Lasting Damage

Chapter 20

24/7/2010



‘Thank you.’ Alice Bean smiled as Charlie took the letter from her. ‘Sam Kombothekra looked terrified when I tried to give it to him.’

‘Men are cowards.’ Charlie opened her bag, made sure Alice saw her putting the envelope safely inside. ‘You could give Sam a note for the milkman and he’d worry about getting mixed up in a scandal.’

‘My aim isn’t to make trouble. The opposite. I care about Simon.’

‘Then take this opportunity to help him.’ Charlie reminded herself that she was here to extract information. It would have been too easy to say, ‘Yeah, well, he wants nothing to do with you – why do you think I’m here?’

She’d suggested to Alice that they meet at Spillages café, but Alice had proposed the park instead. It had irritated Charlie at the time – she hated people who talked about being ‘cooped up’ and behaved as if it was obligatory to go and stand directly under the sun whenever it was out – but now she was glad to be in the open air, following the narrow tree-fringed footpath around the lake, listening as the birds overhead conducted a vigorous debate in a language she didn’t understand. Walking alongside somebody, you didn’t have to look at their face, or let them see yours. Sitting across a table from Alice would have been much harder.

Harder to resist the temptation to say, ‘Oh, by the way – guess who got married last Friday?’ Charlie had decided before ringing Alice that she wouldn’t mention it. She knew that to tell her would lead to open hostility between them, even if she didn’t know exactly how it would happen. Probably it would be her fault. In her official capacity as Simon’s wife, she might feel obliged to say, ‘Take your letter and stick it up your arse.’

She hoped she’d be glad later – proud, even – that she’d chosen the mature, non-confrontational path. She certainly wasn’t enjoying it now, while it was happening; hostility, even if you went on to regret it later, was much more fun in the short term.

‘I’ll help if I can,’ said Alice, ‘but . . . can I ask you a question first?’

‘Fire away.’

‘Do you think Simon will ever forgive me?’

That was one Charlie could answer honestly. ‘No idea,’ she said. ‘He might have forgiven you already. Or he might bear a grudge for ever. The only thing I can guarantee is that he’ll never discuss it with anyone.’ Especially not me.

Alice had stopped in front of a wooden bench by the edge of the lake, under a weeping willow. She brushed the trailing leaves off it and bent to read the writing on the gold plaque. ‘I can never walk past one of these without reading it,’ she told Charlie. ‘I’d feel as if I was leaving someone to die alone. Look at this one – two brothers, both died on 29 April 2005. One was twenty-two and one twenty-four. How sad.’

‘Car accident, probably,’ Charlie said matter-of-factly. She didn’t want to talk about sad things with Alice. With anyone. She imagined herself and Liv both dying on the same day as she reached into her bag for her cigarettes; getting one in her mouth and lit suddenly felt like an urgent need. She took a long drag. ‘When I die, I want my park bench plaque to say, “She always meant to give that up.” ’

Alice laughed. ‘That’s good.’

‘Simon’s worried about Connie Bowskill.’ Time to stop pretending you’re friends enjoying a nice day out. With someone like Alice Bean, there was no such thing as small talk, in any case. So far she’d brought up forgiveness, lonely death, family tragedies – what subject would be next, the torture of small animals?

‘I’m worried too.’

‘Do you know where Connie is?’ Charlie asked.

‘No. She’s not answering her landline or her mobile.’

‘When did you last speak to her?’

‘Much as I’d like to tell you, I’m not allowed to,’ said Alice. ‘Patient confidentiality.’

Charlie nodded. ‘I understand that you have to respect Connie’s privacy. I also know you’re not averse to drafting a new set of ethical guidelines when someone might be in danger. You did it for your own sake, seven years ago. Isn’t it worth relaxing your professional integrity to ensure Connie’s safety?’

‘I did it for my daughter’s sake seven years ago,’ Alice corrected her, apparently without resentment. ‘And I don’t know for sure that Connie’s in danger, or that Simon can keep her safe, assuming she is.’

‘But you think she might be in danger.’ You’ve been trying to convince yourself otherwise, and you’ve failed.

‘I was pretty shocked last time she came to see me,’ Alice admitted. ‘Having been one myself, I recognise a creature threatened with extinction when I meet one. There’s a really harmful energy around Connie, trying to crush the life out of her. It’s unmistakeable – being in a room with her has never been easy, but recently it’s been a real challenge – just for me to stay there, to keep reminding myself that she’s someone who needs my help. What I can’t tell is whether the threat has an external origin, one that she’s internalised, or whether the vicious energy’s coming from Connie herself. It’s not easy to distinguish the two – when people seek to destroy us, we often respond by making ourselves their accomplice, punishing ourselves on their behalf.’

