Border Crossing Read online

  ‘You make him sound like a virus.’

  Tom shrugged. ‘He’s dangerous.’

  ‘Violent?’

  ‘Don’t know. Probably not.’

  ‘Probably not?’

  ‘Yeah. Probably. I don’t know, you don’t know, the parole board certainly didn’t know. I suspect Danny doesn’t know.’

  She was listening intently. It was curious this feeling of intimacy, in the darkening room. ‘Are you sure that’s a fair assessment?’ she asked. ‘I’m wondering a bit whether you don’t see him as threatening because you’re…. feeling threatened anyway. I know what it’s like when a relationship breaks up – my God, I ought to. You do feel threatened.’

  ‘You mean, I’m cracking up?’

  ‘Of course I don’t mean that.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, you might. Might be true. Did you know he accused a teacher at Long Garth of sexual abuse?’

  She looked surprised. ‘Are you sure? There’s nothing on the file.’

  ‘The headmaster decided a public investigation wouldn’t be in anybody’s best interests.’

  ‘So the teacher got away with it.’

  ‘Or Danny.’

  ‘You think he was lying?’

  ‘I don’t know. The teacher had been bending the rules, but then people always do bend the rules with Danny.’

  Martha was worried. ‘Do you want to give up?’

  ‘No, in fact I’m seeing him again tonight. I suppose I’m just reminding myself to be careful.’

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Too soon to say. Danny’s agenda gets clearer all the time. Everything I said about him at the trial’s been systematically contradicted.’

  ‘Convincingly?’

  Tom hesitated. ‘Persuasively. But he hasn’t got on to the murder yet, and that’s when reality’11 start to bite. And of course at the moment he’s distracted by this other case.’

  ‘Well, it must be a hell of a shock to open a paper and find your own photograph there. After all these years.’

  ‘I suggested giving it a rest for a while, but he says he wants to press on.’

  ‘He needs to do it. And there mightn’t be that much time. They’ll be looking for him.’

  ‘Could they find him?’

  ‘They can find anybody. If they want to badly enough. And this is a very good story. Here are these two little thugs – and what do you know? Here’s this other little thug they’ve just let out. Are we too soft on crime? Should life mean life? It’s gold dust.’

  ‘It’s depressing.’

  ‘Yeah, well… I wish I wasn’t going.’

  ‘To the wedding?’

  ‘Yes. Though it’s not that far. It’s only York.’ She sat brooding. ‘If it gets too bad we’ll have to move him.’

  ‘I don’t see the point of a false identity if it can be broken as easily as this.’

  ‘It’s just bad luck. He could’ve gone ten years before anything like this happened.’

  Tom thought for a moment. ‘Okay. Suppose it blows up while you’re away?’

  ‘He’s got my mobile number. Obviously, I can’t leave it switched on all the time, but I’ll keep checking. And he’s got two emergency numbers he can ring, but that’s only if things go really pear-shaped. Anyway, he knows when to use them. There shouldn’t be a problem, and even if there is, there’s no need for you to be involved.’

  ‘Well, good.’ He looked round. ‘I’m trying to think if there’s anything else.’

  ‘We’ve got it covered, Tom. There’s no need to worry.’

  ‘All right.’

  She looked at her watch. ‘And I’d better get me skates on. I promised I’d be there in time for a final fitting.’

  ‘Are you driving?’

  ‘Of course. I might need to get back early.’

  They said goodbye on the doorstep. Martha turned up her collar against the wind and rain.

  ‘Get your priorities right, Martha.’

  ‘I know, I know. Enjoy myself.’

  ‘No. Catch the bloody bouquet!’

  ‘Oh, you still advocate marriage, do you?’

  He smiled. ‘Ye-es.’

  She reached up and kissed his cheek. ‘Bye, Tom. See you when I get back.’

