They were crowded in the hallway~ pressed close together against hanging coats. The family's boots were scattered on the tiled floor. There were tennis rackets in the corner, a bright plastic beach bucket and spade, a chaos of stones from the shore. It was the same comforting clutter that Geoff Markham knew from his own parents' home.
Perry reached past them and pulled the door open. There was an old bolt on it and a new lock. Geoff Markham shuddered in Belfast the psychopaths had sledge hammered through doors to do their killing.
Fenton tried a last time.
'Is it that you're frightened of telling her?'
'Who? What?'
'Frightened of telling your wife what you did. Is that the problem?'
'They never told me what I'd done. Said it was better I didn't know.'
'She doesn't know about before?'
'She didn't need to know.'
'Lived with the secret, did you? Festering, is it?'
'Get out.'
'My advice, Mr. Perry, is to come clean with her, then fall into line.'
'Tell them, back where you came from, no.'
'So much better, Mr. Perry, if you'd had the guts to be honest with your wife. Isn't she just common- law?'
Fenton was on his way to the gate when his feet slipped on the wet brick of the path. He stumbled and cursed.
Geoff Markham was going after him when his sleeve was grabbed. The rain ran on Perry's face. He hissed, 'This is mine. It's all I have. I'm not running again. Tell them that. This is my home, where I live with the woman I love. I am among friends true, good friends. I won't spend the rest of my life hiding, a rat in a hole. This is where I stand, with my woman and my friends… Do you know what it's like to be alone and running? They don't stay with you, the raincoats, did you know that? With you for a week, ten days, then gone. A contact telephone number for a month, then discontinued. You are so bloody alone. Tell them, whoever sent you, that I'm sorry if it's not convenient but I won't run again.'
Fenton was at the car, crouched behind it to protect himself from the rain. Markham reached it and opened the door for his superior.
He looked back. Perry's door was already shut.
Chapter Two.
Behind the cottage homes of brick and flint stone, where climber roses trailed and the honeysuckle was not yet in leaf, the ornamental trees in the gardens were shredded of colour and the sea was slate grey, with white flecks. Between the houses and through the trees, he saw it stretching away, limitless. A solitary cargo ship nudged along the horizon, maybe out of Felixstowe. The sea was like a great wall against which the village sheltered, a barrier that had no end to its width and to its depth.
'God, don't spare the horses.'
It was the reason he'd been fetched out for the day. Fenton wouldn't have wanted to drive or have to face the vagaries of train timetables and a waiting taxi. Geoff Markham's function was to drive, not to play a part in what should have been a reassuring and businesslike making of arrangements for the removal van's arrival. He had the wipers going but the back window was a disaster, as if a filled bucket had been tipped on it. He reversed cautiously, couldn't see a damn thing in his mirror, then swung the wheel hard. The car surged forward. Fenton was writhing out of his dripping coat and nudged Markham's arm so that he swerved. He veered towards a woman in a plastic cape pushing her bicycle. Before he'd straightened up, the tyres sluiced the puddle over her legs. There was a shout of abuse. Fenton grinned.
'First sign of life we've seen…'
Markham should have stopped to apologize but kept going: he wanted away from the place. He knew nothing of the sea and it held no particular attraction for him. He thought it chill and threatening.
They went past a small shop with pottery and postcards in the window from which faces peered. They would have heard the woman's protest. There was a tearoom beside the shop, shuttered for the winter. They swept past the village hall, a low-set building with an old Morris outside. Then there was a pub with an empty car-park.
'Thank the Lord, the open road beckons. Could you live here, Geoff, in this dead end?'
They'd both seen it. The estate agents' for-sale sign was propped in an untrimmed hedge beside a crazily hanging gate with the faded name on it, Rose Cottage. Beyond was a small overgrown garden, then a darkened cottage with the curtains drawn, no lights showing. The rainwater cascaded from the blocked gutters, and tiles were missing from the roof. It would be 'three bedrooms, bathroom, two reception, kitchen, in need of modernization'. And it would also be, down here on the Suffolk coast, ninety thousand pounds before the builders went in. But all that was irrelevant to Markham. He was wondering how Perry was facing up the devastation they'd left behind them.
Sort of place, Geoff. where the major entertainment off-season would be screwing your sister or your daughter or your niece. Eh?'
Not since he had come back from Ireland and gone to work on the Mid East (Islamic) Desk, had he heard his superior utter anything as crude. He was shocked, wouldn't have believed Fenton capable of such vulgarity. The bitter little confrontation with Perry had rattled him.
They went up a long, straight road, first flanked by terraced houses, then, as he accelerated, by larger houses oozing prosperity, set back in gardens with tarpaulin-covered yachts in the driveways. The church was on their right. Geoff Markham was good on churches, liked to walk around them, and this one, through his side window, looked to be worth a quarter of an hour, a fine tower, solid as a fortress, a wide nave, safe as a refuge. Beyond it was a stark facade of flint ruins, the clerestory windows open to the concrete grey of the cloud. He turned his head to see the ruins better. There was a chuckle beside him.
About as dead as the rest of the wretched place.'
Fenton, he knew, lived in Beaconsfield, not on his own salary but on family money; couldn't have managed Beaconsfield, the restaurants, the delicatessens and the bijou clothes shops where his wife went on a desk head's wage. Money was seldom far from Geoff Markham's thoughts, nagging like a dripping tap. Vicky and his future were about money. He was driving faster.
It was strange, but he hadn't seemed to register the village when they came into it, less than an hour before. It had not seemed a part of the present and the future. The village was history, to be left behind once the removal van had arrived. But no removal van was coming, and the village its lay-out, entry and exit route, topography, community was as important as any of those isolated white-walled farmhouses in South Armagh, Fermanagh and East Tyrone.
Fenton was again massaging his moustache and showed no interest in what was around him. Through the trees was the shimmer of silver grey from stretching inland water. The road in front was straight and empty, he had no need to concentrate. Markham's mind was on the landscape, as it would have been if he had been driving in Ireland.
They reached the crossroads, and the main road for Ipswich, Colchester and London. He paused for traffic with the right of way, and the smile brightened on Fenton's face. He checked the distance they had come since leaving the house.
'About bloody time. You never said could you live there? Damn sure I couldn't.'
It wasn't for Markham to pick a pointless argument with his superior.
'I couldn't, but it's right for him.'
'Come again?'
'He chose well, Perry did.'
