The Sick Rose (20 page)

‘Oh! Great.’

‘We’ll bring the cameras.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘We’ve got a film-maker following us around at the moment, wants to do some little trailers for the website, says he might even make it into a documentary. What fun to film your pitch, get an idea of the funding application process.’

Louisa felt all the saliva disappear from inside her mouth.

‘I’ll have to check with Ingram,’ she said. ‘He has the last word on this kind of thing.’

‘Nonsense!’ said Joanna Bower, in a tone that left no room for misunderstanding about who was in the powerful position here. ‘He’ll love it. Everyone wants to be on the box, don’t they? Fabulous publicity for your garden, even if we don’t end up working together.’

Louisa hung up with a grave heart and a head that felt too heavy for her neck. A new worst-case scenario was looming, and it was all her fault. She had thought that nothing could be worse than returning to Warwick Gardens, but at least there the only threat would come from within. If she was filmed, though, if she was broadcast . . .
Someone
was bound to see her face on television. The Other Man had seen her face but not known her name. The rest of them knew her name but not where to find her.

She dug her nails into the flesh of her forearm, a tiny punishment for her own stupidity. Most of the time she thought that the intervening years had toughened her up, made her paranoid, wary, wise. Then there were the times like now, when she felt as incautious as a teenager, as though no lesson had been learned.

Chapter 25

Paul had not celebrated Hallowe’en since he was a little boy. At primary school, he had enjoyed bobbing for apples and picking coins out from flour cakes with his teeth. He had had a black bodystocking from Woolworths, decorated with bones, that he had worn for three years running. After his father’s death, however, even pretend gore was enough to endow the feast with genuine fear. At their house in Grays Reach, Paul and his mother had usually stayed indoors with the curtains closed and the TV off to avoid feral children demanding money with menaces. Daniel and Carl Scatlock might have watched a horror film on an obscure satellite channel but that was as close as they came to celebrating it.

But in Leamington it was harder to avoid. The joke shop opposite his bus stop had swapped its usual window display of clown suits and feather boas for a macabre tableau of green-faced witches and dancing skeletons. In the middle was a shop mannequin in a wig and a long white nightie; like the eponymous girl in the film
Carrie
she was soaked in blood. It never went dark brown like normal blood but stayed scarlet day after day. Paul knew it was only food colouring or fabric dye but still it turned his stomach and made him shake and after a few days he had to walk three hundred yards along the High Street to the next stop because twice he had had his eyes closed tight against the image and had missed his bus.

The young people at Kelstice Lodge were off to a Hallowe’en party in Coventry, some student house a few doors down from their own. Paul had not yet thought of a convincing reason not to go. He was desperate enough to consider telling them the truth, that celebrating the dead was no fun when your own past had a body count. Admitting to his blood phobia might have got them off his back about the party, but telling them might have led to talking about his father. Then the floodgates would open, they would all want to know more and more, and he was afraid that once his secrets began to spill they would be difficult to stem. He reminded himself again that one of these people had almost definitely passed his number to Carl Scatlock. Although he couldn’t work out how or why they had done it, he was still sure. Until he had solved that mystery he wasn’t going to confide in any of them, not about his father and certainly not about Ken Hillyard. If forced, he would have put his money on Dilan. Dilan had no motive – as far as Paul could tell, they had always got on well – but he was the only person at Kelstice whose background had been seriously criminal and for a while Paul wondered if he knew the Scatlocks through some nationwide network of violent petty criminals. He also wondered if it could be the police themselves; they had already proved that they could be manipulative by tricking him into his court appearance, and that Woburn was a heartless bastard who had hated Paul on sight. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Woburn was torturing him for a laugh. The problem was, even if he worked out who was responsible, he would never understand why. These days only his mother, the police, Ross and Demetra had the number. Carl had not called again, although Paul always made himself qualify that thought with the word ‘yet’.