  NINETEEN

  The phone rang at intervals throughout the afternoon. After calling his mother and his secretary to explain the situation, Tom left the answering machine on, and closed the kitchen door so he didn’t have to hear the messages. He spent three hours rearranging the furniture to make the living room look less bare. He brought a table and two chairs down from the spare bedroom, and some paintings down from the loft. Then he decided it was cold enough, certainly wet enough, to justify lighting a fire. The coal was damp, and spat and smoked miserably, but he persevered and managed to coax it into flame. When it was going to his satisfaction, he poured himself a drink. Probably he should have made himself something to eat, but that meant the kitchen, and the kitchen meant the answering machine, so he decided not to bother.

  With the fire lit and the lamps on, the living room looked less desolate than he would have believed possible a few hours ago. It still sounded hollow, and the way the furniture clustered round the hearth was a little too reminiscent of a campfire, but he was aware, as he looked around him, of a shiver of excitement, barely distinguishable from fear. He was free. Perhaps he ought to go away for a few days, sort out what he felt, but he was conscious of a countervailing desire to go to ground, to pull the tattered remnants of his life around him. Keep out the cold. And meanwhile, only an hour or so away, there was Danny, whose problems dwarfed his own.

  He switched on the news. The Kelsey murder was the second item. Close-ups of flowers left at the scene of the crime, blow2y chrysanthemums, ‘Love’ in blue ink dribbling down a wet card. Then pictures of a white van accelerating rapidly, pursued by angry crowds.

  The doorbell rang. Danny. Tom walked through his hollow house, his footsteps, even his breathing, sounding different inside the changed space, and let him in.

  ‘Did you get Martha?’ Danny asked.

  ‘Yes, she came round.’

  ‘Do you know she’s going away tonight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know why she can’t cancel.’

  ‘It’s a wedding. She’s the bridesmaid.’

  ‘She ought to’ ve seen this coming.’

  ‘I don’t see how she could have done. The boys were only charged yesterday. Anyway, come through.’

  ‘Did you see the news?’ Danny asked, following him into the consulting room.

  ‘Yes. They didn’t mention you this time.’

  ‘They’re on to me, though. I’m sure I was followed.’

  He found it difficult to settle, rubbing the backs of his hands, wriggling in the chair. There was no way of knowing whether his conviction that he was being followed was paranoid or not. It could be true.

  ‘By the way,’ Tom said, settling down into his chair, ‘I went to see Angus MacDonald.’

  Danny said nothing at all, just stared at him blankly.

  ‘He asked me to give you his address.’

  Tom scribbled Scarsdale Writers’ Centre and the address on the back of an envelope, and handed it to Danny, who took it, looked at it and put it in his pocket, all without saying anything. He seemed too dazed to take it in.

  ‘Look,’ Tom said, ‘shall we take things a bit easy this time?’

  Danny was already shaking his head. ‘No, now or never.’

  He was reaching for his cigarettes as he spoke. Tom sensed anew tension in him, a new purpose. Familiar sounds – the creak of a chair, the popping of the gas fire; familiar smells – furniture polish, wet wool, the smoke on Danny’s clothes and hair; familiar sights -the circle of reddish light on the desk, Danny’s left forefinger picking at a torn cuticle.

  ‘Lizzie,’ Danny said.

  ‘Don’t rush.’

  Tom sat back, waited, let the silence re-create the spac
e around them. Danny was tapping his cigarette, planning, Tom thought, the shortest route. The atmosphere was different tonight. Partly because Danny was desperate, trying to dismiss the threat of newspaper intrusion from his mind, but partly too because Tom’s recent conversation with Angus had alerted him to the possibility that Danny might be lying. Might be. Tom wasn’t sure, now, which of them he believed. Angus had his own reasons to lie.

  Curiously, as if reading his thoughts, Danny began talking about Angus. ‘When I was at Long Garth I invented a twin. I told everybody I was a twin, and that the other one had died. I think it was… well, it’s obvious what it was, but nobody said, “No, you’re not. You never had a twin.” Because the past didn’t matter. Angus was the only person who said: “No, sorry, Danny. No twin. Just you.”‘ He laughed. ‘And that was actually quite a sharp jerk on the leash. Suddenly there was this objective truth, and I couldn’t get round it. He wouldn’t let me.’

