Obsidian Pebble (19 page)

“I bet Heeps does,” Oz spat. “I bet he's spread it all over the university.”

“Your father's colleagues have been very discreet,” protested Dr. Mackie.

“Dr. Heeps' daughter hasn't been,” Oz said, his voice getting louder.

Mrs. Chambers stepped towards Oz and held out her arms beseechingly. “I am so sorry you had to find out this way, Oz. But it's something I knew you'd eventually have to deal with.”

Oz took a step back. “What does that mean? Are you saying that you think he might have done it?”

“Oh, Oz,” Mrs. Chambers said, and started to cry.

Oz rounded on Dr. Mackie. “I didn't pretend to be rubbish at maths to bait Badger Breath, okay?” He looked from the psychologist to his mother again. “I don't care what any insurance company or inquest says. My dad didn't crash that car on purpose. I know he didn't. And anyone who thinks he did needs their heads examined. But not by you!”

He shot Mackie a furiously defiant glare and ran up to his room.

Oz locked himself in his bedroom, head throbbing with anger at what he had just heard. He strode blindly from one side of the bedroom to the other, looking at the games and books and the flotsam of his life all around him, but not really seeing any of them. His brain was whirling like an out of control helicopter in a crash descent. Why had his mother or Caleb or someone never told him? Did they think that he was still a child that needed protecting? Didn't they know that it was far, far worse hearing it bandied about casually like Dr. Mackie had just done than hearing it from someone who cared? Didn't they know that other people would have been discussing it, like teachers and all of his dad's colleagues and friends, so that they treated Oz with that awful pity he hated so much?

And Pheeps? His skin crawled when he now thought of Pheeps and the truly horrifying nature of her snide, supercilious sneers. Humiliation and fury fought a battle in his chest and threatened to erupt like a boiling geyser. That she was poison he already knew, but this… His ignorance just made things a hundred times worse and made him suddenly want to roll up into a ball and howl. He groaned, threw himself down onto the bed and buried his head in the pillow, concluding with the utmost certainty that all adults were completely mad. He toyed with ringing Ellie and Ruff, but then began wondering if they had known, too. Known and not said anything in case it upset him.

Some time later, he heard his mother knocking gently on the door and heard it open. She called his name softly, but Oz had his back to her, so he didn't move and pretended to be asleep. He didn't want to speak to her. Not yet. He wanted to get things straight in his head. So he kept very quiet, and after a while she went away.

Oz wasn't sure how long he lay there with his eyes shut, trying to quell the images racing around in his head, but sleep was a long, long way off. The discussion with Dr. Mackie had opened up wounds that had only ever partially healed. The idea that his dad had deliberately crashed the car was just insane. He was as certain of that as he was that the sun would come up tomorrow. But in the dark, small hours, Oz could not help reliving the horror of that night. The tension in his mother's expression as they waited for his dad to arrive home, knowing that he'd left the airport four hours before. The excuses she'd used to pretend that all he'd done was run out of battery on his mobile and stopped at a service station for a bite. The horror he'd read in her face as the blue lights of the police car pulled up outside.

When Oz finally gave up trying to shut his eyes, the luminous dial on his alarm clock read half past midnight. He crept out of his room and tip-toed down one flight. There was a light under his mother's bedroom door. He hesitated, still angry with her for what had happened. He wanted to thrash it out with her, vent his fury, but he remembered the look on her face the night his dad hadn't come home and suddenly he found he simply couldn't do it. He couldn't bear the thought of that look returning. Besides, he argued limply, she was probably asleep by now.

He turned and went back upstairs but bypassed his bedroom and went up to the library. He turned all the lights off and sat in one of the old leather chairs. It was a moonless night and stars sparkled in the velvet sky visible through the glass turret windows. When he was much younger, he'd sat in his dad's lap in this very chair staring at the night sky, waiting for a shooting star to appear. Sometimes they'd sat for hours, but it hadn't mattered that they had never seen one in all the times they tried, because his dad would just talk and Oz would listen with half-lidded eyes until he fell asleep. He'd wake up the next day in his own bed and wonder sleepily how he got there. Oz knew that the man who had spent all those hours with him would never deliberately crash a car into a wall. Accidents happened, and Oz could just about accept that his father had not been indestructible and as much a potential victim of capricious fate as anyone else. But deliberately kill himself?

