The Butterfly Tattoo

  But Frank and Billy Carson had a younger brother. His name was Edward, and he was quite a different character. Where they were impulsive, he was calculating; where they were stupid, he was intelligent. He’d taken no part in their criminal activities, not because of any moral scruples, but because he thought crime was an inefficient way to get what you could also get, and more importantly keep, by means of cunning. He had trained as a chartered accountant, and with that cover he had developed ways of making stolen money look clean. He was already wealthy.

  He might have been contemptuous of his elder brothers’ shortsighted brutality, except for one thing: they had jointly and tenderly brought him up after the death of their elderly parents, and he loved both of them with the only love in his life.

  Edward was a strange, cruel, philosophical man; a great reader; a man whose passions were as chilly and implacable as a glacier. So when Billy was killed and Frank sent to prison for what would be at least twenty-five years, that icy intelligence turned towards Barry Springer. Springer had betrayed Billy; Springer had stood in the witness box swearing with wide-eyed innocence that he had no idea where the money was. And that had meant an even heavier sentence for Frank, since the jury simply didn’t believe him when he said Springer must have taken it.

  The one passion that can take root in the frozen soil of a nature like Edward Carson’s is revenge. Springer was responsible; Springer would pay. Carson had found an outlet for his talent and a use for his wealth. He began to look for Barry Springer.

  Chapter Four

  From start to finish on Tuesday, the job took Chris five hours. By the end of it all the old wiring was replaced with new, and there was a ring main circuit with four double sockets on it, a radial circuit for a cooker, and a lighting circuit with two ceding roses. In addition, Chris had thought of a variation on Barry’s infrared idea, and put in the wiring for it: a floodlight mounted on the outside of the shed, which could also be switched on or off from inside.

  When he’d finished, he checked that everything worked, that all the cable was securely tucked alongside the wooden battens that were going to carry plasterboard, and that all the sawdust and odd bits of cable and flexible cord and plastic were swept up. It was three in the afternoon, and he’d finished for the day.

  He locked the shed and pushed his bike along the track. It was too rough for a good road bike; you could slam about on it with a mountain bike, but to Chris mountain bikes were clumsy, heavy things. No one needed a mountain bike in Oxford, so almost by definition anyone who rode one was a poser. Chris’s idea of cycling was the speed and courage of the Tour de France; he saved his wheels for the road.

  When he came out at Wolvercote, he got on at once and rode hard, head down, for the Cowley Road. It took him fifteen minutes to get to Jenny’s house, where he found no one in. He hadn’t actually arranged to meet her, but he still felt disappointed.

  He cruised up and down for a few minutes before swinging away from the Cowley Road and heading for Rose Hill.

  This was an area of small roads and semi-detached houses at the south of the city, where his father had been living for the past six months with Diane, his mistress. Chris wasn’t sure why he was going there now, except that he didn’t want to go home.

  He was surprised to see a For Sale sign outside the house, but when Diane answered the door, he forgot it at once. She was pretty, blonde, plumpish, about twenty-three or twenty-four years old. Chris had known her since she’d come to work in his father’s office two years before.

  ‘Chris! Hi. Er, come in. Your dad’s in the garden.’

  He wished he didn’t blush so easily. It was Diane’s being so pretty, and it was her short skirt and bare legs, and the warm flowery afternoon air, and it was the way she was smiling at him, too, as if she liked him.

  He went through the narrow living room and out through the French window into the sunny little back garden.

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ he said.

  His father, in shorts and a T-shirt and a Panama hat for his balding head, looked up from the papers on the board across his lap.

  ‘Hello, boy,’ he said. ‘What the hell do you want, then?’

  This was a standard greeting. His father was very fond of him, and Chris knew it.

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Business is booming, son. That’s why I’m sitting here doing it in the sunshine. How’s Mum?’

  ‘Fine. Mike Fairfax is living with …’

  He was going to say us, but that wouldn’t have been true. Mike Fairfax was sleeping with Chris’s mother, not living with him. His father brightened with interest.

  ‘Really? Fairfax the philosopher?’