‘Any chance I could get some or all of that in layman’s terms?’ Charlie asked.

Alice stopped walking. ‘My gut instinct tells me Connie might not survive. Either there’s someone out there trying to obliterate her, or she’s doing it to herself.’

‘Who’s your money on?’

Charlie didn’t expect an answer, and was surprised when Alice said, ‘The husband.’

‘Kit?’

‘Yesterday was Connie’s birthday. His present to her was a dress: the same one she saw on the dead woman in the virtual tour picture – different colours, but the design was the same. I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.’

‘So you spoke to her yesterday,’ said Charlie. Why was it that everything Connie Bowskill said – to Simon, Sam, Alice – required a such a gargantuan suspension of disbelief? Because the woman’s a pathological liar. ‘Apart from the dress, what did the two of you talk about?’

‘Connie’s fears, her unhappiness, her suspicions – same as usual. Our sessions are always hard-going, but . . . I’ve never been frightened for her before, but this time she said two things that . . . I don’t know, this thing with the dresses really shook me. I had a nightmare last night – I knew it was a nightmare, even though everything in it really happened. I dreamed my session with Connie, exactly as it was: her sitting in my consulting room telling me that one dress was blue and pink, the other green and mauve.’ Alice shuddered. ‘Sometimes, all the evil seems to be packed into the smallest details.’

Charlie knew what she meant, and wished she didn’t.

‘I can’t stop thinking about Kit – a man I’ve never met – taking two dresses up to the till, one for each of his women. One of them ends up dead on a carpet somewhere in Cambridge – what’s going to happen to the other one?’ Alice turned towards Charlie, put a hand on her arm. Her face was pale in contrast to her bright red lipstick. ‘Where is she? Why isn’t she answering either of her phones?’

‘You said there were two things.’ Charlie realised she was at an advantage, as the person who cared least. She also felt excluded. Simon was worried about Connie Bowskill; Alice was, if anything, even more worried. They could get together and have a panic party. Charlie was as convinced as she’d ever been that Crazy Connie was talking nonsense; she wouldn’t be invited. ‘What else did Connie say that scared you?’ she asked Alice.

‘It won’t make sense out of context: “the Death Button Centre”.’

Charlie laughed. ‘The what?’

‘I wasn’t the only one who was scared. Something occurred to Connie when she said it – something she hadn’t thought of before. I saw it dawn on her, whatever it was. Like she’d seen a ghost inside her head. She ran – literally, ran away.’

‘The Death Button Centre?’

‘Connie and Kit nearly moved to Cambridge in 2003. The house they were going to buy was next to a school building called the Beth Dutton Centre. Connie was stressed at the thought of leaving her family behind. She got it into her head that she couldn’t live in a house that didn’t have a name.’

‘A name?’

‘You know: The Beeches, The Poplars, Summerfields . . .’

‘Right, I see,’ said Charlie. Did she? No, not really. Not at all, in fact. ‘Why couldn’t she live in a house without a name?’ Plenty of people did; most people.

‘It was an excuse. Connie’s lived in Little Holling all her life, and all the houses there have names – it’s what she’s used to. She was afraid of straying too far from the only place she’d ever known, and ashamed to admit it. She and Kit had found this house – the perfect house, or so she said – and she told him she wouldn’t buy it unless they could give it a name. It was attached to the Beth Dutton Centre on one side, and Kit – as a joke – suggested calling it the Death Button Centre. He asked her if she thought it’d annoy the Beth Dutton Centre people, and the postman.’

Charlie turned away to hide her smile. Alice and Connie could find it terrifying if they wanted to; she reserved the right to find it amusing. ‘So you think Connie realised something as she was telling you this? Something that frightened her enough to make her run?’

‘I’m certain of it. I keep going over the conversation in my mind – there was nothing else that could have panicked her. It was the last thing she said before she left.’

‘What exactly did she say, can you remember?’

‘Only what I’ve already told you: that Kit wanted to call the house the Death Button Centre, or pretended to want to – it wasn’t clear which. I assume he was joking. No one would really give a house that name, would they?’

Charlie didn’t think there was anything about which you could safely say, ‘No one would do it.’ There was always some lunatic who would step forward to prove you wrong. After what Alice had been through – after what she herself had done – Charlie wondered how she could be so naïve.

