Chapter 31
BECKETT
Beckett was a mess. He’d faced worse, obviously.
Turning up at the hospital to find Gramps in Intensive Care, barely alive after the stroke.
Overhearing the phone call that ended his engagement to Rebecca.
But the way Mary had stepped into that man’s arms, as though coming back home, had felt like watching all his tender hopes and dreams crash and burn.
Bob had this man’s eyes.
Mary’s reaction at the register office had convinced him there’d been a husband.
Now, here he was to claim his wife and son, and Mary had embraced him as though the past few months had never happened.
As though that kiss had never happened.
Of course she did, you clown.
Beckett berated himself for being selfish enough to feel so aggravated as he drove home and spent a painstaking hour getting Gramps into bed.
His grandfather was hard work that evening, belligerent and rude, fussing and griping.
When Beckett allowed a shred of exasperation to leach into his tone, as Gramps tried to insist upon looking for a pair of socks that Beckett repeatedly assured him were halfway through a washing-machine cycle, Gramps stared defiantly at the floor and barked, ‘Stick me in a home where I belong. Why force both of us to endure this misery?’
Beckett breathed deeply, counted to five and reminded them both that he’d made a promise not to do that, and nothing would make him break it. They’d have help again soon enough.
The endless Mary loop continued, as soon as he’d left Gramps in bed. He’s her husband . You’re a guy she met at a vulnerable moment a few weeks ago, who she happened to kiss, once. A part-time taxi driver. With no money, and no life outside your job and taking care of your ailing grandfather.
Ugh. The man had been driving a Lexus.
Still, he’d better have a heck of an excuse for abandoning his pregnant wife. It was clear there’d been zero contact since.
Beckett poured himself a whisky and turned his phone off, the urge to search for answers online stronger than ever.
* * *
After tossing and turning for hours, eventually drowning out with another large whisky the tormenting thoughts about what Mary and her probably-no-longer-ex were doing right then, Beckett snapped awake at four.
Instinctively, he sensed something had woken him up.
The kind of thing that always meant trouble.
With a weary groan, he hauled himself out of bed and pulled on jeans and the Grinch jumper he’d worn to the rehearsal.
Heart sinking, but not yet alarmed, he found Gramps’ bed empty, along with the rest of the house.
His pulse picked up when he found the back door locked, the front one not quite closed properly.
Wrenching it open, he sprinted down the path and scanned the street in both directions, looking for huddled shapes, misplaced shadows, an old man who could barely walk stumbling along in the freezing darkness.
His curses barely squeezing past the tension in his throat, he threw on his coat, grabbed his phone and Gramps’ parka, still hanging on the rack by the door, and raced back out.
He managed the first few minutes without descending into complete panic, expecting to spot his grandfather any second, already anticipating the flood of relief when he found him.
As more seconds ticked by, the sense of dread suddenly grew overwhelming. Beckett tried to force himself into doctor mode, removing any emotion from the situation and thinking logically. Easier said than done, when it was his only relative and not a random patient.
‘Where the hell have you gone, Gramps?’ he mumbled to the empty street, turning his phone back on. He called Mary. Yes, she had bigger things going on, but she also loved Gramps, and would have as good an idea as anyone where he might have wandered off to.
Who was he kidding? The truth was, her voice was about the only thing that would keep him from completely losing it right now.
No answer.
He carried on pacing along the road, searching frantically as he dialled a different number.
‘What’s up, my friend?’ Moses sounded wide awake. ‘Just trying to get Tabitha to accept Santa isn’t coming for four more sleeps, so it couldn’t have been reindeer she heard on the roof.’ He paused for a second. ‘Nope. Or sleigh bells. Sorry, sweetie.’
‘Gramps is missing.’
Moses instantly switched tones. ‘Fill me in.’
Within half an hour, the police had been informed and there were five men – five!
Beckett hadn’t even met Clive before, but he was a retired police officer, so had offered to help – scouring the Bigley streets in a systematic grid formation that allowed Beckett to hold on to a paltry shred of hope that they’d find Marvin before he froze to death.
