"What are you doing?"
"What does it look as if I'm doing?"
"Putting on a show?"
"Yeah?" Grabbing hold of a shirt, he thrust it toward her face. "Does this look like a fucking show?"
"You wouldn't dare."
"No?"
"Leaving us both, you wouldn't have the guts."
"Watch me." Seizing the bag, he started for the door.
"Will..."
His feet were fast and heavy on the stairs.
"Will..."
He was throwing the bag into the backseat of the car, ducking behind the wheel.
"Will, don't you dare."
The car door slammed; the engine lurched into life.
He could just hear her shout, her face up close against the glass, inches from his face. "You do this and I never want to see your face again. Not ever."
The wheels spun for a moment on the gravel, then caught. Trapped in the porch light, she was there for a few seconds in his mirror, then gone.
By the time Will reached the main road, he realized he was driving too fast, steadied and slowed. Turning off onto a side road, a farm track and little more, he stopped the car just past a low, dark barn and sat, shaking, one hand still fixed to the wheel. A ring of yellow light clung, narrow, to the horizon, all but blocked out by the dark. Everything he had: everything he had ever wanted. His son. He sat there until the cold slid deep into his bones.
When he let himself back into the house, hours later, everything was quiet, no lights on, up or down. He fully expected Lorraine to be in bed, but she was in the living room, just sitting, legs drawn up.
Will switched on the light.
There was no colour in her face, her hair scraped back.
"Turn it out."
He turned it out.
After a moment, she swung her legs down and came slowly toward him.
"I'm sorry," he said.
She slapped him hard across the face.
"Really sorry."
She slapped him again, once, twice.
Blood trickled from his upper lip and he could taste it in his mouth.
"Lorraine..."
He reached for her hand, but she pulled it away, and they stood there, the silence folding around them, not speaking, not touching, until finally they went upstairs to bed.
WHEN WILL WOKE AND WENT DOWNSTAIRS, IT WAS closer to three than four. Outside, in the light from the porch, he watched as flakes of snow hazed lazily down and vanished the moment they touched the ground.
Something had woken him and he wondered what it was. The fox again, roving wild? Hungry and wild.
He didn't often think of Helen at times like this, but now he did. Wondering if she, too, were awake. Alone. A while ago there had been a man, though Will had never met him nor heard Helen say his name. Even so, somehow he had known. Just the most cursory of mentions, a few small changes of routine. And then he was gone. Dismissed? Walked off? Will didn't know. He didn't ask.
Things went on as before.
One evening before Christmas when Helen had been to the house for supper, nothing elaborate, lasagne and then ice cream from the freezer, Lorraine had made a remark—not meaning anything, just making conversation, a question, Will supposed it was—about boyfriends, men friends—he couldn't remember the term she'd used—and Helen had bridled, angrily, resentment clear in her eyes and the set of her mouth.
When Lorraine had asked him about it later, without knowing why, he'd claimed not to have noticed.
The snow, such as it had been, had ceased to fall. Lorraine and the children were all upstairs in their separate beds asleep.
Will stood there a few moments longer before switching off the light and going back inside.
For McKusick, the days since Stephen Bryan's death had not been easy: dreams, nightmares, memories of Stephen's ruined face. Regrets. Plenty of those.
"It helps to talk to someone," the liaison officer had said. "Someone else who knew him well."
He had telephoned Stephen's parents, as much out of obligation as anything else, wanting to be seen as doing the right thing. But the conversation with Stephen's mother had been stilted, broken by long silences and uneven breathing. His father had refused to come to the phone. And, of course, McKusick realized, they hadn't really known Stephen, not since he had left home, had hardly known him at all. When Stephen had come out all the way and had finally convinced his father that he was gay, a light had gone out in the older man's eyes. "Stephen, I'm sorry," he had said, as if his son had just told him he had something akin to a tumour of the brain.
"You want to meet them?" the liaison officer had asked. "The parents? When they're down?"
