The Ties That Bind (25 page)

‘What new boyfriend? I’d never laid eyes on him until an hour ago! And I never will again now, thanks to you. For your information he was the first person since . . . look, why am I trying to justify this to you? Who I sleep with, what I write . . . none of it’s got anything to do with you any more.’ He tried to keep his words gentle, even though he wanted to scream. It seemed to work: Jem’s own voice dropped in response.

‘I’ve been signed off work because of you. I’ve got a fucking psychiatric record now.’

‘No, not because of me,’ said Luke, suddenly feeling desperately sorry for him again. He began to pick up his papers. ‘You’ve been signed off because of
yourself
. You should never have come out of that clinic. You need proper help.’

Instantly the monster was back. ‘You patronising little
shit
,’ screamed Jem, and this time when he lunged at Luke he caught him, landing three blows on the same side of his face: jawbone, cheekbone, temple all took the impact. It was the first time Luke had been hit since he’d rough-housed with his brothers as a teenager. He staggered back: the sofa broke what would have been a dead fall. There was a hot hinge of pain where his jaw connected with his ear and blood oozed from his cheek where Jem’s ring had broken the skin. He remained slumped. In screen brawls, men received a punch and threw one straight back.
How
? Luke felt that it would take him entire minutes even to stand again. He watched helplessly as Jem ripped the walls clean of his research. The pounding in his head was echoed by a knocking on the door.

‘Luke? It’s Belinda. Are you OK in there? We’ve called the police.’

In the time it took the police to arrive, Jem went outside to threaten Belinda and throw another successful punch at Caleb, then forced his way back in and overturned all the freestanding furniture in the sitting room, threads of blood trailing his movements. When he picked up one of the Stonewall awards and raised it above his head, Luke and his neighbours closed the front door on him and waited outside.

Jem was crying as the police took him away, leaving instructions for the rest of them to come and give statements as soon as they could.

‘You just try and stop me,’ said Caleb, rubbing his chin. Luke watched the car turn the corner, before re-entering the cottage. Belinda followed him in and Luke frantically gathered up all his notes, grateful now that his gallery had been torn down. His neighbours stared at the hole where the back door had been.

‘You can’t stay here,’ said Belinda.

‘I can board that up, man,’ said Caleb, anger lost to capability. ‘I’ve got a bit of MDF I can nail over that hole for the night.’

‘What,
now
?’ she said.

‘It’s not as though I’m going to go straight back to sleep, is it? Won’t take me two minutes. I’d feel better knowing the place was secured.’

‘You can crash in our spare room,’ said Belinda, her hand on Luke’s arm. ‘I insist.’

Luke could not have stayed in Temperance Place, not even next door, not even knowing that Jem was in custody.

He looked at his watch: only half two. He would call Sandy at home. She might still be awake, and if she wasn’t, surely she’d rise for this? ‘Thank you, you’re very sweet. But let me make a call first. I think I’d rather go somewhere a bit further away.’

It hurt to talk. He had never known pain like it. How bitterly ironic that his initiation into violence should not come from the dangerous places his work had taken him but the false haven of love.

Chapter 37

There were still a few stragglers leaving the clubs around the front. Luke wondered if his boy had gone back into Revenge. He might still be in there now, some other lucky bastard getting to reap what Luke had sowed. People were in couples, staggering back to their flats or houses or hotels. Down on the beach, a white arse pumped up and down between a pair of brown legs. The handful of people who looked in Luke’s direction let shock show briefly on their faces before breaking eye contact. Two people crossed the road to avoid him.

He had given Sandy the bones of it over the telephone. She must have been waiting for him by the door because it swung open while he was still on the pavement. Her hair was loose, long and witchy, and she wore a powder-blue peignoir that billowed in the breeze, making wings of her sleeves like something from a Hammer horror film. He half expected her to glide along as if on castors.

‘Oh, honey, what’s he done to you?’ She pulled him in for a hug then held him by the shoulders at arm’s length. ‘Do we need to take you to A&E?’

‘It’s just a graze,’ said Luke. Her scrubbed face was smeared in some kind of grease that did little to soften the ruck of concern in her brow.

