Weston

He wrote the plan on Thursday night at the table in his own flat, on the back of an envelope, with the chewed biro, because that was how he had always written them first.

Sat 20. Weston. Depart 12:30. On plot 14:00. Off plot 15:00. Local car in the road from 10:00. Mrs M told at 10:00, by phone, visitors for tea, no names.

Then the cars.

He wrote Car 1: Rashid (drv), Pryor, principal, and looked at it.

It was the ordinary way. It was the way he would have written it for anybody: the senior officer in the principal’s car, in the front, where he could see the road and the mirror at once. It kept every term she had given him. Rashid would be at the wheel the whole way; there would never be a moment when he was alone with her in a car. And it would put her behind his shoulder for an hour and a half down the motorway and along the front at Weston with the sea out, and an hour and a half back, and he would have the sun-visor mirror down.

He knew what that hour and a half would be. That was why he was looking at it.

He crossed it out. He wrote Car 1: Gill (drv), Rashid, principal. Car 2: Pryor. Then he sat with the envelope for a while longer, in a flat with nothing on the walls, and was not sorry, and was not glad either.

· · ·Scene break

“Saturday,” he said to her at nine on Friday, in the kitchen, and put the envelope on the table.

She did not pick it up. She read it where it lay, all of it, and then the top again.

“Why now?” she said. “You said not this week. You didn’t say why next week was different.”

“Because the week they’d look hardest is gone. Because there’s been a car from the local station through your mother’s road twice a day since the ninth, and they’ve seen nothing but the post. Because it’s a Saturday afternoon and nobody’s told, not even her, till the morning. And because you asked, and you gave me a term, and I can’t give you a better why not.” He looked at the envelope, not at her. “It’s somewhere anyone could look. That’s still true. So it’s an hour, and it’s two cars, and when I say we go, we go.”

“An hour.”

“An hour.”

She looked at the cars. He saw her eyes go down the list and stop at the second line, at his name by itself. She knew the ordinary way of doing it; she had sat in the back of three cars with him in the front of them. She did not ask. She read it the way she had read the petrol receipt, and filed it, and he watched the drawer shut.

“Fine,” she said. And then, because she could not help it: “Jas is on nights.”

“I’ve asked her to do the day. She’s the best driver in the unit.”

It was true. It was the reason he would have given anybody. It was not the whole reason, and she knew it was not, and they had agreed at ten to six on Tuesday that the rest of it was not to be said; and so she said, “That’s a reason,” and he said, “It is,” and Rashid, coming in with the rolls, said, “What is?”

He had rung Jas at eight.

“You want me on a day,” she had said.

“We want the best driver in the unit on the Weston road.”

“We.” She let it sit on the line. “Fine. I’ll want Sunday night off.”

“You’ll have it.”

“I know I will,” said Jas, and rang off.

· · ·Scene break

He drove the second car and watched the back of Esther’s head through two windscreens.

She sat behind Rashid, on the left, and did not look round, not once, all the way down the motorway, and he did not expect her to. At the coast the road came off the hills and the sky opened and there was the bay, and the tide was out the way it always seemed to be out at Weston, the sea a grey line a mile off beyond the mud, and the pier going out towards it as if it had been sent to fetch it back.

The local car had been in Pat Mayhew’s road since ten. Nobody had come or gone but a man with a paper and the woman at number nine with her recycling.

The bungalow was pebbledash, with a porch and a square of gravel where a lawn had been, and the door opened before Jas had the handbrake on.

Pat Mayhew was small and square and wore a cardigan with the sleeves pushed up, and she did not run down the path, which he had half expected. She stood in the porch with one hand on the frame and waited for her daughter to come to her, and when Esther did, Pat put both arms round her and held on and said nothing at all, for longer than he had ever heard her say nothing on the phone.

He looked at the road.

· · ·Scene break

There was a tray on the front-room table with cheese scones on it, and a sponge, and a teapot in a knitted cosy, and five cups. Pat had counted them in; somebody had told her visitors, and she had worked out the rest.

“Sit down,” she said to Jas, and Jas sat, and took a scone, and Rashid took two out to the cars on a plate.

“Sit down,” Pat said to him.

