Peter Robinson - Blood At The Root

“I’m going away for a while,” Sandra said. “It’s the only way. The only way both of us can get a chance to think things over.”

“Where are you going?”

“My parents. Mum’s arthritis is playing her up again, and she’ll appreciate an extra pair of hands around the place. But that’s not the reason. We need time apart, Alan. Time to decide whether there’s anything left to salvage or not.”

“So this is just a temporary separation you have in mind?”

“I don’t know. A few weeks, anyway. I just know I need to get away. From the house. From Eastvale. From you.”

“What about the community center, your work?”

“Jane can take over for a while, till I decide what to do.”

“Then you might not come back?”

“Alan, I’m telling you I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. Don’t make it harder for me. I’m at my wit’s end already. The only sensible thing is for me to get away. Then… after a while… we can talk about it. Decide where we want to go next.”

“Why can’t we talk now?”

“Because it’s all too close here. That’s why. Pressing in on me. Please believe me, I don’t want to hurt you. I’m scared. But we’ve got to do it. It’s the only chance we’ve got. We can’t go on like this. For crying out loud, we’re both still young. Too bloody young to settle for anything less than the best.”

Banks sipped more Laphroaig, but it failed to warm the icy hand now busy caressing the inside of his spine. “When are you going?” he asked, his voice curiously flat.

Sandra avoided his eyes. “As soon as possible. Tomorrow.”

Banks sighed. In the silence, he heard the letter box open and close. Odd, at that time of night. It seemed like a good excuse to get out of the room for a moment, before he started crying himself, or said things he would regret, so he went to see what it was. On the mat lay an envelope with his name typed on the front. He opened the door, but it was quiet outside in the street, and there was no one in sight.

He opened the envelope. Inside he found a plane ticket from Leeds and Bradford Airport to Amsterdam Schiphol, leaving late the following morning, a reservation for a hotel on Keizersgracht, and a single sheet of paper on which were typed the words: “JASON FOX: SHHHHH.”

The Dutch coast came into view: first the dull-brown sandbars where the gray sea ended in a long white thread; then the dikes, marking off the reclaimed land, protecting it from the water level.

Banks turned off his Walkman in the middle of “Stop Breaking Down.” He always listened to loud music when flying – which wasn’t very often – because it was the only thing he could hear over the roar of the engines. And he hadn’t played Exile on Main Street in so long he’d forgotten just how good it was. The Rolling Stones’ raucous rhythm and blues, he found, also had the added advantage of blocking out depressing thoughts.

The plane banked lower over the patchwork of green and brown fields, and Banks could soon make out cars on the long straight roads, rooftops glinting in the midday sun. It was as lovely an autumn day in the Netherlands as it had been in Yorkshire.

Banks rubbed his eyes. He had spent a sleepless night in Brian’s room because Sandra had insisted it would only make things more difficult if they slept together. She was right, he knew, but still it rankled. It wasn’t even a matter of sex. Somehow it seemed so unfair, when threatened with the loss of someone you had loved for over twenty years, that you didn’t even get that one last night of warmth and companionship together to remember and cherish. It felt like all the things you had left unsaid when someone died.

No matter how long Sandra said that she had been grappling with the problem, her decision had come as a shock to Banks. Perhaps, as she had argued, that was a measure of how much he had turned his back, drifted away from the relationship, but somehow her words didn’t soften the blow. Now, more than anything, he felt numb, a pathetic figure floating around in zero gravity.

When he thought of Sandra, he thought mostly of the early days in London, where they lived together for about a year before they got married. It was the mid-seventies. Banks was just finishing his business diploma, already thinking about joining the police, and Sandra was taking a secretarial course. Every Sunday, if he didn’t have to work, they went on long walks around the city and its parks, Sandra practicing her photography and Banks developing his copper’s eye for suspicious characters. Somehow, in his memory, it was always autumn on these walks: sunny but cool, with the leaves crackling underfoot. And when they got back to the tiny Notting Hill flat, they’d play music, laugh, talk, drink wine and make love.

Then came marriage, children, financial responsibilities and a career that demanded more and more of Banks’s time and energy. Most of his friends on the force were divorced before the seventies were over, and they all asked in wonder and envy how he and Sandra managed to survive. He didn’t really know, but he put a lot of it down to his wife’s independent spirit. Sandra was right about that. She wasn’t the kind of person who simply hung around the house and waited for him to turn up, fretting and getting angrier by the minute as the dinner was ruined and the kids screamed for bedtime stories from Daddy. Sandra went her own way; she had her own interests and her own circle of friends. Naturally, more responsibility for the children fell on her shoulders, because Banks was hardly ever home, but she never complained. And for a long time, it worked.

After Banks’s near burnout on the Met and a long rocky patch in the marriage, they moved to Eastvale, where Banks thought things would settle down and the two of them would enjoy a rural, peaceful and loving drift into middle age together; the kind of thing that most couples married as long as they had been experience.

Wrong.

He looked at his watch. Sandra would be on the train to Croydon now, and whatever happened, whatever she finally decided, things would never be the same between them again. And there was nothing he could do about it. Not a damn thing.

He picked up that morning’s Yorkshire Post from the empty seat beside him and looked at the headline again: “WORLD WAR TWO HERO DIES AT GRANDSON’S FUNERAL: Neo-Nazis responsible, says granddaughter.” There was no photograph, but the basic facts were there: the Nazi salute, Frank Hepplethwaite’s attack, Maureen Fox’s spirited defense. All in all, it made depressing reading. And then there was the brief sidebar interview with Motcombe himself.

Motcombe deeply regretted the “pointless death” of “war hero” Frank Hepplethwaite, he began, while pointing out how ironic it was that the poor man had died attacking the only people who dared demand justice for his grandson’s killers. Naturally, on further thought, neither he nor any member of his organization had any intention of pursuing charges against Maureen Fox, even though the head wound she gave him required five stitches; things had just got out of hand in the heat of the moment, and he could quite understand her attacking him and his friends with a plank. Grief makes people behave irrationally, he allowed.

Of course, Motcombe went on, everyone knew who had killed Jason Fox, and everyone also knew why the police were powerless to act. That was just the state of things these days. He was sympathetic, but unless the government finally decided to act and do something about immigration, then…

Jason was a martyr of the struggle. Every true Englishman should honor him. If more people listened to Motcombe’s ideas, then things could only change for the better. The reporter, to give her due credit, had managed to stop Motcombe from turning the entire interview into propaganda. Either that or the copy editor had made extensive cuts. Even so, it made Banks want to puke. If anyone was the martyr in this, it was Frank Hepplethwaite.