McKusick had declined.
"You don't look so hot, Mark," McKusick's boss had said, the morning after viewing the body. "Why don't you take a little time?" But the last thing McKusick wanted was more time on his own. That or Will and Helen walking back into the shop and asking for him by name.
They sat in the same demonstration room as before, a couple of Rega R7 speakers angled toward them, something short of £1,500 the pair and, McKusick would have argued, cheap at the price.
"There were just one or two more things we wanted to ask," Will said.
McKusick waited.
"When you and Stephen broke up, according to what you said before, that was because of his work, his need for time and space, that kind of thing?"
"That's right."
"No other reason?"
"Not that I know of, no."
"Not that you know of?"
"No."
"So there could have been something else, something that, for whatever reason, he wasn't telling you?"
McKusick shifted a little on his chair. "It's possible, but, no, that wasn't the kind of relationship we had. If there'd been anything, anything important, he would have said."
"Even if he'd been seeing somebody else?"
McKusick laughed. "That's absurd."
"Absurd that it would happen, or that he wouldn't tell you about it?"
"Either. Both."
"Yours was an open relationship, then?" Helen said.
"In what sense?"
"Whatever sense you take it to mean."
McKusick shook his head. "If you mean were we frank with one another about our feelings, I'd say yes. But if you mean did either of us feel free to live up to the stereotype, then no."
"Which stereotype is that?"
"Oh, come on."
"No, please. Tell me."
McKusick looked at her before answering. "The one so-called straights are so fond of touting. Promiscuity, cruising, more sex than you can shake a stick at."
"You mean it's not like that?" Helen said, sardonically.
"Not at all."
"You and Stephen," Will said, taking over, "while you were together, you were both faithful?"
"I don't see that's any of your business."
"Really? Isn't that a little naive?"
"What do you mean?"
"Your ex-partner's found murdered in his house, presumably by another man, there are no signs of forced entry, and you can't see why we might be asking about fidelity?"
McKusick drew breath. "It's different now."
"Because you were no longer together?"
"Yes."
"So whoever did this, it could have been someone he'd met? Somebody new?"
"No."
"No?"
McKusick shook his head. "I don't think so. I mean, I suppose it's possible, in theory, but, no, I really don't think so."
"Why ever not?" Helen asked.
"Because the whole point of our breaking up was to leave Stephen free, like I said, to give him more time and space. Not to become entangled all over again."
"There are different kinds of relationships," Helen said. "They don't all require a lot of time or space."
McKusick passed a hand across his face.
"And without wanting to get into that gay scene thing you were denying," Helen went on, "isn't it possible this was just someone he met for sex? Someone casual?"
"No." McKusick sounded definite.
"But you can't be sure."
"I can."
"How? How can you be?"
"I knew him. I loved him."
"That doesn't mean..." Helen allowed the sentence to peter out.
"Look," McKusick said, "the scene, as you call it, it was anathema to Stephen. He hated it. You'd no more get him into a gay bar than you could persuade him to—I don't know—go and see Leicester City on a Saturday afternoon."
"There are other ways of meeting people, surely," Will said, "nowadays especially."
"You mean the Internet?"
"Among others." Will seemed to remember reading somewhere the playwright Joe Orton met most of his rough trade on building sites. Hadn't that been in Leicester?
