That Summer He Died (6 page)

‘Mr McCullock?’ James prompted.

The lawyer turned back to him. He removed his glasses and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. His hand stayed there, hovering over his mouth as he spoke.

‘He committed suicide. . . I’m sorry to be so abrupt. People normally know things like this before they come to see me about an estate. I’m terribly sorry.’

James breathed in deeply. It was what he’d dreaded hearing from the moment he’d read the letter. But it was obvious really. How else would Uncle Alan have bidden the world goodbye?

‘When?’

McCullock named a date. It was a few weeks before Dan had been killed. ‘What happened? How did he do it?’

McCullock replaced his glasses and shuffled through the papers on his desk. ‘I have the Coroner’s report. I can email you a copy, if you want?’

‘No, just tell me.’

McCullock selected a clutch of stapled papers. He read as if he were presenting the news on television, as if the words weren’t his and he had no responsibility for the information they conveyed: ‘He shot himself. With a twelve-bore shotgun.’ He met James’s eyes. ‘Death would have been instantaneous.’

‘How long was he there?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘How long was it after he shot himself before he was found?’ McCullock licked his forefinger and leafed over a couple of pages. His eyes continued to traverse the print as he spoke, then his cheeks reddened. ‘The estimated time before discovery is two weeks.’

This came as no surprise either. Alan had followed the script he’d written for himself even after he’d died. Kept himself to himself. Had even denied the world the final intimacy of witnessing his death.

‘Who discovered him?’

McCullock continued to examine the document. ‘Two young boys from Grancombe. It appears that they thought the farm was deserted.’ He glanced up for a moment. ‘As I said, the property is in an extremely dilapidated condition.’ He continued to read. ‘They broke into one of the barns adjacent to the main property. They saw him there, sitting in an old armchair, and started to run, thinking that he’d accuse them of trespassing. It was dark in there. But when he didn’t shout out or chase after them, they went up to him and had a closer look. Neither of them had a phone, but they called the police from the museum further down the lane.’

‘What museum?’

McCullock consulted the paper again. ‘The Jack Dawes Museum.’ He looked up. ‘The artist, I believe.’

‘There’s a museum named after him?’

McCullock checked the paper again. ‘It would appear so.’

‘What about the kids?’

‘I’m not sure I follow?’ the lawyer said.

‘The boys who found him. Are they all right?’

‘Well, yes, I think so.’ He read over the remains of the document. ‘There’s no further mention of them.’ He rubbed at his nose again. ‘There’s no question of them having been responsible for the death, if that’s what you’re thinking. The report makes it quite clear that—’

‘No, that wasn’t what I meant.’ But what had he meant?

McCullock stared.

‘It’s just,’ James said, ‘having to see something like that. . . I wanted to know they were OK.’

McCullock checked the report again, before concluding, ‘I’m afraid I can’t be much help on that, Mr Sawday. I could give you the telephone number of the police officer who dealt with the matter.’

‘No,’ James said, ‘that won’t be necessary.’

Standing on the landing outside the office, waiting for the lift to arrive, he shook McCullock’s hand and said, ‘Thanks for all this.’

The other man nodded. ‘I’ll let you know, then – when all the paperwork’s sorted out. I’ll need you back for some signatures.’

‘Fine.’

‘Have you decided what you’re going to do with the property? It shouldn’t take long to get ownership transferred to you.’

‘No.’

‘No, of course not. All in good time, eh?’

‘Yes, all in good time.’

The lift door opened. James stepped inside.

Outside the building, he breathed in the cold air and watched it leave his mouth in clouds and drift towards the sky. McCullock had a point. What was he going to do with Alan’s house?

The options were limited. He wasn’t going to live there. And he didn’t want to keep it on as a holiday home. He’d rather go sightseeing in Afghanistan. So that left two choices: either flog it or rent it out. From the description he’d been given it seemed neither option was going to be simple to carry out.

The house was a dump. The outbuildings, too. Even the kids who’d found Alan had concluded that. Hardly the ideal pad for a tourist family to rent for a break, then. That left flogging it. James couldn’t exactly see an estate agent begging for the opportunity, but at the same time he couldn’t see them turning it down either. It would be a hassle, but they’d shift it in time. The right upwardly mobile family or opportunistic builder would come along and see its potential, just as Alan and Monique had done all those years before. And James wasn’t in a rush. He hadn’t given a damn about either it or Alan when he’d woken up this morning, so why should he let it bother him now?

