The Casual Vacancy

I

Samantha Mollison had now bought herself all three of the DVDs released by Libby’s favourite boy band. She kept them hidden in her socks and tights drawer, beside her diaphragm. She had her story ready, if Miles spotted them: they were a gift for Libby. Sometimes at work, where business was slower than ever, she searched the internet for pictures of Jake. It was during one of these trawling sessions – Jake in a suit but with no shirt, Jake in jeans and a white vest – that she discovered that the band was playing at Wembley in a fortnight’s time.

She had a friend from university who lived in West Ealing. She could stay over, sell it to Libby as a treat, a chance to spend time together. With more genuine excitement than she had felt in a long time, Samantha managed to buy two very expensive tickets for the concert. When she let herself into the house that evening, she glowed with a delicious secret, almost as though she were coming home from a date.

Miles was already in the kitchen, still in his work suit, with the phone in his hand. He stared at her as she entered, and his expression was strange, difficult to read.

‘What?’ said Samantha, a little defensively.

‘I can’t get hold of Dad,’ said Miles. ‘His bloody phone’s engaged. There’s been another post.’

And when Samantha looked nonplussed, he said with a trace of impatience, ‘Barry Fairbrother’s Ghost! Another message! On the council website!’

‘Oh,’ said Samantha, unwinding her scarf. ‘Right.’

‘Yeah, I met Betty Rossiter just now, coming up the street; she was full of it. I’ve checked the message board, but I can’t see it. Mum must’ve taken it down already – well, I bloody hope she has, she’ll be in the firing line if Bends-Your-Ear goes to a lawyer.’

‘About Parminder Jawanda, was it?’ asked Samantha, her tone deliberately casual. She did not ask what the accusation had been, first, because she was determined not to be a nosy, gossiping old bag like Shirley and Maureen, and secondly, because she thought she already knew: that Parminder had caused the death of old Cath Weedon. After a moment or two, she asked, sounding vaguely amused, ‘Did you say your mother might be in the firing line?’

‘Well, she’s the site administrator, so she’s liable if she doesn’t get rid of defamatory or potentially defamatory statements. I’m not sure she and Dad understand how serious this could be.’

‘You could defend your mother, she’d like that.’

But Miles had not heard; he was pressing redial and scowling, because his father’s mobile was still engaged.

‘This is getting serious,’ he said.

‘You were all quite happy when it was Simon Price who was getting attacked. Why’s this any different?’

‘If it’s a campaign against anyone on the council, or standing for council…’

Samantha turned away to hide her grin. His concern was not about Shirley after all.

‘But why would anyone write stuff about you?’ she asked innocently. ‘You haven’t got any guilty secrets.’

You might be more bloody interesting if you had.

‘What about that letter?’

‘What letter?’

‘For God’s – Mum and Dad said there was a letter, an anonymous letter about me! Saying I wasn’t fit to fill Barry Fairbrother’s shoes!’

Samantha opened the freezer and stared at the unappetizing contents, aware that Miles could no longer see her expression with the door open.

‘You don’t think anyone’s got anything on you, do you?’ she asked.

‘No – but I’m a lawyer, aren’t I? There might be people with a grudge. I don’t think this kind of anonymous stuff… I mean, so far it’s all about the other side, but there could be reprisals… I don’t like the way this thing’s going.’

‘Well, that’s politics, Miles,’ said Samantha, openly amused. ‘Dirty business.’

Miles stalked out of the room, but she did not care; her thoughts had already returned to chiselled cheekbones, winged eyebrows and taut, tight abdominal muscles. She could sing along with most of the songs now. She would buy a band T-shirt to wear – and one for Libby too. Jake would be undulating mere yards away from her. It would be more fun than she had had in years.

Howard, meanwhile, was pacing up and down the closed delicatessen with his mobile phone clamped to his ear. The blinds were down, the lights were on, and through the archway in the wall Shirley and Maureen were busy in the soon-to-be-opened café, unpacking china and glasses, talking in excited undertones and half listening to Howard’s almost monosyllabic contributions to his conversation.

‘Yes… mm, hmm… yes…’

‘Screaming at me,’ said Shirley. ‘Screaming and swearing. “Take it bloody down,” she said. I said, “I’m taking it down, Dr Jawanda, and I’ll thank you not to swear at me.”’

‘I’d’ve left it up there for another couple of hours if she’d sworn at me,’ said Maureen.

Shirley smiled. As it happened, she had chosen to go and make herself a cup of tea, leaving the anonymous post about Parminder up on the site for an extra forty-five minutes before removing it. She and Maureen had already picked over the topic of the post until it was ragged and bare; there was plenty of scope for further dissection, but the immediate urge was sated. Instead, Shirley looked ahead, greedily, to Parminder’s reaction to having her secret spilt in public.

‘It can’t have been her who did that post about Simon Price, after all,’ said Maureen.

‘No, obviously not,’ said Shirley, as she wiped over the pretty blue and white china that she had chosen, overruling Maureen’s preference for pink. Sometimes, though not directly involved in the business, Shirley liked to remind Maureen that she still had huge influence, as Howard’s wife.

‘Yes,’ said Howard, on the telephone. ‘But wouldn’t it be better to…? Mm, hmm…’

‘So who do you think it is?’ asked Maureen.

‘I really don’t know,’ said Shirley, in a genteel voice, as though such knowledge or suspicions were beneath her.

‘Someone who knows the Prices and the Jawandas,’ said Maureen.

‘Obviously,’ said Shirley again.

Howard hung up at last.

‘Aubrey agrees,’ he told the two women, waddling through into the café. He was clutching today’s edition of the Yarvil and District Gazette. ‘Very weak piece. Very weak indeed.’

It took the two women several seconds to recollect that they were supposed to be interested in the posthumous article by Barry Fairbrother in the local newspaper. His ghost was so much more interesting.

‘Oh, yes; well, I thought it was very poor when I read it,’ said Shirley, hurriedly catching up.

‘The interview with Krystal Weedon was funny,’ guffawed Maureen. ‘Making out she enjoyed art. I suppose that’s what she calls graffiti-ing the desks.’

Howard laughed. As an excuse to turn her back, Shirley picked up Andrew Price’s spare EpiPen from the counter, which Ruth had dropped into the delicatessen that morning. Shirley had looked up EpiPens on her favourite medical website, and felt fully competent to explain how adrenalin worked. Nobody asked, though, so she put the small white tube away in the cupboard and closed the door as noisily as she could to try and disrupt Maureen’s further witticisms.

The phone in Howard’s huge hand rang.

‘Yes, hello? Oh, Miles, yes… yes, we know all about it… Mum saw it this morning…’ He laughed. ‘Yes, she’s taken it down… I don’t know… I think it was posted yesterday… Oh, I wouldn’t say that… we’ve all known about Bends-Your-Ear for years…’

But Howard’s jocularity faded as Miles talked. After a while he said, ‘Ah… yes, I see. Yes. No, I hadn’t considered it from… perhaps we should get someone to have a look at security…’

The sound of a car in the darkening square outside went virtually unremarked by the three in the delicatessen, but its driver noticed the enormous shadow of Howard Mollison moving behind the cream blinds. Gavin put his foot down, eager to get to Mary. She had sounded desperate on the telephone.

‘Who’s doing this? Who’s doing it? Who hates me this much?’

‘Nobody hates you,’ he had said. ‘Who could hate you? Stay there… I’m coming over.’

He parked outside the house, slammed the door and hurried up the footpath. She opened the front door before he had even knocked. Her eyes were puffy with tears again, and she was wearing a floor-length woollen dressing gown that dwarfed her. It was not at all seductive; the very antithesis of Kay’s scarlet kimono, but its homeliness, its very shabbiness, represented a new level of intimacy.

Mary’s four children were all in the sitting room. Mary gestured him through into the kitchen.

‘Do they know?’ he asked her.

‘Fergus does. Somebody at school told him. I’ve asked him not to tell the others. Honestly, Gavin… I’m about at the end of my tether. The spite—’

‘It isn’t true,’ he said, and then, his curiosity getting the better of him, ‘is it?’

‘No!’ she said, outraged. ‘I mean… I don’t know… I don’t really know her. But to make him talk like that… putting the words in his mouth… don’t they care what it’s like for me?’

She dissolved into tears again. He felt that he shouldn’t hug her while she was wearing her dressing gown, and was glad that he had not, when eighteen-year-old Fergus entered the kitchen a moment later.

‘Hey, Gav.’

The boy looked tired, older than his years. Gavin watched him put an arm around Mary and saw her lean her head against his shoulder, mopping her eyes on her baggy sleeve like a child.

‘I don’t think it was the same person,’ Fergus told them, without preamble. ‘I’ve been looking at it again. The style of the message is different.’

He had it on his mobile phone, and began to read aloud:

‘“Parish Councillor Dr Parminder Jawanda, who pretends to be so keen on looking after the poor and needy of the area, has always had a secret motive. Until I died—”’

‘Fergus, don’t,’ said Mary, slumping down at the kitchen table. ‘I can’t take it. I honestly can’t. And his article in the paper today too.’

As she covered her face with her hands and sobbed silently, Gavin noticed the Yarvil and District Gazette lying there. He never read it. Without asking or offering, he moved across to the cupboard to make her a drink.

‘Thanks, Gav,’ she said thickly, when he pushed the glass into her hand.

‘It might be Howard Mollison,’ suggested Gavin, sitting down beside her. ‘From what Barry said about him.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Mary, dabbing at her eyes. ‘It’s so crude. He never did anything like that when Barry was –’ she hiccuped ‘– alive.’ And then she snapped at her son, ‘Throw that paper away, Fergus.’

The boy looked confused and hurt.

‘It’s got Dad’s—’

‘Throw it away!’ said Mary, with an edge of hysteria in her voice. ‘I can read it off the computer if I want to, the last thing he ever did – on our anniversary!’

Fergus took the newspaper off the table and stood for a moment watching his mother, who had buried her face in her hands again. Then, with a glance at Gavin, he walked out of the room still holding the Gazette.

After a while, when Gavin judged that Fergus was not coming back, he put out a consoling hand and rubbed Mary’s arm. They sat in silence for some time, and Gavin felt much happier with the newspaper gone from the table.

II

Parminder was not supposed to be working the next morning, but she had a meeting in Yarvil. Once the children had left for school she moved methodically around the house, making sure that she had everything she needed, but when the telephone rang, she jumped so much that she dropped her bag.

‘Yes?’ she yelped, sounding almost frightened. Tessa, on the other end of the line, was taken aback.

‘Minda, it’s me – are you all right?’

‘Yes – yes – the phone made me jump,’ said Parminder, looking at the kitchen floor now littered with keys, papers, loose change and tampons. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing really,’ said Tessa. ‘Just calling for a chat. See how you are.’

The subject of the anonymous post hung between them like some jeering monster, dangling from the line. Parminder had barely allowed Tessa to talk about it during yesterday’s call. She had shouted, ‘It’s a lie, a filthy lie, and don’t tell me Howard Mollison didn’t do it!’

Tessa had not dared pursue the subject.

‘I can’t talk,’ said Parminder. ‘I’ve got a meeting in Yarvil. A case review for a little boy on the at-risk register.’

‘Oh, right. Sorry. Maybe later?’

‘Yes,’ said Parminder. ‘Great. Goodbye.’

She scooped up the contents of her bag and hurried from the house, running back from the garden gate to check that she had closed the front door properly.

Every so often, as she drove, she realized that she had no recollection of travelling the last mile, and told herself fiercely to concentrate. But the malicious words of the anonymous post kept coming back to her. She already knew them by heart.

She had first seen it the previous morning, when she opened up the council website to check the minutes of the last meeting. The shock had been almost physical; her breathing had become very fast and shallow, as it had been during the most excruciating parts of childbirth, when she had tried to lift herself over the pain, to disengage from the agonizing present.

Everyone would know by now. There was nowhere to hide.

The oddest thoughts kept coming to her. For instance, what her grandmother would have said if she had known that Parminder had been accused of loving another woman’s husband, and a gora to boot, in a public forum. She could almost see bebe covering her face with a fold of her sari, shaking her head, rocking backwards and forwards as she had always done when a harsh blow had hit the family.

‘Some husbands,’ Vikram had said to her late last night, with a strange new twist to his sardonic smile, ‘might want to know whether it was true.’

‘Of course it isn’t true!’ Parminder had said, with her own shaking hand over her mouth. ‘How can you ask me that? Of course it isn’t! You knew him! He was my friend – just a friend!’

She was already passing the Bellchapel Addiction Clinic. How had she travelled so far, without realizing it? She was becoming a dangerous driver. She was not paying attention.

She remembered the evening that she and Vikram had gone to the restaurant, nearly twenty years ago, the night they had agreed to marry. She had told him about all the fuss the family had made when she had walked home with Stephen Hoyle, and he had agreed how silly it was. He had understood then. But he did not understand when it was Howard Mollison who accused her instead of her own hidebound relatives. Apparently he did not realise that goras could be narrow, and untruthful, and full of malice…

She had missed the turning. She must concentrate. She must pay attention.

‘Am I late?’ she called, as she hurried at last across the car park towards Kay Bawden. She had met the social worker once before, when she had come in for a renewal of her prescription for the pill.

‘Not at all,’ said Kay. ‘I thought I’d show you up to the office, because it’s a rabbit warren in here…’

Kay led her down a shabby, deserted institutional corridor into a meeting room. Three more women were already sitting there; they greeted Parminder with smiles.

‘This is Nina, who works with Robbie’s mother at Bellchapel,’ said Kay, sitting down with her back to the venetian-blinded windows. ‘And this is my supervisor Gillian, and this is Louise Harper, who oversees the Anchor Road Nursery. Dr Parminder Jawanda, Robbie’s GP,’ Kay added.

Parminder accepted coffee. The other four women began talking, without involving her.

(Parish Councillor Dr Parminder Jawanda, who pretends to be so keen on looking after the poor and needy of the area…

Who pretends to be so keen. You bastard, Howard Mollison. But he had always seen her as a hypocrite; Barry had said so.

‘He thinks that because I came from the Fields, I want Pagford overrun by Yarvillians. But you’re proper professional class, so he doesn’t think you’ve got any right to be on the side of the Fields. He thinks you’re a hypocrite or making trouble for fun.’)

‘…understand why the family’s registered with a GP in Pagford?’ said one of the three unfamiliar social workers, whose names Parminder had already forgotten.

‘Several families in the Fields are registered with us,’ said Parminder at once. ‘But wasn’t there some trouble with the Weedons and their previous—?’

‘Yeah, the Cantermill practice threw them out,’ said Kay, in front of whom sat a pile of notes thicker than either of her colleagues. ‘Terri assaulted a nurse there. So they’ve been registered with you, how long?’

‘Nearly five years,’ said Parminder, who had looked up all the details at the surgery.

