The Cruellest Game

Four

I found the business card DS Jarvis had given me. It was in the pocket of the jacket I’d been wearing the previous day, which now lay in the middle of our bedroom floor tangled up with the rest of my clothes and Robert’s. It seemed the detective sergeant was stationed at Exeter’s Heavitree Road Police Station.

I dialled the mobile number he’d written on the back.

While I was doing so Robert dressed quickly in jeans and a clean shirt and went downstairs. I loved him dearly, but he’d disappointed me by being so apparently unimpressed by what I considered to be my big discovery, and he seemed to have no wish even to listen to any conversation I might have with the police.

As it turned out there wasn’t much of a conversation to listen to.

I had been vaguely reassured and perhaps a bit impressed to find that Jarvis had supplied me with the number of his mobile phone. I was not so impressed to be patched straight through to a duty officer at Heavitree Road.

He said DS Jarvis was not immediately contactable and all he could do was take a message. Unless he could help at all.

‘Perhaps you would like to tell me what you are calling DS Jarvis about, madam?’ he enquired.

‘No, thank you,’ I said. I knew about duty officers who answered calls to police stations nowadays. They weren’t even police officers any more.

‘Just ask him to call Marion Anderson as soon as he can, will you?’ I said. ‘He has my number, I think. But I’ll leave it again.’

I followed Robert downstairs, still wearing my dressing gown.

Vaguely I wondered why he’d been in such a hurry to dress, on the day after our son had died.

I went into the kitchen, expecting him to be making tea. That was our usual routine. He was the morning tea-maker when he was at home. Though my first cup was normally brought to me in bed.

But Robert wasn’t in the kitchen at all. The Aga was still alight — I could feel the heat from it. However, the big old kettle, almost always simmering away on top when Robert was at home, was not in place. Robbie and I were inclined not to bother with it. That day it seemed Robert hadn’t bothered either. I touched the electric kettle gingerly. It hadn’t even been switched on. But then, this was no normal day. Why on earth should either of us be following any kind of normal routine?

I heard a noise in the hall, and called out.

‘Robert? Are you there, Robert?’

He didn’t reply. I stepped into the long passageway. I could see Robert standing by the front door. He was now wearing outdoor shoes and a waterproof jacket over his jeans and shirt. His hand was on the door handle.

‘Are you going out?’ I asked in surprise.

‘Uh, yes. There’s something I have to do.’

‘What? Today? Now?’ I studied him. The way he was standing. The slightly sheepish manner. He seemed unwilling to look me directly in the eye.

‘Were you going out without even telling me?’ I asked incredulously.

I thought his face, not as ashen as it had been when he returned home but still on the pale side, coloured slightly.

‘No, no, of course not. I was just waiting for you to come down.’

I didn’t think he was telling the truth.

‘Where on earth are you going? What is it you have to do on this morning of all mornings?’

‘I have to take the hire car back.’

‘What? Won’t they pick it up from here? Anyway, does it matter if we keep it another day?’

He stood silently for a moment looking at me.

‘I have to go out,’ he said. ‘I have to be on my own—’

‘But you’ve only just got back. I need you with me. Here. In our home.’

‘You must understand. I just have to have a few hours on my own. And this way I’ll be able to leave you our car in case you want to get out too. I can drop the rental in Okehampton later and get a cab home...’

‘But why don’t I come with you? Follow you in our vehicle. Then I can give you a lift straight back.’

‘Look, I thought I might take a walk up over the moors to Meldon Reservoir, or maybe Yes Tor. I need to clear my head.’

‘Robert, you’d drown.’ I gestured out through the hall window. The rain was still pouring down. ‘It’ll be blowing a gale up there, too. What are you thinking of? And where are your heavy-duty waterproofs, and your boots?’

I knew where they were well enough. In the boot room by the back door. We were standing at the front door. Robert was in no way dressed for a tramp over the moors, not even on a much better day than this.

Suddenly he yelled at me.

‘You really don’t understand, do you?’ His voice was not only loud but very Scottish again. He sounded furious. He’d never spoken to me so roughly before.

I took an involuntary step backwards.

‘I have to go out, Marion,’ he continued in the same loud and angry tone of voice. ‘And I have to be on my own. Just trust me, will you, woman?’

I thought I was going to break down and cry again. He saw it in me, I think. His manner softened as swiftly as it had become so harsh.

‘I’ll be back in a few hours, Marion. I promise. I just need a bit of time to myself, that’s all.’

He reached out and touched me on one shoulder. I half waited for the kiss. We never parted, Robert and I, even for a few hours, without kissing. No kiss came. Instead he swung around and left the house.

I found myself shuffling backwards until my heels hit the staircase, jarring my burned feet, and then I just sat down. I was shocked to the core yet again. The death of a son could make any man or woman behave strangely and in a totally out of character way, I told myself. None the less, I was further traumatized by Robert’s behaviour.

