To Catch a Rabbit (7 page)

Karen looked away from her and out of the window. She wanted to say ‘I don’t believe it,’ but she knew she had no right. She stared out at the dove grey sky over the flat fields and watched a gull wheel in and out of view.

Karen gripped the dog’s lead tighter, wrapping it round her wrist. Marvin was part Border collie and looked like she might have a tendency to round things up. When Stacey said she needed to collect Holly from a neighbour, Karen offered to take the dog for a walk. She wasn’t sure if Stacey really wanted her there any more, but she wasn’t ready to leave and her sister-in-law was probably too polite to ask her to go. Anyway, she wanted to see her niece now she’d come all this way. A public footpath sign led Karen across a field, pulled along by Marvin. They approached a hawthorn hedge and as the heels of Karen’s boots sank into the soft ground, Marvin pulled harder. At that moment, a small woman with a large German shepherd stepped through a gap from the next field. Karen tried to get past, but she’d forgotten the sociability of dogs. Marvin began to circle the other animal until their leads were completely entangled.

‘Come on, Marvin.’

‘Oh they love each other these two, old friends they are!’ The woman peered up at her. ‘You a friend of Stacey’s?’

‘Sister-in-law. I’m Phil’s sister.’

‘Oh.’ She bent down to untangle the dogs and Karen couldn’t see her expression. ‘He’s back then is he?’

‘No. I came to see if I could help at all.’

‘Such a shame, with a littl’un.’

‘I’ve been worried,’ Karen offered. ‘It doesn’t seem like him just to disappear.’

‘I usually let Caesar off here, do you think Marvin would like a run?’

Karen’s arm was aching from the constant pull of the dog. When she unclipped the lead, she and Marvin shared a moment of relief and the two dogs raced away after the scent of a rabbit.

‘My name’s Jackie, by the way. Me and my husband Stan, we run The Volunteer Arms.’

‘Karen Friedman.’

It was an oddly formal moment in the damp, dead grass of the field, as she stuck out her hand and Jackie took it with a firm shake. They walked together for a while and Jackie told her about how she met Phil when he first arrived in the village, how she’d offered him a job and what a lovely guy he was, always singing or whistling a tune. Karen found herself sharing a memory of Phil getting into trouble at school for humming and driving the teacher mad. And then it crossed her mind that this was the sort of conversation you have at funerals.

‘You older than him, are you?’ Jackie asked.

‘Yes, I looked after him when we were little. My Mum had MS, she was ill for a long time.’

‘You have a look of Phil. I can see the likeness.’

She’d always thought how different they were, in habits and behaviour at least, but maybe the code that was written across their features and in their bone structure was stronger than that.

‘Did he…Stacey thinks… he may have been seeing other women?’

‘Really?’ Jackie peered ahead, as if trying to visualise it. ‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t listen to gossip.’

The two women walked together without speaking, while the dogs returned, circled them and chased each other away along the edge of the field. Karen found herself thinking about how her mother used to do jigsaw puzzles. She found them harder and harder as her condition worsened, until in the end they only frustrated her. Karen remembered her struggling to force in a piece, which wouldn’t go, and then crying over the loss of that simple function. It was a picture of two retrievers, chasing a rabbit, in an autumn landscape. Now Karen felt like she had a piece of a puzzle in her hand, but she couldn’t see where it fitted.

‘Who’s Johnny?’ She asked Jackie.

‘Johnny?’

‘A friend of Stacey and Phil’s?’

‘Johnny Mackenzie?’ Jackie stopped and looked at Karen. ‘Local lad. He and Stacey used to go out together when they were younger.’

‘What does he do? I think Phil was working for him.’

‘Bit of an entrepreneur. Got an agency with all foreign types, Poles and that. They clean the posh houses out towards Barton. Some of them do the fruit-and-veg picking.’

Karen made a mental note to mention this to Jaz. ‘Phil was driving a van. He was doing some sort of delivery job for Mackenzie, I think.’

‘Oh yeah? Well, Johnny Mac’s got a lot of little schemes.’

Karen listened to the squelch of wet ground under her boots. The leather was spattered with chocolate-brown mud, which had reached the hem of her skirt. Her calves ached and her legs longed for tarmac.

‘Would you trust him? This Johnny Mackenzie?’

‘Would I trust him?’ Jackie’s tone was as flat as the fields. ‘Well, I don’t know really, love. I don’t know.’

When she got back to the house, the dog whined at the front door while they waited for Stacey to answer. She could hear the sound of the television, a nursery rhyme cranked up high. Behind it, a man’s voice was raised in some kind of argument and then she could hear Stacey calling to Holly to turn the volume down. She rang the bell again. Stacey opened the door with Holly pressed between her legs.

