Стивен Бут - Drowned Lives

‘His name’s Godfrey Wheeldon. I’ve given you the address. He said he was sure Great-Uncle Samuel wanted him to pass the keys on to me.’

‘Even so, that doesn’t make the boat your property, Mr Buckley. At the very least, we’re looking at illegal entry.’

Caroline Longden appeared at the end of the path at the back of Ash Lodge. She spoke to neither of us, but merely gazed coolly at the wreck of Kestrel . She was wearing a red fleece, and her face was flushed a clashing pink.

‘I’ll need to talk to you later, Miss Longden,’ called DS Graham.

‘I’ll be in the house,’ she said, with a cold stare in my direction. Then she disappeared again.

Graham turned back to me. ‘Naturally we asked Miss Longden to make sure everything was all right in the house.’

‘Naturally?’

Gradually, under his penetrating gaze, the message began to sink in. The police did not believe my story about why I’d been on the boat. They thought I might have ransacked the house, too, looking for valuables. Had Caroline told them something that would give them this idea?

‘She’s rather upset, of course,’ said Graham. ‘Who wouldn’t be? But we’ve got somebody up at the house with her to check on the contents.’

‘Funnily enough, I’m quite upset as well. It was me that someone tried to kill, you know. If I’m not mistaken, that’s generally considered attempted murder in English law.’

‘We’ll be conducting a full investigation, sir.’

And from the way he said ‘sir’, I could see that I would get no further.

When Graham had finished with me, I walked up the path to Ash Lodge and knocked at the front door, like a polite visitor. Caroline was reluctant to let me in. The chill that struck outwards from the dark hallway wasn’t entirely due to the fact that the house had stood empty for weeks. She regarded me with a hostile expression as I tried to explain falteringly what had happened.

‘Really?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Are you feeling quite well?’

‘Well, just a few cuts and bruises—’

‘I was thinking more of your mental health.’

‘You think I’m making it up?’

‘It’s all rather far-fetched, isn’t it? People following you and trying to kill you? I suppose you’ll say that none of it is your fault.’

‘Well—’

‘You must admit that rather a lot of things have gone wrong since you came into my father’s life. What is it going to be next?’

‘Caroline, you can’t blame me for—’ I was about to say ‘for what happened to the boat’, but I saw from her eyes that it was more than that. I felt a sense of shock, and the words came out as if someone else had spoken them. ‘But of course. You blame me for your father’s death.’

‘Well, it’s in the blood, isn’t it?’ she said, a trifle defensively. ‘The famous split in the Buckley family.’

‘I never knew anything about the damn, stupid split until Samuel told me.’

‘How can I believe that?’

She was right, of course. It was unbelievable. Unbelievable that I should have known nothing about the division in my family, even about the very existence of half of it. I could barely believe it myself. And if my credibility with Caroline was already undermined from the word ‘go’, why should she believe me about anything else?

Before I could say any more, a figure appeared behind Caroline, a dark shadow in the hallway. He glowered ferociously when he saw me at the door.

‘Mr Buckley,’ said Simon Monks, managing to load my own name with a dripping weight of menace. ‘It must be a little while since we met at Fradley.’

‘Two weeks,’ I said, grimacing at the prospect of even more unpleasantness.

‘Really? Long enough to forget what we were talking about, was it?’

‘I’ve come to explain to Caroline—’

‘Yes, I heard what you were explaining. And I heard her say she didn’t want to know.’

How could Caroline stand him? Couldn’t she see the potential for violence that oozed from his every pore?

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Chris was just going anyway.’

‘Excellent. Then you won’t mind if I walk you back to your car, Mr Buckley.’

Caroline watched us for a few moments. But before we’d gone ten yards I heard the front door close behind us. The slam sounded like the door of a prison cell closing behind the condemned man as he walked to the gallows. Though Caroline could barely bring herself to be civil to me, I desperately missed her presence as soon as I was alone with her fiancé.

Monks fell into step with me, walking close by my elbow — much too close for comfort. I could smell his sweat, mingled with a cheap deodorant. He was six inches taller than me, and I found myself gazing down at my feet to avoid having to look up at him. I noticed the heavy toe caps and thick soles of his black boots. They must have been size ten, at least.

As somebody who’d just escaped a violent death, I ought to have been able to stand up to crude intimidation, but I couldn’t account for the irrational fear he instilled in me. I wondered where the police officer was who DS Graham had sent to the house. If there was ever a time I wanted to see a policeman, it was now.

Monks’s voice was low and threatening when he spoke. ‘You’re on a slippery slope, Chris,’ he said. ‘When are you going to see sense?’

I tried to quicken my pace to get ahead of him as we neared the bottom of the drive.

‘Is that your car?’ he said. ‘It’s seen better days, I’d say. A bit like you, old pal.’

I was ashamed to see that my hand shook as I slid my key into the lock. My body was tense and painful, as if it was expecting at any moment to get a punch in the kidneys or a hand slammed in the door. That was the way Monks made me feel with every word he spoke. It was a dread and apprehension made familiar in my childhood by a certain note in my father’s voice.

I wondered if Mrs Wentworth was watching from her front window, and whether she’d report it if she saw Monks attack me in the street. She must know him as Caroline’s fiancé, while I was reduced to the level of a suspicious person again, a definite undesirable. For all I knew, she might be the kind who longed for tough vigilantes in size ten boots dispensing summary justice to keep the riff-raff out of the area.

Monks placed his hand on my shoulder before I could get fully into the car, and I found myself unable to move, crouched at an awkward, undignified angle that sent spasms of pain shooting through my aching legs and back.

‘Be careful,’ he said.

Finally, he let me get into the car. It didn’t give me any reassurance to be able to see him in my mirror, watching me as I drove away.

Back at Stowe Pool Lane, the front room was starting to look like an explosion in a library. Sheets of paper lay limp and crumpled on almost every surface, with the gas fire left on to provide enough heat to evaporate the water that had soaked into them. There were damp patches on the table and the seats of the chairs, and drips had landed on the carpet in dozens of places. The windows had steamed up, and condensation was running onto the ledges.

Inevitably, I hadn’t been in the house more than a few minutes when there was a knock on the back door. Rachel had called to see how I was.

‘Have you still got a headache? How’s the lump on your head? That burn could do with some cream on it.’

‘I’m all right, Rachel. Don’t fuss.’

‘All right? You look a wreck.’

I felt it, too. But I didn’t want reminding of my injuries, because I was trying to keep my mind off the events that had caused them. It was proving very difficult, and I needed something to distract me. I was hoping the last bit of Samuel’s manuscript would do it.