'We were both working over in Eastbourne, but after that he was offered some building work out at Battle. When he'd been doing it for a few weeks a new contract came up and he was offered a steady job as a charge hand. I quit the Metropole Hotel straight away, and we rented a flat in Sealand Place. You know, about half a mile from here. We decorated it, made it nice, and after we'd been living together for a while, we got married.
'I was pregnant within a few months, but 1 lost that one. The following year it happened again. Then we went three years without getting anywhere at all, until 1 fell for another baby and we lost that one as well. After that, the hospital told me 1 probably wasn't going to be able to have any more.
'That was when things started to go wrong. He went out drinking a lot more than he had, but he always came back and there was never anyone else. He always swore that was something 1 didn't need to worry about.
'One day, after we'd had one of our rows, he says to me, had 1 ever thought about going into the hotel business? You see it was this place, the White Dragon, that he used to come to with his mates when he wanted a few drinks. He'd got hold of the idea that your parents were going to sell the hotel and that he and 1 ought to buy it from them. We didn't have money like that, but jase said money was the least of the problems, because his brother Dave would come in with us. He talked big, and 1 believed him. We looked into it properly and went to the bank about it. They said no, and I think other people said no, because jase dropped that idea. Instead, he said he was going to ask your dad for a job. There was an idea behind this, that if he worked hard and your dad grew to trust him, then one day, when he did retire, he might make jase into a partner.
'Anyway, it came to nothing. jase went along to see your
dad one day, and he was out again almost quicker than he
1
1
it
went in. I don't know what was actually said, but what came down to was no again.
'This is where you come into it, Nick. He knew your parents hadn't liked you going out with me, and now he'd married me it was as if he had saved them from having to put up with me, a favour, like. Afterwards, when your dad turfed him out, jase kept going on about how you must have spoken up against him. He blamed himself too, but in small ways. Kept saying he was a fool for even thinking of trying, he should have known people like you would keep him out. Bitter he was, and he never forgave you.'
When he first began talking to her earlier that day Nick had assumed, without thinking, that Amy's misery was the same as many people's: the unfocused sense of loss when a friend dies.
No one had told him anything about the relationships between the people Grove had killed that day, because in a close community like Bulverton it was assumed that everyone would already know. Nick had never asked. AH he had was the list of names, the one everyone in Bulverton now had and probably knew by heart. The twentythree dead, of whom one was Jason Michael Hartland, aged thirtysix, of Sealand Place, Bulverton. Until Amy told him, as they walked down to the town after the funerals, he had not realized that jason Hartland was her husband, that her bereavement was sharper, closer than most people's, including his. He was devastated by the deaths of his parents, and also by the way in which they had died, but how much more horrible was what had happened to Amy?
Grief comes unpredictably, out of control. Nick found himself weeping beside Amy that night, thinking of what had happened to jase and all the others. Death brings innocence to the dead. Whatever jason Michael Hartland's failings in life had been loutish behaviour, drunkenness,
naivety, running away death wiped clean the slate and made the dead as children once again.
While Nick still lay close beside her, Amy continued with her story.
She said, 'Jase was the one the newspapers called 'the man on the roof '. He was helping a friend with some tiling, at the house next door to the Indian restaurant, out there by the church. When Grove came down the road jase had nowhere to hide. He tried to get behind the chimney stack but Grove shot him. His body was thrown backwards by the impact of the bullets, and he slid down the roof on the far side, out of sight. Only a child saw this happen.
He was in his parents' car, which had already been fired at and damaged by Grove. The little boy saw jase being killed, and afterwards tried to tell one of the policemen. He was so upset that all he could say was 'There was a man on the roof' a man on the roof.' Because jase had fallen back his body wasn't found until the next day.
'I had no idea where jase was at the time. We'd had another row, and it felt like it was the last one. He left me. I hadn't seen him for two or three weeks. He could have been anywhere there was work: Hastings, Eastbourne, one of the villages outside, somewhere along the coast. He often went to see one of his mates when he was angry with me.
'After the massacre, the police listed him officially as a missing person, and put his name on the list with the other people who couldn't be found. All of them were actually dead, but for a few hours 1 had the devil of hope in me. More than anything 1 wanted to see jase so 1 could tell him about the massacre. lt was such an immense event, so shattering, it affected the whole town, it was on TV and the radio, and 1 just needed jase with me so 1 could say sorry to him for the argument we'd had, and talk to him about what
had gone on in the town. 1 suppose it was a way of coping, or burying my head in the sand.
1 was awake all that night, round at Dad's place, and in the morning the police told me they'd found him.'
Nick's own story seemed painless and unaffecting compared with hers, but she wanted to know it. Eventually he told her, ashamed of his weaknesses. She dried her eyes, sat up, listened.
They talked on through that long night, holding and touching each other, finding out what had happened, what, in fact, had brought them together again. Sometimes they lay still and in silence, but they never slept. He began to feel, perhaps wrongly, that only by being with Amy would he recover something of what he had lost.
Amy moved in to live with him the following day, arriving back at the hotel after midday, carrying a suitcase of clothes. Then, in the days and weeks that followed, she brought over more of her belongings and furniture from her flat in Sealand Place, as gradually she became a permanent part of his life.