Hadn’t given a damn about Alan. . .

That would be nice. To get rid of his memory, just like the house. Hand both over to some wide-boy estate agent and tell him to sort it out. Then things could go back to how they’d been yesterday. That would be nice, all right, to disassociate himself from what had happened, rarely think about Alan at all. But ‘nice’ didn’t work that way. ‘Nice’ was what you got when you’d fulfilled your responsibilities to someone. It was what you got in bucket-loads when you knew you’d done your bit and weren’t to blame.

But James
was
to blame. Same as with Dan. OK, so he hadn’t squeezed the trigger on Alan, hadn’t wielded the axe on Daniel Thompson, but he could have prevented those things from happening, couldn’t he? Couldn’t he?

James tried to picture Alan in his final moments, peering through the gloom of the barn. No James there. No one. Just Alan and the gun. Just him and the cold metal solution. No one there to tell him that things didn’t have to end this way, that things never had to end this way. Then he tried to picture Dan, on top of that cliff, a psycho pounding after him, hounding him down and splashing his blood up into the winds.

James could have changed that, too. He could have altered history in a million ways, said something to Dan back then when he’d been eighteen that might have sent him on a different path, kept him clear of the one running along that clifftop less than two weeks ago. If he’d stayed in touch, maybe Dan would have chosen that weekend to leave Grancombe for a stopover in LA. If they’d become firm friends after James’s summer in Grancombe, maybe Dan might have seen that there were other horizons to explore than the one seen from the beaches there, and left them behind and moved to London.

Maybe. There were maybe millions of ways James could have made a difference. But he’d ignored them all. He’d taken the easy route, done the coward’s shuffle, shifted into reverse and backed off, kept on shuffling till Alan and Dan had disappeared from sight.

He’d done it because things had been easier that way. Easier for him. Only easy – he started the walk down Piccadilly towards Soho – wasn’t always as easy as it sounded. Sometimes easy turned difficult. Sometimes easy turned out to be the hardest thing in the world.

*

Norm wasn’t in when James got to the office, just after four. Still out at lunch, according to Marcus. Still on the piss, in other words. James fixed himself a coffee out of habit more than the need for stimulation (he’d had more than enough of that already today), then sat at his desk and checked his email, sorting out the junk and the jokes from the messages from various contacts and sources.

Tomorrow. He’d deal with them all then. Complications and leads were the last thing he needed right now. He flipped open his laptop and booted it up, accessed the Headley file, read through what he’d done and checked it against his notes. Then, keen to fill in the time between now and Norm’s return in any way other than by thinking about Alan and Dan, he started to type:

When he committed suicide, Peter Ian Johnson Headley was a short, thin man who had recently been diagnosed as suffering from AIDS. Standing five foot seven and weighing just under nine stone, he appeared, if not athletic, then at least healthy. He wouldn’t have looked out of place jogging slow and methodical circuits in a local park.

Photographs from his high-school year book show that his facial characteristics had altered little in the twenty-three years since he’d graduated. His thin, blond hair remained long, with a fringe falling down to his eyebrows, drawing the casual observer into the trap of his eyes. They were, as his mother described them, ‘Blue. Incredibly blue. Like looking into the sea on a sunny day. The kind of blue that made you want to smile.’

In his late-teens and early-twenties, there were no external signs of the path his life would later take. His high-school friends described him as popular, his teachers as intelligent. During these years, his homosexuality was invisible to those around him. He had a string of heterosexual relationships at both high school and college.

Pattie Estrada, who dated him for six months in college, finds it impossible to relate reports of the man which she read in the newspapers following his suicide to the seventeen-year-old boy she knew. ‘He was fun,’ she said. ‘Rebellious, but not stupid. . . rebellious. Not like most other kids his age, just doing it for the kicks. He thought about things too much for that. He wanted to go places most other people would never go, do things most other people would never do. He loved talking about foreign countries and crazy things that other people had done. The way he saw it, you only landed on earth once and you had to get out of it what you could. You had to live, you know? I mean, really live. Try everything. You know, before you died?’

