Lynch Page 2

  ‘You drink too many of those,’ Scott said.

  She looked round and smiled. ‘It keeps me busy,’ she said. ‘Did I wake you? I just boiled the kettle.’ She looked at the clock on the wall above the range. ‘Well, maybe you should boil it again.’

  On the table was a notepad with a stack of pages torn from it in a neat pile, covered in Katherine’s pristine handwriting. ‘What’re you writing?’ Scott asked as he flipped the kettle on and got two fresh mugs from the cupboard.

  ‘Memories,’ she said.

  ‘Like memoirs?’ he asked. He made coffees and they sat down at the table together.

  ‘I’m not writing a book,’ she said. ‘Just memories. Then I burn them. You should try it.’

  Katherine pushed her reading glasses back up her nose and picked up her pen. Scott watched the concentration on her face, noting the deep crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and the darkening circles under them. She had been sleeping less and less.

  As she ripped the page from the notepad and added it to her pile, she said, ‘Aren’t you getting ready for work?’

  ‘It’s Friday,’ Scott said. ‘I don’t start till ten.’

  ‘That’s good,’ she said, not really paying attention, already writing on a clean page.

  ‘How long have you been awake?’ he asked, hugging his mug of coffee and yawning.

  Katherine shrugged, looking back at the previous page to pick up the strand of what she had been writing. ‘Couple of hours, maybe.’

  ‘You should have woken me.’

  ‘Nonsense. A young buck like you, you need your sleep.’

  ‘And an old dear like you doesn’t?’

  ‘I can still beat you upside the head,’ Katherine said, exaggerating her words in a southern American drawl.

  ‘I think I’m still dreaming,’ Scott laughed.

  ‘In that case,’ Katherine said, ‘magic me up some croissants and a muscled young man to butter them for me—like that new guy at your work.’

  ‘That new guy,’ Scott said, ‘is probably more likely to butter my croissants than yours.’ He picked up a slice of Katherine’s cold toast and bit into it. ‘And besides, what happened to the rule we made? No more men, for either of us.’

  As the phone in the front hall began to ring, Katherine said, ‘Rules are meant to be broken.’

  Scott walked from the kitchen to the hallway, stuffing more toast in his mouth and saying, ‘You’re a floozy and don’t you forget it.’ He picked the receiver up, sucking congealed butter from his thumb, and said, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Scott Lynch?’ the female voice said. And he recognised it immediately. It had been eighteen months since he heard her voice, but he knew who it was with a rush of certainty. He turned, stared back at Katherine as she rose with the aid of her walking cane and stood in the kitchen doorway.

  ‘Yes?’ he breathed.

  ‘We need to talk,’ the voice said. ‘In person.’

  They sat on the sofa, holding hands, Katherine’s walking cane propped against the cushion beside her, her pale skin looking, for all its fifty-one years, like it was paper-thin and translucent. The last eighteen months had not been kind to her.

  ‘What does she want?’ she asked.

  Scott shook his head. ‘She didn’t say.’

  ‘But she’s coming here?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Scott said. ‘Which means there’s nothing to worry about. If it was urgent, she could be here in a few hours.’

  ‘She wouldn’t be coming at all, if it wasn’t urgent,’ Katherine said.

  ‘We won’t know until tomorrow. You weren’t planning on going anywhere today, were you? I don’t want you leaving the house.’

  ‘That’s my afternoon marathon out of the question, then.’

  ‘Is Terri coming today?’ Scott asked. They had employed a cleaner to come in a few days a week to help Katherine out.

  ‘No, she was here yesterday,’ Katherine said.

  ‘Then I’ll speak to Sylvia when I get to work. She’ll pop round at lunch time.’

  ‘I don’t need a babysitter,’ Katherine said.

  ‘No, but I want to know you’re okay.’

  Katherine gripped her walking cane and stood. ‘You’d best get ready for work. I have to finish my memoirs, and besides, you said yourself it’s nothing urgent. I’ll call Terri, see if she can come in first thing tomorrow morning, make sure the place is nice.’

