The Red Oak (The Searight Saga Book 3) | eBook

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Chapter 1: The Day Everything Changed
June 2004

The strong acidic smell hit Tom Searight in the back of the throat as he groped through the darkness of the museum exhibit. The sound of artillery fire shook the stillness of the room. He passed a dugout and listened as the officer inside bellowed down a telephone, his clipped English accent cursing at the sudden loss of signal. A dim lamp flickered on the shelf, next to the tins of condensed milk and a half-full bottle of wine. Tom moved on through the trench, one careful step at a time. The noise of the attack died down. He came to a soldier standing stock-still on the 18-inch-high fire step peering through a periscope into No Man’s Land. Tom stepped up next to him, conscious that even in the dark if his head peeped over the parapet, he risked being caught by a German sniper. The soldier, wearing a greasy waterproof cape, held his rifle in his right hand, the steely point of the bayonet glistening in the semi-light.
Tom heard a commotion to his left. He turned to see a small group of schoolchildren brush hurriedly by, no more than about twelve years old, all commenting on the horrible smell and complaining of boredom. Would he have been so dismissive at their age? Probably not. But then, maybe at the age of thirty-eight, Tom was already turning into a younger version of his intolerant, octogenarian father. If nothing else, he would have thought a trip to the Imperial War Museum was a good excuse to get out of school for the day.
At least his own daughter appeared motivated. Granted, her motivation stemmed from wanting to impress her history teacher, who seemed to be the current flavour of the month. In two weeks’ time, Charlotte was doing a recital of war poetry in a class presentation marking the ninetieth anniversary of the start of the First World War in front of the whole school. She’d suggested a half-term trip to the museum as a means of gathering background information. This teacher, Mr Moyes, was obviously quite something, thought Tom. Not wanting to discourage his normally work-shy daughter, he had volunteered to accompany her during his week off work.
Tom left the trench exhibit as the officer yelled down his radio for the umpteenth time that day and the sentry kept up his watch, his gaze forever fixed on the invisible foe on the other side. He found Charlotte nearby studying a group of medals in a glass display. ‘Found anything interesting?’ he asked her.
She shrugged her shoulders and curled her lip. ‘Not really. Can we go now?’
‘Already? We’ve only just got here.’
‘Whatever.’
Tom couldn’t help but feel disappointed. He’d been looking forward to a morning out with his daughter; they talked so rarely now. The First World War project provided a connection; the trip to the museum a shared venture, an opportunity to talk. But his efforts to engage her in conversation on subjects pertinent to her life came across as either patronising or invasive. He was trying too hard and she let him know it by her monosyllabic answers. He wondered whether Julie would have had more success but she had the convenient excuse of a pre-arranged lunch date. ‘Have you seen everything you want to see?’
‘Yeah. There was nothing on the poets anyway.’
Tom’s attention was caught by a mug made out of a golden syrup tin. ‘Look, sweetheart, ninety years on and they still use the same logo.’
‘Dad,’ said Charlotte, lowering her voice and glancing around. ‘Do you have to call me that?’
‘Sorry, petal, am I embarrassing you?’ It was only meant to be a little joke but her scornful look reminded him that irony wasn’t Charlotte’s strongest point. But it was true; at fourteen, she was already too grown-up and self-conscious for pet names. Fourteen going on seventeen, Charlotte was a pretty girl; she had inherited her mother’s fine bone structure with her cheekbones and delicate nose, and the long blonde hair. Despite the semi-permanent scowl, Charlotte’s natural attractiveness was cause for a mild dose of anxiety for Tom; she was already receiving far too much attention from ill-suited boys.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Can we at least go to the museum shop?’
The shop was packed, far more than the exhibition they’d just left, with people more interested in buying branded rubbers or key rings than viewing the exhibits themselves – anything to show they’d done their bit, shown a passing interest and had the souvenir to prove it. Tom gave Charlotte a fiver, with which she bought a small book on First World War poetry. He could tell she would have far rather pocketed the money and used it on something else. For himself, he bought a lightweight account of the Western Front. At least it showed willing and, if nothing else, would impress his father.
Half an hour later, they were on the stifling tube, heading back to Holloway, both half-heartedly reading their respective purchases.
‘Dad,’ said Charlotte, in a depressingly familiar tone that Tom knew all too well. Charlotte was never one to initiate a conversation unless she wanted something. ‘Y’know you said you’d take me out for dinner after the museum?’
