On the Thursday Cross was at his father’s flat awaiting his small, diverse, trustworthy workforce to arrive. He’d taken advantage of the lull in the case and taken the rest of the week off. He had with him a few rolls of black bin bags and had just taken delivery of fifty more clear plastic storage boxes. He was also equipped with labels and indelible markers.
A car horn sounded, and as he looked out of the window, he saw Mackenzie’s car pull up. Four of her friends then piled out of the car. Cross was aware, particularly thanks to the nature of his job, that you shouldn’t judge people by their appearances, but he wasn’t hopeful. Two of the boys, he was fairly certain, were still asleep as they walked towards the building.
‘Why aren’t you at work?’ Cross said to Mackenzie as he opened the door.
‘I’ve taken a couple of days off to help,’ she replied.
‘You didn’t have to do that.’
‘I wanted to.’
‘I see. But I haven’t budgeted for you,’ he said, a little worried.
‘That’s all right. I wasn’t expecting to be paid.’ She smiled and tried to go past him into the house. But he moved fractionally, making it impossible for her.
‘You have to be paid,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Because otherwise it would be an exploitation of our friendship.’
‘Well,’ she replied. ‘Firstly, I’m flattered that you consider me to be a friend, and secondly, if you look up “exploitation of friendship” in Brewers you’ll find it means “favour”.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Cross said, racking his brain.
Mackenzie decided that it was time to move things along. ‘Right, well, this is Roxy, Aidan, Harry and Sanjeev.’
‘Just wait there a moment,’ Cross said, and disappeared back into the flat.
The truth was that Mackenzie had come because she wasn’t entirely sure how long her friends would put up with Cross without her being there. He was bound to offend them unintentionally, or just freak them out in one way or another. So she was there as a moderator, interpreter and general peacekeeper.
What happened next confirmed to her that taking time off was definitely the right thing to have done. Cross appeared with a clipboard, on which he had forms he’d printed up for them all to fill in. Contact details, national insurance number, agreement of fees, an indemnity and a disclaimer in case of injury.
Mackenzie laughed. ‘George, stop it. You don’t need all this.’
‘I can assure you, as an employer, I most certainly do,’ he said.
‘It’s fine,’ said Roxy.
‘Yeah, it’s totally fine,’ said Harry.
So they all filled out the form as best they could – none of them had their NI numbers but promised to bring them the next day. They then had a brief discussion as to how to proceed with the job. Cross initially suggested they each take a room, but eventually they all agreed it would be more efficient if they cleared a room at a time together. So this is what they did.
By the end of the day they had made good progress. The kitchen was completely cleared. Most of it was rubbish. There were also the ubiquitous piles of magazines and four microwaves which Cross decided to chuck. The next day a skip appeared, which Cross had hired on Sanjeev’s advice from his father’s building company at a good rate – Mackenzie had convinced him that a discount was perfectly acceptable as he wasn’t using his position as a policeman to obtain it. It was because of his new friendship with Sanjeev. He found this reasoning perfectly acceptable. Cross was impressed by all of them; they were hard workers and didn’t complain.
His patience was stretched a little on the second day when Harry appeared at noon. He made a note of the time and called Mackenzie – who had returned to work – telling her of his intention to deduct the requisite amount of money from Harry’s pay packet that night (he had gone out and bought some brown wage envelopes for their daily pay).
She told him he would do no such thing and, much to her surprise, instead of embarking on a twenty-minute lecture about the virtues of punctuality, he just agreed not to. She was flattered by this as it meant he was beginning to trust her. When he discovered that, after finishing at the flat the day before, Harry had worked as a waiter at a gastropub till one a.m., he was glad he hadn’t said anything.
It was in the spare room that Cross came across something that stopped him in his tracks: an old wooden roll-top bureau. It was Edwardian and he hadn’t seen it for years, but as soon as Aidan had revealed it from under dozens of boxes and piles of papers, Cross remembered it at once. It had been the centre of his father’s administration of their lives when he was a child. All the bills were paid from this bureau in a weekly session, with a cheque written and placed in an addressed envelope. Then the corresponding amounts were entered into a ledger and the appropriate bill was stamped with a big red stamp that proudly proclaimed ‘PAID’.