  ‘I’m on a short shift today,’ Scott said. ‘I’ll be back before you know it.’

  When he got to work, he tried to remove all thoughts and memories from his mind, tried to concentrate on the things he had to do today.

  The Silverwood Centre was a stable for retired racing horses in Harrogate, north of Leeds. They also provided a weekend riding school for beginners and had intermediate classes on Wednesday and Friday afternoons, using ponies. Scott was just a stable hand but Sylvia had been impressed by how much he threw himself into work that she was training him up to help out with the weekend classes, providing backstop on their treks until he could go through formal qualification. He had ridden before, in a previous lifetime, but not often and never faster than a walk. In the year and a half that he’d been here, he had seen himself go from loping cantor to careening gallop as though he was born on horseback.

  He found Jesse in the kitchen behind the office, rummaging through the cupboards.

  ‘Lost something?’ Scott asked.

  ‘The coffee jar’s empty,’ Jesse said. ‘Do we have any more?’

  Jesse had only been with them for three weeks but knew more about horses than Scott ever imagined possible, knew the names of the famous horses in films, knew the age of one just by a quick examination, knew how to calm a spooked horse and how to spur a stubborn one on. He had already earned the name of Whisperer among the other hands.

  Scott reached over Jesse, who was stooped at a floor-standing cupboard, and pulled a fresh jar of coffee down from above. ‘It’s the last jar,’ he said. ‘Better write it on the list.’

  Jesse stood and smiled, took the jar from him and asked if he wanted a cup.

  Scott picked up the notes from this morning’s rounds and scanned over the tasks that were still outstanding. ‘I’ve got ten minutes to get Jewel tacked and ready,’ he said. ‘If Sylvia caught me drinking coffee instead, she’d have kittens.’

  He took a juice from the fridge and shook it. ‘This’ll do me for now.’

  As he was leaving the room, Jesse said, ‘Say no if you want…’

  Scott stopped, turned.

  ‘Would you like to go for a drink sometime? Maybe tomorrow night?’ Jesse asked. He turned the coffee jar over in his hands. ‘I mean, just somewhere local. I don’t know many people here yet, you know?’

  Scott smiled. He could already hear Katherine’s words in his head. Rules are meant to be broken. And now she was saying, Do it. ‘If I’m alive by then,’ he said, remembering who was coming to visit tomorrow afternoon.

  ‘Hell,’ Jesse laughed nervously. ‘If you don’t want to go on a date, you don’t have to fake your own death.’

  ‘So it was a date?’ Scott asked.

  ‘Was that presumptuous of me?’

  Images of an old boyfriend flooded his mind and he tried to push them away. He had made a promise—not to Katherine, but to the memory of that boyfriend. The promise of a lifetime.

  Knowing that his peaceful time in Yorkshire might soon come to an abrupt end, Scott smiled as warmly as he could, and said, ‘No, I think I’d like that.’

  Jesse suppressed a grin and turned away. Scott knew he was only playing dismissive. ‘Great,’ he said. ‘See you later, then.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Scott said. ‘Later, then.’

  He left the building with a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. Katherine had long said it was time to move on. Everything that happened over a year ago, the heartache they had both endured, would remain with them forever. ‘You’ll never forget him,’ he remembered her saying. ‘
But in time it’ll get easier.’

  And it had. Even though it felt like only last week, it also felt like a lifetime ago. Somebody else’s lifetime ago.

  Chapter 3

  Jesse Whitaker pulled his car up outside his flat and switched the ignition off. He sat in silence for a moment, remembering.

  In the darkened window of his upstairs flat, he could see the reflection of a crescent moon winking through the dusty clouds that surrounded it. Three weeks in Harrogate and already the past six months were beginning to feel as fictional as something out of a James Herbert story. He was getting back on his feet, making new friends, loving his new job. He knew this move, this new life, would be the perfect thing to get over recent events.