‘Lunch you mean, what about it?’
‘I was wondering, would it be OK if I could go and see Abigail instead? I could show her the book; y’know, read the poems and that.’
Hmm, likely story, thought Tom. But he’d taken the father-daughter thing far enough for one day and his disappointment was deepened by the realisation he was relieved by its premature end. She’d said Abigail: the two girls had been friends since nursery and, like an automatic reflex, whenever Charlotte mentioned her friend’s name, he thought of her mother, Rachel. ‘Well…’
‘Thanks, Dad.’
‘But only if you’re back by four – and you actually do some work. OK?’
‘Yes, I promise. I am your “sweetheart” after all.’
Fourteen years old and she thinks she can twist me around her finger, thought Tom with a wry smile.
Two stops later, Charlotte bounced up from her seat unaware of two adolescent boys in logo-emblazoned sweatshirts watching her. ‘I’ll get off here,’ she said, giving her father a peck on the cheek. ‘Thanks, Dad, see ya later.’
‘Four o’clock, OK?’
‘Yep, four o’clock.’
Tom watched her as she disappeared into the throng of people. He spotted her book of war poetry wedged against the armrest of her vacated seat. He snatched it, rose to his feet and fought against the tide of incoming passengers, calling out her name just as the doors snapped shut, leaving him pawing at the glass door. As the tube picked up speed he saw a glimpse of her striding purposefully along the platform, her eyes fixed on the phosphorus-green screen of her mobile. He turned and leant back against the curved door. The two adolescent boys caught his eye and sniggered.
He got off at the next stop and emerged into the oppressive London heat. He zigzagged his way along the Holloway Road avoiding the abundance of semi-clad youngsters – men stripped to the waist, pale legs and fresh tattoos; girls with exposed midriffs, large earrings and pierced bellybuttons. He popped into his local newsagent, the place decked with England flags ahead of the European football championship due to start in a few days. He bought a copy of The Times, Tony Blair’s serious face dominating the front page. As Tom ambled back home along their quiet, tree-lined road, he felt saddened by the way the morning had gone. She was a good kid, but if only he could breach the widening divide of misunderstanding. And he hated the way that his daughter’s cool detachment made him feel gauche and unsure of his actions. He pined for the little girl who was forever gone and no number of how-to-parent-a-teenager books could alleviate that longing.
He set his mind to the rest of the day; the sun was out and he had the house to himself. He could sit in the garden with a cup of tea and read the paper or his new book. Tom returned home feeling quietly smug.
*

At first, he didn’t notice anything. He closed the front door behind him, threw the newspaper on the small telephone table in the hallway and was greeted with yelps of excitement from Angus, the family’s white Highland terrier. ‘Hello, boy, you all alone?’ He put his head around the sitting room door. Empty. ‘Is anyone at home?’ he yelled. He walked through to the kitchen, noticing the smell of bleach, put the kettle on and let Angus out into the garden. Julie had left three envelopes on the kitchen table propped up against the vase of flowers – the flowers he’d given her on their recent anniversary. He glanced at them quickly. One was a gas bill, another a clothes catalogue for Julie, but it was the third one that intrigued him. It had a French stamp on it and, handwritten, was addressed to him. Who in the dickens would be writing to him from France, he wondered. He was about to open the letter when he saw it: a briefcase at the foot of the telephone table. He padded over to inspect. It was a big scruffy brown thing that had obviously seen better days. It was a man’s briefcase. Whose was it? He’d definitely not seen it before. Did it belong to a friend of Julie’s? The more he stared at this brown briefcase, the greater his sense of unease. And suddenly he knew that it shouldn’t have been there; that something was wrong. The soft brown leather was heavily scuffed with deeply embedded lines like cracks in the parched earth of a dried-out riverbed. He wanted to flick open the scratched silvery latches, to rummage inside for clues as to why it was sitting there, leaning against the telephone table in his hallway. It owed him an explanation for its presence but somehow an inbred respect for privacy held him back. He turned to peer up the stairs. ‘Is anyone home?’ he shouted out again. But this time he was convinced he wasn’t shouting to an empty house. The silence was overwhelming, unnatural. Tom knew there was someone else in his home.
