The Casual Vacancy (57 page)

I

Many, many times had Colin Wall imagined the police coming to his door. They arrived, at last, at dusk on Sunday evening: a woman and a man, not to arrest Colin, but to look for his son.

A fatal accident and “Stuart, is it?” was a witness. “Is he at home?”

“No,” said Tessa, “oh, dear God…Robbie Weedon…but he lives in the Fields…why was he here?”

The policewoman explained, kindly, what they believed to have happened. “The teenagers took their eye off him” was the phrase she used.

Tessa thought she might faint.

“You don’t know where Stuart is?” asked the policeman.

“No,” said Colin, gaunt and shadow-eyed. “Where was he last seen?”

“When our colleague pulled up, Stuart seems to have, ah, run away.”

“Oh, dear God,” said Tessa again.

“He’s not answering,” said Colin calmly; he had already dialed Fats on his mobile. “We’ll need to go and look for him.”

Colin had rehearsed for calamity all his life. He was ready. He took down his coat.

“I’ll try Arf,” said Tessa, running to the telephone.

Isolated above the little town, no news of the calamities had yet reached Hilltop House. Andrew’s mobile rang in the kitchen.

“’Lo,” he said, his mouth full of toast.

“Andy, it’s Tessa Wall. Is Stu with you?”

“No,” he said. “Sorry.”

But he was not at all sorry that Fats was not with him.

“Something’s happened, Andy. Stu was down at the river with Krystal Weedon, and she had her little brother with her, and the boy’s drowned. Stu’s run — run off somewhere. Can you think where he might be?”

“No,” said Andrew automatically, because that was his and Fats’ code. Never tell the parents.

But the horror of what she had just told him crept through the phone like a clammy fog. Everything was suddenly less clear, less certain. She was about to hang up.

“Wait, Mrs. Wall,” he said. “I might know…there’s a place down by the river…”

“I don’t think he’d go near the river now,” said Tessa.

Seconds flicked by, and Andrew was more and more convinced that Fats was in the Cubby Hole.

“It’s the only place I can think of,” he said.

“Tell me where —”

“I’d have to show you.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” she shouted.

Colin was already patrolling the streets of Pagford on foot. Tessa drove the Nissan up the winding hill road, and found Andrew waiting for her on the corner, where he usually caught the bus. He directed her down through the town. The streetlights were feeble by twilight.

They parked by the trees where Andrew usually threw down Simon’s racing bike. Tessa got out of the car and followed Andrew to the edge of the water, puzzled and frightened.

“He’s not here,” she said.

“It’s along there,” said Andrew, pointing at the sheer dark face of Pargetter Hill, running straight down to the river with barely a lip of bank before the rushing water.

“What do you mean?” asked Tessa, horrified.

Andrew had known from the first that she would not be able to come with him, short and dumpy as she was.

“I’ll go and see,” he said. “If you wait here.”

“But it’s too dangerous!” she cried over the roar of the powerful river.

Ignoring her, he reached for the familiar hand- and footholds. As he inched away along the tiny ledge, the same thought came to both of them; that Fats might have fallen, or jumped, into the river thundering so close to Andrew’s feet.

Tessa remained at the water’s edge until she could not make Andrew out any longer, then turned away, trying not to cry in case Stuart was there, and she needed to talk to him calmly. For the first time, she wondered where Krystal was. The police had not said, and her terror for Fats had obliterated every other concern…

Please God, let me find Stuart,
she prayed.
Let me find Stuart, please, God.

Then she pulled her mobile from her cardigan pocket and called Kay Bawden.

“I don’t know whether you’ve heard,” she shouted, over the rushing water, and she told Kay the story.

“But I’m not her social worker anymore,” said Kay.

Twenty feet away, Andrew had reached the Cubby Hole. It was pitch black; he had never been here this late. He swung himself inside.

“Fats?”

He heard something move at the back of the hole.

“Fats? You there?”

“Got a light, Arf?” said an unrecognizable voice. “I dropped my bloody matches.”

Andrew thought of shouting out to Tessa, but she did not know how long it took to reach the Cubby Hole. She could wait a few more moments.

He passed over his lighter. By its flickering flame, Andrew saw that his friend’s appearance was almost as changed as his voice. Fats’ eyes were swollen; his whole face looked puffy.

