Silas Nash Book 1: Hush Hush Honeysuckle. Chapter 21 (b)

At home, he touched things as though he’d been away for a year. He touched his bookcase in the hall and brushed his hand over some of the books. He’d never been in jail before, and it was a big deal to be free. It had only been four days, but it felt like four years. He called for Dexter, but the cat didn’t come. When he went into the kitchen, he saw that his bowls had been washed and put on the draining board. Max unlocked the back door and called for his cat. Panic set in, and he called again. It felt as though Dex was the only friend he had in the world. As he called the cat, he heard the front door closing and somebody in the hall. He swore and thought about hiding in the downstairs toilet. He looked for a weapon. The nearest thing to hand was an eight-page junk mail supplement, and he rolled it up and brandished it in front of him like a foil.

His relief was palpable when he saw it was only Hayley Mooney, his tenant from the cottage he owned across the road. She held a casserole dish wrapped in a tea towel.

‘Hayley. Hi. What are you doing here? Can I help you?’

‘Hi, Max. I didn’t know you were home. I hope you don’t mind. I used the spare key you gave me for emergencies. Oh, heck, this is awkward. I’ve got Dexter, by the way. He’s fine. I’ll bring him over now.’ She held out the dish. ‘This is for you. We didn’t know if you’d be back home today, but I’ve called around every day on the off chance. Steve and I thought you might be hungry. It’s still warm, but two minutes in the microwave will see it right.’

‘Right. Thank you. That’s very kind.’ They made an awkward exchange as she handed over the food, and he remembered handing her boyfriend, Steve, to Nash on a plate. What the Hell? People brought hot food and cakes when somebody died. He wondered how many times she’d been in the house that he didn’t know about, and then there was Steve too. Cufflinks, he thought. Hayley looked at him in confusion.

When they stared at each other too long for it to be bearable, Hayley was the first to break the silence. ‘It’s Irish stew. Nanna’s recipe, so it should be good. She’s gone now, but the stew lives on.’

‘Crikey, how long ago did she make it?’

‘No. I made it, but it’s handed down through the generations.’ Max could tell she was on the point of babbling as the tension between them rose. ‘Very thick gravy and a whole bulb of garlic. The police have been up here a lot, going through your stuff. They brought lots of things out of the house—your computer and whatnot. A woman came, and she said she was taking Dexter to a rescue centre until you came home. So I said I’d take him.’

‘That’s very kind. I hope he’s been no trouble.’

‘No trouble at all. He misses you, though, I can tell.’

This woman was the cat whisperer. He wondered if he smelled. Once they told him he could go, he just needed to get out of that place and hadn’t asked for a shower, preferring the privacy of his own. It used to be private, but now he wasn’t so sure.

The place looked bugged.

It even smelt bugged.

‘The food smells delicious. Thank you.’ The lid was on the small cast iron casserole dish, and Max couldn’t smell anything apart from all the little pieces of recording equipment that he knew were behind every curtain pleat and even hidden in the toilet brush holder. Paranoia was winning over common sense. He wasn’t even near the bathroom. He was holding his impatience. The self-induced Tourettes was threatening again. He wanted to scream at her to go but had to be polite, they were lovely people, and he’d hate to offend them. But one of them could potentially be the killer. ‘Hayley, this is a little bit delicate, but would you mind leaving your key, please? You know—strangers. I mean recent events and what have you. I hope you understand. I don’t mean to be rude.’

‘Of course. And I’ll go and get Dexter, now. He’ll be happy to see Daddy.’ She put her key on the corner of the counter, which left Max holding the dish.

‘I’ve got some important things to take care of in the office.’ The same office that didn’t have a computer to do important things in, but he couldn’t face her again. ‘Can you leave the front door open while you’re gone and just put him in the kitchen, please? Give the door a good slam afterwards. And Hayley?’

‘Yes?’

‘Thank you. You’re a real sweetheart.’ He was going to ask her to force the cat in through the kitchen cat flap so that she wouldn’t have to come back in, but that was a bit much, even for him.

She blushed and tucked her chin into her chest to avoid looking at him. ‘I said to Steve that you won’t have done anything wrong. Those children and everything. Little boys, some of them, and all those girls. Not you. It couldn’t be you.’ Max had the awful urge to rush at her with his hands over his head, moaning like a Scooby-do monster, and the thought almost made him laugh out loud. He suppressed it and choked.

‘No. Not me. I didn’t do anything. You’d think I was Paedo Paddy from Pennington.’

