Under a Silent Moon: A Novel (6 page)

“Thank you.”

They had stopped beside a silver BMW, parked in a designated bay in the staff zone, the one reserved for consultants and senior management.

“Enjoy your wine—I think I might pick some up myself.”

Lou paused at the main entrance, then on a whim walked all the way back to the Intensive Care Unit. She showed her warrant card, said she was here to check on Mr. Fletcher-Norman’s progress. She waited for twenty minutes while they found someone who was prepared to commit to an update, even a vague one.

Still unconscious. Nothing further.

That’s it, she thought. I’m going home.

23:14

After work, Taryn had phoned the hospital to check if her father was still alive. They’d suggested she should come in, that he was still in a critical state but might respond to her voice. Fat chance of that, she thought, but after speaking to her husband, Chris, she had gone in anyway.

She was surprised at how old he looked without his glasses on, his eyes closed, and tubes and monitors everywhere. He was wearing one of those hospital gowns and his skin was pink, the hair on his head was white and tufty, not neatly groomed. He looked frail and vulnerable, not like him at all. From this position she could see there were marks like yellowing bruises on the top of his right arm. Maybe he got them when they were trying to keep his heart going—wasn’t it supposed to be really brutal? Or maybe Barbara had been beating him up; Taryn wouldn’t have put it past her.

The last time she’d seen him had been at the Barn. He had been complaining about the bike she’d bought him last Christmas. It wasn’t right for his needs, apparently, even though it had been the one he had chosen from some enthusiasts’ magazine, and she had gone round to look at it.

Barbara had opened the door to her.

“Oh. It’s you. Well, you’d better come in.”

Her father was in his armchair, reading the
Telegraph
, paisley-patterned feet up on the footstool.

“Good heavens,” he’d said, peering at her. “What the hell is that thing you’re wearing?”

“It’s a poncho, Dad. I’ve come about the bike.”

“It makes your legs look enormous,” he said. “You’d be better off with a long coat.”

She’d taken a deep breath in, and repeated slowly: “I’ve come about the bike.”

“It’s outside, next to the garage,” he said. “You’ll have to take it back.”

“What’s the matter with it?”

“Gears keep slipping,” he said from behind the newspaper.

“What? What do you mean?”

He lowered the newspaper slowly and looked at her over the tops of his reading glasses. “It’s a road bike, Taryn.”

She remembered the feeling bubbling up inside her, the frustration and the misery of being spoken to like that. How long would she have to put up with it? “I know what it is. It’s the one you asked for. The one you picked out of the magazine!”

“I don’t want a road bike, I don’t enjoy cycling on the roads. If I wanted to cycle on the roads I would have asked for a road bike, wouldn’t I? I can’t ride that thing through the countryside. It’s not suitable. It’s not appropriate.”

His voice rose over the course of the outburst until he was on the verge of shouting, his face flushed to a deep crimson.

She stared at him for a moment, counting to ten. Then fifteen. Then she looked away, defeated. “All right. I’ll see if I can trade it in for a different one.”

Her father shook the creases out of the newspaper. The matter was closed, resolved to his satisfaction, for the time being at least. He always won. If he didn’t win, he would carry on and on until he could claim the victory in another way.

She’d gone out to the garage and looked at the bike, leaning miserably against the wall with the front wheel turned out at an odd angle, as though it had been casually tossed aside and had slumped down under the weight of its own inadequacies.

It had started to rain by then and she was wondering whether she could fit the bike in if she put the seats down in the car, when Barbara came to the back door with a bag full of bottles for the recycling bin.

“I’ll see you, then,” Taryn had said, with an attempt at a cheerful wave.

“What? You’re not coming back, are you?”

“No. I just meant—never mind.”

Head down against the rain, she’d gone round to the front as the back door slammed shut. She spent a good twenty minutes trying to fit the bike into the car, scraping the skin on her ankle with a pedal, getting grease on her hands and her new wool poncho and the fabric of the backseat, blinded by tears and hating herself for bothering with them; the pair of them, they were as bad as each other. Hateful people!

