Burial of Ghosts

Chapter Twenty-five

That night Marcus died. An accident apparently.

I found out about it the next day. I’d gone to Whitley to collect my car from outside Nell’s house. On the way there on the bus I’d noticed the inside lane of the Spine Road was closed, but I’d put it down to bridge repairs. There have been roadworks along that stretch for as long as I can remember. Back at Sea View Jess was cooking chilli; you could smell it from the yard, and hear her singing through the open window, so I knew Ray would be there. Chilli’s his favourite and Jess only sings when she’s content. They asked me to eat with them and I said that I would because I like chilli too. As I’ve said before, I’ve got no pride.

She grinned at me, pleased that we’d be playing happy families. ‘It’ll be ten minutes. I’ve got the rice on.’

It would be brown rice. Ray was a health freak and brought it from the wholefood place on Gosforth High Street.

I wandered through to the living room and flicked the local news on the telly. There was a new lass reading the headlines. Young. Bonny. Blond, short hair. I was going to call through to Jess to ask what had happened to the old bald guy who used to do it, when a photograph of Marcus came up onto the screen. He was wearing a white V-necked jersey and looked as if he’d been playing cricket or tennis. I stood there staring at him while she described the accident. He’d driven his car off the bridge on the Spine Road, the high bridge which crosses the River Wansbeck, just before it runs into the sea.

Then Marcus left the screen and there was a shot of his car, hardly recognizable, on the side of the river bank. The incident must have taken place in the early hours of the morning, the reporter said. There were no witnesses. Then she went on to describe the visit of the Princess Royal to a nursery school in Alnwick and Jess called me through for my tea.

What I felt first was a terrible sense of loss. It was entirely selfish. Marcus might have become a friend and now I wouldn’t have the chance to know him better. At that point I didn’t consider his death objectively. It didn’t hit me then that, coming so soon after Thomas’s, it might be more than a terrible coincidence. I didn’t feel in danger myself.

I didn’t mention the accident to Jess and Ray. I didn’t want to talk about it. The next day there were more details in the Journal. The paper had made the link between Marcus and Tom and talked about a tragedy. But the implication was that it had been Marcus’s fault. The tone of the report was sanctimonious. Blood tests showed a high alcohol level. It was understandable that he’d been drinking on the night of his friend’s funeral, but reckless. Someone else could have been killed.

I couldn’t take it in. Nothing seemed to fit. I’d left Marcus at eleven-thirty and there were plenty of cars on the Spine Road then. He’d been drinking earlier in the day, but not as heavily as the rest of us and he’d stopped six hours before. He’d had nothing with me in the house in Delaval. His driving when he’d taken me home had been anything but reckless. He had a new car, properly new, not like mine, another present from Daddy, and he was being very cautious. No way would he have been speeding. Then the old fear came back. Perhaps I wasn’t remembering it properly. Perhaps the confusion was mine. More paranoia.

I was tempted to go to Farrier. I could have explained that Marcus was fine when he left me. But that wouldn’t have explained the alcohol level in his blood. Where had he been? It had been too late for the pub when he left me. Besides, I didn’t want to tell the inspector that I’d been with Marcus just before he died. I could picture him raising his eyebrows and giving me his kind, fatherly look. What is it with you and young lads, Lizzie Bartholomew? You’re the kiss of death to them. I wouldn’t have blamed him. If I’d have been a detective it’d have me suspicious. Besides, all my instincts told me it was crazy to get mixed up voluntarily with the police.

So for two days I sat in Sea View and brooded about it. As Marcus had said, I was given to obsession, even in my well-behaved medication-taking days. If not an accident, then suicide or murder. Suicide because he’d been responsible for Thomas’s death? Or murder because he knew too much about it? I sat at the kitchen table and wrote notes. My writing was very small and cramped, not my usual style at all. I recorded my conversation with Marcus, word for word, as best I could remember it. There’d been a row with Harry Pool, Ronnie Laing had known that Thomas was living with Marcus but hadn’t passed on the information to Kay, Tom had seen his work at the Countryside Consortium as a crusade. Was there anything else? Anything I’d missed?

