Page 22 of The Tapes

SEVENTEEN

I regret quitting my job the moment I walk out the gates.

I had around thirty seconds of satisfaction at seeing Mark’s face until it dawned that I have no easy way of paying the mortgage.

I have some savings, but not much. Suddenly, clearing Dad’s house so it can be sold has become a necessity – which is not the way I want to think about my father.

I don’t necessarily have to declare my past now so much time has gone by – but I’ve had the same job for more than six years. I’m going to have to explain to any potential employer why I don’t have a reference for that time.

What a mess.

I sit in my car for ten minutes, partially hoping Mark will follow me out to ask if I want to change my mind.

I know he won’t, because it would be too close to an apology, which is something he doesn’t do.

Not that I can complain, considering I could say sorry and ask for him to take me back – but I definitely won’t.

Those ten minutes pass but it’s impossible not to stop my mind drifting to Mum’s tapes and the jewellery box she says she found.

I veer from believing her to not. The conversation with my brother still sticks as well.

I’ve not heard a thing from him since the talk yesterday and yet, as well as his dig about Jake Rowett, there was something else he said. Something that’s niggling.

With no job, I find myself driving out of town, still considering calling Mark to see if he’ll pick up and forgive me. Still not doing it.

The sign for the rugby club is battered and weather-worn.

It’s advertising the season’s start in a few weeks, plus training camps for the next half-term.

I pull into the dusty car park, sending a scattering of small stones skittering towards the vast expanse of pitches.

Someone’s on a ride-on mower in the distance but the area is otherwise empty.

There are signs to stay off the pitch, then rows of advertising hoardings for local businesses.

I’ve been here once before. It would have been someone’s baby shower, where they’d rented the function room, or possibly a christening. Something like that.

I head towards the main clubhouse, where a large banner is advertising an upcoming dinner dance. Around the back and a pair of cars are parked by a giant wheelie bin. I ignore those and follow the gravel until I reach a cottage that’s largely overrun by a mangled web of ivy.

It’s a long shot after so many years and yet, somehow, I know there will be at least some answers here.

A woman is watering a flower bed at the front of the house. She’s wearing foam knee pads and gloves, humming to herself with her back to me as I approach. I wait, trying not to startle her – which fails, because, when she turns, she leaps back a step.

‘Didn’t see you there,’ she squeaks.

She pulls off a glove, then lowers her glasses to peer over them.

‘Eve…?’

I nod and she puts down the watering can, then takes off her other glove. ‘I heard about Bruce,’ she says quietly. ‘I didn’t want to, um… well, bother you, I suppose. I didn’t know whether you knew about me.’

My father walked out on nine-year-old me to spend three months living here with this woman.

It’s thirty years ago and I don’t let on that I only found out about it properly the day before.

Perhaps it’s because I used up my well of anger with Mark but I’m struck by a twinge of pity for Harriet.

She must be seventy and I can almost hear the creak as she stands up straighter.

She looks exhausted, as if permanently on the brink of a yawn that won’t quite come.

‘I appreciate you coming,’ she says. ‘I’ve been thinking about you ever since I heard.’

She looks at me so earnestly, this complete stranger, yet I know it’s the truth.

‘It’s the funeral tomorrow,’ I find myself saying. ‘I was wondering if you wanted to come.’

It’s not the reason I visited, yet maybe it is.

Harriet glances away and lets out a long huff, before finding a tissue in her pocket. She blows her nose and waves a hand in front of her face.

‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I didn’t expect this. I don’t want to impose on anyone.’

‘It’s fine. I think I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a while.’

Harriet nods, taking the lie at face value. She gulps, then wipes her hands on her sides, before nodding towards the club house. ‘They do lunch every day,’ she says. ‘I’m life president, and it’s not worth having perks unless you use them. Do you fancy something to eat? I know it’s early.’

She’s right about that but I didn’t eat breakfast and my gurgling stomach reminds me as much.