The next day she had taken the bike back to the shop where she’d bought it, at considerable expense since it wasn’t the cheapest. And despite his protests that it didn’t meet his needs, he had chosen this one specifically, which made it all the more frustrating.

“He says the gears keep slipping,” she’d said.

They took the bike back to examine it and then phoned Taryn at work to tell her the good news. The gears were fine.

When she went back to the shop she asked if there was any way she could exchange it for a mountain bike. The manager showed her round the mountain bike selection and told her he would give her a trade-in value for the road bike. Less than half what she’d paid, and the mountain bikes were much more expensive.

She had wheeled the bike out of the shop and spent another twenty minutes fighting to get it back into her car. Subsequently she chose a Friday lunchtime, when she could be reasonably certain that Barbara would be playing tennis and her father would be at his office, and dumped the bike round the back of the barn. Then put a note through the letterbox, explaining that she couldn’t exchange it, she had tried, and if he wanted to buy himself a mountain bike that was up to him. She had signed it simply “T,” no niceties. And that had been it.

But she’d been working up to seeing him again, working up to contacting him, knowing that the immovable boundary of Christmas was approaching and that someone would have to break the silence and say something about letting bygones be bygones, blood being thicker than water, the wrong time of year to be holding grudges, all of that old nonsense that would still be directed at her as though she were the guilty party.

And now Barbara was dead, and her father was breathing through a machine. She tried to feel sorry. She even tried to feel happy, but that didn’t work either. She couldn’t seem to feel anything apart from tired.

What she had wanted to hear was that he was dead. It was bad of her, very bad, to wish something like that, but it didn’t stop her wishing. And if he was going to die, she wanted it to happen soon so she wouldn’t have to keep going back, day after day. She wanted it to be over with.

Day Two
Friday 2 November 2012

00:52

Flora was in a bar in town, numbing everything from her lips to her heart with alcohol and loud music. At some point she would walk back to the studio, sleep there. Not the flat. It was too full of Polly’s presence, the ghost of her.

Flora could have stayed at the farm; her mother had specifically asked.

“What if I need you, Flora?”

“Need me for what, exactly?” It was like speaking to a petulant child. When she’d been at the wine, their roles were often reversed.

“But what about the horses?”

“The horses are fine. Dad’s here, and that Petrie idiot, if you need him.”

“But Flora . . . Polly . . .”

More tears. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the tears had been for Polly, but they were selfish ones: Felicity was cross that her life had been thrown upside down, that her home had been invaded by police, that Polly had gone and got herself killed and made such a mess in the cottage. And the only way to deal with it was to make it all about herself.

Her mother was pathetic, frustrating, but her father was worse. There was a calmness about him that felt dangerous. The more pressure he felt, the more relaxed he seemed, and today, when they had been taking his fingerprints, police in his house, he had been almost casual. Flora knew how his moods worked, how his temper built, masked by the composure, until a point of no return had been reached. Then his fury was explosive.

Flora left the farm without saying goodbye. They were all busy, anyway.

She’d been approached in the bar several times, propositioned, turned them away. The last one, a bloke twice her size who had also consumed more than his fair share of alcohol, got aggressive when she turned him down, called her a “frigid fucking bitch.” The door staff ejected him, and then came back and asked her to leave too. She’d had enough anyway by then.

The studio was echoing in silence, the only sound the buzzing inside her own head. She curled up on the old sofa, pulled a dust sheet over herself, and sobbed until sleep took her.

05:30

The alarm rang at five thirty, too early, still deeply dark. Lou pressed the snooze button and allowed herself another few minutes. She would feel better after she had been in the shower. As soon as the alarm rang again she got out of bed. If she was late today she would never live it down.

Her mobile was charging downstairs, and already there were two missed calls. One from Andy Hamilton’s mobile, late last night, and one from the office. Nothing on voice mail, so nothing urgent.

Her mind was starting to race ahead. Results from the initial inquiries would be pouring in to the MIR today. Once she had finished the press conference and the results were aired, broadcast, printed, and published, even more would come in. Of course, a lot of it would be worse than useless—the cranks, the would-be investigators, the psychics, the people who only wanted to be helpful, and somewhere, in among it all, would be the crucial bits of information that would lead them to the person who took Polly’s life.