(She had seen Howard in church, at Barry’s funeral, pretending to pray, with his big fat hands clasped in front of him, and the Fawleys kneeling beside him. Parminder knew what Christians were supposed to believe in. Love thy neighbour as thyself… if Howard had been more honest, he would have turned sideways and prayed to Aubrey…

Until I died, she was in love with me, which she could barely hide whenever she laid eyes on me…

Had she really not been able to hide it?)

‘…last seen him, Parminder?’ asked Kay.

‘When his sister brought him in for antibiotics for an ear infection,’ said Parminder. ‘About eight weeks ago.’

‘And how was his physical condition then?’ asked one of the other women.

‘Well, he’s not failing to thrive,’ said Parminder, withdrawing a slim sheaf of photocopied notes from her handbag. ‘I checked him quite thoroughly, because – well, I know the family history. He’s a good weight, although I doubt his diet’s anything to write home about. No lice or nits or anything of that description. His bottom was a bit sore, and I remember his sister said that he still wets himself sometimes.’

‘They keep putting him back in nappies,’ said Kay.

‘But you wouldn’t,’ asked the woman who had first questioned Parminder, ‘have any major concerns health-wise?’

‘There was no sign of abuse,’ said Parminder. ‘I remember, I took off his vest to check, and there were no bruises or other injuries.’

‘There’s no man in the house,’ interjected Kay.

‘And this ear infection?’ her supervisor prompted Parminder.

‘You said it was the sister who brought him in, not the mother? Are you Terri’s doctor, too?’

‘I don’t think we’ve seen Terri for five years,’ said Parminder, and the supervisor turned to Nina instead.

‘How’s she doing on methadone?’

(Until I died, she was in love with me…

Parminder thought, Perhaps it’s Shirley, or Maureen, who’s the ghost, not Howard – they would be much more likely to watch her when she was with Barry, hoping to see something with their dirty old-womanish minds… )

‘…longest she’s lasted on the programme so far,’ said Nina. ‘She’s mentioned the case review quite a lot. I get the feeling she knows that this is it, that she’s running out of chances. She doesn’t want to lose Robbie. She’s said that a few times. I’d have to say you’ve got through to her, Kay. I really do see her taking some responsibility for the situation, for the first time since I’ve known her.’

‘Thank you, but I’m not going to get over-excited. The situation’s still pretty precarious.’ Kay’s dampening words were at odds with her tiny irrepressible smile of satisfaction. ‘How are things going at nursery, Louise?’

‘Well, he’s back again,’ said the fourth social worker. ‘He’s been in full attendance for the past three weeks, which is a dramatic change. The teenage sister brings him. His clothes are too small and usually dirty, but he talks about bath and meal times at home.’

‘And behaviourally?’

‘He’s developmentally delayed. His language skills are very poor. He doesn’t like men coming into the nursery. When fathers turn up, he won’t go near them; he hangs around the nursery workers and becomes very anxious. And once or twice,’ she said, turning a page in her notes, ‘he’s mimicked what are clearly sexual acts on or near little girls.’

‘I don’t think, whatever we decide, there can be any question of taking him off the at-risk register,’ said Kay, to a murmur of agreement.

‘It sounds like everything hinges on Terri staying on your programme,’ said the supervisor to Nina, ‘and staying off the game.’

‘That’s key, certainly,’ Kay agreed, ‘but I’m concerned that even when she’s heroin-free, she doesn’t provide much mothering to Robbie. Krystal seems to be raising him, and she’s sixteen and got plenty of her own issues…’

(Parminder remembered what she had said to Sukhvinder a couple of nights previously.

Krystal Weedon! That stupid girl! Is that what being in a team with Krystal Weedon taught you – to sink to her level?

Barry had liked Krystal. He had seen things in her that were invisible to other people’s eyes.

Once, long ago, Parminder had told Barry the story of Bhai Kanhaiya, the Sikh hero who had administered to the needs of those wounded in combat, whether friend or foe. When asked why he gave aid indiscriminately, Bhai Kanhaiya had replied that the light of God shone from every soul, and that he had been unable to distinguish between them.

The light of God shone from every soul.

She had called Krystal Weedon stupid and implied that she was low.

Barry would never have said it.

She was ashamed.)

‘…when there was a great-grandmother who seemed to provide some back-up in care, but—’

‘She died,’ said Parminder, rushing to say it before anyone else could. ‘Emphysema and stroke.’

‘Yeah,’ said Kay, still looking at her notes. ‘So we go back to Terri. She came out of care herself. Has she ever attended parenting classes?’

‘We offer them, but she’s never been in a fit state to attend,’ said the woman from the nursery.

‘If she agreed to take them and actually turned up, it would be a massive step forward,’ said Kay.

‘If they close us down,’ sighed Nina from Bellchapel, addressing Parminder, ‘I suppose she’ll have to come to you for her methadone.’

‘I’m concerned that she wouldn’t,’ said Kay, before Parminder could answer.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Parminder angrily.

The other women stared at her.

‘Just that catching buses and remembering appointments isn’t Terri’s forte,’ said Kay. ‘She only has to walk up the road to Bellchapel.’

‘Oh,’ said Parminder, mortified. ‘Yes. Sorry. Yes, you’re probably right.’

(She had thought that Kay was making a reference to the complaint about Catherine Weedon’s death; that she did not think Terri Weedon would trust her.

Concentrate on what they’re saying. What’s wrong with you?)

‘So, big picture,’ said the supervisor, looking down at her notes. ‘We’ve got neglectful parenting interspersed with some adequate care.’ She sighed, but there was more exasperation than sadness in the sound. ‘The immediate crisis is over – she’s stopped using – Robbie’s back in nursery, where we can keep a proper eye on him – and there’s no immediate concern for his safety. As Kay says, he stays on the at-risk register… I certainly think we’ll need another meeting in four weeks…’

It was another forty minutes before the meeting broke up. Kay walked Parminder back down to the car park.

‘It was very good of you to come in person; most GPs send through a report.’

‘It was my morning off,’ said Parminder. She meant it as an explanation for her attendance, because she hated sitting at home alone with nothing to do, but Kay seemed to think that she was asking for more praise and gave it.

At Parminder’s car, Kay said, ‘You’re the parish councillor, aren’t you? Did Colin pass you the figures on Bellchapel I gave him?’

‘Yes, he did,’ said Parminder. ‘It would be good to have a talk about that some time. It’s on the agenda for the next meeting.’

But when Kay had given her her number, and left, with renewed thanks, Parminder’s thoughts reverted to Barry, the Ghost and the Mollisons. She was driving through the Fields when the simple thought that she had tried to bury, to drown out, slipped past her lowered defences at last.

Perhaps I did love him.

III

Andrew had spent hours deciding which clothes he ought to wear for his first day’s work at the Copper Kettle. His final choice was draped over the back of the chair in his bedroom. A particularly angry acne pustule had chosen to bring itself to a shiny tight peak on his left cheek, and Andrew had gone so far as to experiment with Ruth’s foundation, which he had sneaked out of her dressing-table drawer.

He was laying the kitchen table on Friday evening, his mind full of Gaia and the seven solid hours of close proximity to her that were within touching distance, when his father returned from work in a state that Andrew had never seen before. Simon seemed subdued, almost disorientated.

‘Where’s your mother?’

Ruth came bustling out of the walk-in pantry.

‘Hello Si-Pie! How – what’s wrong?’

‘They’ve made me redundant.’

Ruth clapped her hands to her face in horror, then dashed to her husband, threw her arms around his neck and drew him close.

‘Why?’ she whispered.

‘That message,’ said Simon. ‘On that fucking website. They pulled in Jim and Tommy too. It was take redundancy or we’ll sack you. And it’s a shitty deal. It’s not even what they gave Brian Grant.’

Andrew stood perfectly still, calcifying slowly into a monument of guilt.

‘Fuck,’ said Simon, into Ruth’s shoulder.

‘You’ll get something else,’ she whispered.

‘Not round here,’ said Simon.

He sat down on a kitchen chair, still in his coat, and stared across the room, apparently too stunned to speak. Ruth hovered around him, dismayed, affectionate and tearful. Andrew was glad to detect in Simon’s catatonic gaze a whiff of his usual ham theatrics. It made him feel slightly less guilty. He continued to lay the table without saying a word.

Dinner was a subdued affair. Paul, apprised of the family news, looked terrified, as though his father might accuse him of causing it all. Simon acted like a Christian martyr through the first course, wounded but dignified in the face of unwarranted persecution, but then – ‘I’ll pay someone to punch the fucker’s fat face through the back of his neck,’ he burst out as he spooned apple crumble into himself; and the family knew that he meant Howard Mollison.

‘You know, there’s been another message on that council website,’ said Ruth breathlessly. ‘It’s not only you who’s had it, Si. Shir – somebody told me at work. The same person – The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother – has put up something horrible about Dr Jawanda. So Howard and Shirley got someone in to look at the site, and he realized that whoever’s doing these messages has been using Barry Fairbrother’s log-in details, so to be safe, they’ve taken them off the – the database or something—’

‘And will any of this get me my fucking job back?’

Ruth did not speak again for several minutes.

Andrew was unnerved by what his mother had said. It was worrying that The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother was being investigated, and unnerving that somebody else had followed his lead.

Who else would have thought of using Barry Fairbrother’s log-in details but Fats? Yet why would Fats go for Dr Jawanda? Or was it just another way of getting at Sukhvinder? Andrew did not like it at all…

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Simon barked across the table.

‘Nothing,’ Andrew muttered, and then, backtracking, ‘it’s a shock, isn’t it… your job…’

‘Oh, you’re shocked, are you?’ shouted Simon, and Paul dropped his spoon and dribbled ice cream down himself. ‘(Clean it up, Pauline, you little pansy!) Well, this is the real world, Pizza Face!’ he shouted at Andrew. ‘Fuckers everywhere trying to do you down! So you,’ he pointed across the table at his eldest son, ‘you get some dirt on Mollison, or don’t bother coming home tomorrow!’

‘Si—’

Simon pushed his chair away from the table, threw down his own spoon, which bounced onto the floor with a clatter, and stalked from the room, slamming the door behind him. Andrew waited for the inevitable, and was not disappointed.

‘It’s a terrible shock for him,’ a shaken Ruth whispered at her sons. ‘After all the years he’s given that company… he’s worried how he’s going to look after us all…’

When the alarm rang at six thirty the next morning, Andrew slammed it off within seconds and virtually leapt out of bed. Feeling as though it was Christmas Day, he washed and dressed at speed, then spent forty minutes on his hair and face, dabbing minuscule amounts of foundation onto the most obvious of his spots.

He half expected Simon to waylay him as he crept past his parents’ room, but he met nobody, and after a hasty breakfast he wheeled Simon’s racing bicycle out of the garage and sped off down the hill towards Pagford.

It was a misty morning that promised sunshine later. The blinds were still down in the delicatessen, but the door tinkled and gave when he pushed it.

‘Not this way!’ shouted Howard, waddling towards him. ‘You come in round the back! You can leave the bike by the bins, get it away from the front!’

The rear of the delicatessen, reached by a narrow passageway, comprised a tiny dank patch of stone-paved yard, bordered by high walls, sheds with industrial-sized metal bins and a trapdoor that led down vertiginous steps to a cellar.

‘You can chain it up somewhere there, out of the way,’ said Howard, who had appeared at the back door, wheezing and sweaty-faced. While Andrew fumbled with the padlock on the chain, Howard dabbed at his forehead with his apron.

‘Right, we’ll start with the cellar,’ he said, when Andrew had secured the bicycle. He pointed at the trapdoor. ‘Get down there and see the layout.’

He bent over the hatch as Andrew climbed down the steps. Howard had not been able to climb down into his own cellar for years. Maureen usually tottered up and down the steps a couple of times a week; but now that it was fully stocked with goods for the café, younger legs were indispensible.

‘Have a good look around,’ he shouted at the out-of-sight Andrew. ‘See where we’ve got the gateaux and all the baked goods? See the big bags of coffee beans and the boxes of teabags? And in the corner – the toilet rolls and the bin bags?’

‘Yeah,’ Andrew’s voice echoed up from the depths.

‘You can call me Mr Mollison,’ said Howard, with a slightly tart edge to his wheezy voice.

Down in the cellar, Andrew wondered whether he ought to start straight away.

‘OK… Mr Mollison.’

It sounded sarcastic. He hastened to make amends with a polite question.

‘What’s in these big cupboards?’

‘Have a look,’ said Howard impatiently. ‘That’s what you’re down there for. To know where you put everything and where you get it from.’

Howard listened to the muffled sounds of Andrew opening the heavy doors, and hoped that the boy would not prove gormless or need a lot of direction. Howard’s asthma was particularly bad today; the pollen count was unseasonably high, on top of all the extra work, and the excitement and petty frustrations of the opening. The way he was sweating, he might need to ring Shirley to bring him a new shirt before they unlocked the doors.

‘Here’s the van!’ Howard shouted, hearing a rumble at the other end of the passageway. ‘Get up here! You’re to carry the stuff down to the cellar and put it away, all right? And bring a couple of gallons of milk through to me in the café. You got that?’

‘Yeah… Mr Mollison,’ said Andrew’s voice from below.

Howard walked slowly back inside to fetch the inhaler that he kept in his jacket, which was hanging up in the staff room behind the delicatessen counter. Several deep breaths later, he felt much better. Wiping his face on his apron again, he sat down on one of the creaking chairs to rest.

Several times since he had been to see her about his skin rash, Howard had thought about what Dr Jawanda had said about his weight: that it was the source of all his health problems.

Nonsense, obviously. Look at the Hubbards’ boy: built like a beanpole, and shocking asthma. Howard had always been big, as far back as he could remember. In the very few photographs taken of him with his father, who had left the family when Howard was four or five, he was merely chubby. After his father had left, his mother had sat him at the head of the table, between herself and his grandmother, and been hurt if he did not take seconds. Steadily he had grown to fill the space between the two women, as heavy at twelve as the father who had left them. Howard had come to associate a hearty appetite with manliness. His bulk was one of his defining characteristics. It had been built with pleasure, by the women who loved him, and he thought it was absolutely characteristic of Bends-Your-Ear, that emasculating killjoy, that she wanted to strip him of it.

But sometimes, in moments of weakness, when it became difficult to breathe or to move, Howard knew fear. It was all very well for Shirley to act as though he had never been in danger, but he remembered long nights in the hospital after his bypass, when he had not been able to sleep for worry that his heart might falter and stop. Whenever he caught sight of Vikram Jawanda, he remembered that those long dark fingers had actually touched his naked, beating heart; the bonhomie with which he brimmed at each encounter was a way of driving out that primitive, instinctive terror. They had told him at the hospital afterwards that he needed to lose some weight, but he had dropped two stone naturally while he was forced to live off their dreadful food, and Shirley had been intent on fattening him up again once he was out…

Howard sat for a moment more, enjoying the ease with which he breathed after using his inhaler. Today meant a great deal to him. Thirty-five years previously, he had introduced fine dining to Pagford with the élan of a sixteenth-century adventurer returning with delicacies from the other side of the world, and Pagford, after initial wariness, had soon begun to nose curiously and timidly into his polystyrene pots. He thought wistfully of his late mother, who had been so proud of him and his thriving business. He wished that she could have seen the café. Howard heaved himself back to his feet, took his deerstalker from its hook and placed it carefully on his head in an act of self-coronation.