  He got out of his car, locked it, and walked up the steps to the front door of the building. On a timer loop, he flicked the hall lights on and looked on the corner table at the letters that one of his new neighbours had placed there. So far, he’d only had a moving-house card from his mother, handmade with glitter and ribbons, a woman from whom he acquired his olive-skinned good looks but none of her creativity. Today, there was a welcome pack from his electricity company and a few letters for the previous tenant. He’d return them to their senders in the morning.

  The woman in Number 2 had moved in with her daughter on Monday night, pulling up with a small haulage van after eleven o’clock, coaxing her sleepy daughter forward as Jesse watched from the window upstairs, gripping the windowsill so hard his fingers hurt. When he saw that it wasn’t her, he relaxed a little, but sleep had eluded him for the rest of the night.

  He still hadn’t learned the woman’s name; they had barely spoken, exchanging little more than nods and tentative smiles if they passed in the hallway, her hair falling in her face, eyes downcast. As though she was hiding from something, too.

  Tony and Kitty in Number 1 were both retired—he a postman, she a military nurse in the war who hadn’t worked since she fell pregnant the first time. She had shown him her old black and white photographs in pristine albums with yellowing pages the day he moved in upstairs. Tony had said, ‘Wasn’t she something, back then?’ and then looked at Kitty and added, ‘Still is.’

  They had made a point of calling on him a few hours after he moved in, bringing him a homemade carrot cake—still warm from the oven—and welcoming smiles. They insisted he join them for dinner that evening and wouldn’t accept any excuse for refusal. ‘You probably haven’t even found your kettle yet,’ Kitty said, ‘let alone had the chance to buy food. Besides, I always make too much. Sometimes I think the kids are still with us.’

  Tonight, their flat was in silence. Jesse could imagine them sleeping together in their musky bedroom, Tony in button-up pyjamas and Kitty in a calf-length nightgown with a ribbon at the neck and her hair done up in curlers. Perhaps they were holding hands in sleep.

  He went upstairs, yawning. Mark Stanton in Number 4 must have been out for a jog earlier—his running shoes were fermenting outside his door. He was probably ten years older than Jesse and dressed as though he was a pauper but, in truth, he worked for some corporate bank or other. How he got away with his four-day stubble and bird’s-nest hair at the office was beyond Jesse’s comprehension.

  Inside his flat, he threw his keys in the bowl by the door and shed his shoes in front of the sofa. Exhausted, but wired from working, he flicked on the TV and poured a glass of red wine. Shutting his brain off had been a problem ever since Prabha tried to kill him. His friends had warned him about her, but he didn’t listen. At first, she was pleasant, a nice new neighbour in an otherwise empty house made up of three self-contained flats. The two flats had stood empty for over a month when she had moved in and instantly ingratiated herself into his life.

  That very first day, as he was running a bath, she came and knocked on his door to introduce herself and, making the most of the manners his mother had drummed into him, he invited her in for a coffee. Her ready acceptance should have rung warning bells, but he was blinded by having somebody to talk to at last. She sat for four hours and told him about her life in India, about moving to York, about hating her job as a supermarket checkout girl, and, mostly, about her love for Jesus and her unwavering faith in Christ as her Saviour.

  She was being baptised, she said, the following month at the local Baptist church and invited him along. Politely, he said that would be nice, and he’d check what he was doing that day, though already he was finding her a bit cloying. His bath had gone cold and still she mumbled on about random things that had no order to them, her thought process as awkward as her dress sense.

  Little more than five feet tall, Prabha didn’t help her podgy appearance by dressing in thick knitted sweaters a few sizes too big for her. Her wild and wiry hair was always drawn back in a pony tail at the base of her neck and the dry skin of her hands was constantly greased in coconut butter. She had large, wet eyes that forever looked as though she was on the verge of tears and one pitted cheek from chickenpox or some other childhood illness.

  When she finally left, Jesse emptied the bath and ran a fresh one, sank into a lather of bubbles, and wished he could be better at saying no.

