Guilty One

9

In the car, Daniel drove above the speed limit, the windows open again, enjoying the fresh air and taking deep breaths that stretched his diaphragm. He frowned at the road, trying to understand why he had been so upset at the funeral, and then so angry at Cunningham. It had been childish and emotional. He berated himself, gently cursing under his breath as he drove.

Now that he was on the road again, he felt better: relaxed but tired. Brampton was a downer; the distractions of work still seemed far away. He took another deep breath and wondered if it was the scent of manure doping him. He should have taken the M6 straight down to London – he wanted to be home before dark – but he found himself just driving with the window open, smelling the fields, observing the small houses and remembering places he had visited as a child.

He found himself on the A69, almost by accident, and then he was trapped in traffic, with Newcastle ahead of him. Daniel had not intended a detour, but there was something that he wanted to see again; something he needed to do, today of all days.

Daniel drove into the city and past the university, out on to the Jesmond Road. He drove much slower here, almost in fear of arrival.

When he got out of the car, the sun was hidden behind cloud. He was mindful of the long drive ahead of him, yet he wanted to stay and see her one more time.

The entrance to the cemetery was a maternal arch of red sandstone and he found himself drawn into its depths. He knew where to go; he had followed the path with teenaged footsteps, finding the place where she was laid to rest.

Daniel was surprised how quickly he found her gravestone. Its white marble was now discoloured and stained. The black-painted letters of her name had almost entirely flaked away, so that from a distance her name read Sam Gerald Hunt, instead of Samantha Geraldine Hunter. Daniel sighed, with his hands in his pockets.

It was a simple cross, with gravel at its foot, so as to negate the need for flowers, upkeep, protestations of love.

Rocking on his heels before the grave, Daniel thought about the words from Minnie’s ceremony: Commit. Body. Elements. Earthly. Dust. Ashes. Trust. Mercy. He remembered standing before this grave as a younger man, feeling wounded because his own name was not engraved on the cheap marble. He had wanted it to read Loving Mother to Daniel Hunter. Had she been a loving mother? Had she loved him at all?

He had been angry about this death for a long time, but now he stood unmoved by the fact that his name was not on the gravestone. He knew that he shared DNA with the bones below his feet, but he had no need for these bones any longer.

He thought of Minnie, immolated and cast on the wind. In his mind he could smell her, feel the chuff of her cardigan on his cheek, and see the glee in her watery blue eyes. Like the present itself he would chase her, ephemeral, like the ever un-snatchable now. Years he had shunned her, but now she was gone: not in the old house, not in the farm, not in the cemetery, not in her sister’s eyes. Minnie had disappeared from the earth without so much as a piece of marble sitting dumbly to tell of her passing.

Daniel remembered crying at this grave. Now he stood with eyes dry and hands in pockets. He could remember Minnie more easily than he could recall his own mother. He had been so little when he last lived with his mother. For years their meetings had been fraught and brief. He had run to her and been dragged away.

He had stayed with Minnie. She had been with him as a child, a teenager and a young man. Now that she was gone he felt strangely calm, but alone: more alone than he had before he knew of her death. It was this that he could not fathom. She had been lost to him years before, and yet now he felt her loss.

Losses should not be weighed, he thought. And yet now, considering the loss of both his mothers, he felt Minnie’s loss the greater.

Driving back to London, Daniel stopped at the service station at Donnington Park. He bought petrol and a coffee and then checked his phone for the first time since he had left.

There were three missed calls from work. Sipping lukewarm coffee and inhaling petrol fumes, Daniel called Veronica. He sat in the driver’s seat with the door open, listening to the hoarse whisper of the motorway behind him.

‘Are you all right?’ said Veronica. ‘We’ve been trying to get in touch with you. You are not going to believe this … How was your funeral, by the way, not someone close, was it?’

Daniel cleared his throat. ‘No … no, what’s happened?’

