter with the evidence and demanding an explanation, but held back. Ernst himself was still considering what all this meant. He was unready for the exposure; unprepared for the implications, though he knew that he could not altogether hide his anxiety from Jennifer and that she would probably misconstrue the distance that had seemed to have appeared, chasm like, since the night before.

The photographs could, he thought, have some logical and innocent explanation but he was hard pressed to think of one and he had still not quite put into words what the most likely reason for Adam having such pictures might be. His thoughts had played around the periphery of this all night, reaching out, half grasping the nettle, then pulling back.

He piled Jennifer's bags into the boot of the car, convinced she had more now than she had arrived with. The bulk, he thought, was most likely made up of glossy magazines. He'd had no concept that so many existed aimed at young women. Lisle had occasionally bought one or other of the weeklies, liking the stories and the recipes, but a swift glance through these revealed neither: sex, fashion, music and more sex, oh and a great wedge of problem pages. Was this the intellectual fodder upon which girls Jennifer's age habitually grazed?

Yesterday he would have been amused; yesterday he
had
been amused. Today, he regarded the glossy, garish publications with a more jaundiced eye. Today a world that had slowly been regaining the colours lost the day that his son died, had reverted to monotone, and even the chill, watery sun failed to lift his mood.

‘Jennifer,' he began.
Jennifer, was your uncle Adam …
‘Jennifer, the father of your baby. Was he … is he someone we might know. The family might know?'

She looked puzzled and shrugged her shoulders. He knew she was nervous about returning home. Nervous and trying hard to be offhand. Her answer reflected that mood. ‘What's the matter, Granddad? You afraid of what the neighbours might think?'

He could see from her face, from the way she looked away and swallowed hard that she regretted her words as soon as they were out. They were unfair and unreasonable. Another time he might have chided her, gently told her how hurtful that was and elicited an apology and a smile. A hug and a plea for forgiveness. But he didn't seem to have the patience for that today. He could tell that Jennifer was hurting more even than he was, that her barbed words pierced her more deeply, but he needed the harshness to keep the questions and the fears at bay.

When he finally dropped her at her mother's house, the ten-minute journey seeming to take three times as long, she took her bags and stalked into the house, not even pausing to say goodbye.

A
t first Clara didn't recognize the rather portly man who knocked on her door, then when he spoke, it dawned on her.

‘Hell, Clara,' he said. ‘I had to come and see you.'

‘James? Jamie Scott?' She couldn't believe it. Where was the skinny, dark haired teenager she had known? This man, thinning on top and dressed in belted jeans that he had chosen should go under his belly because, presumably, they wouldn't fit over the top, was not the James she remembered.

To be fair, the years had passed for her too, but, as she closed the door and caught a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror, her years had been a darn sight kinder.

‘Why are you here? For that matter, how did you find me?'

‘I went and asked your mother. She's still at the old place. She gave me your address. I would have called first, but I thought, you know, make it more of a surprise.'

More of a shock, Clara thought, than a surprise.

‘And you wanted to see me, why?'

He was taken aback. ‘Well, I thought that was obvious.'

‘Not to me. No.' She sighed. OK, let the man say his piece, then she'd at least have the satisfaction of knowing she'd been fair. Though what he had to say to her after all this time she couldn't comprehend.

‘OK,' she said reluctantly. ‘I'll make you a coffee, you can say your piece and then you can go.'

‘Don't be like that, Clara. Don't I deserve more than that after all we shared?'

‘Whatever little we shared was almost two decades ago.'

He looked crestfallen. ‘Well, I suppose I expected more of a welcome,' he admitted. ‘But, all right,'

He flapped flabby arms against his sides reminding her of a penguin. No, he was too fat to be a penguin.
They
were streamlined. He was more like one of those big seals.

‘Coffee it is then and a nice chat. Between friends.'

