The Trawlerman, стр. 70

Forty-nine

— Do you want to tell me about it?

— Not particularly. Best not, really.

— How have you been, then?

— Pretty good. Excellent, in fact. Last night I slept better than I have in months. I finally feel like I’m getting some control back over my life. Well. Maybe not over my own. I’m not sure I’ll ever get there on that. Over other people’s lives, at least. That’s something, isn’t it?

The day after Terry Neill had attacked her, Zoë phoned to say when she would be back.

‘I already called up Jill and asked if she’d pick me up from the station ’cause I know we’ve got no car.’ Alex heard her mother’s radio on in the background playing pop music so loud she could barely make out what Zoë was saying.

‘I can’t hear you,’ complained Alex.

‘I said, are you and Jill OK? Jill says she thinks you’ve been avoiding her. I told her that was nuts.’

The one thing she hated about all this was that she couldn’t tell her friend the truth about what had happened.

When the mint-green car drew up outside, she stayed inside, but Jill came in anyway.

‘Are you OK, Alex?’

‘Yes. I’m fine. I just needed some time on my own,’ she said.

‘Mum! What’s wrong with your face?’

‘I fell off my bike.’ Another lie. ‘It was wet and I couldn’t see the potholes.’ Lie upon lie upon lie.

‘When are you going to get a new bloody car?’ demanded Jill. ‘You can’t live out here in the boondocks without one.’

‘What’s with the candles?’ demanded Zoë.

‘Something my therapist suggested. I thought you’d like them.’

‘Scented candles give you cancer.’

Jill stood, waiting to be offered a drink or something. It broke Alex’s heart, but Jill would be working on the Frank Hogben murder case, and having her around only meant she would have to lie to her more about what she knew.

Jill hovered uncomfortably by the door. ‘I don’t want to stress you out, Alex,’ she said eventually, ‘but you know they’re going to question you about Terry Neill?’

‘Really?’

‘He’s saying it was you that gave him the money. All sorts of stuff like that.’

‘Why would he do that?’

Jill looked down at her feet. ‘I didn’t want to say it was too good to be true, you and him.’

Alex frowned. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Just . . . that he played you.’

Alex was suddenly offended at the suggestion, but unable to show it.

‘Don’t you see, Alex?’ She shuffled her feet. ‘I think maybe he was just using you. To me it looks like he was creating an alibi by going out for a copper. He probably never actually . . .’

‘Never what? Never fancied me?’

Jill didn’t answer. Zoë stood with her bag in her hand, looking embarrassed.

‘That’s absolutely ridiculous,’ said Alex eventually.

‘Yeah. Of course it is,’ said Jill, backing out.

Later, at Zoë’s insistence, she and Zoë walked down to Arum Cottage. ‘We’ve got to tell him,’ she said.

When they arrived there, they saw that the Under Offer sign had been modified. It now read Sold.

The bird bath looked splendid in the deep red of the evening, thought Alex, while her daughter knocked on the door.

‘Are you going to tell him, or am I?’ asked Zoë.

‘Tread carefully,’ Alex told her daughter. She was nervous now, in a way she hadn’t been for weeks. A sense that everything could go very wrong. ‘He’s a very independent man. This might have been a mistake.’

‘Weirdest thing,’ said Bill, when he came to the door. ‘Turns out I don’t have to move out.’

‘What do you mean, Bill?’ Zoë pretended not to know what was going on.

He opened it to let them in. It was the first cool evening of the year. He had lit a fire in the stove and the red flame matched the colour of the sun on the stones outside.

‘The woman who bought it is letting me live here on pretty much a peppercorn rent. She just bought it as an investment, apparently. I mean . . . I know they go for a fortune now round here, but it’s, like, I’ve just been paid two hundred thousand pounds to live in my own house . . .’

‘Well, there’s a thing,’ said Alex.

‘What is it? Why are you grinning?’

Zoë was practically shaking with excitement. ‘Is the woman who bought the house called Helen Breen?’ asked Zoë.

‘That’s right. How did you . . . ?’

‘You know . . . Helen. You know her, Bill. It’s my gran.’

Bill’s jaw dropped. As he stared at Alex, the smile left his face. ‘Your mother Helen?’

‘It was Gran’s idea,’ said Zoë, hesitant now. ‘Not Mum’s.’

Bill looked winded. ‘I’m not sure how I feel about that at all,’ he said.

Zoë looked from one to the other, worried now.

Eventually Alex spoke. ‘I owed it to you. But it was my mum’s idea, not mine. It’s just a financial transaction, that’s all. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. You sold the cottage and now you’ve got the money. But we’d like you to stay, obviously.’

‘Right,’ he said quietly.

Alex wondered if she had miscalculated this badly.

But Bill South was still living in Arum Cottage in mid-September when Alex’s old colleagues from Serious Crime formally charged Terry Neill with the murder of Frank Hogben.

The headline in the Kent Messenger read: Disgraced University Professor Charged with Drug Murder.

Neill’s protestations that the money police found at his house had not been his were contradicted by the fact that a forged note had been discovered in the till of the golf club where he regularly spent time in the bar; nobody noticed or remembered that it was Alex who had paid for the drinks on the evening she had spent with him there. The following day they found others had been passed in shops in the neighbourhood. There was even one in the yellow charity box on the table at the golf club. Members of the golf club who had previously vouched for his good character seemed to be falling away. It