‘You’ve not been answering your phone!’

‘Yeah, I … turned it off. I had stuff to deal with.’

‘You have the Sebastian Croll case back if you want it. Will you take it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Kenneth King Croll is well connected.’

Daniel rubbed a hand across his jaw. He hadn’t shaved and he felt the stubble against his palm.

‘The case ended up with McMann Walkers, but … believe it or not, Sebastian wouldn’t work with them. He had a massive tantrum and said he would only have you as his solicitor!’

‘Why wouldn’t Seb work with them – what did they do?’

‘Well, the solicitor from McMann Walkers went to see Sebastian the day after you left. I know him, Doug Brown, apparently he’s an old school pal of Croll’s …

‘Anyway, I don’t have all the details, but Sebastian was very rude to him. His parents stepped in but then Sebastian started screaming and shouting and saying that he wanted you back. He actually asked for you – for his lawyer, Daniel.’ Veronica twittered with laughter. ‘In the end it was so bad that McMann Walkers turned it down. I’ve had that King Kong bloke, whatever you call him … calling me non-stop. They want you back to keep Sebastian happy.’

Daniel finished his coffee and bit his lip. He had felt an urge to protect the boy, to save him. Sebastian was the same age that Daniel had been when he stood in Minnie’s kitchen for the first time. But now Minnie was gone and Daniel felt drained. He wasn’t sure that he was ready for the case.

‘So, will you take it back?’ asked Veronica. Her clear voice was insistent. ‘I looked at the brief and it seems strong.’

‘Of course I’ll take it,’ said Daniel, but the words were robbed from his lips. The motorway growled behind him and he turned from its callous, aberrant noise.

‘Great. Will you call Irene’s chambers tomorrow? Make sure she and her junior are still available? I would have approached her, but I wanted to check with you first.’

Daniel drove fast, leaving the north behind him. He stopped off at the office to pick up Sebastian’s case notes. It was late, and as he walked through the office’s surreally quiet spaces, he felt relieved that none of his colleagues was there.

The day was waning when he finally returned to Bow. He picked up a takeaway in South Hackney and then found a parking space not far from his flat on Old Ford Road. The sun was setting on Victoria Park, the pond with its fountain like a watery sundial reflecting the bloodied sky. He could smell the vestiges of barbecues in the air. Opening the boot of his car, he lifted out the box that Cunningham had given him and walked to the flat chin-down, the box in one hand and the takeaway and his keys in the other.

He felt strangely deflated, the empty farmhouse inside him still, creaking with her loss. He heard notes again, painful as exposed bone. They chimed cold and hard.

He put the box on the kitchen table but still did not open it to see what it contained. Instead, he ate his curry quickly, hunched over the table in the box’s shadow, then had a shower. He made the shower too hot and leaned into the jet, holding on to the nozzle with both hands. His skin stung as he towelled himself dry. He stood naked in the bathroom, looking at his face in the mirror as his skin chilled, and thought of the kestrel he had seen hovering over the Brampton moors. He felt himself to be alone and unyielding, stiffening his wings and rising on a thermal.

The last two days left him cowed, but he didn’t know if it was fear of the boy’s case and all that it implied, or fear of her loss – fear of life knowing that she was gone; he didn’t need to ignore her any more.

Loss. Daniel considered as he rubbed a hand across his chin and chose not to shave. Loss. He wrapped a towel around his waist and exhaled. Loss. It was like everything else. It could be practised. He almost did not feel it any more. His mother was gone and now Minnie was gone; he would be fine.

Daniel dressed and began to leaf through Sebastian’s case. He hoped that Irene would still be free and willing to take it on. He would call her clerk first thing. He and Irene had worked closely on several cases but particularly on Tyrel’s gang shooting the previous year. They had both been devastated when Tyrel was convicted.

