A Trick of the Mind (27 page)

I flicked through more papers.

Then I found a headline that took my breath away. Later the same year Patrick McIntyre had been arrested for the murder of his wife.

My heart banged, my head span.

Witnesses said they had seen him tampering with the boat he knew Stephanie was using.

The accident had happened shortly after some dispute between Stephanie and her husband Patrick McIntyre, when Stephanie had said she was leaving him. Friends said they had met up to discuss
their relationship in the Harbour Inn and their meeting had ended in a fight where Patrick had lost control. Some people claimed they had heard shouting and crying and later seen Patrick fiddling
with the boat just before his wife went off in it.

No evidence was found to prove that Patrick had tampered with the boat, however, and McIntyre had been released without charge.

On my way back to May’s house the words played around my head: ‘When Stephanie had said she was leaving him.’

The words Patrick had spoken when I’d first asked him about the photo of her in her wedding dress came back to me. They echoed in my ears as I drove down the straight road away from the
town, the sea wall grey to one side, the sky lowering in front of me, towards my aunt’s solitary house. I was filled with a sense of doom that dragged my heart down into my boots.

‘I think you ought to know that she let me down badly, the way EVERYONE seems to think it’s OK to hurt me and then leave me.’

Leaving Patrick was what I had to do.

Leaving Patrick was what meant Stef had been killed.

It occurred to me I could just keep on driving, not go back to Patrick at all. But Patrick was in my cottage, waiting for me, I couldn’t leave him there. He would find me
eventually. Perhaps I was over-imagining; after all he had never been charged.

I had to stay calm. Talk to him, adult to adult.

Patrick was still sitting by the fire when I got back.

‘Ah,’ he said brightly. He was in good-mood mode. ‘Did you get the pills?’

Shit!

‘They didn’t have any,’ I said.

‘Then what took you so long?’

‘Nothing.’ I felt sick. ‘I was just looking for a shop that might be open.’

‘Oh, Ellie darling. There was no need to go to all that trouble. I was getting worried about you. Now, come on, let’s get in that bath.’

He stood up and moved towards me, stroking my hair off my face.

Fear took over now. I could no longer control the adrenalin that was demanding I run for safety.

I spoke without thinking any more about it, trying to keep my voice as steady and as calm and teacher-like as I had to in class when a child was acting up.

‘Hang on, Patrick. Listen,’ I said. ‘I think perhaps I should move out of your flat when we get back to London. It was all a bit rushed and I hadn’t thought it through.
I’ll find somewhere else to rent for a bit and we can take it all a bit more slowly.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’ll drive us back to London tonight, and I’ll go and stay at my dad’s, give you some space, and then we’ll take it one step at a time.’

‘You’re leaving me?’

‘NO! No, not leaving. But it’s all been too fast. I just want to take it more slowly for a bit.’

‘But, Ellie, you can’t. You owe me. Remember?’

‘You can have the studio back, I’ll find somewhere else.’

‘NO, I’m not talking about that. Or letting you live with me in a Wapping warehouse for nothing. You don’t think I’d care about those, do you? Hardly! Money’s no
object for me.’ He was smiling, his head on one side.

Then he took hold of my hair at the back and jerked it hard so I was looking up at him as he put his mouth back to my ear.

‘You owe me my whole fucking leg.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The moment swells and expands. His words ring in the air between us.

My instinct is to run, covering my ears, shutting my eyes, denying what he’s known all along. But there is nowhere to turn. I want to protest but I can’t speak. There’s
nothing to say. I’d like to shake my head, lie my way out of this. But I’ve been caught out. My face is immobile as I stare at Patrick and know he knows. Exposure and pure shame.
I’ve known nothing quite like it since I was a child.

Patrick though, looked quite pleased with himself. He began to speak.

‘I
knew
when you came to visit me in hospital, it was because you were the one who had bumped into me in your car.’ He smiled. ‘I knew you were the
hit-and-runner!’

He was holding me tight to him as he spoke. I was afraid of moving an inch. I had been a fool! I should have gone to the police straight away, not let this thing ride on and on to this. The
wood-burner was blazing, it felt too hot.

