Robinson shifted from his right boot, to his left, and back again. As they’d climbed the hill Shaw had noticed the lameness in his right leg, the foot seemed to hang from the right ankle, as if broken. He was broad, an agricultural frame, heavy and powerful, so that it was easy to underestimate his height, which had to be six-one or two. When he walked the injured leg made his shoulders rock from side to side, like a human pendulum. His face was wind-tanned; his hair brown without a trace of grey, but it was the eyes which held a surprise — a shade of grey that suggested silver, unnaturally light.
‘And you were down there?’ asked Shaw.
They both glanced at the Robinson’s back garden a hundred foot below them. Up by the kitchen door, beyond the chicken run, they could see Ruth, sat at a picnic table with Tilly. They had their arms around each other and in front of them a candle flickered in a glass cylinder, growing brighter as the day died around them.
‘Yeah. And he was up here. That’s what was odd. I just watched, thinking he’d move on.’
‘Do you think he saw you?’
‘Doubt it. Like I said, I was down by the back door. Ruth brings a paper home if she’s up at the lido in the morning and it was stifling indoors, so I got the kitchen chair out, but right on the hardstanding, in the shadows.’
‘Definitely a man?’ repeated Shaw.
‘Sure,’ said Robinson, but he didn’t sound it.
‘Fair?’
Those oddly colourless eyes focused on the mid-distance. ‘Like I said, maybe.’
The heat of the day was flooding out into the sky but there was no wind here, in the lee of the hill. Shaw didn’t like the sound of the ‘maybe’ — suddenly they were going backwards, losing the memory.
‘Did Ruth see him?’
‘Yeah. I told her, and she glanced up the hill. But she was busy in the kitchen so she saw less than I did.’
Shaw changed tack. ‘And then he took a path?’
Robinson nodded, but seemed reluctant to enter the woods. He looked down at his wife, comforting his niece. ‘They’ve always been good together,’ he said. As they watched, Ruth Robinson lit a second candle lantern, embracing Tilly. She drew a cork from a bottle and they heard the pop a second later.
‘Where’s Joe?’ asked Shaw, not to get an answer, but to make the point that he wasn’t there, below, with his daughter.
‘Asleep on our couch. We’ll wake him later, for food. He needs to eat. He doesn’t want to go home.’
Shaw wondered what Aidan Robinson had done with his memory of the summer of 1994. The time he’d spent with Marianne Osbourne as her secret lover. Perhaps he’d locked that image away, so that he could get on with the rest of his life. How else could he have lived here — a single course of bricks between his own bed and Marianne’s? How had he lived with that memory, lying next to her sister Ruth?
Robinson didn’t say another word until he’d led Shaw deep into the woods, perhaps a quarter of a mile, up towards the crest of the hill. He hadn’t asked to go this far and so Shaw wondered if Robinson was buying time. Despite the gathering dusk Shaw didn’t rush, negotiating the half-light as well as his single eye would allow. One of the unexpected repercussions of losing his eye had been the loss of light due to the ‘shadow’ cast by the nose on the one remaining eye — as if a screen hung to his right. And not just light. One eye left him with ten to fifteen per cent less peripheral vision. So he took his time, one hand raised constantly to ward off any stray branches on his sighted side. Losing his good eye in another freak accident would be a disaster which would pretty clearly end his career. He’d had to sit a series of medical boards to stay on active duty, even now, after the first accident.
They made their way over the brow of the hill and then reached the tumbledown wall DC Twine had mentioned — the edge of the large estate which ran south from Creake. It was the kind of wall nobody could afford to build any more: four bricks deep, fired locally, with a stone coping. But it had not been repaired for years, and at regular intervals had been breached. Beyond it the trees opened out into a clearing, at the centre of which stood a tree without bark, blanched, but scarred down one side with a black charcoal seam. It was leafless, architectural; a fossil tree. Around the tree were a series of stumps.
‘You think he came here?’ asked Shaw.
