Authors: Sam Baker
‘Can I come in?’
She glanced over his shoulder.
‘The police don’t know I’m here,’ he said, stepping into the hall.
‘It’s not that. I’m not afraid of the police. I just don’t want to be found by Art.’
‘Helen, Art’s dead. He died in the fire.’
‘You’re wrong. He didn’t.’
Without comment, he watched her lock and bolt them into Wildfell and turn the lights off in the hall before leading him to the kitchen. ‘Coffee … or something stronger?’
Tom inclined his head towards the packet of pills on the worktop. ‘How long have you been taking those things?’
Helen shrugged and filled the kettle. ‘Too long and not long enough.’
Tom sighed.
‘I hope you’re not hungry,’ she added, loading coffee into the jug, and picking up two mugs, ‘because my culinary skills haven’t developed in the last twenty years either. It’s bread and cheese or cheese and bread. Except I’m out of cheese and I’ve only got sliced.’
Tom shook his head. ‘I’m not hungry.’
They talked for hours, up in the little sitting room that Helen was aware had become something of a confessional. Well, Helen talked and Tom listened, occasionally prompting her with another question. He reminded her of Gil like that. Doctors and journalists obviously shared a few tactics. Well, the good ones did. As she spoke, reprising everything she’d already told Gil, her memories started to solidify. When the coffee went cold, Tom headed downstairs to make more while Helen sat on the old settee listening to the comfortable sounds of human existence below. It occurred to her as she listened that he was talking to someone. Murmuring to himself? A thought slipped in that he was on the phone to someone, and she pushed it away.
When he returned, not with coffee, but two mugs and a bottle of red under his arm, Helen was surprised to see Ghost pad in behind him. Back for the first time in days.
‘Wow,’ she said. ‘That’s impressive. He doesn’t like anyone.’
‘This one?’ Tom said. ‘You’re kidding? He’s been all over me.’
‘Who were you talking to, down there?’
Tom inclined his head towards his ankles. ‘Him. Who else? He has some things to say about the level of service around here.’
Helen looked at Tom, at the cat winding itself around his legs and then back at Tom. Then she pushed herself out of the chair, took the mugs from his hands and set them on the floor. It was time, in fact it was long past time. ‘Can we talk about this later?’
‘If you want … Where are you going?’
‘To bed. Are you coming?’
Sun was pouring through the window, long lancing shafts that brightened crumbling plaster on the wall. Her eyes adjusted and she looked up to see Tom resting on his elbow, looking down at her. His smile was wry. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I haven’t slept properly in months. Years.’
‘It’s all right,’ he grinned. ‘I’ve waited twenty years, what’s another night?’
When he slid from the bed, Helen couldn’t help noticing he was massaging his upper arm.
‘Me?’ she asked.
He grinned ruefully. ‘Lost all feeling in it at about three a.m. Didn’t want to move and wake you.’ He smiled, glanced towards the Dales and smiled again, then headed for the loo. When he came back, Helen took her turn, aware of him watching her slip from the bed as she’d watched him.
He was older than she remembered, obviously.
He grinned in the wintery sun.
‘You were my first’ she said. ‘The first to touch me. The first to do most things.’
‘Except the one that counted.’
‘The one I wish I’d given you.’
He smiled. ‘Do you mean that?’
‘Totally. It took me years to work out it’s not the age you first sleep with a boy that matters. It’s who you sleep with. I couldn’t even get that right.’
Gil had coffee and banana bread in the new Costa that used to be the antique shop and then a picture framers and finally a card shop that closed when Gil was still enough months away from retirement to believe he hadn’t decided where to live. The site had lain empty for a while, and everybody had made a huge fuss when they heard the chain was moving in. Who knew, people said darkly, what would be next. It was the first chain in the network of villages that surrounded their part of the Dales. If you ignored the Co-op in the next village along, and that big bank the Chinese owned, and the Tesco Metro at the garage on the way to Keighley.
That’s different, Gil was told.
It was pretty crowded at 8.30 a.m., given the number of villagers who’d claimed they’d never step through its door. Taking his coffee and cake to a corner table near the window, Gil opened his laptop and logged on to next door’s Wi-Fi, which wasn’t locked, and began to work his way through that day’s papers.
In between he checked his phone in case he’d missed a call from Helen when he wasn’t looking. He’d been doing it for the last twelve hours.
