After that everything was a confusion of lights, engines and voices. Fiona gave Matt artificial respiration with a dreadful rhythm while Freddie moaned and wept. Men in fluorescent jackets took over: but still Freddie wept. Nothing seemed to make much sense.
I suppose Hunter must have made sense of it. I was aware of him co-ordinating everything, talking to the paramedics in his terse, no-nonsense manner, even once Larry had turned up, puffing importantly and looking both aggrieved and relieved to have missed out on all the action.
Then Matt had gone, and Freddie with him: Larry went back out to take Selena away too. I led Bryony down to the kitchen. The bedroom was emptied apart from the dark stain on the carpet.
Krista, who had crept in at some point unchallenged, took happy charge of Bryony and sat her by the range with the dog-blanket round her shoulders, probably planning hot milk. First, though, Hunter wanted to talk to her.
Hunter worried me. He was so controlled; only the set of his mouth and the bleakness of his eyes betrayed him. It had happened again: a death on his watch. No matter that the dead man was a murderer. I still knew that Hunter thought that just as in the earlier siege where he lost half his hand, he had failed to do his job.
I had no chance to talk to him. Too much going on, too much to do. While we were waiting for the scene of crime officers, Hunter sat down in the kitchen with Bryony for a preliminary interview, and I was left in the gloomy dining room in the charge of the second young PC, a painstaking and currently shaken lad who did his best to take a statement from me but knew none of the questions to ask. Who was Griff? Why was I looking after him? Why did I let Matt in?– and so on, until I said, “Look, I’ll just write it all down.” Refusing his notebook, I hunted in the dresser drawer for paper and there under the jumble of stationery was Luke’s suicide note staring back up at me like an accusation.
Selena had shot Matt in the same room where Luke had killed himself. The same room, the same gun. This was a house of death, I thought grimly: yet it felt unmoved, unchanged and unchangeable, the clock ticking as it had always done while I sat myself at the polished table with my paper, like a child doing its homework.
Meanwhile vans had arrived and the upper floor was full of footsteps, demented phantoms in the room above me. At one point the door was flung open by a huge man in a flak jacket, who glared at me as if wondering whether to use me for target practice before disappearing as abruptly as he had come.
Gradually they departed, leaving a tangled cat’s cradle of orange tape across the stairs. I gave my essay to the earnest young PC who glanced through it doubtfully and supposed I would be called in for questioning anyway. I supposed so too. And then Hunter left with the two young constables and it was just me and Bryony and Krista and Fiona, who had rung Bryony’s parents and was staying until they arrived. Four girls together, huddled in the kitchen.
Krista made coffee for everyone, and insisted in ladling mounds of sugar in, for shock. She was in her element. We got a bit giggly over the coffee-flavoured syrup, and then sobered again as we recalled why we were there.
Bryony began, hesitantly, to tell us what had happened. Matt had turned up a quarter of an hour before the police; she didn’t know why he’d come but he seemed impatient, in a hurry. She hadn’t been worried, just surprised. He’d chivvied Selena upstairs and she’d heard low arguing voices before they both came down, Selena carrying a large bag. Then as the wail of distant sirens sounded over the fields, he’d changed and started cursing furiously.
“They’re here!” he’d shouted. “Get your money, get the gun! We’re leaving now!” When Selena told him that Bryony had the key to the gun safe, Matt slammed Bryony against the wall and overpowered her. He seized the key while Selena stood and watched.
“I thought he was going to dislocate my shoulder,” said Bryony, rubbing her arm. “Then Selena got stroppy, saying that’s my gun now, it was Luke’s and now it’s mine, and Matt said, Don’t be stupid, you’ve have never even met Luke if it wasn’t for me, and then where would you be? Some cathouse in Liverpool? Shut up and get your money, he said.”
Bryony gazed down at the steam slowly drifting from her mug. “Selena didn’t like that. She said she didn’t want to leave Luke’s things behind, his big coat and stuff. Matt said, Fuck that, what did you care about Luke? She got all indignant. I did care, she said. Oh yeah, he said, you cared so much that you scared him to death with your foot and mouth.” Bryony grimaced, easing her shoulder. “That started her off again until he told her to shut up. He saw the blue lights in the yard and tried to fire the gun out of the window. I grabbed his arm and it went off through the floor.”
