The Vows of Silence (22 page)

“Because while I can understand that it might, I don’t think it’s really your concern. You’re going away, so is Lizzie soon. This is about me.”

“Not only.”

“Yes, only. Or rather, Phil and me.”

“I have to worry, don’t you see?”

“You mean if I marry him?”

“You going to, then?”

“I’ve no idea. We’re fine as we are for now. But if I go to hell I’ll do it in my own way and take responsibility, it won’t be your fault.”

“Only it will. It’ll mean I could have done something and I didn’t.”

Helen laughed, until she saw the pain and anxiety on his face and stopped.

“Don’t worry. I’ve listened to you, I understand how important it is to you and if I reject it that is really not your fault. I’d stand up in your church and tell them so if it’d help.”

He shifted from one foot to the other. Helen’s heart went out to him. He was too young for all this, trying to save everyone from damnation, trying to convert the world. He had been care free, relaxed, a force for good, and now he was tense, troubled, endlessly striving, measuring himself against those she privately thought were not worth a hundredth of him. Whoever they were, they made her angry.

“Do you like Phil? That matters to me.”

“Don’t know him really.”

“What you’ve seen of him?”

Tom shrugged.

“He’s a good person, Tom. By most people’s definitions of what good means, he is.”

“If you say so.” He turned away.

“I do. But you matter to me most—you and Liz. If this really upsets you, I won’t see him.”

He looked at her again, his face open and alarmed. Then he came over and gave her a quick, hard hug. “You’ve got to,” he said. “You go for it. Doesn’t matter what I think.”

He fled from the room.

For a second she made to follow him but stopped herself. Tom worried her because he had changed so drastically. His conversion to this Jesus sect had come in a rush and within months he had spoken of little else, dropped old friends, spent his spare time with new ones from the church, become obsessed with “saving and converting” as Lizzie had said with scorn. But his new-found belief did not seem to make him happy or fulfilled. On the contrary, he was anxious and tense most of the time. The old Tom had been laid-back and cheerful, untroubled by most things.

She made another cup of tea, wondering if she could talk to Phil about it. But this was not his concern. Her children were hers, as Phil’s sons were his.

She went to bed and lay awake, worrying about Tom, and for the first time in some weeks longed for Terry to be here, sorting it all out calmly, talking to Tom, reassuring her as he always had.

She was asleep when Tom slipped out of his room and out of the house without switching on the lights and pushed his motorbike halfway up the road before starting it, for fear of disturbing her and having to answer questions.

Forty-five

“There’s a woman applied for the vacancy,” Ian Dean said on the way to the airfield. “Lucy Fry. Know her?”

“Seen her around. Short dark hair?”

“Lezza,” Clive Rowley said.

“So?”

“Only saying.”

“I could report you for that.”

“Report me for what?”

There were three of them and a vehicle full of gear and it was an hour to the end of shift. It was driving rain.

“What was I thinking? I don’t need the overtime this bad.”

“Hour, tops,” Liam Westleton said, spinning the van round a corner and sending up a sheet of spray.

“Right, and it’s your round.”

“I don’t mind having a woman, best shot I ever worked with was a woman.”

Clive made a noise in his throat.

“What?”

“Be PMT every time we have a nasty situation.”

“You want to watch your attitude, Rowley. Anyway, I only said she’d applied. Right, here we go. Which one are we picking?”

There were five hangars.

“Far one on the left,” Rowley said.

“Why?”

“Dunno. No good taking the nearest, we need a bit of a run.”

Westleton started to plough through the water-filled potholes and muddy grass towards the hangar. It was just after lunch. No one about.

“One day we’ll come out here for training and the place’ll be full of demolition men and builders. Got to be housing here sooner or later, it’s a waste.”

“Think it’s a contaminated site, Ian. No one knows what to do with it. Meanwhile, let’s get on with it. Only this one’s no good, the roof’s half caved in.”

He reversed and drove back, the van lurching and swaying, to the second hangar.

“This one’s too near the road.”

“None of them’s near the road and what does it matter anyway? Save the suspension.”

