“That wasa long time ago,” his mum said, her voice slow with surprise. It was the kindest her voice had ever sounded on a phone call with him. Not that it lasted, the usual edge of tension crawled back into it as she added, “And this isn’t a good time. Can you call back later?”
“No,” Cal said. “Either we talk now, or I fucking move to Newcastle. How much of a good time would that be?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“This is important,” Cal said. It wasn’t the first important thing that his mum had missed, ignored, or ruined, but this time, if she let him down, Cal would actually follow through on his threat. “If you don’t talk to me, I will come up there and ruin my life all over your shiny new one. So answer me, what happened the night Edward crashed the Bentley?”
“He didn’t crash it,” his mom said sharply.There was a muffled pause and he heard her make the excuse of “insurance salesman” to someone. Then a door clicked and she came back. “We were on our way to Cirencester for the night. A band I liked was on, and this red Lexus veered across the motorway. It clipped the front of the Bentley, bashed up the headlights, and then hit the guardrail and went down the embankment. I don’t talk about this,Caleb.”
“Surprised you remember my name.”
“I picked it.’
“Whatever. Look, we both know you’ve seen worse than a car accident. Don’t pretend you’re some shrinking violet now. What happened?”
There was a pause. Cal wondered, with a touch of surprise, if his mother actually was upset.
“It wasn’t the accident,” she said quietly. “It was the screaming. It was a mother and two children in the car.The older child, a girl, crawled out of the broken windshield, but the other two were trapped. I called the ambulance. That’s what you’re meant to do. But by then the car was on fire. Edward went to help—his hands were ruined, all blistered from the metal—but the driver, their mother, wouldn’t let him help her. She told him to get the little boy out first, poor little brat. He wasn’t very old,still a baby, and I remember wondering if I’d have done the same for you. Maybe she was a better mother, or she knew that… well, they took her in two pieces later. I don’t think Edward could have helped her even if she’d let him.”
Cal swallowed the bitter taste in the back of his throat—he never learned where his mum was concerned—and focused on the fact he’d been right. The night Joe’s mum haddied and been carefully erased from his world, Edward had been there. He’d kept the secret and Joe close. Cal wasn’t sure if he’d attribute that to Edward’s self-interest or to some sense of responsibility to the baby he’d rescued.
Either way, thank God for his grandad’s soft spot for ex-squaddies and his daughter’s ex-boyfriends. It had been enough to make their firm Edward’s first call whenhe needed a driver.
“Where did it—” he started to ask.
“It was the little girl, though,” his mum said over him. He’d blackmailed her into this, but now she’d started to speak, Cal didn’t think she even really knew it was him on the line. “She’d caused the accident—that’s what the woman told Edward—grabbed the wheel and drove them off the road. Not even a teenager and so angry, just so… angry.She told Edward to put the baby back in the fire. That’s when I decided to move up north, to make a clean break of it. It was better for everyone, because I was that girl. Every time I came and got you boys, took you away to play house until it went wrong, I put you back in the fire.”
That hadn’t happened. Cal had been five. He’d have remembered if he ever went to live with his mum for longerthan a weekend in a grotty bedsit in Blackpool. Unless that had been it, the best she had to offer before it all went to hell again.
“And Edward went to work for the boy’s dad, right?” Cal said, because that was something he could deal with.
“Yes,” his mum said, her voice surprised. “He was a mess after it happened, he couldn’t get over the fact he let that woman die to save the boy. PTSD, Isuppose. Nightmares. Drink. I was gone for the worst of it, but friends told me about it. They thought it was because I’d left him, but it was her. That poor dead woman. He lost his job, and when the boy’s father found out he offered Edward a job with him instead. In America. The last time I saw him, he’d come up to say goodbye. I don’t know why he bothered. We were broken up by then, but maybe hedidn’t have anyone else to say it to.
“Where did it happen?” Cal asked. “What road? It doesn’t have to be the address, just close enough.”
He didn’t expect much. This was a woman who had once forgotten not only his birthday, but Christmas. To his surprise his mother answered precisely, in a small, firm voice. Cal had heard people give evidence like that.
“The M4,” she said. “It was past PondFarm. I’d made a joke about it, said that Edward could buy it and raise pigs. He didn’t think it was funny. That’s why I remember. He usually thought I was funny.”
Cal exhaled. It felt like the first time since he’d seen the blood. His mother’s story wasn’t much, and he still didn’t know if Rosie was on her way back there, but it was something. It was enough that he mentally cut her free froma lot of things he blamed her for. This made up for it.
“Thank you,” he said. “I won’t call again.”
She surprised him when she didn’t hang up right away. “I knew you’d be okay,” she said. “I knew that my mum, your gran, she’d be like that woman in the car. She’d have saved you boys without a thought. So I knew. I had to stop putting you in the fire.”
Cal couldn’t say anything. He’d spent toomany years angry at her. It was easier to let her off the hook for her screwups than have to admit that maybe she hadn’t made as many as he thought.
For the first time, Cal hung up on her.
Pond Farm. He’d driven past that a couple of times, enough that he could find his way back with no problem. If he was right, then he’d find Joe, and if he wasn’t….
Cal tugged his helmet down over his earsand gave the top of it a smack to settle it in place. There’d been a lot of blood in the hall. If Joe wasn’t at Pond Farm like Cal thought—if the emails and burned bears weren’t Rosie reliving her bad deeds—then maybe Cal wouldn’t find him at all.
HE CAUGHTup with the car about twenty miles from Pond Farm. Rosie’s middle-aged sedan wasn’t built for speed, and he didn’t think she expectedanyone to follow her. Cal tucked himself in behind her and called the police.
Cal had been in enough car chases on the other side of the line to know what a bad idea they were. If he could get the police out there to wear Rosie down, to toss their spike strips over the road to slow her down, Cal would take that.
He recited the license plate number to the chipper young policeman on the otherend of the line, told them that Rosie drove erratically, and exaggerated the damage to the front of the car so they’d make the connection with the car accident at the Renaissance. It would take too long to explain the truth, and it was a bizarre enough story that he’d go through three sets of ears before someone believed him.
