My leave ended. Work could only stretch compassion so far, especially when it had been more for appearances’ sake, and I hadn’t needed the hours of quiet time to organise a funeral or to mourn. The week had been broken by the occasional phone call from the police, checking on details, and my somewhat unhelpful trip to the moors, but otherwise I’d mainly spent it lying on the sofa reading my way through the month’s output of women’s magazines and eating toast. I couldn’t bear to go back to work early because I was hoping that the week would give them all enough time to talk about me and Grant and how awful it had been that he’d left me and then died – raking over the old details until there was nothing left but a gentle sympathy and an extra chocolate biscuit left on my desk at coffee break.
So I went back to the job that gave some kind of purpose to my life. Answering the telephone and emails for a company who made and fitted windows – it was hardly anything to boast about, but it was steady, I knew the work so well I could do it whilst thinking about other things, and it paid sufficiently for me not to have to share my living space with a lodger. But it also left me time to dwell. Time to linger on the past and the questions. What the hell was the Grant I’d known doing ghost hunting? What had driven him out to that isolated spot alone late one night? The police had pinpointed the time of the explosion that had demolished the Fortune House to around one in the morning. At this time of year, darkness only really descended after half past eleven and light was already struggling back into the world by three, so one o’clock would have been during that brief summer night. Why would Grant have been up on the moors in the dark? What was he doing in there?
And then I wondered about ghosts. Had Grant thought he’d seen something during a previous visit, and returned alone to check it out in the black of night? Why wouldn’t he have told Max – the driving force behind the investigation?
My brain wouldn’t let it go. I kept trying to dismiss all the thoughts about Grant, to stop trying to overlay the Grant I had known onto the Grant that Max and Jenna had told me about, but I couldn’t. Grant had never done anything on a whim. His job as a freelance tech consultant could largely be done from the living room, and he’d maintained there was nothing outdoors compelling enough to force him into ‘good’ clothes and out of the door. And yet Max had insisted Grant had had an interest in the Fortune House?
When he’d only taken the most cursory interest in me?
The thoughts itched away in the back of my brain, like a mosquito bite that you rub away at thoughtlessly until it’s the size of your hand. Niggle, niggle, niggle, waking me up in the middle of the night to remember arguments, where my desire to go out, see things that I’d never seen before had collided with Grant’s desire to watch detective shows or lie sprawled on the sofa, ‘meditating’.
When I got home from work the next day, there was a motorbike parked outside my door and a black-leathered figure was sitting on it, idly poking at the kerb with a booted toe.
‘Max?’ I half-whispered his name as my brain ran through all the scenarios it could come up with to explain why on earth Max Allbright would be outside my house. Or even how Max Allbright would know where I lived, let alone why he should care. I had to park several houses up and walk down. I hoped it wasn’t actually a lost hitman or a lookout man for a burglar.
The leather-clad figure took off its helmet. It wasn’t Max, but then again, it wasn’t a hitman. It was Jenna. Her eyes were red, but her hair was still blonde and long and silky. I found I was running my fingers through my lopsided ‘needs a hairdresser’ crop and forced myself to drop my hands.
‘Sorry, Alice. I’m really sorry. I just wanted to be somewhere Grant used go. He used to talk about living here and I really, really want to talk about him to someone who knew him. Max is trying, but he’s getting a bit tired of me, I think.’
‘Grant hadn’t lived here for years! And I’m not sure there’s anything I can tell you about him that you don’t already know.’ I put the key in the door, wavering. This house had become my sanctuary, I didn’t invite people round. It was my private place. Then I looked at her swollen eyes and drawn face and relented. ‘Come in and have a cup of tea.’
After all, the main reason I didn’t invite people round was that I didn’t have anyone to invite round. I wanted to have a romanticised notion of myself as a lone wolf, a prowler in shadows who lived a carefully guarded solitary life, but the sight of a week’s worth of dirty washing piled across the kitchen entrance and one shoe casually discarded on the sofa contrasted with the leggy sophisticated form of my visitor and made me realise that I was two weeks away from filling the place with stray cats.
‘Thank you.’ Jenna sat down on the sofa with a creak of leather. ‘It’s really nice of you to be so understanding, what with – well, our different relationships with Grant.’