  Did you ever talk to Angus about Lizzie? I don’t mean the murder

  ‘Wrote. Not talked.’

  ‘Do you think you could try now?’

  A deep drag on the cigarette, flared nostrils, he looked like an athlete contemplating a jump he probably wouldn’t make.

  ‘She was an old lady,’ he said at last, with a sigh. ‘I know it sounds odd when I call her Lizzie, like, you know, sort of disrespectful, but we all called her that. She was a local character, always the same coat, the same shopping bag. She had these very thick lenses in her glasses, because she’d had cataracts. My mother always used to stop and talk to her, and one of the things you noticed was that she couldn’t have a conversation without her lips moving while the other person spoke. You know, as if she was trying to speak for them. Somebody must have made her self-conscious about it, because she had a habit of putting a hand up to her mouth and trying to hold her lips still. Very thin, pleated upper lip. False teeth, too even, but yellow, age spots on her hands, a wedding ring, swollen knuckles. I remember looking at the ring and wondering how she got it off her finger. It was marooned, you know, very loose, but stranded by the swollen knuckle.’

  Tom was remembering a photograph of Lizzie’s left hand, a close-up of the injuries inflicted when the murderer had tried to wrench the ring off.

  ‘She had huge pupils, they didn’t change in size, they didn’t respond to the light, and she used to bend down and ask me questions about school, and her breath smelt of peppermints. Oh, and the bag smelt offish. It was an old canvas shopping bag, and it used to swing from side to side and hit her on the leg.’

  ‘How old did you think she was?’

  ‘She was seventy-eight.’

  ‘No. How old did you think she was?’

  ‘Oh ancient. Ancient.’

  ‘What sort of person was she?’

  ‘Lonely old lady, widow, lived by herself, kept cats, befriended strays, there was always room for another. She was very protective of the cats. Once Paul and me – a kid I used to go to school with – were playing with one of the kittens, and she came running out to chase us away. She just assumed we were teasing it.’

  ‘And were you?’

  ‘No.’ A pause. ‘I suppose the short answer is, I don’t know what sort of person she was. Because “lonely old lady, kept cats” is just a stereotype, isn’t it? She could’ve been anything.’

  ‘Can we turn now to the day it happened? Do you remember how you were feeling that day?’

  ‘Weird. It was the day after the vicar came round, and Mum had her great attempt at beating me with Dad’s belt. I ran out of the house. I ran miles.’

  ‘And next morning?’

  ‘I lay in bed. She didn’t say: “Are you getting up?” or anything like that. 1 knew everything had changed. I’d kicked away the ground under my feet. I got up, she wasn’t in, and I just wandered off. I seemed to be floating and when I came round I was in the lane by Lizzie’s house, and she was coming out, going to the shops. She had this old shopping bag with her. I watched her. I don’t know why I watched her, I just did. She got to the corner of the street, and then she turned round and came back, shook the door handle and then set off again. I suppose her memory must have been starting to fail a bit. She came right past me, and instead of saying “Hello”, I stepped back into the alley and she didn’t see me.’

  ‘Did you know what you were going to do?’

  ‘Yes. I knew where the key was. All this going back to check the door was locked, and then she left a spare key under a plant-pot in the backyard. As soon as she’d turned the corner, I walked up the alley, got the key and went in.’

  A long pause, but the time for prompting was past.

  I’d been in the house before. Once when she went to hospital for a few days for her cataract operation my mother said she’d feed the cats, so we used to walk down together and do that. I went into the living room and looked round. There weren’t any cats in sight. Then 1 saw one ginger one at the top of the stairs, but it ran away when it saw me. There were all kinds of rumours about how much money she had, she was supposed to have masses stacked away. When I went with my mother she looked in the fridge, and there were all these cod steaks, but my mother said they weren’t for her, they were for the cats. I think she spent all her pension money on the cats. She used to have a handful of dry cornflakes for her breakfast, that was all. You’d see her on the front doorstep when you were walking to school, eating these dry cornflakes, and my mother used to say, “That’s all she ever has. She’s not feeding herself.”‘ He paused. ‘She was a tiny little woman. Just skin and bones.’

