Lucas’s attack on Diana put me in a dilemma. I knew how terrifying it was to be the focus of his anger and of course I could never excuse what he’d done. Nonetheless, that it had happened told me that he must be in a very poor emotional state: he would never behave like that unless under extreme duress. I agreed with Greg that I should telephone him. I rang for the first time the following evening, both on the landline and his mobile, but neither was answered. I left messages, too, but got no response.
It was three days before he called me back and, when he did, it was gone eleven and I could hear the drink in his voice again. He wasn’t angry: the tone of his voice was new. He sounded worn out now, and desperate. I tried to talk to him about Diana but he was moving the conversation in a different direction. He seemed to be edging around something, leading me up to it, then backing away as if he’d changed his mind. If I hadn’t known better, I would have questioned whether he was on drugs, his thought seemed so fractured. Eventually I asked him outright whether there was something he wanted to talk about. He ignored me at first and started asking questions about me: how my job was, the new flat. Then suddenly the dam seemed to give way. ‘I don’t know who I can trust any more,’ he said, and his voice was rushed and paranoid. ‘Can I trust you?’
‘I found something out.’
‘What, Lucas?’ I asked.
‘Everything’s fucked up. It’s so fucked up.’ His voice was getting louder, as if he couldn’t express how he felt except in volume.
‘Tell me. I might be able to help.’ I tried to sound calm but my heart was beginning to beat faster.
‘I can’t. I can’t.’
‘Lucas, anything – and I do mean anything – you tell me stays secret. Whatever it is. If you need to talk to someone, you can talk to me.’
‘Promise me.’
‘I promise,’ I said.
He still havered. I heard him open his mouth as if to speak and then bite back the words again, as though they had tried to escape him and he had caught them at the last possible moment.
‘Anything, Lucas.’
Then he spat it at me, as if he couldn’t bear to have it in his mouth a second longer. ‘My father killed him.’
Now I really began to worry about his mental state. We had all heard what Justin had said about that day and it had been obvious that he was telling the truth. Clearly Lucas was very confused.
‘Don’t you understand, Joanna?’ he said, frustrated at my lack of response. ‘He killed Patrick.’
‘Lucas, Patrick committed suicide,’ I said.
‘Stop talking to me like I’m mad,’ he shouted at me. ‘I’m not mad. I’m telling you, my father killed Patrick. He made it look like suicide. The night he came back, he had a gun. He sat upstairs with Patrick and watched while he swallowed the pills. He made him do it. He said unless he did it, he’d shoot him.’
I closed my eyes, his words beginning to make horrible sense. ‘How do you know this?’ I said at last.
‘Where is he now?’
‘Gone.’
‘Why did he tell you, Lucas?’
‘We’ve been trying to get to know each other, you know that. Patrick was all we talked about – he was our common enemy. He was about all we had in common, actually.’ He laughed bitterly and the sound of it brought the hairs up on my arms. ‘And then yesterday he told me. Like he was proud of it. He thought I’d congratulate him. I told you – it’s fucked up. When he found out about Mum, he went back to Morocco to think about what he was going to do. He wasn’t working out a way to see me at all. He was making a plan. Then he came here and did it. He murdered him. My uncle left some poor bastard to die and my dad’s a murderer. Tesus Christ.’
‘Do you know where he’s gone?’ I said, concentrating on facts to try and still the ground, which was again shifting beneath me.
There was a long pause before he spoke again. I realised that he was crying. ‘No, and I don’t want to know. He’s gone and that’s it. I never want to see him again. I might have hated Patrick when I found out what he did but now I hate them both. What Patrick did was … but killing him …’
‘Are you going to tell anyone? The police?’
‘No. It’s time to bury it. Forget my whole sick family. Forget they ever existed. I just want it all to be over.’ His voice changed again, the paranoia returning. ‘You’re not going to tell anyone, are you? You promised.’
‘No, I’m not going to tell anyone. What happens is entirely up to you.’
‘Nothing’s going to happen. It’s finished.’
I didn’t sleep that night. What he had told me about his father was shocking, of course, but I had developed a sort of immunity when it came to stories about his family, as if I had been exposed to so many that I’d built up a natural internal defence. If I’d heard the same about anyone else’s father, it would have been overwhelming but the Heathfields had lost their power to horrify me now. The real shock had been Lucas, his disturbance, the paranoia that seemed to verge on the pathological. He needed help but I couldn’t work out how I could give it to him. He was like an animal so badly beaten that it had lost the ability to let people show it kindness.