The Cruellest Game

Three

Robert wanted to shower and shave. I was clinging to him again and wouldn’t let go. In the end he just discarded his clothes on the floor where I’d dropped mine earlier, and we climbed into bed, me still in my dressing gown which I couldn’t bear to remove because I was shivering so much. I felt chilled to the marrow even though the day had been warm and I had stepped out of the bath not long before.

Robert wrapped his arms around me inside the dressing gown and eventually his body and the bedclothes covering us warmed me at least to the point where the shivering stopped.

We did not make love. It might have brought us comfort, but I don’t think either of us were capable. Neither could we sleep. Instead we talked, going over what had happened again and again, asking the same questions repeatedly. The same unanswerable questions.

After a bit Robert sat up in bed, opened the wine, without any of the care he usually applied to the task, and poured us both large glasses. We drank deeply then clung to each other again.

‘I want to know why, Robert,’ I said. ‘We both do, don’t we? Why would our beautiful boy have taken his own life?’

After all, hadn’t he had everything that he could possibly have wanted? A loving family, a wonderful home, the brightest of futures?

Yet I recalled how Robbie had once responded when Robert and I had been discussing a teenage suicide case reported in the press. I had wondered aloud how anyone so young could find life so hopeless. Robbie had enquired what difference age made, if life no longer felt worth living.

‘Do you remember that, Robert?’ I asked. ‘We were quite taken aback. It was when he didn’t seem happy at school. We even thought he might be being bullied.’

‘Marion, that was nearly three years ago at his old school,’ said Robert. ‘Everything changed when we moved him.’

I nodded. ‘But he was always such a sensitive boy. Maybe even more so than we realized...’

Robert made no further reply. At first he seemed content to let me do most of the talking. We were both in shock, of course, him every bit as much as me in spite of it having been me who had found our son’s body.

However, when he started to ask questions, in some detail, about exactly how I’d found Robbie, exactly what the police had said, exactly what conclusion they had come to, and so on, it was as if the floodgates opened. He talked and talked. We both did.

‘They don’t really think there’s anything suspicious about his death, do they?’ he enquired.

‘I don’t believe so. I don’t know. There will have to be an inquest apparently.’

‘An inquest?’ Robert sounded alarmed. ‘Why does there have to be an inquest?’

‘Just routine, the CID man said. He said that about everything.’

‘Will we have to appear in court?’

‘I don’t know. I shouldn’t think you’d have to. I might. I found his body. Doesn’t that make me what they call a material witness?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘No.’

‘I just don’t understand it, any of it.’

‘How will we ever be able to understand it?’

‘Your friend. Bella? Has she been to the house before?’

‘Yes. Two or three times. She came here and then we took the dogs up over the moors for an hour or so. She’s barely a friend. Though she was tonight, that’s for sure.’

‘What about Robbie? How did they get on? Did he go with you on the walks?’

‘Only the once, I think. He seemed to like Bella actually. But to him I suppose we were just two old biddies nattering on. He wasn’t very interested in our company. Who cares about that, Robert?’

Suddenly I felt irritated by him. That was unusual. But then, this was an unusual and horrible night.

‘I was just trying to think of anything that was new or different in his life, anything that could have caused him to... to want to do such a thing. What about school? Maybe things weren’t as perfect as we thought. You’ve always been much more involved than me. Could there have been something wrong at school?’

‘I don’t think so. I’m almost sure not.’

Robbie had been a day pupil of Kelly College, the famous Devon public school just outside the Dartmoor market town of Tavistock, about thirty minutes’ drive from our home. He’d won a swimming scholarship there a couple of years previously, which had halved the fees, thus making it possible for us to remove him from Okehampton College, where we had felt he was unhappy. There was nothing much wrong with our local community school, as I knew well enough first-hand now that I taught there part-time, but it had probably been a tad too boisterous for our Robbie. However, he seemed to have fitted in smoothly at Kelly, one of the country’s top swimming schools. He was not remotely interested in any other school sport and hated team games, but he loved his swimming, and had successfully represented Devon County on several occasions.

