Lost Summer

They came to a door with a plate bearing Karen’s name and her title of Publishing Editor.

‘Impressive.’ He ran his finger over the raised gold lettering.

She grinned. ‘I think so.’

‘So, are you going to tell me what this is all about now? Who’s the mystery person you want me to meet?’

‘Her name’s Helen Pierce, she’s an old friend. She came to see me a few days ago to ask for my help and after I’d listened to what she had to say I thought of you.’

He was immediately wary. ‘What kind of help does she need exactly?’

‘I think it would be better if she explained that herself. Come and meet her.’

He put his hand on her arm to stop her opening the door. ‘I get the feeling I’m not going to like this. Listen Karen, if this is about your friend’s missing child I can’t help. I’m sorry but I don’t do that any more.’

She regarded him steadily, searching the depths of his eyes. ‘So, what are you going to do? Another hack job on some flash-in-the pan pop star?’

‘Ouch.’

‘I just can’t believe you’d waste your energy on something so frivolous.’

He looked around with mock confusion. ‘Sorry, there must be some mistake. I didn’t realize this was The Times.’

‘Very funny. Look, you’re here now. At least come and meet Helen, hear what she has to say. Do it for me, please. She doesn’t know who else she can turn to. And incidentally there’s no missing child. Helen doesn’t have children. In fact nobody is missing.’

This last part finally convinced him and he gave in, as he was sure she had known he would. ‘No promises though,’ he said.

‘Fair enough.’ She squeezed his hand briefly, then opened the door.

A woman who had been standing at the window turned to face them. She was about Karen’s age and was wearing a dark-coloured suit. She was attractive, he thought, but not stunning. Her suit was well tailored, probably expensive, but not the sort of cutting-edge fashion favoured by most of the women who worked for Condor. She might have been a consultant of some sort, or maybe a lawyer.

Karen did the introductions. ‘Adam Turner, Helen Pierce. Helen, this is the writer I told you about.’

As he shook her hand he had the feeling it was his turn to be appraised. Her expression was guarded. ‘Karen’s told me a lot about you, Mr Turner.’

‘Don’t believe any of it,’ he joked. She offered a hesitant smile. She was nervous, he thought, and then revised his judgement. She was on edge.

They sat around a small conference table where Karen held her meetings and wielded her power. On the wall behind her desk were the framed covers of the magazines under her control, including Landmark, which occupied pride of place and was the prize that went with her recent promotion. Condor published mostly gossipy coffee-table monthlies, but Landmark was the exception, mixing arts and social commentary along with the occasional investigative piece. It was the least profitable magazine in the Condor stable, but it conferred a degree of respectability on Ryan Cummings, Karen’s boss and the owner of the company.

‘Karen tells me you two are old friends,’ Adam said, breaking the ice. ‘Are you in the publishing business too?’

‘Actually, I work for a research company.’

‘Helen and I were at university in Exeter together,’ Karen explained. ‘We shared a horrible flat for two years.’ To Helen she said, ‘I told Adam that it would be best if he heard what you have to say first-hand.’

‘Alright, though I’m not sure where to begin, exactly.’

‘Take your time,’ Adam told her. He felt himself slip easily into his old persona. How many times had he sat with parents who needed his help to find their son or daughter, trying to get them to open up and talk freely about a subject that, despite them having sought him out, was inevitably painful for them. ‘If I need to clarify anything I’ll ask questions.’

She nodded and dropped her gaze while she composed her thoughts. ‘About a month ago, at the beginning of September, I learned that my brother, Ben, had been killed in a car crash. The fact is that since then I’ve come to believe that his death wasn’t an accident.’

She paused and met Adam’s eye. She was, he knew, trying to evaluate his reaction. She would have told her story before, most likely to people who hadn’t necessarily believed her, including the police. She would have been listened to politely at every level. Sympathy and condolences would have been offered, but in the end the disbelief she encountered would have become increasingly obvious. Frustration and a sense of isolation would have set in. He knew all this had happened otherwise she would not be sitting at this table now.

