Chapter 40 Ash
Ash
NOW
Ash gets a chance to talk to Olly a few days later.
Olly is on his half-term break and Ash is taking the week off work.
He knows Olly and Iris don’t need babysitting, but he hopes they’ll come round to Mayflower Farm if he’s there.
At Ash’s request – well, insistence, really – Olly has come round to help him do a bit of DIY.
It’s about time Ash got the Mayflower looking ship-shape, so to speak.
Ash was doubtful Olly would actually show up.
When he asked for his son’s help, he got a noncommittal grunt in reply.
Ash has decided to install a shower in the downstairs toilet.
Although it’s a large room for a lavatory, it’s going to be cramped as a bathroom.
But when Olly and Iris stay over – and, more recently, Liv, too – one bathroom simply isn’t enough for all of them.
The girls each spend an inordinate amount of time in there, drying their hair and putting on make-up.
Olly spends nearly as long, although the transformation is less apparent when he emerges.
‘I haven’t got long, Dad,’ Olly says, by way of a greeting as he slopes into the house, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his jeans. He has cycled over from Holtleigh. ‘Liv’s picking me up.’
‘Sit down a sec,’ Ash says, pointing at the bar stool in the kitchen. ‘Do you want something to drink?’
‘Nah. I’m good.’
Ash takes the stool next to Olly’s and waits for his son to look at him, to establish eye contact. Then he takes a deep breath and says, ‘Olly, your mum knows.’
‘Knows what?’
Ash waits for the penny to drop. It only takes a second or two. Olly’s eyes widen and his mouth forms a large ‘O’, but no sound comes out.
‘Shit!’ Olly says at length. ‘Did you tell her? Or did Iris?’ His tone is accusatory.
‘Neither of us,’ Ash says. ‘She worked it out by herself, sort of put two and two together.’ He pauses, hearing the words as they leave his mouth.
Carla sometimes points out that he uses a lot of mathematics idioms. It’s a stand-in joke between them.
The thought makes him smile wistfully in spite of everything.
‘I didn’t confirm it,’ Ash continues. ‘In fact, I did my best to convince your mum she’d got it wrong. ’
‘So she doesn’t really know, then,’ Olly says.
‘No, you’re right,’ Ash says. He should have planned what he was going to say before his son arrived today.
‘She suspects you had something to do with Josh’s death.
Let’s put it that way. I just thought I’d give you a heads-up.
You know, in case she brings it up. I don’t think she will, but if she does, you’ll be ready. I didn’t know everything either.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You didn’t tell me it was Josh who drugged and raped Liv. You let on it was some random guy she didn’t know at a party. But it was his party, his drugs; it was him.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Did you know all along?’
‘What? No. I found out … it’s the reason why … he thought it was …’
Olly clearly isn’t going to finish any of his sentences, so Ash says, ‘It’s what made you lose it, isn’t it? That day in the woods.’
‘Yeah. So now you know.’
‘You could have told me.’
Olly shrugs. ‘Does it matter? Liv didn’t want anyone to know she was raped.’
Ash ponders that question. He understands Olly’s motive better now. As Carla said, he was avenging both his sister and his girlfriend. And it matters that his son didn’t think he could confide in him. But he leaves the question unanswered.
Ash’s mind takes him back to that evening, which kicked off with a phone call from Iris, who was clearly very distraught.
He set off immediately in the car and picked up Olly and Iris from Lower Buryknoll Wood.
They were soaked to the skin – it was raining heavily – and Olly’s clothing was bloodstained.
Iris said they hadn’t meant to kill Josh; they’d wanted to threaten him, to get the truth out of him.
Ash had believed her. He’d assumed she meant the truth about the video, that she’d wanted him to admit he did it.
It didn’t occur to him there might be more to it.
Ash’s immediate instinct was to cover for Olly.
It’s what Iris was insisting he should do, even though they were all aware that suspicion could fall on her.
Ash was ready to provide an alibi; he washed the knife on the highest setting in the dishwasher and instructed Olly to put it back where he’d found it at the earliest opportunity; he disposed of Olly’s clothing – and Carla thought she was the one getting rid of evidence!
