Burial of Ghosts

Chapter Fifteen

They decided to let me go in the end, though I could tell Miles didn’t like it. Even walking to get bailed by the custody sergeant, I was still trying to persuade Farrier that I’d been telling the truth.

‘There was a receptionist at Howdon’s office. Show her my photo. She’ll know me.’

‘Perhaps.’

But I could tell he didn’t hold out much hope. Nor did I. She worked for Howdon, didn’t she? She’d do as she was told.

He felt sorry for me. Like the bystanders that day in Blyth, he thought I was a nutter. He felt a bit foolish because he’d been taken in by my story, but, as I’ve said, he was a kind man. He suggested I make an urgent appointment to see my psychiatrist. ‘No trekking in the Atlas Mountains this time, though, pet, whatever he says. You mustn’t leave the country.’

I nearly told him about the feeling I’d had in Delaval that I was being followed. It was possible that there was someone else in Isabella Street that morning. But I couldn’t. All I’d had was a sense of being watched. Glimpses of shadows. He couldn’t take that seriously and nor could I.

Jess was waiting for me by the front desk. I’d been bailed to stay at her house. She didn’t see me immediately. She was sitting on a padded bench which ran along one wall, staring ahead of her. Not reading or knitting, just sitting, as if sitting was an active pastime in its own right. She was making a statement and she wasn’t going anywhere. Then she saw me and she opened her arms wide.

‘Eh, bonny lass,’ she said. ‘Fancy stumbling on something dreadful like that.’ To show me and the officers with me that she didn’t believe for a minute I was capable of hurting a fly. She never believed any of her lodgers were guilty of the crimes they were charged with, but it was still comforting. She pulled me onto the seat beside her and gave me a hug. I wanted to cry, but I’d save that for later. We stood up together and walked out to the car park, where Ray was waiting patiently in the van.

As we joined the Spine Road a big brown cloud covered the setting sun and the light seeped out from behind.

‘I’ve asked Lisa to pop in,’ Jess said casually. So she intended to treat me as an invalid, not a murderer.

‘Jess, man, it’s eight in the evening. She’ll want to be out.’

Lisa was a party animal. Her idea of business wear was a short leather skirt and fishnet tights, a skimpy cardie which left nothing to the imagination, and a jacket on top to make her look professional. Often she turned up on a visit with a hangover. She’d done a stint attached to the drug and alcohol abuse clinic. ‘I know,’ she said, when I’d pointed out there might be a tad of hypocrisy in her position. ‘I met a couple of patients in the Bigg Market the other weekend and I was in a worse state than they were.’ She’d been brought up in Ashington, had one of those accents which pinpoint where you were born to a couple of streets. During our first session she’d invited me to talk about my family. ‘After all,’ she’d said, ‘our parents are always with us.’ When I’d explained that mine very certainly weren’t, she choked with laughter over one of Jess’s milky coffees and apologized for not having read my notes properly. After that we’d got on fine.

‘She was on call anyway,’ Jess said. The three of us were squashed in the front of the van, with Jess in the middle, and I felt her tense. ‘Humour me, eh, pet? I feel the responsibility, you know. I’d rather have a professional give you the once-over.’

Ray dropped us in the back lane. He wouldn’t come in. He muttered something about his neighbour’s ballcock, but I suspect all the talk of madness was making him feel uncomfortable.

A couple of lodgers were sprawled in front of the telly in the front room. You could tell their minds weren’t on the programme. They’d stayed in especially to find out what had happened with the police. Murder was well outside their league and I sensed a new respect. They were probably disappointed that I was there at all. It would have been much more dramatic if I’d been arrested. Jess got rid of them, bribed them probably with a couple of quid each to spend in the club. Then we sat looking at each other.

‘I spoke to that Mr Farrier,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t think you did it.’

‘No? You could have fooled me.’

She ignored the interruption. ‘Not possible, he said. Time-wise. The boy wasn’t long dead when you found him. Mrs Russo remembered you in the icecream shop. You were sitting there like a wet weekend, she said. Apparently. Then there was that lassie that let you into the house and went up with you. She went in first, didn’t she? She swears you couldn’t have killed him then. So when could you have done it? And what did you do with the knife?’

‘I was at the house earlier. No one was in, but I could have done it then and got rid of the knife.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You were too long in the ice-cream shop. And why would you go back to the house if you’d killed the lad?’

She stared at me. A challenge to be rational. I wondered how she’d got all that out of Farrier. Why had he given away the information? She went on, ‘What were you doing there, anyway?’ So that was it. He’d asked her to find out.