He’d cried, great, big, gasping gulps that had almost brought him to his literal knees, when the two cars had pulled up, and Moses, Bill and the other guys had sprung out, bearing huge torches, blankets and serious expressions.
Not for the first time in the past few weeks, Beckett appreciated afresh the monumental difference it made when heading into a storm with good people either side of you.
He barely felt the biting wind and icy drizzle, mind as numb as his fingers as he set his face like flint and doggedly followed the route assigned to him by Clive. Bill’s wife, Susanne, was waiting at the house in case by some miracle Gramps found his way home.
Beckett had accepted that Gramps wouldn’t live forever.
But for him to go like this, alone and lost on a cold, dark street.
Spreadeagled in some alleyway or sprawled in a gutter.
Especially when, after the despair of the past few years, Gramps had finally started to find some enjoyment in life again.
Beckett’s head might be frozen, but his heart ached with a ferocity that put his earlier anguish about Mary to shame.
He couldn’t even speak when he answered Sam’s call, thirty minutes later.
‘Found him curled up on a bench in that tiny park behind the school.’
Beckett sank to the wet ground. That park was a five-minute walk from their house. Fifteen, maybe, for Gramps. A good ten from where he was now.
‘He’s got a pulse. Breathing shallow, but steady. His extremities are ice, but his dressing gown and hat probably saved him.’
‘Conscious?’ Beckett was already lurching to his feet, gearing up for the sprint.
‘For a few seconds, then drifted out again. Ambulance is on its way.’
Six minutes later, Beckett cradled his grandfather against his chest, as the worst of the fear seeped slowly into the night.
Gramps had cried out when Beckett ran a hand down his left leg, the doctor pulling down the thick socks that had previously been in the washing machine with a grim shake of his head to find a purple, swollen ankle.
‘Cancel the ambulance,’ he told Sam. ‘It’ll be quicker if we go in a car. I can take care of him.’
Moses drove the two of them to the hospital. Gramps was drowsy, but lucid enough when he did stir.
‘I told you,’ he growled as Beckett strapped him in, after moving a booster seat and mountain of kid’s clutter. ‘Put me in a damn home.’
* * *
Beckett called Mary again once Gramps was finally settled on a ward.
Still no answer, despite it being late morning.
An X-ray had showed up a nasty fractured ankle, but mercifully minimal signs of hypothermia (the socks had helped, a nurse cheerfully informed them).
Beckett related some of the other worrying behaviour and symptoms that had developed recently, and the doctor assured him that they’d refer Mr Bywater on to the help he needed.
Beckett felt like a deflated balloon. He’d sent Moses home at some point in the hours spent waiting for assessments and tests and then finally a free bed, then, much later, got a lift home with Jakob from Sherwood Taxis. It felt almost eerie to be entering an empty house.
He debated sending Mary a message, but he fell asleep on the sofa before he’d come up with something to say.
After waking up in the late afternoon, he showered and changed, grabbed a banana and raced back to the hospital, not bothering to charge his dead phone.
Gramps stayed awake for maybe ten minutes, during which he had the energy to grumble about half a dozen words, so, after watching him sleep for a couple of hours, Beckett chose the sensible option and left him to rest.
Instead of turning off to Bigley, he instead found himself heading along the smaller road towards Hatherstone.
Beckett promised himself he’d no intention of causing trouble; he would pretend the kiss never happened, simply fill Mary in and be clear that, no matter what she’d said about ruining their friendship, he would make it work.
His foot rammed on the brake when he reached the cottage. The Lexus still squatted like a giant flea on the driveway.
All the hopes he’d dared not admit, that maybe Mary would have had an official goodbye conversation, agreed to work out some arrangement for letting this man see his son from time to time, and sent him on his way, collapsed along with his resolve to act like the better man.
Still reeling from the night before, unable to face putting on a polite mask when inside was a devastated wasteland, he turned the car around and headed back to his empty house, wondering what on earth he was going to do now.