The Lying Tongue (18 page)

I lay there in the dark, hardly moving, barely breathing, until Jake returned home. He walked in, switched on the light and found me sitting there, eyes open.

“For fuck’s sake, man! What are you trying to do, give me a coronary?” he said, dropping his keys into the bowl on the sideboard.

I cleared my throat and laughed it off. “Sorry,” I said.

“So how did you get on today? Find out anything interesting about your mystery man?”

I told him that the cuttings library had proved useful and thanked him again for his help. To prevent further questions, I asked him about his day. He’d been to a book launch that evening and sported red wine stains around his lips, like an extra mouth.

“I saw your favorite person there,” said Jake.

“Who?”

“Can’t you guess?”

I had a good idea who he meant, but I didn’t want to think about him.

“Dr. Kirkby. God, you should have seen his face when he saw me. I think he thought you’d be around. But I was probably equally as astonished to see him. It was the launch of a biography of an obscure nineteenth-century female artist. Critics generally thought of her merely as a muse, but apparently she painted in secret. Quite a story, I suppose, and really—”

“Did you speak to him?”

“Only very briefly, just to be polite. His arm’s better, out of its sling, anyhow.”

We laughed.

“She wasn’t with him, was she?”

Jake looked at me with concern, even anxiety.

“No, she wasn’t there, mate,” he said quietly. “You still think about her then?”

I nodded. I didn’t really know what to say.

“You are better though, aren’t you?”

“I think I am,” I said. “It was one of those moment-of-madness things, I expect. Lost all sense. Like I was a different person.”

“Yeah, right.”

“But I’ve changed since then. I’ve got a real direction now.” I couched the clichéd phrases with a certain amount of irony. “Know what I’m doing. Focused.”

At that moment I remembered that last time with Eliza. I had just wanted to be with her, close to her.

“So what are your plans?”

“I’m off to Dorset tomorrow—more research for my writer. I’ll probably come back to London again for a night or so—stay here if that’s okay—and then back to Venice next week.”

I’m sure anyone would have behaved just like I did in a similar situation. Provocation, that’s what they call it. Parading her new man around like that. And so soon as well. He used to be her—our—lecturer. There was something so sordid about it all.

“How are you getting there? Dorset?”

“Train—two and a half hours, Waterloo to Dorchester.”

I had waited outside the college building and followed him home. I made sure I kept out of sight on the Tube, moved to a different carriage and hid behind my newspaper. I trailed him from Finsbury Park, dropping behind him if he slowed down or if I thought he might turn his head.

“Where are you going to stay?”

“I’m not sure yet. Probably in a B & B somewhere or a pub perhaps.”

Before he had turned the corner to his street, I had slipped on a balaclava. An overly theatrical touch, maybe, but at the time it seemed to make sense. That morning I had gone to a tacky clothing shop and bought a nasty nylon hooded top, a pair of jogging trousers and some trainers. I also wore a pair of black fake leather gloves.

“What are you going down there for?”

“Just a bit of research.”

I had checked to see if there was anyone around. Good—no one.

“Which part of Dorset?”

“It’s a village called Winterborne. It’s about fifteen miles from Dorchester, toward—what is it?—Blandford Forum.”

As he had turned the key in his lock, I ran up behind him and grabbed him around the neck. He tried to spin around and wrestle free, but I had him in a tight lock, his arms flaying around like an insect’s. I decided it would be too risky to speak, but I gestured for him to give me his bag.

He dropped his briefcase and told me to take whatever I wanted. Just leave him alone. The pathetic fuck. His tawny beard quivered with fear, his slate-gray eyes rabbit-scared. How could Eliza choose someone so insipid, so cowardly, so pathetic?

I released the grip on his neck, causing him to fall forward like a rag doll. He greedily drank the air around him, a drowning man surfacing above water. I could have finished him off, I was sure. Perhaps I should have. Instead, I took hold of his right arm and twisted it behind his back, snapping it like a wishbone. The sound was really satisfying. I pushed him down to the ground, laughed at his whimpering, ransacked his bag, took a credit card, some cash, and then ran off. I heard him feebly call for help, but I disappeared down a side street. I took off the trainers, slipped off the joggers and hooded top, ripped away the balaclava and shoved the lot inside my rucksack. Underneath I was nice and respectable, a hardworking student—jeans, white shirt, black loafers, all of which I had carried with me. If I was stopped by the police, I could plead ignorance. Nobody would believe that I was the type of person who could do that kind of thing.

In the end, I decided not to call my parents before leaving London. I didn’t want to know about my finals. What difference would it make to my life now? Whatever class of degree I had been awarded, I knew it would never be good enough for my dad. There was no talking to him, he was just insane.