Robinson sat on one of the stumps. Then he put his hands together and, using his left, pulled the index finger on the right, producing a crack of cartilage: a sickening noise, and a habit Shaw loathed. And with Robinson it conjured up an image: the same hands, pulling a neck straight on a chicken at the poultry farm.
‘Little choice.’ His voice was gentle, like most of his movements. Gentle giant was a cliche but, thought Shaw, that didn’t mean it couldn’t be true. ‘You’d end up here whatever — the paths all take you down to the old house.’ He rolled a cigarette with one hand and pointed north. ‘That way you’d be able to walk for about 300 yards, but then you’d hit the security fence at Docking Hill — the wind farm?’
Shaw nodded, unfolding an OS map, trying to orientate it to unseen compass points.
Robinson lit the cigarette he’d fashioned, squinting as it flared. He didn’t say anything more and was clearly unembarrassed by silence. Lifting his right leg he adjusted the angle of the damaged foot and then set it back on the ground. The silver-grey eyes seemed to help suck what light was left out of the air. ‘I don’t come up here — not anymore,’ he said, and there was a sudden note of bitterness in his voice. ‘Not for years. But you get poachers — we hear the guns at night. And kids from the village.’ Robinson pointed into the edge of the trees where a rope swing hung.
Shaw looked around, thinking of his own childhood, played out in a block of flats in North London. ‘Great place to play.’
‘I came up here with dad and granddad. We always had guns — we’d take rabbit, a few pheasant, set traps. Even then there were outsiders — professional poachers. They’d come for the venison on Old Hall. These days you’d get fifty quid for a carcass — if you can drag 600lb out of the woods without being seen. They come over from the Midlands — a white van — bag a few and then go. High velocity rifles — night sights. Old days it was all traps. That’s how I did this. .’ He jerked up his trouser leg to reveal the calf, lacerated by an old circular wound, triangular teeth scars cut deep into the muscle. Shaw winced at the thought of the trap shutting, the bone shattering, the energy in the springs enough to bring down a stag.
‘Here?’ Shaw asked, almost in a whisper.
‘Blicking — the big wood.’ Shaw knew the spot, acres of estate around a fine Jacobean house. ‘We went everywhere, me and dad that was — granddad was dead. Gun went off when the trap sprang — I nearly blew dad’s head off.’ He laughed, but his eyes didn’t join in.
‘When was that?’
‘November ’93.’ Shaw looked at Robinson; the grey eyes seemed colder, like ice on the river. So the accident had happened while Ruth was away at university for her first year, and before East Hills and the year of his affair with Marianne. Shaw thought that for him, and for Marianne, the year had been a fulcrum: one of those points in your life when the number of possible futures suddenly narrows, as if the path ahead has been chosen.
‘Look,’ said Shaw, deciding that there would be no better time to talk about the past. ‘This is painful — and it’s private. But I want to ask you about your relationship with Marianne, the year after the accident -1994.’
Robinson’s backwoods colour drained from his face. He half stood, but had to sit again, and Shaw guessed that his knees had given way because he almost fell back.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked, trying to sound aggressive, aggrieved, but the words came out in a whisper. And those penetrating eyes didn’t meet Shaw’s but scanned the edge of the woods, as if the primeval urge to escape threatened to overwhelm his self-control.
‘I understand this is something you don’t want to talk about,’ said Shaw. ‘And it’s certainly something the police don’t wish to make public unless it is absolutely necessary. But I do need to know about Marianne that summer: who she was with, who she was seeing. She saw you?’
The light in the clearing was failing fast, and Shaw knew that soon the moment would come when his good eye shifted to night vision, giving up the effort of seeing the world in colour, and switching to black and white. In the gloom he watched Robinson struggling with the consequences of telling the truth — or, possibly, with the benefits of a lie.
‘I think there were plenty of us,’ he said. Was that how he’d dealt with it over the years? That he was one of many? A random indiscretion, not a betrayal.
‘Ruth came down after the accident,’ he said. ‘I was up at the Queen Vic — they tried to reattach the