After a while I hoisted myself up off the stairs and wandered distractedly into the kitchen. I switched on the kettle but never quite got round to making myself the tea I had half planned. I just sat down at the table, my back to the door, in the same chair I’d been using when Robert had arrived at one in the morning, unexpected in every way. Neither looking nor sounding like the husband I so loved. And now he had walked away from me, when I needed him most.

I began to wonder again what it meant. One half of my brain and certainly my heart told me that it meant nothing at all. Robert was a terribly bereaved father. I couldn’t expect him to behave logically. I couldn’t expect him to be his usual self. No doubt I was not my usual self, either. The other half began to relive the events of the last twenty-four hours. To dissect them meticulously. And even to look further back into our shared past.

I thought about the Amaco emergency number he had given me being unobtainable.

The piece of card upon which he had written it all those years ago was still on the kitchen table in front of me, alongside the discarded shopping list upon which PC Cox had scribbled the main number of the Amaco head office in Aberdeen after she’d got it from directory enquiries.

I checked my watch. It was now just after 9 a.m. I dialled the head office number and asked for human resources, telling the operator that I was the wife of an Amaco employee.

‘Oh, and just before you put me through I wonder if I could check with you the direct-line number my husband gave me in case of an emergency,’ I said. ‘I can’t seem to get it to ring.’

The operator obligingly did so. Just one digit was wrong in the number Robert had supplied. A simple careless mistake, easy to make, or a deliberate one designed to present an obstacle, albeit not one that couldn’t be overcome with persistence, should I ever try to contact Amaco? It could have been either.

I ended the call before being put through. If the situation had not been so dire, and if PC Cox had not been with me, I mightn’t have persisted the previous evening, mightn’t have sought out an alternative out-of-hours number for Amaco.

I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know anything any more. I didn’t even know why I was torturing myself like this.

My son was dead. That was all that mattered in my life. What was I doing doubting my husband at such a time? I hadn’t doubted him in sixteen years. He had shown me and our son nothing but kindness and generosity. What was wrong with me? Why was I doubting him?

It was perhaps odd, but my brain seemed overly active at a time when I might have expected it to be anaesthetized. If I suddenly had all this mental energy, then surely I should be concentrating on Robbie’s death, the manner of it, and what might lie behind it, rather than questioning my husband.

Anyone was entitled to behave strangely in such circumstances, I told myself.

I went up to Robbie’s room again and spent an hour or so there, checking everything, looking around the place, once more studying those marks on the floor.

Then I made my way down to the kitchen to call DS Jarvis again and for the second time was patched through to Heavitree Road.

This time I didn’t even bother to speak. I just hung up.

I opened the back door. Robert had fashioned a kind of leanto gazebo, wooden uprights and a slate roof, beneath which we could shelter on wet days while still enjoying the garden. I breathed the Dartmoor air deep into my lungs and stood there watching the rain fall.

A song kept going through my head. Robert was a bit of a jazz buff, and it was one of his favourites, sung by Dinah Washington — ‘What a Difference a Day Makes’.

Could it really be only a day ago that I’d set off cheerily for work at Okehampton College, leaving Robbie in the kitchen tucking into the bacon sandwich I’d made him? Crispy, on naughty white bread. Just the way he liked it.

I tried to remember our last words to each other. And I couldn’t, which made things even worse somehow.

I was quite sure, though, that there had been nothing to give cause for concern. But had I missed something? No, I was sure of it. It had all been so ordinary and inconsequential.

I thought he’d just said: ‘Bye, Mum, see you tonight.’ Or something like that. He wasn’t a great talker in the mornings. What teenage boy was?

I couldn’t even remember what I’d said to him. Vaguely I recalled telling him I’d be stopping off on the way home to do some shopping, and then I’d just said ‘goodbye’. Or ‘cheers’ maybe. I said that sometimes.

I shivered. It was a cool morning as well as wet. I was still wearing only my fluffy dressing gown. And I’d never fully warmed up from the unnatural chill I’d experienced during the night. I stepped back into the kitchen. I really should eat and drink something. I needed energy. I needed strength. I toasted a couple of slices of bread and, using our fancy coffee machine, made a double espresso in a bid to wake myself up a bit, to hopefully become just a little more alert.

Then I switched on the TV in order to provide a diversion. It didn’t work.

I waited until nearly midday before I tried to call DS Jarvis again, with exactly the same result. I cursed under my breath. Perhaps I should speak to somebody else. Perhaps I should get dressed and just drive to Exeter, to Heavitree Road.

But that could so easily prove to be a total waste of time and effort. It would be better to be patient for a bit. I’d call again later.