‘He said the name was growing on him the more he thought about it, suggested getting a plaque made for the front door.’ Alice’s eyes narrowed as she concentrated on the memory. ‘I think that was the last thing Connie said before she . . . Oh, no, sorry. Kit suggested another name for the house, even sillier – 17 Pardoner Lane – but that wasn’t what provoked Connie’s fearful reaction.’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s hard to explain. You probably don’t believe in energetic vibrations . . .’

‘Probably not,’ Charlie agreed.

Alice changed tack. ‘Take my word for it: it was the Death Button Centre that frightened Connie – that horrible name. Who would dream up such a disturbing name for a house they loved and wanted to live in? Even as a joke, you wouldn’t.’

Somehow, Charlie felt the shiver as it passed through Alice’s body. How was that possible?

The Death Button Centre. Press the button and someone dies.

‘17 Pardoner Lane was the address of the perfect house they didn’t buy,’ said Alice.

‘So Kit wanted to stick with just the address?’

‘No, he . . .’ Alice looked up at the sky. ‘Oh,’ she said, sounding surprised at having interrupted herself. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe what he meant was, “Let’s not call the house something daft – let’s be sensible and call it by its address: 17 Pardoner Lane.” Though, I have to say, that wasn’t my impression, from what Connie said.’

‘You’ve lost me,’ said Charlie.

‘I thought she meant that Kit had leapt from the absurd to the even more absurd and suggested 17 Pardoner Lane as a name for the house – one that also happened to be its address. I thought the duplication was the joke.’ Seeing the expression on Charlie’s face, Alice looked embarrassed. ‘I know – it’s mad. But so is the Death Button Centre. Connie’s often described Kit as funny, witty – maybe he’s got a surreal sense of humour.’

‘So letters would be addressed to 17 Pardoner Lane, 17 Pardoner Lane, Cambridge?’ Charlie found herself smiling again. ‘Sounds to me like he was taking the piss out of her.’ The more Charlie thought about it, the more she liked the idea: giving a house its own address as a name was a bit like sticking two fingers up at everyone who took the business of house-naming too seriously. She decided to suggest it to Simon: 21 Chamberlain Street, 21 Chamberlain Street, Spilling. They could have labels printed. Simon’s mother, who had no sense of humour, would be horrified, and, although nothing would be said in so many words, Simon and Charlie would be given to understand that the Lord shared her horror. It was nothing short of miraculous, the way God and Kathleen Waterhouse saw eye to eye on every issue.

Liv would think it was hilarious.

‘I’m going to have to go.’ Alice looked at her watch. ‘I’ve got to take my daughter to a birthday party.’

‘If you remember anything else, can you ring me?’ said Charlie. Simon wasn’t going to be happy. A joke about calling a house the Death Button Centre was unlikely to be the answer to anything. If Connie Bowskill was in a fragile emotional state, on a self-destruct mission, mightn’t the word ‘death’ be enough to bring on an attack of paranoia? She had probably put two things together that weren’t connected at all – a daft joke her husband made years ago, and the dead woman she’d seen on her computer screen, or claimed to have seen.

As she watched Alice walk away, Charlie felt something vibrate against her stomach. Energy vibrations. What crap. She pulled her mobile phone out of her bag. It was Sam Kombothekra. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked without preamble.

‘Not much,’ said Charlie. ‘How about you?’ Under normal circumstances, she would have told him, but she didn’t want to say the name ‘Alice’ out loud in case Sam sensed her guilt down the phone. Not that she felt guilty; she simply recognised that she was. Or soon would be. On this occasion, her culpability didn’t bother her. Tucking her phone under her chin, she used both hands to retrieve Alice’s letter from her handbag.

‘Where are you?’ Sam asked.

Charlie laughed. ‘Is your next question, “What colour underwear are you wearing?” ’

‘My next question is, where’s Simon? I’ve been trying to ring him.’

‘He’s in Bracknell talking to Kit Bowskill’s parents,’ Charlie told him. How ludicrous that she felt proud: she knew where Simon was and Sam didn’t.

‘Can you meet me at the Brown Cow in fifteen minutes?’

‘Should be okay. What’s the problem?’

‘I’ll tell you when I see you.’

‘I’ll get there quicker with a hint to speed me on my way,’ said Charlie. Her fingers traced the sealed flap of the envelope. Nothing good would come of opening it; Simon was unaware of its existence, and Charlie didn’t want its contents in her own head any more than she wanted them in his. She ripped the envelope into small pieces, then smaller ones still, letting them fall at her feet.

‘Jackie Napier,’ said Sam. ‘The problem is Jackie Napier.’