“I’m all right here, Mrs Mayhew. Thank you.”

He stood at the window, to one side of it, where he could see the gate and the road and the local car at the end, and the room behind him in the glass. There were two armchairs, and a settee, and by the window a small table with the phone on it and a chair beside it, a straight wooden chair with a flat cushion that had taken the shape of one person over a long time. He knew what it was. Sundays, the same time, for eleven years.

Esther sat on the settee with her mother. They talked about nothing: the woman at number nine, the price of the parking on the front, a cousin’s boy who had gone to Canada. Pat said Esther looked thin, and Esther said she had been eating soup, and Pat said, “I know, I’ve been told,” and looked at him in the glass.

Once, only once, Pat put her hand on her daughter’s knee and said, quietly, “Are you all right, love?” in a different voice, and Esther said, “Yes,” and then, “No. Mostly,” and Pat said, “That’ll do,” and took her hand back.

He looked at the road.

At twenty to three Pat stood up and said, “You can make yourself useful,” to him, and gave him the tray.

He carried it into the kitchen because there was no way not to. It was a small kitchen, very clean, with a calendar from a garden centre and a spider plant on the sill. From the doorway he could still see the front door and the hall. He put the tray down on the counter and Pat ran the tap.

“You’re the one who doesn’t sit down,” she said, to the tap.

He did not answer at once. She turned the tap off.

“She said. On the phone. Sunday.” Pat dried her hands on a tea towel and looked at him, not unkindly, the way he supposed she had looked at a line of children with trays, working out which one was going to drop his. “She said there’s one who doesn’t sit down.”

“No, Mrs Mayhew,” he said. “I don’t.”

“No,” said Pat. “I can see that.”

She hung the tea towel on the oven door and straightened it. She did not say anything else. She looked at him for a moment longer, and he stood in her kitchen and let her, the way he had let her daughter look at him across a table in the cottage; and then she went past him into the hall and said, in her telephone voice, “Right. Who wants the rest of this sponge?”

· · ·Scene break

He called it at three.

Jas went out first and brought the car to the kerb and sat with the engine running. Rashid was behind in the second, at the wheel, because Aled would walk Esther out and there was no sense in two officers on a pavement. Pat stood in the porch. Esther hugged her once, hard, and came down the path, and he walked on her left, between her and the road, a half-step behind.

The man came along the pavement from the right.

Forties. Grey anorak, hood down, hands in his pockets. A man walking home from the shop at three on a Saturday, and Aled had him from forty yards and watched him the whole way, his hands, his pace, the line he walked, and there was nothing in any of it. He did not change speed. He did not look at the car.

At the gate he looked at Esther.

“Esther,” he said. Friendly. The way a neighbour says it.

She stopped. Aled’s hand came up, open, not touching her, between her and the man; he was already moving her with his body towards the car, the half-step turning into a step.

“Some money doesn’t like to be counted, Miss Mayhew,” the man said, pleasantly, and walked on.

He did not hurry. He went on along the pavement and round the corner by the post box, and he did not look back, and the whole of it had taken less time than it took to open a car door.

Aled opened the car door.

“In,” he said. “Now. Head down.”

She was in. He shut the door on her and was in the front passenger seat of Jas’s car before he had thought about which car he was getting into; it was the car at the kerb, and she was in it. “Go,” he said, and Jas went, and he had the radio up and was giving the local car the man, the anorak, the corner by the post box, the direction, in a voice he recognised as his own and did not remember choosing.

In the mirror on the sun visor Esther sat very upright in the back, with her hands in her lap, looking at nothing.

“Rashid’s got the other car,” he said, without turning round. “I’m with you now because of him. That’s all it is.”

“I know,” she said.

· · ·Scene break

The roundabout was at the edge of the town, a big one, with a retail park on one side and the motorway signs on the other. Jas took it in the outside lane, not fast, with Rashid two lengths back.

The car came up on the inside.

He saw it late, because it had come through the retail park and not along the road: a dark saloon, no front plate, too fast for the roundabout. It did not try to pass. It came up level with their back wheel and turned into them.

