He wouldn’t go if he didn’t think his patient was out of danger.
We reached the bottom of the stairs and Jacob put a hand on the newel post. “Anyway, I’ll go and get cleaned up and then we can talk,” he said, dredging up a false brightness. “I don’t suppose there’d be the likelihood of any grub going, would there? I’m half starved.”
“Of course,” I said. “We even have fresh mushrooms.”
He smiled at me again, pausing. “Thank you, Charlie,” he said quietly, heartfelt. “For being here for her. For us.”
With that he turned and trudged slowly up the staircase, his shoulders coming down a little more with each step, as though he’d made a superhuman effort to be upbeat in front of us and now he’d done his bit he could stop putting on the act.
I turned away, feeling his pain like my own.
“Be very careful here, Charlie,” Sean’s soft tone stopped me dead. I looked over and found him watching me intently, a certain coldness to his features. “Just remember – you can always tell him more later if you want to. But once it’s out in the open you can’t take it back . . .”
***
An hour later we sat at the scrubbed pine kitchen table, regarding the debris of a huge thrown-together breakfast. It’s amazing what you can do when you’ve access to a well-stocked freezer and a microwave with a fast defrost setting. And, of course, someone who can tell a mushroom from a toadstool.
Sean had taken care of the cooking with his usual undramatic competence, leaving me to sit and fill Jacob in on events so far. Bearing in mind Sean’s warning, it was an edited version I delivered.
He made shocked noises about the Transit van that had tried to run me down and had been responsible for my trashed Suzuki but for the moment I glossed over its true significance. I’d skipped over quite a few other elements, too, including MacMillan’s visit and all of what Tess had said at the wake about Clare’s possible entanglement with Jamie.
When Jacob raised an eyebrow that she should have been on the back of anyone’s bike, let alone a chancer like Slick, I’d just shrugged and repeated Clare’s story about the Ducati, without adding that Sean and I had already torn holes in it.
Jacob seemed surprised when I told him about Jamie’s arrival. But more by the fact he’d turned up at all, rather than by his unorthodox method of entry at some ungodly hour of the night. Jamie clearly wasn’t a regular visitor – at least, not when his father was around.
Jacob was even more taken aback when I told him about Isobel’s visit.
“She was in here turning the place over?” he queried, frowning. “Well I can’t imagine what she was hoping she’d find. Hell, I thought she took everything of value with her when she went.”
“We didn’t spot anything obviously missing,” Sean said, starting to clear away the dirty plates and taking the opportunity to pass me a meaningful flicker as he did so. “But you might want to have a check round yourself, just to make sure.”
Jacob nodded, distracted. “Mm, I’ll do that later,” he said wearily. “Nothing like asking for a divorce to bring them out of the woodwork, is there?” he murmured, almost to himself.
He rescued a piece of crispy bacon rind off the plate Sean was collecting and dropped it towards the floor. I don’t think it ever hit the tiles. There was some undignified scuffling under the table and a low growl before Beezer emerged the victor.
“Until she told me, I thought you two were already divorced,” I commented.
Jacob shook his head, eyes fixed on the terrier. “Never had the need for it,” he said, sounding gruff. “But I thought Clare might—” He broke off, glanced up and smiled suddenly. “I thought it was time I made an honest woman of her.”
“You don’t know anything about the guy Isobel was with – Eamonn – do you?” I asked, remembering his venom and his speed. My knee still ached this morning and the skin on the outside had turned the colour of summer storm clouds. “Seemed a bit of a nasty piece of work.”
“New one on me,” he said. “But then, I never did keep track of her dalliances – before or after we separated.”
Sean finished filling the dishwasher and came and sat down, leaning his forearms on the table and linking his fingers together. When they weren’t actually engaged in activity he’d always had the quietest hands.
“What do you know about a mob called the Devil’s Bridge Club?” he asked Jacob.
Jacob reached for his mug, took a sip. “Not much,” he said but there was something uneasy tugging at the back of his voice. He must have heard it, too, and he rushed to elaborate. “I know of them, of course. Can’t go to Devil’s Bridge of a Sunday and not be aware of that bunch of idiots. Why?”
It was quite something, I thought, for a rider as fast and as fearless as Jacob to refer to them that way.
“So you don’t know about Jamie being part of some jaunt to Ireland they’ve got planned?” Sean asked. He’d kept his voice absolutely level, but there was still a challenge there, even so, that wasn’t lost on Jacob.
“Is he?” he said, his expression hardening fractionally. “Well, I’d have hoped he’d have more sense, but the lad’s old enough to make his own mistakes.”
“But you’re not a member yourself?”
“Of course not,” Jacob said, more confidently now, with maybe a touch of defiance. “Why would you think so?”
“Just something we heard,” Sean said with a shrug, and suddenly I wished he hadn’t included me in that statement.
As it was Jacob sat back in his chair and looked sharply from one of us to the other. “I think,” he said grimly, “you’d better tell me what else it is you’ve heard.”