‘You have to treat it as you would a bereavement,’ Barbara Bowskill told Simon. ‘You used to have a son, but you don’t any more. You’re in the same position as a mother whose son went to fight in Iraq and was killed by a bomb, or someone whose child died of cancer, or was murdered by a paedophile. You tell yourself there’s nothing you can do – they’re gone – and you stop hoping.’ She looked like Simon’s idea of what a bereavement counsellor ought to look like, though in reality they rarely did: frizzy dyed auburn hair, grey at the roots; an embroidered tunic over flared jeans, chunky wooden jewellery, sandals with fabric tops and heels made of rope and cork. And no real bereavement counsellor would advise pretending that one’s child had been murdered by a paedophile when that child was alive and well and living in Silsford.

Not for the first time since he’d arrived, Simon had doubts about Kit Bowskill’s mother. It wasn’t only the paedophile remark. He found her smile unsettling, and was glad he’d only seen it twice – once when she’d opened the door to let him in, and then again when she’d handed him a mug of tea and he’d thanked her. It was intrusive, a violation of a smile – one that suggested extreme empathy, shared pain, yearning and a strong desire to devour the soul of its recipient. There was too much crinkling of the skin around the eyes, too much pursing of the lips, almost as if she was about to blow a kiss and start crying simultaneously.

Nigel Bowskill looked as if he belonged to a different world from his wife, in his grey suit trousers, green T-shirt and white trainers. ‘It’s too painful otherwise,’ he explained. ‘We can’t spend the rest of our lives waiting for Kit to change his mind. He hasn’t for seven years. Probably never will.’

‘Why should he have that power over us?’ Barbara sounded defensive, though no one had criticised her. There was something odd about the way this couple spoke, thought Simon – as if each disagreed violently with what the other had just said, though if you listened to the words rather than the tone, they appeared to be unanimous all the way down the line.

So far, Simon hadn’t enjoyed being in their house: a detached beige-brick modern villa which, together with its built-on double garage, made an L-shape. He reminded himself that it didn’t matter; this was unpaid work, not fun. Day eight of his honeymoon. He wished he’d brought Charlie with him, but knew that if by some miracle time were to rewind to yesterday, he would choose again to make the trip alone. ‘It must be hard,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I ask what caused the rift?’

‘Kit didn’t tell you?’ Barbara rolled her eyes at her own foolishness. ‘No, of course he didn’t, because he couldn’t, not without revealing something about himself that he didn’t want you to know – that once he tried to do something and didn’t succeed, shock horror. What you’ve got to understand about my son is that he’s the most intensely private person you’ll ever meet, as well as the proudest. Since he refuses to come to terms with his own fallibility, his pride is easily wounded – that’s where the secrecy comes in, all in the good cause of saving face. There’s no doubt in Kit’s mind that the whole world is watching him, eagerly awaiting his downfall. He might seem relaxed and chatty on the surface, but don’t be fooled – it’s all image management.’

‘He spent his whole childhood hiding from us,’ said Nigel.

Automatically, Simon looked round the living room for possible hiding places, and saw none; there was nothing here to hide behind, only two leather sofas at right angles to one another, each one pushed up against a wall. The hall Simon had been ushered through had been the same, as had the kitchen he’d stood in, briefly, while Barbara made him a cup of tea. He’d never seen a less cluttered house. There were no shelves, no ornaments, no coats on pegs by the front door, no plants, no fruit bowls or clocks, no occasional tables. The house was like a film set, not yet fully installed. Where did Kit’s parents keep all their things? Simon had asked them if they’d only just moved in, and been told that they’d lived in the house for twenty-six years.

‘I don’t mean he hid physically,’ Barbara was saying. ‘We always knew where he was. He never stayed out and left us worrying, like some of his friends did to their parents.’

‘We thought we knew who he was, too,’ said Nigel, whose face was his son’s plus two and a half decades. ‘A contented, polite, obedient boy – sailed through school, loads of mates.’

‘He showed us what he knew we wanted to see,’ Barbara blurted out, as if afraid her husband might get to the punch-line first if she wasn’t quick about it. ‘All through his childhood, our son was his own spin doctor.’

‘What was he trying to hide?’ Simon asked. So far, the questioning had been all one way. If either of Kit Bowskill’s parents wondered why a detective had invited himself to their house in order to ask about their son, they were keeping quiet about it. If only everyone Simon interviewed could share their lack of curiosity; he hated having to explain himself, even when the explanation was a good one.

‘No guilty secrets,’ said Nigel. ‘Only himself.’