‘Max, one day, that inappropriate sense of humour is going to get you into trouble and then—bang—it’ll be too late. I’ll go get your cat now.’

He wondered what she meant. That sounded like a threat. He was jumping at shadows. These people were his friends. He was going to quiz her on it, but she turned her back and flounced out in a haze of floral perfume that Max had only just noticed.

In the office, he picked things up and put them down again, just to make his lie a truth as if she could see him through walls, a road and two garden hedges.

He had a spare flat in Barrow and wondered if he should be there instead. The area was more populated than here, but it had that air of impersonal couldn’t-give-a-shit-about-anybody flat living. It was more of a bedsit, really, but this was his home in Ulverston.

He owned the whole house in Barrow but kept the top floor of the last house on the street for himself. The other five flats in the house were filled with the no-hopers, the no-chancers and the useless. There was no lift, and he said those eighty stairs were his best friend. He liked being higher than the trees and looking down on Wetherspoons across the road. At Christmas, the council put a tree at the bottom of the pedestrianised part of the high street, and it was just across the road. He loved looking at the tree and all the lights and decorations. It was as though they went to all that effort just for him.

Most of the time, he lived here in the Ulverston house. The loneliness made him feel like Heathcliff, and he loved the clean air and the isolation. It felt like the end of the world. You got to the King’s Arms—the big Kings, not to be confused with the little Kings—and walked up the hill until all the houses, all the people, and all the life had petered out, and then you kept walking up the fell road, which was a killer feat of endurance, for another mile. Max owned the big house on the right. It was built out of old stone for an old house and held no history for him but history for some family somewhere.

He’d bought it from a school teacher who’d terrorised the children at Ulverston Victoria High School. His days of screaming and bawling at frightened children and whacking canes around were over, and he was old. He’d mouldered away in the big house until he couldn’t look after himself anymore. Max bought it for a song and didn’t feel guilty about knocking the price down to rock bottom—the owner hadn’t been very kind to children, apparently. And then he’d died years ago in a nursing home.

Max had bought the cottage, too. It was a sweet little two-in-one deal. Maybe the whole thing was born of nostalgia for that little old stone shack. He remembered it when he left school and had a fondness for it. Twenty years ago, while the boys were all still living at home with their mammies, Fiona, Jonathan’s sister, had struck out for independence pretty much as soon as she left school. She got a job at Ashley’s Accessories, a factory making plug sockets, and had just enough money left at the end of the week to pay her rent and bills. She rented that little cottage. It didn’t last long, only a year or so, and then she got herself into trouble and went home to her mum, who didn’t know the half of it.

The cottage was upside down in that the bedrooms and bathroom were downstairs, and the living room and kitchen were at ground level. It was built into the hill and had a ramshackle green porch over the front door where Fiona always seemed to have washing hanging on a wooden clothes horse. The first thing to greet you when you knocked on the door was Fiona’s knickers. And yes, he had to admit that he had pocketed a pair once for his own dirty deeds.

Fi did this weird thing—she grew up. Man, did that scrawny kid grow up. She bought a racer and cycled to work every day. She had some tiny Jeans that she’d long grown out of, but she cut them down to make the world’s smallest shorts. Her arse fell out of them at either side, and when she rode that bike standing forward over the bars to get up Soutergate Hill, Max wanted to do things that he never expected to do to his best friend’s sister.

Jon’s little sister had her own place, and that was an opportunity not to be missed. Jon, Bobby and Max partied there a few times, but old man Collins lived across the road and went ballistic if he heard so much as a mouse squeak. It killed the fun. And then Max partied there a few times on his own. Fi had muscles where he didn’t know a girl could have muscles. Riding that bike made her one hell of a ride. But she was serious. She was all about overtime and making her rent, and all Max wanted was to have fun. She got pregnant. Max asked if the baby was his, and she said no. And that was that. Max had already moved on several times before Fi had a quiet abortion and moved back home to Mummy. He grinned as he remembered those times in that cottage. He thought he might have gone from Fi to one of her school friends, but he couldn’t even remember that one’s name. The girls fell out for a while, and he remembered a lot of high-pitched yelling. Way too heavy and bitchy for Max. He was out of there.

It wasn’t like that now. The cottage had a new extension on an extension by an extension behind an extension before he bought it. You could still see the shell of what it had been, but it was insulated and had solar panels and was very different from its humble origins.

