‘Bloody well take him, Lily, bloody well gut him.’ The man’s voice. The breadknife swished within an inch of his stomach. Up another stair. She would have to follow him. She took the first stair and stabbed viciously downwards at Edward’s feet. He jumped. The knife cracked against the wooden step and got stuck in it. He kicked at her hand as she tried to withdraw it. Les had now moved left and was trying to climb the staircase banister. Up another stair Edward went. He glanced behind him and saw a darkened hallway.
Suddenly there was a silhouette in the pale light. Another person, thin, younger. This was it. He was dead. He had nowhere to go. He half-turned, not wanting to take his eyes off Lily. Directly above him, a man at least thirty years younger than the two giants was wiping tired eyes as if he had just woken.
‘Mum, Dad, what the fuck?’
Edward barely heard. The voice was quiet. The hearing aid was knocked out and his damaged ear was the one closest to the younger man. Edward was too panicked to speak.
‘This is the fucker,’ said Les. ‘Questions Man.’
‘Mum, what—’ The young man seemed to go into shock, his whole body trembling. ‘Mum, put down the knife, my God, my God.’
The woman on the stairs pulled her mask off. Edward saw her face, the same face he had seen in the church on the day of the Met’s presser, puffy and red, bright ginger hair, freckles.
‘This ishim!’ she screamed.
‘Get back in your chair, Mum, or you’ll faint with the pain.’ His eyes flickered to Edward, sprawled on the stairs, and his face tightened.
‘But this cunt—’ she screamed.
‘Never mind “this cunt”, what are you thinking of, threatening him with a knife? What do you think’s going to happen? Are you going tostabhim, really, Mum? Really?’ With each question, the young man had taken a step further down the stairs, until he stepped over Edward, and stood between him and the massive couple.
With the son between him and the knife, Edward realized he had to get out of this madhouse before the mood turned again. If the son changed his mind, Edward could not take on all three of them, even with a crash helmet in his hands. He slid down the stairs, along the banister and around the man, pushing past the massive hulk of Lily Boyd.
She yelped again in pain. ‘I need to sit down!’
Their eyes met. She leant against the wall and used her walking stick to spear the crash helmet on the floor. She lifted it with the stick and pushed it at Edward.
‘Cancer of the pancreas,’ she snapped suddenly, fixing mad eyes on him, ‘and you won’t let me go!’
Edward looked up the stairs. Les might have been stopped by his son but he was deliberately grinding the dropped hearing aid into the stair carpet with the toe of his boot.
‘No more questions from you,’ hissed Les Boyd.
Regretting that he had not taken Kim’s advice and stayed well clear, Edward raced outside and started his moped, as if leaving the scene of his own murder.. When he looked back at the house, the hulk of Lily Boyd was in the doorway, propped up by the gnarled walking stick; father and son behind her. He turned back to the road and jumped. The old lady was standing in front of the bike handlebars. It was the pedestrian hehad seen briefly earlier, slowly passing the house, headscarfed, hunched in her shawl.
‘We’re used to it,’ she said. ‘The lady is sick.’
‘You’re telling me,’ he said. He tore away, hearing the moped’s motor burn with the strain.
Chapter Forty-Two
At Matty’s headstone, he sank to his knees. There was no one around, and he wanted to cry out. The grave was in Topsham, at a spot where the River Exe widened as the sea drew the water towards the beaches at Exmouth. The church had a cemetery over the water.
Matty had been buried in one of the last plots, next to a petite gravestone which said only WTF 1740, presumably the initials of a long-gone Wallace Theodore Flux or Wilma Thea French, although the modern meaning of ‘WTF’ meant that sometimes Edward came upon people laughing at the stone and photographing it. He never knew whether to be angry or join in.
Today there was no one. Would Tara come? He had sent Matty’s mother a message, knowing she was the only one who really understood, even if they had stopped understanding each other years ago. He had stopped the bike and, through tears, texted:
Really hard at the mo. Thinking Matty. Will be at Topsham in 20 mins to cry
He looked at the words. The message was so incomplete and yet she would understand it. Tara had remarried and hadchildren but neither of them could move on from the day a car ploughed into their son. They had been already divorced, but the joint loss was like a remarriage.
The words on the gravestone were: MATTHEW TEMMIS, LOVED HIS LIFE, LOST IT TOO SOON, BREATHED HIS LAST IN DEVON AIR. The stones around Matthew’s plot were weathered by winter rain and wind, and some letters on them were faded to a trace. Edward disliked the way his son’s inscription was so new and so bold, a black wound in grey marble.
‘Matty, Matty, Matty,’ he cried quietly. He remembered the football games on the clifftop, schoolwork that stumped him when he tried to help, the inaugural slice of cake in the Clock Tower Café (too big for an adult, let alone a child), changing nappies in his son’s first years, the rush to hospital when they thought their four-year-old had swallowed a battery (it was stuck in his shoe). The images raced like old film which had shuddered off the sprocket wheel, the celluloid shooting out of the projector into a tangle. That’s what it was, he thought, a tangle. A tangle of images. A tangle in his mind that any moment of happiness could snag itself on. How could he inflict that on Kim? He had wanted her to move in with him. No wonder she had swerved that.
He might have been crying for five minutes or fifteen. The violence in Barton Ottery had shaken him to his core. His phone stopped him for a moment – Stevie texting:
RING ME