His new waitresses arrived together at half-past eight. He had a surprise for them.

‘Here you are,’ he said, holding out the uniforms: black dresses with frilly white aprons, exactly as he had imagined. ‘Ought to fit. Maureen reckoned she knew your sizes. She’s wearing one herself.’

Gaia forced back a laugh as Maureen stalked into the delicatessen from the café, smiling at them. She was wearing Dr Scholl’s sandals over her black stockings. Her dress finished two inches above her wrinkled knees.

‘You can change in the staff room, girls,’ she said, indicating the place from which Howard had just emerged.

Gaia was already pulling off her jeans beside the staff toilet when she saw Sukhvinder’s expression.

‘Whassamatter, Sooks?’ she asked.

The new nickname gave Sukhvinder the courage to say what she might otherwise have been unable to voice.

‘I can’t wear this,’ she whispered.

‘Why?’ asked Gaia. ‘You’ll look OK.’

But the black dress had short sleeves.

‘I can’t.’

‘But wh – Jesus,’ said Gaia.

Sukhvinder had pulled back the sleeves of her sweatshirt. Her inner arms were covered in ugly criss-cross scars, and angry fresh-clotted cuts travelled up from her wrist to her inner arm.

‘Sooks,’ said Gaia quietly. ‘What are you playing at, mate?’

Sukhvinder shook her head, with her eyes full of tears.

Gaia thought for a moment, then said, ‘I know – come here.’

She was stripping off her long-sleeved T-shirt.

The door suffered a big blow and the imperfectly closed bolt shot open: a sweating Andrew was halfway inside, carrying two weighty packs of toilet rolls, when Gaia’s angry shout stopped him in his tracks. He tripped out backwards, into Maureen.

‘They’re changing in there,’ she said, in sour disapproval.

‘Mr Mollison told me to put these in the staff bathroom.’

Holy shit, holy shit. She had been stripped to her bra and pants. He had seen nearly everything.

‘Sorry,’ Andrew yelled at the closed door. His whole face was throbbing with the force of his blush.

‘Wanker,’ muttered Gaia, on the other side. She was holding out her T-shirt to Sukhvinder. ‘Put it on underneath the dress.’

‘That’ll look weird.’

‘Never mind. You can get a black one for next week, it’ll look like you’re wearing long sleeves. We’ll tell him some story…’

‘She’s got eczema,’ Gaia announced, when she and Sukhvinder emerged from the staff room, fully dressed and aproned. ‘All up her arms. It’s a bit scabby.’

‘Ah,’ said Howard, glancing at Sukhvinder’s white T-shirted arms and then back at Gaia, who looked every bit as gorgeous as he had hoped.

‘I’ll get a black one for next week,’ said Sukhvinder, unable to look Howard in the eye.

‘Fine,’ he said, patting Gaia in the small of her back as he sent the pair of them through to the café. ‘Brace yourselves,’ he called to his staff at large. ‘We’re nearly there… doors open, please, Maureen!’

There was already a little knot of customers waiting on the pavement. A sign outside read: The Copper Kettle, Opening Today – First Coffee Free!

Andrew did not see Gaia again for hours. Howard kept him busy heaving milk and fruit juices up and down the steep cellar steps, and swabbing the floor of the small kitchen area at the back. He was given a lunch break earlier than either of the waitresses. The next glimpse he got of her was when Howard summoned him to the counter of the café, and they passed within inches of each other as she walked in the other direction, towards the back room.

‘We’re swamped, Mr Price!’ said Howard, in high good humour. ‘Get yourself a clean apron and mop down some of these tables for me while Gaia has her lunch!’

Miles and Samantha Mollison had sat down with their two daughters and Shirley at a table in the window.

‘It seems to be going awfully well, doesn’t it?’ Shirley said, looking around. ‘But what on earth is that Jawanda girl wearing under her dress?’

‘Bandages?’ suggested Miles, squinting across the room.

‘Hi, Sukhvinder!’ called Lexie, who knew her from primary school.

‘Don’t shout, darling,’ Shirley reproved her granddaughter, and Samantha bristled.

Maureen emerged from behind the counter in her short black dress and frilly apron, and Shirley corpsed into her coffee.

‘Oh dear,’ she said quietly, as Maureen walked towards them, beaming.

It was true, Samantha thought, Maureen looked ridiculous, especially next to a pair of sixteen-year-olds in identical dresses, but she was not going to give Shirley the satisfaction of agreeing with her. She turned ostentatiously away, watching the boy mopping tables nearby. He was spare but reasonably broad-shouldered. She could see his muscles working under the loose T-shirt. Incredible to think that Miles’ big fat backside could ever have been that small and tight – then the boy turned into the light and she saw his acne.

‘Not half bad, is it?’ Maureen was croaking to Miles. ‘We’ve been full all day.’

‘All right, girls,’ Miles addressed his family, ‘what’ll we have to keep up Grandpa’s profits?’

Samantha listlessly ordered a bowl of soup, as Howard waddled through from the delicatessen; he had been striding in and out of the café every ten minutes all day, greeting customers and checking the flow of cash into the till.

‘Roaring success,’ he told Miles, squeezing in at their table. ‘What d’you think of the place, Sammy? You haven’t seen it before, have you? Like the mural? Like the china?’

‘Mm,’ said Samantha. ‘Lovely.’

‘I was thinking about having my sixty-fifth here,’ said Howard, absent-mindedly scratching at the itch Parminder’s creams had not yet cured, ‘but it’s not big enough. I think we’ll stick with the church hall.’

‘When’s that, Grandpa?’ piped up Lexie. ‘Am I coming?’

‘Twenty-ninth, and what are you now – sixteen? Course you can come,’ said Howard happily.

‘The twenty-ninth?’ said Samantha. ‘Oh, but…’

Shirley looked at her sharply.

‘Howard’s been planning this for months. We’ve all been talking about it for ages.’

‘…that’s the night of Libby’s concert,’ said Samantha.

‘A school thing, is it?’ asked Howard.

‘No,’ said Libby, ‘Mum’s got me tickets for my favourite group. It’s in London.’

‘And I’m going with her,’ said Samantha. ‘She can’t go alone.’

‘Harriet’s mum says she could—’

‘I’m taking you, Libby, if you’re going to London.’

‘The twenty-ninth?’ said Miles, looking hard at Samantha. ‘The day after the election?’

Samantha let loose the derisive laugh that she had spared Maureen.

‘It’s the Parish Council, Miles. It’s not as though you’ll be giving press conferences.’

‘Well, we’ll miss you, Sammy,’ said Howard, as he hauled himself up with the aid of the back of her chair. ‘Best get on… all right, Andrew, you’re done here… go and see if we need anything up from the cellar.’

Andrew was forced to wait beside the counter while people passed to and from the bathroom. Maureen was loading up Sukhvinder with plates of sandwiches.

‘How’s your mother?’ she asked the girl abruptly, as though the thought had just occurred to her.

‘Fine,’ said Sukhvinder, her colour rising.

‘Not too upset by that nasty business on the council website?’

‘No,’ said Sukhvinder, her eyes watering.

Andrew proceeded out into the dank yard, which, in the early afternoon, had become warm and sunny. He had hoped that Gaia might be there, taking a breath of fresh air, but she must have gone into the staff room in the deli. Disappointed, he lit up a cigarette. He had barely inhaled when Gaia emerged from the café, finishing her lunch with a can of fizzy drink.

‘Hi,’ said Andrew, his mouth dry.

‘Hi,’ she said. Then, after a moment or two: ‘Hey, why’s that friend of yours such a shit to Sukhvinder? Is it personal or is he racist?’

‘He isn’t racist,’ said Andrew. He removed the cigarette from his mouth, trying to keep his hands from trembling, but could not think of anything else to say. The sunshine reflected off the bins warmed his sweaty back; close proximity to her in the tight black dress was almost overwhelming, especially now that he had glimpsed what lay beneath. He took another drag of the cigarette, not knowing when he had felt so bedazzled or so alive.

‘What’s she ever done to him, though?’

The curve of her hips to her tiny waist; the perfection of her wide, flecked eyes over the can of Sprite. Andrew felt like saying, Nothing, he’s a bastard, I’ll hit him if you let me touch you…

Sukhvinder emerged into the yard, blinking in the sunlight; she looked uncomfortable and hot in Gaia’s top.

‘He wants you back in,’ she said to Gaia.

‘He can wait,’ said Gaia coolly. ‘I’m finishing this. I’ve only had forty minutes.’

Andrew and Sukhvinder contemplated her as she sipped her drink, awed by her arrogance and her beauty.

‘Was that old bitch saying something to you just then, about your mum?’ Gaia asked Sukhvinder.

Sukhvinder nodded.

‘I think it might’ve been his mate,’ she said, staring at Andrew again, and he found her emphasis on his positively erotic, even if she meant it to be derogatory, ‘who put that message about your mum on that website.’

‘Can’t’ve been,’ said Andrew, and his voice wobbled slightly. ‘Whoever did it went after my old man, too. Couple of weeks ago.’

‘What?’ asked Gaia. ‘The same person posted something about your dad?’

He nodded, relishing her interest.

‘Something about stealing, wasn’t it?’ asked Sukhvinder, with considerable daring.

‘Yeah,’ said Andrew. ‘And he got the sack for it yesterday. So her mum,’ he met Gaia’s blinding gaze almost steadily, ‘isn’t the only one who’s suffered.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Gaia, upending the can and throwing it into a bin. ‘People round here are effing mental.’

IV

The post about Parminder on the council website had driven Colin Wall’s fears to a nightmarish new level. He could only guess how the Mollisons were getting their information, but if they knew that about Parminder…

‘For God’s sake, Colin!’ Tessa had said. ‘It’s just malicious gossip! There’s nothing in it!’

But Colin did not dare believe her. He was constitutionally prone to believing that others too lived with secrets that drove them half-demented. He could not even take comfort in knowing that he had spent most of his adult life in dread of calamities that had not materialized, because, by the law of averages, one of them was bound to come true one day.

He was thinking about his imminent exposure, as he thought about it constantly, while walking back from the butcher’s at half-past two, and it was not until the hubbub from the new café caught his startled attention that he realized where he was. He would have crossed to the other side of the Square if he had not been already level with the Copper Kettle’s windows; mere proximity to any Mollison frightened him now. Then he saw something through the glass that made him do a double-take.

When he entered their kitchen ten minutes later, Tessa was on the telephone to her sister. Colin deposited the leg of lamb in the fridge and marched upstairs, all the way to Fats’ loft conversion. Flinging open the door, he saw, as he had expected, a deserted room.

He could not remember the last time he had been in here. The floor was covered in dirty clothes. There was an odd smell, even though Fats had left the skylight propped open. Colin noticed a large matchbox on Fats’ desk. He slid it open, and saw a mass of twisted cardboard stubs. A packet of Rizlas lay brazenly on the desk beside the computer.

Colin’s heart seemed to have toppled down out of his chest to thump against his guts.

‘Colin?’ came Tessa’s voice, from the landing below. ‘Where are you?’

‘Up here!’ he roared.

She appeared at Fats’ door looking frightened and anxious. Wordlessly, he picked up the matchbox and showed her the contents.

‘Oh,’ said Tessa weakly.

‘He said he was going out with Andrew Price today,’ said Colin. Tessa was frightened by the muscle working in Colin’s jaw, an angry little bump moving from side to side. ‘I’ve just been past that new café in the Square, and Andrew Price is working in there, mopping tables. So where’s Stuart?’

For weeks, Tessa had been pretending to believe Fats whenever he said that he was going out with Andrew. For days she had been telling herself that Sukhvinder must be mistaken in thinking that Fats was going out (would condescend, ever, to go out) with Krystal Weedon.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Come down and have a cup of tea. I’ll ring him.’

‘I think I’ll wait here,’ said Colin, and he sat down on Fats’ unmade bed.

‘Come on, Colin – come downstairs,’ said Tessa.

She was scared of leaving him here. She did not know what he might find in the drawers or in Fats’ school bag. She did not want him to look on the computer or under the bed. Refusing to probe dark corners had become her sole modus operandi.

‘Come downstairs, Col,’ she urged him.

‘No,’ said Colin, and he crossed his arms like a mutinous child, but with that muscle working in his jaw. ‘Drugs in his bin. The son of the deputy headmaster.’

Tessa, who had sat down on Fats’ computer chair, felt a familiar thrill of anger. She knew that self-preoccupation was an inevitable consequence of his illness, but sometimes…

‘Plenty of teenagers experiment,’ she said.

‘Still defending him, are you? Doesn’t it ever occur to you that it’s your constant excuses for him that make him think he can get away with blue murder?’

She was trying to keep a curb on her temper, because she must be a buffer between them.

‘I’m sorry, Colin, but you and your job aren’t the be all and end—’

‘I see – so if I get the sack—’

‘Why on earth would you get the sack?’

‘For God’s sake!’ shouted Colin, outraged. ‘It all reflects on me – it’s already bad enough – he’s already one of the biggest problem students in the—’

‘That’s not true!’ shouted Tessa. ‘Nobody but you thinks Stuart’s anything other than a normal teenager. He’s not Dane Tully!’

‘He’s going the same way as Tully – drugs in his bin—’

‘I told you we should have sent him to Paxton High! I knew you’d make everything he did all about you, if he went to Winterdown! Is it any wonder he rebels, when his every movement is supposed to be a credit to you? I never wanted him to go to your school!’

‘And I,’ bellowed Colin, jumping to his feet, ‘never bloody wanted him at all!’

‘Don’t say that!’ gasped Tessa. ‘I know you’re angry – but don’t say that!’

The front door slammed two floors below them. Tessa looked around, frightened, as though Fats might materialize instantly beside them. It wasn’t merely the noise that had made her start. Stuart never slammed the front door; he usually slipped in and out like a shape-shifter.

His familiar tread on the stairs; did he know, or suspect they were in his room? Colin was waiting, with his fists clenched by his sides. Tessa heard the creak of the halfway step, and then Fats stood before them. She was sure he had arranged his expression in advance: a mixture of boredom and disdain.

‘Afternoon,’ he said, looking from his mother to his rigid, tense father. He had all the self-possession that Colin had never had. ‘This is a surprise.’

Desperate, Tessa tried to show him the way.

‘Dad was worried about where you are,’ she said, with a plea in her voice. ‘You said you were going to be with Arf today, but Dad saw—’

‘Yeah, change of plan,’ said Fats.

He glanced towards the place where the matchbox had been.

‘So, do you want to tell us where you’ve been?’ asked Colin. There were white patches around his mouth.

‘Yeah, if you like,’ said Fats, and he waited.

‘Stu,’ said Tessa, half whisper, half groan.

