False Tongues (39 page)

Lilith shook her head with regret. ‘I don't think so.'

‘How about the boy? The one they arrested? Josh, is it? You could interview him, and do a ‘My night of hell in the slammer' sort of story. Police bungling, arresting the wrong person—a poor, innocent lad who was minding his own business.'

She liked that idea, and could see the possibilities there. The father: a religious headcase, from what she'd seen of him. He was bound to be indignant about the treatment his son had received at the police's hands, and he didn't seem to be shy about sharing his feelings.

‘Leave it with me,' said Lilith confidently. ‘I'll come up with something. I promise.'

***

‘He was my mate. I didn't mean to kill him,' Tom repeated. ‘You have to believe me.'

He
didn't
have to believe him, but Neville did. It sounded right; it explained everything. Or almost everything. 'Tell me what happened after that,' he said.

‘I realised…he was dead. Straight away. He didn't, like, bleed to death slowly or anything. He didn't scream or yell. He just…died. I couldn't believe what had happened, what I'd done. One minute he was sticking his tongue down my throat, and the next minute he was dead.' Tom rubbed his eyes with his hand. ‘I suppose I freaked out at that point.'

That sounded about right, too.

‘Because of what he did to me, I like freaked out and…did something weird. He was laying on the ground, and I cut his tongue.'

That box was ticked, then. And Neville hadn't even had to ask.

‘And then I thought about how I'd sent him a text. Anyone who found his phone would, like, know that he was meeting me there. So I took his phone out of his pocket, and smashed it.'

Everything accounted for, then. Except…

Tom closed his eyes. ‘Then I threw the knife in the canal.'

So Josh's fictional account of disposing of the knife had been right on the mark, Neville thought with a certain grim satisfaction.

‘And I realised that there was blood on my hoody. Seb's blood.' He shuddered. ‘I thought about chucking it in the canal as well. I might not be that good at science, but I figured it might float.' His mouth twisted in a half-smile. ‘Then I thought about Lexie. Seb's girlfriend. I've always known she fancies me. And she doesn't live too far away. So I texted her and asked her if she'd do me a favour.'

‘You wanted her to wash your hoody,' Neville stated.

‘Yeah. I took it round. I told her if she got the stain out, she could keep it. She always said she liked that hoody.'

That raised another question in Neville's mind. ‘How did you explain the blood?'

Tom shrugged. ‘I told her it was chilli sauce. From a kebab.'

Had Lexie believed such a flagrant lie? She wasn't a stupid girl, by any means. How much, then, had she guessed or surmised, when Sebastian turned up dead? Questions for another day, thought Neville wearily.

The door opened and Mrs Gresham came into the room, crossing to her son's bed. She bent over him protectively and put a hand on his forehead.

‘Tom, you look pale. All done in. I hope you haven't upset him, Detective Inspector,' she addressed Neville with a frown. ‘Maybe you'd better go now.'

‘I will,' he said. ‘But first I'd like a word with you, Mrs Gresham. In the corridor.'

***

Jane had always liked watching families. She enjoyed speculating about their relationships, and observing the variations and repetitions in their genetic codes: the curve of a nose, repeated through generations, or the peculiar whorl of an ear, handed down from father to son.

There were plenty of families for her to observe at Kew Gardens on that beautiful Saturday afternoon. Parents with young children in prams and pushchairs, extended families with reluctant teenagers lagging behind, grandparents and offspring in all sorts of combinations.

After walking quite a bit, and taking the little train round vast tracts of gardens, Brian declared it was time to have their cream tea at the Orangery. They chose a table outside where they could enjoy the sunshine.

‘This
is
lovely,' Jane said contentedly, lifting her face to the sun while they waited for their tea to arrive.

A large family group arrived nearby, moving tables together to create more room. There was an older couple and two younger couples, as well as assorted children. Jane watched their efforts with interest.