‘His low opinion of himself,’ Barbara amended. ‘What he perceived as his weakness. Of course, we’ve only worked all this out in retrospect – we’ve been rather like detectives, you might say. We’ve spoken to his school friends, found out things we had no idea about at the time because Kit made sure to conceal them from us – the torture he inflicted on boys who won the prizes he thought he should have won, the bribes he offered those same boys once he’d come to his senses, so that they wouldn’t say anything to their parents or teachers about who’d injured them.’

‘He terrified the life out of all those who came within his orbit,’ said Nigel.

Barbara smiled. ‘In his absence, we’ve put together a psychological profile of him, the way you lot do with criminals. At the time, he had us completely fooled. Deliberately or not, he played on our egos. Nigel and I were happy, prosperous – we had a successful business. Of course we believed that our son was this blessed golden boy who never suffered a set-back, never got upset or angry, never admitted to having a problem.’

‘His act was watertight.’ The regret in Nigel’s voice was laced with admiration, Simon thought. ‘He couldn’t bear for anybody to see that he was an ordinary human being who sometimes made a fool of himself – with highs and lows, just like the rest of us. Kit had to appear to be above all that – always in control, happy all the time . . .’

‘Which meant that no one was allowed to know what mattered to him, or that he sometimes got upset, that he sometimes failed or wasn’t the best at something.’ Barbara’s frenzied delivery made it hard to listen to her. Her eagerness to speak made her sound unbalanced. She seemed to find it unbearable when it was her husband’s turn and she had to wait. ‘All his life, Kit’s worked on an image of perfection. That’s the real reason he can’t forgive us – for a few hours in 2003, the mask slipped and we saw him agitated and unhappy, having cocked up something that really mattered to him. It’s himself he won’t forgive, for allowing things to reach the point where he needed to come to us for help – nothing to do with us not giving him the fifty grand.’

‘Fifty thousand pounds?’ Simon asked. Was that what Kit had meant when he’d said his parents had failed to ‘rally round’?

Nigel nodded. ‘He needed it to buy a house.’

‘I’ve still got the brochure somewhere, I think,’ said Barbara. ‘Kit brought it round to show us. When we wouldn’t cooperate, he told us he didn’t want the brochure, not if he couldn’t have the house. “Why don’t you tear it up, or burn it?” he said. “I expect you’d enjoy that.” I think he thought that as soon as we looked at the pictures and saw how stunning it was, we’d hand over the money. And it was stunning, but . . . it wasn’t worth the amount the vendor was asking Kit to pay on top, and we didn’t think it would be fair on the people who thought they were buying it if Kit and Connie were to pull the rug out from under them all of a sudden. What kind of charlatan behaviour is that?’

‘It was no way to treat them, and no way to treat us.’ Nigel threw this out as a challenge, daring someone to disagree. He was gearing up to have the fight all over again, as if Kit were sitting here opposite him instead of Simon. ‘Connie and Kit could easily have afforded a house in Cambridge that was more than adequate for their needs – there’ll have been any number of places they could have bought. Why did they have to have this particular house, which was effectively already sold?

Because Kit was too proud to compromise, determined to hold out for the ideal?

‘Kit saw no need to tell us why,’ said Barbara. ‘He behaved as though it was his God-given right to have that house, at whatever cost.’

‘He had a damn nerve, telling us he wanted to waste fifty thousand pounds doing something immoral and expecting us to foot the bill. He didn’t even ask for a loan, that was what got to me. Said nothing about paying the money back, just expected us to give it to him. When we said no, he turned vicious.’

Simon wanted to ask Nigel what he’d meant about the house already being sold, but he didn’t want to interrupt. He could get the details later. ‘Vicious how?’ he asked instead.

‘Oh, it all came out. Barbara and I had no standards – we didn’t know the difference between a good thing and a bad thing, didn’t know a beautiful house when we saw one, didn’t understand the importance of beauty, didn’t notice it when it was staring us in the face. Oh, and we didn’t notice ugliness either, and didn’t take the appropriate steps to avoid it – we’d only ever bought ugly houses.’ Nigel tried to sound light-hearted as he reeled off the list of his son’s insults, but Simon could hear the hurt in his voice.

‘And of course we’d made Kit suffer, because he’d had to live in those ugly houses with us,’ Barbara contributed. ‘He said we were like animals, we didn’t understand about aiming high and only accepting the best. What did we know about anything? We’d chosen to live in three awful, barbaric places one after another: first Birmingham, then Manchester, then Bracknell – all places that should be wiped off the face of the earth. How could we have made Kit live in them? How could we have lived in them ourselves?’