After the papers, Gil went through his usual routine, checking Huntingdon’s Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, scouring Google for Huntingdon, Lawrence and now Ackerman, despite the absence of any further alerts. He didn’t expect to find anything and his expectations weren’t disappointed. But the silence bothered him nonetheless. If Huntingdon had gone to ground, where the hell was he?
Gil glanced out of the window, half expecting to see the deformed face of a monster staring in. Instead he saw a small child in a red anorak fighting to get out of his buggy.
When he’d finished, he checked his own Facebook page.
A few friend requests from people he’d never heard of and had no friends in common with; nothing from Karen. Then he remembered the page he’d set up in order to friend Mark Ridley. Unsurprisingly, the friend request hadn’t been accepted but there was a message, a terse one-liner: Don’t know who you are, mate. But you must have the wrong Mark Ridley. I haven’t been looking for Helen Lawrence.
Frowning, Gil opened Ridley’s profile on Facebook, compared it with the one on LinkedIn and everything else he knew about him. It was the right Mark Ridley, he knew it.
So either Ridley was lying …
Or he wasn’t.
Gil bought another coffee, extra shot this time, and drank it to a soundtrack of hummable songs from the eighties for which he mostly knew the words or at least the choruses. Occasionally he’d snap awake to the early notes of something from the seventies and feel for a second how he used to feel when the tracks were new.
It’s a rat trap Judy, and we’ve been caught.
So, what were the alternatives? Ridley was lying: in which case he
was
looking for Helen but wasn’t about to tell any random chancer on social media his business. Fair enough, Gil thought, protect your leads and all that. It was what Ridley planned to do if and when he found Helen that bothered him. It wasn’t losing an exclusive that scared Gil – he’d long since given up on that, he was surprised to realise. He was scared for Helen. But if Ridley was telling the truth, if he really hadn’t been looking for Helen …
Then someone else was.
Someone who was using Mark Ridley’s name.
Gil could only think of one person who would have the inside knowledge to do that.
When what remained of his second coffee was drunk, Gil folded down his laptop lid and transferred to The Café on the Corner, where the cappuccino was more expensive and the music classical, courtesy of Classic FM. Helen still hadn’t called and without her number the only way of contacting her was to turn up on her doorstep. It was doubt that stopped him. What would he say when he got there? Either he’d upset her, or she’d just think he was making excuses to see her. He needed more detail before he went again.
Gil was glad when the clock reached twelve and he could relocate to The Bull. Ordering a pint, he settled himself in his corner. Then he went home and watched bad afternoon television with one eye on his laptop and read a chapter of a crime novel he barely remembered. He was back at the door of The Bull on the dot of six.
Conversation dipped the way it always did whenever a stranger walked in; not so much unfriendliness as watchfulness; as everyone waited to see if the newcomer was one of those who’d smile and want to talk. This man walked to the bar carrying a bag of shopping from the General Stores and ordered a pint, and while it was pouring asked a question. The girl holding the fort behind the bar glanced over his shoulder to where Gil sat. She turned her head away before the man had time to turn to see where she was looking.
He said something low and serious and she seemed troubled. This time when she looked across Gil nodded and the girl pointed him out. She did it discreetly, with a jerk of her chin towards the table Gil now thought of as his.
‘Mr Markham?’
‘Who’s asking?’ Gil had heard it used in a film, and then several times in a row on different television shows. It seemed to work, though; because the man blinked and immediately adjusted his expression.
‘Tom … Tom Bretton. I’m a friend of Helen’s.’
‘Who?’ Gil picked up his pint and stared at the beer moodily, hoping the man hadn’t caught the flicker of recognition when he announced himself. The beer was cloudy as ditchwater with flakes of yeast. He was learning to like it. Well, he told himself he was learning.
‘I know you know Helen, Mr Markham.’
‘Don’t tell me what I know.’
The stranger gestured at the spare chair opposite and, when Gil didn’t react, he took it anyway. He ran his hand through his hair and sighed. He looked tired, and worried, and uncertain. What he didn’t look, at least to Gil, was remotely dangerous.
‘What did you say to May?’
‘Who …?’
‘The landlord’s granddaughter.’
‘I told her I was a doctor. That I had something I needed to discuss with you but that I didn’t know you by sight.’