‘How do you think they're related?' Brian asked. ‘Do you think those two women are sisters?'

She scrutinised them covertly, not wanting to be caught staring. ‘No,' she said at last. ‘They don't look anything alike. I think the two men are brothers. Look—they both have the same pattern baldness. The one just took his baseball cap off to scratch his head, and his hair is just like the other one, even though it's cut shorter. And the older man,' she added. ‘He's obviously their dad. He hardly has any hair at all.'

Brian, who was rather sensitive about his own receding hairline, smoothed back the strands on his forehead. ‘Poor chaps,' he said.

The older woman plucked a fat baby out of its pushchair and dandled it on her knee, crooning wordlessly, while the older man leaned over her shoulder and pulled faces at the baby.

Jane smiled.

‘Look at that,' said Brian, smiling as well. ‘Just think, Janey. One day we'll be like that. Granny and Granddad.'

One day.

Jane took a deep breath. Perhaps there would never be a better opening. ‘Actually,' she said, ‘it's not that far off.'

Her husband gave her a quizzical look. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Simon,' she said quickly, before she lost her nerve. ‘He and Ellie…are having a baby. They're going to get married,' she added.

Brian's jaw dropped. ‘But they're too young! And we're far too young to be grandparents.'

‘I agree, but it's going to happen anyway.' Now that she was on the other side of the fence, arguing for it rather than against, she found herself echoing Simon's words. ‘They'll make it work. You'll see, Brian. They've thought it all through. And they love each other.'

‘How long have you known about this?'

‘A few days,' she confessed. ‘Simon left it to me to break the news to you.'

He sighed and shook his head. ‘It's not the way we did it in our day.'

‘I know.'

‘In our day there was none of this living together nonsense,' he pronounced gloomily. ‘You got married, then after a decent interval you had your babies.'

Jane couldn't help laughing: he sounded like a grumpy old man, sixty-something instead of forty-something. ‘But you know how much things have changed,' she pointed out to him. ‘How many of the couples who come to you to marry them are living together?'

‘All of them, or nearly all,' he admitted. ‘That's just taken for granted now.'

The server arrived with their cream teas, which seemed to improve Brian's frame of mind considerably. ‘Splendid,' he said, rubbing his hands together. He split a scone and slathered it with clotted cream and jam.

Jane poured the tea. ‘I know it's a shock,' she said. ‘About Simon and Ellie, I mean.'

‘Oh, well.' He gave a philosophic shrug. ‘Ellie's a lovely girl. And Simon's mad about her. I'm sure they'll make a go of it. And,' he added, ‘I suppose it will be lovely to have a grandchild. It will keep us young, Janey.'

It was now or never, she told herself. And never wasn't an option. ‘Actually,' she said quietly, feeling herself blushing, ‘we won't have to rely on our grandchild to do that. I…we…are going to have a baby. As well.' She stared down at her scone, afraid to look at him.

‘But…but…'

Jane looked up and watched as Brian's expression of slack-jawed incomprehension slowly transformed itself into a delighted grin.

‘I don't believe it!' he said. ‘You're sure?'

‘I'm sure.'

‘Janey, you
are
a clever thing,' he announced, abandoning his scone and reaching for her hand.

***

Neville sagged wearily against the wall of the hospital corridor for a moment, closing his eyes to shut out the glare of the fluorescent lights.

Parenthood: it was a mug's game, he reflected.

If people knew, or even gave half a thought, to what having a kid was going to do to them, they'd probably never go down that path. They would stay out of the bedroom altogether, or at the very least make damned sure that there was no chance that anything would come of it. Not just contraception, but sterilisation.

It was too late for him. Way too late for the Greshams. And for the Frosts.

The trouble was, kids didn't come with any guarantees. You could be the best parent in the world—knock yourself out for your kids, lavish everything that money could buy on them—and it could still end in tears. A dead son. Or a son who was capable of sticking a knife into one of his best mates.

Heartache. That's what kids brought you.