‘He didn’t leave me for you.’ I tried to tidy up unobtrusively, but her eyes seemed to be drawn to the walls and I’m not sure she’d have noticed me recovering the sofa and hanging new curtains. ‘Otherwise I might be going for you with the kitchen scissors, but anyhow. None of it was your fault.’
‘He used to talk about you, you know,’ Jenna said. I’d gone through to the kitchen, and very nearly dropped the entire tea caddy in the sink.
‘Did he? How strange. He hardly talked to me when we were together.’
‘Grant was…’ Jenna tailed off, as though she was searching for a metaphor. I, standing at the chilly, chipped sink with my feet on the crunchy edge of worn vinyl flooring, had a few I could have lent her, but I stayed quietly making tea. Being practical. Being Alice. ‘He felt he’d made some bad decisions over the years. He was sad that he hurt you.’
I popped my head back through, to see her looking out of the little front window onto the narrow street. Mrs Henkus from number eleven was putting out her bin, it was hardly a view. I wondered what Jenna was really seeing. Grant, looking decisive and manly, clearing out the guttering on a stepladder? That had never happened.
‘He didn’t hurt me that badly.’ I poured boiling water onto tea bags; the domestic smell was reassuring. ‘Not really. Our marriage was pretty much over before it started, we were like a couple of housemates. We were friendly enough, we didn’t argue or anything, but it wasn’t a grand passion for either of us.’
‘Why did you get married?’ Jenna leaned forward, elbows on her knees. I wasn’t sure what to say. I’d dealt with Grant leaving, I’d dealt with his death. And I didn’t want any of my confidences about the fact that I’d married Grant because he was the only man to ever get close enough for me to have a sniff of coupledom to get back to Max.
‘My parents were both very ill all of my life.’ I put the tea mugs down on the coffee table. It never got used as anything other than a footstool, so now was its time to shine. Although it would absolutely be a figurative shine, the table hadn’t seen a can of Pledge for years. ‘My mum wanted to see me settled before she – well. She needed to know I’d be all right. My brother was already married and working in Scotland, she wanted me to have a life, I suppose.’
‘So you got married to please your mother?’ Jenna sounded a bit happier now. I wondered what Grant had told her about our relationship. I wondered how much of our relationship he had been able to remember, being that most of it had consisted of him watching football in his pants.
‘It was one reason.’ I sat in the never-used armchair and wondered if getting cats was really so bad as an option.
We sat and sipped our tea. A weird kind of silence had descended, broken only by the sound of the children next door to the right playing a game that involved shrieking and bouncing one another off the party wall, and I still wasn’t sure how I felt about having Jenna here. She was gazing around the room as though molecules of Grant were still here and she could reassemble him.
‘So, how did you meet?’
She put her cup down and stood up, restless, creaking in her leathers. ‘He came to sort out our computer network at the house. We just sort of clicked.’
That was also odd. Grant didn’t deal in domestic computers, he only installed company-wide systems. It had been how he’d met me.
‘So do you work with computers?’ I asked idly, watching her pace the floor, stare at the spines of my books on the bookcase that was starting to sag at the shelves, peer at the photograph of my brother and his wife and their children on the mantelpiece.
‘Not really.’ She tilted her head again and, almost unconsciously, bunched her hair behind her head into one hand. She looked very young. Then she turned around to face me and her eyes were old with a depth of sorrow and loss I could only imagine. ‘Tell me about Grant, Alice, please. Tell me everything he told you, about his childhood and his family and his favourite places.’
I looked at that fragile, slim figure and those reddening eyes. ‘I’m not sure it will do you any good,’ I said gently. ‘He’s gone, Jenna.’
‘I need…’ She paced again and it came home to me how strange the situation was. Ex-wife, bereaved girlfriend, bonding over Grant. ‘I need to talk about him.’
I’d told Max he needed to listen, hadn’t I? I could hardly be so hypocritical as to refuse to listen to her request myself. So I raked back through my memory for all the things Grant had told me about his boyhood, his teenage years. His upbringing, with a widowed mother in a rattly old house in Bristol. His degree in computer engineering from York, his freelance work setting up computer networks and ensuring their smooth running. His love of football and food and his lack of ability to cook. By the time I’d finished, I almost missed him myself.