The flame went out. Fats’ cigarette tip glowed bright in the darkness.

“Is he dead? Her brother?”

Andrew had not realized that Fats did not know.

“Yeah,” he said, and then he added, “I think so. That’s what I — what I heard.”

There was a silence, and then a soft, piglet-like squeal reached him through the darkness.

“Mrs. Wall,” yelled Andrew, sticking his head out of the hole as far as it would go, so that he could not hear Fats’ sobs over the sound of the river. “Mrs. Wall, he’s here!”

II

The policewoman had been gentle and kind, in the cluttered cottage by the river, where dank water now covered blankets, chintzy chairs and worn rugs. The old lady who owned the place had brought a hot-water bottle and a cup of boiling tea, which Sukhvinder could not lift because she was shaking like a drill. She had disgorged chunks of information: her own name, and Krystal’s name, and the name of the dead little boy that they were loading onto an ambulance. The dog walker who had pulled her from the river was rather deaf; he gave a statement to the police in the next room, and Sukhvinder hated the sound of his bellowed account. He had tethered his dog to a tree outside the window, and it whined persistently.

Then the police had called her parents and they had come, Parminder knocking over a table and smashing one of the old lady’s ornaments as she crossed the room with clean clothes in her arms. In the tiny bathroom, the deep dirty gash on Sukhvinder’s leg was revealed, peppering the fluffy bath mat with black spots, and when Parminder saw the wound she shrieked at Vikram, who was thanking everyone loudly in the hall, that they must take Sukhvinder to the hospital.

She had vomited again in the car, and her mother, who was beside her in the backseat, had mopped her up, and all the way there Parminder and Vikram had kept up a flow of loud talk; her father kept repeating himself, saying things like “She’ll need a sedative” and “That cut will definitely need stitches”; and Parminder, who was in the backseat with the shaking and retching Sukhvinder, kept saying, “You might have died. You might have died.”

It was as if she was still underwater. Sukhvinder was somewhere she could not breathe. She tried to cut through it all, to be heard.

“Does Krystal know he’s dead?” she asked through chattering teeth, and Parminder had to ask her to repeat the question several times.

“I don’t know,” she answered at last. “You might have died, Jolly.”

At the hospital, they made her undress again, but this time her mother was with her in the curtained cubicle, and she realized her mistake too late when she saw the expression of horror on Parminder’s face.

“My God,” she said, grabbing Sukhvinder’s forearm. “My God. What have you done to yourself?”

Sukhvinder had no words, so she allowed herself to subside into tears and uncontrollable shaking, and Vikram shouted at everyone, including Parminder, to leave her alone, but also to damn well hurry up, and that her cut needed cleaning and she needed stitches and sedatives and X-rays…

Later, they put her in a bed with a parent on each side of her, and both of them stroked her hands. She was warm and numb, and there was no pain in her leg anymore. The sky beyond the windows was dark.

“Howard Mollison’s had another heart attack,” she heard her mother tell her father. “Miles wanted me to go to him.”

“Bloody nerve,” said Vikram.

To Sukhvinder’s drowsy surprise, they talked no more about Howard Mollison. They merely continued to stroke her hands until, shortly afterwards, she fell asleep.

On the far side of the building, in a shabby blue room with plastic chairs and a fish tank in the corner, Miles and Samantha were sitting on either side of Shirley, waiting for news from theater. Miles was still wearing his slippers.

“I can’t believe Parminder Jawanda wouldn’t come,” he said for the umpteenth time, his voice cracking. Samantha got up, moved past Shirley, and put her arms around Miles, kissing his thick hair, speckled with gray, breathing in his familiar smell.

Shirley said, in a high, strangled voice, “I’m not surprised she wouldn’t come. I’m not surprised. Absolutely appalling.”

All she had left of her old life and her old certainties was attacking familiar targets. Shock had taken almost everything from her: she no longer knew what to believe, or even what to hope. The man in theater was not the man she had thought she had married. If she could have returned to that happy place of certainty, before she had read that awful post…

Perhaps she ought to shut down the whole website. Take away the message boards in their entirety. She was afraid that the Ghost might come back, that he might say the awful thing again…

She wanted to go home, right now, and disable the website; and while there, she could destroy the EpiPen once and for all…

He saw it…I know he saw it…

But I’d never have done it, really. I wouldn’t have done it. I was upset. I’d never have done it…

What if Howard survived, and his first words were: “She ran out of the room when she saw me. She didn’t call an ambulance straightaway. She was holding a big needle…”

Then I’ll say his brain’s been affected,
Shirley thought defiantly.