Cross could still remember the smell of the ink, and could hear the two stamping sounds now, the first softer one on the ink pad followed by a harder, louder, satisfied stamp on the bill. This bureau hadn’t seen the light of day for decades. The roll-top was locked. Cross remembered his father reaching under the desk into the leg well, where he’d attached the key with sellotape to the underside, and opening the desk. Cross reached under and felt remnants of sellotape now hardened, but no key. The leg well was filled with piles of books, which he removed. He then found the key on the carpet.
The inside of the bureau, with its small compartments and drawers, was much more organised than the chaos surrounding it. His father obviously hadn’t always been a hoarder, but Cross couldn’t recall exactly when it started. He always remembered it being this way. He found the ‘paid’ stamp and the ink pad for it, and boxes of transparencies. He looked at a couple. They were of his dad and best mate Phil – ‘Uncle Phil’ to George. In the centre of the leather inlay of the desk was a letter addressed to his father. The postmark was 1972. He realised it was from his mother. Cross had never read anything written by his mother. He couldn’t even remember the sound of her voice, he’d realised one day. She had formed no part of his life since she left when he was five.
He read the letter carefully, as his gang of helpers cleared up around him. They continued asking questions about what they’d found, but realised quite quickly that he was engrossed in whatever it was that he was reading, so they stopped bothering him. Anything they had doubts about, they put to one side. But they were getting pretty adept at sorting the chaff from the wheat anyway. Cross had insisted day one on giving his opinion about everything they found, but soon realised this was time-consuming and inefficient, so now they were good at discerning what was crap to be thrown out and what was crap that an old bugger of seventy-two would think of as indispensable. To their young eyes it was all crap.
From what he could tell, this was possibly the last letter Cross’s mother had sent to his father. The fact that it had been left out on the desk made Cross think that his father had probably read it and then left it there, locking up the desk that moment and never reopening it. As if that part of their life was now closed. But it was the last few sentences of the letter that Cross kept reading.
I can’t live with things like this. I cannot accept him the way that you want me to. He’s driven a wedge between us and we now live a life I no longer recognise. It is so far away from what I dreamt of when we first met. I hope you can see that. If when little George has grown up he wants to find me, let him know I would welcome it. But for now things will have to be this way. Christine.
So there it was in black and white. What he’d assumed all his life. What his father had never told him, doubtless to protect him. That his mother left because she couldn’t cope with him as a child. This was way before his diagnosis and he thought she probably just found him uncommunicative, recalcitrant, possibly rude and unloving. But the fact of the matter was that he’d wrecked his parents’ marriage. He wasn’t upset by this discovery but relieved, perhaps, that he finally knew the truth, as it was a topic of conversation his father had tried to avoid his entire life. He put the letter in his pocket, locked the bureau, found some fresh sellotape and put the key back in its proper place.
After four days the flat was clear, except for the furniture that was staying put. Mackenzie’s friends had done a terrific job. In many ways they had made the whole process almost enjoyable. Whenever they found something curious or odd, he would tell them stories of how his father had come across it and how he justified holding onto it, often with the most tenuous and outrageously funny reasoning. The young people ate their lunch together every day, and every lunchtime he refused their invitations to join them. That was a step too far for him. On the last day, as he paid them and they surveyed the empty space in front of them, he commented that all he needed to do now was get someone in to deep-clean the place and maybe give it a lick of paint.
‘We could do that for you,’ said Sanjeev.
‘Really?’ Cross asked.
‘Of course. We’d be a lot cheaper than getting professionals in,’ said Harry.
‘And probably a lot less professional too,’ Cross pointed out.
There was a pause and then the four kids laughed. Sanjeev could borrow the equipment off his dad’s firm and also get all the materials at trade prices. They could have it finished in a week.
Cross had to agree that anything they did would be an improvement on the current state of the place and, what was more, they were keen to do it and needed the money. But he had to be back at work the following week so they would be on their own.
Initially this was a stumbling block for him. Then Sanjeev’s father agreed to drop in every evening and inspect their work. It didn’t occur to Cross, but Mackenzie made a passing comment to Ottey about the effect he sometimes had on people who saw beyond the eccentric exterior – people would often go out of their way to help him, in any way they could.