Clive shrugged and went straight round to the back of the van when they stopped. Westleton went to the metal bar that held the hangar doors and lifted it.

“One of the other lot must have been out here,” he said, coming back. “Thought that would be stiff but it came up sweet as a nut.”

“Fire service come up here for training.”

“Right. Better check when we get back then, make sure they haven’t got a session clashing with us tomorrow.”

They were hauling the gear out of the van, long wooden and metal poles, a steel-mesh rope ladder. The smaller gear, mainly hand tools, came up with them on the day. The training day happened every six weeks, occasionally out here, with team exercises, climbing practice, breaking down and entering. Westleton and Rowley dragged out a couple of old doors from the van, set one down and carried the other towards the hangar. They would be building a makeshift entrance with the doors suspended on poles.

“Ian, bring the box of padlocks from under the bench, will you?”

Padlocks and chains to hitch round some of the girders, another kind of obstacle to be broken through.

The grey light of a sodden autumn afternoon filtered a short way through the open doors but the recesses of the hangar were dim. They would rig up makeshift lighting in the morning but some of the session would be in darkness with the doors half closed.

“OK, let’s have this stuff up against the side here, cover it with the sacks. Not that anyone’s going to be interested.”

They lugged things in and out, saying little. The rain slanted across on the wind into the hangar.

They stashed the last of the wooden poles and doors, covered them with tarpaulin and were making to go when Rowley said, “You hear that?”

“Nope.”

“What?”

“I thought I heard something over there.”

“Birds. You get birds nesting in here, up in the roof.”

“Right.”

“You spooked or what?”

“Nah. Be my ears want syringing. See the ME if it gets any worse.”

But as they swung the hangar doors together, Liam Westleton turned and looked back inside.

“What?”

“Was it like a whistling sound?”

“Yeah, and I said, it’s my ears. Forget it.”

“Come on, I want to get home, I’ve got footie training.” Ian Dean played for the county force first eleven.

They slammed the doors, dropped the bar across, piled into the van. The rain had eased but the sky was oyster-coloured, the wind whipping across the water-filled potholes and ruffling the surface.

Westleton had his hand on the starter, but then he hesitated.

“Come on, come on.”

“If there was something, we’d better check it out.”

“There wasn’t.”

“All the same. I’ll drive the van right in, scout the place with the headlights. Apart from anything else, I don’t want that lot nicked.”

“Be a fox,” Ian said. “Foxes all over here, you can smell them when it’s drier.”

“Get the doors open again.”

Clive Rowley got slowly out of the van again and stumbled as he caught his foot. “Shit.”

“Get on with it.”

“Twisted my ankle.”

“You’re not hurt.”

But Rowley was hopping on one foot, leaning against the side of the van.

Westleton sighed. “Get him back on board then. Leave it be.”

“Probably nothing, Sarge.”

The other two helped Clive Rowley up the back step of the van and onto the bench, where he sat rubbing his ankle and muttering under his breath.

“Ears. Ankle. You got a pencil. Better write the ME a list.”

“Ha ha.”

Liam Westleton turned the van and headed off towards the road.

Forty-six

It had taken him a week to plan everything. She hadn’t been in touch at all, not a word, not a note. She hadn’t and not one member of her family. He felt as if he hadn’t existed as far as they were concerned, as if they had airbrushed him out of their lives and their memories.

He wasn’t having it. But he didn’t rush anything. His anger had been a flaring bonfire, but he waited until it had shrunk down and become a small, spinning, red-hot core which he knew he could control. You needed control. He went running, he walked it off up on the Moor, he went into Starly Woods and shot pigeons, and after the pigeons, he took half a dozen empty tin cans and set those up, shot at those until he could do the row, one to six, without missing. Every time one went down, it was one of them. Her father. Mother. Sister. Grandmother. Kid brother. Then
her. She was the last each time. When he’d shot them all down he set them up in the same row and shot them again.

A week.

He had waited until teatime, half past six, when he knew she’d be home from work. She was always home then.