‘I’ve been out with Krystal Weedon,’ said Fats.

Oh God, no, thought Tessa. No, no, no…

‘You’ve what?’ said Colin, so taken aback that he forgot to sound aggressive.

‘I’ve been out with Krystal Weedon,’ Fats repeated, a little more loudly.

‘And since when,’ said Colin, after an infinitesimal pause, ‘has she been a friend of yours?’

‘A while,’ said Fats.

Tessa could see Colin struggling to formulate a question too grotesque to utter.

‘You should have told us, Stu,’ she said.

‘Told you what?’ he said.

She was frightened that he was going to push the argument to a dangerous place.

‘Where you were going,’ she said, standing up and trying to look matter of fact. ‘Next time, call us.’

She looked towards Colin in the hope that he might follow her lead and move towards the door. He remained fixed in the middle of the room, staring at Fats in horror.

‘Are you… involved with Krystal Weedon?’ Colin asked.

They faced each other, Colin taller by a few inches, but Fats holding all the power.

‘“Involved”?’ Fats repeated. ‘What d’you mean, “involved”?’

‘You know what I mean!’ said Colin, his face growing red.

‘D’you mean, am I shagging her?’ asked Fats.

Tessa’s little cry of ‘Stu!’ was drowned by Colin shouting, ‘How bloody dare you!’

Fats merely looked at Colin, smirking. Everything about him was a taunt and a challenge.

‘What?’ said Fats.

‘Are you –’ Colin was struggling to find the words, growing redder all the time, ‘– are you sleeping with Krystal Weedon?’

‘It wouldn’t be a problem if I was, would it?’ Fats asked, and he glanced at his mother as he said it. ‘You’re all for helping Krystal, aren’t you?’

‘Helping—’

‘Aren’t you trying to keep that addiction clinic open so you can help Krystal’s family?’

‘What’s that got to do—?’

‘I can’t see what the problem is with me going out with her.’

‘And are you going out with her?’ asked Tessa sharply. If Fats wanted to take the row into this territory, she would meet him there. ‘Do you actually go anywhere with her, Stuart?’

His smirk sickened her. He was not prepared even to pretend to some decency.

‘Well, we don’t do it in either of our houses, do—’

Colin had raised one of his stiff, clench-fisted arms and swung it. He connected with Fats’ cheek, and Fats, whose attention had been on his mother, was caught off guard; he staggered sideways, hit the desk and slid, momentarily, to the floor. A moment later he had jumped to his feet again, but Tessa had already placed herself between the pair of them, facing her son.

Behind her, Colin was repeating, ‘You little bastard. You little bastard.’

‘Yeah?’ said Fats, and he was no longer smirking. ‘I’d rather be a little bastard than be you, you arsehole!’

‘No!’ shouted Tessa. ‘Colin, get out. Get out!’

Horrified, furious and shaken, Colin lingered for a moment, then marched from the room; they heard him stumble a little on the stairs.

‘How could you?’ Tessa whispered to her son.

‘How could I fucking what?’ said Stuart, and the look on his face alarmed her so much that she hurried to close and bar the bedroom door.

‘You’re taking advantage of that girl, Stuart, and you know it, and the way you just spoke to your—’

‘The fuck I am,’ said Fats, pacing up and down, every semblance of cool gone. ‘The fuck I’m taking advantage of her. She knows exactly what she wants – just because she lives in the fucking Fields, it doesn’t – the truth is, you and Cubby don’t want me to shag her because you think she’s beneath—’

‘That’s not true!’ said Tessa, even though it was, and for all her concern about Krystal, she would still have been glad to know that Fats had sense enough to wear a condom.

‘You’re fucking hypocrites, you and Cubby,’ he said, still pacing the length of the bedroom. ‘All the bollocks the pair of you spout about wanting to help the Weedons, but you don’t want—’

‘That’s enough!’ shouted Tessa. ‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that! Don’t you realise – don’t you understand – are you so damn selfish…?’

Words failed her. She turned, tugged open his door and was gone, slamming it behind her.

Her exit had an odd effect on Fats, who stopped pacing and stared at the closed door for several seconds. Then he searched his pockets, drew out a cigarette and lit it, not bothering to blow the smoke out of the skylight. Round and round his room he walked, and he had no control of his own thoughts: jerky, unedited images filled his brain, sweeping past on a tide of fury.

He remembered the Friday evening, nearly a year previously, when Tessa had come up here to his bedroom to tell him that his father wanted to take him out to play football with Barry and his sons next day.

(‘What?’ Fats had been staggered. The suggestion was unprecedented.

‘For fun. A kick-around,’ Tessa had said, avoiding Fats’ glare by scowling down at the clothes littering the floor.

‘Why?’

‘Because Dad thought it might be nice,’ said Tessa, bending to pick up a school shirt. ‘Declan wants a practice, or something. He’s got a match.’

Fats was quite good at football. People found it surprising; they expected him to dislike sport, to disdain teams. He played as he talked, skilfully, with many a feint, fooling the clumsy, daring to take chances, unconcerned if they did not come off.

‘I didn’t even know he could play.’

‘Dad can play very well, he was playing twice a week when we met,’ said Tessa, riled. ‘Ten o’clock tomorrow morning, all right? I’ll wash your tracksuit bottoms.’)

Fats sucked on his cigarette, remembering against his will. Why had he gone along with it? Today, he would have simply refused to participate in Cubby’s little charade, but remained in bed until the shouting died away. A year ago he had not yet understood about authenticity.

(Instead he had left the house with Cubby and endured a silent five-minute walk, each equally aware of the enormous shortfall that filled all the space between them.

The playing field belonged to St Thomas’s. It had been sunny and deserted. They had divided into two teams of three, because Declan had a friend staying for the weekend. The friend, who clearly hero-worshipped Fats, had joined Fats and Cubby’s team.

Fats and Cubby passed to each other in silence, while Barry, easily the worst player, had yelled, cajoled and cheered in his Yarvil accent as he tore up and down the pitch they had marked out with sweatshirts. When Fergus scored, Barry had run at him for a flying chest bump, mistimed it and smashed Fergus on the jaw with the top of his head. The two of them had fallen to the ground, Fergus groaning in pain and laughing, while Barry sat apologizing through his roars of mirth. Fats had found himself grinning, then heard Cubby’s awkward, booming laugh and turned away, scowling.

And then had come that moment, that cringeworthy, pitiful moment, with the scores equal and nearly time to go, when Fats had successfully wrested the ball from Fergus, and Cubby had shouted, ‘Come on, Stu, lad!’

‘Lad.’ Cubby had never said ‘lad’ in his life. It sounded pitiful, hollow and unnatural. He was trying to be like Barry; imitating Barry’s easy, unself-conscious encouragement of his sons; trying to impress Barry.

The ball had flown like a cannon ball from Fats’ foot and there was time, before it hit Cubby full in his unsuspecting, foolish face, before his glasses cracked, and a single drop of blood bloomed beneath his eye, to realize his own intent; to know that he had hoped to hit Cubby, and that the ball had been dispatched for retribution.)

They had never played football again. The doomed little experiment in father-son togetherness had been shelved, like a dozen before it.

And I never wanted him at all!

He was sure he had heard it. Cubby must have been talking about him. They had been in his room. Who else could Cubby have been talking about?

Like I give a shit, thought Fats. It was what he’d always suspected. He did not know why this sensation of spreading cold had filled his chest.

Fats pulled the computer chair back into position, from the place where it had been knocked when Cubby had hit him. The authentic reaction would have been to shove his mother out of the way and punch Cubby in the face. Crack his glasses again. Make him bleed. Fats was disgusted with himself that he had not done it.

But there were other ways. He had overheard things for years. He knew much more about his father’s ludicrous fears than they thought.

Fats’ fingers were clumsier than usual. Ash spilt onto the keyboard from the cigarette in his mouth as he brought up the Parish Council website. Weeks previously, he had looked up SQL injections and found the line of code that Andrew had refused to share. After studying the council message board for a few minutes, he logged himself in, without difficulty, as Betty Rossiter, changed her username to The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother, and began to type.

V

Shirley Mollison was convinced that her husband and son were over-stating the danger to the council of leaving the Ghost’s posts online. She could not see how the messages were worse than gossip, and that, she knew, was not yet punishable by law; nor did she believe that the law would be foolish and unreasonable enough to punish her for what somebody else had written: that would be monstrously unfair. Proud as she was of Miles’ law degree, she was sure that he must have this bit wrong.

She was checking the message boards even more frequently than Miles and Howard had advised, but not because she was afraid of legal consequences. Certain as she was that Barry Fairbrother’s Ghost had not yet finished his self-appointed task of crushing the pro-Fielders, she was eager to be the first to set eyes on his next post. Several times a day she scurried into Patricia’s old room, and clicked on the web page. Sometimes a little frisson would run through her while she was hoovering or peeling potatoes and she would race to the study, only to be disappointed again.

Shirley felt a special, secret kinship with the Ghost. He had chosen her website as the forum where he would expose the hypocrisy of Howard’s opponents, and this, she felt, entitled her to the pride of the naturalist who has constructed a habitat in which a rare species deigns to nest. But there was more to it than that. Shirley relished the Ghost’s anger, his savagery and his audacity. She wondered who he might be, visualizing a strong, shadowy man standing behind herself and Howard, on their side, cutting a path for them through the opponents who crumpled as he slayed them with their own ugly truths.

Somehow, none of the men in Pagford seemed worthy to be the Ghost; she would have felt disappointed to learn that it was any of the anti-Fielders she knew.

‘That’s if it’s a man,’ said Maureen.

‘Good point,’ said Howard.

‘I think it’s a man,’ said Shirley coolly.

When Howard left for the café on Sunday morning, Shirley, still in her dressing gown, and holding her cup of tea, padded automatically to the study and brought up the website.

Fantasies of a Deputy Headmaster posted by The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother.

She set down her tea with trembling hands, clicked on the post and read it, open-mouthed. Then she ran to the lounge, seized the telephone and called the café, but the number was engaged.

A mere five minutes later, Parminder Jawanda, who had also developed a habit of looking at the council message boards much more frequently than usual, opened up the site and saw the post. Like Shirley, her immediate reaction was to seize a telephone.

The Walls were breakfasting without their son, who was still asleep upstairs. When Tessa picked up, Parminder cut across her friend’s greeting.

‘There’s a post about Colin on the council website. Don’t let him see it, whatever you do.’

Tessa’s frightened eyes swivelled to her husband, but he was a mere three feet from the receiver and had already heard every word that Parminder had spoken so loudly and clearly.

‘I’ll call you back,’ said Tessa urgently. ‘Colin,’ she said, fumbling to replace the receiver, ‘Colin, wait—’

But he had already stalked out of the room, bobbing up and down, his arms stiff by his side, and Tessa had to jog to catch him up.

‘Perhaps it’s better not to look,’ she urged him, as his big, knobble-knuckled hand moved the mouse across the desk, ‘or I can read it and—’

Stuart wrote that, thought Tessa, at once.

Colin’s face was ghastly in the light pouring out of the monitor. It was how she imagined he would look if he had had a stroke.

‘Colin—’

‘I suppose Fiona Shawcross has told people,’ he whispered.

The catastrophe he had always feared was upon him. It was the end of everything. He had always imagined taking sleeping tablets. He wondered whether they had enough in the house.

Tessa, who had been momentarily thrown by the mention of the headmistress, said, ‘Fiona wouldn’t – anyway, she doesn’t know—’

‘She knows I’ve got OCD.’

‘Yes, but she doesn’t know what you – what you’re afraid of—’

‘She does,’ said Colin. ‘I told her, before the last time I needed sick leave.’

‘Why?’ Tessa burst out. ‘What on earth did you tell her for?’

‘I wanted to explain why it was so important I had time off,’ said Colin, almost humbly. ‘I thought she needed to know how serious it was.’

Tessa fought down a powerful desire to shout at him. The tinge of distaste with which Fiona treated him and talked about him was explained; Tessa had never liked her, always thought her hard and unsympathetic.

‘Be that as it may,’ she said, ‘I don’t think Fiona’s got anything to do—’

‘Not directly,’ said Colin, pressing a trembling hand to his sweating upper lip. ‘But Mollison’s heard gossip from somewhere.’

It wasn’t Mollison. Stuart wrote that, I know he did. Tessa recognized her son in every line. She was even astonished that Colin could not see it, that he had not connected the message with yesterday’s row, with hitting his son. He couldn’t even resist a bit of alliteration. He must have done all of them – Simon Price. Parminder. Tessa was horror-struck.

But Colin was not thinking about Stuart. He was recalling thoughts that were as vivid as memories, as sensory impressions, violent, vile ideas: a hand seizing and squeezing as he passed through densely packed young bodies; a cry of pain, a child’s face contorted. And then asking himself, again and again: had he done it? Had he enjoyed it? He could not remember. He only knew that he kept thinking about it, seeing it happen, feeling it happen. Soft flesh through a thin cotton blouse; seize, squeeze, pain and shock; a violation. How many times? He did not know. He had spent hours wondering how many of the children knew he did it, whether they had spoken to each other, how long it would be until he was exposed.

Not knowing how many times he had offended, and unable to trust himself, he burdened himself with so many papers and files that he had no hands free to attack as he moved through the corridors. He shouted at the swarming children to get out of the way, to stand clear, as he passed. None of it helped. There were always stragglers, running past him, up against him, and with his hands burdened he imagined other ways to have improper contact with them: a swiftly repositioned elbow brushing against a breast; a side-step to ensure bodily contact; a leg accidentally entangled, so that the child’s groin made contact with his flesh.

‘Colin,’ said Tessa.

But he had started to cry again, great sobs shaking his big, ungainly body, and when she put her arms around him and pressed her face to his her own tears wet his skin.

A few miles away, in Hilltop House, Simon Price was sitting at a brand-new family computer in the sitting room. Watching Andrew cycle away to his weekend job with Howard Mollison, and the reflection that he had been forced to pay full market price for this computer, made him feel irritable and additionally hard done by. Simon had not looked at the Parish Council website once since the night that he had thrown out the stolen PC, but it occurred to him, by an association of ideas, to check whether the message that had cost him his job was still on the site and thus viewable by potential employers.

It was not. Simon did not know that he owed this to his wife, because Ruth was scared of admitting that she had telephoned Shirley, even to request the removal of the post. Slightly cheered by its absence, Simon looked for the post about Parminder, but that was gone too.

He was about to close the site, when he saw the newest post, which was entitled Fantasies of a Deputy Headmaster.

He read it through twice and then, alone in the sitting room, he began to laugh. It was a savage triumphant laugh. He had never taken to that big, bobbing man with his massive forehead. It was good to know that he, Simon, had got off very lightly indeed by comparison.

Ruth came into the room, smiling timidly; she was glad to hear Simon laughing, because he had been in a dreadful mood since losing his job.

‘What’s funny?’

‘You know Fats’ old man? Wall, the deputy headmaster? He’s only a bloody paedo.’