Harriet takes a few steps, then remembers the knee pads.

She crouches to remove them and then ekes her way up.

After that, she leads the way towards the club, then uses a key to open the back door.

We end up in a large reception room with floor-to-ceiling bay windows that overlook the pitches.

A man is mopping a floor on the far side but he stops and checks his watch.

‘You’re early,’ he says.

‘I’ve got a friend today,’ Harriet tells him. ‘Is it too early for food?’

He tells her everything’s fine, then takes a menu from the bar and passes it across.

Harriet tells him she’ll have the usual, so he offers an enthusiastic ‘of course’, before heading to the coffee machine.

Meanwhile, Harriet leads me to the small table in the centre of the window, giving us a sweeping view.

‘This is the president’s table,’ she says, and there’s a whisper of glee at the pomposity of it all.

She waves a hand towards the pitches. ‘My dad owned all this land back in the day. He sold it to the rugby club for a pound when they were looking for a site. It was all history for him because he grew up in a Welsh mining town. They made him life president but he insisted it was a hereditary title, which is why this is all mine.’

She laughs a fraction and catches my eye, wanting me to know it’s a joke, that she doesn’t take herself this seriously. I smile as she points to the menu. ‘I always have the club sandwich. Brian’s the bar manager and makes it as good as anyone.’

As if on cue, Brian reappears with a black coffee that he places in front of Harriet.

He asks what I want, so I say I’ll have the same as Harriet – and then he heads back to the coffee machine for round two.

We sit quietly for a moment, watching the guy on the mower, who’s ploughing a straight line widthways across one of the pitches.

‘If it’s any consolation,’ she says, quieter now, ‘I know it probably isn’t – but your father and I really did have feelings for one another.

Nothing happened the way I wanted it to.

I told him not to leave you, or your mum.

I kept saying it but him and me weren’t this spur-of-the-moment thing.

Your dad would say he and Angela were incompatible.

She was outdoorsy, he wasn’t. Other things too.

I said he couldn’t walk out on his family. I really did tell him.’

Outdoorsy was the least of it, I’m sure.

Harriet cuts off because Brian returns with a second coffee for me.

He almost drops the cup as he lowers it, then apologises, before heading to the kitchen.

There’s a different type of quiet now because Harriet was right about one thing: it isn’t a consolation.

Nobody wants to hear their parent walked out on them to be with another person.

I’m thinking of Mum and the way she told nine-year-old me that Dad was working away: how she kept that up for months, knowing he was on the other side of town.

‘I don’t think Mum deserved that,’ I say carefully, except there’s no disagreement from the other side of the table.

‘Neither did my husband from the time. I’m not trying to justify anything – and I would change almost everything that happened.

I suppose I wanted you to know that it wasn’t a pointless fling.

There were feelings.’ She waits and there’s a mawkish melancholy between us because we’ve both lost the same person, even though he meant different things to each of us.

‘Your mum didn’t want to poison him against you,’ Harriet adds, even quieter. ‘I know he appreciated that. I think we all knew things would go back to how they were after a while.’

If it hadn’t been for seeing Mark earlier in the day, I know there’d be a fury I would struggle to contain, but, in the moment, I’m limp and defeated by it all. Dad walking out happened thirty years ago and almost everybody involved is now dead.

‘Did you have any kids at the time?’ I ask.

‘No. I never could. I suppose when I’m gone, the club will need a new president.’

She doesn’t laugh this time and the swathe of lush green pitches suddenly has a bleakness that wasn’t there before.

Brian is suddenly back, two plates of sandwiches that he places in front of us. He checks that everything else is fine and then returns to mopping the floor in the furthest corner. Neither Harriet or I reach for the food. I still haven’t brought up the real reason I came.

Dad walked out at almost the exact time of the first Earring Killer murder. If Mum is telling the truth in her tapes, there’s a link from my family to the killer somewhere.

Not that I can say as much so openly.