Hayley reminded him a bit of Fiona back in those days. She had long brown hair and a sweet smile. He flirted in the early days and even tried a direct come-on but was firmly put back in his box before he even got the lid open. Hayley and Steve were a blended family, and Steve wasn’t there all the time. She’d been in the cottage for over three years now, and Max had received the message. He looked out for her, though. It was isolated up there, and she was alone sometimes with two young kids. Isla and William were great, and Max liked talking to them.

They were at the age where William wanted to be an astronaut and Isla a great ballerina. Max said he wanted to be a rock star and would do some singing with his air guitar while the kids laughed and covered their ears. Steve’s kids, Theo and Ellis, came to stay every other weekend, and Max loved sitting in his living room and hearing all the noise and laughter from the cottage across the road. It was a happy home, and they were some of the nicest people Max had ever known. Max couldn’t understand why he’d blamed Steve so readily to Nash. Now he even wondered if Hayley could have something to do with it too. He didn’t know what was wrong with him.

But lovely though they were, today he couldn’t face anybody, and the intrusion into his home had hit him like a bullet. He’d make it up to her with a bottle of wine one night. He couldn’t wait for the front door to shut again. He realised he missed Dexter a lot more than the cat probably missed him. He just wanted to cuddle him. He heard the door close and then her checking it to make sure it was shut properly, and he forced himself to wait a minute before opening the office door.

Max was in for a serious telling-off. Dex wasn’t proud enough not to twine between his legs until his dad picked him up and made a huge fuss of him, but he made it clear that Max’s recent behaviour was unacceptable.

Max was starving. Dexter, on the other hand, turned his nose up at the bowl of Nanna’s Irish Stew that Max put down for him.

He took the lid off the dish, and it smelt delicious, but if the cat turned his nose up at it, maybe it was poisoned. Max was so hungry that he decided it didn’t matter. He was a dying man. He was supposed to be living each day in the moment and all that shite. In custody, he’d had as much toast and as many ready meals as he liked, but at three times a day, you can only eat so many frozen individual fish pies.

The house was left in a mess from the police being in and out, and every flat surface was black with fingerprint dusting powder. He put the dish in the microwave and hunted his office for a pen and paper. The damned things bred when he didn’t want one, and he had pens all over the place. When he needed one, he had to wade through his desk drawer for—socks. What were they doing there? Post-it notes that would do to write a note on. There were paper clips, cigarettes and a lighter. He hadn’t smoked for six years. And at the bottom of the drawer, an old Playboy, very old. It showed a black-haired girl with black boots sitting in a cocktail glass—classy. He found a pen.

If I turn up dead, I’ve been poisoned by Nanna’s Irish Stew, kindly donated by Hayley Mooney. I suspect her Boyfriend, Steve Hill. I’m a mess. I suspect everybody. These are lovely people. I’m a bad man. Please look after the Playboy Magazine in my top drawer. It’s iconic. It will be worth something in a few years.

Maxwell Edward Bartholomew Tyler Jones

He looked at the bookcases in the office. He had a lot of books and a lot of bookcases. He wondered which one the police would shake out first and went for Winnie-the-Pooh.

The microwave pinged, and he decided he was being ridiculous. They were his friends, or was he just their landlord and, therefore, dispensable? He took the note out of Winnie, scrunched it up, and threw it in the bin. He was being ridiculous. Of course his tenants weren’t psycho killers, not even with a Qu'est-ce que c'est?

As he straightened, the world span in a fast vortex of dizziness. Geometric floaters the size of spaceships appeared across his vision, and he had to hold on to the counter to stay upright. He watched the shapes dance, and they looked as if they were made of chrome. It was like being drunk when the room went around, and as one shape appeared, he had to follow it across his field of vision otherwise, he’d have thrown up. He couldn’t keep it up for long, and despite taking deep breaths—in through his nose, out through his mouth, he had to stumble across the kitchen to the sink to vomit. He was glad there was no week-old washing up in it, and that was something else he had Hayley to thank for. Max did domestic chores once a day. He saw little point in doing them more than that as they only needed to be done again the following day.

He squirted a sheen of disinfectant spray and washed the sink out. It was coming—he—death. He was coming to get him.

A couple of hours after being ill, he was starving. Nanna’s stew should have been the best he’d ever tasted. He heated it in the microwave, and the smell permeated throughout the room. Max brought the spoon up to his lips but couldn’t force himself to open his mouth. The thought that Nanna’s stew might be poisoned prevailed, and with a huge and regretful sigh, he opened the pedal bin lid and scraped the whole delicious-looking lot into it. He could have sworn the cat was laughing at him.