‘How much of that is true?’
‘All of it.’
‘Just not in the way she thought?’
The stranger shrugged.
‘What do you want?’ Gil asked. He could see the stranger, he supposed he should try to think of him as Tom, choosing his words with care. When they came, they weren’t what Gil expected.
‘Someone’s slashed the wheels of my hire car.’
Gil shrugged.
‘My hire car,’ Tom repeated. ‘They slashed all four.’ He glanced at the pint in Gil’s hand. ‘You fit to drive?’
‘You’ve come in here to ask me for a lift?’ Gil sounded incredulous.
‘I’m meant to be seeing Helen.’
‘Call her. Whoever she is. Presumably you have a number?’
‘I forgot to ask her for it.’
Gil looked up at this.
‘I was out there until an hour or so ago. I should have got her number then.’
‘She didn’t suggest you take it?’ Gil asked, more jealous than he dared admit.
‘We, uh, no she didn’t and I forgot to ask.’ Tom looked uncomfortable.
‘You went out there this morning?’ Gil said, forgetting to pretend he didn’t know where there was.
‘No,’ Tom said. ‘I went out there last night.’ He nodded. ‘I waited until after you left. That was you, wasn’t it?’
Gil didn’t answer.
‘Mr Markham,’ Tom said. ‘I’m not the enemy. I’m a friend of Helen’s. An old friend. And if the things she’s told me – things I know she’s told you – are even halfway true, I’m scared for her. I was scared even before someone slashed my tyres.’
‘Could be kids,’ Gil said. ‘They don’t like tourists or incomers.’
‘And you don’t either?’
‘I’m an incomer. Well, sort of. Never really belonged.’
‘I don’t think kids did it. Too neat. Too professional.’ Gil could see the impatience on Tom Bretton’s face, the difficulty with which he made himself answer Gil’s time-wasting comments.
‘Call the police. If you’re scared for her.’
‘And say what? I’ve found a woman French police apparently want to eliminate from their enquiries? That I think she’s being hunted by someone who until last night I thought was dead?’
Gil pushed back his chair so hard the squeak of wood on stone brought the pub to sudden silence. He shrugged his apologies, half on the edge, but not yet out of, his chair.
‘Huntingdon?’
‘I think she’s mad to have talked to a journalist …’
Gil rounded on him. ‘I think she’s mad to trust someone she hasn’t seen in twenty years.’ Then he caught himself, heard the jealousy talking. ‘If I was going to anyone it would be the police and I’m starting to wonder if I should. Come on. We can talk in my car.’
The entire Bull stilled to watch them leave.
On the way out, Gil stopped to talk to the landlord’s granddaughter, who was looking anxious.
‘It was OK me saying?’ she asked.
‘Of course.’
‘I thought, him being a doctor and all.’
‘It was fine, I promise.’
‘Good. Someone else was in here asking.’ She blushed. ‘About the French woman. He asked where she lived. Granddad said I was to tell you.’
‘You didn’t tell him?’
‘No, but I think one of the incomers did.’
The stone bridge over the burn had been there long enough for everyone to say for ever, although 1787 carved into the side said it was nothing like that long. It was the width required to let two riders pass in opposite directions or a single coach cross if there was no other traffic. An old metal sign gave its width in feet and inches and warned that it was unsuitable for lorries. The size and shape of the lorry on the sign hadn’t been seen on the road for years.
‘Shit,’ Tom said.
Heading towards them from the far side of the bridge were a flock of Swaledale, all off-white wool and curling horns. The first crested the bridge at a trot and the wave carried the rest behind him. Gil dragged on the wheel of his old Golf and pulled as tight to the drystone wall as he could manage, car half on the road and half on the bank.
‘Can’t you get past them?’
Snorting, Gil asked, ‘How am I meant to get past that lot?’
At the sight of the car some of the sheep broke away and Gil restarted his engine and reversed until the stone wall was no longer beside the car and he could pull off the road entirely. The sheep who’d broken away rejoined the herd.
‘We wait,’ he said, before Tom had time to say anything else. ‘Driving through that lot isn’t an option.’ And wait they did, while seemingly endless sheep trotted past the car until all that was left were the dawdlers, a collie and a girl not much out of her teens who raised her hand in passing. ‘Seen a car?’ Gil asked her.