  ‘Yes. She’s gone all political. She wears badges and goes to meetings and things.’

  He sat on the step of the patio and held out his hand to the black-and-white kitten playing there. The little creature batted suspiciously at it before running away to hide under a lavender bush.

  ‘I know the type,’ his father said. ‘Fairfax, I mean. Don’t tell me, he’s Labour, isn’t he? Can’t be a Liberal. Must be Labour. Am I right?’

  ‘Even if I said no, you’d tell me I was making a mistake.’

  ‘Stands out a mile. He’s got a social conscience, I can tell. I never had one of them. Your mum was shocked when she found out. I remember, soon after we got married, the big thing then was saving the tiger. I said save the bloody tiger, good idea; we can use it for medical experiments, get a lot more experiments per tiger than per rat. She didn’t take to that. Serious woman, you see. Still, if old Fairfax is keeping her warm, fair enough. Thank you, Diane, bless you.’

  Diane had appeared with a tray of tea and a plate of greasy-looking homemade biscuits. His father reached down and took one.

  ‘You’re getting fat,’ Chris said.

  ‘Fat? What’s that? Would you say I was fat, Diane?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘You’re a shapeless old lump.’

  She tipped his hat over his face and went inside.

  ‘You see how she treats me?’ said his father, delighted, his mouth full of biscuit.

  ‘Did Diane make these?’ Chris asked him.

  ‘Yes. Don’t you like ’em?’

  ‘They’re very nice, yeah. Are you working from home now, Dad?’

  ‘When I can. No point in going into the office if I can sit here and do it. Not a lot of work about now, anyway. I’m doing an extension for some rich geezer out at Charlbury at the moment. I talked him into having his whole house redone. He’s made a lot of money, so he wants it classical; that’s what all the yuppies like – pediments and columns and that. I can fake it easy enough, but I hate it, really. I thought I’d do a kind of Florentine dome on his garage, except he’d probably spot I was pulling his leg.’

  ‘You shouldn’t do it if you hate it. That’s just prostitution.’

  ‘Pays the rent. Nothing immoral about paying the rent.’

  ‘Yeah, but … you should do what your talent tells you, not what some rich bloke decides.’

  ‘I am. My talent’s for faking. Anyway, he’s paying; he can have what he wants. I make sure it won’t fall down and the rain won’t come in.’

  He frowned, fumbled in his trouser pocket, and pulled out a tattered tube of indigestion tablets.

  ‘Flaming biscuits,’ he said, thickly chewing a tablet. ‘Always give me heartburn. She’s a wonderful girl, you know, Diane. Tremendous talent.’

  ‘Talent?’

  ‘For architecture.’

  ‘Really?’

  He hoped he didn’t sound sceptical. He didn’t mean to.

  ‘Yeah,’ his father went on. ‘She’s wasted as a secretary. She’s going to do the university course. What about you? What are you doing with yourself?’

  Chris told him about Barry Miller and the job. He wondered if he should mention the hideaway, and thought it wouldn’t matter as long as he didn’t say where it was.

  ‘Gangsters after him?’ his father said. ‘He??
?s having you on. What he wants is a love nest.’

  ‘He’s not like that!’

  ‘Betcher. Somewhere to take a girlfriend. That’s why he didn’t want you to tell his wife. We don’t have gangsters running around, not in Oxford.’

  ‘He’s not like that,’ Chris said stubbornly. The idea of Barry deceiving Sue and Sean, breaking up that close and loving family, was horrible.

  ‘Oh, well, I suppose I can talk,’ said his father, sighing. ‘Oh, I know what I was going to ask you. We’re going away, me and Diane, just for the weekend. Friday to Sunday. You couldn’t pop in and keep an eye on the cat, could you?’

  ‘Yeah. Sure.’

  ‘Little bastard shits everywhere, eats everything, and bites. It’d suit me if you could get him run over, but Diane’d be upset, so you’d better not. Just feed him and water him. I’d ask the neighbours, but we had words the other day; they’re a dodgy bunch. We’re not going to stay here long.’

  ‘Oh, yeah! I saw the For Sale sign outside. Where are you going?’

