Killing a Stranger (8 page)

Naomi heard Patrick shift, his feet scuffing the floor as he reacted in surprise to his dad's question.

‘Bad dreams. You mean about the siege?' she asked.

‘The siege, and other things.'

Helen. He meant Helen, Naomi thought. She nodded slowly. ‘Yeah, sometimes. I find it harder to sleep. The smallest thing wakes me.' She laughed. ‘Not that Alec notices; he sleeps like the dead.' She regretted the simile even as it escaped. She heard Patrick stand up.

‘We ready then?'

‘Your dad hasn't finished his coffee,' Naomi said gently.

Patrick sat back down.

‘What makes you ask?' It wasn't a Harry sort of question.

‘I don't know. I suppose, because
I
still do. I suppose I wanted to know if that was normal.'

‘I think it probably is.' She paused. ‘Sometimes, I wake up and I'm back there, locked in, waiting … just waiting. I have to put the light on, check the time, make sure I'm back in my own bed in my own room.'

‘You put the light on?' Harry was intrigued.

‘Old habits, I guess. It's still the first thing I do when I come home. I can, just, tell the difference, if I stare straight at it.'

‘I dreamt about Rob last night,' Patrick said and Naomi understood what this was all about.

‘You often dream about Rob,' Harry said gently.

Patrick sounded shocked. ‘How do you know?'

‘Sometimes, you call out his name.'

Naomi could feel Patrick's shock at this exposure. She wondered what she should say.

‘Look, I think I'd like to go home now,' Patrick got in first. ‘See you on Monday, Naomi. If that's OK?'

‘Of course.' She heard him get up again and cross the room to the corner where he'd dumped his bag and coat.

Harry got up to follow his son. He bent down to kiss Naomi on the cheek.

‘Go slowly,' she breathed. ‘Don't push it, Harry.'

She felt him nod, then the footsteps across the room, the door close, the front door slam.

Did she still dream? Oh yes. Panicked dreams where she searched in vain for her friend Helen. Dreams in which she was a child again, lost and confused and very, very scared. Sometimes the dream child would wander into the armed siege. The child in Naomi crying with fear as the shots rang out and the men's voices were raised in threat and anger, and the worse thing was, she didn't even need to be sleeping for the dreams to come.

‘You want to talk about it?' Harry asked. He reached to switch on the radio. Experience had told him that distraction, such as listening to music, could make it easier for his son to relax.

‘Not really, thanks anyway.' Patrick was trying hard to sound mature and off hand.

‘OK, then,' Harry told him. Experience had also told him, and Naomi reminded him, that pushing too hard was likely to have the opposite to the desired effect. ‘Well, I'm here. Naomi's always ready to listen too, you know that. And there's your counsellor.'

‘Her,' Patrick snorted. ‘Dad, I don't know why you keep paying for her. All she does is sits me down and waits for me to “open up” to her. Like that's going to happen.'

‘She seems pleased with your progress,' Harry said mildly.

‘Oh, sure she is. She's pleased with the money you keep paying her, whether she does any good or not.'

‘Or whether you turn up or not?'

‘Whether I …' Patrick sighed and reached to change the channel on the radio.

To Harry's surprise, he settled on a station playing jazz. Harry listened, trying to place the piece. ‘What is that?' the question was self-addressed, but his son answered.

‘It's Miles Davis,' he said. ‘“Angel Eyes”. It's on that compilation Nan bought you for your birthday.'

‘Oh yes, so it is. I didn't know you liked it.' He turned to glance at his son.

Patrick shrugged. He was staring hard out of the side window. Harry could see his reflection in the shadowed glass. The face, tight and pinched. Emotion dangerously close to the surface. ‘I like all sorts of stuff, you know that.'

‘Well, yes. I suppose you do.'

They listened in a silence that was almost companionable, then when the last notes of ‘Angel Eyes' tailed away Patrick asked, ‘Do you think you could kill someone?'

Harry flinched at the question. Asked for a description of Harry, most people would use words like ‘mild mannered' or ‘even tempered', but … ‘Yes,' he said. ‘I believe I could. If someone threatened those I love, I believe I could take their life, or maim or injure and not even hesitate.'

