The First Cut (32 page)

‘Nice wheels. I hope you’ve got the key in your pocket – we’re going for a drive.’ Troy saw Greg open his mouth as if to say something into the phone, but no sound emerged. ‘Fuck with me and I’ll blow your head off.’

‘No fucking,’ he heard Greg reply.

Troy grinned his five-grand smile.

N
icky stopped the car on the rise looking down at Hayersleigh House. There were no cars in view, the shutters were drawn and the windows she could see were closed. Ripples ran across the surface of the lake, which looked cold and deadly, and the brown scar of newly turned earth on the lawn was now a black slash in the rain. She thought about the last time she was here, running for her life, scared out of her wits. She wasn’t that Nicky now; that woman had died with every new revelation about Greg’s past, with the danger she’d only just escaped at the carnival. She drove on to the house and parked the Polo near the back door. She got out and stood for a moment, listening. She walked to the barn, the only noise her feet crunching on the gravel. The tractor had been put away, its job done, and the bicycle that she’d used for her final escape was propped up in its original place. The barn door creaked in the wind.

The rain began to fall again, the scorching summer already a distant memory. She skirted the back of the house, peering in windows, steeling herself for what she was about to do. The police must have come and gone in their search for the shotgun used to kill Louise. The kitchen door was locked but the key was in the flower pot as before. A moment later she was standing in the kitchen, inside the lion’s jaw.

The house looked different under cloud: its colours muted, the atmosphere stiller – and deadlier. She knew that she was alone, yet the house gave her the creeps nonetheless. She went and stood in the hall, right on the spot where Struan had died. Doorways into gloomy rooms with their windows shuttered surrounded her. She looked at the brooding outline of the gun cabinet and saw an image of her terrified self chained to the radiator. Not again, never again. She picked the key out from behind the photo on the bureau and opened the door, took one of the guns out and cocked it. There were no bullets. She opened the drawer underneath and found a box containing cartridges. Their golden metal ends glinted up at her before she loaded the gun and shut it with a snap. It sounded horribly loud in the country silence. She closed and locked the cabinet and put the key in her pocket.

She turned to the large cupboards outside the kitchen and dug around in several drawers until she found a torch, then she began a slow ascent up the stairs, listening all the time. The wind was getting up and the house was groaning and creaking like a yacht tossed on the high seas. She paused on the top landing and headed on silent feet down the corridor to Connie’s bedroom. The room was shuttered and she needed the torch for extra light. She left the door open and pulled out the suitcase containing Catherine’s diaries. She sat down in the corner under the window facing the open door, propped the gun next to her against the wall, and began to read.

The entries covered a fifteen-month period from June 1988 to September 1989. Nicky had seen Catherine’s dabbling in the artistic life in the paintings downstairs, but what she now realized was that Catherine was a much better writer. The notes here began when Adam was a tiny baby, presumably her one great creative act spurring her on to record her life as well. She wrote quite movingly about her love for her son and the small triumphs, irritations and tiredness of early motherhood. She didn’t write every day and there were whole weeks that passed without an entry, but an idea of the life of a typical upper-middle class woman with a large house to look after came through. There were dogs and a horse, a part-time housekeeper and a gardener who argued with Lawrence. Connie was often staying and helping with childcare while she took flying lessons.

After half an hour Nicky started to get frustrated. These red books were not offering any revelation of anything. She put them down for a moment. What were diaries for? Nicky didn’t keep one, had never had any urge to. She didn’t know anyone who did keep one. Was it generational? A class thing? What Nicky did know was that if she did write one it wouldn’t be like this: lacking hatred and malice and family squabbles. This was a portrait cleansed of life’s battles and frustrations. It wasn’t real. These were books for public consumption – or books Catherine knew were being read.

Nicky picked up the last notebook and raced past a large dinner they’d held at the house; after that there was a week of no entries and then the tone changed.

The yellowing pages were blank from here. The entry was 9 September 1989: her last. She must have died soon after this, Nicky realized.
Under the lawn
. Adam had taken this note literally, and from this small piece of text he had literally dug up his own lawn. So Connie and Catherine hated each other, that much was clear. A plane roared over the house. What was Adam expecting to find? Had he already discovered it? Whether he had or hadn’t found what he wanted, she was as much in the dark as before.

She stood and put the diaries away in the suitcase and pushed it back under the bed. Then she went along the landing, the gun in her hand, past Catherine’s row of sludgy pictures.
Under the lawn
,
under the lawn
 . . . What now? A banging noise from the billiard room froze her to the spot. There it was again. She crept down the stairs, eyes locked on the door, which stood lightly ajar. She crossed the entrance hall and steeled herself to push at the door with the barrel of the gun in one hand, torch in the other. She heard three bangs in quick succession as the door opened and she turned on the torch. The beam of light bounced off armchairs and the huge table and she saw that one of the shutters hadn’t been closed properly and was moving back and forth in the wind.