‘From the moment Kit set foot in Cambridge, nowhere else was good enough,’ said Nigel. ‘We weren’t good enough any more.’

‘Though Kit was so skilled at concealment, we had no idea we’d gone down in his estimation – not until we wouldn’t give him the money he thought it was his right to take, and he was angry enough to tell us that everything we’d ever done was wrong.’

‘The list of our crimes was endless.’ Nigel started to count them off on his fingers. ‘We should have moved to Cambridge when Kit started at university – moved our home and our business – so that he wouldn’t have to leave the city in the holidays and come back to Bracknell . . .’

‘. . . which he described as “the death of hope”. Imagine saying that about your home!’

‘We should have helped him when he finished his degree and the only job he could get was in Rawndesley – should have offered to support him financially, so that he didn’t have to move, didn’t have to leave Cambridge.’

‘At the time he’d told us he was thrilled with his new job in Rawndesley and really looking forward to a change of scene!’

‘His usual tactic,’ said Nigel. ‘Pretending that what had happened was what he’d wanted all along, so that he could come out looking like the winner.’

‘He was very convincing. Kit’s always convincing.’ Barbara stood up. ‘Would you like to see his room?’ she asked Simon. ‘I’ve kept it exactly how he left it – like a dead child’s room, everything just the same, and me the grieving mother, curator of the museum.’ She let out a bark of laughter.

‘Why would he want to see Kit’s bedroom?’ Nigel snapped. ‘We don’t even know why he’s here. It’s not as if Kit’s missing and he’s after leads.’

Simon, on his feet now, waited to be asked about the reason for his visit.

‘He might be missing,’ Barbara told her husband. ‘We don’t know, do we? Might even be dead. If he isn’t, then he’s of interest to the police for some other reason. Anyone who wants to understand Kit needs to see his bedroom.’

‘We’d have been told if he was dead,’ said Nigel. ‘They’d have to tell us. Wouldn’t you?’

Simon nodded. ‘I’d like to see the room, if you don’t mind showing me,’ he said.

‘The more the merrier,’ said Barbara, her tone flirtatious. She stretched out her arms, inviting a non-existent crowd to join them. ‘Though I warn you, I’m rusty. I haven’t done my tour guide bit for a while.’ Out came the voracious maudlin smile again; Simon tried not to recoil.

Nigel sighed. ‘I won’t be joining you,’ he said.

‘No one asked you to.’ Barbara slapped down her response like a trump card.

Simon followed her out of the room. Halfway up the stairs, she stopped and turned to face him. ‘You’re probably wondering why we don’t ask,’ she said. ‘For the sake of our emotional survival, we can’t give in to our curiosity. It’s much easier if we hear no news.’

‘It must take a lot of discipline,’ said Simon.

‘Not really. No one likes to suffer unnecessarily, or at least I don’t, and Nigel doesn’t. Any new information about our ex-son would knock three days off our lives. Even the most insignificant detail – that Kit went to the shop and bought a newspaper this morning, that he wore a particular shirt yesterday. Even if that was all you told me, I’d be in bed tomorrow, unable to do anything. I don’t want to have to think about him in the present tense – does that make sense?’

Simon hoped not, hoped it didn’t make the sense he thought it made.

‘We have to believe time has stopped,’ Barbara lectured him, as convinced of the rightness of her position as a political campaigner. ‘That’s why I go into his room every day. Nigel can’t bear it. Neither can I, really, but if I didn’t go in, I wouldn’t know for sure that it hadn’t changed. And someone has to keep it clean.’

She climbed the remaining stairs to the first-floor landing. Simon followed her. There were four doors, all closed. One had a large sheet of paper stuck to it, on which someone had drawn a black rectangle, sides perfectly straight, and written something inside it in small black handwriting. From where he was, Simon couldn’t read it.

‘That’s Kit’s room, with the notice on the door,’ said Barbara. Simon had guessed as much. As he moved closer, he saw that the sign was made of something thicker than paper – a kind of thin canvas board. And the words had been painted on, not written. Carefully; it looked almost like calligraphy. Kit Bowskill had intended the sign on his door to be more than a means of imparting information.

Barbara, standing behind Simon, recited the words aloud as he read them. The effect was unsettling, as if she was the voice of his thoughts. ‘Civilization is the progress towards a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.’

Beneath the quote was a name: ‘Ayn Rand’. Author of The Fountainhead. It was one of many novels that Simon wished he’d read, but never actually fancied reading. ‘This an intellectual way of saying, “Kit’s Room – Keep Out”?’ he asked Barbara.