Ruth’s smile slipped. She hurried forward to read the post.

‘I’m going to shower,’ said Simon, in high good humour.

Ruth waited until he had left the room before trying to call her friend Shirley, and alert her to this new scandal, but the Mollisons’ telephone was engaged.

Shirley had, at last, reached Howard at the delicatessen. She was still in her dressing gown; he was pacing up and down the little back room, behind the counter.

‘…been trying to get you for ages—’

‘Mo was using the phone. What did it say? Slowly.’

Shirley read the message about Colin, enunciating like a newsreader. She had not reached the end, when he cut across her.

‘Did you copy this down or something?’

‘Sorry?’ she said.

‘Are you reading it off the screen? Is it still on there? Have you taken it off?’

‘I’m dealing with it now,’ lied Shirley, unnerved. ‘I thought you’d like to—’

‘Get it off there now! God above, Shirley, this is getting out of hand – we can’t have stuff like that on there!’

‘I just thought you ought to—’

‘Make sure you’ve got rid of it, and we’ll talk about it when I get home!’ Howard shouted.

Shirley was furious: they never raised their voices to each other.

VI

The next Parish Council meeting, the first since Barry had died, would be crucial in the ongoing battle over the Fields. Howard had refused to postpone the votes on the future of Bellchapel Addiction Clinic, or the town’s wish to transfer jurisdiction of the estate to Yarvil.

Parminder therefore suggested that she, Colin and Kay ought to meet up the evening before the meeting to discuss strategy.

‘Pagford can’t unilaterally decide to alter the parish boundary, can it?’ asked Kay.

‘No,’ said Parminder patiently (Kay could not help being a newcomer), ‘but the District Council has asked for Pagford’s opinion, and Howard’s determined to make sure it’s his opinion that gets passed on.’

They were holding their meeting in the Walls’ sitting room, because Tessa had put subtle pressure on Colin to invite the other two where she could listen in. Tessa handed around glasses of wine, put a large bowl of crisps on the coffee table, then sat back in silence, while the other three talked.

She was exhausted and angry. The anonymous post about Colin had brought on one of his most debilitating attacks of acute anxiety, so severe that he had been unable to go to school. Parminder knew how ill he was – she had signed him off work – yet she invited him to participate in this pre-meeting, not caring, it seemed, what fresh effusions of paranoia and distress Tessa would have to deal with tonight.

‘There’s definitely resentment out there about the way the Mollisons are handling things,’ Colin was saying, in the lofty, knowledgeable tone he sometimes adopted when pretending to be a stranger to fear and paranoia. ‘I think it’s starting to get up people’s noses, the way they think that they can speak for the town. I’ve got that impression, you know, while I’ve been canvassing.’

It would have been nice, thought Tessa bitterly, if Colin could have summoned these powers of dissimulation for her benefit occasionally. Once, long ago, she had liked being Colin’s sole confidante, the only repository of his terrors and the font of all reassurance, but she no longer found it flattering. He had kept her awake from two o’clock until half-past three that morning, rocking backwards and forwards on the edge of the bed, moaning and crying, saying that he wished he were dead, that he could not take it, that he wished he had never stood for the seat, that he was ruined…

Tessa heard Fats on the stairs, and tensed, but her son passed the open door on his way to the kitchen with nothing worse than a scathing glance at Colin, who was perched in front of the fire on a leather pouffe, his knees level with his chest.

‘Maybe Miles’ standing for the empty seat will really antagonize people – even the Mollisons’ natural supporters?’ said Kay hopefully.

‘I think it might,’ said Colin, nodding.

Kay turned to Parminder.

‘D’you think the council will really vote to force Bellchapel out of their building? I know people get uptight about discarded needles, and addicts hanging around the neighbourhood, but the clinic’s miles away… why does Pagford care?’

‘Howard and Aubrey are scratching each other’s backs,’ explained Parminder, whose face was taut, with dark brown patches under her eyes. (It was she who would have to attend the council meeting the next day, and fight Howard Mollison and his cronies without Barry by her side.) ‘They need to make cuts in spending at District level. If Howard turfs the clinic out of its cheap building, it’ll be much more expensive to run and Fawley can say the costs have increased, and justify cutting council funding. Then Fawley will do his best to make sure that the Fields get reassigned to Yarvil.’

Tired of explaining, Parminder pretended to examine the new stack of papers about Bellchapel that Kay had brought with her, easing herself out of the conversation.

Why am I doing this? she asked herself.

She could have been sitting at home with Vikram, who had been watching comedy on television with Jaswant and Rajpal as she left. The sound of their laughter had jarred on her; when had she last laughed? Why was she here, drinking nasty warm wine, fighting for a clinic that she would never need and a housing development inhabited by people she would probably dislike if she met them? She was not Bhai Kanhaiya, who could not see a difference between the souls of allies and enemies; she saw no light of God shining from Howard Mollison. She derived more pleasure from the thought of Howard losing, than from the thought of Fields children continuing to attend St Thomas’s, or from Fields people being able to break their addictions at Bellchapel, although, in a distant and dispassionate way, she thought that these were good things…

(But she knew why she was doing it, really. She wanted to win for Barry. He had told her all about coming to St Thomas’s. His classmates had invited him home to play; he, who had been living in a caravan with his mother and two brothers, had relished the neat and comfortable houses of Hope Street, and been awed by the big Victorian houses on Church Row. He had even attended a birthday party in that very cow-faced house that he had subsequently bought, and where he had raised his four children.

He had fallen in love with Pagford, with the river and the fields and the solid-walled houses. He had fantasized about having a garden to play in, a tree from which to hang a swing, space and greenness everywhere. He had collected conkers and taken them back to the Fields. After shining at St Thomas’s, top of his class, Barry had gone on to be the first in his family to go to university.

Love and hate, Parminder thought, a little frightened by her own honesty. Love and hate, that’s why I’m here… )

She turned over a page of Kay’s documents, feigning concentration.

Kay was pleased that the doctor was scrutinizing her papers so carefully, because she had put a lot of time and thought into them. She could not believe that anybody reading her material would not be convinced that the Bellchapel clinic ought to remain in situ.

But through all the statistics, the anonymous case studies and first-person testimonies, Kay really thought of the clinic in terms of only one patient: Terri Weedon. There had been a change in Terri, Kay could feel it, and it made her both proud and frightened. Terri was showing faint glimmerings of an awakened sense of control over her life. Twice lately, Terri had said to Kay, ‘They ain’ takin’ Robbie, I won’ lerrem,’ and these had not been impotent railings against fate, but statements of intent.

‘I took ’im ter nursery yest’day,’ she told Kay, who had made the mistake of looking astonished. ‘Why’s tha’ so fuckin’ shockin’? Aren’ I good enough ter go ter the fuckin’ nurs’ry?’

If Bellchapel’s door was slammed shut against Terri, Kay was sure it would blow to pieces that delicate structure they were trying to build out of the wreckage of a life. Terri seemed to have a visceral fear of Pagford that Kay did not understand.

‘I ’ate that fuckin’ place,’ she had said, when Kay had mentioned it in passing.

Beyond the fact that her dead grandmother had lived there, Kay knew nothing of Terri’s history with the town, but she was afraid that if Terri was asked to travel there weekly for her methadone her self-control would crumble, and with it the family’s fragile new safety.

Colin had taken over from Parminder, explaining the history of the Fields; Kay nodded, bored, and said ‘mm’, but her thoughts were a long way away.

Colin was deeply flattered by the way this attractive young woman was hanging on his every word. He felt calmer tonight than at any point since he had read that awful post, which was gone from the website. None of the cataclysms that Colin had imagined in the small hours had come to pass. He was not sacked. There was no angry mob outside his front door. Nobody on the Pagford Council website, or indeed anywhere else on the internet (he had performed several Google searches), was demanding his arrest or incarceration.

Fats walked back past the open door, spooning yoghurt into his mouth as he went. He glanced into the room, and for a fleeting moment met Colin’s gaze. Colin immediately lost the thread of what he had been saying.

‘…and… yes, well, that’s it in a nutshell,’ he finished lamely. He glanced towards Tessa for reassurance, but his wife was staring stonily into space. Colin was a little hurt; he would have thought that Tessa would be glad to see him feeling so much better, so much more in control, after their wretched, sleepless night. Dreadful swooping sensations of dread were agitating his stomach, but he drew much comfort from the proximity of his fellow underdog and scapegoat Parminder, and from the sympathetic attention of the attractive social worker.

Unlike Kay, Tessa had listened to every word that Colin had just said about the Fields’ right to remain joined to Pagford. There was, in her opinion, no conviction behind his words. He wanted to believe what Barry had believed, and he wanted to defeat the Mollisons, because that was what Barry had wanted. Colin did not like Krystal Weedon, but Barry had liked her, so he assumed that there was more worth in her than he could see. Tessa knew her husband to be a strange mixture of arrogance and humility, of unshakeable conviction and insecurity.

They’re completely deluded, Tessa thought, looking at the other three, who were poring over some graph that Parminder had extracted from Kay’s notes. They think they’ll reverse sixty years of anger and resentment with a few sheets of statistics. None of them was Barry. He had been a living example of what they proposed in theory: the advancement, through education from poverty to affluence, from powerlessness and dependency to valuable contributor to society. Did they not see what hopeless advocates they were, compared to the man who had died?

‘People are definitely getting irritable with the Mollisons trying to run everything,’ Colin was saying.

‘I do think,’ said Kay, ‘that they’ll be hard-pushed, if they read this stuff, to pretend that the clinic isn’t doing crucial work.’

‘Not everybody’s forgotten Barry, on the council,’ said Parminder, in a slightly shaky voice.

Tessa realized that her greasy fingers were groping vainly in space. While the others had talked, she had single-handedly finished the entire bowl of crisps.

VII

It was a bright, balmy morning, and the computing lab at Winterdown Comprehensive became stuffy as lunchtime approached, the dirty windows speckling the dusty monitors with distracting spots of light. Even though there was no Fats or Gaia here to distract him, Andrew Price could not concentrate. He could think of nothing but what he had overheard his parents discussing the previous evening.

They had been talking, quite seriously, about moving to Reading, where Ruth’s sister and brother-in-law lived. With his ear turned towards the open kitchen door, Andrew had hovered in the tiny dark hall and listened: Simon, it appeared, had been offered a job, or the possibility of a job, by the uncle whom Andrew and Paul barely knew, because Simon disliked him so much.

‘It’s less money,’ Simon had said.

‘You don’t know that. He hasn’t said—’

‘Bound to be. And it’ll be more expensive all round, living there.’

Ruth made a noncommital noise. Scarcely daring to breathe in the hall, Andrew could tell, by the mere fact that his mother was not rushing to agree with Simon, that she wanted to go.

Andrew found it impossible to imagine his parents in any house but Hilltop House, or against any backdrop but Pagford. He had taken it for granted that they would remain there for ever. He, Andrew, would leave one day for London, but Simon and Ruth would remain rooted to the hillside like trees, until they died.

He had crept back upstairs to his bedroom and stared out of the window at the twinkling lights of Pagford, cupped in the deep black hollow between the hills. He felt as though he had never seen the view before. Somewhere down there, Fats was smoking in his attic room, probably looking at porn on his computer. Gaia was there too, absorbed in the mysterious rites of her gender. It occurred to Andrew that she had been through this; she had been torn away from the place she knew and transplanted. They had something profoundly in common at last; there was almost melancholy pleasure in the idea that, in leaving, he would share something with her.

But she had not caused her own displacement. With a squirming unease in his guts, he had picked up his mobile and texted Fats: Si-Pie offered job in Reading. Might take it.

Fats had still not responded, and Andrew had not seen him all morning, because they shared none of their classes. He had not seen Fats for the previous two weekends either, because he had been working at the Copper Kettle. Their longest conversation, recently, had concerned Fats’ posting about Cubby on the council website.

‘I think Tessa suspects,’ Fats had told Andrew casually. ‘She keeps looking at me like she knows.’

‘What’re you gonna say?’ Andrew had muttered, scared.

He knew Fats’ desire for glory and credit, and he knew Fats’ passion for wielding the truth as a weapon, but he was not sure that his friend understood that his own pivotal role in the activities of the Ghost of Barry Fairbrother must never be revealed. It had never been easy to explain to Fats the reality of having Simon as a father, and, somehow, Fats was becoming more difficult to explain things to.

When his IT teacher had passed by out of sight, Andrew looked up Reading on the internet. It was huge compared with Pagford. It had an annual music festival. It was only forty miles from London. He contemplated the train service. Perhaps he would go up to the capital at weekends, the way he currently took the bus to Yarvil. But the whole thing seemed unreal: Pagford was all he had ever known; he still could not imagine his family existing anywhere else.

At lunchtime Andrew headed straight out of school, looking for Fats. He lit up a cigarette just out of sight of the grounds, and was delighted to hear, as he was slipping his lighter casually back into his pocket, a female voice that said, ‘Hey’. Gaia and Sukhvinder caught up with him.

‘All right,’ he said, blowing smoke away from Gaia’s beautiful face.

The three of them had something these days that nobody else had. Two weekends’ work at the café had created a fragile bond between them. They knew Howard’s stock phrases, and had endured Maureen’s prurient interest in all of their home lives; they had smirked together at her wrinkled knees in the too-short waitress’s dress and had exchanged, like traders in a foreign land, small nuggets of personal information. Thus the girls knew that Andrew’s father had been sacked; Andrew and Sukhvinder knew that Gaia was working to save for a train ticket back to Hackney; and he and Gaia knew that Sukhvinder’s mother hated her working for Howard Mollison.

‘Where’s your Fat friend?’ she asked, as the three of them fell into step together.

‘Dunno,’ said Andrew. ‘Haven’t seen him.’

‘No loss,’ said Gaia. ‘How many of those do you smoke a day?’

‘Don’t count,’ said Andrew, elated by her interest. ‘D’you want one?’

‘No,’ said Gaia. ‘I don’t like smoking.’

He wondered instantly whether the dislike extended to kissing people who smoked. Niamh Fairbrother had not complained when he had stuck his tongue into her mouth at the school disco.

‘Doesn’t Marco smoke?’ asked Sukhvinder.

‘No, he’s always in training,’ said Gaia.

Andrew had become almost inured to the thought of Marco de Luca by now. There were advantages to Gaia being safeguarded, as it were, by an allegiance beyond Pagford. The power of the photographs of them together on her Facebook page had been blunted by his familiarity with them. He did not think it was his own wishful thinking that the messages she and Marco left for each other were becoming less frequent and less friendly. He could not know what was happening by telephone or email, but he was sure that Gaia’s air, when he was mentioned, was dispirited.

‘Oh, there he is,’ said Gaia.

It was not the handsome Marco who had come into view, but Fats Wall, who was talking to Dane Tully outside the newsagent’s.

Sukhvinder braked, but Gaia grabbed her upper arm.

‘You can walk where you like,’ she said, tugging her gently onwards, her flecked green eyes narrowing as they approached the place where Fats and Dane were smoking.

