Safe House (5 page)

‘Son, nobody was living there. Nobody’s lived there in a long time. We know. We checked.’

‘Checked, how exactly?’

‘Just trust me. My point is, you need to get past this. You need to think about what’s causing it. Work on that.’

I said nothing.

‘Teare spoke with your doctors, OK? Guy in occupational therapy. He told her what he thinks is going on.’

I closed my eyes. ‘Did you talk to my father about this?’

‘Eh?’

‘About what the therapist said. Because he’s wrong, you know. I didn’t make this stuff up. I fixed their heating system for Christ’s sake.’

‘Nobody’s saying you did it on purpose. We’re not monsters. I mean, if what happened with your sister didn’t mess you up a bit, well, you wouldn’t be human, would you?’

I let that one drift. I didn’t know what to say, where to take things next. Shimmin saved me the trouble.

‘Rest up, OK? Let a week go by. Maybe two. If you still have questions, you have my number. But Rob? I really think you should let it go. If this girl existed, we’d have found her. I mean, this is the Isle of Man. People don’t just vanish here.’

He cut the connection, leaving me to listen to the electric hum of the machines in my hospital room. I lay still for a while, pressing my mobile against my lips, reflecting on what he’d said. I didn’t like it. Not one bit.

I hadn’t made Lena up. I knew it with the same certainty I knew I was lying in that hospital bed. No dream I’d ever had was as detailed as my memories of her. And one look at the boiler in the cottage would prove that I’d worked on it. Shimmin had to know that. He had to see there were loose ends. But he’d been determined to dismiss my story. And I couldn’t think of one good reason why.

*

Snaefell View, the care home my parents own and manage, is located right on the TT course, on the way to Signpost Corner in Onchan, and it looks out across residential bungalows towards the Isle of Man’s one and only mountain. It’s a sprawling pebble-dashed property that’s been adapted and extended over the years, and is currently big enough to accommodate eighteen residents (including my grandfather), plus three permanent staff, my parents’ living quarters and my own place out back. Sounds grand, I suppose, but the bank has a sizeable share in the place and my parents have had to fight hard to keep the business going. I help out in my own way, for a cut in my rent, by tackling any maintenance and repairs that might be needed around the home.

We’d pulled into the driveway and Dad had silenced the rumbling engine on the home’s minibus when I finally got up the courage to speak with him about what Shimmin had said.

‘Dad,’ I began, toying with the plastic bag that contained my belongings, ‘there’s something I need you to know.’

There was a tightness about his smile, a wariness around his eyes, as if he already regretted the need I felt to do this.

‘I remember her, Dad. I do. There’s no way I made this girl up.’

He rested a hand on my thigh. The skin on the back of his knuckles was dry and cracked, marked by sprigs of looped grey hairs. His nails were trimmed down, squared off, the flesh of his fingers swelling around them. Mechanic’s hands. They’d got that way from the long hours he’d spent tuning my bikes, applying the know-how he’d picked up during his racing career in the quest for a fractional edge that might help me to draw the eye of a professional team.

I said, ‘This isn’t about Laura.’

His hand went limp. I felt its weight on my leg. Sunshine burned through the window glass, heating the air inside the minibus. He swallowed. Swallowed again.

‘Why don’t you go on inside?’

‘Dad? We can say her name, can’t we? We have to be able to do that, at least.’

He pulled his hand away and fumbled with the catch on the door. ‘Get cleaned up,’ he muttered. ‘Then come and find me. Something I want to show you.’

He fell from the cab like a drunk stumbling out of a bar and I watched him tramp wearily across the gravel like a man floundering through quicksand.

*

It took me a long time to wash and pat myself dry, and when I emerged from my bathroom, Grandpa was sitting next to Rocky on the end of my bed. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve spoken about this. It’s become a kind of game, I suppose. It starts off with me explaining about personal boundaries and the value I place on my privacy, and then Grandpa nods along enthusiastically with a few sage asides about how he remembers feeling the same when he was my age, before forgetting it all just as soon as it suits him. I suppose I can understand where he’s coming from. He spends most of his days cooped up with the other residents, and when he lets himself into my place, he acts as if he’s just pulled off an audacious prison break.

