Andy Jardine was giving her his lopsided smile. ‘Wet out here. We can get into the house through the back door.’
Wildlife had been making itself at home inside the house. There were pigeon droppings everywhere, a thick crust on the floor, and Andy identified the pungent smell as fox. ‘Must have a den under the floorboards.’
It was a sad old place, with peeling layers of flowery wallpaper making Lulu think of all the people who had called it home through the years.
Andy went to one of the windows, so filmed with grime it was hard to see through it. ‘You’re sure Nick can’t have followed you?’
She supposed he wouldn’t want his friend to know about whatever issues he was having.
‘Yes. He was shut up in the study when I left.’
There were a couple of old wooden chairs in what would have been the kitchen, set companionably in front of the remains of the old black range built into a recess. Andy dusted them off with a tissue and they sat down.
‘Is Nick abusing you?’
Oh my God!
‘No, of course not!’
‘Sexually or physically?’
‘No!’ Where on earth was this coming from?
‘At Craibstone Wood, I saw him. I saw how angry he was with you.’
She remembered, then, that Andy had witnessed Nick storming off, after she’d got the phone call from the police about Paul. ‘That was a silly misunderstanding.’
‘You’re saying he’s never hurt you?’
‘Never! For goodness’ sake, Andy!’ Lulu didn’t want to talk about her marriage with this man. But she made her expression sympathetic. ‘Yvonne going missing is hard on him, as I’m sure it is on everyone. Have you been finding it hard? Is that why you wanted to talk to me?’
‘No. I want to talk to you about Nick.’
Andy, she suspected, was on the spectrum. If so, he would find people’s behaviour hard to understand. Seeing Nick angry like that, on top of the upset over Yvonne, could have been frightening for him. ‘You and Nick were good friends when you were young, weren’t you? Best friends?’
Andy stared at her.
She left a silence.
Eventually: ‘He terrorised me, Lulu. From when we were little kids. In fact, I can’t remember a time in my childhood when Nick wasn’t terrorising me. He hit me, he bit me, he cut me. But he soon learned that those things leave marks that have to be explained. So he would pull my hair. Give me Chinese burns. Make me eat sand. Do you know how painful it is to pass sand out of your arse?’
Completely inappropriately, laughter bubbled up in Lulu. She suppressed it, schooling her face. She knew, from growing up with two younger brothers, how horrendous small boys could be to one another. Andy probably hadn’t been diagnosed with Asperger’s as a child – had he been diagnosed, even now? – so the adults around him wouldn’t have known that he would find the normal rough and tumble of kids’ interactions extremely challenging. And the other kids, of course, would hardly have given him an easy ride. Quite the opposite. ‘That must have been awful. Did you tell your mum and dad?’
‘When you’re really young, three, four, five, you just go along with the status quo, don’t you? I did try to tell Mum, but Nick was always so convincing. Oh no, Andy fell over. I was trying to catch him, not push him. Andy ripped his arm on a nail – I don’t know why he’s saying I cut it. And Nick did this.’ He touched the scar running through his mouth. ‘With an adze from Duncan’s shed.’
Oh God.
‘As we got older, the physical abuse stopped, but he started messing with me in other ways – like he’d steal things from other kids and put them in my locker and get me in trouble. He said if I told anyone about it, he’d kill me. And I believed him. I still believe that he was serious. He would have killed me, and enjoyed doing it. But that was his plan B. He didn’t want me dead because I was useful to him. I don’t know how many times I provided him with an alibi; said he was with me.’
‘Andy, I’m sure Nick was only joking when he said he would kill you.’
‘No.’ Andy shook his head vigorously. ‘No, Lulu. He meant it.’
How awful, for teenage Andy, that he had thought his best friend was genuinely threatening to kill him. How awful that he still believed it. But how to reassure him? ‘I’ve got two brothers,’ she tried. ‘They were real tearaways when they were children. Dennis has a scar too, on his leg. It was ripped open on a broken twig when John pushed him out of a tree. And they were always coming up with terrible ideas of how they might kill one another. But they didn’t mean it. They were only joking.’
‘Nick wasn’t joking!’ Andy suddenly shouted at her.
‘Okay.’ She kept her voice calm. ‘It was very wrong of him to say it, whether he was joking or not.’
‘He wasn’t joking when he murdered Dean Reid!’