‘Robbie had so much to look forward to all round,’ I went on. ‘You know his coach was trying to get him trialled for England youth? He was on cloud nine about that.’

And we had been so proud. Had we pushed him too much? No, I was sure we hadn’t. Yet something had pushed him over the edge.

‘He had his GCSE exams looming, though,’ Robert countered. ‘He’d already started his mocks, hadn’t he? Was he worried about the results? Was he having problems?’

‘Not that I knew of. And why would he have been worried? He was clever. You came to the college open day last time you were home. Don’t you remember how all the teachers said Robbie would sail through?’

‘Yes I do.’ Robert was thoughtful.

‘Robbie always seemed to find everything so easy, didn’t he?’ I continued. ‘He was an athlete and an academic. The tote double. I’m sure he didn’t have any problems at Kelly. I know he didn’t seem to make many close friends, if any, but that’s how he was, wasn’t it? That’s how we’ve always been as a family, I suppose.’

‘Yes. And maybe that’s what was wrong. I blame myself for this, Marion. The life I forced him to lead. I will always blame myself.’

I sighed. ‘You didn’t force him do anything. Robbie was a happy boy. He liked his life, I’m quite sure he did.’

‘Apparently not,’ said Robert grimly.

We kept going over the same ground. And always we came to the same conclusion. Robbie could not have taken his own life. It wasn’t possible. He had no reason to. No reason at all. And yet he had. There could be no rational alternative to that. Could there?

I felt as if all my insides were tied in one big knot. And the more we talked, the more I had to accept that it wasn’t just Robbie’s death that had shocked and bewildered me so. I was also anxious about my husband and the manner of his homecoming. I had uncertainties. I couldn’t help it. There were concerns I needed him to satisfy, but feared to raise. In the end I could not stop myself.

‘Robert, which rig have you been on?’

‘Jocelyn. Why?’ Robert sounded puzzled, as he might. A rig had always been a rig to me. It had never mattered which one he was on, only that he was away from home.

‘It’s just that when I called Amaco and they couldn’t find you on the list, well, they mentioned a man called Rob Anderton. And he was on Jocelyn.’

Robert made no comment. Did I feel him stiffen as he lay by my side? Or did I imagine it?

‘So who’s Rob Anderton?’ I went on.

‘He’s a derrickman, I barely know him,’ said Robert evenly.

‘Yes, they told me he was a derrickman. That’s a crewman, isn’t it? Someone who helps maintain the drill—’

‘A senior crewman, yes,’ Robert interrupted, his tone indicating that he had no wish to continue with this topic.

‘Quite a coincidence, isn’t it?’ I carried on doggedly. ‘Rob Anderton and Rob Anderson on the same small platform in the North Sea?’

‘Is it? I suppose so. I don’t know. And aren’t I Robert? Since when did you ever call me Rob? I don’t want to talk about Rob Anderton, Marion. Actually I don’t want to talk about anything more tonight. I just can’t. We really need to try to get some sleep. I don’t know if it’s possible, but if we’re even going to begin to get through this, we must try.’

He turned away, wrapping his arms around his pillow instead of me. I lay on my back staring at the ceiling. I had slept before, but I feared sleep was not going to come again that night.

Robert tossed and turned by my side. Eventually he began to snore intermittently, so I knew that he at least had finally managed to find some brief respite. Or had he? Once or twice he cried out as if in torment. I hoped his dreams were not as bad as mine had been earlier.

At about five o’clock in the morning I crept out of bed and groped my way from our bedroom without switching on the light. My burned feet had stopped throbbing while I lay in bed but started to hurt again as soon as I put weight on them. Moving cautiously, I closed the door as softly as possible behind me and, on tiptoe, or as near to tiptoe as my damaged feet would allow, climbed the second staircase to Robbie’s room.

It was the first time I had been in it since the police and the ambulance crew had left and Robbie’s body had been removed. The nylon noose had thankfully also been removed from the central beam.

Other than that nothing much had been touched, or at any rate altered, from how I had seen it when I had kicked open the door, clutching those two mugs of tea, to be confronted by my son’s body hanging before me.