  ‘Out Long Hanborough way. We’ve got a place already. Filthy dirty old cottage; the outside toilet’s the only thing holding it up. I got Mike Lovell working on it now. He did the kitchen extension, remember him? As soon as it’s ready we’ll move out there so this’ll be vacant for a buyer. Here, you could stay here over the weekend, if you wanted. Give Mum and Fairfax a run of the house on their own. Have some mates in here, if you’d like. Have a party and annoy the neighbours.’

  ‘Yeah! Right, I will.’

  Chris knew instantly what he was going to do that weekend. He said goodbye to his father, having arranged to pick up the key on Friday afternoon, and went back through the French window. He looked around for Diane, to say goodbye, and found her coming downstairs. She looked past him and shut the living room door so that they were alone in the hall together.

  ‘Chris,’ she said quietly. ‘Your mum … is she all right?’

  ‘He kept asking that,’ Chris told her. ‘Yes, she’s fine, honest.’

  ‘Because she’s such a nice person. I’d hate it if she was, you know, unhappy or anything. I couldn’t bear that.’

  ‘Well, she was at first. But I think she’s OK now. She’s actually got this boyfriend, so probably she’s not going to commit suicide or anything.’

  She gave him a complicated look and twisted her mouth. She looked even younger than Jenny. She was so close that he could smell the soap she’d been using.

  ‘I couldn’t bear it if everyone thought, you know, I was just …’

  ‘Course they don’t,’ said Chris vaguely. ‘Dad says you’re going to do an architecture course.’

  ‘Yeah. It was his idea, really. It looks interesting.’

  They stood awkwardly for a second or so, two people closer in age, personality, and manner to each other than either was to the man outside, the father, the lover. Then Diane gave a rueful little smile and opened the door for him to leave.

  Chapter Five

  Chris’s mother was quite happy for him to stay at his father’s house over the weekend. He hadn’t known what her reaction would be; she’d become unpredictable since taking up with Mike Fairfax, or else Chris had become less good at guessing. He’d been afraid that she’d make a scene, treat it as desertion, taking his father’s side against her, and so on. In fact, she seemed pleased.

  ‘How is he?’ she said that evening as the three of them sat at supper.

  ‘He kept asking how you were. He’s fine. He’s getting fat.’

  ‘Good,’ she said.

  ‘Good?’

  ‘Well, if he’s not worried about getting fat, he won’t do what that man in Switzerland did.’

  ‘Man in Switzerland?’ said Mike Fairfax.

  ‘The year before last,’ Chris told him, ‘when we were on holiday, there was this middle-aged bloke in the hotel with a really young girl. She was half his age, and he was obviously trying to impress her with how fit he was. Everywhere we went we’d see him jogging or swimming or doing push-ups, and she was trailing along behind looking dead bored. They have these exercise runs marked out in the forest, with wooden apparatus set up, so you run a bit, then do bench jumps and chin-ups, and then run a bit more. Anyway, he was out one morning impressing her and he had a heart attack and snuffed it, just like that.’

  Mike made a noncommittal reply and helped himself to some grapes. He went running every morning himself, which was why Chris had told the story. He was a good man, Chris could see that; he was concerned and committed and energetic and kind and decent. He was particularly keen to involve Chris in things, to defer to him politely as an inhabitant of the house of longer standing, to treat him as a sensible, intelligent adult. It was one of the biggest mysteries in the world, Chris thought, how someone who did all the right things could be so irritating.

  However, Mike wasn’t important. The only important thing was Jenny, and the fact that Chris was going to see her the following evening.

  Some of Barry Miller’s lighting equipment was on hire to a theatre group that was performing Romeo and Juliet in one of the college gardens. Chris had asked Jenny to go to it with him, and she had agreed. Chris had bought the tickets and washed and shaved and dressed in his sharpest casual clothes, and by the time he was standing outside the college lodge, where they’d agreed to meet, he was shaking with nerves.

