Page 37 of The Tapes
‘I’ve got a friend today,’ Harriet tells him. ‘Is it too early for food?’
He tells her everything’s fine, then takes a menu from the bar and passes it across. Harriet tells him she’ll have the usual, so he offers an enthusiastic ‘of course’, before heading to the coffee machine. Meanwhile, Harriet leads me to the small table in the centre of the window, giving us a sweeping view.
‘This is the president’s table,’ she says, and there’s a whisper of glee at the pomposity of it all. She waves a hand towards the pitches. ‘My dad owned all this land back in the day. He sold it to the rugby club for a pound when they were looking for a site. It was all history for him because he grew up in a Welsh mining town. They made him life president but he insisted it was a hereditary title, which is why this is all mine.’
She laughs a fraction and catches my eye, wanting me to know it’s a joke, that she doesn’t take herself this seriously. I smile as she points to the menu. ‘I always have the club sandwich. Brian’s the bar manager and makes it as good as anyone.’
As if on cue, Brian reappears with a black coffee that he places in front of Harriet. He asks what I want, so I say I’ll have the same as Harriet – and then he heads back to the coffee machine for round two. We sit quietly for a moment, watching the guy on the mower, who’s ploughing a straight line widthways across one of the pitches.
‘If it’s any consolation,’ she says, quieter now, ‘I know it probably isn’t – but your father and I really did have feelings for one another. Nothing happened the way I wanted it to. I told him not to leave you, or your mum. I kept saying it but him andme weren’t this spur-of-the-moment thing. Your dad would say he and Angela were incompatible. She was outdoorsy, he wasn’t. Other things too. I said he couldn’t walk out on his family. I really did tell him.’
Outdoorsy was the least of it, I’m sure.
Harriet cuts off because Brian returns with a second coffee for me. He almost drops the cup as he lowers it, then apologises, before heading to the kitchen. There’s a different type of quiet now because Harriet was right about one thing: it isn’t a consolation. Nobody wants to hear their parent walked out on them to be with another person. I’m thinking of Mum and the way she told nine-year-old me that Dad was working away: how she kept that up for months, knowing he was on the other side of town.
‘I don’t think Mum deserved that,’ I say carefully, except there’s no disagreement from the other side of the table.
‘Neither did my husband from the time. I’m not trying to justify anything – and I would change almost everything that happened. I suppose I wanted you to know that it wasn’t a pointless fling. There were feelings.’ She waits and there’s a mawkish melancholy between us because we’ve both lost the same person, even though he meant different things to each of us.
‘Your mum didn’t want to poison him against you,’ Harriet adds, even quieter. ‘I know he appreciated that. I think we all knew things would go back to how they were after a while.’
If it hadn’t been for seeing Mark earlier in the day, I know there’d be a fury I would struggle to contain, but, in the moment, I’m limp and defeated by it all. Dad walking out happened thirty years ago and almost everybody involved is now dead.
‘Did you have any kids at the time?’ I ask.
‘No. I never could. I suppose when I’m gone, the club will need a new president.’
She doesn’t laugh this time and the swathe of lush green pitches suddenly has a bleakness that wasn’t there before.
Brian is suddenly back, two plates of sandwiches that he places in front of us. He checks that everything else is fine and then returns to mopping the floor in the furthest corner. Neither Harriet or I reach for the food. I still haven’t brought up the real reason I came.
Dad walked out at almost the exact time of the first Earring Killer murder. If Mum is telling the truth in her tapes, there’s a link from my family to the killer somewhere.
Not that I can say as much so openly.
‘What was Dad like when he was with you?’ I ask.
Harriet shifts for the first time in a while, probably wondering why I’m asking. She looks to me momentarily but then turns back to the field. ‘I think he and I both knew it was a mistake,’ she says. ‘You don’t want to know specific details but it took a bit of time for us both to admit it. He missed you and there were a couple of days he went to the school. He’d watch from a distance as your mum picked you up?—’
‘Really?’
The older woman catches my eye again, wanting me to know this is true. ‘He really did love and miss you. Maybe he missed your mum as well? He used to go out in the evenings and sometimes didn’t come back. I wondered if he’d returned to you but then he’d be back the next morning, saying he’d been out walking all night, thinking things over.’
It’s not what I wanted to hear and I almost have to tell her to stop. The idea of Dad disappearing for entire nights at the same time as the Earring Killer chose his first victim is beyond comprehension. I figured there’d be a coincidence of timing that could be cleared up with this talk. Instead, everything is much worse.
Harriet notices because she leans in. ‘Are you OK?’
I tell her I am but my mind is racing far away from this rugby club. On the tape, Mum said she found a jewellery box filled with earrings – but it was unclear from where she’d taken it. I assumed she meant somebody else’s house but was she talking about something Dad had hidden away?
It’s impossible.
‘Your brother came over a few times,’ Harriet says. ‘He’d sit and talk to your dad. I think your father enjoyed the company because he was feeling cut off.’
That explains how Peter knew where Dad had gone. He’d have been nineteen, maybe twenty at the time.
Harriet pauses a moment, perhaps considering whether to say something. ‘I asked your brother to leave one time because he was ordering me around in my own house, being really disrespectful.’
‘How do you mean?’