Jess hovered around me at this time, brewing tea and feeding me home-made cake, growing more concerned. On the third day she brought herself to speak. ‘You should get out, pet. I’m no company for you. Go and spend some time with your friends. What about that nice lad who brought you the flowers?’

She meant Dan. I presumed he’d still be working in Absalom House. With Ellen. Like a shock, I remembered the conversation we’d had in the pub on the afternoon of Thomas’s funeral. ‘He was troubled,’ Ellen had said, as she gripped my arm. Perhaps he’d talked to her, given her more than the few hints he’d dropped to Marcus Tate.

She answered the phone herself when I rang the hostel.

‘It’s Lizzie Bartholomew,’ I said. ‘I wondered if I might come and talk to you. As we agreed.’

‘Yes, yes.’ The same double hiss which was a habit of speech, almost a nervous tic. ‘As soon as you like. Whenever you can.’

‘Can I buy you lunch somewhere? It might be easier to talk away from Absalom House.’ There’d be fewer interruptions, I thought. No one to overhear. No Dan to stir up memories.

She suggested a coffee shop in Cullercoats, not far from the sea front. We arranged to meet at twelve; she had a meeting in the afternoon. I offered to postpone to a more convenient day but she was insistent. ‘Today,’ she said. ‘I want to meet today.’ When I replaced the receiver I felt lighter, as if a terrible headache had begun to clear. Relief, perhaps, at being able to walk away from my writing. Jess watched me leave the house with a mixture of anxiety and pride, like a mother sending her child to school for the first time. She was pleased I’d taken her advice but not sure I was fit to be let out alone.

Ellen was already there when I arrived. I saw her hair from the street. She was at a table in the bay window and seemed lost in thought. She didn’t notice me until I joined her. It was one of those places where all the staff and most of the customers are over fifty. Restful, but irritating if you’re in a hurry. We ordered coffee and sandwiches and then we were left alone for twenty minutes to talk.

‘You said that Thomas was troubled. What did you mean?’ I had a notebook and pen. It wasn’t just that I wanted to look the part. I didn’t want to take any chances with my memory.

‘I’m not sure this should go into the article,’ she said. ‘Not specific details. It wouldn’t be fair. To him or his family.’

‘Off the record, then.’ I said, closing the notebook.

‘Thomas came to me for advice,’ Ellen said. ‘He was concerned that our conversation should be confidential. I haven’t been to the police. It hardly seems relevant to his death. But it makes a general point which I’d like you to put in your piece. It shows what a responsibility parents have for their children, even when they’re older. It shows how careful we have to be. How thoughtful. We can’t take them for granted.’

I wondered again about her own son. What had she done to drive him onto the streets. Probably nothing. Nothing terrible. But she’d felt guilty for thirty years.

‘I wouldn’t submit anything without showing you first.’

‘He didn’t get on with his stepfather.’

So, I thought, tell me something I don’t know.

‘I had gathered that.’ I said it gently, though. Social work had taught me patience. People have to tell their stories in their own ways.

Ellen took a packet of cigarettes from her bag. She set it on the table and looked at it. ‘It made him fantasize about his natural father. Who he might be. Thomas had got it into his head that it might be a man of some importance, some wealth. He was desperate to trace him.’

‘Had his mother never told him his father’s name?’

‘Never. All the time he was growing up, he was just told it was someone she’d worked with when she had a part-time job. The grandparents had been given the same story. According to Thomas, they’d assumed the father was a student too, but his mother wouldn’t even confirm that to him. Thomas couldn’t let it go. He pushed and pushed to know.’

‘Is that why she threw him out of the house?’