A year ago he had decided that he couldn’t do this kind of work any more. At least not if he was trying to make up for something that had happened seventeen years earlier. After his divorce from Louise he had begun to seriously question the direction his life was taking. Louise wasn’t the first casualty of the guilt he felt about Meg Coucesco. There had been others over the years, all of them eventually driven away. Maybe getting married had been an expression of a subconscious desire to change, as writing the autobiography of a spoiled pop star had been a conscious one. Neither had worked. Besides, nothing was ever that simple. Even now as he listened to Helen Pierce he felt a familiar stirring of interest. He hadn’t felt that way for a while.

‘Why do you think your brother’s death wasn’t an accident?’ he asked, conveying no judgement either by his tone or expression.

She took a visible breath. ‘Ben was killed with two of his friends when their car left the road and rolled down a hill. The police report said that Ben was driving and the autopsy showed that his blood alcohol level was four times the legal limit. But that can’t be right. Ben didn’t drive. I mean he couldn’t drive. He didn’t know how. And he didn’t drink either. At least not to the extent the police are claiming. I’ve never known him to have more than the odd beer.’

‘Then how do you explain the autopsy report? Mistakes are very rare.’

She gave a quick impatient shake of her head, her eyes flashing a brittle defensiveness. ‘I can’t explain it. But I know, I knew, my brother.’

‘Tell Adam why Ben didn’t drink,’ Karen prompted gently.

‘Since he was a child he’d suffered from epilepsy. It was controllable though he still had the occasional seizure, but he had to take medication every day. Something called Lamictal. Drinking reacted with the drug and made him violently ill.’

‘Is it possible he had stopped taking his medication when the accident happened?’ Adam asked.

‘No. The autopsy report showed that it was present in his blood.’

Her point, Adam thought, was interesting rather than compelling. At least from the point of view of a detached third party, which was always the role he forced himself to take, at least initially. ‘How old was Ben?’

‘Nineteen. He was studying at London University.’

‘You said that he didn’t drive. That’s unusual for somebody of his age.’

‘It was because of his illness,’ Helen explained. ‘Legally he wasn’t allowed to hold a driving licence. Even though his medication largely controlled his condition he still sometimes had seizures.’

‘So, what exactly made the police so sure he was driving when the accident happened?’

‘He was behind the wheel when the car was found, still wearing his seatbelt. Look, I know how it looks. I can understand why the police drew the conclusions they did.’

‘But you still think they have it wrong?’

‘I’m certain of it. I wish there was some way I could convince you. It’s here, inside, that I know that somehow this is all wrong.’

She put her hand against her chest. Her expression was intense and her eyes almost pleaded for him, for somebody, to listen to her. He felt instinctively that she was genuine. Not everybody was. Sometimes it wasn’t even intentional, just a kind of self-delusion, a refusal to accept the facts. In the past he had chosen the cases he worked on not because of any revelatory fragment of information he had learned when he interviewed relatives, but because he was moved by their certainty, their instinct about what had happened to their child. Often there was nothing solid to go on. He felt Helen’s instinct was true, but on the face of it the police appeared to have drawn the logical conclusion.

‘Tell me this,’ he said. ‘If you don’t believe your brother’s death was an accident, then what do you think happened?’

The pleading in her eyes turned to defeat, frustration. ‘That’s the trouble. I just don’t have an answer to that question. Believe me I’ve thought about it, I’ve looked at this from every possible angle, I’ve even doubted myself on occasions. I’ve wondered if the police were right, if it was just one of those terrible things, a momentary lapse of judgement. If something made Ben act out of character and he got drunk and then for some reason he got behind the wheel of that car. Sometimes I’ve even half believed that. If enough people tell you that you’re wrong, Mr Turner, believe me after a while you start to wonder, no matter what your convictions are.’

‘And yet despite the evidence … ?’

‘I still can’t accept it. And I can’t simply stand by and do nothing. I tried to get the coroner to listen to me at the inquest, but he accepted the police version of events. The verdict was accidental death.’

‘Why don’t you tell Adam about the protest, Helen,’ Karen interjected.

‘The protest?’