The desk was still in the middle of the room where I’d presumed Robbie had dragged it. The shattered computer screen still lay on the floor. I picked out the shards of glass and put them in the bin. There were sheets of paper, pens and pencils, and a couple of books on the floor too. I picked them up and piled them neatly on the desk. Unusually for a teenage boy, Robbie had always been tidy. So I set about tidying his room, making it look, as much as I could, the way it had always been before.

I didn’t move the desk, though. I was afraid that dragging it across the wooden floor would wake Robert. And although I had been so desperate for his return, and thankful that he’d arrived so much earlier than either of us had expected, I just wanted to be alone for a bit in my boy’s room with all his things around me.

I did move the chair, carrying it across the room from where it had been left by the chimney breast, and placing it carefully in front of the desk so that I could sit there, just as Robbie had spent so much of his time sitting before that same desk.

I ran my hands over the smoothly finished wood in front of me.

I wondered what sort of things the police looked for when they checked out a death like Robbie’s. I found, now that I was confronted by such an unimaginable situation, that I had little or no idea. I had no experience of these matters other than watching the odd detective show on TV.

This was different. This was for real.

I supposed that in a case like Robbie’s they would routinely look for anything that might indicate that his death was not as it first seemed. Anything which indicated that there was something suspicious about it. That another person might be involved, presumably. Although DS Jarvis had more or less suggested that they weren’t considering that option very seriously. ‘Routine, just routine, Mrs Anderson.’

I slid open the top drawer on the right-hand side of Robbie’s desk. I knew he’d always kept his diary there. I was mildly surprised to see that it was still there. I’d somehow expected the police to have taken it away.

Perhaps they’d read it on the spot and decided it wasn’t relevant. I’d never read Robbie’s diary. I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing such a thing. Even though Robbie and I were so close.

Things were different now, though. Very different.

I lifted the diary from the drawer. It was a rather smart shiny black leather job, with Robbie’s initials on it, which Robert and I had bought off the Net for him the previous Christmas. I suppose a lot of young people nowadays kept an electronic diary, if they did so at all. But there’d been an old-fashioned side to Robbie. He’d said he much preferred the traditional version, a bound book.

I opened the diary towards the back, and turned to the most recent entries. The dates of his mock GCSEs had all been neatly entered. I flipped backwards. Our birthdays were marked, Robert’s and mine, and the date of his own late spring birthday, the 28th of May.

He’d indicated it with a cross and added a comment. ‘Mum and Dad arranged for me to have a flight over the moors in a glider. FANTASTIC!’

I felt the tears welling up again. I could see his face when we told him about the glider trip. I could so clearly remember his enthusiasm both before and afterwards. He hadn’t stopped talking about it for days.

I flipped a few pages further on and the diary fell open at random to that weekend in late July when he and his father had gone on their biking trip over the moors. Robbie’s entries there also burst with enthusiasm. ‘Coolest time ever,’ he’d written. ‘I’m going to make Dad do this again.’

There was quite a lot about school. And his swimming, of course. All pretty positive. A few schoolboy jokes, including one really obscene one which he credited somewhat gleefully to another boy.

He’d been invited, it seemed, though I didn’t remember him ever mentioning it, to a classmate’s rather smart-sounding black-tie birthday bash just before Christmas. I hadn’t known about that, but I suppose he would have told me eventually. For a start Robbie hadn’t owned a dinner suit and he’d doubtless have expected me to acquire one for him.

He hadn’t been a bit interested in clothes, and had always relied on me to sort out his wardrobe. One of so many tasks I would never have to perform again. I swallowed hard and read on.

‘I suppose I’ll have to go, Jack is a really good bloke,’ he’d written. ‘I do hate those kind of things, though.’

He always had too. He was so like his father in that regard. At his happiest in his own home. Or so I’d always thought.

He went on to mention the name of a girl I’d never heard of before.

‘It would be OK if I could persuade Sue S. to go with me. I wonder if she might?’