‘All right, Arf,’ called Fats, as the three of them came close.

‘Fats,’ said Andrew.

Trying to head off trouble, especially Fats bullying Sukhvinder in front of Gaia, he asked, ‘Did you get my text?’

‘What text?’ said Fats. ‘Oh yeah – that thing about Si? You leaving, then, are you?’

It was said with a cavalier indifference that Andrew could only attribute to the presence of Dane Tully.

‘Yeah, maybe,’ said Andrew.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Gaia.

‘My old man’s been offered a job in Reading,’ said Andrew.

‘Oh, that’s where my dad lives!’ said Gaia in surprise. ‘We could hang out when I go and stay. The festival’s awesome. D’you wanna get a sandwich, then, Sooks?’

Andrew was so stupefied by her voluntary offer to spend time with him, that she had disappeared into the newsagent’s before he could gather his wits and agree. For a moment, the dirty bus stop, the newsagent’s, even Dane Tully, tattooed and shabby in a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, seemed to glow with an almost celestial light.

‘Well, I got things to do,’ said Fats.

Dane sniggered. Before Andrew could say anything or offer to accompany him, he had loped away.

Fats was sure that Andrew would be nonplussed and hurt by his cool attitude, and he was glad of it. Fats did not ask himself why he was glad, or why a general desire to cause pain had become his overriding emotion in the last few days. He had lately decided that questioning your own motives was inauthentic; a refinement of his personal philosophy that had made it altogether easier to follow.

As he headed into the Fields, Fats thought about what had happened at home the previous evening, when his mother had entered his bedroom for the first time since Cubby had punched him.

(‘That message about your father on the Parish Council website,’ she had said. ‘I’ve got to ask you this, Stuart, and I wish – Stuart, did you write it?’

It had taken her a few days to summon the courage to accuse him, and he was prepared.

‘No,’ he said.

Perhaps it would have been more authentic to say yes, but he had preferred not to, and he did not see why he should have to justify himself.

‘You didn’t?’ she repeated, with no change of tone or expression.

‘No,’ he repeated.

‘Because very, very few people know what Dad… what he worries about.’

‘Well, it wasn’t me.’

‘The post went up the same evening that Dad and you had the row, and Dad hit—’

‘I’ve told you, I didn’t do it.’

‘You know he’s ill, Stuart.’

‘Yeah, so you keep telling me.’

‘I keep telling you because it’s true! He can’t help it – he’s got a serious mental illness that causes him untold distress and misery.’

Fats’ mobile had beeped, and he had glanced down at a text from Andrew. He read it and experienced an air punch to the midriff: Arf leaving for good.

‘I’m talking to you, Stuart—’

‘I know – what?’

‘All these posts – Simon Price, Parminder, Dad – these are all people you know. If you’re behind all this—’

‘I’ve told you, I’m not.’

‘—you’re causing untold damage. Serious, awful damage, Stuart, to people’s lives.’

Fats was trying to imagine life without Andrew. They had known each other since they were four.

‘It’s not me,’ he had said.)

Serious, awful damage to people’s lives.

They had made their lives, Fats thought scornfully as he turned into Foley Road. The victims of the Ghost of Barry Fairbrother were mired in hypocrisy and lies, and they didn’t like the exposure. They were stupid bugs running from bright light. They knew nothing about real life.

He could see a house ahead that had a bald tyre lying on the grass in front of it. He had a strong suspicion that that was Krystal’s, and when he saw the number, he knew he was right. He had never been here before. He would never have agreed to meet her at her home during the lunch hour a couple of weeks ago, but things changed. He had changed.

They said that her mother was a prostitute. She was certainly a junkie. Krystal had told him that the house would be empty because her mother would be at Bellchapel Addiction Clinic, receiving her allotted amount of methadone. Fats walked up the garden path without slowing, but with unexpected trepidation.

Krystal had been on the watch for him, from her bedroom window. She had closed the doors of every room downstairs, so that all he would see was the hall; she had thrown everything that had spilt into it back into the sitting room and kitchen. The carpet was gritty and burnt in places, and the wallpaper stained, but she could do nothing about that. There had been none of the pine-scented disinfectant left, but she had found some bleach and sloshed that around the kitchen and bathroom, both of them sources of the worst smells in the house.

When he knocked, she ran downstairs. They did not have long; Terri would probably be back with Robbie at one. Not long to make a baby.

‘Hiya,’ she said, when she opened the door.

‘All right?’ said Fats, blowing out smoke through his nostrils.

He did not know what he had expected. His first glimpse of the interior of the house was of a grimy bare box. There was no furniture. The closed doors to his left and ahead were strangely ominous.

‘Are we the only ones here?’ he asked as he crossed the threshold.

‘Yeah,’ said Krystal. ‘We c’n go upstairs. My room.’

She led the way. The deeper inside they went, the worse the smell became: mingled bleach and filth. Fats tried not to care. All doors were closed on the landing, except one. Krystal went inside.

Fats did not want to be shocked, but there was nothing in the room except a mattress, which was covered with a sheet and a bare duvet, and a small pile of clothes heaped up in a corner. A few pictures ripped from tabloid newspapers were sellotaped to the wall; a mixture of pop stars and celebrities.

Krystal had made her collage the previous day, in imitation of the one on Nikki’s bedroom wall. Knowing that Fats was coming over, she had wanted to make the room more hospitable. She had drawn the thin curtains. They gave a blueish tinge to daylight.

‘Gimme a fag,’ she said. ‘I’m gasping.’

He lit it for her. She was more nervous than he had ever seen her; he preferred her cocky and worldly.

‘We ain’ got long,’ she told him, and with the cigarette in her mouth, she began to strip. ‘Me mum’ll be back.’

‘Yeah, at Bellchapel, isn’t she?’ said Fats, somehow trying to harden Krystal up again in his mind.

‘Yeah,’ said Krystal, sitting on the mattress and pulling off her tracksuit bottoms.

‘What if they close it?’ asked Fats, taking off his blazer. ‘I heard they’re thinking about it.’

‘I dunno,’ said Krystal, but she was frightened. Her mother’s willpower, fragile and vulnerable as a fledgling chick, could fail at the slightest provocation.

She had already stripped to her underwear. Fats was taking off his shoes when he noticed something nestled beside her heaped clothes: a small plastic jewellery box lying open, and curled inside, a familiar watch.

‘Is that my mum’s?’ he said, in surprise.

‘What?’ Krystal panicked. ‘No,’ she lied. ‘It was my Nana Cath’s. Don’t—!’

But he had already pulled it out of the box.

‘It is hers,’ he said. He recognized the strap.

‘It fuckin’ ain’t!’

She was terrified. She had almost forgotten that she had stolen it, where it had come from. Fats was silent, and she did not like it.

The watch in Fats’ hand seemed to be both challenging and reproaching him. In quick succession he imagined walking out, slipping it casually into his pocket, or handing it back to Krystal with a shrug.

‘It’s mine,’ she said.

He did not want to be a policeman. He wanted to be lawless. But it took the recollection that the watch had been Cubby’s gift to make him hand it back to her and carry on taking off his clothes. Scarlet in the face, Krystal tugged off bra and pants and slipped, naked, beneath the duvet.

Fats approached her in his boxer shorts, a wrapped condom in his hand.

‘We don’ need that,’ said Krystal thickly. ‘I’m takin’ the pill now.’

‘Are you?’

She moved over on the mattress for him. Fats slid under the duvet. As he pulled off his boxers, he wondered whether she was lying about the pill, like the watch. But he had wanted to try without a condom for a while.

‘Go on,’ she whispered, and she tugged the little foil square out of his hand and threw it on top of his blazer, crumpled on the floor.

He imagined Krystal pregnant with his child; the faces of Tessa and Cubby when they heard. His kid in the Fields, his flesh and blood. It would be more than Cubby had ever managed.

He climbed on top of her; this, he knew, was real life.

VIII

At half-past six that evening, Howard and Shirley Mollison entered Pagford Church Hall. Shirley was carrying an armful of papers and Howard was wearing the chain of office decorated with the blue and white Pagford crest.

The floorboards creaked beneath Howard’s massive weight as he moved to the head of the scratched tables that had already been set end to end. Howard was almost as fond of this hall as he was of his own shop. The Brownies used it on Tuesdays, and the Women’s Institute on Wednesdays. It had hosted jumble sales and Jubilee celebrations, wedding receptions and wakes, and it smelt of all of these things: of stale clothes and coffee urns, and the ghosts of home-baked cakes and meat salads; of dust and human bodies; but primarily of aged wood and stone. Beaten-brass lights hung from the rafters on thick black flexes, and the kitchen was reached through ornate mahogany doors.

Shirley bustled from place to place, setting out papers. She adored council meetings. Quite apart from the pride and enjoyment she derived from listening to Howard chair them, Maureen was necessarily absent; with no official role, she had to be content with the pickings Shirley deigned to share.

Howard’s fellow councillors arrived singly and in pairs. He boomed out greetings, his voice echoing from the rafters. The full complement of sixteen councillors rarely attended; he was expecting twelve of them today.

The table was half full when Aubrey Fawley arrived, walking, as he always did, as if into a high wind, with an air of reluctant forcefulness, slightly stooped, his head bowed.

‘Aubrey!’ called Howard joyfully, and for the first time he moved forward to greet the newcomer. ‘How are you? How’s Julia? Did you get my invitation?’

‘Sorry, I don’t—’

‘To my sixty-fifth? Here – Saturday – day after the election.’

‘Oh, yes, yes. Howard, there’s a young woman outside – she says she’s from the Yarvil and District Gazette. Alison something?’

‘Oh,’ said Howard. ‘Strange. I’ve just sent her my article, you know, the one answering Fairbrother’s… Maybe it’s something to do… I’ll go and see.’

He waddled away, full of vague misgivings. Parminder Jawanda entered as he approached the door; scowling as usual, she walked straight past without greeting him, and for once Howard did not ask ‘how’s Parminder?’.

Out on the pavement he found a young blonde woman, stocky and square, with an aura of impermeable cheerfulness that Howard recognized immediately as determination of his own brand. She was holding a notebook and looking up at the Sweetlove initials carved over the double doors.

‘Hello, hello,’ said Howard, his breathing a little laboured. ‘Alison, is it? Howard Mollison. Have you come all this way to tell me I can’t write for toffee?’

She beamed, and shook the hand he proffered.

‘Oh, no, we like the article,’ she assured him. ‘I thought, as things are getting so interesting, I’d come and sit in on the meeting. You don’t mind? Press are allowed, I think. I’ve looked up all the regulations.’

She was moving towards the door as she spoke.

‘Yes, yes, press are allowed,’ said Howard, following her and pausing courteously at the entrance to let her through first. ‘Unless we have to deal with anything in camera, that is.’

She glanced back at him, and he could make out her teeth, even in the fading light.

‘Like all those anonymous accusations on your message board? From the Ghost of Barry Fairbrother?’

‘Oh dear,’ wheezed Howard, smiling back at her. ‘They’re not news, surely? A couple of silly comments on the internet?’

‘Has it only been a couple? Somebody told me the bulk of them had been taken off the site.’

‘No, no, somebody’s got that wrong,’ said Howard. ‘There have only been two or three, to my knowledge. Nasty nonsense. Personally,’ he said, improvising on the spot, ‘I think it’s some kid.’

‘A kid?’

‘You know. Teenager having fun.’

‘Would teenagers target Parish councillors?’ she asked, still smiling. ‘I heard, actually, that one of the victims has lost his job. Possibly as a result of the allegations made against him on your site.’

‘News to me,’ said Howard untruthfully. Shirley had seen Ruth at the hospital the previous day and reported back to him.

‘I see on the agenda,’ said Alison, as the pair of them entered the brightly lit hall, ‘that you’ll be discussing Bellchapel. You and Mr Fairbrother made good points on both sides of the argument in your articles… we had quite a few letters to the paper after we printed Mr Fairbrother’s piece. My editor liked that. Anything that makes people write letters…’

‘Yes, I saw those,’ said Howard. ‘Nobody seemed to have much good to say about the clinic, did they?’

The councillors at the table were watching the pair of them. Alison Jenkins returned their gaze, still smiling imperturbably.

‘Let me get you a chair,’ said Howard, puffing slightly as he lifted one down from a nearby stack and settling Alison some twelve feet from the table.

‘Thank you.’ She pulled it six feet forward.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ called Howard, ‘we’ve got a press gallery here tonight. Miss Alison Jenkins of the Yarvil and District Gazette.’

A few of them seemed interested and gratified by Alison’s appearance, but most looked suspicious. Howard stumped back to the head of the table, where Aubrey and Shirley were questioning him with their eyes.

‘Barry Fairbrother’s Ghost,’ he told them in an undertone, as he lowered himself gingerly into the plastic chair (one of them had collapsed under him two meetings ago). ‘And Bellchapel. And there’s Tony!’ he shouted, making Aubrey jump. ‘Come on in, Tony… we’ll give Henry and Sheila another couple of minutes, shall we?’

The murmur of talk around the table was slightly more subdued than usual. Alison Jenkins was already writing in her notebook. Howard thought angrily, This is all bloody Fairbrother’s fault. He was the one who had invited the press in. For a split second, Howard thought of Barry and the Ghost as one and the same, a troublemaker alive and dead.

Like Shirley, Parminder had brought a stack of papers with her to the meeting, and these were piled up underneath the agenda she was pretending to read so that she did not have to speak to anybody. In reality, she was thinking about the woman sitting almost directly behind her. The Yarvil and District Gazette had written about Catherine Weedon’s collapse, and the family’s complaints against their GP. Parminder had not been named, but doubtless the journalist knew who she was. Perhaps Alison had got wind of the anonymous post about Parminder on the Parish Council website too.

Calm down. You’re getting like Colin.

Howard was already taking apologies and asking for revisions to the last set of minutes, but Parminder could barely hear over the sound of her own blood thudding in her ears.

‘Now, unless anybody’s got any objections,’ said Howard, ‘we’re going to deal with items eight and nine first, because District Councillor Fawley’s got news on both, and he can’t stay long—’

‘Got until eight thirty,’ said Aubrey, checking his watch.

‘—yes, so unless there are objections – no? – floor’s yours, Aubrey.’

Aubrey stated the position simply and without emotion. There was a new boundary review coming and, for the first time, there was an appetite beyond Pagford to reassign the Fields to Yarvil. Absorbing Pagford’s relatively small costs seemed worthwhile to those who hoped to add anti-government votes to Yarvil’s tally, where they might make a difference, as opposed to being wasted in Pagford, which had been a safe Conservative seat since the 1950s. The whole thing could be done under the guise of simplifying and streamlining: Yarvil provided almost all services for the place as it was.

Aubrey concluded by saying that it would be helpful, should Pagford wish to cut the estate away, for the town to express its wishes for the benefit of the District Council.

‘…a good, clear message from you,’ he said, ‘and I really think that this time—’

‘It’s never worked before,’ said a farmer, to muttered agreement.