And if he died…

Beside her, Samantha was hugging Miles. Shirley did not like it;
she
ought to be the center of attention; it was
her
husband who was lying upstairs, fighting for his life. She had wanted to be like Mary Fairbrother, cosseted and admired, a tragic heroine. This was not how she had imagined it —

“Shirley?”

Ruth Price, in her nurse’s uniform, had come hurrying into the room, her thin face forlorn with sympathy.

“I just heard — I had to come — Shirley, how awful, I’m so sorry.”

“Ruth, dear,” said Shirley, getting up, and allowing herself to be embraced. “That’s so kind. So kind.”

Shirley liked introducing her medical friend to Miles and Samantha, and receiving her pity and her kindness in front of them. It was a tiny taste of how she had imagined widowhood…

But then Ruth had to go back to work, and Shirley returned to her plastic chair and her uncomfortable thoughts.

“He’ll be OK,” Samantha was murmuring to Miles, as he rested his head on her shoulder. “I know he’ll pull through. He did last time.”

Shirley watched little neon-bright fish darting hither and thither in their tank. It was the past that she wished she could change; the future was a blank.

“Has anyone phoned Mo?” Miles asked after a while, wiping his eyes on the back of one hand, while the other gripped Samantha’s leg. “Mum, d’you want me to —?”

“No,” said Shirley sharply. “We’ll wait…until we know.”

In the theater upstairs, Howard Mollison’s body overflowed the edges of the operating table. His chest was wide open, revealing the ruins of Vikram Jawanda’s handiwork. Nineteen people labored to repair the damage, while the machines to which Howard was connected made soft implacable noises, confirming that he continued to live.

And far below, in the bowels of the hospital, Robbie Weedon’s body lay frozen and white in the morgue. Nobody had accompanied him to the hospital, and nobody had visited him in his metal drawer.

III

Andrew had refused a lift back to Hilltop House, so it was only Tessa and Fats in the car together, and Fats said, “I don’t want to go home.”

“All right,” Tessa replied, and she drove, while talking to Colin on the telephone. “I’ve got him…Andy found him. We’ll be back in a bit…Yes…Yes, I will…”

Tears were spattering down Fats’ face; his body was betraying him; it was exactly like the time when hot urine had spilled down his leg into his sock, when Simon Price had made him piss himself. The hot saltiness leaked over his chin and onto his chest, pattering like drops of rain.

He kept imagining the funeral. A tiny little coffin.

He had not wanted to do it with the boy so near.

Would the weight of the dead child ever lift from him?

“So you ran away,” said Tessa coldly, over his tears.

She had prayed that she would find him alive, but her strongest emotion was disgust. His tears did not soften her. She was used to men’s tears. Part of her was ashamed that he had not, after all, thrown himself into the river.

“Krystal told the police that you and she were in the bushes. You just left him to his own devices, did you?”

Fats was speechless. He could not believe her cruelty. Did she not understand the desolation roaring inside him, the horror, the sense of contagion?

“Well, I hope you
have
got her pregnant,” said Tessa. “It’ll give her something to live for.”

Every time they turned a corner, he thought that she was taking him home. He had feared Cubby most, but now there was nothing to choose between his parents. He wanted to get out of the car, but she had locked all the doors.

Without warning, she swerved and braked. Fats, clutching the sides of his seat, saw that they were in a lay-by on the Yarvil bypass. Frightened that she would order him out of the car, he turned his swollen face to her.

“Your birth mother,” she said, looking at him as she had never done before, without pity or kindness, “was fourteen years old. We had the impression, from what we were told, that she was middle class, quite a bright girl. She absolutely refused to say who your father was. Nobody knew whether she was trying to protect an underage boyfriend or something worse. We were told all of this, in case you had any mental or physical difficulties. In case,” she said clearly, like a teacher trying to emphasize a point sure to come up in a test, “you had been the result of incest.”