Never.

But what had all that business about insurance companies been about? He should have asked. Now it would have to wait until morning…unless… He fished out his mobile and sent a single line of text:

Caleb, of course, knew who Dr. Mackie was, but was visibly shocked to hear about the purpose of her visit.

“Oz, I'm so sorry you had to hear that. You needed to know, but that isn't the way to find out,” Caleb said with a look of stark horror. “Dr. Mackie isn't renowned for her tact.”

“But why didn't you tell me?”

Caleb shook his head. “Your mother… She loves you to bits, Oz. She just wanted to protect you from all that.”

“But she can't, can she? She can't protect me, because she can't make it go away. You knew what Pheeps was on about when I told you the other night, didn't you?”

Caleb sighed and turned off the stove. “I could guess.”

“But what did Mum mean about the insurance company?”

Caleb poured the hot milk into mugs and began stirring in the chocolate. “When you get older and have responsibilities like houses and children, you insure your life against horrible things like accidents. That way, if anything happens to you, the insurance company pays out a sum, which can be very large, in order that those left behind are looked after.”

“Right,” Oz said, accepting a mug, “but Mum said that the insurance company was trying to wriggle out of paying.”

“That's generally what insurance companies do. It was a new-ish policy that Michael had taken out after you'd moved in here. He wanted to make sure everything was taken care of, should anything happen. Companies don't pay out on suicide cases in the first two years.”

“But he didn't do that to himself. I know he didn't.” Oz could hear the faint tremor in his own voice.

“I know that, too, Oz. Michael never stopped talking about you and your mother. A man less likely to want to take his own life, I have never met. But the coroner left an open verdict. That's enough for the insurance company to contest the case. I'm sure they'll pay up eventually, but these things can drag on, and for your mum it's like trying to swim through treacle.”

“That's why she wants to get rid of this place, isn't it?” Oz said, suddenly realising what it all meant.

Caleb nodded and Oz frowned, trying to unravel the strands of thought that were knotting in his head.

“Don't judge her too harshly, Oz. She's been through a lot. She depends on the money from us tenants and what she earns doing some copyediting. It isn't much.”

He knew that there wasn't much spare money around, but now he understood a lot better why that was. Oz blew over the top of his mug and sipped at his hot chocolate. He felt better instantly. “I just wish there was something I could do to help her understand how brilliant this place is. How amazing it is just to be here.”

“You can. Just be you. Have your friends over. Have Halloween parties. Go for a kick about in the park. That's what your dad would have wanted.” Caleb's eyes narrowed quizzically. “And now that we've mentioned it, I've been meaning to ask you about football. Do you play for a team now?”

Oz shook his head.

“Why not?”

Oz let the steam from the hot chocolate tickle his nose as he put it to his lips. It was the same question he'd avoided answering whenever Ruff and Ellie asked.

“Your dad told me you were very good,” Caleb persisted, regarding Oz over the top of his mug.

“Did he?” Oz said without looking up. Eventually he sighed and explained. “We made a promise.”

“A promise?”

“I made Dad promise that, if ever I played for a team, he'd come and watch me.”

There was a long moment of ballooning silence before Caleb said, “So playing for a team is breaking that promise.”

“He can't keep it, can he?” Oz said bitterly.

“But if you did play, how do you really know he wouldn't be there watching?”

Oz frowned. Caleb was really good at making him consider things that he would never have thought of himself.

“How could he?”

Caleb put his mug down. “Sometimes, keeping someone alive in our hearts can seem like the most difficult thing in the world, Oz. But if we don't, we're in danger of losing the connection that made them so special.”

