I didn’t try to hide my surprise at his words. Not at what he’d said, but the fact that he’d said them at all.
I didn’t give him an answer, partly because I didn’t have one to give. Logic agreed with the Superintendent, but emotion told me something different altogether.
As he reached the path, he paused and turned back to me, his last question halting me just before I’d got the door safely closed behind him. “Oh, by the way, what happened to your hands?”
I glanced down at them on reflex. They were still looking pretty scabbed up where I’d hit the road bailing out of the Grand Cherokee. “Friday,” I improvised quickly. “He spotted a cat the other morning and pulled me right over. Doesn’t know his own strength, the daft dog.” My voice sounded nervous and babbling, even to me.
MacMillan nodded with a quizzical half smile which told me he didn’t believe a word of that, either, but found trying to decipher my reason for lying probably more illuminating than a straight answer. Turning on his heel without further comment, he strode up the drive towards his patiently waiting colleague.
I shut the door and leaned my back against it. If I was going to face MacMillan again without getting myself arrested, I was going to have to learn how to lie a lot more convincingly.
Either that, or I was going to have to find out some answers. And soon.
***
An hour later I was knocking on another front door, in another street not dissimilar to the one I’d just left. The same neglected brick and pebbledashed houses. The same scruffy fleet of broken-down cars, and overgrown, rubbish-strewn gardens. The scenery may have looked largely identical, but the atmosphere was something different all together.
Unlike Lavender Gardens, there were no black or Asian faces on the Copthorne estate. Maybe there had been, once, but there are only so many petrol bombs through your letterbox you can smother before you take the hint and get out.
I may not have been Asian, but I stood out like a sore thumb on Copthorne nevertheless. It had only taken minutes before my presence on the estate was registered.
A group of grubby-looking kids playing football in the middle of the road spotted me first. They’d been using a handily parked Astra van as a goal, but by the looks of the dents in the side of it, their keeper wasn’t up to much. As I walked by the whole group of them abandoned their game and froze, like a bunch of meerkats.
As I moved deeper into the estate there was always someone conveniently loitering to keep an apparently casual eye on my movements. If I hadn’t been expecting it, it might have seemed natural, but I knew that the bush telegraph system on Copthorne made any high-grade military communications network look like a couple of tin cans joined with string.
The residents of Lavender Gardens, if they were serious about setting up their own Neighbourhood React, could have learned a lot from the smooth co-ordination evident on Copthorne, but they would have practically needed an armoured personnel carrier to observe it first hand.
The only thing was, the Copthorne inhabitants weren’t keeping such a close eye on me because they thought I was a potential burglar, car thief, or vandal. They were more worried that I might be from Social Services, or the police.
I made sure that I didn’t appear to be taking too much interest in the houses. I just kept my head down and kept walking like I knew exactly where I was going, that I had every right to be there.
I breathed a little easier when I finally opened the rotting gate and walked along the short lichen-covered concrete path leading to the mid-terrace house that a scan of the local phone book told me was where Sean’s mother lived.
I’d no idea when I moved to Lancaster that’s where Sean was originally from. In the time he and I had been together, he’d never told me much about his family. I’d certainly never been taken home to meet them.
We’d been to see mine, though. Spent a weekend at my parents’ place in Cheshire. The contrast between their ivy-clad Georgian house, with its circular gravel drive and immaculate formal garden was sharp with the run- down property in front of me. Still, it made me wonder what he’d really thought of me, that he hadn’t wanted me to see it.
Not that the weekend with my parents had been anything of a success. My mother hadn’t known what to make of the self-contained, quiet soldier I’d presented her with. As for my father, well maybe they were too alike to have ever really got on.
He’d accurately read Sean’s background, and made sure the younger man was subtly aware of the gulf between us. Even so, did Sean really think I would have looked down my nose at his own family home?
Now, there was a long enough pause before anyone answered the front door for me to begin planning an organised retreat. Then the curtain was pulled to one side in the front bay window, and a couple of small heads peered at me over the sill.
I smiled and waved, and the heads bobbed out of sight. It still didn’t mean there was an adult in. There were more latchkey toddlers on Copthorne than you could shake a shoplifted box of rusks at.
Then, to my relief, there came the sound of bolts being drawn on the other side of the door. I struggled to martial my thoughts and realised, too late, that I’d no clear idea what I was going to say to Mrs Meyer.
I needn’t have worried.
When the faded front door was pulled open, it was Madeleine who stood on the other side. The tall, dark- haired girl was wearing jeans and a pale green shirt, and looked like she’d just been modelling them for
“Hi,” she said. “You must be Charlie. Sean said you might call round. He’s not here at the moment, but do come on in.”
Thirteen
Madeleine stepped to one side and ushered me, unresisting, into the hallway.
It was small and cluttered, with a row of china ornaments on a shelf over the radiator, and a jumble of dirty child-size trainers piled in a heap on the floor. As Madeleine shut the door behind me two kids holding plastic water pistols came galloping down the stairs and disappeared through a side door, carrying on a running battle as they went.
Madeleine ignored them, leading me through into a tiny living room. It was made all the smaller by the presence of a huge three-piece suite with heavy wooden feet. There were three more kids arranged around the TV set, which had a games console plugged into it. The animated picture was frozen just at the moment some scaly double-headed monster with chainsaws for arms was having its head exploded in a dungeon.
It made me remember the Superintendent’s words about the meaning of life and death to kids today. I began to think he might not be so far off the mark with his theory. If only I could be sure that Sean wasn’t involved.
As soon as Madeleine reappeared, the kids started clamouring for her to continue their game. She favoured them with an indulgent smile. “Do you mind?” she said to me. “Only we’re right up at Level Five. They’ll never forgive me if I back out now.”
I shook my head, still a little bewildered by my reception, and she dropped onto her stomach on the floor with the kids. Almost straight away, her thumbs were stabbing agilely at the buttons on one of the hand controllers. Four pairs of eyes were suddenly transfixed on the screen.
I stood for a moment or two, unsure what to do other than wait, when the living room door swung open again and a small wiry woman with untidy grey hair dashed in.
“Ah, I thought I heard the front door,” she said, “but I was just rolling out some pastry. Excuse me not shaking hands, won’t you, dear.” She held up hands that were floured to the elbows. “Now, would you like a nice cup of tea?”
“Thank you,” I said faintly. Madeleine gave me a quick grin over her shoulder and I followed the older woman as she bustled out to the kitchen.
That room, like the rest of the house I’d seen so far, was cluttered, but spotlessly clean. I leaned against a cupboard and watched as Mrs Meyer shot water into the kettle, clicked it on, plucked the teapot from its stand, and brought down two mugs from hooks on the wall. It took me a few moments to realise that there wasn’t any particular reason for her to be hurrying.