‘I knew all along you weren’t really a girl who was coming for a sailing weekend with me,’ he said, chuckling. He had his hand on my thigh, pressing down. ‘There was no
girl! I wanted to see how long you’d keep up the pretence. Quite a long time, as it turns out!’

‘I would have told you.’ My words came out quietly when at last I found my voice. ‘I wanted to. But then you said I was the only one who had visited you. I was worried it would
be worse for you to know the truth than to go along with what you believed!’ My protest sounded feeble even to myself.

‘Do you remember,’ he said, ignoring this, ‘that while you thought I was unconscious, you promised me I could come down to your Aunty May’s house by the sea when I was
better? Because you wanted to make amends for what you’d done to me?’

‘Yes, I do remember.’

‘But now you’re reneging on that promise! Surely all that hasn’t just passed out of your mind now you’re finding things a bit – how did you put it? “A bit
rushed”?’

‘It isn’t like that, Patrick. We’ve got very involved with each other very quickly and I just think perhaps we should take it a bit more slowly.’

‘NO!! You don’t give up on me now! You don’t walk out on me! Not now you’ve maimed me for life!’

‘We aren’t a hundred per cent certain it was me who ran you over, are we?’ I asked desperately. ‘What about that man at the pub . . .’

He pushed me off my feet, onto my back on the sofa. Held my hands against the sofa arm, above my head.

‘Sweetie, your numberplate is branded on my brain. NS08 NTJ. Your silver blue Nissan Micra disappearing into the night while I lay on the tarmac will never be erased from my
memory.’

I stared up at him.

I struggled against his grip.

‘What about – you know – compensation.’ I could hear the fear in my own voice. I was breathless, panicky. It was too hot. ‘Surely, if I was responsible for what
happened, I must also be responsible for paying it somehow? And of course I’ll do that, Patrick! I do understand! I have to pay. I should have gone to the police straight away. I’ll go
to them now, make amends.’ I knew I was gabbling, revealing how panicked I was. But I couldn’t stop myself.

‘My goodness, Ellie, you’re a clever girl but you’re terribly innocent. You do know what you committed that evening, hitting me without reporting it, is a serious offence? All
you had to do when you realised, was stop, call the police. The worst thing you did wasn’t knocking me over.’ He shifted his weight so he was bearing down on me even harder as I
struggled again against his hold. ‘It was driving away from it and withholding the information when the police appealed for witnesses.’

‘Isn’t there anything I can do? Now, I mean? Shouldn’t we go to the police? Explain. Then I’ll do what I should have done straight away and we—’

‘I could sue the pants off you.’ He laughed. ‘Have you any idea what I’m worth? What my walking’s worth? How much I could sting you for the leg you’ve
destroyed?’

I couldn’t speak. I was trying to process what was happening. What this meant.

His voice softened then, and he loosened his grip.

‘I’m not asking you to do anything you’ve never wanted to do, am I? You
wanted
to help me, to care for me. You came to me, remember? Not the other way round.
It’s what you wanted too, isn’t it? To be with me?’

‘Of course. Yes, of course.’

‘Then, Ellie, stop resisting. We’re meant to be together, aren’t we?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, we are.’

I wanted to get away. I needed to go outside and breathe some air. But everything Patrick was saying was making me realise how trapped I was. I felt the heat from the wood-burner sear up my back
to my neck, the back of my neck under my hair break out in a sweat.

We were here in Aunty May’s remote seaside house, with nothing beyond us but the wild North Sea on one side, and flat countryside for miles on the other. A fear as familiar as my own hand,
for it was the one I’d had as a child. I was alone, marooned in this village that was not on the way to anywhere, unable to get back to civilisation even if I wanted to.

Patrick could sue me to the bones. He’d seen my car. He’d remembered the numberplate. But he also knew that even if I were to pay money, compensation, a fine, serve a prison
sentence, whatever, I would always have his injuries on my conscience.

I could walk away but I’d never walk away. I was trapped. With a man who had tried to kill a woman when she realised she had to leave him.

And it was a trap of my own making.

CHAPTER THIRTY

I handed in my notice to the school the following Monday. Patrick convinced me I couldn’t be trusted to look after children, pointing out the ease with which I’d
lied about his accident, on top of the way I often seemed distracted and had let Timothy go home on his own.