"Let me tell you," McKusick said, leaning forward, "a story about Stephen. This happened more than two years ago, close to three, we hadn't been a couple all that long. On this particular night, this was before we moved here, we were in a pub close to the city centre. Not a gay pub at all, nothing like that, but anyway we're sitting there, drinking, and suddenly, out of nowhere, we had this row. I can't even remember what it was about, not exactly, nothing important anyway, and besides, the row isn't the point. There was a bit of shouting, a bit of swearing, and it ended up with me banging down my glass and storming out. Which was when this bloke, he'd been sitting close by, came over to Stephen and called me a bit of a tosser. To which Stephen replied—he told me this later—I had to be good at something. The bloke laughed and asked Stephen if he wanted another drink and Stephen said yes and an hour or so later the two of them went back to this bloke's flat and fetched up in bed. Which might have been all right, except after a bit, the bloke gets up and says he has to go to the loo and a few minutes later the bedroom door opens and it's another guy, someone else altogether, and this one is not good news. He starts to get into bed with Stephen and Stephen says sorry, he's not interested, and then the first bloke comes back and the two of them, they take it in turns till Stephen's bleeding and then they throw him out. He phones me on his mobile, three in the morning."
"They raped him," Will said.
"By any definition you care to use."
"He reported it?"
"What would have been the point?"
"Rape is rape."
"And gay men getting rougher trade than they bargained for is their own stupid fault."
"Your words, not mine."
"But isn't that what you think? What the majority of your colleagues would have thought, even if nowadays they might hesitate before saying it too loud?"
No sense in going there, Will thought. "These men," he said, "do you know who they were?"
"No, and it doesn't matter. Not now. What matters is that after what happened, there's no way Stephen would have taken a risk like that again. He would have been terrified."
"In which case," Will said, "if Stephen did invite whoever killed him into his house, the probability is that it was someone he already knew."
McKusick repeated a little sideways gesture with his head and sighed. "I suppose so," he said. "You don't know that, though, do you? That it was someone he knew? I mean, just because there were no obvious signs of a break-in, that doesn't mean it couldn't have happened."
Neither Will nor Helen answered.
"Things were missing," McKusick said, persevering. "That's right, isn't it? On the news, it said..."
"His laptop appears to have been taken," Will said. "Cash. Possibly some papers."
"What kind of papers?"
"As yet we don't know."
"But were they important, or..."
"As I say, as yet we don't know."
"In the meantime," Helen said, "perhaps you'll be good enough to help us with a list of Stephen's friends and acquaintances, gay or straight, it doesn't matter. There may well be people we haven't spoken to yet."
"There's a sister," McKusick said. "Lesley. In New Zealand, I think. I assume her parents will have told her what happened, but I don't know."
"Put it all down," Will said. "Anyone in particular you can remember him mentioning from work as well."
"Of course," McKusick said. "I'll do what I can."
Helen offered him a pen.
Will was sure he could remember a time, not so far back, when if someone had told him he'd fork out two pounds for a cup of coffee he'd have called them daft.
"Any cakes or pastries at all?" asked the young woman behind the counter,
barista in training
emblazoned on the front of her uniform.
Will shook his head, pocketed the change from his five-pound note and carried the two lattes over to where Helen was browsing, somewhat incongruously, through a copy of the previous day's
La Repubblica.
"Didn't know your Italian was that good," Will said.
"It's not." Helen reached sideways and slid the newspaper back into the rack.
"You believe McKusick's story?"
"The one he told about Stephen?"
Will nodded.
"Yes, I think so." Helen sipped her coffee and when she lowered the cup away, there was a faint smear of milk along her upper lip. "That doesn't mean I agree with his conclusion."
"You don't think what happened—the rape—you don't think that would be enough to prevent him ever putting himself in that situation again?"
"Certain kinds of pain," Helen said, "it doesn't matter how severe they are at the time, how much we swear we're never going to submit to them again, somehow, if we think the payoff might be worthwhile, we forget, take the risk. Why else would women go on having children, for instance?"
"Hang on, you're not equating childbirth and...?"
"You know what I'm saying."
"So you think, despite what happened before, he might have gone out cruising and picked up the wrong person?"
"It's possible."
Will set his coffee back down. "The way he was beaten—that amount of anger—it's either deeply, deeply personal or else, I don't know, maybe it's the opposite. Not personal at all."
"But not just robbery? You're not thinking robbery?"
"No."
"You think it's because of what he was. Because he was gay."