Fragile Lives Read online

  You forgot about a sister that’s wanted for murder, he thought, though Cheryl probably didn’t know about that. So far as George could tell, only Mac and his bosses and Rina knew. Karen had not been publicly named as a suspect for Mark Dowling’s murder and, though a lot of people had wondered why she’d gone away when George most needed her, most had been polite enough to accept his story that she’d been offered a good job and that she needed to take a break from being ‘Chief Responsible Person’ for a while.

  A light tap on the door made him jump. Probably Cheryl, he thought. Come to check up on him. Wearily, he climbed down from the window and opened the door. Not Cheryl but a girl he’d been introduced to at teatime. He tried to remember her name. Failed. She looked just a bit younger than him, but it was hard to tell. Blonde and skinny and small with a pinched little face and almost too large blue eyes.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I thought you might be feeling … you know. Look, I thought you might want to borrow this.’ She held out her hand and proffered what George recognized as an MP3 player and a tangle of headphone wires. It was a cheap, generic thing and bright, virulent green. ‘It’s my spare,’ she said. ‘My aunt sent it to me, that’s why it’s such a vile colour. She thought it was “funky”.’

  George could hear the inverted commas. He summoned a half-hearted smile.

  When he didn’t move, she reached around the door and set it down on the desk. George noted her familiarity with the layout of the room and wondered if it meant that all of them were the same.

  ‘It’s got a radio on it if you don’t like any of the tracks,’ she added. Then, as she turned to go: ‘I’m Ursula, by the way. I’ve been here for six weeks and five days.’

  ‘How many hours?’ George didn’t know what made him ask; just knew that she’d be counting.

  She grinned, a slightly lopsided effort, as though she’d lost the habit. ‘Seven hours and …’ She paused to look at her watch. ‘Thirty-nine minutes. My watch doesn’t have a second hand.’

  ‘Thanks,’ George finally managed as she walked away.

  The next house along the cliff top had a single light still burning in an upstairs window. The curtains were still open; the window faced the ocean and could not be overlooked so Simeon rarely bothered to close them. He knew, vaguely, that it was important that he didn’t get undressed where other people could watch and that was why his brother had given him this room. In here, no one could see anyway, so it didn’t matter that Simeon left the curtains undrawn. His brother knew that Simeon hated to cover the windows, he loathed not being able to see outside. Andrew, on the other hand, liked to shut out the dark and sit close to the fire. He said it felt cosy. They had reached a compromise. Simeon knew that Andrew liked compromise. Andrew’s rooms were on the other side of the house. A bedroom upstairs and a sitting room and study down. Andrew did as he pleased in his own space and Simeon didn’t go in there; the curtains might be closed and that might lead to the cold, heart-stopping sense of panic that Simeon hated so much. Besides, those were Andrew’s rooms and Andrew liked his own space. Simeon liked his own space too and Andrew never intruded there.

  Simeon’s rooms and the rooms the brothers shared never had their curtains drawn.

  Compromise. Andrew said that was what made the world work.

  Simeon was still sorting through the newspaper clippings his brother had brought home, collected over the week and presented to Simeon at Sunday teatime. A weekly ritual.

  Andrew might tell him that it was compromise that was the most important thing but Simeon knew better. It was order. Routine. Placement. At least in Simeon’s world. He knew that other people didn’t think like that; that very few could understand him the way his brother did. Some part of Simeon’s complex self-appraisal informed him that most people would in fact view him as frightening or at best just downright weird, but he knew, Andrew having told him and empirical evidence having reinforced that information, that he could do nothing to help that. There was the outside world and there was Simeon’s world, and he was on the whole happier when the two did not have to collide.

  He spread the clippings on the bed, still thinking about the order and placement of them. It was important to work this out before pasting them into their final positions. Once fixed, they were there forever; visibly there until covered, at which time they changed form. Fossilized, stratified but, like a fossil in a matrix of rock, still present.