He was home early on Thursday afternoon and bought a curry from the hatch on the High Street, waiting with his back to the joke shop. When it was ready he carried his takeaway around the back of the alleyway so that it ended up back where it started, the lights of the Balti house kitchen casting a dim glow on his own front door. He didn’t want to stink out his bedroom so he ate it straight from the foil under the strip-lighting of the kitchen, clearing a space for himself on the sofa among the spread of local newspapers that were weeks old and nothing but adverts anyway. As usual, he had the place to himself. The red bike was gone from its hook on the wall, although the silver one still hung there. Tyre marks made it look like it had actually been ridden up the walls. Paul wished he had thought to bring his own bike. If he could navigate the ring roads and A-roads of estuary Essex then the winding lanes of Kelstice would prove no problem. He thought about the last time he had ridden a bicycle – it had not been his own – and forced himself to derail that train of thought. One of the Poles had evidently been in at some point that day because someone had slid a letter underneath his door. The crisp white corner pointed at him. It made him nervous. It was not usual for him to get post here. Officially, he was living in Goring; his mother had paid to have the whole family’s post redirected there. It was only the police who knew his address. Of course there was also Demetra and Ross, possibly Ingram, and now Louisa knew where he lived, but why would any of them write to him when they saw him every day? He looked at the franked envelope: fat, milky, thick quality paper. The logo on the front said CJS, a familiar set of initials but one he couldn’t quite place. He held it in his hands for a few minutes, willing it to be good news; but it had to be something official, and official could only mean bad.

The letter was from the Criminal Justice System and called him Mr Seaforth, which made him think of his dad. It confirmed – as though he had already known, as though he had been waiting for verification – that he would be called as a witness for the prosecution at Daniel’s trial, and informed him that although a date had not yet been set it was likely to be in the new year. The letter said that he would be hearing from them nearer the time so that he could set aside a fortnight to come to court. The second sheet of paper was a glossy leaflet entitled ‘What to do if you are a witness’. Paul read the letter twice. It was obviously a mistake, and one that needed to be corrected as soon as possible. Instinctively he shut the bedroom door and turned the key as though someone was coming after him. He felt as frightened as he would if Daniel or Carl had delivered it by hand.

He knew who he had to talk to. He vaguely remembered using the business card as a bookmark. He had been sure he wouldn’t need it again. His bookshelf was quite full now; it could be in any of them. He took the first couple of paperbacks and held them by the covers, spine up, to see if anything was pressed between the pages. Nothing. He became increasingly frantic with each empty book, shaking them violently as though they themselves were in trouble. After a while he stopped working systematically and began to pick them up at random, unable to tell which he’d already searched and which he hadn’t. He threw a charity shop Terry Pratchett across the room in frustration and panic and something fell out. It lay on the rug, a tiny white rectangle with the Essex Police logo in the top right-hand corner.

‘Hello?’ The voice was female, but not the one he’d been hoping for.

‘Can I please speak to Christine?’

‘Detective Chief Inspector Shaw is on annual leave,’ said the woman. He thought it was the squat little woman with short hair who’d processed him on arrival at the station. ‘Who’s calling?’

‘My name’s Paul Seaforth, it’s to do with Daniel Scatlock’s trial.’

‘Who? Oh, hang on, I know. I’m going to put you through to one of her team.’

He just knew it would be Woburn.

‘Mr Seaforth.’ The detective sergeant’s voice was freighted with sarcasm. ‘How’s life in the cabbage patch? Got to ride on the big lawnmower yet?’

‘It’s the wrong time of year for that,’ said Paul automatically. Woburn laughed. ‘Listen, I think you’ve made a mistake. I got a letter this morning saying I need to go to court when Daniel has his trial. But I’ve already given my statement.’

‘Yes, and very useful it was too.’

‘So I thought that meant I didn’t have to go to court?’

‘Where did you get that idea?’

‘You
told
me. You said—’

‘I said that we wouldn’t charge you in relation to the offence, and we haven’t. This is a murder trial. You’re our star witness. It’s your word against his. It’s your performance in the witness box that’s going to put him away.’