I paced around the house. In spite of my throbbing feet I just couldn’t sit still anywhere. One half of me was drawn to Robbie’s room again. The other half wanted to stay as far away as possible.

The house phone rang and I rushed to it hoping the caller would be Robert, offering an explanation, apologizing for his behaviour, saying he was on his way home. Anything. I could see from the display panel that it wasn’t him. I had no wish to speak to anyone else so I waited for the answering machine to kick in. The caller was the bursar at Kelly. The school wanted to know where Robbie was, and why he hadn’t turned up for his mocks that day.

I didn’t pick up. I couldn’t pick up.

I made more coffee. Just to give myself something to do. On top of my shock and grief I was now just so bewildered and troubled by Robert’s behaviour. It hadn’t occurred to me that he would leave me for anything that morning. I had assumed, once he had made his so welcome middle-of-the-night arrival, that he would just want to cling to me as I’d so wanted to cling to him while we tried to make some sense out of the terrible tragedy which had befallen us.

Instead he had gone off on his own. And in anger, it seemed.

I thought back to our first meeting sixteen years previously. I’d been twenty-four and had just started teaching at Exeter’s Bodley School. I’d taken a break after finishing my training when the grandmother who’d brought me up became seriously ill. I’d looked after her until her death the previous year. Work and independence were still new to me and I didn’t find Bodley easy. As an English literature specialist I had been attracted to the school because it had been named after Thomas Bodley, founder of Oxford University’s famous Bodleian Library, who was born in Exeter. The school was situated in a leafy residential road to the north of the city, and I’d imagined it to be a civilized, rather bookish seat of learning in this predominately rather middle-class old county town. I was, however, to discover that much of Bodley’s catchment area covered the Bridge Estate, a 1960s-built council development already way past its sell-by date, which, by West Country standards anyway, was quite notorious. And Bodley turned out to be a far tougher school than I’d expected.

Perhaps preoccupied with the assorted problems I had to deal with on a regular basis at Bodley, I was riding my bicycle through the city centre on a wet November day, unaware of any danger, when, as he was passing me, a BMW driver swung in too tightly to take the approaching corner and just caught the rim of my front wheel, which folded right round. The bike collapsed, and me with it. I fell to the ground, raking one arm right along the edge of the pavement and knocking my head. I was momentarily stunned.

Robert was my good Samaritan. A kind stranger at my side in a flash. The BMW driver did not stop. Robert, loudly and colourfully Scottish, cursed him as he tended to me. He seemed to know at least the rudiments of first aid — making me count the fingers he held up in front of me to check if I was concussed, and so on — as indeed, I was later to learn, did all Amaco rig workers. He wanted to take me to hospital, but I insisted that I was fine.

‘In that case I’m taking you home,’ he said.

We padlocked my buckled bike to a railing, to be collected some other time, and picked up a taxi from a nearby rank to take us to the little studio flat I rented near the station in Exwick, less than five minutes’ cycle ride from Bodley School.

Robert found some vaguely appropriate ointment, tore up a tea towel to fashion bandages, and dressed my grazed arm. Then he made us both tea. And I began to notice that striking Gaelic colouring, the black hair, the sharply contrasting pale skin, the light-blue eyes. And his big capable hands. I thought he was an attractive man. Obviously a kind man too.

We began to talk. I told him about my grandmother, whom I’d adored, because she was still so much on my mind. And he said that he too had been brought up by his grandmother who’d also recently died. Wasn’t that a coincidence? He was in his early thirties, some years my senior. He’d decided to move from his Glasgow home to Devon, where his gran had taken him on holidays as a boy, after the irrevocable break-up of a long-term relationship a few months earlier. He also told me about his work in the oil industry, which meant he could make his home, such as it was, pretty much anywhere he wanted.

I don’t know if it was love at first sight. Or lust. Or the shock of my accident, minor as it was. I do know I had never done anything like it before in the whole of my rather sheltered life. But we ended up in bed together that very night. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. Not to mention unexpectedly and wonderfully exciting. It somehow never occurred to either of us to take any precautions. We had unprotected sex, at the time quite oblivious to all that might lead to.

Rob, as he called himself then, stayed the whole night but in the morning told me he had to leave for his scheduled spell of duty on a North Sea rig. He would call me as often as he could and be back to see me as soon as he returned on leave right after Christmas. He said he usually offered to work over the festive season to allow the married men time off at home, but he could spend New Year with me, if I liked.

I shared a quiet Christmas with my father in North Devon, as previously arranged, feeling as if I were in a kind of limbo. And even though Robert did phone several times, from one of the land — sea payphones used on the rigs in those days, I couldn’t help wondering, of course, if I would ever see this man again. He was, however, as good as his word, which was just as well, because I soon realized that I was probably pregnant. Tests confirmed this to be the case. I had fallen for Robbie that very first night.

