She came over to me and sighed. “Who could do such a thing?” Behind the kind face was a look of abject terror.
We were silent a minute. “I’m so glad Simon has so many friends in the village. It’s reassuring. He can be a grumpy sod. Even when he was a wean.”
She sat beside me, and I took the opportunity to look at her properly. I could see her son’s face in her own. A face that was usually full of laughter and fun but was now marred with concern and stress.
“I’ve read your books, you know,” she said after a minute of silence. “They were very good. I enjoyed them.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m finishing the next one, it’ll be out for Christmas.”
“Lovely. Simon encouraged me to read them. He loved sci-fi as a teenager, always with a book in his hand.”
I couldn’t help but snort. We’d been the same. Nerdy boys with our noses buried in a book.
She went quiet again, but eventually spoke. “Could – could you keep an eye on him? We won’t be able to stay forever, and—” She twisted her hands in her lap. “He used to tell us everything. It’s like there’s a wall up between us now. He rings every Sunday, but I can feel that for every detail of his life he does tell us about, there’s ten more he doesn’t.”
I should have told Marion that he and I weren’t as close as she imagined. We were no great friends. But I couldn’t.
“I worry he’ll do something silly,” she said. “Or that he won’t do anything at all. That he won’t process it.”
No one knows what grief will do to you. I hadn’t predicted it’d drive me to amateur sleuthing. Or that catching Tarquin would turn me into a shut-in for months.
Instead, I smiled, and I gave her assurance. I soothed her tired nerves with trite words about a fictitious friendship with her son. I ignored the comments he’d made earlier. The vehemence.
We played a dance of social niceties. Marion looked at me with her kind eyes – the sort of eyes my mother never looked at me with – and she smiled. “You’re a good man, Arden.”
I departed not long after. Sharing pleasantries with Lady F, and a brief flicker of a smile to Simon. Back home,drained, I stared at the ceiling. One day, I told myself, one day you’ll know how this is supposed to work.
Chapter 13
After a restless night of tossing and turning in the heat, I gave up at about 5 a.m. on Tuesday and rose from my pit.
Every time I’d managed to close my eyes, Riz’s face appeared in front of my eyelids. Except he was holding a gun to my head and spoke in Tarquin’s voice.
Together, Kenny and I beat the paps for a nice run in the opposite direction across the fields towards Winterborne Minster.
Forty-five minutes later, I nodded at a man about the same age as me, waiting near the village green, as we arrived.
I kept my distance. But I already knew it was too late. He’d been smoking a fag but dropped it on the ground as I approached. “Arden?”
I froze.
“Don’t worry, I won’t make trouble. Dominic Grundy, you answered my call last week?” he said in his Brummie accent. He was late twenties, with a scraggly beard and thin, sloping shoulders. Not a looker by any stretch of the imagination. “I saw you running off in this direction while all the others were busy scratching their arses. I’m not paparazzi, I’m a reporter.”
“No comment,” I said.
“You were a reporter once; you know what it’s like. Trying to get through to someone.”
My career in journalism was a distant memory. I was mostly in it for the evening canapé receptions.
“I don’t care. I have no comment to make. On anything.”
“Listen,” he said, looking around. “I’m working on a story about Macauley Sheridan. Nothing to do with you. But this is tangentially involved.”
Kennedy seemed intrigued by him, and I had to hold him back.
“See, your dog trusts me.”
“My dog eats fox shit,” I snapped. Kennedy looked up at me. An expression on his face that I could have sworn was telling meHey! I thought that was our secret. Like when you kick me out of the bedroom for twenty minutes after viewing certain websites.