I gave her exactly the same story as I’d given the police. ‘But Farrier doesn’t believe I’d been asked to trace Thomas. He won’t accept that’s why I was there. He thinks I’m crazy. Or lying.’ I paused. ‘Did I show you the letter from the solicitor, Jess? The one telling me about the funeral at Wintrylaw?’

She shook her head slowly. ‘Sorry, pet. I never did see it. You were outside, do you remember, when the postie came. But of course there was a funeral. Why else would you get Ray to take you all that way up the coast? You’d never heard of the place before, had you?’

That was true. Philip had never mentioned it.

Outside in the lane there was the sound of a car being driven too quickly, the painful squeal of brakes. Lisa had arrived.

‘That lass’ll kill herself one day,’ Jess said automatically. It was what she always said. She caught my eye and gave an awkward grin to show she realized she was repeating herself, then stood up to let Lisa into the house.

Tonight Lisa was in casual mode: jeans which seemed moulded to her backside, a sleeveless top and nothing else apparently except short shiny boots with big heels. Jess very obviously left us alone. She said I must be starving – she knew she was – and she’d sort out some food. Lisa seemed to have skipped that part of her training which emphasized the need for a non-judgemental approach, for tact and discretion.

‘What’s been going on, then?’ she demanded. ‘Jess says you’ve not been taking your pills.’ Thanks Jess, I thought. Who else have you told? Perhaps you put a note in the Newbiggin parish magazine?

I explained how good I’d felt in Morocco, how I hadn’t thought I needed them.

‘You’ll need them now.’ No argument, no discussion.

‘Maybe.’

‘No maybe. It’ll be a stressful time. Don’t you think anyone walking into a room and finding what you did would be shocked? For Christ’s sake, Lizzie, accept that you’re human.’

‘Could I have dreamt up my whole reason for being there?’ I asked suddenly. ‘I mean, could it be a symptom of the illness? Like the dreams and the flashbacks.’

‘You’ve not been hearing voices too?’ Jokey, but she really wanted to know. ‘Instructions down the telephone wire? Over the radio?’

I shook my head impatiently.

‘Nah,’ she said. ‘You’ve a perfectly sound grasp on reality. You’ve enough on your plate without going down that road. Trust your own judgement, Lizzie. I believe you.’ Then her pager bleeped and she said she was off to see someone more ill and less stubborn than me.

So I wasn’t mad. Lisa said it, so it must be true. But if I wasn’t mad, Stuart Howdon must be lying. Why would he do that? Did it mean he had killed Thomas? And that idea, that someone as fat and respectable as Stuart Howdon might have stabbed a teenage lad to death, was the craziest thought I’d had all day.

We ate in the kitchen. Soup cooked the day before and heated through. One of Jess’s specials, made from neck of lamb and pearl barley, so thick a spoon would stand upright in it. Jess wanted to ask what Lisa had said and thought she was being tactful for not asking. In fact the silence was as dense as the broth, suffocating, so at last I said, ‘Lisa doesn’t think I’m mad.’

‘Of course she doesn’t, pet.’

It sounded as if she was humouring me. Like I was a kid. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she meant it. But I lost my temper. All the tension of that day in the police station came streaming out of my mouth, all the crap of the last six months. I shouted as loud as I could, filth, words that I hadn’t used since the kids’ home because I knew Jess hated them, because I’d wanted to be different from the dumb-arse morons who couldn’t speak without swearing. She sat there and took it, a gesture as active as her sitting and waiting in the police station. She didn’t move. She just waited for me to stop. It took a long time, minutes that seemed like days, but at last the screams turned to sobs and she gathered me up in her arms and stroked my hair, pushing it behind my ear, away from my forehead.

‘I’ll be good,’ I said. So who was the kid, then? ‘I’ll do what Lisa says.’

Then we opened a bottle of wine and sat together on the sofa, watching a soppy film, just as I’d imagined in the police station.

It must have been midnight when I went up to bed. It was comfortable on the sofa, dozing in front of the story with its impossible happy ending, and I couldn’t quite face being on my own. Jess would have stayed up all night with me, but I knew she’d be tired. One of the lodgers had a New Deal job and she got up every morning to make sure he left the house in time for the bus.

In my room I’d gone beyond the need for sleep. I opened the window wide and looked out over the sea. There was a moon, not quite full, not quite perfectly round. I thought of Philip. Listening to the water stirring up the shingle, I allowed myself a self-indulgent rerun of the last night in Marrakech. At least he would never know how his son had died. I didn’t believe in God and couldn’t imagine them meeting up for a cosy chat in heaven.