She showed him through to the living room and told him to sit down, then went through to the kitchen and used the time it took to boil the kettle to gather her thoughts. She'd already decided he only deserved instant coffee and, after a further moment, she searched in the cupboard for the cheap supermarket stuff she kept for making cakes. What right had this flabby man to come here, to go and see her mother, to expect …? What exactly did he expect?

She carried the coffee through and handed him the sugar bowl.

‘Oh, no thank you. I'm trying to lose some of this.' He patted the stomach which now hid the belt of his jeans altogether. ‘I've been under a lot of strain,' he explained. ‘So I've eaten a bit too much lately, I suppose. Still, it'll soon go.'

Did he have some miracle diet up his sleeve? Clara wondered. Or was he planning to deflate? She didn't want to be around if he planned on the second option. Clara, she chided herself. Since when have you been fattist? Clara's sister was a plump woman and it would never have occurred to Clara to have such thoughts as these about her.

He sipped his coffee and, much to Clara's annoyance, seemed to be enjoying it.

He smiled. ‘I can't tell you how good it is to see you again and you look so well, especially, considering … You never married then? Your mother was telling me.'

‘Seeing as I rarely speak to my mother I'm surprised she knows one way or another,' Clara said. ‘I never married because my early experience of men taught me they weren't worth the bother.'

She was irritated that he merely clucked his tongue and refused to take offence. ‘Women can be just as disappointing, Clara,' he said sententiously. ‘I married and look at me.'

You blame your wife for what? Looking like a seal or being a slime ball? Clara, for god's sake you don't know anything about the man. He's as good as a stranger to you. She wondered if she should say something sympathetic, but there was no need for her to bother. Her sympathy was anticipated and assumed and for the next ten minutes Clara sipped her coffee and listened to Jamie Scott wallow. His marriage had been a disaster, his children likewise. He had a lousy job, but other opportunities never seemed to arise. He hated his life and should have stayed with her.

‘I would have stood by you, given half the chance,' he assured her.

‘Your mother phoned up and told me I was a whore.' So did mine, but that doesn't count.

‘I never knew that.'

‘I passed you in the street one day and you shouted “scrubber” at me and a few more choice expletives as I remember.'

‘I was with my friends, you know how it is. Anyway, I was mad as hell because you'd gone with that Aiden bloke. Can you blame me?'

‘Yes, actually. I had sex with Aiden out of spite, because you'd been snogging Maureen Hargreaves. Rumour has it you'd done more than that. Who did you marry in the end anyway?'

‘Oh, well, I married Maureen but, like I said, it isn't working out. You and me, though …'

‘Didn't work out either.' She took a deep breath. The emotional turmoil evoked on seeing this man amazed her. She'd been convinced that she'd put all this aside long ago. Moved on. Now it bubbled from some deep dark pit marked unresolved anger and she couldn't seem to swallow it back down.

Was it really all his fault? Hadn't she been just as foolish? ‘Look,' she said in a more conciliatory tone, ‘I appreciate the gesture in you coming here, but I really do think you should go. It's been too long and I don't think anything can be gained from raking over old coals, do you?'

His look was pitying. ‘I just can't help but think,' he said, ‘that if we'd still been together things might have been different. Robert might not have gone off the rails if he'd had a father, a man around.'

‘A man around?' She blinked, not quite believing what she heard. ‘Off the rails. Look,' she shook her head. ‘You didn't know Rob and you don't know me. Maybe you should go back to your wife and kids. Be the man for them, huh?'

She stood up, signalling more emphatically that it was time to go, but he sipped his coffee and refused to move. ‘Leave,' she said. ‘Go now.'

He set the mug down and looked at her with pity in his eyes. It was, she realized with shock, genuine emotion. He had convinced himself of the rightness of what he was saying. Clara couldn't get her head around it, but his next words tipped her over the edge of reason.

‘I can understand your grief and how much you resent my not being there for you,' he told her. ‘But you should have some sympathy for me as well. After all, Clara. I've lost a son too.'

The next moment he was dripping coffee and yelling about assault. The broken mug lay on the rug.

‘Get out,' Clara said. ‘Get the hell out of my house.'