Architect? Landscaper? Jack supposed that El ie must have recently been reading magazines again, something he knew she liked to do.
The old bugger was sitting up in bed, making a show of it, holding a mug of hospital tea. He’d looked at Jack, eyes stil bright as pins, and Jack had known he was looking right through him to his father. Then he’d raised the mug of tea to his lips and grimaced.
“It’s not like El ie’s, boy,” he said. And winked.
Holding a mug of El ie’s tea now, and sitting up in bed, Jack got the odd impression that, had El ie been another woman, a rich man’s wife, she might even have been interested in buying Jebb Farmhouse and carrying out the renovations herself. She might have found the prospect exciting and absorbing.
“But keep Barton Field,” she said, “to go with the house.
It never was much of a farming field anyway, was it? A big back garden, a big back lawn. Throw it in with the house and you could make a bomb.”
She put down her own mug of tea, ran the smooth of her nails down his arm and sidled up.
“Just as long as we don’t breathe a word about that hole.” 29
JACK DROVE OUT of Marleston vil age. Who was the runaway now? There they al were, housed together again, under the same roof of churchyard turf, and, once the thing was done, he couldn’t wait to turn his back on them. He’d borne Tom’s coffin and he couldn’t bear any more. It was hardly proper, hardly decent. But who was going to stop him? No one had stopped him yesterday, and it was al suddenly again like yesterday. (Only the voice of his own mother, impossibly cal ing to him—“Jack, don’t go”—could have stopped him.)
BUT HE WASN’T QUITE the total fugitive. He’d taken the east-bound road, in the direction of Polstowe, and had known he couldn’t drive straight past. It was a sort of test. At a familiar gap in the hedge on the right-hand side of the road, about a mile from the vil age, he pul ed across and stopped.
Or it was familiar only in essence. The double line of hedges, meeting the roadside hedge and marking the ascending path of the track, was stil as it had been, but the old five-bar gate was gone, along with the old, hedge-shrouded gate posts. So too was the concrete churn platform, and the wooden mail box on the latch side of the gate with the carved, weathered sign above. Instead, there was a large white thick-railed gate with a built-in mail box and the words “JEBB FARMHOUSE” in bold black letters in the middle of the top rail.
Wel , you couldn’t miss it.
Even more noticeable was that where there’d once been just the grassy, often muddy, roadside recess, with nettles and brambles sprouting round the churn platform—al deliberately left untrimmed (so no fool would go and park there, Michael used to say)—there was now a clean tarmac surface. On each side of the gate there was even a neat quarter-circle of low brick kerb. And, beyond the gate, it was obvious that the whole track, disappearing down the hil side, had been surfaced too. Jack could only guess what that must have cost.
But this was hardly his principal thought. He got out and stood by the gate. He left the engine running and the door open and wasn’t sure if this was because he intended opening the gate and driving through or because he might, in a matter of seconds, wish to drive off again in a hurry.
The gate had no padlock. It wasn’t that sort of gate. Its boxed-in latch mechanism suggested some sophisticated, perhaps remotely control ed locking system, and set into the right-hand gate post—as thick and pil ar-like as gate posts come—was a complicated metal panel that was either an entry-phone unit or key-code device, or both.
So, the damn thing could be unlocked, he thought, even opened and closed perhaps, from the house. The Robinsons, he remembered, had wanted to know quite a lot about “security.” There hadn’t been much he could tel them.
He stood by the gate, slightly afraid to touch it. Though the air al around was bril iant and stil , a faint, extra-cold breeze seemed to siphon its way up the shaded trackway between the hedges. There was the sound of rooks below.
They would be in Brinkley Wood.
The Robinsons, he supposed, weren’t around. This was their summer place. It was November. Or their weekend place, and it was a Friday morning. In any case, he imagined they wouldn’t be here, not now. Definitely not now.
They would have read their newspapers, put two and two together and—if they’d had any notion at al of driving down this weekend—would have chosen to avoid any awkward association with the property they’d bought. A funeral in the vil age. Not their affair.
They wouldn’t be here. They’d be safe in their other house, their main house, in Richmond (it had sounded to Jack like a place where rich people lived and had stuck in his mind).
So there was nothing, in theory, to stop him from opening the gate and driving down. Except the wired-up booby trap of the gate itself. Except, even if he got past that, a possible minefield of burglar alarms further down the track. But who would blame him, on this of al days, who would accuse him of unlawful intentions? Trespassing, intruding? On his own birthright?
And if the gate was beyond opening, there was stil the option—though he’d have to leave the car by the road like some glaring advert of his presence—of climbing over and walking down. Gates were there to be climbed over. And even if the Robinsons were, by some unlikely chance, actual y in occupation—so what? They’d get a surprise.
Would they cal the police? (The police would be Ireton.) I’m Jack Luxton. Remember me? I sold you this place. I was passing, and I thought I’d—. I’ve just buried my brother.
So there was nothing to stop him. He stood by the gate, putting his hands on it, gingerly at first. His hands just straddled the black name on the top rail. He felt again the wood of the coffin under his palms.
Tom would have climbed over the gate, Jack was sure of it, quickly dropping his backpack over first, like a thief. But on that dazzling morning, so like this one, he, the big obedient brother, had opened the gate for his