‘Well, now, John, we’ve never been invited to state our position before,’ said Howard.

‘Shouldn’t we decide what our position is, before we declare it publicly?’ asked Parminder, in an icy voice.

‘All right,’ said Howard blandly. ‘Would you like to kick off, Dr Jawanda?’

‘I don’t know how many people saw Barry’s article in the Gazette,’ said Parminder. Every face was turned towards her, and she tried not to think about the anonymous post or the journalist sitting behind her. ‘I thought it made the arguments for keeping the Fields part of Pagford very well.’

Parminder saw Shirley, who was writing busily, give her pen a tiny smile.

‘By telling us the likes of Krystal Weedon benefit?’ said an elderly woman called Betty, from the end of the table. Parminder had always detested her.

‘By reminding us that people living in the Fields are part of our community too,’ she answered.

‘They think of themselves as from Yarvil,’ said the farmer. ‘Always have.’

‘I remember,’ said Betty, ‘when Krystal Weedon pushed another child into the river on a nature walk.’

‘No, she didn’t,’ said Parminder angrily, ‘my daughter was there – that was two boys who were fighting – anyway—’

‘I heard it was Krystal Weedon,’ said Betty.

‘You heard wrong,’ said Parminder, except that she did not say it, she shouted it.

They were shocked. She had shocked herself. The echo hummed off the old walls. Parminder could barely swallow; she kept her head down, staring at the agenda, and heard John’s voice from a long way off.

‘Barry would’ve done better to talk about himself, not that girl. He got a lot out of St Thomas’s.’

‘Trouble is, for every Barry,’ said another woman, ‘you get a load of yobs.’

‘They’re Yarvil people, bottom line,’ said a man, ‘they belong to Yarvil.’

‘That’s not true,’ said Parminder, keeping her voice deliberately low, but they all fell silent to listen to her, waiting for her to shout again. ‘It’s simply not true. Look at the Weedons. That was the whole point of Barry’s article. They were a Pagford family going back years, but—’

‘They moved to Yarvil!’ said Betty.

‘There was no housing here,’ said Parminder, fighting her own temper, ‘none of you wanted a new development on the outskirts of town.’

‘You weren’t here, I’m sorry,’ said Betty, pink in the face, looking ostentatiously away from Parminder. ‘You don’t know the history.’

Talk had become general: the meeting had broken into several little knots of conversation, and Parminder could not make out any of it. Her throat was tight and she did not dare meet anyone’s eyes.

‘Shall we have a show of hands?’ Howard shouted down the table, and silence fell again. ‘Those in favour of telling the District Council that Pagford will be happy for the parish boundary to be redrawn, to take the Fields out of our jurisdiction?’

Parminder’s fists were clenched in her lap and the nails of both her hands were embedded in their palms. There was a rustle of sleeves all around her.

‘Excellent!’ said Howard, and the jubilation in his voice rang triumphantly from the rafters. ‘Well, I’ll draft something with Tony and Helen and we’ll send it round for everyone to see, and we’ll get it off. Excellent!’

A couple of councillors clapped. Parminder’s vision blurred and she blinked hard. The agenda swam in and out of focus. The silence went on so long that finally she looked up: Howard, in his excitement, had had recourse to his inhaler, and most of the councillors were watching solicitously.

‘All right, then,’ wheezed Howard, putting the inhaler away again, red in the face and beaming, ‘unless anyone’s got anything else to add –’ an infinitesimal pause ‘– item nine. Bellchapel. And Aubrey’s got something to tell us here too.’

Barry wouldn’t have let it happen. He’d have argued. He’d have made John laugh and vote with us. He ought to have written about himself, not Krystal… I’ve let him down.

‘Thank you, Howard,’ said Aubrey, as the blood pounded in Parminder’s ears, and she dug her nails still more deeply into her palms. ‘As you know, we’re having to make some pretty drastic cuts at District level…’

She was in love with me, which she could barely hide whenever she laid eyes on me…

‘…and one of the projects we’ve got to look at is Bellchapel,’ said Aubrey. ‘I thought I’d have a word, because, as you all know, it’s the Parish that owns the building—’

‘—and the lease is almost up,’ said Howard. ‘That’s right.’

‘But nobody else is interested in that old place, are they?’ asked a retired accountant from the end of the table. ‘It’s in a bad state, from what I’ve heard.’

‘Oh, I’m sure we could find a new tenant,’ said Howard comfortably, ‘but that’s not really the issue. The point is whether we think the clinic is doing a good—’

‘That’s not the point at all,’ said Parminder, cutting across him. ‘It isn’t the Parish Council’s job to decide whether or not the clinic’s doing a good job. We don’t fund their work. They’re not our responsibility.’

‘But we own the building,’ said Howard, still smiling, still polite, ‘so I think it’s natural for us to want to consider—’

‘If we’re going to look at information on the clinic’s work, I think it’s very important that we get a balanced picture,’ said Parminder.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ said Shirley, blinking down the table at Parminder, ‘but could you try not to interrupt the Chair, Dr Jawanda? It’s awfully difficult to take notes if people talk over other people. And now I’ve interrupted,’ she added with a smile. ‘Sorry!’

‘I presume the Parish wants to keep getting revenue from the building,’ said Parminder, ignoring Shirley. ‘And we have no other potential tenant lined up, as far as I know. So I’m wondering why we are even considering terminating the clinic’s lease.’

‘They don’t cure them,’ said Betty. ‘They just give them more drugs. I’d be very happy to see them out.’

‘We’re having to make some very difficult decisions at District Council level,’ said Aubrey Fawley. ‘The government’s looking for more than a billion in savings from local government. We cannot continue to provide services the way we have done. That’s the reality.’

Parminder hated the way that her fellow councillors acted around Aubrey, drinking in his deep modulated voice, nodding gently as he talked. She was well aware that some of them called her ‘Bends-Your-Ear’.

‘Research indicates that illegal drug use increases during recessions,’ said Parminder.

‘It’s their choice,’ said Betty. ‘Nobody makes them take drugs.’

She looked around the table for support. Shirley smiled at her.

‘We’re having to make some tough choices,’ said Aubrey.

‘So you’ve got together with Howard,’ Parminder talked over him, ‘and decided that you can give the clinic a little push by forcing them out of the building.’

‘I can think of better ways to spend money than on a bunch of criminals,’ said the accountant.

‘I’d cut off all their benefits, personally,’ said Betty.

‘I was invited to this meeting to put you all in the picture about what’s happening at District level,’ said Aubrey calmly. ‘Nothing more than that, Dr Jawanda.’

‘Helen,’ said Howard loudly, pointing to another councillor, whose hand was raised, and who had been trying to make her views heard for a minute.

Parminder heard nothing of what the woman said. She had quite forgotten about the stack of papers lying underneath her agenda, on which Kay Bawden had spent so much time: the statistics, the profiles of successful cases, the explanation of the benefits of methadone as against heroin; studies showing the cost, financial and social, of heroin addiction. Everything around her had become slightly liquid, unreal; she knew that she was going to erupt as she had never erupted in her life, and there was no room to regret it, or to prevent it, or do anything except watch it happen; it was too late, far too late…

‘…culture of entitlement,’ said Aubrey Fawley. ‘People who have literally not worked a day in their lives.’

‘And, let’s face it,’ said Howard, ‘this is a problem with a simple solution. Stop taking the drugs.’

He turned, smiling and conciliating, to Parminder. ‘They call it “cold turkey”, isn’t that right, Dr Jawanda?’

‘Oh, you think that they should take responsibility for their addiction and change their behaviour?’ said Parminder.

‘In a nutshell, yes.’

‘Before they cost the state any more money.’

‘Exact—’

‘And you,’ said Parminder loudly, as the silent eruption engulfed her, ‘do you know how many tens of thousands of pounds you, Howard Mollison, have cost the health service, because of your total inability to stop gorging yourself?’

A rich, red claret stain was spreading up Howard’s neck into his cheeks.

‘Do you know how much your bypass cost, and your drugs, and your long stay in hospital? And the doctor’s appointments you take up with your asthma and your blood pressure and the nasty skin rash, which are all caused by your refusal to lose weight?’

As Parminder’s voice became a scream, other councillors began to protest on Howard’s behalf; Shirley was on her feet; Parminder was still shouting, clawing together the papers that had somehow been scattered as she gesticulated.

‘What about patient confidentiality?’ shouted Shirley. ‘Outrageous! Absolutely outrageous!’

Parminder was at the door of the hall and striding through it, and she heard, over her own furious sobs, Betty calling for her immediate expulsion from the council; she was half running away from the hall, and she knew that she had done something cataclysmic, and she wanted nothing more than to be swallowed up by the darkness and to disappear for ever.

IX

The Yarvil and District Gazette erred on the side of caution in reporting what had been said during the most acrimonious Pagford Parish Council meeting in living memory. It made little difference; the bowdlerized report, augmented by the vivid eye-witness descriptions offered by all who had attended, still created widespread gossip. To make matters worse, a front-page story detailed the anonymous internet attacks in the dead man’s name that had, to quote Alison Jenkins, ‘caused considerable speculation and anger. See page four for full report.’ While the names of the accused and the details of their supposed misdemeanours were not given, the sight of ‘serious allegations’ and ‘criminal activity’ in newsprint disturbed Howard even more than the original posts.

‘We should have beefed up security on the site as soon as that first post appeared,’ he said, addressing his wife and business partner from in front of his gas fire.

Silent spring rain sprinkled the window, and the back lawn glistened with tiny red pinpricks of light. Howard was feeling shivery, and was hogging all the heat emanating from the fake coal. For several days, nearly every visitor to the delicatessen and the café had been gossiping about the anonymous posts, about the Ghost of Barry Fairbrother and about Parminder Jawanda’s outburst at the council meeting. Howard hated the things that she had shouted being bandied about in public. For the first time in his life, he felt uncomfortable in his own shop, and concerned about his previously unassailable position in Pagford. The election for the replacement of Barry Fairbrother would take place the following day, and where Howard had felt sanguine and excited, he was worried and twitchy.

‘This has done a lot of damage. A lot of damage,’ he repeated.

His hand strayed to his belly to scratch, but he pulled it away, enduring the itch with a martyr’s expression. He would not soon forget what Dr Jawanda had screamed to the council and the press. He and Shirley had already checked the details of the General Medical Council, gone to see Dr Crawford, and made a formal complaint. Parminder had not been seen at work since, so no doubt she was already regretting her outburst. Nevertheless, Howard could not rid himself of the sight of her expression as she screamed at him. It had shaken him to see such hatred on another human’s face.

‘It’ll all blow over,’ said Shirley reassuringly.

‘I’m not so sure,’ said Howard. ‘I’m not so sure. It doesn’t make us look good. The council. Rows in front of the press. We look divided. Aubrey says they’re not happy, at District level. This whole thing’s undermined our statement about the Fields. Squabbling in public, everything getting dirty… it doesn’t look like the council’s speaking for the town.’

‘But we are,’ said Shirley, with a little laugh. ‘Nobody in Pagford wants the Fields – hardly anyone.’

‘The article makes it look like our side went after pro-Fielders. Tried to intimidate them,’ said Howard, succumbing to the temptation to scratch, and doing it fiercely. ‘All right, Aubrey knows it wasn’t any of our side, but that’s not how that journalist made it look. And I’ll tell you this: if Yarvil makes us look inept or dirty… they’ve been looking for a chance to take us over for years.’

‘That won’t happen,’ said Shirley at once. ‘That couldn’t happen.’

‘I thought it was over,’ said Howard, ignoring his wife, and thinking of the Fields. ‘I thought we’d done it. I thought we’d got rid of them.’

The article over which he had spent so much time, explaining why the estate and the Bellchapel Addiction Clinic were drains and blots on Pagford, had been completely overshadowed by the scandals of Parminder’s outburst, and the Ghost of Barry Fairbrother. Howard had completely forgotten now how much pleasure the accusations against Simon Price had given him, and that it had not occurred to him to remove them until Price’s wife had asked.

‘District Council’s emailed me,’ he told Maureen, ‘with a bunch of questions about the website. They want to hear what steps we’ve taken against defamation. They think the security’s lax.’

Shirley, who detected a personal reproof in all of this, said coldly, ‘I’ve told you, I’ve taken care of it, Howard.’

The nephew of friends of Howard and Shirley’s had come round the previous day, while Howard was at work. The boy was halfway through a degree in computing. His recommendation to Shirley had been that they take down the immensely hackable website, bring in ‘someone who knows what they’re doing’ and set up a new one.

Shirley had understood barely one word in ten of the technical jargon that the young man had spewed at her. She knew that ‘hack’ meant to breach illegally, and when the student stopped talking his gibberish, she was left with the confused impression that the Ghost had somehow managed to find out people’s passwords, maybe by questioning them cunningly in casual conversation.

She had therefore emailed everybody to request that they change their password and make sure not to share the new one with anybody. This was what she meant by ‘I’ve taken care of it’.

As to the suggestion of closing down the site, of which she was guardian and curator, she had taken no steps, nor had she mentioned the idea to Howard. Shirley was afraid that a site containing all the security measures that the superior young man had suggested would be way beyond the scope of her managerial and technical skills. She was already stretched to the limits of her abilities, and she was determined to cling to the post of administrator.

‘If Miles is elected—’ Shirley began, but Maureen interrupted, in her deep voice. ‘Let’s hope it hasn’t hurt him, this nasty stuff. Let’s hope there isn’t a backlash against him.’

‘People will know Miles had nothing to do with it,’ said Shirley coolly.

‘Will they, though?’ said Maureen, and Shirley simply hated her. How dare she sit in Shirley’s lounge and contradict her? And what was worse, Howard was nodding his agreement with Maureen.

‘That’s my worry,’ he said, ‘and we need Miles more than ever now. Get some cohesion back on the council. After Bends-Your-Ear said what she said – after all the uproar – we didn’t even take the vote on Bellchapel. We need Miles.’

Shirley had already walked out of the room in silent protest at Howard’s siding with Maureen. She busied herself with the teacups in the kitchen, silently fuming, wondering why she did not set out only two cups to give Maureen the hint that she so richly deserved.

Shirley continued to feel nothing but defiant admiration for the Ghost. His accusations had exposed the truth about people whom she disliked and despised, people who were destructive and wrong-headed. She was sure that the electorate of Pagford would see things her way and vote for Miles, rather than that disgusting man, Colin Wall.

‘When shall we go and vote?’ Shirley asked Howard, re-entering the room with the tinkling tea tray, and pointedly ignoring Maureen (for it was their son whose name they would tick on the ballot).

But to her intense irritation, Howard suggested that all three of them go after closing time.

Miles Mollison was quite as concerned as his father that the unprecedented ill-humour surrounding next day’s vote would affect his electoral chances. That very morning he had entered the newsagent’s behind the Square and caught a snatch of conversation between the woman behind the till and her elderly customer.