‘Stop it, Holly! You’ll trip me up!’

‘Marvin!’ She was not much bigger than the dog, this little girl who wrapped her arms round its grubby neck. She smiled up at Karen.

‘Remember your Aunty Karen, Holly?’

Karen let go of the dog’s lead and closed the door behind her. She thought she felt a sudden draught, as if another door had been opened at the back of the house. Holly didn’t show any sign of remembering her, but she took her hand anyway and led her into the front room to show off her toy box.

It was only later, when they were sitting down to a pizza in front of the TV, that Holly asked where Uncle Johnny had gone.

‘Isn’t he having pizza Mummy? Can I give his bit to Marvin?’

‘He had to pop out, love.’ She turned to Karen and said quickly, ‘He’s just a neighbour. Everyone’s Uncle or Aunty to her.’

‘He’s the guy Phil was working for.’

‘So what?’

‘For God’s sake, Stacey!’ Karen stood up. The jigsaw piece had just clicked into place. She had a dizzy sensation of filling the room as her plate slipped off the sofa and the pizza landed face down on the purple carpet. Holly started to cry and Marvin rushed in, seizing her chance.

‘Can’t you see?’ Karen could hear her voice pitching out of control. ‘He’s probably the last person to see Phil. He could be telling a pack of lies! And you just believe everything he’s said.’

‘Nobody asked you to come here!’ Stacey was on her feet too. She scooped Holly up into her arms.

‘That’s right.’ It was a man’s voice behind her. ‘So I think you’d better leave.’

He was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, a small and squarely built man of about thirty, with wind-burned cheeks and reddish hair.

‘I know who you are and I want to know where my brother is!’

‘You know nothing lady, not a bloody thing. This your bag?’

He crossed the room in three strides, picked up her handbag and opened the door to the hall in one seamless action.

Karen looked at Stacey, but she couldn’t see her face, buried in Holly’s hair. She felt hopeless and huge, like Alice in Wonderland, grown too large for the tiny room. She walked to the door and took the bag from Mackenzie’s outstretched hand. When she was level with him, he whispered in her face:

‘Ten thousand pounds, that’s what you owe me for that van. Your old feller didn’t look like he had that sort of money, but you do, lady. I take cash or a cheque.’

On the way out of the village, Karen slowed down outside The Volunteer Arms, leaking warmth and yellow light into the darkness. She was tempted to go in and find Jackie, but she was scared; not just of Mackenzie and any friends he might have, but of herself. She’d never been one for picking fights, but now she’d started she was afraid she might not be able to stop. She tipped the lights to full beam, put her foot down hard on the accelerator and headed for the main road to Doncaster.

She parked in the allotted space and posted the keys through the door of the car-hire office. Her heels rang out in the station forecourt. It was Saturday night, but the place was almost deserted. In the ticket hall a couple leaned drunkenly against a shuttered counter, lost in each other’s faces. The girl pressed against the boy, and he gripped her to stop himself from falling. Karen checked the departure board. The last train to York had left half an hour ago. She walked outside to a scratched metal bench where she sat down, breathed in cold, damp air and let the tears come. When she’d exhausted the only tissue in her pocket, she got up and walked away from the station. A man passed her, weaving slightly, pausing to look at her for just too long. She wasn’t sure where she was going, but on the next corner she came to a large Victorian pub with a Vacancies sign trapped behind a grey net curtain. She pushed open the door and there was a brief murmur, which she just caught the end of, ‘…lady present. Thanks Sid.’

There were four men in the warm room and a television set high up on the wall. The picture was frozen. She caught sight of a leg and a head of long, blonde hair. She looked away, feeling the men watching her as she walked to the bar.

‘Do you have any rooms?’

‘We do, love.’ The barman was large and smiling, a diamond patterned jumper stretched over his belly. ‘How many would you like? Eat in or take away?’

She smiled weakly at his joke. ‘Just one, just for tonight.’

‘Follow me madam, or would you like a drink first?’

‘I’ll take one up, if that’s okay. A glass of red wine please.’

While she waited for him to pour her drink, she found herself looking at the pictures on either side of the bar; two Turner prints, their cloudy colours smudged under dirty glass. She knew them like old friends, ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ and ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’, two of a set of place mats her mother used to get out for Sunday lunch. Phil’s favourite was the ghostly warship limping home in the sunset, while she always chose the little black steam train, hurrying through a yellow-grey mist. She picked up her glass and followed

the landlord through a door at the side of the bar. There was a buzz of relief from the men behind her and she heard the elaborate orchestral score of their porn film start up again. It sounded like Debussy.