  His brother was sleeping. He had heard him moving about until an hour ago, then the sounds, dim but audible, of him getting into bed. It was part of their compromise that Simeon would have to wait until morning and after Andrew had left for work before he put these clippings in place. Andrew needed to get some sleep. Andrew said that he thought Simeon was semi-nocturnal. He rarely went to bed before three or four o’clock in the morning and then slept for most of the day before lunch. Simeon didn’t really like mornings.

  He studied the clippings again and rearranged them, his fingers tracing the headlines and caressing the photographs. Andrew always tried to get pieces with photographs.

  All these people who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, Simeon thought. All these fragile lives. The woman hit by a bus; the young couple and their baby killed when their car skidded off a frozen road; the old woman who had disturbed a burglar; the man stabbed outside of a nightclub. He studied their faces, looking for a connection he was sure would be there if only he could see it. Andrew had argued once that Simeon could not really attribute the lives lost to wrong temporal placement. That saying someone was in the wrong place at the wrong time implied that there was a right place and a right time for them to occupy.

  Simeon remembered the argument, and he nodded slowly. Of course that was what it implied. ‘If they hadn’t been there, hadn’t been then, they wouldn’t have died.’ Obvious.

  And tomorrow, this new handful of disasters would join the others pasted to the walls. The dead, the wounded, the murdered and the suicidal alongside the accidents and the misadventures all logged and catalogued according to Simeon’s complex definition of wrong place; wrong time.

  Two

  There were eight resident children at Hill House and George was getting a bit of a feel for things now, largely thanks to Ursula’s mumbled commentary at breakfast.

  Everyone was expected to pitch in and help and George found himself making toast, pouring tea, and supervising the two youngest members of the household who turned out to be eight-year-old twin girls who rejoiced in the names of Tiffany and Abigail.

  ‘Been here six months,’ Ursula informed him. ‘Parents got divorced, mum went off, dad had a breakdown. This is supposed to be a temporary place for them to stay till their dad gets better.’

  ‘Six months doesn’t sound temporary.’

  She shrugged. ‘The oldest one here is called Grace.’ She nodded in the direction of a tall, heavily built girl currently wrestling with a pan of frying eggs. ‘Talk about inappropriate names,’ Ursula muttered. ‘Not much grace about her personality either, she’s a right bitch. She’s fifteen, doesn’t go to our school, thank God, she’s at the Catholic place down the road. Hates it.’

  ‘How long she been here?’

  Ursula shrugged. ‘Lot longer than I have. I’ve not really talked to her so I don’t know. She doesn’t really talk to anyone. She went to foster placement but it didn’t work out so they had her back here and she’s sixteen this summer so …’

  George didn’t get it. ‘So?’

  ‘So she gets shifted out of the care system and into some kind of hostel. Like she’ll cope with that.’

  George wanted to ask more but Grace stumbled their way still holding the pan and Ursula veered off, dumping a stack of toast on the kitchen table and pausing to refill the kettle before sitting down.

  George followed suit, helping himself to toast he didn’t really want and tea that he did. He eyed the others, all busy talking among themselves and paying him no attention.

  ‘Then there�
�s Caroline. She’s twelve and goes to our school, and her friend Jill.’ Ursula jerked her head in the direction of two girls, one a redhead with freckles and the other with dark hair with the palest skin George had ever seen. They were deep in whispered conversation on the far side of the table. Same as they had been at tea the night before, George thought.

  ‘Why are they here?’

  Ursula shrugged. ‘Jill’s parents got killed in a car crash. She wants to go and live with her nan but there’s a problem of some sort. I think her other nan is saying she should go and live with her and Jill doesn’t want to.’ She shrugged again. ‘Her and Caroline only really talk to each other. Don’t know much about Caroline except she was taken into care five years ago and she’s been shuffled round places like this ever since, but she’s been here a year now and wants to stay.’

  Why would anyone want to stay? George thought. He felt a sudden rising panic that he might feel like that one day. That this place or somewhere like it might be somewhere he actually wanted to be.