  He was resolute now, even after moving, about locking doors and windows. Once locked, he would recheck them, and then he would go to bed, swallowed by pillows, and stare at the ceiling for an hour or more before sleep finally came. Sometimes, he swore he could still hear her crying.

  It was an unfounded nervous reaction, they told him, this overwhelming and sticky fear he allowed himself to flounder in, especially now that he had moved to a new town. It was his chance to get away from everything, put the past firmly behind him and start afresh, new friends, new life.

  He didn’t keep in touch with anybody in York other than his mother, and this evening, physically tired but mentally alert, he called home. He knew she’d still be awake—with her hips the way they were since her accident a few years ago, she slept little and stayed up most nights to watch endless marathons of senseless romantic comedies.

  ‘Hey, gorgeous,’ she said on the phone. He swore sometimes she used pet names so as not to get any of her six children mixed up. ‘Not in bed, yet?’

  ‘I’m going that way in a minute,’ he told her. ‘Guess what.’

  ‘You’re pregnant?’ she laughed.

  ‘With triplets,’ he said. ‘No, you remember that guy I mentioned? The one I work with?’

  He could hear the smile in her voice. ‘The one with the stunningly bright blue eyes and gorgeous Irish accent?’

  He laughed. ‘That’s the one. I asked him out.’

  ‘On a date? Where are you taking him?’

  ‘I haven’t decided yet. There’s a place in Leeds called Bibi’s. It does the nicest venison in a red wine and chocolate sauce.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit too close to horse meat?’

  ‘Mother!’

  ‘I’m joking. Sounds lovely. What’re you going to wear?’

  He had a great relationship with his mother, particularly since Prabha. He pictured her now, sitting in her chair, catch-up TV paused so she could give him her undivided attention, full pot of tea in its usual place on the coffee table beside her, in constant supply like a drip feed.

  As he was telling her about the new shirt he had bought at the weekend, she abruptly changed the subject. ‘You’re still not sleeping right.’ It wasn’t a question.

  Jesse sighed, rested his head back on the plush sofa. ‘I know what you’re going to say.’

  ‘And I’m going to say it anyway.’

  ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘She’s history, honey. You’re thirty miles away at least. And no one here has seen her around town. With any luck, she’s gone back to India like she said she would.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. It was the same ritualistic words every time he spoke to her.

  ‘We’ll come through next weekend,’ she said. ‘Your father misses you, even though he’s too stubborn to say so. We both do.’

  �
��I know.’

  ‘And you’ve nothing to worry about. She’s gone.’

  He yawned. ‘I know.’

  When he hung up, locked his front door and checked his windows, he finally went to bed and lay in an irrational knot of fear. If she was no longer in York, there was one of two possibilities in Jesse’s mind. She had either truthfully gone back to India—although he suspected not; she often spoke of how much she hated it there—or she was trying to track him down.

  He scratched at the pink scar under his left armpit, and hoped he was wrong.

  Chapter 4

  When her car pulled up the dirt track to the old farmhouse they lived in, Scott and Katherine went out onto the porch to meet her. Half hoping it wasn’t her, they said nothing as they waited for the car to stop, and watched as she got out of the driver’s seat.

  She smiled in the sunlight, raising a hand over her eyes to see better. ‘Scott,’ she said.

  It sounded strange, hearing his new name spoken by her.

  ‘Ann,’ Katherine beamed, coming down the three wooden steps with the aid of her cane and holding up an arm for a hug.

  They embraced warmly and Scott, from the porch, said, ‘Why are you here?’ He hadn’t intended it to sound as cold as it did.

  Ann Clark leaned back into her car and picked up a folder. ‘Can we go inside?’ she asked.

  Once inside the house, Scott dropped his cool exterior—if Ann was here, maybe they were being watched—and gave her a hug. ‘Are we moving again?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Clark said. ‘Nothing’s changed.’

  Katherine busied herself in the kitchen, making coffees and arranging biscuits on a plate, and when all three of them were settled at the table, Clark said, ‘How’s Yorkshire?’

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ Katherine said. ‘So much open space. You can’t hear a thing at night, it’s so peaceful.’