Kids, James thought. Always categorising danger signs as cool. Never bothering to think about what direction they’re really pointing in. But maybe that’s the beauty of being young and naive. Not knowing what danger is. Not knowing when to be afraid. And maybe that was what growing up was about: the knowing. The sense you developed for danger. The ability to chicken out of something and not feel you’d missed out. The knowledge that being cool could get you burnt.

‘Oi, Marple. Get your arse in here.’

James looked over his shoulder to see Norm leering at him, propped up against the doorframe, electric cigarette hanging from his lower lip.

‘I’m in the middle of something,’ James called back.

‘So put it on the backburner.’ Norm withdrew the cigarette from his mouth and grinned, beckoning James with his hand. ‘Come on, we need to talk.’

James noticed that the iPad link with the story about Dan was still on, glowing right there on Norm’s desk. He ignored it, sat down on the sofa so he didn’t have to look.

‘So where were you this morning?’ Norm said. ‘Oversleep?’

James couldn’t be bothered with this. Norm always got officious after a few lunchtime beers, started acting like he ran the place, rather than just getting on and doing it.

‘No, my uncle died while I was away. Killed himself. Had to go and see a solicitor, clear some stuff up.’

This information had the desired effect. ‘Fuck,’ Norm said. He peered at James. ‘You OK and all that?’

‘I’m fine.’ He felt the need to justify the statement. ‘We weren’t close. I hadn’t seen him for years.’

Norm exhaled, relieved by the lack of awkwardness. ‘Best way with relatives, I think. Keep the tossers at bay.’

‘Yes.’

‘Suicide, though,’ he said. ‘That’s a tough one.’ His expression altered as a thought hit him. ‘You mind me asking how—’

‘How he did it?’ James said. ‘Yeah, I do.’

‘Only Tim Lee and Mark Lane are doing a piece on weird ways to go and—’

‘You know what, Norm? You can be a real sick bastard sometimes.’

Norm shrugged. ‘Sorry, mate. Just doing my job, you know.’

‘Let’s change the subject.’

‘OK. . . then how about we get back to what we were talking about yesterday? The Grancombe thing. The axe killer job.’

‘I’ve been kind of busy.’

‘OK, so d’you wanna think about it now?’

‘Nope.’

‘Well, I think maybe you should. It might keep your mind off what’s happened if nothing else, right?’

‘You’re a real Samaritan, Norm.’

He waved his hand dismissively. ‘Hey, just trying to help. . .’

‘. . .yourself.’

Norm smiled. ‘Whatever. So, what’s your answer? You gonna do it?’

James had thought about little else. On the walk over from McCullock’s office, and before that, too. Before he’d even met the lawyer, the possibility of Alan’s house becoming his responsibility had weighed on his mind as heavily as if every ounce of its bricks and mortar had been strapped to his back.

If Alan hadn’t died and it had been a matter of Norm trying to make him accept the feature then it would have been simple just to say no. Or if no hadn’t worked, then fuck off. Or if fuck off hadn’t worked either, then I quit. But the choice wasn’t so clear-cut any more. Other issues had swept into focus, leaving the original picture blurred.

James was going to have to return to Grancombe anyway to sort things out. An estate agent would need to be given the task of converting the property into cash. And then there were Alan’s belongings. Someone was going to have to go through them, throw stuff out, keep stuff back, wipe his uncle’s existence from the place, lay his ghost to rest. And the only someone who could do that was James.

And the way he was figuring it now was that, if he was going to have to return to Grancombe, then he might as well keep Norm sweet by doing the article while he was there too. Or at least doing enough to keep the editor off his back.

It didn’t need to be detailed. James knew enough about the place and its history already for him to keep his investigations down there to a minimum. He could stick pretty much to himself, didn’t need to risk getting sucked back into thae town. A word with the local rag’s editor should do it. Nothing more involved.

Only not right now, not ‘Get your arse down there Monday’, as Norm would no doubt suggest. There was the issue of the legal paperwork to be resolved before the house was in his name and the keys in his hand. If James was going back to Grancombe, it was only going to be once. Not for Norm and then for the house. Two birds, one stone. One shot. Clean and quick. Then back to London and the future, back to London to forget.