Girls. He was beginning to show an interest in girls. And he hadn’t told his mother. It was all so normal. I was fleetingly glad of that somehow. Of course he was showing an interest in girls. He was fifteen, wasn’t he? TV and the papers seemed full of tales of fifteen-year-old dads, for God’s sake.

I vaguely wondered who Sue S. was. Another pupil at Kelly? Someone he’d met through his swimming? I might never know now, and probably would never meet her. She could have become his first girlfriend. Maybe she had been.

I flipped through the pages again, looking specifically for a mention of her name. I found it just once more, part of a frustratingly brief entry in mid-September.

‘Sue S. so well fit. Wicked!’

I wondered what that meant, but the diary offered no further clarification. Indeed, Robbie seemed not to have shared too many intimate thoughts at all with his diary, keeping it principally for factual entries, reminders of dates and appointments and so on. Just like his father, I thought.

I felt the tears welling again and only just forced them back. It’s difficult to think clearly through a haze of tears, and I was trying so hard to think clearly.

Another entry did supply a little more insight into his life. It referred to him and a couple of mates managing to successfully order a few beers at a pub in Tavistock where the landlord either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care that they were under age. It made me smile. I had no idea he had ever done anything like that and again was rather glad he had.

‘Everybody keeps going on already about what they’re going to do in their gap years, and which uni they want to go to,’ Robbie had continued. ‘I suppose I’m going to have to think about that one day. But I don’t want to. Certainly not yet. I don’t like to think about leaving home.’

I felt a pang of the only anxiety Robbie had ever previously given me, really. I’d worried about his leaving home. He’d certainly displayed none of the usual desire to spread his wings that might be expected of a young man at the beginning of his life. And I’d always feared the experience might ultimately be traumatic, both for him and for us. I’d sometimes even thought that maybe Robbie would just stay at home. Find work nearby. Or attend a local college. Was it mandatory nowadays for a young person to fly the nest so irrevocably at a tender age?

I closed the diary and put it back in its drawer. As far as I could see there was absolutely nothing in it to indicate that Robbie had any worries at all, let alone anything serious enough to make him want to take his own life.

Perhaps he was the sort of boy who kept his true feelings bottled up to such an extent that he quite simply could not cope with them any more. I hadn’t thought he was like that, but I no longer knew. I didn’t know anything. That was the trouble. Perhaps he’d had concerns, worries, fears that he’d never shared with us or his diary. With anyone.

And perhaps these had driven our Robbie to such a point of despair that he’d felt that he could not carry on.

Could that be? It kind of had to be. I still could not accept it.

I sat there for a while, elbows on Robbie’s desk, my chin resting in my hands, staring out of the window. It had become pretty much completely light outside by then. Or as light as it was probably ever going to get that morning. Appropriately, somehow, dawn had broken dull and wet, in sharp contrast to the previous day. The night must have clouded over eventually. It was drizzling and there was thick mist over the moors. Actually, you couldn’t even see the moors. They were concealed by a dense grey curtain. This was typical November weather. On Dartmoor anyway.

I felt close to Robbie sitting in his room like that. I thought back over his all too brief life. Robbie had been born prematurely twenty-nine weeks into my pregnancy. For several weeks he was in an incubator fighting for survival and at first we were told his chances were not good. Fearing that we were going to lose him made him all the more special. That and the fact that complications during the birth meant I would have no more children.

But that didn’t matter one jot, because Robbie, a little fighter, got through it all, grew into the fine young man we were so proud of, and from the beginning was more than enough for his father and me.

He had been all either of us wanted. He’d meant absolutely everything to us both. And now he was gone.

I had no idea how much time passed before I heard noises from below. Robert was moving around down there. I heard him go into the bathroom.

I stood up, preparing to go downstairs. Before doing so, and now that Robert was awake, I decided to move the desk back to its rightful place by the chimney breast. It was somehow important to me that everything in the room was once again as it should be.

I grasped one end of the desk with both hands and dragged it across the room, finally pushing it, with some difficulty, to fit flush again in its corner.