“You shouldn’t have,” said Fiona gently.
“Selena cared more about that old coat than she ever cared about Luke. Well, maybe she did care. Not like I did, though.” Bryony’s face crumpled and Fiona handed her a tissue.
“Bryony,” I said cautiously once she had recovered. “Selena scared Luke to death with her foot and mouth? What did that mean?”
“I don’t know. When Matt said that, she started shouting at him. That was your idea! I would never have thought of that! And he said, You did it, though, didn’t you?”
“Luke started worrying about foot and mouth when a cow went lame,” I said. “Did it have any other symptoms?”
“Yes, it had blisters round its mouth, but the vet knew straight away they weren’t typical vesicles,” said Bryony. “He reckoned it had eaten some poisonous weed.”
“Not ragwort?” asked Fiona sharply.
Bryony shook her head. “No. Any number of plants can cause irritation. It could even just have been buttercups, though at that time of year you wouldn’t think... but it was my fault. I should have been more vigilant.”
“And the lameness?”
“It was an abscess caused by sole penetration. The cow must have stood on a nail or broken glass. Anyway, Selena said, I never thought Luke would shoot himself over it, and Matt said, yes you did, that was the whole point. And then he looked at me.” Bryony swallowed.
“You all right?” said Fiona.
“Yes. I want you to hear this.” Bryony’s voice wavered, and then steadied. “Matt looked at me, and he said, Did you tell Bryony about the little games you played with Luke’s head? Did you tell her what Luke thought just before he died? That Bryony was having an affair with his dad? And Selena screamed back, I told Luke the truth! You said she was! You said she was doing it with Isaac long ago, before we met! You said that was why Luke needed a new girlfriend!”
“So Luke thought you had an affair with Isaac?” I asked, incredulous.
“Did you?” said Fiona.
Bryony’s head jerked up. “Of course not!”
“I had to ask,” Fiona said unapologetically. “Selena appears to have believed it.”
“No wonder she thought Isaac was a dirty old man,” I said.
“Did she have any other reason to?” Fiona asked.
He didn’t actually do anything, Selena had told me. He was just creepy… like Griff, who maybe hadn’t tried to kiss her after all. “I think she just didn’t like old men,” I said.
“She turned Luke against me,” Bryony said quietly. “Her and Matt. They made him hate me. I never knew.” She looked very small, hunched in her chair. Krista patted her hand.
“I will make you supper,” she said. “You are needing food after all the huczek.” At that point, however, Bryony’s parents arrived: a small, chunky father and a tall, graceful and surprisingly posh mother who enfolded Bryony in her arms like an elegant willow embracing a holly bush, and shooed the rest of us away.
Once Krista had climbed into her car and left, exacting vows to meet again – after all, I was still wearing her clothes – I climbed over the police tape that now straddled the stile, and trudged back to Raven How across the darkened fields alone.
Halfway, I slowed and stopped. Here the path was darkest, the night as thick as mud. My limbs felt even heavier than they had on Windermere’s s
tony shore. I wanted to lie down and be swaddled by the shadow.
Instead I leant against the wall and gazed across the blackness of unseen fields. I felt myself floating, adrift on the thin skin of the midnight lake, its strong, cold fingers waiting to reach up from the depths and pull me down forever. The drowned girl. I wanted Nick, hopelessly, unbearably: I wanted his hands in mine, his arms around me, his voice comforting me, and knew that he had gone for ever.
At last I made myself take a leaden step, and then another, and another, until I reached Raven How. By that time I was blind with tears for all that I had lost.
Ruby and Russell were talking quietly in the kitchen. At least they had stopped shouting. I avoided them and slowly climbed the stairs up to the small, drab dormitory, thinking its clean austerity would be a comfort. But when I lay down on the lumpy mattress, the cold water still lapped silently beneath my bunk, as inescapable as death.