Guilty One

EPILOGUE

The rain had just stopped when Daniel pulled into Brampton. He felt a rare calm settle on him. Until he reached Cumbria, the trial had been on his mind.

He was not sure if he had ever thought Sebastian innocent. It had never mattered to him beyond the case. But now that the little boy was free and had admitted his guilt, Daniel felt responsible. He thought again about Paul and Madeline Stokes, their grief adrift without the rudder of conviction. The child needed help, but Daniel’s role in that was now over. He could only hope that the case conference members and the professionals who had been involved with Sebastian so far would realise what he needed.

If the verdict had been different, Daniel knew that he would not feel better. His experience of secure units, juvenile detention centres and prisons had shown him that however damaged juveniles had been in the past, however desperate their problems, they would only be made worse in the places they would be sent for punishment and rehabilitation.

Now that he was in Brampton, Sebastian seemed far away: painfully faint, like a note he had to strain to hear. It was nearly winter now, and Brampton’s trees had been blown free of their leaves. The naked trees stood stark against the sky, like lungs. He heard the rain splash against the tyres of his car as he drove into the village. He took a breath and held it, wondering what rare change would have been possible if Sebastian had known a Minnie.

He tried to push aside thoughts of the boy. He remembered the taste of Irene’s lips from the evening before and smiled.

He pulled up outside the farm. The yard had been tidied and the old shed had been removed. The garden had been dug and the grass at the front cut. Daniel inhaled the clean smell of the earth. The air was cold and so he took out his key and stepped inside the farmhouse, for the last time.

It was different from before. There was almost no trace of her now. The floors were spotlessly clean and the bathroom and kitchen smelled of bleach. He had never seen the old electric cooker shining so white. He ran his forefinger along it, remembering the meals she had cooked for him: shepherd’s pie, fish and chips, roast beef and Yorkshire puddings.

The windows had been painted. The table was clear and the fridge open and clean. He would meet Cunningham later to exchange the contracts and hand over the keys. He remembered coming to the empty house a few months before, still angry with her, aching but not acknowledging her loss – asking for all her things to be thrown away, professionally cleared. Now he wished to see the newspaper she had been reading, her jars of odd buttons, her old clothes, her vinyl records which had not to be marked with fingerprints, the animals that had shared her life while he had scorned her.

Daniel’s throat hurt. He opened the door to the living room. It was empty: gone her old couch, gone her old-fashioned television and video recorder, gone her photographs and pictures, gone the footstool on which she would rest her thick-skinned, hard-nailed feet.

The floorboards were scuffed from the feet of the piano, the wood darker where the body of the instrument had shaded the floor from the light. Daniel covered his eyes with both hands. I’m sorry, Mam, he whispered in the quiet empty farmhouse, his throat tight as hot tears flashed across his cheeks. Forgive me.

Her bare feet pumped the pedals, her knees apart and the material of her skirt falling in between her thighs. She straightened her shoulders and leaned back with a laugh as she struck the keys.

‘When did you learn to play the piano?’ he asked her. He was lying on the couch watching her with his hands behind his head.

‘When I was a child. My father liked to play and he taught both us girls … and he would take us to concerts … and make us sit still with our fingers on our lips listening to his records. Some of those records in there belonged to him, and I listened to them when I was a little girl.’ Minnie leaned towards Daniel as she spoke, right hand tinkling up the keys, her left forefinger pressed against her lips. ‘Would you like me to teach you?’

He shook his head. ‘Did your daughter play the piano?’

She didn’t answer.

He still didn’t understand about the little girl whose butterfly he had tried to steal, but each time he saw the butterfly he thought of her.

‘She could play a little,’ was all she said, and then she started to play again, loudly, so that he could feel the vibrations through the couch. It made his scalp itch. He watched her, as her cheeks reddened and her eyes misted with tears. But then, like always, she threw back her head and laughed. She looked out of the window, her strong hands heavy on the keys.

‘Ach, come on will you now, Danny. Sit down here beside me and let me see what you can do.’

Again he shook his head.

‘I heard you playing the other week, you know. You thought I was outside but I heard you try. It won’t break, you know. I can teach you how to play a tune, or you can just do your thing. It doesn’t matter. It just feels nice to make a noise sometimes. It stops the noise in your head. You’ll see. Come and sit beside me …’

She moved over on the long piano stool, and patted the spot beside her. It was only a fortnight since he had been beaten up and run away to his mother’s. His nose still felt funny and he sniffed as he sat down beside her and looked at the keys. He could smell the damp wool of her and feel the soft cushion of her hip against his.

‘Do you want me to teach you a wee easy song, or do you just want to make a noise, like? Both are fine with me.’

‘Teach me something, then,’ he said quietly, letting his fingers fall on the keys. He listened to the lonely, hollow notes that sounded.

‘Right, well, if you look at the keyboard, you have your black and you have your white keys. What do you notice about the way the black keys are grouped?’

Daniel stroked a finger across the black keys. ‘Some are in twos, some are in threes.’

‘God, you’re a smarty-pants, aren’t you now. Why don’t you teach me to play the bloody piano?’ She laughed and Daniel turned to smile up at her. From this angle he could see the space in her teeth: her missing tooth was on the top, near the molar.

‘And now listen to this.’ She reached to the right side of the piano, stretching across him so that her face was close to his. She struck the keys and then ran her fingers down the keyboard and struck the keys at the very left of the piano. ‘What do you notice about the difference in the sound?’ she said, leaning close to him, so that he could see the dark blue rings around her pale blue eyes. They were like marbles, hard and clear.

‘That’s low and that’s high,’ he said, pointing at either end of the piano.

‘Right you are, high on the right and low on the left – sure but you’re a natural. Now, we’ll try a duet.’

She took time to show him the high keys of the piano, numbering them one, two, and three, in the order that she wanted him to play them, and then she started to play a tune at the low end of the piano. She showed him when to push down on the keys, trying to get him to use a three-finger action, but he preferred to stab with his forefinger, enjoying the chill note that he produced.

They did that for a few minutes, with her playing the song on the left of the keyboard and elbowing him in the ribs and shouting now, now, with her strange Irish vowels, when she wanted him to play the notes she had taught him at his end. She told him the song was called ‘Heart and Soul’.

But he tired of it, and slammed the keys with his palms. Tring tring tring, up and down. He expected anger from her. He still didn’t know her well. He looked up into her eyes, but they were wide with glee. She slammed her own palms down on the low keys, so that the grave noise chimed with his high-pitched squeals and yelps. It was a duet all the same. The noise chased Blitz from the room, and she started singing at the top of her voice, any old words and so did he, until he was hoarse and until they were half deaf and tears ran down both their cheeks with laughter.

Then they were still, and she pressed him into her. He was tired and he allowed it. As the ringing subsided in his ears, a thought came to him sharp and clear as the high note on the piano. He liked her, and he wanted to stay. The thought resonated in his head and it made him quiet. He smoothed the ivory-coated wood of the piano, his fingers still tingling from the bashing he had given the keys.