Ash tells Carla everything. It’s the one and only secret he hasn’t shared with her, partly for her own sake, but mainly because Iris swore him to secrecy.
Ash gets down from the stool and puts on the kettle. He could do with a coffee. He has a high-end espresso maker – a present from Carla and the kids for his fiftieth – but he has run out of coffee beans, so it will have to be instant.
He has his back turned when Olly suddenly says, ‘Dad, I’ve been thinking.’
‘Uh-oh,’ Ash says in a feeble attempt to lighten the mood. ‘Are you feeling OK?’ He winces as his joke falls flat.
‘I want you to ring Uncle Ian.’
Ash stiffens. He hasn’t heard Olly call Roly that for years, not since Olly was about eight years old. ‘What for?’ he asks, though he can hazard a guess.
‘I want to hand myself in, Dad. I wanted to hand myself in then. You know I did. That’s why Iris told you in the first place. So you would talk me out of it.’
Ash turns to face his son. ‘Look, Olly, you killed a vile, hateful, evil person. If he’d lived, he would have gone on to cause even more trouble and hurt even more people.’
‘We don’t know that for sure.’
‘I think we can be pretty sure.’
‘Doesn’t make what I did OK, though, does it? It hasn’t even stopped the problems. Jordan and Jasper are pushing drugs now. It’s like they’ve taken over the family business or something.’
‘Plus, a man was arrested in connection with Josh’s murder,’ Ash continues, as if his son hasn’t spoken. ‘You don’t have to do this.’
‘We can’t let an innocent man take the rap.’
‘An innocent man? Tomlinson?’ Ash scoffs. ‘One: he wasn’t all that innocent himself. He was a paedophile. And two: he’s dead.’
He’s doing it again. One and two. Carla would have said A and B.
She works with letters; he works with numbers.
Opposites that fit together, he and Carla.
He still thinks of her as the yin to his yang, especially when it comes to the kids.
Christ, he wishes she was in on this, backing him up and finding the right arguments.
‘Doesn’t make it OK,’ Olly repeats, his voice at least an octave too high. ‘And what about his loved ones?’
Ash gets that Olly has a conscience – that’s all very honourable.
He also understands his son’s desire to come clean and put an end to all of this.
He must have felt as if he was in limbo over the past few weeks, as if the sword of Damocles was hanging over his head.
But his son has no idea what will happen to him if he goes to prison.
Or what it will do to Carla. ‘Olly,’ Ash says gently, ‘I don’t think he had any.
Loved ones, I mean. But you do. Your mum—’
‘Dad, I did something bad.’ Olly’s eyes are bright, too watery. Ash realizes his son is on the verge of tears. ‘I should pay for it. I want you to ring Ian.’
Ash contemplates ringing his friend. Would Roly help him out here? Ash is well aware that Roly took himself off the case for Iris’s sake. But would he help Ash to talk Olly out of this? Or would he want to do the right thing by the law?
Ash runs his fingers through his hair. His son is impulsive. Always has been. He acts without thinking things through and then often regrets it afterwards. ‘Olly, why don’t you think about it first?’
‘I have been thinking about it, Dad!’ Olly shouts. ‘It’s all I think about!’
Olly will come round. Ash needs to play for time.
Is he wrong to want to protect his son when his son has killed someone?
Does it make a difference, morally, that Olly didn’t plan to kill Josh?
It wasn’t a premeditated crime – Olly only meant to scare Joshua into telling him the truth.
Does it make a difference that the world is a better place – and the women in it better off – with Joshua Knoll six feet under?
‘How about I give him a ring later and sound him out?’ Ash suggests. ‘We could talk through what would happen. Hypothetically.’
Olly lets out a sigh. It sounds like relief rather than frustration. Or is that just Ash’s wishful thinking?
‘Yeah. All right,’ Olly says. ‘Good idea.’
His answer gives Ash a flicker of hope. Just as he’d thought.
His son has spoken rashly and he’s already having second thoughts.
Ash should have asked for Roly’s advice months ago.
His advice as a best friend, not as a police officer.
Ash takes a sip of his coffee, and then sets down the mug, grimacing.