The last time he had seen her was at the party to celebrate her promotion to QC in March, although he had barely managed to say two words to her. She was a Londoner, born in Barnes, and several years older than Daniel, but she had read Law in Newcastle. She liked to try to impress him with her Geordie. Daniel couldn’t bear to think of anyone else defending Sebastian.

Alone in the flat, Daniel found that he couldn’t sleep, so he settled down to work. His clerk had already watched the CCTV tapes which had been released to the defence through disclosure. Daniel watched them again, in case they had missed something. During the day, the cameras were mostly facing Copenhagen Street and Barnsbury Road, turning to focus on the park after 7 p.m. Daniel fast-forwarded to flashes of the park, but there were no unaccompanied children, no one else who seemed suspicious.

It was after one o’clock in the morning when he finished writing notes on Sebastian’s defence and only then did he lift the lid of the cardboard box which Minnie had left for him. It contained what he expected: his school photographs, photos of picnics on the beach at Tynemouth. There were his medals from primary school and prizes from secondary school, drawings and paintings that he had done for her as a child, an old address book of Minnie’s.

There was the framed photograph that had sat on her mantelpiece, showing Minnie with her daughter and her husband. Her husband was holding the little girl in his arms and she was blowing bubbles that drifted over Minnie’s face. As a child Daniel had marvelled at this picture, because of Minnie’s youth. She was slimmer, with short, dark hair and a large white smile. He had to look carefully at the photograph to find her features as he knew them.

At the bottom of the box, Daniel’s fingers found something cold and hard. He finished his beer as he liberated the object from the cardboard depths.

It was the porcelain butterfly, its blue and yellow brighter than he remembered. It seemed cheap. There was a chip on the wing but it was otherwise undamaged. Daniel held it in his palm.

He thought about her gathering up these things and putting them aside for him, about her illness and how that would have manifested. He imagined her asking the nurse to help her sit up in her hospital bed, so that she could write to him. He could almost see her, making small sighs at the effort, the shine of her blue eyes as she signed the letter, Mam. She had known then she was dying. She had known that she would never see him again.

He tried hard to remember the last time he had spoken to her. All these years but never a birthday or a Christmas passed without her cards and phone calls. Last Christmas he had gone skiing in France. She had left two messages and sent a card with a twenty-pound cheque inside. As he always did, he deleted the messages, ripped up the cheque and put the card straight into the bin. He felt a twinge of guilt at the aggression implied in these acts.

It would have been on his birthday in April when he had spoken to her last. He had been in a rush; otherwise he would have checked and seen her number before he picked up the telephone. He had been late home from work and was now late for dinner.

‘It’s me, love,’ she had said. Always she spoke with the same familiarity, as if they had seen each other only last week. ‘I just wanted to wish you happy birthday.’

‘Thanks,’ he had said, the muscle in his jaw throbbing. ‘I can’t talk now, I’m trying to go out.’

‘Of course. Going somewhere nice, I hope.’

‘No, it’s a work thing.’

‘Oh, I see. And how is your work? Are you still enjoying it?’

‘Look, when are you going to stop?’ he had shouted. She had said nothing. ‘I don’t want to speak to you.’

Daniel remembered waiting for a response before he hung up. She might have known about the cancer by then. He had hung up but then thought about her for the rest of the night, his stomach tight with anger. Or had it been guilt?

The music from the funeral was still lilting in his mind. He remembered Harriet’s accusing tones, as if it had been his fault, as if Minnie had been blameless. Daniel doubted that she would have told Harriet what she had done. Harriet thought he was ungrateful, but he was the one who had been wronged.

Now, Daniel held up the butterfly to look at it. He remembered standing in Minnie’s kitchen for the first time and holding a knife to her face, the hard, unflinching look in her eyes. It was that he had first loved about her: her fearlessness.

Daniel’s thoughts turned to Sebastian. He wondered what the boy had seen in him, why he had insisted on him as his lawyer. He stroked the butterfly one more time with his thumb and then placed it gently on the coffee table.