Paul could not believe how naive he had been. He would see Daniel again, and in the worst possible circumstances. He pressed the phone into his neck. It was a moment or two before he could speak. In the interval Woburn started chewing something noisy, gum or toffee, and Paul could hear the click of his fingers on a keyboard.

‘I think you’ve tricked me into this.’

‘Oh, man up,’ said Woburn.

‘When’s Christine back?’ said Paul.

‘A week Monday, but she won’t tell you any different to me,’ said Woburn. He stopped typing and eating. ‘Listen, let me dig out the number for Witness Support. They’ll tell you what to expect, how to deal with the briefs and silks. You’ll be fine.’

There was the click of a receiver and the line went dead. Paul dashed across the landing to the bathroom and threw up £4.95 of lamb balti.

Chapter 26

The next day, Hallowe’en itself, seemed to dawn earlier than usual. Paul woke up with a start at 5 a.m., just as the night music of pigeons and lone motors gave way to the lumbering rumble of lorries on the High Street. Five was the psychological cut-off point: if the clock had said 4.59 he would have tried to go back to sleep but at five it was time to begin to carve out a day. He consoled himself with the knowledge that exhaustion would take the edge off the next night’s insomnia and used the time to rearrange his scattered books onto their shelves, taking the opportunity to reclassify them into author groups. They were all in place long before 7 a.m. He had memorised the letter, of course. Its content, and yesterday’s conversation with Woburn, replayed themselves over and over in his mind until the words condensed into a scream in his throat. He couldn’t stay in his room.

He got a much earlier bus than usual; it was full of commuters rather than students, and morgue-silent. A few of them had university staff ID cards on ribbons around their necks. He wondered what these people did with themselves in the two or three hours before the students came onto campus. He forced himself not to think about the parallel life where he was one of them, Emily coming to visit him at university, Daniel left behind in Grays Reach wondering where he had gone.

Louisa was the only one there. She, who had the shortest commute, was always the first to arrive. She was coming out of the toilet block in her usual jeans and jacket but with a white towel wrapped around her head. This solved the mystery of where she bathed at least. It could not have been comfortable washing her hair in that shower; the water may have been hot but it came out in a compact jet, like a hose, and the cabin was unheated.

‘You’re early,’ she said, with a stare that dared him to comment on her incongruous turban.

‘Couldn’t sleep,’ he said.

‘I know the feeling.’ She gave him a sad, slow smile.

Ingram assigned Paul to Louisa for the first hour of the morning. In the office, he printed out emails and posted requests on websites for gardening geeks who swapped seeds and bulbs like kids swapped football cards. At first he had thought that her astonishment – ‘But it’s so
quick
! You make it look so
easy
!’ – was mockery. He had never met such a technologically illiterate person before. For all her obvious intelligence, she needed as much help as Daniel.

Just before lunch, he took delivery of a tray of saplings, little shoots in compost that looked like weeds on the brink of death but had cost, according to the docket he signed, £200. He scrunched up the docket, stuffed it in his fleece and took the plants straight to Louisa, now kneeling over mysterious implements in the greenhouse. When she saw what he had brought her she clapped her hands in excitement. As he walked away, he could hear her chatting to them in baby talk. She was absolutely barking mad. He meant to tell Ross and the others what he’d seen over lunch in the pub, but when it came down to it he found that betraying her little moment wasn’t worth the points he would score.

Lunch lasted for two hours and they had only been back at the Lodge for half an hour when Demetra came to collect Ingram to take their twins trick-or-treating. This left Louisa the most senior person on site; at four o’clock she handed the keys to Ross and asked if he wouldn’t mind locking up for her today. A carnival atmosphere prevailed. Someone had retrieved a few feeble little pumpkins from the greenhouse and Jodie was carving crude eyes and mouths into their flesh with a knife Paul didn’t like the look of. Dilan produced a crate of Guinness from a cupboard in the canteen and passed them around.