*

Julie Searight lay on the bed in the spare bedroom, her fingers gripping the hot crumpled sheet beneath her. She was naked. She hadn’t moved; pinned to the bed by panic, immobilised by the thumping of her heart. She could hardly breathe in the humid closeness of the room, melting into the cloying stickiness of the sheets, her back drenched in sweat. She would have opened the window if she hadn’t felt so frozen with panic. Her mind blank, she stared at the ceiling, her mouth gaping, her breath coming in short staccato bursts. Her world was about to collapse around her at any moment. How could she have been so stupid? She lowered her eyes and looked at Mark. She hated him for having put her in this position. Mark too hadn’t moved an inch since they heard the door key turn in the latch. He was kneeling on the bed between Julie’s opened legs, his hair stuck to his forehead, a bead of sweat glistening on his upper lip. The smell of illicit sex hung in the air like an accusing spirit mingling with the early afternoon heat. She looked at the pile of hastily discarded clothes on the wicker chair in the far corner of the room: a dark blue tie, a black sock, his favourite boxer shorts (which he wore on every occasion), and her bra coiled half in and half out of the snake-charming laundry basket. She could hear Angus yelping outside – Tom must have closed the back door on him.
At least, she thought, Charlotte hadn’t come back. But what was Tom doing at home anyway? They weren’t due back for ages yet. What could she say? Introduce them? Mark meet Tom; Tom, this is Mark; Mark and I have been having a rampant affair these last eighteen months; you don’t mind, do you, love? She almost laughed; what an absurd situation she found herself in – caught red-handed by her husband in bed with her lover. This had been the first time she had invited Mark to her house. It’d been Mark’s idea. Or had it been hers? She couldn’t remember. Usually, when Tom said he’d be back at three, you could depend on him being back at three, not two hours earlier.
‘Is anyone home?’ Second time around, Tom’s voice had an edge to it – he knew something was wrong. The first time, there was still a chance. A chance he might have gone out into the garden and cut the lawn, or fallen asleep in the sun-lounger. A chance he might have gone out again, taken Angus out for a walk, anything. Mark could have slipped away. She could have pretended to have been stood up by her lunch date, returned home early and had a snooze. In the spare bedroom? She could have fluked it. Tom would never have known. She would have taken the sheets and put them in the wash – just doing the domestic chores. But not now. The second shout was more real, more urgent. What had given the game away? Maybe he heard something, but she and Mark had barely moved a muscle from the moment he came in.
Julie and Mark looked at each other, both lost in their own fearful thoughts, Mark’s hand resting on Julie’s bent knee. Averting her gaze, she concentrated on the reflection of Mark’s slender back in the long mirror opposite the bed, the hollows in the small of his back, the arch of his spine, the top of his smooth buttocks. They heard Tom moving around downstairs. Even his footsteps sounded different as he carefully and deliberately checked each room: the sitting room, the living room, back to the kitchen. Julie’s heartbeat, already unbearably fast, quickened at the sound of Tom’s muffled footsteps on the carpeted stairs. She tried to control her breathing as Mark’s hand tightened its grip on her knee. With Tom at the top of the stairs, they both felt the need to appear slightly more dignified. Mark covered his lap with his tee shirt. Julie pulled the warm sheet over herself, covering her nakedness.
Tom was on the landing. Julie wanted to scream: ‘Just get it over and done with’. She heard him cross the landing and check their main bedroom and then heard him say ‘hello?’ as he looked in Charlotte’s room. Two bedrooms gone, one to go. I’m sorry, she thought, I’m so sorry. As Tom approached the spare bedroom, Mark put his hand to his mouth and Julie gripped the sheet tighter still. They both turned to face the door. The bed was behind the door as it opened, so Tom would have to open the door fully or put his head around it before seeing them. It was the last room of the house. His presence lingered on the other side. What a sight to behold, she thought, as her self-pity transferred itself to Tom. Poor man, he’d done nothing wrong; nothing to deserve this indignity, this shame.
Holding her breath, Julie watched as the doorknob moved slowly around. The door opened an inch, maybe two. And then paused. What was holding him back, was it the mirror? But no, it was too far to one side. Then, miraculously, the door slowly closed again. The doorknob moved back to its original position, finishing with a tiny clunk. Tom had let go.
Her heart still thumping furiously, Julie breathed out. She heard Tom walk back across the landing and quickly back down the stairs. Mark raised an eyebrow and looked as if he was about to speak. She put a finger to her lips and listened as Tom went through to the kitchen and let Angus back in from the garden. To her eternal relief, she heard the jangling of the dog lead, the sound of an excitable dog and Tom saying, ‘Come on, let’s go for a walk.’ He was going out after all. The front door closed and Julie sighed loudly and resisted the urge to scream out. She rubbed her eyes and groaned.