‘Thank you.’ Jenna breathed the words. Her shoulders had dropped, I noticed, she wasn’t hunched as much as she had been on arrival. ‘At least now I know he didn’t lie about anything, and you’ve filled in some gaps for me.’ She stood up. ‘I ought to go. Max will be wondering where I am, and he’ll be worrying. He worries about me, you see. He doesn’t need to, but he does.’
Looking at her huge eyes with the smudgy purple shadows underneath, I thought she was wrong. ‘You see a lot of one another?’ It was a casual question, but I was really trying to establish something of Max – did he have a wife who complained about the time he was spending with his sister? A life of debauchery and recklessness broken into only by the need to care for her?
‘We live together,’ she said, surprising me. ‘Our place was left to Max when Father died, and he’s letting me stay on until…’ Her voice trailed off. ‘Grant and I were going to move into a little cottage,’ she said sadly. ‘When…’
‘I know about the baby,’ I said gently. ‘Max told me. I’m sorry.’
Her eyes had filled again. I contemplated offering her another cup of tea, but she was already heading towards the front door, determination in her steps. ‘Grant would have made a good dad.’ There was a tone in her voice that sounded as though she were contradicting someone. ‘He really would.’
I couldn’t answer that. So I opened the door for her, and she passed in a swish of expensive scent, a whirl of hair and the vaguely animal smell of the leathers. When she got to the doorstep, she turned around. ‘You’ve got questions too, haven’t you?’ she asked. ‘I saw you, at the inquest, and you wouldn’t have gone if you didn’t think there was more to this than Grant being in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
Next Door Left’s front door creaked open, and I waved a hand automatically at my neighbour, who passed us with a curious look, his small black dog straining at the lead. ‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘But then, so much had changed over the years since I saw him last, it was mostly curiosity. It sounded so unlike Grant to get himself blown up in the middle of the night out on the moors. If he’d been electrocuted changing channels on the TV with a bag of peanuts in his lap, I wouldn’t have gone, that’s pretty much how I always expected him to die.’
‘The police will be stripping the site down completely soon,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Max is trying to get the last bits of research done for his book before there’s no building left. Why don’t you come back up there tomorrow and we can look for clues?’
‘Clues,’ I said flatly. ‘Jenna, that’s what the police are doing.’
‘No, they aren’t!’ She was practically jittering now. ‘They think it was just a weird accident with a leaky gas valve! All they are doing is making sure that the site is safe and there’s nothing more…’ She tailed off, stopped, sniffed and went on, ‘…that there’s really no body left to find. Please, Alice, come back up and we can look around together. Maybe see whatever it was that made Grant want to go back up there that night.’
I wanted to tell her that this was real life, not an episode of Midsomer Murders. That we were very unlikely to see a ghost that turned out to be a smuggler hiding out in the Fortune House, with Grant trying to prove the existence of the paranormal and being blown up to cover nefarious crimes. Actually, forget Midsomer Murders, wasn’t that actually the plot of an Enid Blyton book?
But one look at Jenna’s face stopped me. Her eyes had lost the flat misery and gained a degree of animation. There was a tinge of colour in her cheeks too. I remembered what Max had said about her issues with food – if I refused to go along with her, would it send her into a spiral of not eating? Was it better to pretend there might be something to find up on the moors, purely for her mental health? Plus, well, Max might be there…
‘Well, I could,’ I said slowly. ‘But it’s a bit of a hike.’
Jenna smiled now, and never mind seeing what Grant had seen in her, I practically fancied her myself. Her whole face became rounder and more lively, she sparked with life and energy and the kind of radiant beauty that I could never have been accused of. ‘We’ll meet you at six, up at the parking spot,’ she said. ‘I can give you a lift over, save you the walk. Thank you, Alice. This means a lot.’ She pulled her helmet on and even managed to look gorgeous with all her features squashed by its padding. ‘And thank you for the tea and talking to me.’
She threw a leg over the bike, and it started with a roar that was going to attract the attention of everyone in the street. By tomorrow, they’d probably have constructed a story whereby I was the mastermind of an international drug smuggling ring, I thought, and then reassured myself that I was just still suffering the backwash of Jenna’s Scooby Doo mindset, and went inside to make an attempt to clean the kitchen floor.