That one made Oz really think. He opened his mouth to argue twice, but shut it again without speaking on both occasions, while Caleb just sat calmly drinking his hot chocolate, his expression unreadable. They continued in silence, each occupied with his own thoughts, sipping at the delicious brown liquid, until Caleb finally said, “Did I tell you about the time your dad and I went to look at the old Celtic settlement in Brittany and stayed at a really weird old hotel?”

Oz shook his head and listened for ten minutes to Caleb's shaggy dog story, smiling at the funny foreign voices he put on, and wincing at the punch line about why they hadn't ordered two eggs for breakfast because “…one egg is usually
un oeuf
.”

When he'd finished laughing, Oz put down his empty mug, yawned and said casually, “Thanks for talking to me about this.”

“Luckily, I'm something of an insomniac, so it really is no trouble. But I think you should probably try and get some sleep now, and don't worry about what Mackie said.”

Oz nodded and got up, remembering something else as he did. “By the way, we think we've found one of Morsman's artefacts.”

“Really?” Caleb asked, looking up.

“Yeah. It's called the black dor and it's like this brooch thing that looks a bit like a beetle. Anyway, we'll know for definite tomorrow. At least, Ruff and I will since Ellie's thrown a wobbly.”

“One of Morsman's artefacts, you say? Some people think they don't really exist, you know.”

Oz thought he could hear a forced element to Caleb's voice. Almost as if he was desperately trying to keep it even.

“Yeah? Well, we won't tell Mum, that's for sure. Anyway, Ellie's really brilliant at stuff like that. Give her a job to do and she doesn't stop until she's done it.” Oz rinsed his cup under a tap and thanked Caleb again.

“Any time, you know that.”

Oz took the stairs two at a time, his heart all the lighter for having chatted with Caleb. But as he reached the first floor of the east wing, he paused. Someone was crying softly. It was a girl's sob, and it was coming from Lucy Bishop's room. He thought about going back and telling Caleb, but decided it was really none of his business. Besides, another huge yawn almost split his face in two, and at that moment what he needed more than anything was his bed.

* * *

Despite his tiredness, Oz slept only fitfully, tossing and turning throughout the night, his thoughts veering between Pheeps' smug supercilious smile and Dr. Mackie's emotionless delivery of what she'd assumed he, like everyone else, apparently, knew. And there was someone else in his dreams, a grey-eyed girl who kept calling his name, but seemed to disappear whenever Oz looked at her. Judging by the dark smudges under his mother's eyes the next morning, it didn't look like she'd slept very well, either. At least there was no sign of the black dog peeking out from behind the calendar, and for that Oz was thankful. Even so, for a long while breakfast was a silent affair, pierced only by polite requests for milk or toast. Finally, Oz could stand no more of it.

“Mum, I don't care what anyone else says, Dad couldn't have done what they say he did. I just know it,” he said in a low voice.

Hollow-eyed, Mrs. Chambers responded in a tremulous voice, “Oh, Oz. I just couldn't bring myself to tell you. I couldn't stand to see you hurt again…” She broke down in a stifled sob.

“I'm eleven now, Mum. I need to know this stuff, especially when other people already do.”

Mrs. Chambers grabbed him in a tearful hug. “I'm so sorry about last night,” she whispered with her mouth pressed against his head. “I haven't slept a wink.”

“It's okay, Mum. Just keep that Dr. Mackie away from me.”

“She's banned,” Mrs. Chambers said, dabbing her eyes. “I thought she'd be tactful, but she's obviously about as subtle as a mallet.”

“A big mallet,” Oz said, and was pleased to see his mother smile. “Maybe she did us both a favour though,” he went on, “in a weird kind of way.”

Mrs. Chambers frowned, but then shrugged. “Maybe.” She looked hopefully into Oz's face before adding, “So we're pals again, are we?”

He grinned in reply.

“No more secrets, I promise,” said Mrs. Chambers earnestly. Oz nodded, but turned quickly back to his cereal so that his mother couldn't see how uncomfortable her reference to “secrets” made him. After all, he had said nothing to her about the footsteps on Halloween, or of the weird symbols on his laptop, or of Morsman and his artefacts.