Chapter Forty-Two
At Matty’s headstone, he sank to his knees. There was no one around, and he wanted to cry out. The grave was in Topsham, at a spot where the River Exe widened as the sea drew the water towards the beaches at Exmouth. The church had a cemetery over the water.
Today there was no one. Would Tara come? He had sent Matty’s mother a message, knowing she was the only one who really understood, even if they had stopped understanding each other years ago. He had stopped the bike and, through tears, texted:
He looked at the words. The message was so incomplete and yet she would understand it. Tara had remarried and had children but neither of them could move on from the day a car ploughed into their son. They had been already divorced, but the joint loss was like a remarriage.
The words on the gravestone were: MATTHEW TEMMIS, LOVED HIS LIFE, LOST IT TOO SOON, brEATHED HIS LAST IN DEVON AIR.
The stones around Matthew’s plot were weathered by winter rain and wind, and some letters on them were faded to a trace.
Edward disliked the way his son’s inscription was so new and so bold, a black wound in grey marble.
‘Matty, Matty, Matty,’ he cried quietly.
He remembered the football games on the clifftop, schoolwork that stumped him when he tried to help, the inaugural slice of cake in the Clock Tower Café (too big for an adult, let alone a child), changing nappies in his son’s first years, the rush to hospital when they thought their four-year-old had swallowed a battery (it was stuck in his shoe).
The images raced like old film which had shuddered off the sprocket wheel, the celluloid shooting out of the projector into a tangle.
That’s what it was, he thought, a tangle.
A tangle of images. A tangle in his mind that any moment of happiness could snag itself on.
How could he inflict that on Kim? He had wanted her to move in with him. No wonder she had swerved that.
He might have been crying for five minutes or fifteen. The violence in Barton Ottery had shaken him to his core. His phone stopped him for a moment – Stevie texting:
RING ME
Normally he would have responded in a second. But he was in the wrong headspace. He walked among the other graves and saw a new headstone like Matty’s.
NINA LOPEZ, it said, with the dates. CHILD OF GOD NOW.
So they were united, in a way, he and Andrea Lopez. He hadn’t realized Nina was here. He stood staring at the tombstone for as long as he had stared at his own son’s.
He was at a loss. He rang Jordan Callintree, who picked up straightaway. The officer’s voice had a heaviness to it, a series of words that sounded like one long sigh. ‘Are you about to tell me you’ve found all the stuff we didn’t?’
Should he mention the madness at the Boyds’ place? What had she said – ‘He won’t let me go!’, when he was not even touching her? What if they only wanted to warn him, to scare him off, but they did not know their own strength?
‘Are you there?’ asked Callintree.
‘Sorry,’ said Edward. ‘A lot going on at this end. I’m guessing you talked to the lady with dementia at the estate.’
‘My officers have interviewed her, yes,’ he said, ‘and I’m pretty sure they got nowhere.’
‘We’re just looking at different things.’
‘Progress?’
‘Confusion.’
‘Maybe I’ve been too hard on my officers.’
‘Look, I wanted to speak to Andrea Lopez.’
‘Ah. Now that really is tricky.’
‘I don’t think she’d mind if someone gave me her number. I was at the funeral. I’ve just discovered her daughter is buried near my son.’
Callintree was silent at the other end for a moment. ‘That’s heavy. Is it genuinely a call she’d want to get?’
‘I can’t answer that either way,’ said Edward, never taking his eyes off Nina’s tombstone.
‘Um, let me think about it. I’ll send you the number in five minutes if I decide it’s okay.’
Edward stood in the graveyard, waiting. Eventually, there was a buzzing and he looked at his phone. There was a number, and the text:
This didn’t come from me.
The phone rang several times, then was picked up. The receiver was fumbled for a moment.
‘Hello?’
‘Mrs Lopez?’
Silence.
‘It’s Edward Temmis, from the radio station.’
She sounded drunk when she spoke, but then he wondered if she was sedated. ‘How nice of you … to call.’
‘I lost a child too,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m at my son’s grave, in Topsham. Nina is here.’
Silence.
‘Please don’t speak if it’s too much.’
He pictured her in bed, adrift in grief, because he heard a rustling sound that could have been blankets.
‘You were at Nina’s funeral, Mr Temmis. You gave us more information through the radio than the police did.
The police didn’t. Even. Damn. Invest-ti-gate.
’ The staccato delivery was rage, controlled, but only just. ‘They closed the case.’
‘They haven’t closed it, I promise. They just hit a dead end, and the Met left.’
‘I have seen no activity. Nada. None.’ More energy now. He pictured her sitting up, elbows on knees, edge of the bed, hissing into the phone.
‘I want to ask you a strange question, Mrs Lopez. They found tubes in the apartment where Lev Malnyk stayed. The police said it showed Malnyk was using, dealing—’
‘No, no, no.’
‘My friend Stevie heard you didn’t believe it.’
‘Stevie? Who is that? No, but that’s not what those tubes are for.