It was a beautiful evening, warm, still, sweet-smelling even in the middle of the town. He’d parked the car higher up and strolled down. A couple of kids had been doing wheelies in the middle of the road near her house. He’d waited a bit but in the end he’d told them to scarper. He didn’t want kids there even if he was only going to frighten her. Frighten them all. Kids oughtn’t to be involved.

He could trust his anger now. It was under control. He’d frighten her but nothing more. He wanted to see her face, how she’d look at him, what she’d try to say. Then see the fear.

As he’d walked he’d wondered why he was doing this because, in spite of it, he loved her. He had never thought he would feel as he had felt for Alison, as he still felt, and his ball of anger was a part of the same feeling. He had walked all the way down one side of the street, looking at her house as he had passed it, and then back on the other side. The gate was painted blue, quite bright. He could see the blueness staring out at him.

He had slowed down, slowed and slowed until he was hardly putting one foot in front of the other as he had approached the blue gate.

There was no car in the drive.

He’d stood there, hand on the gate, swallowing his anger down. Then he’d seen the movement in the window, behind the curtain. He had pushed the blue gate open.

She must have run down the stairs and been waiting because as he lifted his hand to knock she opened the door wide.

Georgina.

He could sense the fear on her. She was holding it back, behind defiance, but her eyes were everywhere, at him, away from him, over his shoulder.

“She’s not here.”

“I don’t believe you. I want to talk to her, Georgie. Tell her.”

“I said. She’s not here.”

“I want to come in and see for myself.”

“Well, you can’t. She doesn’t want to see you anyway, she doesn’t want anything to do with you, she told you that.”

He tried to push her out of the way but then there was someone else, a man he had never seen before, right behind her.

“This is my Uncle Gordon,” she said. “Tell him Ally’s not here.”

The man wasn’t tall but he was squat and muscled, like a small thick barrel, arms crossed. He could have dealt with him easily enough but that wasn’t what he’d come for.

“Alison,” the uncle said, “isn’t here. Can’t you take that in?”

“I want to see her, that’s all. I’ve a right to an explanation.”

“You’ve had one.”

“If she isn’t here, where is she then?”

“Mind your—”

“No, it’s fine, Uncle Gordon, I’ll tell him. I think he ought to know.”

“Know what?”

She moved away from the door a few yards down the path and he followed.

“Look, she’s not here and that’s the honest truth. She hasn’t been here for a few days. She’s gone away and she isn’t on her own. She’s with Stuart. So you’d better leave.”

“Where is she? Where? Where?” He felt himself start to shake, felt the rage burst out of its strict confines. “I’ve a right to know.”

“No,” Georgina said, “no, you haven’t. I’m not saying any more and don’t come here again.” She turned.

He grabbed her arm. “If I write a letter to her, will you pass it on?”

“I don’t know.”

He hesitated. He didn’t want to hurt Georgina. He didn’t want to hurt Alison. But others would suffer. Others. Others would never taste happiness.

He pulled himself up. “Thanks,” he managed to say, “thanks, Georgie.”

He walked down the path, closed the bright blue gate behind him and went fast up the road, and now he was shaking, now he almost lost it, almost knocked over an
old woman who was going past him, almost pushed her to the ground. He was angry with himself. He shouldn’t be thinking like that. He needed to get himself under control.

He passed his car and walked on, walked fast and steadily, for a couple of miles, in and out of streets at random, talking to himself, bringing himself down, reining himself in slowly. It was like trying to get hold of a mad horse, but in the end, he felt that he was getting there.

He walked until he came to a corner pub and went in. Half of him wanted to drink himself into a stupor. He bought a pint of Guinness and sat down. He drank it slowly, making it last. His hands were shaking but he made that stop too.

When he was halfway down the glass, he started to think, coolly, rationally, point by point, trying to make a clear plan. He had the beginnings of it by the time the glass was empty.

He didn’t allow himself another.

Forty-seven

It was thundery. The narrow road that wound up the slope to the crematorium was slicked with rain making the cars move even more slowly. Three cars.