‘Christ,’ breathed Mark, running his fingers through his hair. ‘That was close, too damn close. He must’ve known; why didn’t he come in, could he smell us? I mean, what stopped him?’
‘Shut up a minute.’ She needed silence, not the sound of Mark theorising on the obvious. What was he so worried about anyway, what did he have to lose?
Mark didn’t take the hint. ‘I’m sorry, Julie, that was too much. Too much. I told you it was too risky; we’re not doing it here again.’
Julie sat bolt upright, clutching the sheet over herself, seized by a sudden sense of anger for compromising her marriage for the sake of idle sex. She wanted Mark to go and to go now. ‘Mark, get out, just piss off. We’re not doing it again here or anywhere. I’m through with it. Just leave.’ She grabbed his shirt from his lap and threw it at him. She fell back against the pillow, exhausted and close to tears.
Mark recoiled at the harshness of her words. He’d expected her to be upset, but not to so vehemently take it out on him. He climbed off the bed and grappled furiously with his clothes, fighting back his own anger at the injustice of her comments. ‘You bitch,’ he muttered, as he hastily pulled on his boxer shorts. ‘You bloody bitch. I know you’re upset, but don’t take it out on me. I mean, at the very least, I thought I meant something to you. But no, obviously not. I was just a bloody shag to you, wasn’t I? Well, thanks, Julie; thanks a bloody bunch.’
Julie rolled her eyes. She knew Mark deserved better, but she didn’t care, not now. ‘Go, Mark, just go.’
‘I’m going all right. I just hope for your sake I don’t bump into Tom on the way out,’ he said menacingly. He stuffed his tie into his trouser pocket, grabbed his jacket, and paused at the bedroom door. ‘I’ll see you at school sometime then.’ Julie lay still, unable to move, unable to make any response.
Mark hurtled down the stairs and saw his briefcase in the hallway beneath the telephone table. Damn it, he thought, what a stupid place to leave it. Tom must have seen it. He paused briefly at the hallway mirror and brushed his hair back into place, rearranged his collar, and gave himself a pitiful look. Taking a deep breath, he opened the front door, looked up and down the street, and walked hurriedly up towards the end of the road where he’d parked his car. The visitor’s parking permit had run out barely fifteen minutes ago, and already stuck to the windscreen of his Ford Fiesta was the familiar yellow penalty notice. Mark cursed – what a crap way to end a crap day.
*

Meanwhile, Julie, realising she might have little time before either Tom or Charlotte returned, snapped out of her state of self-pity. She began by hunting for a clean, nondescript bra and knickers, placing the more alluring set neatly in her drawer. With a pang of guilt, she realised how her sexy underwear saw the light of day more for Mark’s benefit than Tom’s. She desperately wanted a shower to remove the smell of sex and sweat but she knew time could be against her; a quick wash would have to suffice.
Once fully dressed, she began maniacally making the bed, stuffing the crumpled sheets into the laundry basket, replacing them with ironed duplicates and puffing up the pillows. Half an hour later, both she and the spare bedroom looked as they should in the middle of a weekday afternoon. Only the faint aroma of sweat remained. She opened the window and then cruised around the house picking up dirty mugs and plates and stuffing them willy-nilly into the dishwater. Tom would have a seizure. He liked the dishwasher to be loaded properly to his exacting standards. The main plates went here, the bowls there, the mugs at ninety bloody degrees from the sodding side plates. One of the mugs slipped, fell to the floor and broke. Julie swore; her nerves were on edge. To her horror, it was Tom’s favourite mug, his Arsenal football mug, celebrating the ‘Double’ of 2002, a Christmas present from Charlotte. Fortunately, only the handle had snapped off, the mug itself was still intact. She put the handle in the mug and hid the evidence behind the tins in the food cupboard.
Still feeling jittery, Julie made herself a coffee and went outside into the garden to try and enjoy the sun. Sitting in the sun-lounger beneath the shade of the laurel hedge, she closed her eyes, breathed deeply through her nose and tried to compose herself. She promised, to whatever greater being might have been eavesdropping, that she had learnt her lesson. From now on, she was going to be the perfect mother and the model wife. Things were going to change.