Briefly she wondered about the Fletcher-Normans. Of course it could be something straightforward, with no connection to the Polly Leuchars murder other than a horrible coincidence of time and location. But it felt like an uneasy tangle of events. The forensics would help to sort out one case from the other, and Jason’s reports, once they started to come through. She was lucky to have him; not any old analyst, since they were in such short supply, but one of the seniors. Unhelpful as he’d been during that initial phone call, it was clear that he knew what he was doing, and he was committed enough to the investigation to put in the hours. They weren’t all like that.

Hope I get to keep him
, Lou thought.

07:14

From somewhere far away, Flora could hear her phone ringing. In her dreams she kept answering it, only for there to be no one on the other end.

“Polly?” She woke herself up saying the name out loud, then, as she realized that her mobile was ringing, it stopped.

Moments later it rang again.

“What.” Her voice sounded like it was a long way off, even to her.

“Flora. It’s me. Are you okay?”

Taryn, at last! Her best friend, the only person who would understand the devastation . . .

“Oh, Tabby . . .” Tears started. Only moments since she’d opened her eyes and everything was there despite the headache thumping inside her skull. Polly was dead, Polly was dead . . .

“Flora? What’s the matter? I know about Dad, if that’s what you were calling about. The police came round to work yesterday. I got your messages and—”

“Polly’s dead.”

“Polly? What? Flora, how?”

Flora took a moment, a few deep breaths to steady herself, prepare her voice. “She was murdered, Tabs. Someone hit her on the head. The night before last. They don’t know who. I’ve been trying to ring you, but there were so many people at the farm, and Mum’s gone mental, of course.”

Shocked silence, then: “Barbara’s dead too!”

“What? How? And what’s happened to your dad?”

“I don’t know about Barbara, I didn’t wait for them to tell me. I suppose it was a car crash or something. Dad had a heart attack. He’s in the hospital—they said he’s critical but they don’t know him, do they? He’s a tough old sod . . .” Her voice trailed off. And then: “I didn’t realize. Poor, poor Flora, I’m so sorry about Polly.”

“There’s been nobody I can talk to about it. Mum—well, you know what she’s like. And she found her—Polly, I mean. Oh, Tabs, I missed you so much yesterday.”

“Where are you? Do you want me to come round now?”

Flora ran a hand through her hair. “No, I’ve got to go back to the farm. Maybe—could I come round to yours later? I can’t go back to the flat, and I certainly don’t want to stay with
them
. Would you mind? And what about Chris?”

“Chris won’t mind at all. Have you still got the spare key?”

“Yes.” She had moved in for a fortnight in the summer, when Chris and Taryn had gone to France on holiday, to water the plants, keep an eye on things.

“Well, come round whenever you like. I’ll make the spare bed up later. And, Flora, it will be all right, okay? Everything will work out.”

No, it won’t, Flora thought. How can it be? Nothing could ever be all right again. But what she managed to say was, “Okay. Thanks.”

“Deep breaths, Flora. Yeah? You have to get through this bit. This is the difficult part.”

“At least you haven’t said I told you so.”

“What do you mean?”

“You always said she would break my heart . . .”

There was a pause. The tears were blinding Flora, pouring down her cheeks. She rubbed them away with the back of her hand, sniffed.

“I didn’t mean like this,” Taryn said quietly.

“You never really liked her, did you?”

“You know why that was,” Taryn said, with emphasis.

“She wasn’t flirting with Chris,” Flora said, remembering Taryn’s housewarming dinner party.

“She absolutely bloody was. She flirted with
everyone
, Flora, you know she did.”

“That’s—that’s simply how she was.”

“She wasn’t good enough for you. There. I’ve said it.”

Flora couldn’t speak. It was too much. She hated herself for the high-pitched wail that she couldn’t hold in anymore.

“Oh, Flora, I’m sorry. But you know what she was like; you deserve to be treated better than that. She was beautiful, but you deserve someone who is going to put
you
first, someone who is going to love you properly. I’d rather be honest with you—and I know she hurt you. It wasn’t fair.”