He half felt, half heard his son release the breath he had been holding and wondered at the cost of asking that question. It saddened him. He and Patrick had once been able to discuss anything, trade ideas and bad jokes, be peaceful and happy in one another's company. Oh, Harry knew how to behave when Patrick was around his college friends. Then, if you were a sensible parent, you took a back seat and kept yourself just a little bit apart. He remembered his own embarrassments at the hand of his beloved mother, Mari, when he'd been Patrick's age. He didn't think he'd done too badly in comparison.

‘I know I could,' he corrected himself. ‘Patrick, if I'd had a weapon during that siege … I know I would have used it. Believe me; I'm not comfortable with that little piece of self knowledge.'

Patrick nodded. He was, Harry noted, now staring fixedly out of the front windscreen. They turned into their road and pulled on to the drive, though, by some tacit consent, made no move to get out of the car.

‘I know I could have then,' Patrick said quietly. ‘And that kind of scared me, you know?' He turned to look at his father, eyes fixed and intense, searching for confirmation, understanding.

Harry nodded. ‘As I said, I'm not comfortable with that either, but Patrick, I think of all those ordinary men and women who have had that decision, that … acknowledgement thrust upon them. In war or in danger or … whatever. It's kind of comforting, knowing that they must have found it just as hard. Just as revelatory and just as distasteful and uncomfortable. I can't believe many people kill easily. I can't believe many actually become immured to it. Maybe even get to enjoy it.'

‘You've thought about it a lot, then.'

Harry nodded. ‘I don't think there's a day gone by I haven't considered it. I've not tried to convince myself that I'm different.'

‘Different?'

‘From the man who murdered Helen. From the men who held us hostage.' Harry shrugged. ‘Just
different from
…'

‘Rob was
different from
,' Patrick said slowly. ‘Dad, I've thought about it so much and I'm certain now. Rob would never just go and kill someone he didn't know. Not even as an accident, he, just wouldn't.'

‘Accidents, by their very nature, aren't preventable or predictable,' Harry said cautiously, not really understanding where Patrick was going with this.

‘No, I know that,' Patrick's voice carried an edge of impatience and Harry, wisely, made no comment that might put him off further from getting his thoughts out. ‘I've thought about it a lot and I think … I know … that's what Rob must have been doing. Protecting someone else. Someone he cared about.'

Harry frowned. His first instinct was to tell Patrick he was clutching at straws; trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. He bit down on the impulse to voice this, knowing it was a sure fire way to stop Patrick in his tracks.

‘Who?' he asked. ‘You don't think Becky might have followed him? Been there …'

Patrick was shaking his head vehemently. ‘No, not Becks,' he said. ‘She wasn't there. No, someone else, someone … we don't know about and the police don't know about.'

Harry considered. ‘Alec would have said if there was evidence of a third person.'

Patrick shook his head. ‘No one was looking, were they?' he asked bleakly. ‘They've got a dead body and someone to blame for it. Not even Alec cares about anything more than that.'

I
t seemed to Jennifer that the whole world had Christmas on the brain. She hadn't attended college much in the past month; morning sickness that lasted all day and fear of the looks, the sly nudges now she was starting to show, had contrived to keep her at home. In the end, her mum had given up trying to make her go. Her form tutor had kept in touch, though and was still sending her work in the hope she'd change her mind and there had been talk, for the New Year, of placing her in a specialist unit set up for girls in her position.

‘In her position', Jennifer thought. Seventeen, pregnant, disapproved of. The more so since her utter refusal to name the dad. Her own father had gone all macho on her and stormed round to the home of every boy he even suspected of looking the wrong way at her – behavior that had not exactly helped on the college front. But he had drawn a blank as she had known he would.

After that, his fury had seemed to dissipate, transmuting, instead, into a grudgingly uncomfortable silence. He seemed, now, Jennifer thought, to be going out of his way to ignore her expanding belly, while her mother, ever the practical one, had been looking round for the best deals on baby paraphernalia. The spare room, destined to become the nursery, was already stacked with packs of nappies.

