The Hiding Place(13)

“Oh God,” Susan says. “I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“How old was your sister?” Beth asks.

“She was eight.”

They regard me with sad, sympathetic eyes, apart from Simon, who, I’m pleased to see, can’t meet my gaze.

“Anyway,” I say, “it was a long time ago. And fortunately I had my heart set on being a teacher, not a tap dancer, so here I am.”

They laugh, a little nervously. The conversation moves on. I’ve played it well. I’m a good man; an honest man. A man who has faced tragedy, bears the scars, but still has a sense of humor.

I am also a liar. I didn’t lose my sister in a car crash, and I didn’t have the limp back then.





6





People say time is a great healer. They’re wrong. Time is simply a great eraser. It rolls on and on regardless, eroding our memories, chipping away at those great big boulders of misery until there’s nothing left but sharp little fragments, still painful but small enough to bear.

Broken hearts don’t mend. Time just takes the pieces and grinds them to dust.

I sit back in one of the cottage’s creaky armchairs and take a deep swig of beer. It’s been a long day. The first full day I’ve taught for a while. I’m feeling it, both mentally and physically. My bad leg throbs, and even the four codeine tablets I’ve taken are doing little to ease the insistent dull ache. I won’t sleep tonight, so my solution is to get drunk enough to pass out. Self-medication.

The room is dim, lit only by a single table lamp and the crackling wood-burning stove. I made it to an out-of-town supermarket and stocked up on the essentials: pizza, frozen dinners, coffee, cigarettes and alcohol. On the way back, I spotted a farmhouse/B&B selling logs. No one answered the door when I knocked, even though a battered Ford Focus sat outside. There were two child seats in the back and a sign in the rear window: little monsters on board.

A basket had been left beside the logs: “￡5 per bag—pay here.” There looked to be about thirty pounds in the basket. I stared at the crumpled notes for a moment, thought about the child seats and chucked in a fiver. Then I picked up a bag and drove back to the supermarket for firelighters.

It’s taken me half a dozen of these and a lot of swearing to get the damn thing lit. However, now, for the first time since I moved in, the room is filled with a pleasant dry heat. I can practically see the damp retreating from the walls. Aside from the ramshackle furniture, lack of any personal mementoes and the fact that two people died here, I almost feel at home.

A notebook is open on my lap. On the first page I’ve written four names, with scribbled notes beside them: Chris Manning, Nick Fletcher, Marie Gibson and, of course, Stephen Hurst. The old gang back together, on paper at least. The ones who were there when it happened. The only ones who knew.

Fletch, I have discovered, now runs a plumbing business in Arnhill. Hurst is on the council. Marie, I couldn’t find anything about online, but she may have married, changed her name. Beside Chris’s name I have simply written: “Deceased.” Although that doesn’t really cover it. Not at all.

At the top of the next page are two names: Julia and Ben Morton. Beneath, I’ve jotted more notes, mostly gleaned from the Internet and the newspapers—neither wholly reliable, I know. If newspapers are the place where facts become stories, the Internet is the place where stories become conspiracy theories.

What I do know is this: Julia had a history of depression. She’d just finalized her divorce from Ben’s father (Michael Morton, a solicitor). She had stopped her medication, requested a leave of absence and taken Ben out of school. Oh, and after she bludgeoned her son to death—before she blew her own head off—she wrote three words in blood on the wall of Ben’s bedroom.

Not My Son.

In summary—hardly the actions of a balanced mind.

I’ve printed off two pictures and paper-clipped them inside the notebook. The first is of Julia. It looks like it was taken at a work event. She wears a smart suit, hair tied in a loose ponytail. Her smile is wide but her eyes are tired and guarded. Take your picture and leave me alone, her face says. I wonder if that’s the reason the newspaper chose it. This is a woman about to break. A woman on the edge. Or maybe just a woman irritated at being forced to pose for a stupid photo.

Ben’s is a school photo. His smile is wide and engaging, front two teeth slightly crooked, tie done up neatly for (probably) the first time ever. The reporters have trotted out all the usual platitudes: popular, a good student, plenty of friends, a bright future. They say nothing of the real boy. Simply a cut-and-paste job from their stock “dead child” folders.

Only one article hints at something more. A shadow skimming beneath the sun-dappled surface of Ben’s imagined existence. In the weeks before he died an unnamed school source claimed that Ben had been acting strangely; getting into trouble, absent from classes: “He was weird. Not himself.”

I think about the words Julia wrote: NOT MY SON. An icy fingernail caresses the top of my spine.

I chuck the notebook onto the coffee table. My phone rings, “Enter Sandman” piercing the cozy silence. I tense, then pick it up and glance at the screen. Brendan. I press Accept Call.

“Hello?”

“How’s it going?”