She nodded. ‘We did. Religiously. Until Kit told us we’d seen him and spoken to him for the last time. Then I thought, “Sod it – if I’m losing my son, at least I can get a room in my house back.” I was so livid, I could have ripped the walls down.’ The electric tremor in her voice suggested she was no less angry now. ‘I went in there intending to strip it bare, but I couldn’t, not when I saw what he’d done. How could I destroy my son’s secret work of art when it was all I had left of him? Nigel says it’s not art, Kit’s not an artist, but I can’t see any other way to describe it.’

Simon was closest to the door – two footsteps away. He could have walked in and seen it for himself, whatever it was, instead of standing outside listening to Barbara describe it obliquely, but that would have felt inappropriate; he ought to wait for her permission.

‘Have you ever had your heart run over by a large truck?’ She pressed both her hands to her chest. ‘That’s what happened to me when I opened that door for the first time in eleven years. I couldn’t understand it at all – what was I looking at? Now it makes sense, now that I’ve got to know Kit a bit better, in his absence.’

Eleven years. Number eleven again. In spite of the heat, a cold shiver snaked down Simon’s back. Barbara must have seen the question in his eyes, because she said, ‘Nigel and I were banned when Kit was eighteen. He came home from his first term at university and that was the first thing he said. It wasn’t just us, because we were his parents – everyone was banned. No one set foot in his room after that – he made sure of it. He didn’t bring friends round often, but when he did, they stayed in the lounge. Even Connie, when the two of them used to come and visit, he never took her upstairs. They’d sit in the lounge, or the den. Kit had his own flat by the time they met – I don’t think Connie knew he still had a room here, one that was more important to him than any of the ones he actually lived in. You wouldn’t think of it, would you? Most people, when they move out, they move out altogether.’

Unless they had something they wanted or needed to hide, thought Simon. Most people couldn’t get away with saying to their girlfriends who lived with them, ‘This room’s mine – you’re not allowed anywhere near it.’ Come to think of it, most people couldn’t get away with saying that to their parents either. ‘In eleven years, you weren’t tempted to go in and have a look?’

‘I probably would have been, but Kit had a lock fitted.’ Barbara nodded at the door. ‘That’s a new one, with no lock, to symbolise the new admissions policy: my ex-son’s room is open to the public, twenty-four seven. I’ll show it to anyone who wants to see it,’ she said defiantly, then giggled. ‘If Kit doesn’t like it, let him come back and complain.’

‘You had the old door removed, the one with the lock?’ Simon asked.

‘Nigel kicked it down,’ Barbara told him proudly. ‘After the “big bust-up”.’ She mimed inverted commas. ‘It was the only way we could get in. Nigel said, “At least it’s clean”, which was a bit of an understatement – it was cleaner than I could ever get a room to be, that’s for sure. Kit bought his own hoover, dusters, polish, the works. He used to come round once a fortnight and spend a couple of hours in there, maintaining it – you could hear the hoover buzzing away. I don’t think Connie knew what he was doing – she spent so much of her free time round at her mum and dad’s, Kit could come here at weekends and she’d know nothing about it. Nigel and I used to feel sorry for her in her ignorance, shut out of something that was so important to him – as if we were the lucky ones, privy to his secrets, because we knew about his room even if we didn’t know what was in it.’

Barbara shook her head as pride gave way to frustration. ‘We were idiots, letting an eighteen-year-old child lock us out of a room in our own house. If I had my time again, I wouldn’t let Kit close a door against me, let alone lock it. I’d watch him like a hawk, every second of every day.’ She pointed her finger at Simon as if to fix him in place. ‘I’d sit by the side of his bed all night and stare at him while he slept. I’d stand next to the shower while he washed, even stand over him while he was on the toilet. I’d allow him no privacy whatsoever. He’d be horrified if he heard me saying this, and I don’t care. Privacy’s the soil that nourishes all sprouting evils, if you ask me.’

‘Can we have a look at the room?’ Simon asked, finding her repellent. If he’d met her before what she called the ‘big bust-up’, he would probably have felt quite differently about her. She’d have been a different person then. Simon would never have admitted it to anyone, but he often felt disgusted by people to whom exceptionally bad things had happened; his fault, not theirs. He figured it was something to do with a desire to distance himself from the tragedy, whatever it was. If anything, it made him try harder to help them, to compensate.

‘Go ahead,’ said Barbara. ‘I’ll follow you in a minute. I don’t want to get in the way of your first impression.’