Jennifer, hearing a car door slam, glanced out of the window, surprised she had not heard the engine. She saw her aunt get out of the car and her parents' 4 × 4 pull round it and on to their drive.

Jennifer sighed. She'd been spared the funeral, but the wake was going to be as bad, if not worse; relatives and friends no doubt dividing themselves into the two parental camps: ignore the fact that she was pregnant or offering unwelcome advice.

Truthfully, Jennifer was unsure which was worse.

The front door opened and her mother called up to her. Reluctantly, Jennifer left the sanctuary of her room. She paused on the landing, sitting for a moment on the top step to gaze down into the hall, remembering the many times she'd done that as a child, sent to bed while the family party still went on downstairs, sharing in the noise and laughter of the adults, though at one remove. As she'd got older and bedtimes been delayed, she had been allowed to share in the grown-up gossip and discovered that, in fact, it often got quite boring. Parents and relatives getting slowly more inebriated – though never to the point of disgrace; her mother would never have countenanced that – and talk turning to politics or sport or long-dead strangers that Jennifer had never known. She had, almost, longed to be back on the stairs, catching the snatches of conversation and Uncle Adam's shouts of raucous laughter. The little treats he'd sneak out to her, while her mother pretended not to notice.

Once, when she'd been about ten, and he more sauced than usual, he had brought her a glass of cherry brandy. Liking the taste, she'd drunk it like pop and asked him for more. She tried to recall if he'd obliged, but couldn't. She bit her lip and fought down the urge to cry.

Here, at the head of the stairs, she was almost on a level with the tinsel star set atop the tall tree. December the twenty-first, time to begin the celebrations and the tree had been set up as usual, delivered by the friend of her dad's who owned the Christmas-tree farm, and set carefully in its pot guided by her father's instructions. Even her uncle's death was not allowed to interfere with such a family tradition.

She and her mother had trimmed it last night ready for the arrival of today's guests, almost as if this were just another family celebration, the usual coming together of the generations. It was possible to forget … no, not quite, seeing her mother dressed in formal black and her father in the suit that came out only on such solemn occasions and Aunt Carol's inappropriately bright red hair covered with a sober blue scarf. No, not really possible to forget that this was not some pre-Christmas ritual, but was instead the wake for a murdered man.

‘How was the funeral?' Naomi asked.

‘It was a funeral.' Alec pulled her close and planted a kiss on her nose.

‘Yeuk. Now a proper one.' She wiped her face on his shirt. ‘Anything useful happen?'

‘Well,' he released her and bent down to fuss Napoleon. ‘I don't know that there was a lot useful left to expect. The family were glad to finally be able to bury their dead and, I think, were mollified by the fact we had sent representatives, but disappointed we were no further on.'

‘You still don't know why Rob killed him,' Naomi said.

‘No, and frankly, I think that's the way it's going to stay. Case solved, move on.'

‘But it isn't solved.'

‘We're not looking for anyone else. The investigating team's been broken up and reassigned. It's about as solved as it's going to get.' He sighed, flopped down on the blue sofa and dragged Naomi beside him. ‘You know the score; it's all a matter of allocating resources.'

‘It isn't right,' Naomi objected.

‘Right doesn't even come into it. How's Patrick? Did he turn up this evening?'

‘No, actually he's gone to the pictures with Charlie and Becky, some others too, I think. Term ended at lunchtime.'

‘Ah, right, I was forgetting that.'

‘And what have you been doing with your day?'

Naomi stretched and wriggled into a more comfortable position, plonking her legs down across his lap. ‘Foot massage, please. I met Mari and my sister, in Pinsent, no less, and we finished off the Christmas shopping.'

‘Pinsent?'

‘Yep and I caught the bus.'

‘I'm impressed.'

‘So you should be. We're talking about going to London for the sales. What do you think?'

‘I think I should hide your credit cards.'

‘Bit late for that.' She wriggled her toes. Strong fingers dug into the soles of her feet, applying just enough pressure to be almost painful but immensely relieving. ‘Um, feels good. What are they like? Adam Hensel's family. Unusual name.'