The sheets were clean but cold. Karen sat up in bed in her blouse, a cardigan round her shoulders. Probably not what the men at the bar would consider foxy, but she locked the door and put the chain on anyway. The room was uniformly yellow with years of cigarette smoke, or maybe it was intentional. Perhaps Dulux had a special colour called Pub Fag Yellow. There was paint peeling from the cornices on the ceiling and the embossed wallpaper was scratched and torn. The bulb in the bedside lamp had blown, so she sat with the stark overhead light on and sipped her wine. Its rough, raw tannins hit the roof of her mouth and sucked at her cheeks. She phoned Max and told him what had happened and that she was safe. He said she should have checked the timetable, which she didn’t need to hear. She wished she had a radio, the low mumbling of a documentary or even the shipping forecast, but there was just the sound of the occasional passing car below the window and a swarm of questions buzzing round in her head. She tried to think things through, but nothing would stay put.

Karen had a sudden start, as if a door had banged. She knew she’d been asleep, but she couldn’t tell for how long. Her heart was pounding in her ears and the light was still on. Her watch said 2.30 and she needed the toilet. She crossed the sticky carpet, thankful for her socks, pausing at the shabby sight of herself in the mirror, make-up worn to a smudge on her pale skin and her hair flattened on one side. She realised that Max must see her like this all the time. That was the point of being married. You said what you thought, looked how you wanted to, nothing mattered. At least that’s what she’d always believed. She was suddenly over-whelmed with the urge to go home to Max and the children.

Bonfire Night: 8.45
am

By quarter to nine, the scrubby brown fields and makeshift fences along the main road had given way to the boundary wall of a new-build estate and Phil was trapped in traffic. For the last five minutes he’d been looking at the words: ‘Is your wife as dirty as your van,’ written in the dust on the back end of a white Luton. He used the opportunity to poke at the jammed cassette player with a biro refill. As the Luton lurched forward ahead of him, the tape finally slithered free of the machine.

The address he was looking for was on the other side of Doncaster Racecourse. He thought he knew a short cut from his one and only visit to the races. Keith, Stacey’s Dad had taken him for a day out and a bit of man-to-man talk, after they’d announced Stacey was pregnant. Phil hadn’t needed to get drunk and be mildly threatened by Keith Clegg to do the right thing by his daughter, but he went along with it. The day had turned out okay, he’d lost a tenner and Keith had won fifty quid. The wedding was all planned before the end of the last race.

His memory served him well. His short cut opened out on to the road on Mackenzie’s note. Between a hairdresser’s and a pet shop, a narrow entry led to a row of garages. He eased the van up between high red brick walls and out into a tarmac square behind a row of 1960s flats. He turned the music off and waited. Somewhere a siren tried to force its way through the morning traffic. Phil wished it luck. A woman in a navy tracksuit, covered with a floral apron, banged the gate behind her as she came out of the back of the flats. She smiled at Phil and he opened the window.

‘You got Mackenzie’s stuff?’ she said.

‘Yup.’

‘I’m Carole. Back up to garage number 18, will you, love?’

They unloaded the van into the garage with a bit of small talk about the weather and how it was getting much colder at nights.

‘Can’t believe it’s Bonfire Night already,’ Carole said. ‘Doesn’t seem five minutes since August Bank Holiday.’

The boxes weren’t particularly heavy and Phil could see she liked to work at speed, as if she had plenty of other jobs to get done today. When the van was empty she locked up and thanked him, before disappearing back into the flats with a brisk wave. She was an improvement on the man in Hull, friendly at least. He wondered where Mackenzie found his odd little team. The guys he’d met back on the farm in Moorsby had all been Eastern European. Same as the girls on the cleaning teams. They only cracked a smile when they came into the office for their money. And you never saw them in
the village. He suspected the boss didn’t want them mixing with the locals. Stacey was right, Johnny Mac had done well for himself, but Phil didn’t entirely like the smell of his money. A wave of leaves and paper bags blew along the guttering in front of the garages and Phil climbed back into the van. There was another load waiting for him in Hull.

The sun was low in the sky and failing to reach over the high brick wall, condemning the red freight container to a chilly shade. Len was waiting for Phil in his car. A news broadcast boomed indistinctly from behind the steamed up windows.

‘What took you?’ he grunted at Phil, getting out and walking stiffly towards the container without waiting for an answer.

He unlocked a huge padlock and let the heavy bar drop away from the door, clanging against the metal.

‘There’s another five cases of Panda Pops for Carole and then this lot needs to go in Mr Mackenzie’s little hut, d’you know it?’