‘Ben had just finished his first year of an arts degree. Last year he got involved with an environmental group through some people he met at university. They lobby against habitat destruction, the use of pesticides and so on, organizing petitions and protests, that sort of thing. To be honest I don’t think Ben was as committed as a lot of them. He cared about the issues like most of us do, but he was never really a political person. He got involved through a girl he met. Her name was Jane Hanson. She was a year or so older than him, very pretty, very serious type. I met her once when he brought her round to the flat. I think she’d been involved in the protest at Newbury when she was at school, she came from that way somewhere, and she was completely immersed in this sort of thing.’

Something in her tone struck Adam. Was it a faint trace of bitterness? Jealousy perhaps.

‘Anyway, she was taking part in a protest during the summer,’ Helen went on. ‘A group of activists were trying to prevent some woodland being cut down to make way for a holiday camp and Ben decided to go with her. They’d dug tunnels and built tree huts and all that sort of thing to keep the bulldozers out. That was in June. He was supposed to come back in September, but he was killed a week before he should have left.’

‘There had been a lot of bad feeling between locals and some of the protesters,’ Karen added.

‘Some people were beaten up, threats were made, that sort of thing,’ Helen explained.

‘Was Ben threatened personally?’

‘I think so. He mentioned on the phone that there had been some incidents but it was nothing serious, at least not that I know of.’

‘The police knew about this?’

‘I imagine they did. Yes, I’m sure they did.’

‘Do you think there could be a connection between the protest and your brother’s death?’

He saw her indecision as she considered how to answer, and guessed that it was tempting for her to say yes, to latch onto anything that might make some kind of sense, but to her credit she shook her head wearily.

‘To be honest I just don’t know. I can’t say that Ben ever gave me the impression that there was anything sinister going on. It was just the sort of clashing between groups you’d expect really. It’s possible that he wouldn’t have said too much though. He wouldn’t have wanted to worry me.’

‘What about this girl you mentioned, Jane Hanson? Was she in the car when the accident happened?’

‘No,’ Helen answered, her mouth tightening. ‘She left the protest a week earlier.’

‘Have you spoken to her or anybody else from the camp to see if the threats were any more serious than Ben told you?’

‘I haven’t spoken to Jane, but I did go to the camp. Nobody there seemed to think there was any reason why Ben would have been singled out.’

‘Helen,’ Karen said. ‘Tell Adam about your parents.’

‘Both my parents are dead, Mr Turner,’ Helen said. ‘Ben was my only family. He lived with me ever since he was thirteen, when my parents’ car was hit by a van travelling at eighty miles an hour. The driver was drunk. Both my parents died at the scene but he survived. That’s why when Ben knew he had epilepsy he decided he would never learn to drive. It’s also why I know that it’s inconceivable that he would have been drunk behind the wheel of that car, even if for some inexplicable reason he had decided to drive that night. Ben wouldn’t even be a passenger in a car if the driver had so much as had one drink. He was almost obsessive about it.’

It was, Adam thought, the most convincing argument she had put.

‘I don’t know where else I can go, Mr Turner,’ she said. ‘I’ve wondered if I should let it go. Nothing will bring Ben back. But I can’t. He was all I had. I loved my brother and now he’s dead and I want to know what happened to him. What really happened. I can’t go through life always wondering.’

Again there was a plea in her eyes. He wasn’t sure yet if this was something he wanted to get involved in. He was aware of Karen watching him, trying to gauge his reaction. In fact he was intrigued, and he was moved by what Helen had said. He understood what she was going through, and he reasoned that in this instance there were no obvious parallels with Meg Coucesco. But he needed time to think. He promised that he would consider everything she’d said, and she didn’t press him, but took her cue and rose to leave. She held out her hand.

‘I want to thank you for at least listening to me, and for not being patronizing. Whatever you decide, I’m grateful for that at least.’

He shook her hand and Karen showed her to the door, murmuring something to her quietly, and as he watched them he remembered something. ‘Wait a minute. You didn’t say where all this happened. Where exactly was your brother killed?’

‘In Cumbria,’ she said. ‘Near a town called Castleton.’

He barely registered her leaving, or Karen coming back to the table. She looked at him, her brow furrowed. ‘What is it, Adam?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Look, I have to go, can we meet later?’