‘Sit down,’ she ordered, and wafted into the kitchen. He heard cupboards opening and the tinkle of metal on glass. Was she preparing more drinks? He had drunk too much already to benefit further from the anaesthetic effects. When she returned the silver tray was laid not with glasses and bottles but a triage kit: a tumbler of water, cotton balls, a tube of Savlon cream and an old-fashioned brown medicine bottle with a white lid. The antiseptic tang of its contents carried him back to when he’d skinned his knees at school. ‘Let’s get you cleaned up. I’m not having anyone going septic in my house.’

She handed him a doused swab. He held it against his temple and sucked his teeth at the sting. A lot more blood came off than he was expecting.

‘I’ve got to go to the station in the morning, make a statement. I think they’re expecting me to press charges against him.’

Sandy squeezed a strip of ointment onto her fingertip. ‘Are you mad? Of course you must press charges.’

‘He’s not evil or anything, he’s just not well,’ said Luke. ‘He’s having some kind of nervous collapse. He’s already been signed off work. This might be what tips him over the edge. Just because I don’t want to be with him doesn’t mean I want to ruin the rest of his life.’

She began to stroke the cream onto his face, wincing in sympathy with him.

‘Luke. I don’t want to frighten you, but what if he comes back again, and does something worse? You know as well as anyone how important it is to get these things on record. Your own safety has to come first. Get stuff down. Get it official, get a police record. Keep a
diary
.’

‘What, so that when he comes back and kills me in the middle of the night, at least he’ll have a track record?’

‘Can you stop being sarcastic for five minutes?’ said Sandy. ‘I’ve attended one too many DV inquests to see the funny side of this. I’ll make sure you press charges even if I have to march you down to the station myself.’

‘It’s not domestic violence. I don’t live with him any more.’

‘It’s still . . . look, we’ll talk about this in the morning. Help yourself to whatever you need from the kitchen. I’ve made up a bed. Lie in as long as you need to.’

‘Thanks, Sandy,’ said Luke, taking her hand and holding it against his cheek for a few moments. ‘I can’t sleep in, though, I’ve got to be up first thing to deal with this. I’ll need to call Charlene to tell her about the house before I go to the police.’

Stiffness in his jaw woke him at nine the next morning in a narrow single bed surrounded by haphazardly stacked box files and leaning towers of yellowing papers. He lay there for as long as he could bear it, then raided Sandy’s bathroom cabinet for painkillers, which he swallowed dry. He collapsed back into bed, waking again hours later to the smell of black coffee.

‘Morning,’ said Sandy. ‘Afternoon, I should say.’ Her hair had been tied back but she had not yet applied her makeup. She looked like a faded photograph of herself. ‘How are you feeling, lovey?’

‘Sore,’ said Luke. ‘Angry.’

‘Give me a while to wake up and get dressed and I’ll come back to the house with you if it’d help. Give a hand with the clean-up operation, maybe?’

Luke pictured the cottage, the upturned furniture and the blood-splattered walls. It would be lovely not to have to deal with that on his own but there was debris that incriminated him, too. The rogue’s gallery might have been torn down, but his notes, the paper trail of his research would give him away. One look and Sandy would know exactly what he’d been up to.

‘No!’ he said. ‘I’ve got to do this by myself.’

‘Fair enough,’ she said in a brisk voice that almost masked the hurt.

By the time he had eaten breakfast, spoken to Charlene, gone home to change his bloodstained clothes, gathered his scattered notes and hidden them in his satchel it was nearly four o’clock. It was half past before he made it to the police station. A desk sergeant informed him that Caleb had already given his statement and that Jem had gone before the magistrate after lunch.

‘So soon?’ said Luke.

‘Nice easy job, in and out in fifteen minutes,’ said the sergeant. ‘He’s pleaded guilty to one charge of breaking and entering, one of vandalism and two of assault. He’s been fined and given a suspended sentence.’

‘So now what happens?’ panicked Luke. ‘He could go straight back to my house. He could be there now, waiting for me.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about that. Apparently he’s gone back up North.’ He looked Luke slowly up and down, then said, ‘His wife came to get him,’ with obvious relish.

