'Suit yourself'
He tried to make himself comfortable, bashing the pillow and pulling up his side of the bedclothes, but Amy sat in rigid anger beside him. Her lovemaking had given no clue of the mood she had been working herself into. He turned to and fro, trying to settle, and all the while Amy sat beside him, her eyes glinting, her mouth in a thin rictus of irritation. He fell asleep in the end.
CHAPTER 8
The next morning Teresa took her rental car for a drive around the Sussex countryside, but the sky was shrouded in low clouds, which were dark and fastmoving, bringing in squalls of heavy rain from the sea and obscuring the views she had come out to look at. She gained only the barest impression of the trees and hills and pretty villages she passed through. She was still ill at ease with driving on the left and before lunchtime she had done enough exploring to satisfy her curiosity.
She ate lunch in the bar of the White Dragon: Amy Colwyn served her in what seemed to be unfriendly silence, but on request microwaved a quiche for her and produced some boiled rice. Teresa sat at one of the tables closest to the fire, forking the stodgy food into her mouth with one hand and writing a letter to Joanna, Andy's mother, with the other. Amy meanwhile sat on a stool behind the counter, flicking through the pages of a magazine and not taking any notice of her. Teresa inevitably wondered what she might have said or done, but was not too concerned. A little later, when more customers came in from outside, the oppressively silent atmosphere in the room lifted noticeably.
After lunch she drove along the coast to Eastbourne, and found the editorial offices of the Courier. She saw this as a preliminary trip, expecting that a trawl through the back issues of the paper would take two or three days, but to her surprise the newspaper stored its archives digitally. In a small but comfortably appointed room set aside for the purpose she accessed the archive from the terminal she found there, and in under half an hour had identified and downloaded everything she wanted about Grove, including brief court reports of his earlier minor offences as well as 'detailed accounts of the day of the massacre, and the aftermath. On her way out she paid for the floppy disk she had used, thanked the woman on the reception desk, and by midafternoon she was back in Bulverton. If she had known, or had thought to enquire, she could have used the internet and downloaded the same information from home. Or perhaps even from the hotel, if there was a modem she could use.
. She returned briefly to the hotel and put away the disk for future study. Consulting her town map she located Brampton Road. lt was one small street amongst many others like it, on the north-eastern edge of the town. She worked out the simplest route that would take her there, then found her tape recorder. She slipped in the new batteries she had bought that morning and briefly tested the recording level. All seemed well.
Brampton Road was part of an ugly postwar housing estate, whose best feature was that its position on one of the hills surrounding the town gave it an impressive distant view of the English Channel. The thick clouds of the morning were starting to disperse, and the sea was brilliantly illuminated by shafts of silver sunlight. Otherwise, the estate itself was a bleak and dispiriting place.
The terraced houses and three and fourstorey apartment blocks were built in a uniform palebrown brick, and had been positioned unimaginatively in parallel rows, reminding Teresa of the Air Force camps of her childhood. There were not many mature trees to soften the harsh outlines of the buildings, and gardens were few. Much of the ground appeared to be covered in concrete: paths, hardstandings,
driveways, alleys. AH the roads were lined by rows of vehicles parked with two wheels up on the kerbs. A short row of shops included a convenience store, a satelliteTV supplier, a betting shop, a video rental store and a pub. A main road ran along the crest of the hill, and through the line of trees up there she could glimpse the high sides of trucks moving quickly along.
There was a smell of traffic everywhere.
When she had found a place to park her car, and had climbed out to walk the rest of the way, Teresa felt the sharp edge of the cold wind. lt had not been too noticeable in the lower parts of the town; here the uneven dips in the rising land created natural funnels when the wind came in from the direction of the sea. From the angle at which some of the more exposed trees were growing, she presumed it must do so most of the time.
The house she was looking for was not difficult to find. In this most unappealing of neighbourhoods it presented an even harsher aspect than the others. lt was clearly unoccupied: all the windows in the front were broken, and the ones at street level had been boarded up, as had the door. Remains of an orange policeline tape still straggled on the concrete step and round the corner into the alley alongside. The grass in front of the house had not been trimmed for several weeks or months, and in spite of the winter season it was long and untidy.
lt was the end house of one of the long terraces. The number 24 on the visible part of the door confirmed that this was the house Gerry Grove had been living in during the weeks leading up to the massacre. Apart from its recent decrepitude it had obviously been neglected since its moment of notoriety there was little to distinguish the house from any of the others. Teresa found her compact camera in her shoulderbag, and took photographs from a couple of angles. Two women, trudging wearily up the hill and leaning low over the child strollers they were pushing, paid no attention to her.
She worked her way round to the rear, but here an old wooden fence, several feet high, blocked her access. A garden door had been sealed with a wooden hasp nailed across it. She peered through the loose slats of the fence, and could see an overgrown garden and more boardedup windows. If she had really wanted to she could have forced her way through the battered fence, but she wasn't sure of the rules. The police had once scaled this place; was it still protected by them from intruders? Why should anyone, other than the curious, like Teresa herself, want to look round this unexceptional house?
She stepped back and took some more photographs of the windows of the upper storey, wondering even as she did it why she was bothering. lt was just one more lousy house in a street full of identically lousy houses; she might as well take pictures of any of them.
Except, of course, for the fact that this was the actual one.
Feeling depressed about the whole thing, Teresa put her camera away and again consulted her map. Taunton Avenue was two streets away, parallel to Brampton Road and higher up the hill. She left the car where she had parked it and walked up.
The women pushing their children were still ahead of her. It was not a steep hill, but it was a long one. When she paused for breath and turned to look back, Teresa could see the road trailing down and away towards the main part of the town for at least a mile. She could imagine all too easily what it must be like to slog up and down this long hill with small children to push, or when laden with shopping bags.
When she reached Taunton Avenue the two women ahead of her continued slowly upwards, and Teresa felt a