Look, I don’t care about Lev Malnyk, maybe he was using drugs, but those tubes were for dialysis.
My sister has at-home dialysis for kidney disease.
Blood in, blood out. Machine cleans it when your kidney doesn’t work. Saved my sister’s life.’
‘That’s an expensive machine to have in your house.’
‘Oh, thousands of dollars, sure. Health Service would lend it unless you are rich.’
‘Thank you, Andrea.’
‘I was a nurse once. Sorry if I sound dopey. I asked for tranquillizers. They make me sleep all the time. Nina …’
It was appropriate, he thought, as she clicked off the line, that her daughter’s name was the last word in the conversation, almost as if she was reaching for the little girl as she fell back to sleep.
He opened his phone and googled KIDNEY DIALYSIS MACHINE BONNET.
The webpage returned with a question: Did you mean Kidney Dialysis Machine Bonot?
So that’s what it was. In his haste to scout the flat, Cammell-Curzon had misread the brand name and misrecognized the machine, which was understandable, a great lump of complicated white goods like that. Lev Malnyk was not 3D printing, he was on dialysis, and the police had missed it because …
Because the machine had been removed from his apartment the instant the accident happened.
The call sank Edward into deep thought, and he walked back towards his son’s resting place. As he approached the grave, he saw the willowy figure of Tara there.
‘Who were you calling?’
There was no harm in telling her. ‘The mother of Nina, the little girl who—’
‘I know who Nina is. Right now, everyone in the country knows.’
‘She’s buried over there.’ The phrase was so brutal he put his hand up to his chest and crossed himself.
‘Poor sweet little innocent lamb.’
He regarded his ex-wife with tenderness. She was always well turned-out, with dark mascara and oxblood lipstick. Tara exuded a have-to-be-somewhere-else-in-a-minute vibe, always, but reached out her arms.
‘Come here, old man.’
He sank into her body and cried.
‘What’s brought this on?’
No one else could ask that question. The death of a child didn’t ‘come on’ – it was never absent. But Edward knew what Tara meant.
‘Oh,’ he wept, ‘a number of things. Being misrecognized as someone’s dead son didn’t exactly help. Being called “sonny” by a randomer. And this Nina case.’
‘You’re not involved in that, though?’
‘Just helping the police a little.’
‘What? Did they ask you?’
‘Actually, yes.’ He felt proud at his answer, but when he pulled away a little and wiped his eyes, he saw her looking at him with something like pity. ‘Every time the paper refers to you, they say “crime-busting Edward Temmis, known as Devon’s Rockford”, or something.’
‘Rockford as in The Rockford Files?’
‘I guess so?’
He hugged her again, more formally this time. ‘I hope you get hugs like that at home.’
‘Don’t …’ she began. ‘Don’t do that.’
‘No, I mean, if the sadness strikes you.’
‘Oh. Well, thank you. I do.’ She stared at him, her big brown eyes piercing. ‘I have to be somewhere. I want to catch up. I’ll always come to his grave for you, always. I’m here all the time. I love that he can hear the water.’
‘Thanks, Tara.’
‘How’s that lady of yours?’
‘Eh?’ He was not aware they had even discussed Kim.
‘What’s her name? Vim?’
‘Don’t do that,’ he said, borrowing her phrase. Tara responded by curling her fingers and placing the heels of her hands together, making a heart.
‘Two hearts,’ he said.
‘Don’t do that either.’ They smiled at each other. Losing a child could break two people apart. But it also bonded them for eternity.
He did not see her leave. He was looking down at Matty’s headstone and his whole body shook with the agony of it.
She has other children now, he reminded himself, feeling disloyal to Tara even by having the thought.
His body pinged and cracked, as if a loose power cable was swinging left and right inside him.
What was this, Matty trying to tell him something? Two hearts?
Two hearts.
He felt those words burst inside him. The letters enlarged and broke, became fragments, dispersed, gathered again and made the words: TWO HEARTS.
‘What are you trying to tell me, Matty?’
He sank to his knees and, for the first time, reached out with his hands and held the top of the gravestone.
But the sobs would not come. This time his mind, far from being overwhelmed with emotion, sharpened.
He opened his eyes. He was six inches from the bevelled edge of the grey marble, and every tiny indent came into focus.
And now, as he let his brain lead him, a single fact took its rightful place.
Hearts.
The referee on the tenancy was a doctor called Hearts.
Hearts did not exist.
But Hurst did.
And because Edward had written ‘Hurst’, he had missed the obviously alternative spelling …
Hearst.
Change one letter …
There was a real doctor somewhere here. He knew now that there must be a real doctor, because Lev Malnyk had thousands of pounds’ worth of expensive medical equipment in his flat.
So why had the doctor put his name down wrong on the tenancy agreement and why had he not come forward to the police after the crash?
Because he wanted to be untraceable.
Was it possible that Wendy’s doctor friend was the elusive Dr Hearts?
He thought of Stevie: ‘Are you saying these two cases are connected?’
The simplest question of all. And he had laughed at her.