She clicked off the torch as daylight flooded the room with the shutter swinging open, and dropped the heavy gun to her side. She should leave – drive away in the Polo and take her experiences and her terror at the carnival to the police; she could get no further information from this cursed house. She looked at the huge picture of the willow that Cathy had painted, a shaft of grey light falling across it, and she thought back to that blistering day when she had first become alarmed at Adam’s behaviour and had gone and sheltered under that canopy for real. If only she had walked away then and there, had stridden across that lawn in the burning heat—

The lawn
. Nicky took a step forward. The willow dominated the painting, but the foreground was a pale green strip of lawn. Hadn’t Adam said this was the last picture she’d painted? She went across the room and touched the painting in its heavy and ornate frame. The room darkened as the shutter swung closed. Lawrence had said today that Adam was looking for ‘something that isn’t there’. Had Adam taken his mother’s words too literally? She felt round the edges in the gloom, knowing that what she was doing was ridiculous, but doing it anyway. She tried to lift the painting away from the wall but it was stuck fast; it must have been attached halfway up each side with screws to carry its great weight. She couldn’t get even a little finger behind it. Maybe she could poke something behind the frame. With an increasing sense of urgency she turned on the torch and rooted around in an old bookcase filled with vases and hardbacks for a ruler-shaped object but found nothing suitable. She went into the hallway, wondering where to look next, when her eyes came to rest on the photo of Catherine. She flipped the picture out of its frame and with the cardboard back that had held Catherine in place for twenty years she started poking up behind the painting. Towards one end she stopped as the cardboard hit an obstruction. She pushed harder, could hear Sellotape ripping . . . and the corner of a piece of brown paper poked out below the frame. She pulled.

The afternoon was grey and silent and Greg was cold, still in a T-shirt that no longer fitted the mood. Autumn had swept over the land in six hours, pulling the temperature down ten degrees. The unnamed man sat behind him on the back seat, a silent and deadly passenger. Greg hadn’t seen a gun but he didn’t have to; it was there, somewhere, the fatal force that could end his life. Greg thought of himself as an actor – he’d played a part for so much of his life – but today was his hardest role of all. As soon as he’d opened the door and seen the guy leaning so nonchalantly on his BMW he knew he was out of his depth. Show the guy a moment’s doubt about what he was doing, any hint of indecision, and this guy would kill him and Nicky. So he’d walked down his steps like a condemned man and got in the car. When he’d been passed Nicky’s phone to unlock it and get rid of the photo, he’d done it without complaint.

Greg had tried conversation, had offered inane icebreakers in an attempt to ease his tension, had tried to engage him in conversation, hoping he would reveal things that could be useful later, but he didn’t respond. Now he drove on autopilot, following the man’s instructions, wondering how many people Troy had killed – and in what way.

He headed south, eventually leaving the motorway for a succession of A roads and then a series of smaller roads until finally he turned onto the winding country lane that led to their destination. Greg felt sicker and sicker the closer he got.

He pulled slowly into the drive that led to Hayersleigh House, drinking in every change. The sign was gone but he knew where he was going. He had driven here in his dreams, or nightmares, that summer that changed the course of his life – and that of others – for ever. The road was pitted and overgrown, the bracken that carpeted the forest yellow and drooping. It had been hot that summer too. The images in his memory were jumpy and the colours bleached, like in a nineteen seventies cine film.

They reached the open gate as the rain began to fall again. Greg heard a plane overhead but couldn’t see it through the low cloud. Had they been that loud back then? His twenty-year-old self wouldn’t have noticed, or cared, yet now he shrank like an old man, loud noises ringing in his worn eardrums.

They reached the rise and he saw the lake and the house before them. It was the same, and yet so different. He was no longer impressed; his own wealth and success and life’s experiences had dulled the grandeur of the place, made it seem tired and ordinary. How dazzled had been his first impressions, how intense had been his feelings as a young man. The romance and the excitement of it, the heady rush of the new – all harder and harder to recapture as the years rolled on.

My happiness ended here, he thought. I have never been happy since that summer. And there had been so many summers since; his attempts at running away from what had happened here, of escaping, had been pathetic. Now that he was back she was as vivid to him as if it had all happened yesterday.

Nicky ripped open the dusty envelope in her hands as a volley of rain splattered the shutters. She pulled out a photo. When she looked at it she didn’t understand at first, but she was a huge step nearer. There
was
a connection between all of this – between all of them. Catherine Thornton had known Greg. She had known him very well. Nicky stared down at an image of Greg lying naked on a bed here at Hayersleigh, the strut from the four-poster bed in Adam’s room visible at the edge of the picture. He was looking up at the camera, his blond hair tousled against the sheets, his cheeks fuller and his twenty-year-old body slimmer. He seemed caught in the act of saying something, his front teeth just visible over his lips. The scene was intimate and he was relaxed; this was not the first time they had done this. Catherine had indeed hidden her laughing lover beneath the lawn.
The depths of what I know and what you don’t, what I’ve got that you’ll never have
 . . .
She was tormenting Connie, gloating about her experience of love and passion.
You’ll never dare tell
 . . . Nicky heard the rushing in her head that came as she thought through the ramifications of this discovery, but was interrupted by another lower noise, increasing in intensity. She listened for a few more moments to make sure she wasn’t mistaken: it was a car.

Greg drove over the uneven gravel towards the house. There was the double front door, still painted that shade of bottle green. She’d stood in her white dress, banging one half of that double door with her heel, as he had grappled with a stuck bottom lock. Her feet had been bare and brown with dots of pink nail polish on her toes. He’d grabbed her ankle. Her giggle crowded his head. He felt sick and took his foot off the accelerator.

‘Don’t stop,’ Troy said.

But Greg was in a trance. He got out of the car. How often had Liz told him he was not to blame? That Catherine’s death was not something that should trouble his conscience. And yet it had, whatever she had said. He couldn’t move beyond it, and that had set the pattern for all of his disastrous relationships that were to come.

A light rain fell on his face as he stood and listened. This place had a silence all its own; the planes only accentuated it when it returned. A bird gave a mournful cry as it swooped across the fields. This peace had been so profound and appealing after his parents’ cul-de-sac with its revving cars and screeching garage doors. He couldn’t describe that silence. Liz once sneered and called it the sound of money, but that wasn’t it. It was the sound of his youth and he’d never have it back.