I went over the events of the day, trying to make sense of them. Had Philip asked me to trace Thomas because he knew his son was in danger? Had he expected me to protect him? If so, I’d failed him big time.

Come on, Lizzie, dump the guilt. It was something Lisa would say in the sessions when we talked through the mistakes I’d made in the past. I could hear her voice now, persuasive, in my head.

But today I had more to be guilty about, another death on my conscience.

You can’t take responsibility for all the crimes in the world. Another of Lisa’s sayings. If I wasn’t responsible for Thomas’s death, who was? Who had stabbed and cut at him, then slipped into the street just before I’d arrived? Did it really matter? Why should I care?

I did care. I’d let Philip down. I couldn’t let it go.

On the window-sill was a pile of papers, my unofficial in-tray: a tax return form still to be completed, bank statements, something complicated about the local authority pension, the latest sick note. And the letters Dan Meech had given me to deliver to Thomas. I’d forgotten to put them in my bag when I set out that morning. There were three of them. I lay them on the bed and tried to divine from the envelopes what they might contain.

The first was easy. It was a bank statement. I used the same bank and recognized the long white envelope and the return address on the back. The second was postmarked in Whitley Bay. The address was handwritten in spiky italics using a real fountain pen. The third had been typed, but it didn’t look like a circular or junk mail. The address wasn’t printed on one of those labels which spew out of a computer. Then I turned it over and saw a portcullis and a House of Commons stamp on the back. A letter from an MP. Most likely a response to an enquiry Thomas had raised. About what? Homelessness? Dysfunctional families?

I knew exactly what I should do with those letters. I should put them back on the window-sill and in the morning I should phone Mr Farrier and tell him about them. But I left them on the bed and stared at them, as if with enough concentration and willpower I could develop X-ray vision and see what they contained. I found myself calculating the chances that Dan Meech would tell Farrier he’d given them to me. Practically nil. Farrier would talk to Dan, of course. If I hadn’t killed Thomas, the most likely suspect would be one of the kids from the hostel. They’re unstable, the homeless. According to the cops. Capable of anything. But Dan has a memory like a sieve. He’s famous for it. I’m surprised he recognized me that day in the street.

Then I thought, Well, I can give Farrier the bank statement. How interesting can that be? If Dan does remember giving me letters to deliver he won’t remember how many. And at the same time I was thinking again, Why am I doing this? Why interfere? I promised Jess I’d be sensible. The only answer I could come up with was that I wanted to take some control. I hated the sensation of things happening to me.

I opened the handwritten note first. The envelope wasn’t very firmly stuck. I slid my thumb under the flap and separated the gummed paper carefully, managing not to rip the envelope at all. If need be I could restick it and no one would ever know. Inside was a square of red card. Written on it in the same italics were a couple of lines:

I’m really sorry to have given you that grief. Can’t we still be friends? I hope they forward this. Please forgive me.

No name at the top and no signature, but I thought it must be Nell, Thomas’s girlfriend. There was no address for her, which was a bummer, but Dan Meech had mentioned her surname: Ravendale. The family might be in the phone book and it wasn’t a common name. I scribbled Ravendale on the back of the card so I wouldn’t forget it, then realized what I’d done. It would be impossible to hand the thing back to Farrier now without explaining that I’d opened it. Stupid. And why would I want to trace the girl anyway?

I opened the letter from the House of Commons without any attempt to keep the envelope intact. It was from our MP, a woman called Shona Murray, newly elected in a by-election. She had a reputation for being radical and honest, but then she was very new. I’d seen her once on Question Time. I remembered a lot of hair, wild in an untidy, untamed way, not as if some designer had spent hours with a comb and the mousse. I’m not sure what she’d said – pretty much the party line, I think – but she’d impressed me with her humour. She, or more probably her secretary, had written:

Dear Thomas

Thanks so much for the information. I do need of course to be certain of its accuracy before I can use it. I’m sure you understand the responsibility of an MP in a situation like this.

The letter was laser-printed, but Shona Murray had signed it. The use of Thomas’s first name seemed significant. Had there been a regular correspondence? Had they met?

I felt suddenly exhausted. It was too much to take in. I returned the letters and the unopened bank statement to the window-sill. A container ship was moving slowly towards Blyth docks. I didn’t expect to sleep but lost consciousness immediately.