The Cruellest Game

Twelve

Bizarrely, I was saved from myself by Tom Farley. He arrived a good two hours before the time he had given me, just before eleven o’clock. When I heard the doorbell ring I almost didn’t respond, and may not have done so had he not shouted through the letter box.

‘It’s me, Mrs Anderson,’ he called, obviously quite certain that I would know who ‘me’ was, and I did, of course. Tom had an unmistakably resonant voice, rich in its broad Devon vowels.

‘I managed to get away early, couldn’t leave ’ee in the state you be in, could I?’

‘Oh, Tom, you’re a saint,’ I called back, fighting to keep my voice steady and wiping away my tears with the back of one hand. ‘I won’t be a minute.’

I picked myself up from the floor, quickly splashed my face with cold water from the sink, blew my nose in a piece of kitchen paper, did my best to straighten my hair and my apparel, and hurried along the hallway to let him in.

I knew I must look almost as much of a wreck as my house. But Tom made no mention of my appearance. He was a good practical Devon man, just the person, I felt sure, to bring order back to Highrise. But not all that hot, probably, on coping with an overly emotional woman in a state of significant distress. If I wanted his help, and by God I did, I was just going to have to pull myself together again. And that was, of course, probably the very best thing for me.

As I opened the door the first thing Tom saw was our smashed grandfather clock lying in shattered pieces on the flagstoned floor.

‘Oh, my good Lord,’ he said. ‘Now, who on earth would do that to such a lovely thing?’

‘I have no idea,’ I told him. ‘But I intend to find out.’

And as I spoke I realized I did still intend to do just that. My emotions were all over the place. But I would not weaken again. I must not weaken again. There would be no more sobbing and breaking down. That was not helping anything or anybody — not Robbie and his desecrated memory, and certainly not me.

And if the police weren’t going to offer any assistance, then somehow or other I had to get on with it alone. They may think that the case of the missing child completely overshadowed all else, but dreadful though that was, I had lost my child too. And I was damned well going to find out why.

However, first I had to work with Tom to restore at least some order to Highrise. The house could not be lived in as it was.

‘Our Eddie’s finishing t’other job,’ Tom told me. ‘Missus’ll bring him up dinner time.’

Tom had been a manual worker of some sort all his life and had ended up with shoulders so wide he was almost as broad as he was long. His face, beneath still abundant white hair, had been well weathered by Dartmoor and could only have been the face of a countryman. He was able to lift large pieces of furniture alone and with animal grace. When Tom was about you knew you were in safe hands.

He suggested I continued to sort out the kitchen. He wouldn’t let me near the sitting room where excrement clung to the walls, the carpet and the soft furnishings.

At about one o’clock Eddie arrived. His mother did not come into the house, merely dropping her son in the yard and driving away again immediately. I was relieved. I certainly didn’t want visitors, and Ellen Farley, although the most kindly of women, was known to be one of Blackstone’s premier gossips.

Eddie was now a strapping fifteen-year-old, the same age as my Robbie had been, but I knew I mustn’t dwell on that. He was at least a couple of inches taller, surely, than when I’d last met him a year or so ago. Having said that, it suddenly dawned on me that he was the young man who had rescued my hat at the funeral, though, unsurprisingly I suppose, I hadn’t recognized him at the time. I thanked him for doing so. He smiled awkwardly. A shy boy, but, as his father had promised, every bit as good a worker as any man.

Eddie brought with him a professional-standard upholstery and carpet cleaner and a couple of tins of antique white emulsion paint. Tom took his son, the equipment and the paint into the sitting room and shut the door on me.

I assumed they would wash the walls and then cover the nasty amendments with paint, but I could not imagine that they would be able to clean the upholstery or the carpet properly. Both had looked permanently defiled to me.

I was, however, proven wrong.

When I was eventually allowed back into the sitting room it really didn’t look bad at all. The walls needed a second coat and I could still see a bit of a shadow on the part of the settee that had been most badly affected, but I didn’t suppose I would even have noticed it had I not known what had occurred. The room was without a television, of course. The Samsung Smart, which Robert and Robbie had been so fond of, had been damaged beyond any hope of repair and now lay, its once super-shiny screen smashed to pieces, in the back of the Farley van, to be delivered later to the local recycling centre.

During the early part of the afternoon Dad phoned, and so did Bella, coincidentally within minutes of each other. I didn’t feel up to taking either call, but I did listen to their messages. Dad wanted to know how I was and asked again if I’d like him to pop over and maybe stay overnight. I managed a wry chuckle. He’d be lucky to find a bed in one piece. Bella, returning my call of the previous evening, suggested the following morning, Sunday, for that dog walk. I told myself I would get back to both of them sometime the next day. But I certainly no longer felt like a walk on the beach with Bella.

The Farleys continued to load everything else that was irretrievable into their white van. Everything that could be saved they set to work cleaning and restoring. I helped as much as I could.

We concentrated on the ground floor first, making it as ready as possible for the alarm people, who arrived, as promised, promptly at four. There were two of them, both male, wearing pale-grey overalls proclaiming the initials of their company, TAS, in fluorescent yellow. One was young, thin, bespectacled and clever-looking, the other older, plumper and with that air of a man who’s seen it all before. Or thinks he has, anyway. After tut-tutting at the state of Highrise and the state of the world in general, as Tom Farley had done, they began at once to fit alarms to the external doors on the ground floor and a beam system inside, as I had arranged with their head office.