It’s revolting. He can’t drink it. He steals a glance at Olly.
He’s so proud of his son. Does Olly know how proud he is of him?
He’s about to tell him, but Olly speaks before Ash can.
‘So, you wanna make a start on the bathroom?’ Olly gives him a quick smile, but it looks forced and quickly capsizes.
‘You don’t have to,’ Ash says. ‘It’s not urgent.
’ He tries to sound upbeat, but he feels a bit like crying.
He can’t remember the last time he cried.
Carla crying earlier nearly set him off.
And now Olly’s clearly upset even though he’s trying to put a brave face on it. He can’t bear for his family to be sad.
‘I want to. But I haven’t got long. Like I said.’
‘OK. Well, let’s do this!’
Olly fetches Ash’s portable Bluetooth speaker and connects his phone to stream a playlist through it.
‘What is this?’ Ash asks after a while, more to make conversation than out of interest. It’s awful, in Ash’s opinion, loud and monotonous, worse even than Carla’s opera music.
‘Rap,’ his son informs him. ‘Drake. What do you think?’
‘Yeah,’ Ash says, ‘groovy.’
Olly rolls his eyes and Ash feels old. He has given up trying to speak his son’s language. He has given up, too, trying to convert Olly to music from the Seventies and Eighties, which is all Ash ever listens to himself. By choice anyway.
They’ve been working for about an hour, Ash removing the tiles on one wall with a hammer and chisel and Olly sanding down the wall opposite – when a car horn sounds from outside.
Ash hardly registers it over the music and the racket they’re making, but Olly drops everything and rushes to the front door to greet Liv.
Olly’s a mess, but he doesn’t seem to care.
He washes his hands in the kitchen – Ash has cut off the water in the downstairs loo – and brushes down his jeans with his hands, which dirties them again without visibly improving the state of his jeans.
As he says goodbye to Ash, Olly’s face is still stippled grey with dust, and tufts of his blond hair, also speckled with grey, stick up like antennae.
Liv doesn’t seem to mind Olly’s scruffiness, so Ash doesn’t say anything. In fact, she’s smiling. It’s the first time Ash has seen her looking genuinely happy for a while.
‘Liv and I will be back before dinner,’ Olly says. ‘’Bout five-ish.’
Ash watches from the open doorway as Liv and Olly get into her Nissan Micra – Ash learnt to drive in one of those, albeit a much older model, decades ago.
Unlike Olly, who passed his test on his first go and crashed his car a month or so later, it took Ash three attempts to pass his driving test, but he has never had an accident.
He thinks back to Roly’s accident, years ago, when they were at uni, and wonders how Tracey is now.
Does she still walk with a limp after all these years?
Does Roly ask himself the same question?
He’s still observing them when Olly leaps back out of the car and runs up to him.
‘Don’t tell Liv what we were talking about earlier,’ he says, looking over his shoulder, as if to check she’s well out of earshot.
‘I’ll tell her when we’ve spoken to Ian, when we know, like, what to expect if …
you know. Liv will blame herself. I haven’t told her anything. Ring Ian, though, yeah? Promise?’
It’s not very coherent, but Ash gets the general idea. ‘Yes, I promise, if you’re sure that’s what you want,’ he says.
‘Yeah. But, like, a hypothetical convo, yeah? Like you said.’
Ash has forgotten his exact words, but he definitely didn’t phrase it quite like that. ‘No problem, Olly,’ he says. ‘Go and have some fun.’
‘Oh, we’re not going out for fun,’ Olly says. ‘We’ve got jobs and stuff to do.’
‘Jobs?’
‘Yeah, like, chores.’
‘What? Who for?’
But if Olly hears him, he doesn’t answer. He has already turned away and raises one hand in a wave without looking back at Ash.
Ash closes the front door and walks slowly into the kitchen, where he pours himself a glass of water and guzzles it down thirstily.
He’d be very surprised if Olly had any errands to do.
It’s more likely an excuse to get out of doing any more DIY.
Ash sighs. Then he slides his phone out of the back pocket of his jeans and, before he can change his mind and break his promise to Olly, he rings Roly.