‘I was just checking on Rocky,’ Grandpa said, before I could launch into phase one of the game.

‘Uh huh.’

‘Didn’t want him to get lonely.’

‘Even though I just got back from the hospital.’

‘I didn’t know about that. Your mother doesn’t tell me anything.’

He might have blushed, but he seemed to have no problem with the lie. Truth was, we both knew he’d been watching me from the window of his room when I’d climbed out of the minibus. I’d even waved.

Grandpa’s gnarled old hand was resting on Rocky’s flank. Rocky was gazing at me watchfully, body tensed, forehead furrowed. He knew he should be in trouble, too. He wasn’t normally allowed up on my bed.

So this is what two nights in hospital got me. Open rebellion.

‘That bruise on your chest looks a real doozy,’ Grandpa said.

‘The ones on my leg aren’t a lot of fun, either.’

I was standing before him in just my boxer shorts and a few sterile dressing pads. With Grandpa, this was relatively tame. He’d let himself in at worse times – including once when I had female company. Not that his visit had lasted long. And neither, oddly enough, had my date.

I picked my jogging trousers up off the floor and worked my way into them, using my good arm to pull them up around my waist.

‘Help with my socks?’

I opened a drawer and passed a pair of black ankle socks to Grandpa, and he set about getting the first one ready with a look of grave concentration on his face. I lifted one foot on to his bony lap, then the next. Despite his quaking fingers and my suspect balance, we managed to complete the task without too much trouble.

‘Want me to help with your sling?’ he asked.

‘No. But you can button my shirt.’

Grandpa nodded and patted Rocky’s backside.

‘Took your dog for a walk round the garden yesterday.’

Rocky exhaled loudly and looked at me as if this was a great injustice – as if really he’d been the one who’d exercised Grandpa.

I eased my bad arm through a striped shirt I’d removed from a hanger in my wardrobe, then carefully ducked down and fed my good arm inside. I stepped close to Grandpa and watched him lift his quivering fingers towards the button at my collar.

‘Not the top one,’ I said.

‘Not wearing a tie?’

I looked down at the way my shirt tails were hanging over my grey sweat pants. ‘I don’t think it would really go with this outfit.’

Grandpa pursed his lips and lowered his hands to focus on tackling the second button. He seemed to be having trouble with it. His fingers slipped on the little ivory disc. He didn’t mention it and neither did I.

Grandpa is bald like a monk, with a ring of unruly, snow-white hair running from one ear to the other. His scalp has a smooth, leathery appearance, and he has a dark-purple birthmark near the back of his skull, like Gorbachev.

‘What happened to this blonde girl, then?’ Grandpa asked.

‘Where did you hear about that?’

‘Your mother told me.’

I made a honking noise in the back of my throat. It was meant to sound like a television quiz buzzer when a contestant gets an answer wrong. ‘Mum doesn’t tell you anything.
Your words
.’

Grandpa shrugged. He’d finally managed to fasten the button and he was moving on to the next. ‘Everyone’s talking about it.’

‘Everyone?’

‘All the old folk.’

Grandpa liked to refer to his fellow residents that way. As if he was still young and staying at Snaefell View was simply a lifestyle choice he’d made. Sometimes he’d tell new residents he was the care home’s handyman. Especially if they were female. I wasn’t sure what that made me. His apprentice, probably.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by what Grandpa had said. To most of the residents, fresh gossip was a rare and valuable currency. Once news of my accident had slipped out, it would have spread like a bout of winter flu.

‘And what do they all think?’

‘Well, some of them reckon you’ve gone potty. Like Valerie Gregg.’ Valerie Gregg has dementia. She spends most of her days humming softly to herself in a corner of the television room. For many of the residents, she’s become a kind of bogeyman – a living, breathing waxwork of the future they all fear. ‘One or two think you killed her.’
Christ
. ‘But I’m with the majority.’

‘And what do the majority say?’

‘They believe you.’ He prodded me in the chest and I bared my teeth against the pain. ‘And they think the police are up to no good.’

‘Really?’

‘It’s like that old bossy one says.’
That old bossy one
was Mrs Rosemary Forbes, a retired school headmistress and, according to Mum at least, the one-time object of Grandpa’s affections. ‘The police have all kinds of places over here. Secret places. They use them for hiding people and the like.’