  Danny seemed to be losing his way. At the same time, Tom thought this detailed re-creation of Lizzie had its own value. He waited, but there was nothing else. ‘So there you are in the house,’ Tom said. ‘What happened next?’

  ‘I started looking for money. I found some loose change on the mantelpiece, couple of quid for the insurance man, and then I went upstairs and started looking round her bedroom. There was a musty smell, and some sort of peach-coloured powder on the dressing-table top. I rubbed it between my fingers, and…’ He seemed surprised by the banality, the emptiness of his own recollections. ‘I just stood, looking in the mirror, and the face didn’t look like mine.’

  Under his normal voice, a child’s piping treble was faintly audible, growing clearer by the minute. Danny was producing this sound without sign of strain, without a hint of falsetto, and seemed to be unaware that he was doing it. Tom felt a prickling at the back of his neck.

  ‘I don’t know why she came back, because she’d already checked that she’d locked the door. Perhaps she was checking she’d turned the gas off. Anyway, I heard the key turn in the lock, and she’s corning in. I look round for somewhere to hide…’ His eyes were closing. ‘The bed’s a divan, I can’t get underneath, I have to get in the wardrobe. I push the clothes along, and I get right in the back and close the door. It’s pitch black, everything stinks of mothballs, and fur. My face is pressed into fur, and there’s something on my cheek. It’s a fox’s nose, a real fox with glass eyes, and its paws are dangling.’

  Danny’s hair was damp with sweat. Tom said, It’s not happening now, Danny.’

  His eyes opened, the pupils huge, glutted on darkness. ‘No, I know. I pushed it away from me, and the wardrobe banged against the wall. I’m like, don’t come up, don’t come up, but she must have heard the bang. The living-room door opens – opened – and I know she’s standing at the foot of the stairs, listening. I go very quiet. I can’t breathe, the fur’s up my nose, and, you know, I… I can’t, I can’t, I’ve got to breathe, so I push my way out, and she’s coming up the stairs. So I run – ran – on to the landing, she didn’t hear, she didn’t look up. There’s a parting in her hair, a line of pink, and I know there’s only seconds before she looks up and sees me. I’ve got to get out. So I run down the first four stairs to the half landing… And she’s seen me. She won’t back off, she says: “What you doing, you little bugger?” I’ve got to get past, so I put my
hands on the banisters and kick her in the chest, and she falls backwards. Slowly, ever so slowly, but she can’t have done, can she? It can’t have been slow.

  He was staring at Tom, as if the answer to this question might change everything.

  ‘And then the next thing is she’s lying at the foot of the stairs. Her face has gone all red because her legs are halfway tip the stairs, and a! the blood’s drained down into her head. Her eyes are closed, just little slits of white, and I – I don’t know what I thought. I’d got beyond thinking. I –’

  ‘Danny,’ Tom said again. ‘It’s not happening now.’

  Danny widened his eyes with the look of somebody waking from a long sleep, and blinked several times.

  ‘Do you want to stop?’ Tom asked.

  A deep sigh. When he spoke again his voice was deeper, but then shaded up again into a treble. ‘No. I’m looking down at her. One of her shoes has come off and it’s lying next to her face. She doesn’t move, I can see right up her nostrils, and I’m like trying to get past without touching her.’

  ‘She’s unconscious?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ He sounded dazed. ‘I thought she might grab hold of me as I went past, but she didn’t.’

  ‘What happened next?’.

  ‘I’m kneeling beside her, I put the cushion –’

  ‘Where did the cushion come from?’

  A blank stare. ‘From the living room. It must have done, mustn’t it? I must’ve gone into the living room and got it. I put the cushion over her face, and pressed…’

  ‘Do you know why you did that?’

  He’d gone very white. ‘I don’t want to see her eyes. I don’t want her looking at me.’

  ‘You could go away.’