While they worked Tom and Eddie and I disappeared upstairs to give them a clear field. They took just over three hours to equip the front and back doors and install motion sensors in each of the downstairs rooms. The control box was set up in a hall cupboard. Modern electronics, it was explained to me, meant that little wiring was called for and that speeded up the installation process. They would come back the following week, if I wished, to fit alarms upstairs.

After they had gone the Farleys and I just kept on working. While they painted, cleaned and repaired what they could, I swept and washed all the uncarpeted floors including the flagstones on the ground floor, which rewarded me by glowing even more than ever. Nothing could destroy those floors, I thought, and surely nothing could ever totally destroy Highrise.

I told myself firmly that the old house had badly needed decluttering. And my further needs were going to be few. I would have to acquire some new crockery and a few glasses, but I wasn’t about to be doing any entertaining. Other than that I could manage with Highrise just how it was.

Once all the wreckage had been removed from the house, including the furniture from Robbie’s devastated room, Highrise looked surprisingly clean and in order again, if a lot emptier than before. There was too much to be taken in one vanload, so Tom and Eddie piled the rest of the broken furniture and other debris in the yard. I would just have to try not to look at it until they could dispose of that too. They refused to leave ‘till you’m straight, near as dammit’, as Tom put it, and finally departed just before 10 p.m.

‘Us’ll be back in the morning to give the sitting room a second coat, and take away the rest of the ruined stuff,’ Tom said. ‘But at least you’m on the way to being straight again.’

I thanked them with all my heart. They’d been quite wonderful and done an amazing job, to a higher standard than I had imagined possible. I was cheered to be no longer surrounded by wreckage, and by the restoration of some degree of order.

But as I watched them trundle off up the lane, their van weighed down with the smashed remains of a life that had once seemed so perfect, the sadness of it all was overwhelming. I had lost so much. And the loss of so many treasured possessions, though, of course, totally overshadowed by the death of my son and the realization that my husband was not the man I had thought him to be, was another devastating blow. Indeed, very nearly the straw that broke the camel’s back, I thought to myself unoriginally. But I was not going to let my back be broken. Absolutely not.

I closed the front door on the Farleys’ retreating van and a cold and damp Dartmoor night and retreated to the kitchen with Florrie. Then I sat down at the table, with my chipped mug full of hot chocolate and a tooth mug full of malt whisky, and made myself think.

Someone out there was persecuting me. Or maybe trying to get to Robert through me.

I still did not intend to tell Robert about either of the break-ins. Or that I had suspected him of the first one. I don’t think I ever seriously considered that he might have played a part in the second horrific violation of Highrise. I was pretty sure he was still in the North Sea and I could not imagine he would be capable of such desecration of the home he had so loved; there was surely no motive for him to have done so. It was almost as if he already was no longer part of my life nor of our home together. More than anything, I suppose I felt that I didn’t trust him any more. He really wasn’t my Robert. For a start, I had absolutely no idea whether or not I could believe anything he said.

I needed to sort out my own thoughts. I still felt the key to all that had happened lay in finding out exactly how and why Robbie had died. And although I had little idea how to set about that, I believed less and less that my son had killed himself.

I also needed to find out more about my husband, which was another reason why I didn’t want to speak to him. Until a few days ago it had not occurred to me that there was any more to Robert than the man I knew and lived with. He was simply my husband, and a good, kind one, I’d thought.

That was no longer the case.

I had two telephones, my mobile and my house phone, and I had one remaining intact computer, my iPad. Our broadband system also remained intact. Surely that was all the equipment you needed nowadays to embark on almost any investigation?

I decided that the master bedroom, spacious and virtually undamaged, would be the least unpleasant and most comfortable place to be right now, and that I should overcome my aversion to it. I carried my iPad and mobile up there in my school bag, which also contained pens, pencils and paper. Florrie followed very quietly, probably not quite believing her luck at being allowed upstairs, and maybe into bed with me, for the second night running.

The pillows and the duvet in the master bedroom had been slashed and tossed on the floor, their stuffing spilled out everywhere. But the Farleys had removed them and cleaned up the mess. I carried in the bedding from the spare room I’d been using. The duvet wasn’t quite big enough but it would do.

I wondered if it was significant that only the bedding in the room that was obviously mine and Robert’s had been damaged. And I thought it probably was. But I was not going to indulge in any more unconstructive thoughts.

I would have liked some music to help blot out all the bad stuff, and reached instinctively for the digital radio, which usually stood on the wide window ledge. It had obviously been swept to the floor, where it still lay partially concealed by a curtain, its casing cracked in several places. It rattled as I picked it up and stood it upright again. More in hope than expectation I switched it on. The radio stuttered a bit, then, rather to my surprise, came to life. I tuned in to Classic FM.

As the sweet sounds of a Mozart piano concerto filled the room, I sank back on the pillows, Florrie draped over my legs, iPad on my lap, and set to work.