“When there’s tiny bubbles and a skin forming on the top. Something like that. Anyway, you’ll just know. Is Robert all right in the front room? There’s not been a fire in there all winter, so it felt a bit damp.”
“It’s fine, Mother. You must have been surprised to hear from him.”
“Yes indeed. And to come all that way in a wheelchair! The ambulance will come and fetch him and take him back to the hospital tomorrow. Don’t ask me how he organised it! All he would say was “Friends in high places,” and silly things like that.”
“It’s boiling. Shall I take it off?”
“Of course! Now, what are you going to do? Supper will be in an hour or so.”
“If there’s nothing more I can do to help, I think I’ll go and make a few phone calls. Check up that all is well back at the flat. Give me a shout when supper’s ready.”
“Thanks for all you’re doing, dear. Oh, and I have decided to go and see my friend Vera after we’ve settled Father safely . . .” She paused, and wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron. “So you go back, Justin, and get on with things again. I shall be all right, and we’ll keep in touch. I might get a computer and one of those things where we can talk face-to-face. Off you go now, dear.”
Justin retired to his bedroom, and sat for a while, staring out of the window at the dark, cold fenland. He did not really want to talk to anyone. He felt a stranger in his own home, and realised that the presence of Robert Pettison in the house was disturbing. He fell into a light doze in his chair, and dreamed that his uncle was wheeling himself miraculously upstairs, and finding his way into his bedroom, gun in hand. He awoke with a start, hearing his mother’s voice calling him for supper.
*
Back in Farnden, Lois sat in her office, waiting for Dot Nimmo to call. Gran and Derek were watching television, and she had retired to take the call. There had been a message on the phone, and when she had tried to call back, Dot had been engaged. Lois’s thoughts were far away, up in the fens of Lincolnshire, where she had never been, but imagined as looking something like the tulip fields of Holland. Justin would be very out of place there, surely, she thought. How did the son of a tulip farmer get to be a swinging young actor in the Midlands. She supposed his parents had decided on private education, and then university, in order to give him a broad education, but had succeeded only in producing a smooth young man, like many other smooth young men, with ambitions to make enough money to live in a luxury executive dwelling, somewhere in a leafy suburb.
But was Justin really one of them?
“We know nothing about him,” she said aloud, and then continued to remember exactly what they did know. His father had died, and he had a strange preference in his choice of pets. Pets? She stood up suddenly. Of course they were not pets, nor were they Justin’s! He was an intermediary and an actor, and of course she knew who was boss.
Her phone rang, and it was Dot. “Thanks for ringing back, Mrs M,” she said. “Just checking that it’s all right for me to work at the zoo tomorrow.”
“As it happens, yes. We’ve lost a couple of baby elephants and you may be able to help us find them.”
Thirty-nine
Justin padded over to the window to draw his curtains back, and was relieved to see a clear blue sky and a brisk wind blowing the few trees in the farmhouse garden. He had been dreading a wet day for his father’s funeral, but now, with any luck, they should be able to smile a little, and welcome guests who had come to mourn the loss of a loved one.
That’s what Pettison had said! An old friend, not a distant relative, nor a colleague. No doubt he would want that forgotten. Looking back, