CHAPTER ONE
He could smell the lad. Smell his son on the field as he approached.
The unquenchable, restless love of the parent, scanning the air like radar.
The lion’s nose – the wind always told you where your cub was.
The February cold stung his cheeks as a slap would.
In the distance he heard the teams shouting ‘Pass! Here!’ and strained for Matty’s voice.
He could not wait to reach the touchline and call out his support.
The mist rose from his mouth as thick as vaped cinnamon.
Approaching the other parents, he felt a sudden cough leap in his chest and stifled it, hugging his overcoat.
A cough at this moment might have sounded deliberate, a way of ensuring they turned and greeted him. He would rather be alone.
The sports field was on Pinn Lane, a former wheatfield halfway between the school in Cubitt St Clare and the coast at Sidmouth.
The seaside was a four-mile drive from the school; the boys must have been disappointed when the coach stopped halfway, after the sharp left which put the River Otter behind them.
A sign read school sports private, suggesting a world shortage of colons.
On the field, the occasional lopsided bounce of the football was a reminder of furrows here in years gone by, a memory of wheat grown.
Some sheaves still sprouted behind the goalposts; once a wheatfield, always a wheatfield.
Edward Temmis hated that the kids did the trip from Cubitt by minibus even on the hottest summer days, all those young-sters seat-belted and cooped up behind toughened glass, but he guessed it was school insurance that made the protection of a vehicle necessary.
Perhaps that could be an item for the show one day.
Avoiding the home supporters – the gaggle of parents on the far touchline who knew him – meant lifting his knees high to cut through the long grass and brambles at the back of the pavilion, which still showed the last cricket score of summer.
This was one of those days when you could not imagine going without an overcoat, much less wearing sunglasses or hearing the thwack of a cricket bat.
He admired the boys for coming out in shorts on a day like this.
They were twelve; some were thirteen already.
At eleven, Matty was the youngest by a year.
He admired his son for staying with the team; his boy was the best player by a country mile.
No gloves on the pitch – which was, quite literally, ‘old school’.
The shouting got louder. He felt the damp from the unkempt grass reach his shins, and cursed a bramble that caught the end of his trouser leg. No one heard his expletives. He could have been invisible.
Emerging from behind the pavilion, incognito, safely away from the other parents, he made for the left touchline and chose a spot where any action in the midfield would stop him being seen by the mothers and fathers on the line opposite.
He began shouting for the team. Stupidly he had left the fixture list at home and had a sudden panic about where the visiting players had come from.
This was the Devon and Cornwall Schools’ League.
Cubitt St Clare Boys were mid-table, punching above their weight, not least because of a couple of crackers Matty had scored from midfield.
Matty’s mother would have loved to hear about that.
An observer might have wondered about this tall, heavyset dad with a whiskery growth of beard and dark hair curling beyond his collar who joined the visiting team’s parents and, rocking backwards and forwards in those big shoes, shouted for his child.
They might have noticed the hearing aid when he reached behind his left ear once or twice.
A boys’ football game was not the sort where fans of opposing teams had to be kept separate, but the way he called his son’s name and urged him to ‘pass, Matty, double back, that’s it!
’ or ‘watch for the long ball, just run, it’ll find you!
’ was a little hard on the ears. The parents around him – the away fans, visiting from Dittisham, he now remembered, forty-five miles distant – shot each other glances.
‘Nice to have you with us,’ said one of the mums eventually, as if she was the one the others insisted should speak. The woman was much shorter than Edward, with a smart, pea-green coat and matching driving gloves. He wondered if Dittisham was a private school.
‘What’s the score?’ he asked. ‘I was late.’
With that he adjusted the hearing aid. She might have thought he was trying to hear the answer, but Edward was actually trying to turn the world down.
He was just here to shout for Matty. The woman turned and contemplated him.
The calling of the boys on the pitch quietened, momentarily, for a throw-in.
‘I know your voice,’ she said. After a pause, as if she had tried and failed to place it, she turned to another woman next to her. ‘The score, Chloe?’
‘There isn’t one,’ said the woman. She was dressed all in muddy green, taller and altogether more imposing than her friend. Her jeans were streaked with oil. She kept her eyes on the pitch, as if refusing to be interested in the stranger.
Sensing that the two women desired some sort of acknowledgement, he wanted to say his name: ‘I’m Edward Temmis, Matty’s father.
Matty plays for Cubitt’s.’ He could have added in a raised voice, ‘I don’t have to explain why I didn’t stand on the home line.
’ He was on the wrong side of the pitch because he did not want to stand with the parents from Matty’s school, and there were good reasons for that, reasons he did not want to explain.