  He had no idea why, except that this was a formal kind of date, something he’d never done before. But when she turned the corner into the narrow medieval street, looking so fresh and sweet and wise, his heart nearly burst with pride and love, and he found his hands reaching out for her of their own accord, almost. Hers responded. They stood for a silly second or two smiling at each other, and he thought, This is the first time we’ve touched.

  The stage was a wooden floor under the trees, with the seats built up in tiers around it. They sat high up and watched the story unfold, a little patch of tragic light in the gathering darkness. Chris hardly noticed it. All his attention was focused on Jenny, on her hand in his, on the delicate curve of her bare neck, on the fresh freesia-like smell of her perfume, the same one he’d smelled on the ball gown in the boathouse.

  During the intermission she said, ‘I’ve never seen a Shakespeare play before. We did this at school, but I never paid any attention. It was all mixed up with West Side Story, and we had to do our own modern version with punks and that. I didn’t know it’d be like this.’

  ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘It’s wonderful!’

  At the end she cried. At least, she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and sniffed. Chris found himself more moved by that than by the play itself.

  They walked out through the lamplit garden, holding hands, and a tense expectation seemed to be hanging in the air, like heavy fruit on the trees all around.

  Outside the garden, in the narrow cobbled lane with the high garden wall on one side and the ancient stone of a college on the other, she said, ‘I was wondering …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I was wondering if you were ever going to get around to kissing me.’

  He let his bicycle fall and put his arms around her. He’d expected warmth and softness, but never in this degree, and never combined with a lithe and sinuous strength that seemed to quiver like a flame in his arms.

  Dazed with it, he hardly knew how much time had passed when they drew apart. They were standing a little way from an old streetlight mounted on the college wall, and her half-shadowed face looked strong and mysterious, like an Aztec sculpture.

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ she said.

  ‘Why? What d’you mean?’

  ‘I mean you obviously want to, but you hang back. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  ‘No. It’s difficult to explain. I think it’s—’

  ‘Don’t explain. You don’t have to explain.’

  ‘But you said you didn’t understand, so I was—’

  ‘I don’t want to understand, neces
sarily. I think you’re strange, but I don’t mind your being strange; it’s nothing I want altered or anything. I like you as you are.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I just said so.’

  ‘I love you, Jenny.’

  He’d said it. He hadn’t meant to, but there it was.

  Suddenly, with a little convulsion that felt like a sob, she was kissing him again. Her lips were open and moist, it was honeydew, he was drinking the essence of her and it was making him drunk with wonder.

  ‘Listen,’ he whispered when they, finally stopped kissing. ‘My father’s got a house in Rose Hill, OK, and he’s going away for the weekend and he’s asked me to stay there and look after his cat.’

  ‘Yeah, and …’

  ‘Would you come and stay with me?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Friday night. And Saturday.’

  ‘OK.’

  He searched his memory exhaustively later on in bed, after he’d walked her home and they’d shared a pizza and one beer, which was all they could afford, in the kitchen of the squat with a girl named Marje. Jenny wouldn’t let him come to her bedroom, but she’d promised to come to his father’s house; he was sure she had. He replayed their kisses and her words over and over again. He was sure he’d got it right.

  When Friday came, and he was sitting in the narrow living room at Rose Hill, his certainty began to fade. The kitten for whose sake he was there was curled up asleep on the sofa, and the setting sun threw a warm glow over the Victorian tiled fireplace, the shelves of books beside it, his father’s neatly stacked architectural journals and art books, the shabby but beautiful Persian rug. Chris sat in the silence, feeling the house empty all around him, prepared for her. There was food in the kitchen: a cold quiche and salad, laid out by Diane. There was music; his father was not one to live without his cassettes and his compact discs: Wagner, Mahler, Bruckner, Strauss.

  The whole house was theirs … Chris began to tremble. He’d got it wrong. She hadn’t said she’d come. She wasn’t going to come; she had no intention of coming. She’d laughed when he’d said he loved her, and he’d blanked it out of his memory. He’d never had pizza and beer in the kitchen of the squat; he’d dreamed the whole thing. She was sitting with Derek and Ollie now, laughing at him. He imagined every kind of humiliation as he sat there in the neat little room while the evening faded and the night began to gather in the garden.