‘Witness protection, you mean?’

‘Damn thing.’

I looked down to where he’d fastened a button into the wrong hole, hitching my shirt up and leaving a gap that revealed my navel.

‘It’s fine.’ I pushed his liver-spotted hands away. ‘Thanks, Grandpa.’

He stood and smiled awkwardly, patting me on my bad shoulder. I winced at the electric charge that raced up my neck.

‘Was she pretty?’ He showed me his yellowing dentures. ‘These foreign girls can be pretty.’

‘Grandpa,’ I told him, ‘she was a knockout.’

Chapter Six

After Grandpa had left, I spent twenty minutes in my office, going over the police report of my accident and contacting those customers whose appointments I’d missed or would need to reschedule. Some were understanding. Some asked me to recommend other plumbers. Once I’d cleared my diary for the rest of the week, I whistled for Rocky and headed out to the yard. The barn doors to my bike workshop were open and I could hear voices from inside. Rocky padded on in ahead of me and I entered just as the conversation died.

I could see Dad at the far end of the garage and another figure crouching on the floor beside him. Three of my Yamaha race bikes were positioned in a wedge of sunlight in the middle of the room, stripped down and balanced on paddock stands, with bits of fairing, component parts and a stack of wheels arranged around them.

It stung to think I wouldn’t be racing in this year’s TT. The next few weeks were when twelve months of hard work had been supposed to bear fruit. My fitness regime. My race practice. The sponsorship we’d secured and the investment we’d made in new machinery. Now I’d have to watch the entire festival pass me by. A whole window of opportunity would be gone, not to mention my best hope of dragging my parents out of the pit of despair they’d fallen into.

I moved past a couple of red metal cabinets where most of our tools are stored and stepped over a compressed-air gun. A set of race leathers were hanging from a metal hook above my head and I brushed them aside until I had a clearer view.

Dad’s visitor was a woman. She had on light denim jeans and a collarless black leather jacket. The jacket was zipped to her chin and shimmered beneath the strip lights in a way that suggested it had never been subjected to fly spats and streaks of rain and muck on the back of a motorbike. Her coffee-coloured hair was pulled into a sleek ponytail and one delicate eyebrow was arched, as if she expected me to explain my presence. I’d have been happy to explain most things to her. She was spectacular. Early thirties. Slim nose. Sharp cheekbones. Very full lips. Wonderful brown eyes. Eyes I couldn’t help staring at, and that I’d been staring at for a little too long.

I glanced down. A white dust sheet had been spread across the floor where she was crouching. Arranged on the sheet was a bent and buckled hunk of machinery that, I realised with a creeping sickness, looked very much like the remains of my road bike, a Yamaha R1.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Robert.’ Dad blinked and rocked on his heels. He looked from me to the woman and back again. Rocky jogged over and settled beside him, pushing his head into Dad’s leg. ‘This is my son,’ Dad said, waving his hand at me, then dropping it on to Rocky.

The woman assessed me for a long moment, her lovely brown eyes running down from my face to the mid-point of my torso. They snagged on something and a smile flirted with her plump lips. I glanced down to where she was looking and immediately saw the gaping hole in my shirt.

‘Your father tells me you cracked your shoulder blade,’ she said.

I shrugged, my good shoulder carrying most of the gesture. I wasn’t sure why, but she made me feel defensive. I covered the gap in my shirt with my hand.

‘I’ve done that myself. Ski accident. Hurts, doesn’t it?’

‘It’s not so bad,’ I told her. ‘Barely even a fracture. I can move a bit more than I expected. And the pain meds help.’

She watched me for a moment longer, her eyes seeming to grow and enlarge. Then she returned her attention to my bike, prodding and probing it with the end of a biro. The dinged frame was laid out on the dust sheet like a body on a mortuary slab. Dotted around it were chunks of metal, plastic fairing and machinery parts. It reminded me of the way museums arrange fossilised skeletons to explain how an extinct dinosaur used to be put together.

‘When did you get this?’ I asked.

‘We collected it from the police this morning,’ Dad said.

I assumed the
we
included the woman in the leather jacket. It hadn’t escaped my notice that she hadn’t been introduced to me yet.