John Harvey - Good Bait

Inside there were three bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, a wide kitchen with a refectory table and a tap that permanently dripped. You could have fitted Cordon’s old Newlyn sail loft in twice with space to spare. No need for them to get under one another’s feet.

Letitia seemed to be in denial: whenever Cordon tried to get her to talk about what they were going to do, consider their options, ‘There are no fucking options,’ was the best he could get.

Letitia stayed in bed late, drank supermarket wine and cooked a few unwilling meals. Listened in a half-hearted fashion to the Madeleine Peyroux CD that had been left in the portable stereo. Without too much of an argument, she let Danny talk her into helping him do one of the several jigsaw puzzles he’d found in one of the cupboards, played hide-and-seek with him until that too palled and she ran her hand through his hair, kissed his cheek and begged for a rest. Time to do a little reading instead.

When she’d finished the Martina Cole she’d bought on board, she tried some of the books the owners had left around-Ian McEwan, Rose Tremain, Julian Barnes — but with limited success. Sometimes she just sat, collar hunched up, on a folding chair close to the front door of the house, smoking cigarette after cigarette and staring at the empty lane beyond the gate.

As far as Danny was concerned the whole thing was just a holiday, a place to run around; the owners clearly had kids of their own and there were toys in boxes, DVDs of Toy Story, Chicken Run, Tintin, Planet Earth . There was even a child’s bike with a slow puncture in the rear tyre forever in need of pumping up, and Cordon taught Danny, after a fashion, to ride. Wobbly circles that ended less and less in tears and bumps and grazed knees.

‘Don’t make him too fond of you,’ Letitia said one afternoon, her voice edged like a rusted blade. ‘He’s already got one father to get over. He doesn’t need a fuckin’ second.’

Cordon drove to the town and bought lamb chops and a bottle of good Scotch, Johnny Walker Black Label. Scoured the bins of cheap CDs and found an old recording from the Paris Jazz Festival in 1949, remastered: the Tadd Dameron Quintet with Miles Davis.

He’d called the headquarters of the Devon and Cornwall Police in Exeter when they’d arrived and spoken in the vaguest terms of the need to take an extended break, leave without pay; let them try turfing him out a few years short of his pension if they cared to, if they dared. Serve them right for putting him out to grass for having a mind of his own, playing the awkward bugger one too many times.

Even so, they couldn’t stay there for ever.

A fantasy family.

Lives in hiding.

Recipients of someone else’s good nature.

Funny thing, Jack Kiley had told him, but a few days after he got one of his contacts to run a check on Anton Kosach, as Cordon had asked, he’d had a caller himself.

‘SOCA,’ Kiley said, ‘Serious and Organised Crime Agency. Bloke looked like a bloody tax inspector. Wanted to know about my interest in Kosach. Gave the impression I might have crossed some line. I spun him a bunch of lies and half-truths, how the name had come up as part of something I’d been helping out on, steered well clear of mentioning names. Not sure how much he bought of it, if any. Asked him why he was so interested, of course, but he wasn’t giving anything away. Mr Kosach is one of a number of people who are currently under investigation, that was the sum of it. Hands off, in other words. Steer well clear. Thought you should know.’

‘Thanks, Jack,’ Cordon had said.

He hadn’t mentioned it to Letitia.

Then one day when he got back to the farmhouse after taking a stroll around the narrow lanes, the door hung wide open.

There was no one there.

His chest tightened; skin dimpled cold along the backs of his legs and arms. The book Letitia had been reading was on the ground beside her chair; Dan’s borrowed bike lay on the grass. Inside there were no signs of anything amiss.

He walked to the end of the lane where it met the road, then a short way in both directions, seeing no one. The earlier chill had disappeared and the sun was filtering weakly through the clouds. Their names when he called them echoed back to him along the still air.

Going inside, something caught his eye. Something white, a scrap of paper on the floor. A note Letitia had scribbled that had blown from the table, the wind through the open door. Gone for a walk. Thought we might catch you . Cordon broke the seal on the Black Label, poured a small measure into a glass, his hand shaking only slightly as he raised it to his mouth. For God’s sake, he told himself, get a grip.

For some minutes he stood in the doorway, listening for sounds of them returning, looking into the space beyond the trees. They wouldn’t have gone far.

Back inside, he set the newly acquired CD to play: track two, another version of ‘Good Bait’. You could never have too many. He smiled as the trumpet rose above the crackle of sound. Miles not yet cool, only twenty-three, still trying to sound like someone else, like Dizzy, not yet his own man.

That was how it happened, Cordon thought, you started by copying, learned through doing. Experience. Some did. Some never learned.

‘All right,’ Letitia said, the words out of her mouth almost before she was through the door. ‘Sit. Listen. I’ve been thinking.’

Her skin had taken on some vestige of colour, no longer the putty-like grey it had been more or less since they’d arrived. She looked five years younger; there was, if not a sparkle, liveliness in her eyes.

‘We can’t just stick here and bloody fester, right?’

‘Right.’

Dan was tugging at Cordon’s sleeve, anxious to show him the shells he’d collected from the garden earlier, tiny shells that lay mixed with the gravel, each one no bigger than a fingernail.

‘Danny,’ his mother said, ‘just go and play outside, okay?’

Disappointment flooded the boy’s face.

‘Ten minutes,’ she said, ruffling his hair. ‘That’s all. We’re playing catch later, remember? Why don’t you go and get some practice.’

He pouted. ‘I can’t on my own.’

‘Throw it up against the wall. Just mind the windows, that’s all.’

‘You won’t be long?’

‘I promise. Now off you go, go on.’

The boy grudgingly outside, Cordon pulled out one of the chairs from the table and sat down. ‘So, what’s the brilliant idea?’

‘No need to be bloody sarky.’

‘I’m sorry. Go on.’

‘Taras?’

‘Who?’

‘Taras. Anton’s brother.’

‘The one with the hotel …’

‘In the Lakes, exactly.’

‘What about him?’

‘Well, for one thing he liked me …’

Cordon raised an eyebrow.

‘Liked me, not fancied me. Well, maybe … but we always got along, that’s the thing. He liked Danny, too. And he was reasonable. Not like Anton. You could talk to him and he’d listen.’

‘And you think that’s what we should do? Talk to him?’

‘What someone should do, yes. Get him to talk to Anton, make him listen to reason.’

‘You think that’s possible?’

She shrugged. ‘It’s got to be, hasn’t it? For Danny’s sake as much as anyone’s.’

Cordon glanced towards the door. ‘You think he misses his father?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’ve never heard him mention him. Not once.’

‘That doesn’t mean he’s not thinking about him.’

Cordon nodded, thought that was probably right. Children did, young children. Seemed to need to. Until they grew up, grew away …

‘Besides, Danny or no Danny, we can’t just stay here for ever. It’s not real. We’ve got to go back to England sooner or later and when we do I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder all the time in case Anton’s crazy twin brothers are going to be there, waving guns in our faces.’