So Edward sank into his overcoat, screwing up his eyes to find his son as he stared at the mob of boys around the ball.
There was a Dittisham lad who broke clear on the other side at that moment, trapping a loose ball that had been headed by one of the Cubitt’s boys and, left toe killing the energy in the ball for a second, turned his body and completed a back-heeled pass to one of his team members.
‘I know it now,’ said the woman beside him. She tried again. ‘I realize where I know your voice from.’ Instead of turning to her left, where Edward stood, she angled her body right and spoke to the friend in the oil-encrusted jeans. ‘The radio.’
That would have been the end of the conversation, which Edward had barely heard and had no desire to continue, except that the second taller woman suddenly said loudly, ‘Oh! I know it too. I know it now. Oh goodness. Excuse me, Cheryl.’
And, while he focused on the pitch, she turned and walked off purposefully.
‘I don’t know what’s got into her,’ said Cheryl.
‘Your friend?’ he asked, sounding uninterested. He touched the hearing aid, realizing he was not going to be allowed to tune them out.
‘We’re Chloe and Cheryl,’ said the shorter woman.
‘So we sound like something halfway between a CBeebies cartoon and a porn movie.’ She giggled at her joke, which he thought she must have made a dozen times before.
He hadn’t expected the words ‘porn movie’ from a woman in an immaculate coat with gold buttons, but his laughter caught in his throat and the cough he had stifled ten minutes ago emerged.
To counter it he raised his voice, spluttering: ‘Matty! Matty! Pass here! East–west! This side! Now! Now!’
He had been too loud.
Something happened beside him, a fractal shift in the way the light curved. Cheryl shifted her weight from one foot to another and said softly, ‘But aren’t you …? Didn’t you …? No, that can’t be.’
The Dittisham boys had the ball again. They played in a mauve and white stripe.
A fair-haired lad, about the same age as Matty but bigger and bulkier than Edward’s son, tore down the left, and for a moment Edward worried that Matty would try to intercept him and get trampled.
But he shouted anyway, ‘Get over here, Matty!’
And then he felt the hand on his forearm.
‘Oh, Edward,’ said Cheryl. The tone was as far away as it was possible to be from her brisk and rather remote greeting not five minutes earlier.
When he looked down at the woman, he could not take his eyes away from a dash of scarlet lipstick that had moved from her upper lip to one of her front teeth. It made him think of blood.
‘Oh, Edward,’ she said again, and he saw that she was crying. Her make-up ran. Her grip tightened.
At that point he could have hugged her and cried his eyes out, for reasons both of them would understand without speaking another word.
But no, he was here to support his son and would not be distracted.
A Dittisham beanpole with red hair brought the ball down.
That must have been Matty who tackled him.
As he turned back to the pitch, his pride overcame him. Again and again, louder and louder, he called for Matty to pass it, bury it, lob it, lift it … ‘Just walk it through to the goal!’
Now he turned his hearing aid fully down so that, at least on his left side, there was no return path and no one could interrupt him with a clumsy question or the conversation he knew was coming.
But he could no longer avoid the way the mums and dads on the opposite side of the pitch were huddled around Chloe, the denim-clad woman who must have walked two hundred yards of touchline to reach a group of perfect strangers.
He pulled his arm away from Cheryl by taking a step to the left.
He was supporting Matty. That’s what he was here for.
He would not let Chloe or Cheryl or Clare or Carole or Chris or Clive or whoever these people were …
No, he would not let them stop him. They had no right.
He was here for his darling eleven-year-old, his Matty, who was so good at everything, so loving towards his father, so promising, so bright.
And such a goal-scorer! Hey, was that him now, through on goal?
He grew hoarse as he called his son’s name.
But strangely, each time Edward shouted, his words seemed to stop a player on the pitch.
One at a time, they halted their runs. They said something to each other.
The ball went out of play and no one went to fetch it.
Some of them stared at him. Two hugged each other.
Cheryl, the lady he had met less than half an hour before, put her arm around him and held him close. This time he did not resist. Chloe was walking back with some of the Cubitt’s parents, at first hugging the touchline and then, with play apparently suspended, cutting across the pitch itself.
‘What’s happened?’ he asked, the question directed at his shoes as the new arrivals gathered around him.
Cheryl pinched her nose. Her eyes narrowed. He turned on his hearing aid and it whistled.
‘Lovely man, it doesn’t help you if I mince my words.’ She inhaled the winter air deeply, like a chain smoker drawing on her first cigarette after a long-haul flight. ‘I am a business coach. Honesty is at the heart of what I do.’
Then she uttered three quick sentences.
‘Edward, your son is not here. He is not on the pitch. Edward, your son is dead.’