Road Kill (26 page)

I spent a moment in puzzled silence. When had Jamie had the chance to speak to Clare alone? Then I recalled my shock at Sean’s arrival. We’d only left the two of them together for a few minutes, but long enough.

“Why’s Jamie so desperate to keep Slick’s death low-key?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “maybe it has something to do with the fact that Slick’s not the first.”

For a moment my brain put all sorts of connotations on that last sentence. I took an ill-advised gulp of my coffee, burning my tongue.

“The first what?” I managed.

“Bike death on that road,” Jacob said. “You could put one or two down to stupidity but there have been quite a few more than usual so far this summer.”

“Twelve,” I said slowly, remembering MacMillan’s original visit back at the cottage, when he’d thrown statistics at me to try and get me to join the Devil’s Bridge Club and spy for him. “Slick makes it thirteen.”

“Does he?” Jacob shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you numbers. All I know is I don’t want my lad to become number fourteen.”

“But surely, if someone’s doing this deliberately – picking them off – Jamie would be safer going to Ireland than if he stayed here?” I said, testing the water. “Unless, of course, there’s more to it than that . . .”

Jacob frowned and I could see the conflict on his face. Would he come clean? Would he trust me enough to tell me?

“Look, Charlie, it’s complicated,” he said. “What with Clare and everything, I—” He broke off, sighed heavily. “I’d just be a lot happier if I knew Jamie had someone to watch his back for him while they’re over there. Will you go? Please?”

Well, that answered
that
question.

“All right,” I said, giving in.

“Thank you,” he said and he smiled, much closer to the old Jacob.

“You are overlooking one small point, of course,” I said, cutting across the relief on his face. “There’s no guarantee I’ll pass the audition.”

On Tuesday evening I went back to the cottage. It seemed sad and dingy when I walked in but I was fresh out of clean clothes and, besides, the first floor walls wouldn’t knock themselves down. I really needed to get on with it or I was still going to be camping on a building site come Christmas.

I left my mobile switched on all night but Sean didn’t ring. By Wednesday morning I realised he wasn’t going to. He would be up to his neck in the Heathrow job and it wasn’t fair to expect him to be at my beck and call when he was working. He’d spared me more than enough of his time already. More than I probably deserved, given the circumstances.

I spent the day clearing up the mess I’d made at the weekend, shovelling the rubble into bags and boxes so I could cart it downstairs. I knew I couldn’t put off hiring another skip for much longer.

The activity was physically hard work but required no particular cerebral participation, leaving my mind free to wander. Almost inevitably, I found myself thinking about Sean, and my father’s warning.

They’d never liked each other from the first time they met. Perhaps, as far as my parents were concerned, there was always going to be an element of whoever I chose to bring home with me would never be good enough for their little girl.

It didn’t help that Sean’s personal transport back then had been a motorbike. A Yamaha EXUP – the FireBlade of its day. I was on an old Yamaha 350 Power Valve, the first bike I’d bought when I passed my test.

I remember being nervous on that ride up to Cheshire nearly six years ago, as though I’d had some premonition of how it was going to go. We’d arrived in the dark on a Friday evening, so the full extent of the house was shrouded. Even so, as we’d turned onto the driveway and our headlights had swept across the imposing front facade, it didn’t occur to me how it must look to him.

“Your folks live here?” he’d asked when we’d pulled up by the front steps and cut the engines. “Which bit?”

“All of it,” I’d said. At the time I hadn’t registered the significance of the question but later I realised he’d thought – hoped, really – that a house this big might be split down into apartments. It wasn’t until I’d visited his mother, years afterwards, that it dawned on me her little council house on a run-down Lancaster estate would have fitted inside the garage at my parents’ place and barely touched the walls.

Sean had still been a sergeant then, one of the instructors on the Special Forces course I had fought my way onto. Any obvious relationship between us would have set alarm bells ringing – as it was destined to do so catastrophically. So, we’d snuck away, leaving separately, meeting up on a motorway services.

I knew having an affair with Sean was madness but, like any doomed enterprise, once I was in the grip of it the dangers seemed worth the risk. Going anywhere together where people knew us, even my parents, was reckless at best. I suppose I was hoping that they would be as taken with him as I was.

Some hope.

My mother had prepared an elaborate meal for us and gone to town on the silver candlesticks and the starched linen in the dining room. I don’t know if she was expecting to impress Sean or overawe him. At least, as an NCO, he’d attended enough formal army dinners to know his way around a knife and fork with some finesse, even if he didn’t look entirely comfortable while doing it. Now, he spent so much time with royalty and riches he was blasé in any company, but back then I was aware of watching him anxiously while we ate.

I wasn’t the only one. My mother might have been regarding him as if he’d come before her on the bench but at least she had made an effort to be sociable. Not easy when just about every aspect of our work could not be discussed with outsiders. My father had spent the first two courses in almost silent scrutiny before he’d condescended to join in the conversation.

“You’ll have been posted to Northern Ireland at some point, I assume, Sean?” he’d asked with cool detachment.

Sean had nodded cautiously. “I’ve spent a little time there, sir, yes.” I knew he’d done two tours as a squaddie and three more he wouldn’t talk about, even with me.

“I was there myself many years ago,” my father said casually, dabbing his mouth with his napkin. “It was not long after I qualified as a surgical registrar.”

“The City hospital?” Sean had asked.

“No, the Royal Victoria.”

Sean had a good face for playing poker but even he couldn’t prevent his eyebrows climbing at that. “That’s near the Falls Road,” he’d said, respect mingling with the surprise in his voice as he reached for his wine glass. “What kind of surgery did you specialise in?”

