He looked pathetically grateful to be invited in, but even so, as I finished securing the bike, I made sure I turned my back on him as little as I could get away with. He seemed to understand my circumspect behaviour, not following me too closely up the wooden staircase, and standing well to one side while I unlocked my front door.
In the flat, I switched on the lights, and noticed for the first time how pale he was, with the exception of his nose, which had bloomed in the sudden warmth. He made no move to take his coat off, and he was shivering.
“How long have you been waiting?”
“I don't know,” he said. “They let me go late this afternoon, and I went straight to see Ailsa. Then I came here. Four, five hours. Something like that.”
He hadn't, I deduced, spent long with his wife. “How has she taken all this?” I asked.
“Badly, as you'd expect. In fact, when I arrived she and the girls were busily throwing all my stuff onto a mammoth bonfire in the garden. My books mostly.” His voice was neutral, but he was struggling not to cry again.
I thought of all those poetry first editions, and my heart went out to him. Ailsa had a huge capacity for compassion, but I could also well believe that she had an equally elephantine memory when it came to being wronged. And Tris had wronged her, of that there was no doubt.
I made him coffee, sat him down on my sofa, and gradually, in fits and starts, he told me all about it.
“I was eight years old when my father died,” he began. “He was a wonderful man, but he had very set ideas about the role of women. He would never have approved of my mother having a job, but charity work was all right. So, she got herself involved with battered wives, and when he died she turned her whole life over to the cause. My life, too.”
He stuck his nose into his coffee, took a slurp, then went back to thawing his hands out round the mug. “I suppose I was spoilt as a child,” he went on. “I was the only one, the centre of attention, but after my father died the house was suddenly constantly full of children who all needed my mother's attention much more urgently than I did. I grew up on the sidelines, ignored.”
It sounded almost petulant when he said it, but I could still appreciate the sense of desolation he must have felt. There are more ways to abandon your children than to leave them wrapped in a blanket on someone else's doorstep.
“There's never any peace in the house,” he said. He stopped, sighed, and searched for a better way to explain. “You have a baby of your own, and for the first year or so you expect sleepless nights, and constant crying, but they grow out of it.” He looked at me, and I saw the pain in his face. “There have been babies crying in that house for nearly thirty years. I just wanted a little peace.”
Understanding arrived slowly, like a murky sunrise. “So you thought you'd frighten them away,” I said, taking a sip of my own coffee.
Tris ducked his head, and an ugly red stain crept up the side of his neck. “When Susie Hollins was – killed, we realised that both she and that other girl had been at the Lodge at one point or another. Some of the girls made the obvious connection, and they started to get nervous. Two of them left that night, you know.”
I nodded, but I remembered Nina's paralysing fear and had to bite down on my anger. “Didn't you know how much you'd terrify them, doing what you did?”
He shifted in his seat, awkward. “I suppose so, but it just seemed the easiest way. I knew Ailsa would never be persuaded to just close the place down. She'd see it as betraying the girls, throwing them out on the streets. But, if they left of their own accord, and the house was empty, then she might think differently.” He gave me another forlorn smile. “I never meant to hurt anyone.”
“But it was you we saw, running away that night Joy was murdered, wasn't it?” I said. I have a clear memory for shapes and faces. The way someone moves is as distinctive as a signature. The masked figure who had shoved Victoria aside that night had been the same we'd captured. I would have staked my life on it.
“I found her,” he admitted, swallowing back the tears again. “I was trying to help her when that girl saw me and started screaming. I-I panicked. I knew I couldn't explain what I was doing there, so I just ran. I'm so sorry.”
I didn't say anything to that. Joy's injuries had not been survivable, no matter how quickly we'd sent for the paramedics. I didn't think Tris's actions – or lack of them – had contributed to her death, but I couldn’t find it in me to offer words of consolation, even so.
“So it wasn’t you who rang to threaten me that night?” I asked.
He shook his head straight away. “No, of course not. I never meant anyone any harm, Charlie,” he said, trying not to plead. “You have to believe that.”
I asked him if he had anywhere to spend the night, but I confess I was relieved when he said that a friend out in Quernmore had offered use of a sofabed.
I called Tris a taxi. He wouldn’t stay inside until it arrived, saying he preferred to wait in the street. I let him out in silence, unable to condemn or condone.
At the top of the stairs he turned back, and his voice when he spoke held the plaintive note of the eight- year-old boy he’d once been. “They took away my home, Charlie,” he said. “I just wanted it back.”
After he’d gone, I sat for a long time on one of the flat slate window ledges, hugging my knees to my chin, and staring out through the darkened glass without seeing anything beyond my own reflection.
So, Tris wasn’t the cruel murderer I’d been so quick to believe he was. The relief was tangible, like a taste in the back of my throat. I was just disappointed in myself that I hadn’t wondered more, doubted more. It didn’t matter that the evidence against him had seemed so overwhelming.
I’d spent some time sitting there, in silent contemplation, before it registered with a creeping chill that this hadn’t solved any of my problems. Far from it.
If anything, it had made them worse.
***
The next morning I woke up instantly panicky, heart screaming into the red line like a two-stroke motor with its throttle jammed wide open. When I opened my eyes I found I was already tensed upright in bed, shivering from the chill of the cold air on my sweating skin.
For a moment I froze, uncertain whether I'd really heard the noise that roused me, or if it was part of some instantly forgotten dream. I scrambled out of bed on legs that weren't quite steady, pulling on a towelling robe, and padded through to the lounge.
There was an untidy sprawl of mail across the doormat. I thought I heard footsteps retreating down the stairs, and when I crossed quickly to the window I saw the postman emerge from the doorway below. The sudden surge of relief left me feeling limp.
I went to pick up the mail, but my hand stilled. For a moment I couldn't escape the memory of those tumbled letters in Terry's hallway. The way they'd spilled down over his corpse. They might even have been delivered by the same postman.
I took a deep breath and gathered the mail quickly, almost trying not to look at the mat for fear that I'd see an inert trainer-clad foot at the end of rumpled jeans. I didn't, of course, but what I did see turned out to be much more frightening.
A plain white envelope.
It had obviously been hand delivered, pushed furtively under the door rather than dropped through the letterbox, because one corner had slipped under the doormat itself. I'd already got it in my hand before it dawned on me what it might contain.
I carried the letter over to the coffee table very carefully, at arm's length, as if it might explode at any moment. Placing it down gently, I went and fetched a pair of the thin latex gloves I normally use for cleaning the bike.
I checked with my fingertips for lumps, bumps or wires, then opened the letter with great delicacy, as you would if you were handling some long-buried ancient parchment. If this was a begging letter from some local charity, or a note from my landlord, I was going to feel the biggest fool going.
Inside was a single sheet of A4 paper, good quality laid stuff, folded with origami precision. I eased it flat, trying not to touch more than the edges. In the centre were two brief lines of bold type.
YOU WANT TO PLAY?