  The door crashed open. ‘Mind what you’re doing,’ Cheryl reprimanded, ‘and hurry up you pair or you’ll have no time to eat before the bus gets here.’

  ‘Bus?’ George asked eyeing the two newcomers and thinking that he’d have described them as a lot of things but definitely not a pair.

  ‘Minibus,’ Ursula told him. ‘It’s kept in a garage down the hill. Jim, he does the gardens and the repairs and stuff and he drives it. Keep away from those two,’ she added. ‘Couple of creeps.’

  Richard, George remembered. That was the name of the tall one. He’d grunted some sort of reply when George had been introduced the day before. George guessed he was about his age and he didn’t remember seeing him at school but he knew the type even without Ursula’s warning. Thick, sly and unable to think for themselves, like the kids who used to hang around with Mark Dowling back in Frantham.

  ‘Does he go to our school?’

  ‘Used to, got expelled a couple of years ago. He goes to that place for morons. Back on track or whatever it’s called.’

  George had never heard of it but he figured he’d got the gist.

  ‘The other one, Brandon Jones.’ She pronounced the name grandly. ‘Thinks he’s too good for us. He’s a right nerd.’

  Something in the way she said it caused George to take a closer look, both at Brandon Jones and at Ursula herself. There had been a bitter, angry edge to her tone as though something about Brandon really hurt her, cut through that ‘I can take care of myself’ carapace that Ursula had deliberately cultivated to protect herself. Ursula was tough because she had to be, but George didn’t for one minute think she liked it any more than he did.

  Ursula bit into her toast and the brief silence allowed George time to take another look at Brandon. He was taller than George – everyone was taller than George – but looked about the same age and, now he’d had reason to take notice of him, George figured he’d seen him about the school but he was definitely not in any of the same classes. George was in one of the two ‘middle streams’ for most stuff, so Brandon must be either in the top group or in amongst the no-hopers down in the bottom. George’s biggest school fear had always been that his grades would slip enough for him to fall into that particular category. He’d never quite made it into the top stream but he’d just about managed to maintain his place in the upper mid.

  ‘What class are you in?’ It was something he didn’t know about Ursula either.

  ‘Mrs Regans’.’

  ‘Oh.’ He might have known Ursula would have been in the stream above him.

  ‘I hate it.’

  George shrugged. He didn’t know anyone that actually admitted to liking school.

  ‘So’s Brandon.’

  ‘Oh.’ He figured that might explain something but he wasn’t yet sure what.

  ‘OK,’ Cheryl announced. ‘Five minutes. Make sure you check your lists. George, you need to fill yours in. Ursula will show you the board.’

  ‘Board?’ George asked as they scurried out of the kitchen.

  ‘That thing.’ She pointed to a whiteboard at the end of the hall. It was divided into a daily grid and had their names listed down the side. ‘Tells us when we’ve got to take our games kit and all that rubbish. Like we can’t think for ourselves.’

  Glancing at the board as he passed, George actually thought it might be quite a good idea to have a daily checklist. He guessed that Ursula might have the kind of encyclopedic memory that meant she never turned up with the wrong thing on the wrong day, but when it came down to remembering what homework he had due in or if there was some extra kit he needed, he had to write it down. Karen had stuck a list up next to the phone in the hall so he could check the usual stuff and with a pad of Post-it notes close by so he could keep track of anything unusual.

  Karen was good at doing all that; the small things their mother could never get her head around.

  George felt tears pricking at his eyes and busied himself with fastening his backpack so that Ursula wouldn’t see. He wasn’t sure if the threatened tears were because of his mum or missing Karen or just because he was feeling generally sorry for himself or a mixture of the whole bloody mess, but whatever it was it hurt. Hurt almost more than he could bear.

  ‘All ready then?’ Cheryl sang out. ‘See you all tonight.’ She held the door and they trooped out into the chill, damp morning air and climbed aboard the dark-blue minibus.