We had been sitting around the dining room table. Mum had tried to make the occasion a special one: pretty place settings, candles, bone-handled knives, crystal glasses. She had cooked Italian food in anticipation of my trip, and her lasagna wasn’t at all bad. We had enjoyed a few glasses of Prosecco and then a nice bottle of red wine. Conversation was confined to a narrow, safe path—nothing that veered off into the danger zones of my past or my future—and it looked as though we were going to enjoy a perfectly civilized evening, culminating with kisses on both cheeks from my mum, a strong shake of the hand from Dad and a flurry of well-meaning parting words. All that changed in the space of a moment.

Mum brought in a dish of tiramisu, my father’s favorite, and placed it in front of us on the table.

“Gosh, look at that. Doesn’t that look splendid?” said my dad.

I probably should have said something then, or at least tried to have made some sort of inarticulate but appreciative sound. But I was thinking about Venice, my new job teaching English and the time I could spend on my novel. I was somewhere else.

I think he must have tried to pass me a slice, but I wasn’t aware of this until I heard him slam the plate down.

“That’s the problem with you, you think of no one else but yourself,” my father said suddenly. “Your mother has gone to all this trouble for you and you can’t even thank her.”

“Oh, Peter, come on now, really—”

“I’m sorry, Sally, but this really has to be said. I’m not going to let him treat you—treat us—like this. He’s got to learn a lesson.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Have I missed something here?”

“You know very well what’s wrong. Why can’t you just try, at least
try
to be normal?”

“Darling, now stop it. It’s Adam’s last night, and I wanted it to be really nice—for all of us.”

My father’s eyes blazed with anger. “There’s no need for you to defend him. Remember, you were the one who was upset when you found out what he’d done.”

“Peter, now is not the time—”

“No, Mum,” I interrupted. “If Dad wants to say something, why not let him? He’s obviously not happy, and I’d rather have him come straight out with it than let it fester.”

I pronounced the last word with undisguised disgust, as if it encapsulated everything he stood for.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll tell you what bothers me. If you really want to know, I can’t bear to even think about what you’ve done. When Eliza’s father called me, I could not believe what he was saying. I was just so ashamed. Although that is disgusting enough in itself, what is even worse is that you don’t seem to show any kind of remorse for your actions. Where’s your conscience, Adam?”

“Peter, calm down. You know you don’t mean it, really. Come on, say sorry now. Otherwise Adam’s going to go off thinking—”

“For God’s sake, Sally, don’t you understand? We’ve been through all that with him before, but he just doesn’t seem to take it in. I almost wish Eliza had called the police. Her father certainly wanted her to, and I can’t understand why she talked him out of it. Maybe we should have turned him in.”

“Don’t be so ridiculous. You don’t mean that,” my mother said, tears filling her eyes.

“It might have done some good. At least it might have forced him, for once in his life, to stand up and take responsibility for his own actions.”

No one said anything for a few seconds. My mother looked down at the table, desperately trying not to cry, and then she pushed her chair away, flinging her napkin into her seat.

“If it wasn’t for you being so distant with him,” she muttered under her breath as she walked into the kitchen, “none of this would have happened.”

“So it’s all my fault now, is it, that we’ve got a monster with no morals for a son?”

I couldn’t stand any more. I got up from the table and, without saying anything, grabbed my coat and rucksack from the hallway. In the kitchen I kissed my mum good-bye as she scraped her plate of tiramisu into the rubbish bin. Of course, she halfheartedly tried to stop me from going but realized it was no use. On the way out, I caught my dad staring at me, his mouth open, docile and moronic. I looked at him with hatred. For once it felt good to be me.

“Don’t fucking come anywhere near me or I’ll kill you, you cunt,” I said. I slammed the door behind me and left.

I hadn’t spoken to him since. It was safer if we kept our distance.

I was back on Crace’s trail. I felt as if over the past few days, apart from my encounter with Lavinia Maddon, I had let him slip away. The past had intruded too much, shadowing my thoughts and obscuring my real purpose.

On the train down to Dorset, I looked through all the material I had gathered on Crace. I flicked through my notebook, now full of my research, and examined the newspaper cuttings once again. If everything went to plan, by the end of my trip I would find out exactly what had taken place between Mr. Shaw’s “stepson” and Crace, and I would be in possession of the diary. When I flew back to Venice next week, I would be armed with the basic biographical material provided by the very obliging Lavinia Maddon; hopefully the journal would describe the lead-up to Chris’s death and tell me whether he had taken his own life or if he had been murdered. The word sounded so strange and unreal. I still couldn’t believe that Crace was capable of killing.

The train, sheathed in a gray mist, pulled into Dorchester station. Outside, rain bulleted down onto the platform, sending people for cover, hunched and scuttling. I ran inside, past the ticket office and down a slope that led to the taxi rank where one car remained, its windows steamed up from the inside. As I ran my hands through my wet hair, I caught the attention of the driver, an overweight but youngish man with doughlike skin. I asked him if he knew the village, about fifteen miles from Dorchester, and we settled on a fee of £18.

As he drove through the streets, skirting around the edge of the town, the window wipers flicking backward and forward like the wings of a distressed mechanical bird, he attempted to strike up conversation.