Simon turned the handle. As the door swung open, the smell of furniture polish was unmistakeable. Kit Bowskill might not have set foot in his private sanctuary since 2003, but someone had been maintaining it to his high standard since then. Barbara. It was the sort of thing only a mother would bother doing.

‘Don’t fall over the hoover,’ she warned. ‘Unlike all the other rooms in this house, Kit’s actually has things in it.’ She laughed. ‘I got rid of the bulk of what Nigel and I owned about six months after Kit gave us our marching orders. If we didn’t have a son any more, there didn’t seem much point in us having anything.’

The door stood half open. Simon pushed it all the way and walked in. The room was full without being cluttered: bed, two chairs, desk, wardrobe, chest of drawers, a bookcase against one wall with a Dyson vacuum cleaner next to it. Between the bookcase and the too-small window there was a line-up of cleaning products – for glass, for wood, for carpets – next to a grey plastic bucket from which six feather-dusters protruded, a mockery of a vase of flowers.

At first Simon thought the walls were papered, because every inch of wall space was covered, and the ceiling. He quickly saw that it couldn’t be paper; there was no repeated pattern. No designer, not even the most radical, would create something this convoluted and bizarre. Photographs. Simon realised he was looking at hundreds of photographs, melded together in such a way that you couldn’t see the joins. Maybe there were none; Simon couldn’t see lines where one picture started and another finished. How had Kit done it? Had he taken all these photos and had them made into wallpaper, somehow?

They were all of roads and buildings, apart from the ones on the ceiling. Those were of the sky: plain pale blue, blue streaked with white cloud, grey flecked with sunset pinks and reds; a deep blue with part of the moon in one corner, a curve of uneven glowing white.

Simon moved closer to the wall; he’d spotted a street he recognised. Yes, there was the Six Bells pub, the one near the Live and Let Live, where he’d met Ian Grint. ‘Is this . . . ?’ Turning in search of Barbara, he found himself looking at the books on the shelves instead. They were lined up in neat rows, their spines exactly level. From their titles, Simon saw that they had a subject in common.

‘Welcome to Cambridge in Bracknell,’ said Barbara.

Histories of Cambridge, books about the origins of the university, the boat race, Cambridge’s rivalry with Oxford; about famous people associated with the city, Cambridge and its artists, Cambridge and the writers it inspired, the pubs of Cambridge, the gardens of Cambridge, its architecture, its bridges, the gargoyles on the college buildings, A Cambridge Childhood, Cambridge college chapels, Cambridge and science, spies with a Cambridge connection.

Simon saw the words ‘Pink Floyd’ – had he found a book that broke the pattern? No, it was The Pink Floyd Fan’s Illustrated Guide to Cambridge.

At the far end of one shelf there was a pristine copy of the city’s A–Z – an old one, if Kit hadn’t been inside this room since 2003, but it looked brand new. On the shelf above it, Simon saw a row of Cambridge Yellow Pages and telephone directories.

He was aware, suddenly, of Barbara standing beside him. ‘We knew he was fond of the place,’ she said. ‘We had no idea it was an all-consuming obsession.’

Simon was reading the road signs in the photographs: De Freville Avenue, Hills Road, Newton Road, Gough Way, Glisson Road, Grantchester Meadows, Alpha Road, St Edward’s Passage. No Pardoner Lane, or at least none that Simon had seen yet. He looked up at the pictures of the Cambridge sky. Thought about eighteen-year-old Kit Bowskill, unwilling to sleep under its Bracknell equivalent.

Connie had been wrong. She’d told Simon that Kit had been in love with someone while he was at university, someone he wouldn’t tell her about, whose existence he flat-out denied. For obvious reasons, she’d suspected it was Selina Gane.

It wasn’t. It was no one. The love Kit Bowskill had been intent on hiding from his wife – so strong that he either couldn’t put it into words, or was unwilling to – was not for any individual inhabitant of Cambridge. It was for the city itself.

Barbara was doing her tour-guide bit, as promised. ‘This is the Fen Causeway – Nigel and I used to drive along it when we went to visit. King’s College Chapel you probably spotted. The Wren Library at Trinity. Drummer Street Bus Station . . .’

Simon was aware of his breathing and not much else. Like Kit Bowskill seven years ago, he could think about only one thing.

‘Are you all right?’ Barbara asked. ‘You look a bit worried.’

18 Pardoner Lane.

Kit Bowskill, who hated to fail, had found his perfect house in his perfect city. His parents wouldn’t give him the money he needed, so he hadn’t been able to buy it, but someone had bought it. Someone had succeeded where Kit had failed.

Someone who, at the time, must have felt lucky.