Mrs Patel, the lovely head teacher, reminded me my contract demanded half a term’s notice, and if I broke it I would find it hard to be employed in schools again.

I told her nothing would change my mind.

She looked at me with concern.

‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing, Ellie? I know your painting’s going well, but it’s hard to make it in the art world. Teaching is secure and you’re good
at it. I had plans for you to coordinate the art next year.’

I didn’t want to bring up the issue of Timothy again, when she had so kindly overlooked it, so I said nothing, but thanked her and told her I’d keep in touch and let her know how I
got on in New York.

I painted at the studio on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and did my last day’s teaching on Friday. It was the end of term, the children restless and excited, and the
parents sent in presents: endless boxes of chocolates, soaps, biscuits from the corner shop. I donated all of them to the rest of the staff. I left the school for the last time with a heavy heart.
Timothy was back at school, and speaking again. It was all I could do to stop myself from crying as I waved goodbye to him and he went off with his child minder.

The following week I worked at the studio without stopping, every day. I didn’t eat anything. I worked like a maniac, only thinking of my commission. Convinced that once I got it done, if
I got to New York, everything else would sort itself out somehow.

If I kept working, kept Patrick sweet, I believed somehow all the things I had done that had caused harm – to Timothy, to Patrick – would be atoned for.

As I worked I thought about the little child Daisy who had drowned and wondered again how Patrick knew so much about it. A horrible thought came to me about his possible part in her death. Hers,
then Stef’s. But then I remembered that I was the guilty one where he was concerned and I crushed the bad thoughts about him back down again and gave up trying to make everything fit together
– it was pointless.

Patrick would come to see me when things were quiet in his work. He always came unannounced, arriving in a taxi, between jobs.

‘I like to see how my artist is developing her work,’ he would say and he’d sit and watch. He was a sentinel watching over me. His eyes wouldn’t leave me. I wanted to
tell him to go, but was afraid of how he would react, and so I worked on, and let him sit.

‘Haven’t you work to do, Patrick?’ I asked him once, gently, so as not to anger him.

He shrugged. ‘It’s all gone a bit quiet on the fish front lately,’ he said. ‘I’m taking some down time, well earned, I’d say. And it’s good to watch you
work, to see what an artist actually does with her day. They do say, you know, that you should be able to churn out a picture in the morning, if you know what you’re doing, and buy a Ferrari
in the afternoon. But I guess you’re not that sort of artist.’

‘That’s what commercial painters do,’ I said. ‘I like to think my work has more integrity.’

I told him how Matisse had once destroyed one of his works when he knew how much it was worth, to show this wasn’t what his art was about.

‘He was a bloody fool then, wasn’t he?’ Patrick said. ‘You wouldn’t be so daft, would you, Ellie? I told you, I’ve got people interested in taking a look at
your work. That doesn’t mean you’re going to chop it up, does it?’

‘No. I’m not quite in Matisse’s position.’

‘Yet.’

My painting
was
developing. It would be finished by the deadline. I was putting into it all the layers I felt lay beneath our surfaces, both mine and Patrick’s.
What else could I do with him there, watching, penetrating my creative thoughts? The painting might appear to be about the river, but it was about so much more. The darkness beneath, the depths,
the unseen currents, the bodies it carried in the deep and deposited later on the shores, on the driftwood collectors.

I thought of Patrick saying, ‘It might appear to be benign but it can be a monster when it wants to be.’

And my saying, ‘It’s what my painting’s about.’

I was finding out just how true this was.

It isn’t the people who are easy to be with who are the most sustaining to one’s soul, I told myself as I worked. I could never have built such a painting about Finn. It is people
who are complex, who stretch you to your very limits. The people who treat every obstacle as a challenge, who ask you to give 150 per cent to everything, as Patrick did.

Patrick hurt like a child when he felt he was going to be abandoned, and yet he gave so much – most of the time – when he was confident of my love. All I had to do was to stand by
him. And be careful not to upset him. I had my antennae up all the time, trying to predict what might set him off, careful to avoid it. I reminded myself that I did owe him so much, that this was a
situation of my own making. And I convinced myself that if I played it right, I might eventually change Patrick so that I no longer felt he was an explosive I was being careful not to ignite.