‘His
wife
?’ echoed Luke, although he might have known she’d be down the first chance she got.

The policeman’s tone turned nasty. ‘Didn’t you know he was married?’

Luke fought the urge to tell him where to shove his truncheon and turned on his heel.

Outside the station, he lit a cigarette so that he could breathe. He hoped that Serena’s influence, a night in the cells and a conviction had scared Jem away from Brighton for good.

His thoughts turned again to the question of how Jem had found him.
A little bird told me
. That was not what you would say if you had paid an investigator to trace someone. What little bird? Who had betrayed him?

Chapter 38

Charlene of course knew who had really broken into the house but the official story was that it had been a bungled burglary. The insurers had their police incident number: they never needed to know that it was Luke’s former partner who had done the damage, and Joss Grand certainly didn’t.

The maintenance men from JGP had done a good job of patching the place up. Within twenty-four hours they had replaced the broken window pane with a fresh one that showed the rest up as filthy, and hung a new PVC door in place of the old wooden one. They had not needed to do much to the interior apart from right the furniture that had been tipped over; the damage was surprisingly light. In his cyclone of vandalism, Jem had only actually destroyed one item of furniture, a utilitarian dining chair that had broken into pieces. His blood, however, was a messy signature on floors and walls and although Luke cleaned up the worst of it, he kept finding splashes of it here and there, little scarlet stop signs that had dulled to the dark ruby shade of Grand’s car seats.

Luke rearranged his papers into working order, flinching at the tiniest sound. The house, which had been a source of intrigue when its secrets were decades old, now seethed with immediate, intimate danger. He had added his own chapter to its strange narrative and struggled to muster the detachment necessary to live there. The lump of wood by his bedside was now accompanied by the longest knife from the kitchen drawer.

He took Sandy’s advice and wrote a document outlining the way his relationship with Jem had spiralled into abuse. After a brief précis of his current situation, he trusted in the facts, listing dates and times and places as far as he could give them. He noted the names and numbers of the police officers he had dealt with. It made uncomfortable reading. He dated, signed and sealed it, then wondered what to write on the envelope. What this was all about, what this boiled down to, was that no one would ever read this letter unless Jem did something really stupid. His pen hovered over the manila. The obvious words were TO BE OPENED IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH but he recoiled from the melodrama of the phrase. It was still blank when he dropped it off at Disraeli Square.

‘You’ve done the right thing,’ said Sandy. ‘I won’t mention it again and please God I never have to open it, but I feel happier knowing it’s all down in black and white. Nothing’s ever true until it’s in print. I’ll stick it upstairs in the office with the rest of the admin.’

Luke was confident that it would never be seen again. For all her constant filing of paper, she never seemed to retrieve anything. Still, the act of entrusting it to her took the edge off his nerves, so that when she offered him a bed for the night, he felt confident enough to say no. Unless he faced his fears night-time in Temperance Place would become something he could not manage, days would soon follow suit and eventually he would be afraid to approach the cottage entirely. He had to stay there; its connection to Joss Grand was key to his story and there could be no lower rent in the whole of Brighton. Besides, it was where their interviews took place and Kathleen’s spirit still resided there.

Serena called.
Suicide
was Luke’s knee-jerk thought, he’s done it for real this time. But instead of the expected hysteria she sounded as exhausted as a new parent. Luke had the surreal feeling that he and Serena were the divorcing couple, engaged in strained discussion of their problem child.

‘He’s back in rehab,’ she said. ‘We’ve managed to avoid sectioning again.’

‘I’m not actually sure that would be such a bad thing at this stage,’ said Luke. ‘He seems to be getting worse, not better.’

‘No.’ Serena was firm. ‘I’m pretty sure this was rock bottom. Even he’s been shocked by this last . . . episode.’

Her euphemism, her persistent denial, angered him. ‘It wasn’t an
episode
, Serena, he broke into my house and beat the crap out of me.’ Luke had to ask the question that had been troubling him since the attack. He swilled it around one more time before spitting it out.

‘When you were married, did he ever . . . was he ever like this with
you
?’