‘What was Dad like when he was with you?’ I ask.

Harriet shifts for the first time in a while, probably wondering why I’m asking.

She looks to me momentarily but then turns back to the field.

‘I think he and I both knew it was a mistake,’ she says.

‘You don’t want to know specific details but it took a bit of time for us both to admit it.

He missed you and there were a couple of days he went to the school.

He’d watch from a distance as your mum picked you up?—’

‘Really?’

The older woman catches my eye again, wanting me to know this is true.

‘He really did love and miss you. Maybe he missed your mum as well? He used to go out in the evenings and sometimes didn’t come back.

I wondered if he’d returned to you but then he’d be back the next morning, saying he’d been out walking all night, thinking things over. ’

It’s not what I wanted to hear and I almost have to tell her to stop.

The idea of Dad disappearing for entire nights at the same time as the Earring Killer chose his first victim is beyond comprehension.

I figured there’d be a coincidence of timing that could be cleared up with this talk. Instead, everything is much worse.

Harriet notices because she leans in. ‘Are you OK?’

I tell her I am but my mind is racing far away from this rugby club. On the tape, Mum said she found a jewellery box filled with earrings – but it was unclear from where she’d taken it. I assumed she meant somebody else’s house but was she talking about something Dad had hidden away?

It’s impossible.

‘Your brother came over a few times,’ Harriet says. ‘He’d sit and talk to your dad. I think your father enjoyed the company because he was feeling cut off.’

That explains how Peter knew where Dad had gone. He’d have been nineteen, maybe twenty at the time.

Harriet pauses a moment, perhaps considering whether to say something. ‘I asked your brother to leave one time because he was ordering me around in my own house, being really disrespectful.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘A woman’s place, and all that. Seemed to think I should be cooking for him, waiting on him, clearing up after him.

That sort of thing. I never saw him after that.

Your dad said he agreed with me but he already felt alienated.

He didn’t say anything to your brother and just let me deal with it.

I think that was probably the final straw for us, really.

If Bruce couldn’t stick up for me, what was the point of it all? ’

It’s something that feels both surprising and not. Entirely in keeping with my experience of Peter, of course. I’ve often wondered if he’s a nob in general, or only when it comes to women. It’s almost heartening that it isn’t only me he has a problem with. An equal-opportunity nob.

The sandwich is untouched but I should probably go. I came hoping for some sort of exoneration, or explanation of a timing coincidence. Instead, I have more questions than answers.

There’s no ill-will towards Harriet, not really. She’s welcome to come to the funeral but, at the same time, I don’t think I want to be around her.

The lie is ready and perhaps I should be worried at how easily it comes. ‘I found a jewellery box in Dad’s things,’ I say. ‘There are flowers engraved on the side but I don’t think it’s Mum’s. I wondered if it might be yours?’

There’s a moment in which I think Harriet’s about to say that it is hers.

That she’s been searching for it all these years.

That I’ll have to admit that Dad took it.

Except she shakes her head. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever owned one,’ she says.

‘Let alone lost one. I wasn’t particularly precious about that sort of thing.

’ She holds up her left hand, showing a single ring on her index finger.

‘This is the only jewellery I ever wear. I never saw the point – but thank you for thinking of me. I hope you find the owner.’

So that’s it. No link between Harriet and the Earring Killer, assuming she’s telling the truth.

She reaches for her sandwich as I stare out towards the pitches and the mower once more, trying to think of the politest way to leave.

As if on cue, my bag buzzes, so I retrieve my phone. There’s a text from Dina and I assume she’s just found out that I quit. She’ll be asking what happened, and I’ll have to decide whether I want to feed the gossip mill.

Except her text isn’t about that at all.

Have you heard about Owen?

My first thought is that he has my tape. I’m halfway through a reply, asking what’s happened, when Dina’s name appears on screen. I answer the call but barely manage to say ‘hello’ before her tearful voice cuts me off.

‘He’s dead,’ she says.