The noise was very loud and very short. The car slewed. The back end went out and the world went sideways through the windscreen, the signs, a lamp post, the grass of the middle going round, and Jas said something that was not a word and put her hands where they needed to be, and the car came back under her.

He had turned in his seat before he knew it. He put his hand on the top of Esther’s head and pushed her down, hard, flat across the back seat, below the line of the windows.

He held her there. Two seconds. Perhaps three. He could feel her hair under his palm, and the shape of her skull, and her whole body gone rigid under the belt.

“Stay down,” he said.

Jas took them off at the wrong exit, onto the dual carriageway, and put her foot to the floor. Behind them Rashid came across the roundabout and put the second car between them and whatever was behind, and the dark saloon was not behind; it had gone off the next exit, towards the town, and was gone.

He took his hand away.

Nobody said anything for half a mile.

“Everybody all right?” said Jas. Her voice was perfectly steady and her right hand was shaking on the wheel.

“Yes,” he said. “Esther.”

“Yes.” She had sat up. She had her hand on her collarbone, where the belt had caught her, and her hair was pushed the wrong way on one side, where his hand had been. “Yes. I’m all right.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have asked.”

“Don’t,” she said.

He looked at her in the mirror. She was looking back at him, in the mirror, very white.

“Don’t,” she said again, more quietly. “Not that. You don’t have to be sorry for that.”

· · ·Scene break

They were all right. That was how the log put it, afterwards, and it was true. Esther had a bruise across her collarbone the width of a belt. Jas had jarred her wrist on the wheel and would not let anyone look at it. He had hit the side of his face on the door frame when he turned and not noticed until Rashid said, in the services car park, “You’re bleeding, you know.”

The saloon had been stolen that morning from outside a supermarket, and was found at six in a lane eight miles off with its doors open. The man in the grey anorak was not found at all. The local car had reached the corner by the post box in under a minute, and there had been nobody beyond it but a woman with a pushchair, who had seen a man go past in a coat, she thought grey.

Adair rang at seven. He told her. She listened without interrupting, which was how he knew how angry she was, and at the end she said, “Is she going to want the screen now?”

“You’d have to ask her, ma’am.”

“I will,” said Adair. “Or the Crown will. Write it up tonight.”

He wrote it up in the front room of the flat over the bakery, at the desk with the monitor, after Jas had gone home with her wrist and the relief had come on for the night. He wrote it the way he wrote everything: times, places, who was where. He wrote physical contact on its own line, because there had been, and after it: 15:14 approx. Hand to principal’s head to lower her below window line during collision at roundabout. Approx three seconds. Not asked. Explained and apologised for at the time. He read it back. It was the only line of its kind in the log for this operation, and he meant it to be the only one there ever was.

Then he wrote down what the man had said.

The male said, “Esther.” He then said, “Some money doesn’t like to be counted, Miss Mayhew.”

He stopped, with the pen on the paper.

Some money doesn’t. He had heard those three words before. In the cottage kitchen, on the Wednesday afternoon, with the rain on the window, in her voice, going fast; and then he had been in the hall with the door shut behind him, before the fourth.

He sat very still at the desk.

It was hers. It was the thing she had started to tell him, and he had left the room so as not to hear. It was, he understood now, what she would say in Court Three with her hand on the card, the thing the whole three weeks was for. And he had not heard it from her; the rule had held. He had heard it on a pavement in Weston from a man in a grey anorak who had it word for word, down to the Miss, and who had wanted her to know that he had it.

It was out in the street now. Whoever sent the man had had it all along. They had only wanted her to hear it said somewhere she had thought was hers.

He finished the statement and signed it. He read it through once more and did not change a word, because every word was true.

Then he sat in the lit front room, with the curtains drawn on the street she was not allowed to look at, and thought about the cottage kitchen, and her voice going fast, and how she had said afterwards, That was before I knew what it would feel like. She had wanted to give him that sentence herself. He had known it then without letting himself know it. She had wanted to hand it to the one person who would not write it down.

And now he had written it down, in a police statement, in his own hand, because a stranger had given it to him in the street. And she had been standing at his shoulder when it happened.

He did not know whether she had thought of that yet. He thought she would have. He thought she would have thought of it before the car door shut.