The following Thursday George was at Stephen’s church settling into the organ loft for his weekly practice. The murder of a young man in Longwell Green had been settled quickly. Another sad case of young knife crime that was growing in alarmingly senseless numbers. In this case the teenager charged wasn’t even aware his victim had died. He’d stabbed him in the thigh but severed the femoral artery. He was pronounced dead at the scene, not even making it to the hospital.
The priest wasn’t at the church. What George didn’t know was that Stephen was at Bristol Airport waiting for the arrival of Raymond and Christine back from Alicante. The reason George was unaware of this was that after Stephen had told them about the state George was in during their outward flight, they had decided to bring their return forward by twenty-four hours. They didn’t want to put George through that again and reasoned that if he didn’t know they were flying, he wouldn’t become so agitated. He wasn’t expecting them back till the next day.
George finished practice and seeing Stephen’s car wasn’t in front of the presbytery, gathered up his bike and belongings to head home. As he got to the end of the church path he saw Stephen’s car driving down the road towards him. He was about to cycle off when he saw Raymond and Christine also in the car. This was puzzling. So he pushed his bike up to the priest’s house.
‘Hello, George!’ his father greeted him enthusiastically as he got out of the car.
‘Hello, George,’ said his mother, joining in.
‘Why are you here?’ was the welcome they received. ‘You’re not due back for…’ he consulted his watch, ‘another twenty-two hours.’
‘We just decided to come back a day early, that’s all,’ Raymond replied innocently. But there was something alien to George in his father’s delivery. The pattern of speech he was so familiar with sounded off. He realised what it was almost immediately. Artificiality. He looked over at Stephen who just shrugged his shoulders in a non-committal kind of way.
‘But why?’ George persisted.
Raymond and Christine hadn’t exactly thought this through. They had neglected to take into account the inevitable interrogation they would suffer at the hands of George, with this late change of plan. A sudden alteration like this was something Raymond knew full well his son hated and had difficulty coping with. They should have discussed a plausible excuse on the plane.
‘It’s my husband, George,’ Christine explained. ‘He’s not been so well in the last week. I felt we had to come back.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’ George asked.
‘A chest infection.’
This was in fact true. But it wasn’t something they’d had to come home early for.
‘I see,’ replied George.
‘Could you help me with the luggage?’ Stephen asked him, thereby preventing him from pressing the matter any further.
They sat in the familiar setting of Stephen’s kitchen. Normally this offered Cross some sense of comfort. He felt more at ease in places he knew well, particularly this one when Stephen was offering up his famous salted caramel cake with a pot of tea. Raymond and Christine chatted away, ensuring there wasn’t a moment of silence. But Cross was still preoccupied with his parents’ premature return. There was always a reason for change in situations like this. His mother had ostensibly supplied him with one; her husband’s ill health. But the logistics, the timing of it, didn’t quite stack up for him. For example, why was she here and not on her way to Gloucester, if the situation was urgent enough for them to have had to come home a day early? The main question he had, though, was why hadn’t he been told?
‘When did you decide to come home early?’ he asked.
‘Just a couple of days ago,’ Raymond replied.
‘Why didn’t you inform me?’
‘We knew from Stephen that you were working a brand-new case and so didn’t want to disturb you,’ his father explained.
‘You were in contact with Stephen while you were away?’
‘Yes.’
‘But not with me,’ he pointed out.
‘At your own insistence, if you remember, George.’
This was undeniably true. George had reasoned that ‘out of sight, out of mind’ was definitely the best coping strategy for his father’s absence. He knew himself well enough to realise that daily communication would have only caused him stress. Worrying about his father. Even setting up times to make the calls would have caused him anxiety. Better all round to have a policy of no communication.
‘We had a lovely time,’ said Christine trying to divert the conversation in a different direction.
‘You should come with us next year, George,’ said Raymond.
‘You’re going back?’ George exclaimed.
‘I think probably, yes,’ said Raymond.
‘Wasn’t once enough?’
‘No, there’s plenty more to see.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well, you don’t have to decide now, George,’ said Christine.
‘The other good thing is it’s at the same time every year. You know, being a timeshare.’
Cross said nothing. He was thinking about the possibility.
‘I’d have to travel by train,’ he said after some consideration.
‘We could all go by train,’ exclaimed Raymond, obviously excited by the prospect. ‘It would be quite the adventure.’
Christine didn’t look at all sure.
As they drank the tea and ate cake, the couple described how they’d spent their time in Spain. The daily routine they quickly adopted, the markets they shopped at, the restaurants they frequented. But George couldn’t help notice a discomfort in the way they were speaking. In the same way a group of suspects talked with heightened animation when they were trying to cover something up. One clue was the absence of small periods of silence that normally cropped up in the conversation of people so familiar and comfortable with each other. Every hint of a pause was leapt on by one of the others to keep the conversation flowing. All conducted with a slightly enforced hilarity.
Christine finally ordered an Uber.
‘That’s quite an extravagance,’ George observed. ‘A taxi to Gloucester.’
‘Oh, I’m not going to Gloucester. I’m staying with Raymond tonight,’ she replied breezily.
George couldn’t initially work out why this disconcerted him. It wasn’t the fact that she was staying the night with his father. After all they’d been staying together in Spain. Added to the fact that he now knew his father was gay. No, it was the fact that having come home twenty-four hours early on account of her husband’s health she wasn’t going straight to the care home.
‘What is it, George?’ Stephen asked after they’d departed. He sensed his guest wasn’t about to leave before he got something off his chest. George was still thinking about the circumstances of his parents’ early return from Spain. What was running through his mind was the fact that at work the answer to a fundamental question in a case often lay within the question itself. In this instance that question was why they hadn’t told him, and there was the simple answer. Why wouldn’t you tell someone something? Because you didn’t want them to know.
‘They lied,’ he said finally. ‘About coming home early.’
‘They did.’
‘As did you.’
‘Actually, I think you’ll find that I didn’t say a word, so you can’t accuse me of lying. Anyway, I’m a priest.’
‘Then you lied by association.’
‘I did, and gladly so.’
George thought about this and why they would do it. Then it struck him.
‘You didn’t want me to know they were in the air.’
‘Correct.’
George thought about the implications of this.
‘It was Christine’s idea,’ Stephen told him.
George was pleased by this. Not because he was touched by her thoughtfulness. Of course not. Such sentiments never occurred to him. The reason he was pleased was that the idea of the deception, as small as it was, had not been his father’s. And this was where he understood what was perplexing him about the whole situation. His father never deceived him about anything. He was always honest and direct. Had flying home early been Raymond’s idea, he wasn’t sure he would ever have been able to trust him in the same way ever again. He also realised in that moment how trust was unequivocally at the centre of his relationship with his father. How up until this point it was something he had taken for granted. That it was something he valued intrinsically.
On the way home this thought created a sense of deep unease in George. A sense that without his father in his life there would be no one for him to trust and he found himself wondering how he would cope without him.