I told Rob — whom I’d already begun to call by what he’d told me was his full name, Robert, because it seemed to suit him so much better — with some trepidation.

He was overjoyed. I couldn’t believe it. He didn’t seem fazed at all to be having a child with a young woman who was more or less still a stranger.

‘That’s it then,’ he said. ‘We have to find a home together and we have to get married.’

And that is what happened. That was the beginning of our life together. I just allowed myself to be carried along by him, to be swallowed up in his plans.

Robert told me he’d been renting a room close to Exeter city centre, because his work kept him away so much and he’d had nobody to make a home with. He went out one afternoon, just a couple of days after I informed him I was pregnant, saying he had some business to attend to, and arrived back at my little studio flat mid-evening carrying a large suitcase. He said he’d given notice and paid off his landlady. I never even had a chance to see where he’d been living. In any case, he said he hadn’t really been living there at all. The room had just been somewhere to keep his stuff, not that there was much of it, and a place to stay when he was on leave.

A few weeks later we married at Okehampton Register Office. It was a quiet occasion, which Robert had made clear he wanted from the start, and, with the benefit of hindsight, convinced me I did too. My father came up from the coast and was my witness, and I invited a couple of friends from college and a fellow teacher I’d become matey with.

We’d already found and were trying to buy Highrise, which even in considerable disrepair was a much more impressive home than I’d expected us to be able to afford. But Robert had explained how well rewarded his job was, as it should be too, he’d said. The estate agent who helped us find the place turned out to be Robert’s witness. An unlikely choice perhaps, but Robert had an easy explanation.

‘He’s the most important person in my life right now apart from you,’ he said. ‘Thanks to him we have our dream home.’

There was nobody else. He had no relatives left, he told me, and he’d moved on so far from his old life in Scotland that there wasn’t anyone from his past he wished to be present.

I just accepted it all at the time and indeed had accepted it for sixteen years. Robert was a loner after all. Only now did I begin to wonder, to wonder about so much.

The photographer Robert told me he had booked failed to turn up. The only photographs of our wedding were taken by my father with his ancient camera, and the film seemed somehow to have become damaged, so that the images were mostly just a blur. I’d been disappointed, of course, to have no pictorial record of our big day, and Robert had professed disappointment too. Only now did I reflect on how he had so often throughout our marriage avoided having his photograph taken, saying merely that he was camera-shy.

I thought again about a derrickman called Rob Anderton. A derrickman working on Jocelyn the day my son died. On the same rig as my husband, Robert or Rob Anderson. I had tried to put it out of my mind without success. I didn’t know how many people Amaco employed. I didn’t know how big or small the coincidence was. But it continued to bother me.

On an impulse I dialled the direct line I now had for Amaco’s human resources department. Rather to my relief a different, female, voice responded.

‘I’m trying to get hold of my brother, Rob Anderton,’ I said, surprised by the ease with which the lie rolled off my tongue. ‘It’s a family emergency. His wife called me late last night and left a garbled message about some sort of tragedy, and now I can’t get an answer from either of their phones. Rob was working on Jocelyn. I don’t know if he’s still there. Or if... or if he’s hurt or something...’

‘Just let me check,’ said the voice.

There was silence. I was just beginning to wonder if I’d been cut off when the voice returned.

‘Could I ask who I’m speaking to?’

‘I told you. I’m Rob’s sister. Marion Jackson.’

I used my maiden name.

‘Well, I can tell you your brother is no longer on Jocelyn, Mrs Jackson. He was transported back to the mainland last night.’

‘But is he all right? What’s happened?’

‘Look, Mrs Jackson, we’re not supposed to give out information like that over the phone. I know you’re a relative but—’

I interrupted. ‘Please help me if you can. I’m about to get in my car and drive to Rob’s home. It’s all I can think of. But neither he nor his wife are answering their phones and I don’t even know if he’s back there. I mean, has Rob been taken to a hospital? Is he still in Scotland?’

There was another pause.

‘I can tell you that your brother is fine,’ said the voice, sounding, I felt, more than a little awkward and uneasy.

‘Then it’s his son, Robbie. I thought that could be it. Only my sister-in-law didn’t actually say what had happened. Is Robbie hurt? Is he... he’s not, not dead? Is that it?’

I tried to make myself sound as hysterical as possible, which wasn’t difficult.

The voice on the other end was being very calm.

‘Mrs Jackson, it’s your family that you should be speaking to, not me.’

‘But, I’ve told you. I can’t get through to them. Look, please help me. It is Robbie, isn’t it? Something terrible has happened to Robbie. Hasn’t it?’

There was an even longer pause.

‘Well, yes,’ said the voice eventually. ‘Something has happened to Robbie, I’m afraid. But you must get the details from your family, I can’t possibly—’

I hung up, cutting her off in mid-sentence.

She had told me all I needed to know.