‘…Mollison’s always thought he was king of Pagford,’ the old man was saying, oblivious to the wooden expression on the shopkeeper’s face. ‘I liked Barry Fairbrother. Tragedy, that was. Tragedy. The Mollison boy did our wills and I thought he was very pleased with himself.’

Miles had lost his nerve at that and slipped back out of the shop, his face glowing like a schoolboy’s. He wondered whether the well-spoken old man was the originator of that anonymous letter. Miles’ comfortable belief in his own likeability was shaken, and he kept trying to imagine how it would feel if nobody voted for him the following day.

As he undressed for bed that night, he watched his silent wife’s reflection in the dressing-table mirror. For days, Samantha had been nothing but sarcastic if he mentioned the election. He could have done with some support, some comfort, this evening. He also felt randy. It had been a long time. Thinking back, he supposed that it had been the night before Barry Fairbrother dropped dead. She had been a little bit drunk. It often took a little bit of drink, these days.

‘How was work?’ he asked, watching her undo her bra in the mirror.

Samantha did not answer immediately. She rubbed the deep red grooves in the flesh beneath her arms left by the tight bra, then said, without looking at Miles, ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, actually.’

She hated having to say it. She had been trying to avoid doing so for several weeks.

‘Roy thinks I ought to close the shop. It’s not doing well.’

Exactly how badly the shop was doing would be a shock to Miles. It had been a shock to her, when her accountant had laid out the position in the baldest terms. She had both known and not known. It was strange how your brain could know what your heart refused to accept.

‘Oh,’ said Miles. ‘But you’d keep the website?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘We’d keep the website.’

‘Well, that’s good,’ said Miles encouragingly. He waited for almost a minute, out of respect for the death of her shop. Then he said, ‘I don’t suppose you saw the Gazette today?’

She reached over for the nightdress on her pillow and he had a satisfying glimpse of her breasts. Sex would definitely help relax him.

‘It’s a real shame, Sam,’ he said, crawling across the bed behind her, and waiting to put his arms around her as she wriggled into the nightdress. ‘About the shop. It was a great little place. And you’ve had it, what – ten years?’

‘Fourteen,’ said Samantha.

She knew what he wanted. She considered telling him to go and screw himself, and decamping to the spare room, but the trouble was that there would then be a row and an atmosphere, and what she wanted more than anything in the world was to be able to head off to London with Libby in two days’ time, wearing the T-shirts that she had bought them both, and to be within close proximity of Jake and his band mates for a whole evening. This excursion constituted the entire sum of Samantha’s current happiness. What was more, sex might assuage Miles’ continuing annoyance that she was missing Howard’s birthday party.

So she let him embrace and then kiss her. She closed her eyes, climbed on top of him, and imagined herself riding Jake on a deserted white beach, nineteen years old to his twenty-one. She came while imagining Miles watching them, furiously, through binoculars, from a distant pedalo.

X

At nine o’clock on the morning of the election for Barry’s seat, Parminder left the Old Vicarage and walked up Church Row to the Walls’ house. She rapped on the door and waited until, at last, Colin appeared.

There were shadows around his bloodshot eyes and beneath his cheekbones; his skin seemed to have thinned and his clothes grown too big. He had not yet returned to work. The news that Parminder had screamed confidential medical information about Howard in public had set back his tentative recovery; the more robust Colin of a few nights ago, who had sat on the leather pouffe and pretended to be confident of victory, might never have been.

‘Is everything all right?’ he asked, closing the door behind her, looking wary.

‘Yes, fine,’ she said. ‘I thought you might like to walk down the church hall with me, to vote.’

‘I – no,’ he said weakly. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I know how you feel, Colin,’ said Parminder, in a small tight voice. ‘But if you don’t vote, it means they’ve won. I’m not going to let them win. I’m going to go down there and vote for you, and I want you to come with me.’

Parminder was effectively suspended from work. The Mollisons had complained to every professional body for which they could find an address, and Dr Crawford had advised Parminder to take time off. To her great surprise, she felt strangely liberated.

But Colin was shaking his head. She thought she saw tears in his eyes.

‘I can’t, Minda.’

‘You can!’ she said. ‘You can, Colin! You’ve got to stand up to them! Think of Barry!’

‘I can’t – I’m sorry – I…’

He made a choking noise and burst into tears. Colin had cried in her surgery before now; sobbed in desperation at the burden of fear he carried with him every day of his life.

‘Come on,’ she said, unembarrassed, and she took his arm and steered him through to the kitchen, where she handed him kitchen roll and let him sob himself into hiccups again. ‘Where’s Tessa?’

‘At work,’ he gasped, mopping his eyes.

There was an invitation to Howard Mollison’s sixty-fifth birthday party lying on the kitchen table; somebody had torn it neatly in two.

‘I got one of those, as well,’ said Parminder. ‘Before I shouted at him. Listen, Colin. Voting—’

‘I can’t,’ whispered Colin.

‘—shows them they haven’t beaten us.’

‘But they have,’ said Colin.

Parminder burst out laughing. After contemplating her with his mouth open for a moment, Colin started to laugh too: a big, booming guffaw, like the bark of a mastiff.

‘All right, they’ve run us out of our jobs,’ said Parminder, ‘and neither of us wants to leave the house but, other than that, I think we’re in very good shape indeed.’

Colin took off his glasses and dabbed his wet eyes, grinning.

‘Come on, Colin. I want to vote for you. It isn’t over yet. After I blew my top, and told Howard Mollison he was no better than a junkie in front of the whole council and the local press—’

He burst out laughing again and she was delighted; she had not heard him laugh so much since New Year, and then it had been Barry making him do it.

‘—they forgot to vote on forcing the addiction clinic out of Bellchapel. So, please. Get your coat. We’ll walk down there together.’

Colin’s snorts and giggles died away. He stared down at the big hands fumbled over each other, as if he were washing them clean.

‘Colin, it’s not over. You’ve made a difference. People don’t like the Mollisons. If you get in, we’d be in a much stronger position to fight. Please, Colin.’

‘All right,’ he said, after a few moments, awed by his own daring.

It was a short walk, in the fresh clean air, each of them clutching their voter registration cards. The church hall was empty of voters apart from themselves. Each put a thick pencil cross beside Colin’s name and left with the sense that they had got away with something.

Miles Mollison did not vote until midday. He paused at his partner’s door on the way out.

‘I’m off to vote, Gav,’ he said.

Gavin indicated the telephone pressed against his ear; he was on hold with Mary’s insurance company.

‘Oh – right – I’m off to vote, Shona,’ said Miles, turning to their secretary.

There was no harm in reminding them both that he was in need of their support. Miles jogged downstairs and proceeded to the Copper Kettle, where, during a brief post-coital chat, he had arranged to meet his wife so that they could go down to the church hall together.

Samantha had spent the morning at home, leaving her assistant in charge at the shop. She knew that she could no longer put off telling Carly that they were out of business, and that Carly was out of a job, but she could not bring herself to do it before the weekend and the concert in London. When Miles appeared, and she saw his excited little grin, she experienced a rush of fury.

‘Dad not coming?’ were his first words.

‘They’re going down after closing time,’ said Samantha.

There were two old ladies in the voting booths when she and Miles got there. Samantha waited, looking at the backs of their iron-grey perms, their thick coats and their thicker ankles. That was how she would look one day. The more crooked of the two old women noticed Miles as they left, beamed, and said, ‘I’ve just voted for you!’

‘Well, thank you very much!’ said Miles, delighted.

Samantha entered the booth and stared down at the two names: Miles Mollison and Colin Wall, the pencil, tied to the end of a piece of string, in her hand. Then she scribbled ‘I hate bloody Pagford’ across the paper, folded it over, crossed to the ballot box and dropped it, unsmiling, through the slot.

‘Thanks, love,’ said Miles quietly, with a pat on her back.

Tessa Wall, who had never failed to vote in an election before, drove past the church hall on her way back home from school and did not stop. Ruth and Simon Price spent the day talking more seriously than ever about the possibility of moving to Reading. Ruth threw out their voter registration cards while clearing the kitchen table for supper.

Gavin had never intended to vote; if Barry had been alive to stand, he might have done so, but he had no desire to help Miles achieve another of his life’s goals. At half-past five he packed up his briefcase, irritable and depressed, because he had finally run out of excuses not to have dinner at Kay’s. It was particularly irksome, because there were hopeful signs that the insurance company was shifting in Mary’s favour, and he had very much wanted to go over and tell her so. This meant that he would have to store up the news until tomorrow; he did not want to waste it on the telephone.

When Kay opened the door to him, she launched at once into the rapid, quick-fire talk that usually meant she was in a bad mood.

‘Sorry, it’s been a dreadful day,’ she said, although he had not complained, and they had barely exchanged greetings. ‘I was late back, I meant to be further on with dinner, come through.’

From upstairs came the insistent crash of drums and a loud bass line. Gavin was surprised that the neighbours were not complaining. Kay saw him glance up at the ceiling and said, ‘Oh, Gaia’s furious because some boy she liked back in Hackney has started going out with another girl.’

She seized the glass of wine she was already drinking and took a big gulp. Her conscience had hurt her when she called Marco de Luca ‘some boy’. He had virtually moved into their house in the weeks before they had left London. Kay had found him charming, considerate and helpful. She would have liked a son like Marco.

‘She’ll live,’ said Kay, pushing the memories away, and she returned to the potatoes she was boiling. ‘She’s sixteen. You bounce at that age. Help yourself to wine.’

Gavin sat down at the table, wishing that Kay would make Gaia turn the music down. She had virtually to shout at him over the vibration of the bass, the rattling saucepan lids and the noisy extractor fan. He yearned again for the melancholy calm of Mary’s big kitchen, for Mary’s gratitude, her need for him.

‘What?’ he said loudly, because he could tell that Kay had just asked him something.

‘I said, did you vote?’

‘Vote?’

‘In the council election!’ she said.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘Couldn’t care less.’

He was not sure whether she had heard. She was talking again, and only when she turned to the table with knives and forks could he hear her clearly.

‘…absolutely disgusting, actually, that the parish is colluding with Aubrey Fawley. I expect Bellchapel will be finished if Miles gets in…’

She drained the potatoes and the splatter and crash drowned her temporarily again.

‘…if that silly woman hadn’t lost her temper, we might be in with a better shot. I gave her masses of stuff on the clinic and I don’t think she used any of it. She just screamed at Howard Mollison that he was too fat. Talk about unprofessional…’

Gavin had heard rumours about Dr Jawanda’s public outburst. He had found it mildly amusing.

‘…all this uncertainty’s very damaging to the people who work at that clinic, not to mention the clients.’

But Gavin could muster neither pity nor indignation; all he felt was dismay at the firm grip Kay seemed to have on the intricacies and personalities involved in this esoteric local issue. It was yet another indication of how she was driving roots deeper and deeper into Pagford. It would take a lot to dislodge her now.

He turned his head and gazed out of the window onto the overgrown garden beyond. He had offered to help Fergus with Mary’s garden this weekend. With luck, he thought, Mary would invite him to stay for dinner again, and if she did, he would skip Howard Mollison’s sixty-fifth birthday party, to which Miles seemed to think he was looking forward with excitement.

‘…wanted to keep the Weedons, but no, Gillian says we can’t cherry-pick. Would you call that cherry-picking?’

‘Sorry, what?’ asked Gavin.

‘Mattie’s back,’ she said, and he had to struggle to recollect that this was a colleague of hers, whose cases she had been covering. ‘I wanted to keep working with the Weedons, because sometimes you do get a particular feeling for a family, but Gillian won’t let me. It’s crazy.’

‘You must be the only person in the world who ever wanted to keep the Weedons,’ said Gavin. ‘From what I’ve heard, anyway.’

It took nearly all Kay’s willpower not to snap at him. She pulled the salmon fillets she had been baking out of the oven. Gaia’s music was so loud that she could feel it vibrating through the tray, which she slammed down on the hob.

‘Gaia!’ she screamed, making Gavin jump as she strode past him to the foot of the stairs. ‘GAIA! Turn it down! I mean it! TURN IT DOWN!’

The volume diminished by perhaps a decibel. Kay marched back into the kitchen, fuming. The row with Gaia, before Gavin arrived, had been one of their worst ever. Gaia had stated her intention of telephoning her father and asking to move in with him.

‘Well, good luck with that!’ Kay had shouted.

But perhaps Brendan would say yes. He had left her when Gaia was only a month old. Brendan was married now, with three other children. He had a huge house and a good job. What if he said yes?

Gavin was glad that he did not have to talk as they ate; the thumping music filled the silence, and he could think about Mary in peace. He would tell her tomorrow that the insurance company was making conciliatory noises, and receive her gratitude and admiration…

He had almost cleared his plate when he realized that Kay had not eaten a single mouthful. She was staring at him across the table, and her expression alarmed him. Perhaps he had somehow revealed his inner thoughts…

Gaia’s music came to an abrupt halt overhead. The throbbing quiet was dreadful to Gavin; he wished that Gaia would put something else on, quickly.

‘You don’t even try,’ Kay said miserably. ‘You don’t even pretend to care, Gavin.’

He attempted to take the easy way out.

‘Kay, I’ve had a long day,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I’m not up to the minutiae of local politics the second I walk—’

‘I’m not talking about local politics,’ she said. ‘You sit there looking as if you’d rather be anywhere else – it’s – it’s offensive. What do you want, Gavin?’

He saw Mary’s kitchen, and her sweet face.

‘I have to beg to see you,’ Kay said, ‘and when you come round here you couldn’t make it clearer that you don’t want to come.’

She wanted him to say ‘that’s not true’. The last point at which a denial might have counted slunk past. They were sliding, at increasing speed, towards that crisis which Gavin both urgently desired and dreaded.

‘Tell me what you want,’ she said wearily. ‘Just tell me.’

Both could feel the relationship crumbling to pieces beneath the weight of everything that Gavin refused to say. It was with a sense of putting them both out of their misery that he reached for words that he had not intended to speak aloud, perhaps ever, but which, in some way, seemed to excuse both of them.

‘I didn’t want this to happen,’ Gavin said earnestly. ‘I didn’t mean it to. Kay, I’m really sorry, but I think I’m in love with Mary Fairbrother.’

He saw from her expression that she had not been prepared for this.

‘Mary Fairbrother?’ she repeated.

‘I think,’ he said (and there was a bittersweet pleasure in talking about it, even though he knew he was wounding her; he had not been able to say it to anyone else), ‘it’s been there for a long time. I never acknowledged – I mean, when Barry was alive I’d never have—’

‘I thought he was your best friend,’ whispered Kay.

‘He was.’

‘He’s only been dead a few weeks!’

Gavin did not like hearing that.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m trying to be honest with you. I’m trying to be fair.’

‘You’re trying to be fair?’

He had always imagined it ending in a blaze of fury, but she simply watched him putting on his coat with tears in her eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and walked out of her house for the last time.

On the pavement, he experienced a rush of elation, and hurried to his car. He would be able to tell Mary about the insurance company tonight, after all.