He arranged a time and hurriedly left, and only paused when he stood outside again and was gulping lungfuls of air. ‘Christ,’ he muttered.

CHAPTER SIX

Adam sat stirring a long black outside an Italian café near Covent Garden. He saw Karen stop at the lights and wait for them to change before she crossed. She looked over and when she saw him she waved. She was tall, her short, dark hair framing fine, even features. He lost her when a bus thundered past spewing out diesel fumes into the already polluted London air, and then the lights changed and a swarm of people stepped into the road.

When she arrived he pulled out a chair and signalled to a waiter. ‘I ordered you a cappuccino. Do you want something to eat?’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t, Nigel’s picking me up to go to dinner. Some business thing. You go ahead though if you want.’

‘Maybe later.’

Nigel. Tall, good-looking Nigel, who was an investment banker and whose family owned half of Shropshire. Old money, old school tie. He tried to imagine Karen being the perfect hostess on one of those country weekends, hanging out with the polo and horsey set and dressing for dinners in some great baronial hall. Somehow he couldn’t see it.

‘So, how is Nigel?’ he asked.

‘Fine. He’s very busy.’

He stirred his coffee, saying nothing.

‘You don’t like him do you?’

‘I don’t know him.’

‘That’s right, you don’t,’ she said, a trace of defensiveness in her tone.

‘Maybe I just don’t like the idea of him taking my best friend off to live in the country.’

‘Flatterer,’ she said, though she smiled. ‘Anyway, Nigel knows my career is here.’

Does he? Adam wondered. Nigel struck him as the type who, when he married, would expect his wife to give up her amusing hobbies, like her career for instance, and settle down to produce lots of little well-bred Nigels to continue the family line.

‘Besides, it isn’t as if we’re engaged or anything,’ she said.

Yet, Adam silently added. The waiter brought Karen’s coffee and Adam changed the subject. ‘I’ve been thinking about your friend Helen.’ She looked at him over the rim of her cappuccino. ‘I can’t help, Karen. I’m sorry.’

She looked surprised. ‘Is that because you don’t want the commission, or because you don’t believe her?’

‘It isn’t because I don’t believe her.’

‘Then you don’t want the commission?’

‘I wasn’t aware there was a commission. I thought you were helping a friend.’

‘I am.’

‘But you think there might be a story in it for Landmark, is that it?’

‘I’m not sure I like the way you said that,’ she replied in clipped tones.

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean that to sound the way it came out.’

‘Apology accepted.’

‘But you do want to commission me professionally I take it?’

‘Yes. But I don’t know if I would run the story, even if it turned out there was one. It would depend on the story. If for example it turned out to be a case of police bungling I might not be interested. But if it was more than that

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. That’s your part isn’t it, to ferret out the truth? But whatever the case I wouldn’t run anything without Helen’s agreement.’

‘Fair enough. But as I said, I can’t help. Sorry.’

‘But you still haven’t told me why.’

‘I’m busy at the moment.’

‘I thought you’d finished the book you were working on.’

‘I have.’

She waited, saying nothing, levelling her intelligent gaze on him, and he knew he’d have to do better than that.

‘Alright. The truth is I’m not sure this is the direction I want to take.’

‘Oh. So it’s that again. Sorry, I must have mistaken you for somebody I knew who had a mission in life.’

‘I wouldn’t say it was a mission.’

‘Wouldn’t you? Righting wrongs. Helping people like Helen who don’t know where else to turn. That girl you wrote about in Suffolk, the one who was pushed off a train, she’d never have been found if it wasn’t for you.’

‘Liz Mount. That was her name. Perhaps it would be better if she hadn’t been. At least her parents could have clung to the hope that she was alive and well somewhere.’

‘I don’t think you believe that,’ Karen said.

‘Well, maybe not.’

Karen sipped her coffee thoughtfully. ‘So, what’s the real reason you don’t want to do this? I get the feeling you’re not telling me something.’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘Then at least promise you’ll think about it.’

She had pricked his conscience, as of course she had intended. She gave no quarter, Karen, which was probably why he liked her so much. ‘Alright. I’ll think about it.’