  ‘When does she go off duty?’ George wondered out loud. Cheryl had been there when he arrived, still at Hill House late last night and here she was again.

  ‘Oh, she’s on a three-day stopover.’ Ursula was disinterested. ‘Then she’s off for two and back on again. She’s not married or anything so she doesn’t need to go home. I suppose she gets an extra allowance for anti-social hours or something.’ She sniffed as though disapproving. ‘Come on, we’ll sit here.’

  And so George found himself sitting next to this small, skinny blonde girl and staring past her out of the window at countryside and sea half obscured by drizzle, half glad, half dreading the return to school.

  ‘Just had an interesting call,’ DS Frank Baker told Mac as he walked into the lobby of the police station that morning. ‘We’ve got ourselves a dead body.’

  ‘I told him, bodies usually are dead,’ PC Andy Nevins said. ‘It’s tautological, that is.’ He ducked away, out of Frank’s reach.

  ‘Not always, lad. The body in question might be a living, breathing celebration of God’s creative urges. It would still be a body.’

  ‘And is this one dead?’ Mac asked.

  ‘Ah, well this one is. Been dead a little while, I reckon, and as it happens the experts would back me up.’

  He sounded happier, Mac thought, than one should usually be on receiving news of a corpse. ‘Parker,’ Mac guessed.

  ‘Don’t know for sure,’ Frank confessed, ‘but it seems likely to me.’

  Mac nodded. George’s father had gone into the water just less than three weeks before. As he was beginning to find out, it could take time before tide and current combined to bring any lost thing back into the shore. ‘Where?’ he asked.

  Sergeant Baker handed him a slip of paper. ‘Directions. You’re expected. Take you about twenty minutes to get there.’

  ‘Who found the body?’

  ‘Dog walkers,’ Frank told him. ‘There’s a little bit of a cove, beach is only accessible for a few hours at low tide. They went down there this morning and found our friend.’

  ‘Lucky them,’ Mac muttered as he made his way out through the back way to collect his car. He wondered vaguely just what proportion of bodies was found by dog walkers and, more gingerly, speculated on what state the body might be in. It was hard, though, to summon any sympathy for this dead body; George’s father had been a brute, violent to the very last. Mac decided he would have to go up and tell George about it before he heard about the find on the news. He wondered how George would cope with yet another bit of grim news. T
rue, he’d spent half his life running away from the man, but Mac couldn’t think that yet another funeral was likely to improve the quality of the boy’s life. Would he even want to go? If he did then Mac would ask Rina to go along as well; Rina would be better than Mac at knowing what to do or say for the best.

  Mac wriggled his car out of the tiny space behind the police station and set out along the coast road. According to Frank’s directions he’d have to turn off after about two miles on to one of those single-track lanes that looked as though they were just farm tracks but which might actually go on for the best part of a mile before ending abruptly on a cliff top or link unexpectedly with two or three others of their ilk. Locals drove these tiny tracks like Mac might have driven a motorway. Mac himself was far more cautious, knowing he’d be the one to have to practise his reversing skills should he meet a tractor coming up the other way. He still wasn’t local enough to have won the right not to have to back up.

  ‘Right, this looks like my turn.’ He picked the instructions off the passenger seat and paused to scrutinize them again before committing. ‘Two stone gateposts; no gate.’ He swung the car in the best arc he could manage on the too-narrow lane and eased between the posts, just clipping the wing mirror on the passenger side. It shuddered, but, to his relief, remained attached. He’d lost the first only three days after his arrival and the second two weeks after that. Rob DeBarr up at the local garage had taken to joking that he should get a smaller car.

  He could see that he was in the right place. A huddle of people clad in a mix of white overalls or fluorescent jackets stood out against an increasingly angry sky, the angle of the parked vehicles indicated the steepness of the slope high on the cliff top. Mac bumped his way down the track and then across sodden grass. The line of the footpath had been trodden into the mud, leading back towards Frantham and on in the direction of Bridport. A slit cut in the cliff pointed the way down.