His chest tightened; skin dimpled cold along the backs of his legs and arms. The book Letitia had been reading was on the ground beside her chair; Dan’s borrowed bike lay on the grass. Inside there were no signs of anything amiss.
He walked to the end of the lane where it met the road, then a short way in both directions, seeing no one. The earlier chill had disappeared and the sun was filtering weakly through the clouds. Their names when he called them echoed back to him along the still air.
Going inside, something caught his eye. Something white, a scrap of paper on the floor. A note Letitia had scribbled that had blown from the table, the wind through the open door.
For some minutes he stood in the doorway, listening for sounds of them returning, looking into the space beyond the trees. They wouldn’t have gone far.
Back inside, he set the newly acquired CD to play: track two, another version of ‘Good Bait’. You could never have too many. He smiled as the trumpet rose above the crackle of sound. Miles not yet cool, only twenty-three, still trying to sound like someone else, like Dizzy, not yet his own man.
That was how it happened, Cordon thought, you started by copying, learned through doing. Experience. Some did. Some never learned.
‘All right,’ Letitia said, the words out of her mouth almost before she was through the door. ‘Sit. Listen. I’ve been thinking.’
Her skin had taken on some vestige of colour, no longer the putty-like grey it had been more or less since they’d arrived. She looked five years younger; there was, if not a sparkle, liveliness in her eyes.
‘We can’t just stick here and bloody fester, right?’
‘Right.’
Dan was tugging at Cordon’s sleeve, anxious to show him the shells he’d collected from the garden earlier, tiny shells that lay mixed with the gravel, each one no bigger than a fingernail.
‘Danny,’ his mother said, ‘just go and play outside, okay?’
Disappointment flooded the boy’s face.
‘Ten minutes,’ she said, ruffling his hair. ‘That’s all. We’re playing catch later, remember? Why don’t you go and get some practice.’
He pouted. ‘I can’t on my own.’
‘Throw it up against the wall. Just mind the windows, that’s all.’
‘You won’t be long?’
‘I promise. Now off you go, go on.’
The boy grudgingly outside, Cordon pulled out one of the chairs from the table and sat down. ‘So, what’s the brilliant idea?’
‘No need to be bloody sarky.’
‘I’m sorry. Go on.’
‘Taras?’
‘Who?’
‘Taras. Anton’s brother.’
‘The one with the hotel …’
‘In the Lakes, exactly.’
‘What about him?’
‘Well, for one thing he liked me …’
Cordon raised an eyebrow.
‘Liked me, not fancied me. Well, maybe … but we always got along, that’s the thing. He liked Danny, too. And he was reasonable. Not like Anton. You could talk to him and he’d listen.’
‘And you think that’s what we should do? Talk to him?’
‘What someone should do, yes. Get him to talk to Anton, make him listen to reason.’
‘You think that’s possible?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s got to be, hasn’t it? For Danny’s sake as much as anyone’s.’
Cordon glanced towards the door. ‘You think he misses his father?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ve never heard him mention him. Not once.’
‘That doesn’t mean he’s not thinking about him.’
Cordon nodded, thought that was probably right. Children did, young children. Seemed to need to. Until they grew up, grew away …
‘Besides, Danny or no Danny, we can’t just stay here for ever. It’s not real. We’ve got to go back to England sooner or later and when we do I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder all the time in case Anton’s crazy twin brothers are going to be there, waving guns in our faces.’
Cordon angled his chair round away from the table and looked at her carefully. ‘What do you want? Longer term, I mean.’
Letitia took a breath. ‘I just want to go back and be getting on with my life. Our lives. Danny and me. I don’t know where. Not yet. But one thing’s certain, Anton, no way am I going back to live with him, that’s over. And he’s got to accept it. If he wants to see Danny on some kind of regular basis, that’s fine. If he wants to take him places, weekends, holidays, that’s fine, too. But Danny’s living with me.’
As if on cue, her son’s voice came from the garden, ‘Mum!’
‘A normal life,’ Letitia said. ‘Is that too much to ask?’
Cordon shook his head. It shouldn’t be, but maybe, in this instance, it was. And for Letitia, what was normal anyway?
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Your friend Kiley,’ she said, ‘you think he’d do that? Talk to Taras? Some kind of go-between?’
‘I don’t know. We’ve asked a lot of him already.’
‘But he might.’
Cordon nodded. ‘He might.’
Letitia’s face broke into a rare smile, a grin almost, carried away on her own idea. ‘Good-looking, is he? Fit?’ She winked. ‘I’d make it worth his while.’
‘Mum!’
‘Coming!’
She reached out towards Cordon’s shoulder as she passed, her fingers brushing the bare skin of his neck; just a touch, but it sent a shock through him as if he’d been grazed by electric wire.
34
Not so long ago, it would have been a smoke-filled room. Silk Cut, Benson’s King Size, the occasional small cigar. The air acrid and blue. Not a black face, not a woman in sight. Now it was pristine, anonymous, the lingering scent of air freshener and cheap polish. The faint hum of central heating. A table, centrally placed, and seven chairs, three occupied. Burcher stood by the window, looking out through the double glazing.
They were on the eleventh floor, a view south and west across London, far beyond the Imperial War Museum and the Elephant, out towards the old Battersea Power Station and the television mast at Crystal Palace, topping out at over two hundred metres.
Karen they kept waiting outside, a small room across the corridor, coffee, bland and undrinkable, in a plastic cup. A week-old copy of the
‘Want me to come and hold your hand?’ Ramsden had asked.
‘As if.’