‘Thank you, Adam.’ She reached across the table and briefly put her hand over his.

Just then a taxi drew up by the kerb. The rear door opened and Nigel poked his head out. He was wearing a dark pinstriped suit with a red handkerchief in the breast pocket. His dark hair was smoothed back over his aristocratic forehead. ‘Come on, darling, we’ll be late.’

Karen withdrew her hand. ‘Sorry, I have to go. Will you call me tomorrow?’

‘Yes.’

She bent to kiss his cheek as Nigel looked impatiently at his watch. ‘Hurry up, Karen. You know what the traffic’s like at this time of day.’ He held the door for her, and then belatedly remembered Adam. ‘Sorry to drag her off like this. You weren’t discussing anything important were you?’

‘No, not really,’ Adam answered, but it was a rhetorical question and Nigel was already turning away.

He watched the taxi pull away from the kerb, and for a moment he experienced a faint regret.

Karen sat back as the taxi negotiated rush hour traffic. Nigel was telling her about the people they were having dinner with, giving her tips on whom she ought to be especially nice to. Or perhaps instructions would be a better term. Like when he’d taken her home to meet his parents and he’d lectured her on etiquette for the entire journey, as if he was afraid she’d embarrass him by using the wrong cutlery at dinner. She tuned him out, turning her thoughts instead to Adam.

She wondered why he was reluctant to take on this commission. If Helen was right about her brother here was a possibly innocent victim whose death might not be what it appeared to be, a police force who wouldn’t listen, and apparent discord between a bunch of protesters and locals. It was exactly the sort of thing that would normally interest him. She sensed there was something he wasn’t telling her. She remembered a year ago, shortly after they’d met when Condor had put on a launch bash and she’d invited him to go along with her. Sort of a date. The truth is she had been interested in him. He was intelligent, and quite good-looking, and there was something else about him that appealed to her. He was a loner, slightly mysterious in some fashion. Maybe that was it. The lure of mystery.

Somebody had organized a karaoke machine and Adam, quite drunk, had got up to do a rendition of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, spoofing Freddie Mercury’s camp antics. To her surprise he was funny, hilarious in fact, and when he finished it was to loud applause and calls for an encore, which he’d declined. At two in the morning they’d found themselves sitting together outside, watching the lights reflected on the Thames at Kew, sharing a bottle of Heineken. She had looked at him lopsidedly and directed a playful punch to his arm.

‘You’re a dark horse, Adam Turner. Who would have thought you could take off Freddie Mercury?’

‘That’s me. Dark horse from way back,’ he’d agreed.

‘But you really are, aren’t you?’

‘Absolutely.’

She’d regarded him solemnly. ‘You know what? I don’t really know anything about you.’

‘There’s not much to know.’

‘There must be something. I don’t even know where you’re from.’

‘Hampstead.’

She’d frowned. ‘I thought you mentioned once that you went to school in Scotland or somewhere. Up North anyway.’

‘Did I?’

She’d pointed to his knee, which he’d absently begun massaging the way he did sometimes. ‘And what about that? How did that happen?’

‘An accident.’ He passed her the Heineken bottle. ‘Look at the lights on that boat out there. See the way they’re reflected on the water, like a mirror image. The water looks like oil.’

‘It probably is fifty per cent oil,’ she’d said, and then sighed. ‘There you go. You always do that. Change the subject whenever we start talking about you.’

‘Bad habit. Sorry.’

‘Tell me about Louise.’

He’d looked surprised. ‘My ex-wife? What about her?’

She wasn’t sure why she’d brought the subject up, except that she was curious, she supposed. He’d mentioned her once and then abruptly steered the conversation in another direction. ‘What went wrong between you two?’

‘Long story.’ He’d stood up and offered her his hand. ‘We should look for a taxi.’

She’d sighed. ‘Dark horse. That’s what you are.’

There were no taxis around so when they did finally flag one down they decided to share, but since they lived in opposite directions she’d suggested he should stay at her place. When they got in she put on some music and said she was going to get ready for bed. When she came out of her bedroom wearing her Dodgers T-shirt he was flaked out on the couch, with his shoes off. She’d given him a pillow and a blanket.