“Orthopaedics. By the time I was finished I’d become quite an expert on kneecaps.” He’d allowed himself a flicker of disgust. “Whenever we thought we’d developed a new technique for repairing the joint, they came up with a new way of destroying it.”

“Well, they’re nothing if not inventive when it comes to killing or maiming people over there,” Sean had said, his voice low.

“They’re not the only ones.”

Sean had heard the censure in his voice and put down his glass with a careful precision that made my shoulders tense. He’d tilted his head towards my father very slowly.

“Excuse me?”

“Come now, Sean,” my father had said with some asperity. “You can’t try to tell me that the soldiers weren’t just as guilty of delivering beatings – and worse – to people they thought were working against them. I’ve seen the results for myself.”

“And I’ve seen the results of a nail bomb being detonated by remote control when there was an eighteen-year-old soldier less than six feet away from it,” he said, his voice calm almost to the point of indifference.

My mother had given a soft gasp. “Oh, but that doesn’t happen any more, surely?” she’d said, shaky.

Sean had turned his head and pinned her with that dark and merciless gaze.

“It happens, just in a way that doesn’t offend middle-class sensibilities so much,” he’d said. He’d wiped his own mouth with his own napkin and thrown it onto the table, sitting back.

“If you’ve done something to offend the paramilitaries over there, they make you an appointment to have your kneecaps done,” he’d gone on, ignoring her averted head. “You have to turn up or, when they find you, you’re dead. And trust me, they
will
find you. People used to die from kneecappings. They’d bleed to death before the ambulance got there and it would be reported in the papers – another death chalked up to terrorism.”

“But—”

“But now,” Sean had overridden her protest, rolled right over it and crushed it and kept on coming. “Now, they call the ambulance for you first and make you wait, and when they hear the sirens approaching,
then
they kneecap you. More people survive, that’s the only change. It looks better that way on the news. Somebody sat down and thought long and hard about how to do that. That’s the kind of people we’re up against.”

He’d turned back to my father who had listened to his quietly bitter outburst without expression. “So you can’t try and tell me that the occasional squaddie stepping out of line isn’t understandable, isn’t justified.”

“Torture is never justified,” my father had rapped back with the iron certainty of someone who had the moral high ground and wasn’t going to relinquish it.

Sean had shaken his head. “Wait until it’s your family who are under threat, sir,” he’d said. “Until then, it’s nothing more than an academic exercise to you.”

We’d left the following morning, although we’d been intending to stay until after lunch. I’d been so ashamed of the way my parents had behaved that I hadn’t seen them again until I was in hospital after my attack, two months later. I hadn’t had to worry about my father sniping at Sean by then.

He was long gone.

***

The Devil’s Bridge Club held their midweek meet at a pub just outside the tiny village of Watermillock, overlooking Ullswater. William hadn’t been thrilled when I’d called him and asked for a chance to try out, but he hadn’t shot me down in flames either. Maybe they were just expecting me to crash and burn all by myself.

I’d set off early to get up there, taking the back roads through Sedbergh and up to Kendal.

The FireBlade bounded effortlessly up the sharp incline out of the town. And when I hit the derestricted zone at the top and opened the throttle, the response was instant.

Still grinning inside my visor, I made short work of the fast open stretch of road that now by-passes Staveley, filtering down a line of slow-moving cars and flicking past a lumbering cattle truck.

At Troutbeck Bridge I turned off for Kirkstone Pass. The going was slower and trickier there, the steep gradients and acute bends making me feather the rear brake more to keep the FireBlade balanced. It was this kind of road where the lightweight little Suzuki always used to hold its own against the big bruisers and I felt a pang of regret that I didn’t have it with me now.

Mind you, the FireBlade certainly came into its own once I arrived at the Watermillock Arms pub. The Watermillock was a typical Lakeland slate building with a gravel car park by the side of it that led out onto a grassed area with benches. From there you could sit and bask in the heat and admire the majesty of Ullswater in front of you and the craggy magnificence of Helvellyn at your back. When I brought my drink back outside from the bar intending to do just that, I found the bike had already gathered a small cluster of admirers of its own.

They were all young men probably around Jamie’s age, wearing expensive-looking race leathers and skinned kneesliders. One even had the aerodynamic hump on his back, which I thought was a little over the top for road use.

“Hey, does your boyfriend know you’re out on his bike?” he called when he spotted me. The rest of them cackled. He was short and stocky and blond haired, with that kind of pink and white complexion that goes instantly ruddy when exposed to just about any kind of weather.

“Seriously, you never ride this, do you?” one of the others said, dubious. “I mean, not by yourself?”

“Oh no,” I said, sweetly sarcastic, “I usually push it, or if it’s raining I take it in a taxi.”

That loosened them up a bit. I found out part of the reason for their disbelief was that the one with the hump, whose name was Mark, was on a FireBlade himself, albeit an earlier model that was rather more scuffed around the edges. I gave him some stick for owning a girl’s bike – which he denied vehemently – and by the time the place began to busy up the group of us had fallen into easy conversation.

The Devil’s Bridge Club arrived together, almost in formation, making a show of it. Their bikes rolled into the car park and slotted into line one after another, with Daz in the lead on his Aprilia, Jamie and Paxo in the centre, and big William bringing up the rear on his lime green Kawasaki.

I don’t know if he was looking anyway, but Daz spotted me as soon as he got off the bike. He hooked his lid over the Aprilia’s mirror, rubbed a hand through his hair and sauntered over to us.

“You really up for it then, Charlie?” he said, challenge in his voice.