‘You don’t sound fine, Robin,’ Holly said, slipping into the use of his full name. In the past she’d deployed it as a sign of affection, because she knew exactly how much he hated it. Or had, once, before Holly had turned it into something good. ‘You sound … thin,’ she went on. ‘Like a ghost of yourself.’
Fleet would have dismissed the description as pointless poetry – another consequence of Holly’s love affair with language – if, as was her habit, she hadn’t summed up the way he was feeling so precisely.
‘Look, Holly, I’d better go.’
And somehow, with a sentence, Fleet ruined it. He managed it every time. He was like a clumsy oaf with five thumbs, trusted to look after a house of cards.
‘Right,’ said Holly, in a tone Fleet recognised all too well. ‘Of course you do. Take care of yourself, Rob.’
‘Holly, wait. Listen, I … Thanks. You know, for –’
But the line had already gone dead.
Calling, Fleet thought.
He stared at the screen of his mobile, which blackened and then showed him his shame. He tossed it on to the car seat next to him, then raised his head to stare through the windscreen. He lit that cigarette, exhaling the first cloud of smoke through the crack he’d left in the driver’s-side window.
That door was still out there waiting for him.
Don’t even think about it, came Holly’s voice.
And she was right. Always, about so many things, Holly was right. So if he knew it, why did he never listen?
He pulled the car keys from the ignition and unbuckled his seatbelt.
DI Robin Fleet
‘Hello, Mum.’
Fleet was unprepared for how old she looked. He’d warned himself, braced himself, and yet the face that confronted him when the door opened was as worn and weathered as the faded green paintwork. His mother’s hair, once blonde, was now grey, her posture buckled by the weight of years. And not only that, probably. There were some things, Fleet knew, that aged you quicker than the passing of time: politics, the superintendent had claimed, was one; grief, clearly, was another. If Fleet hadn’t known his mother was only sixty-one, he would have guessed her to be a decade and a half older.
But even as he tried to keep the shock from his expression, another thought struck him. The last time he’d seen his mother he’d been seventeen years old. He was now thirty-six. If she looked old to him, what must he look like to her? Flecks of grey had started appearing in his own hair of late, and he was a long way from the beanpole he’d been as a teenager. On the contrary, his middle-aged spread had kicked in early.
There was a pause, long enough for Fleet to wonder whether his mother recognised him at all.
Then, ‘I was wondering how long you were going to sit out there,’ she said.
That voice. It had been roughened by the years and the cigarettes, just like her skin, but underneath it was as familiar to Fleet as the voice inside his own head.
Fleet hadn’t cried since the day he’d left home. The urge to do so came upon him now, seizing him as violently as a sudden cramp.
What was he doing here? Why the hell hadn’t he taken Holly’s advice?
‘I suppose you’re deciding whether to come in,’ said his mum. ‘Me, I’m deciding whether to let you.’
Which cured Fleet of the urge to cry, at least.
‘I suppose one of us needs to make a decision,’ he said. ‘Otherwise we could be standing here for another nineteen years.’
His mother looked beyond him at the weather. Somehow it seemed to make up her mind for her, though she didn’t appear best pleased with the decision.
She turned her back.
‘Wipe your feet,’ she said, retreating into the house. ‘And make sure you close the door properly. It –’
‘Sticks when it’s raining,’ finished Fleet. ‘I remember.’
There was a glitch in his mother’s movements, but she didn’t turn around. Fleet watched her as she veered into the sitting room, caught the slight stiffness she showed on every second step. A knee, perhaps? A hip? Another reminder of time’s false promise. It didn’t heal. Not always. Often it simply found new ways of inflicting hurt.
Fleet closed the door, shoving it in the end with his shoulder, and found himself alone in the hallway of his childhood home. For a moment nothing seemed real. How often he’d dreamed of this place. When he had nightmares, which was frequently, this house was invariably the setting. Which on the face of it made no sense. Fleet’s childhood here had been safe, secure, dull – right up until the day it hadn’t been. And at that point Fleet had been weeks away from moving out forever. The house, as a setting, had barely featured. Then again, after what had happened, everything about Fleet’s upbringing had become tainted. He didn’t believe in counselling, therapy, all that sitting around excavating old bones, but even he would have agreed that the house had become a symbol. On the one hand, it was a cradle. On the other, a coffin.
He found his mother standing by the fireplace, her back to the doorway and her fingers holding the crucifix that had always hung around her neck. When she looked at him it was via the reflection in the mirror on the chimney breast.
Fleet noticed the pictures on the mantel. They were all of him. Every one of them. As a newborn, as a toddler, as a boy, as a teenager. At the oldest he would have been about fifteen.
His mother saw him looking. ‘My son,’ she said, as though introducing the image to a stranger. She turned, and pulled back her shoulders.
They were all of him. Every one of the pictures was of him. There was not