Standing back to check that it was correctly in position, I noticed the floor. There were two crooked grooves in the highly polished wood clearly marking the path the desk had taken when I pushed it back. The floorboards were ancient, but when Robert had refurbished Robbie’s room he’d put a finish on the floor which had produced a wonderful deep glow that looked as if it had evolved with age rather than out of a bottle, but had turned out to be rather more fragile than he’d expected. I remembered him telling Robbie to take care, and how the two of them had attached little patches of green felt to the legs of Robbie’s chair. The desk however, had not been designed to ever be moved, and no such protective measures had been taken.

I stared at the floor, slowly taking in the significance of what had just happened. There were no other noticeable marks on the floorboards. Just those I had caused by dragging the desk back to its place. No other marks at all.

I ran down the stairs to Robert, making my feet throb badly again. I shouted out to him before I even got to the bedroom, eager to share my discovery. The door to the en-suite bathroom was open. Robert was standing naked at the basin, his mouth full of toothpaste. His hair was wet. He’d obviously showered, and he’d shaved off his stubbly beard. Funny how the routine of life goes on even on such a day. Although his distress showed clearly in his eyes, he looked like my Robert again and not so very different from how he’d been when we’d first met. His face, long and narrow with angular cheekbones, was a bit more lined and leathery and not quite so pale, down to all those years of exposure to North Sea air probably, but his hair had yet to show any trace of grey and he was still in quite good shape.

‘Robert, Robert, there was someone there with Robbie when he died,’ I cried. ‘I’m sure of it. I don’t think he did kill himself, I really don’t.’

As I said the words they brought me relief. It seemed crazy, but I realized I would prefer my son to have been murdered rather than to have taken his own life. It was totally selfish and all to do with guilt, I assumed.

While Robert rinsed the toothpaste from his mouth I explained what had just happened in the room upstairs. How I’d moved the desk on my own, leaving nasty jagged grooves on the polished floor and how these were the only marks on the floor.

‘Don’t you see, Robert, don’t you see? The only way that desk could have been moved to the middle of the room in the first place without marking the floor would have been if two people had carried it, one lifting each end. Robbie couldn’t have carried it on his own. You made it out of solid oak. It would have been far too heavy for him. Anyway, you wouldn’t try to lift it, would you? Not if you were going to... going to...’ I didn’t want to say it.

‘No, if he’d been on his own he’d have dragged the desk across the room,’ I went on. ‘Just like I did.’

Robert wiped his mouth with a towel.

‘But he was always very careful with that floor,’ he ventured tentatively.

‘Not when he was planning to kill himself, surely,’ I blurted out finally. And saying it hurt me terribly again, physically as well as mentally.

‘I don’t know, Marion. I just don’t know. What alternative could there be? Anyway, he was alone here, wasn’t he? While you were at work. Who would have come here? And who could possibly have wanted to harm our Robbie?’

Robert had said the last words in a very distracted sort of way. I could see he was still having difficulty taking anything much in. Or else he was just trying to blot everything out. Or maybe a bit of both.

‘I’m going to call the police,’ I said. ‘This changes everything. I’m sure of it.’

‘It’s only just gone half past seven,’ said Robert. As if that mattered a damn.

‘Since when have the police worked office hours?’ I enquired.

‘Look, you’re clutching at straws, Marion,’ Robert persisted.

‘Am I? There aren’t any straws to clutch. Our son is dead.’

‘I know. But it’s the guilt, isn’t it? Don’t you see? I understand exactly how you feel. I told you. I feel so guilty. If our boy killed himself, we must be responsible. Surely? Me mostly. It was me who created this life we have here. Me who cut us off so much from the rest of the world. I reckon that’s what he couldn’t take.’

He was right about the guilt, but I hadn’t invented the marks on the floor. I was just about to tell him so, when I noticed that tears were rolling down Robert’s cheeks.

My heart melted. I went to his side. How could I ever doubt him, or anything about him?

‘You created a wonderful life for us, Robert,’ I said. ‘Robbie thought it was wonderful too. I’ve just been reading his diary. Our boy didn’t kill himself. I’m absolutely certain of it. The police have to listen to me. And I’m going to make them. I promise you that.’