Ann Cleeves - Telling Tales

“Will there be enough food for three? Look who’s come to supper.” Her voice sounded unnaturally bright. She wasn’t really sure how well the two men got on. They seemed pleasant enough to each other, though once, in an unguarded moment, James had told her he thought her brother arrogant. It was true, she thought. Sometimes Chris gave the impression that he despised the whole world, apart perhaps from a couple of Nobel scientists.

James looked up from the chopping board. He must have heard Chris’s voice at the door and had his response already prepared.

“Sure,” he said. “It’s great to see you.” He paused for a beat. “Do Robert and Mary know you’re here? We could invite them round too.”

“God, no.” Chris was horrified. “I need a good night’s sleep before I can face that.”

James slid the onion from the board into a frying pan.

“There’s beer in the fridge,” he said. “You can get me one too.”

When Chris had his back to them James rolled his eyes and pulled a face. What was that about? Chris’s attitude to his parents, or his own disappointment that they would no longer have the evening to themselves? Emma couldn’t tell.

They would eat in the small narrow room which led immediately from the kitchen. Emma lit candles and set the table, while Christopher went upstairs for a shower. James moaned gently at her through the open door while he prepared a salad.

“Really,” he said. “Chris could have given us some warning. We might have been busy. Who else would just turn up on the doorstep like that?”

“He’s very focused,” she said. “He decided he wanted to visit and that was it. He wouldn’t think much of anything other than how he’d get here, once the decision was made.”

Christopher had always been like that, even when he was quite young. He would become obsessed with an object of study or a project. All his energy would be taken up with that. Other school subjects would be dealt with in a cursory, detached way, but his teachers would know that his mind was elsewhere. The fixation would end as suddenly as it had begun and he would move on to something else dinosaurs or gravity or an obscure composer. He had stuck with seabirds for a surprisingly long time. Perhaps the puffins had come to bore him and that was why he was here.

At the time the family had put his sudden passions down to the eccentricity of an academic. Now Emma wondered again when the fixations had begun. With the move to Elvet or Abigail’s murder? And were they as harmless as they had seemed at the time or the indication of a deeper disturbance? She wished she’d made more effort to understand him when they’d both been living at home, decided that his appearance was a good sign. It wasn’t too late to understand him better.

They ate at first in silence. The wind had dropped to a murmur, but Emma was aware of it still in the background. She made a few attempts at conversation, asking about Christopher’s work, the flat in Aberdeen, but soon realized that he was exhausted. He sat with his left elbow on the table, resting his head on his palm, holding his fork in his right hand, pushing pasta into his mouth. She could tell James disapproved. He had an obsession about table manners. Occasionally Chris’s eyelids would droop, then something would jerk him awake and he would stare wildly at them for a moment as if he’d forgotten who they were. He had drunk the beer and most of a bottle of Australian red. Emma considered what problem might have brought him home. Could he have become addicted to drugs? Is this how someone who was suffering withdrawal might behave? She had no idea. Perhaps his depression she thought he probably was depressed was the result of the end of a love affair. It didn’t occur to her that Chris’s arrival in Elvet could have anything to do with Abigail Mantel.

They had moved on to the cheese and fruit. James said to him, quite gently, “Look, you’re obviously tired. Go to bed whenever you like. We won’t mind.”

“No!” Christopher’s head jerked back in spasm again. “It’s no good. I won’t sleep yet.”

“Well, I think I’ll go. I’ve got an early start in the morning.” He gave Emma a meaningful look. Perhaps he thought they could carry on where they’d left off when Chris interrupted them.

“I won’t be long.” But she was careful to keep any hint of promise from her voice. And she knew him. Once James was in bed he would go straight to sleep.

She waited until he’d gone upstairs then fetched more wine from the kitchen, opened it and poured ‘each of them a glass. It was the most she’d drunk since she’d found out she was pregnant. She’d never had to play big sister before. As a child she’d been the needy one. Chris had been independent, self-contained.

“What is it, Chris?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”

He sat upright for the first time, looked directly at her.

“Don’t you know?” Brutal, cruel. “Really, are you so thick that you never realized?”

She felt her eyes prick with tears.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m a mess. I haven’t slept since it all started again.”

“What?” she demanded. “What started?”

Abigail Mantel. All that.”

“Jeanie’s suicide was only in the paper yesterday.” She couldn’t make sense of it.

“That was what made me come, of course,” he said. “But it started long before that. There was that piece in the Guardian. It seems as if people have been talking about her for weeks.”

“I didn’t realize she meant anything to you.” i She thought of the evening after she had found Abigail’s body, the two of them looking out of his bedroom window at the moonlit image of the stretcher bearers. He hadn’t seemed upset then, had he? Or had she been so absorbed by her own place in the drama that she hadn’t noticed?

“She meant everything,” he said. At the time.”

“But you were young.”

“Fourteen,” he said. “Given to obsessions.”

“You can’t have gone out with her?” Abigail had considered herself too sophisticated for the lads in their own year. Certainly she would never have deigned to go out with someone like Chris.

“No,” he said. “Nothing like that.”

“Well then?”

“I followed her. Everywhere she went. All that summer.” He stared into his glass. “It started when we met up on the Point. The first time you spoke to her. We’d just moved. Dad had dragged us out for a bike ride. You remember?”

“We were eating ice creams.”

“Yes!” he was almost shouting. “Yes!”

“And Abigail arrived in her father’s car and got out to introduce herself.”

“That was the start of it. After that I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Literally. I’d wake up thinking about her, she was there, lurking at the back of my mind all day, and at night I’d dream about her.”

“She was your project for the summer.” She was frightened by his intensity and hoped to tease him out of it, but he answered her seriously.

“No. Projects are intellectual. Abigail was more than that. I can’t explain it even now. I don’t expect you to understand. Look at you. Married, a mother, too sensible to have dreams.”

“Marriage doesn’t stop you dreaming,” she said, but very quietly and anyway, he wasn’t listening. She thought suddenly, If Abigail had heard me say that she’d have pretended to be sick. So predictable. So cheesy. For the first time in years she missed the girl who had been a real friend despite all the later misgivings.

He went on. “It’s never gone away, you know. If she hadn’t died I expect I’d have moved on, got over her. As it’s I’m stuck with it. A passion I’ll never satisfy. A fantasy I can never make real.” He tried to smile. “Crazy, huh?”