Harry and Patrick were not having much luck. The first three names on their list had been out. The second two insisted that they had told Marcus all they could and they really couldn’t be bothered with it all again. Didn’t he take notes? The next was an elderly lady called Mrs Thorpe who lived alone if you didn’t count the African Grey parrot that harassed them from the second she allowed them to come through the front door.
‘Of course I remember Mr Friedman,’ she said. ‘What a charming man. I had such a nice time with him. He was with me all afternoon one week and then he came back the next. It was so nice; one gets so few visitors, you know.’ She turned to look quizzically at Patrick, taking in the baggy jeans, long-sleeved surfing shirt and the canvas record bag he carried slung across his body. She drew in a deep and rather hesitant breath, as though teenage boys were a novelty she wasn’t sure she included in the category of pleasant visitors. She turned back to his father. ‘He took a lot of notes and even recorded some things I told him. It was very exciting. Please sit down. Do.’
They sat. The parrot came and stood on the back of Patrick’s chair. It squawked loudly and dived a beak into his unruly hair.
‘Ow!’ Patrick protested.
Mrs Thorpe turned and frowned in his direction. She said nothing to the parrot. ‘Now how can I help you?’
Harry launched into the story of how they wanted to finish Rupert’s book. Mrs Thorpe nodded and smiled. ‘Oh, how nice.’
The parrot started on Patrick’s ears. He hunched his shoulders and sat forward trying to get out of its way.
Mrs Thorpe looked back in his direction. ‘Oh, don’t slouch, dear. I do think it’s such a shame the way young people slouch, don’t you?’
‘Um …’ said Harry glancing absently at his son.
‘It’s the parrot,’ Patrick protested.
Mrs Thorpe clucked her tongue at him. ‘No, dear,’ she said firmly. ‘My parrot doesn’t slouch.’ She focussed attention back on Harry. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘where were we?’
The parrot switched tack and hopped down on to the arm of Patrick’s chair, out of sight, he noticed, of its owner. Once there it began a concerted attack on his sleeve, pulling viciously at the cuff and sinking its beak through the fabric and right into Patrick’s arm.
Patrick yelped again.
‘My dear –’ Mrs Thorpe stared sternly at him through rimless spectacles – ‘perhaps if you are determined to torment my parrot, you ought to go and wait outside.’
Stung by injustice but more than happy to escape, Patrick fled. Outside he examined his torn sleeve and the damaged flesh beneath. The beak had drawn blood. He wondered what nasty diseases you could catch from parrots and whether you might risk going to jail should you wring its neck.
There was a patch of overgrown grass in front of the cottage and Patrick sat down with his back to the wall wishing he’d brought his MP3 player. Instead, from the inside pocket of his record bag he pulled the journal that he had been reading after breakfast and hidden in there when Marcus arrived to collect Naomi.
He wasn’t sure why he should be worried about Marcus seeing it – he had made a point of taking the other two journals to his room that morning. Patrick wasn’t sure, either, what made him so uncomfortable around Rupert’s business partner but something did.
The journal he had brought with him was the second one of the three. The first they had skimmed briefly and the third read in more detail the night before. It contained several references that appeared to relate to Sam Kinnear, but never by name and nothing that added to the sense of what they already knew. The second journal had remained untouched until today.
Patrick had begun to plough through the accounts of cinema visits and restaurants and buying trips detailed in the journal. He flicked back to the page he had been reading that morning. On the face of it there was no reason for Rupert to have concealed these books or, for that matter, the laptop. An initial examination of the laptop last night had revealed the text of his new book, some saved emails and a favourites list of internet sites that were fascinating for the variety of sites he visited if nothing else. Patrick was eager to get back to the task.
He found his place in the journal. Rupert was writing about a film he’d watched the night before and the entry was for June 14th 2004. Rupert liked his films and he wrote short reviews on them. Many of the films seemed to be art house or foreign language films that Patrick had either never heard of or never seen, but this one was familiar: Memento, a film Patrick had watched with Naomi. It had been a fascinating story, Patrick remembered. A man who had lost his memory was slowly trying to piece together who he was. The film ended with a twist and Patrick had liked that. He’d enjoyed The Usual Suspects for the same reason, that twist in the tail, and had watched it several times over, noting the clues by which he could have worked it out.
Patrick looked up from the book and stared out across the road and into the field beyond. There was something … something now nagging at the back of his mind. Something about the way the journals were written? He wasn’t sure. Patrick shook his head. It would all come together, he thought. It usually did but he had learnt that such flashes of intuition could not be forced.
He read on. Another lunch – Rupert had been fond of his food – another meeting with a client who collected arts and crafts silver and gave details of what he might be looking for. Patrick read on. His heart skipped. Another reference to a man who was probably Kinnear:
I thought I’d got rid of the man. Last year, when he first barged his way back into my life and started making his demands, I thought I’d done enough to satisfy the man’s greed. I should have known better than that. Men like him are never satisfied. I should have cut my losses then, before he got out, cut my losses, signed the business over to Marcus, and gone away. You may not be able to run away from your past, but at least you can try to run from the people you left behind there.
Patrick mulled this over. So, in June 2004 Kinnear was still in prison but already causing problems for Rupert. So, why did Marcus think that the problems were more recent, starting only a month or so before Rupert’s death. What had changed?
He read on and found a partial answer a couple of pages on:
It turns out he still doesn’t know where I am, a fact for which I give profound thanks. Elaine returned his letters ‘address unknown’ and I’m glad she didn’t have to lie about that. Glad I never let her know where I was. Elaine was always loyal. God alone knows why. I never did anything to deserve it. But the question remains, how long can I breathe easy in the knowledge that he has lost me. A man like Sam does not give up and go away, especially when he feels he has been wronged and, I suppose, from his perspective, he has.
But I would do the same all over again. Indeed I would, though to be truthful, the actions I took have done little to assuage the guilt I still feel.
Who on earth was Elaine? Patrick wondered. He flicked through the remaining pages but there was no reference to her again that he could see from that brief check. And what did Rupert feel guilty about? How might he feel he had done wrong by Kinnear?
Patrick frowned, staring down at the neatly written text. Irritated now, he flicked through the book again, then froze. What? Patrick laid the book open flat on the ground and lifted the pages, then flicked slowly. No, not quite right, with those flick books they had to be flicked properly. Fast.
Not quite sure what he’d seen, he did it again. Earlier, when he’d tried to figure out what bothered him about the book, he had intuited that it was something about the way that the words were written – and he’d been right. Every now and again Rupert had changed the spacing of his entries, added a random letter to a line, or what had at first looked like a date, to the foot of a page. Patrick had taken little notice of the odd misspelling or random annotations; his own writing was full of them. He now realized he had assumed Rupert was having the odd dyslexic moment.