He'd already had to see it inflicted it on one woman today, when he told Mrs Gresham what her cherished boy had done, and explained what was likely to come out of it. Even if Tom Gresham managed to avoid the worst of the possible legal consequences, by reason of his age or the unpremeditated nature of his crime, he would have to live with what he'd done for the rest of his life. A young life shattered; a family in ruins.

And the Frosts? They'd lost their only son, their link to the future of the planet. Their lives would certainly never be the same, even if they managed to pull together as a couple and survive the anger and acrimony that Sebastian's death had caused—or uncovered?—in their marriage.

Now it was time for him to tell another woman that her son had been killed—needlessly, senselessly—by his close friend. He didn't want to do it. But he'd promised.

It was only after he'd accomplished that that he would be able to return to the police station, to set in train the endless, hateful quantities of paperwork necessary to bring this case to its conclusion.

And after he'd done that, he could return home to his pregnant wife. To pretend to her that all was now right with the world. To try to convince himself that he wasn't actually terrified about being a father, and that, contrary to everything his head was telling him, their kid would turn out just fine.

Neville sighed, squared his shoulders, and went in search of Miranda Frost.

***

When Detective Inspector Stewart had gone, Miranda Frost continued to sit in the little cubicle which served as her office, staring at the blank wall for a very long time.

Sebastian's killer had been found. Had confessed, and this time the confession was accepted by the police as the truth.

He was here in the hospital now, the boy who had stabbed her son.

Tom. His friend.

Not a random maniac. Not even a bitter and twisted outsider, jealous of Sebastian's gifts. His friend.

She couldn't believe it. Couldn't get her head round it.

And all because Sebastian…was
gay
?

How could that be? And how could she not have known?

Miranda picked up the framed photo of Sebastian from her desk and examined it, with an intense scrutiny she'd never before subjected it to.

Sebastian, smiling. Just as in life. Nothing to indicate that he was anything other than the gifted, sunny boy she had always believed him to be.

But behind that smiling face, there had been inner torment. DI Stewart had told her of his secret journals, full of suppressed passion and misery. She hadn't known: hadn't even suspected.

Had she ever really known her son at all? That was the question with which Miranda now tortured herself.

First there had been the bullying. She'd been so sure that it couldn't be true, until the hard proof had established it beyond any doubt. Her lovely son had demonstrated a deliberate cruelty toward another human being of which she would never have believed him capable.

And now this. Gay.

How could she not have known?

It didn't really bother her that he'd been gay. What bothered her was that she'd had not the slightest inkling of it.

Why hadn't he told her, confided in her, shared his distress? And why had she not seen the signs? Had he been so adept at hiding them, or did she really, on a deep level, not want to know?

She had, she was beginning to realise now, constructed an image of Sebastian as she wanted him to be: clever, popular, sporty, gifted in so many ways. Perhaps he wasn't any of those things. Had he known that she couldn't cope with the real Sebastian, and thus been complicit in projecting to her the qualities she wanted to see?

How could you live with someone for more than fifteen years—the entire span of their life—and not know them?

Sebastian had been an easy child, fitting in with her punishing schedule and not making unreasonable demands of her. He knew—he'd been told often enough—that both of his parents were busy people, performing essential work, committed to saving lives.

Yes, she was busy. She had a demanding career. That had always been her excuse. But it was no excuse, really.

There
was
no excuse. Nothing should have been more important to her than her child.

And in that she had failed him. She'd never made an effort to go beneath the image of the ideal Sebastian, to get to know the real one. As long as he seemed to be everything she wanted him to be, she was happy.

Was that why she'd been so angry, in those days after his death?

Her anger had been directed chiefly at Richard—an easy target, and someone else whom it was convenient to take at face value. Their marriage had largely been lived out on the surface. She'd never had the commitment or the inclination to find out what really made her husband tick.

What was all that anger really about? Not about Richard at all.