‘He believed that had something to do with it.’ Ellen paused as a flat-footed middle-aged woman approached. She was dressed in the sort of nylon overall I’d made Jess throw away. In slow motion she put a pot of coffee and two cups and saucers on the table, then walked off. Ellen watched until she was out of earshot and continued. ‘He felt it as a terrible injustice. He thought he had a right to know, that his father would want to meet him and his mother had deliberately kept them apart.’

‘Perhaps she was doing it to protect Thomas. If she knew the father wasn’t interested…’

‘Of course. I explained that. But he couldn’t accept it.’

I couldn’t accept it either. Philip had been thinking of Thomas before he died. He was a kind man. It might have been difficult for his wife and family, but he would have wanted to get to know the boy.

‘I think he’d guessed, or believed he’d guessed, the identity of his father,’ Ellen said. ‘He hinted as much just before he left Absalom House.’ I expected her to mention Marcus Tate’s death then, but she said nothing. Perhaps Thomas had never told her Marcus’s name, so the report of the accident meant nothing to her. Perhaps she hadn’t heard about it.

‘Did he tell you his father’s name?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He wanted to be sure before he told anyone. There was someone he needed to talk to, he said, to confirm it. And it wasn’t my place to pry.’

She broke off again as the waitress appeared with our food. Thoughts were tumbling into my head. I would have liked to write them down but Ellen would have been suspicious of that. Perhaps this was the explanation for Thomas’s interest in the Countryside Consortium. If someone had led him to believe that Philip was his father, he might have seen it as a way of getting close to the Samson family. Joanna’s name appeared on all the publicity material. It would be a big step to confront a stranger with the knowledge that you were his son. He might want to see something of the man first.

Ellen set down her tuna sandwich. ‘Do you think he found his father before he died?’ she asked. ‘Oh, I do hope he did.’

‘Is there anyone else he might have confided in?’

She shook her head. Her eyes were big and brown. Watery. Cow’s eyes. ‘He didn’t have many friends. Not real friends. So few of them do.’

‘There was Nell.’

‘I’m not sure he’d have talked to her.’

‘Why?’

She didn’t give a direct answer. ‘I never cared for Nell, even before she left Thomas for Daniel.’

‘What was the problem?’

‘She’s too intense. Driven. And too bright. Thomas never thought he was good enough for her. He couldn’t compete.’

‘Did he have any good friends at Absalom House?’ I was thinking of the dark girls I’d seen in the room next to his. The sisters with the white scarves. Had he confided in them?

‘He wasn’t there for very long,’ Ellen said. ‘And of course he was working, out all day…’

‘Did you ever meet Marcus Tate, the lad he moved in with?’

She shook her head.

‘What about his employer? How did they get on?’ This was fishing, but I was starting to feel desperate. I wanted to find out if Ellen knew about a row between Thomas and Harry Pool. If Tom had confided in her about personal stuff, his father, she could know what he’d meant in his whistle-blowing letter to Shona Murray.

‘Something was going on at work.’ It came out in a rush and she seemed to regret her words almost immediately.

‘What sort of something?’

She paused and again I had the impression that she wished she hadn’t raised the matter. ‘I wondered if he was being bullied. The men who turned up for his funeral seemed pleasant enough, but it’s possible they weren’t all like that. Some days when he got in he was angry. He wouldn’t talk about it, but I know he wasn’t happy there.’

‘Perhaps he was bored, frustrated. It can’t have been a very exciting job.’

‘There was more to it than that.’

I pressed her for details but she insisted that there was nothing else to tell. She’d worked with young people long enough to pick up the signals. Something at Pool’s was causing Thomas stress. She finished eating before I did and hurried off, mumbling something about the trustees’ AGM. She seemed anxious to leave. Her attitude puzzled me. I thought I hadn’t handled the meeting well. She’d seemed to distrust me. In the pub after the funeral she’d seemed desperate to talk to me, yet today she’d given me nothing but gossip, opinions. I was left wondering if I could believe any of her ramblings. Perhaps she’d wanted to appear more important to Thomas than she’d ever really been. Perhaps she was just a lonely old woman who wanted someone new to share her guilt with.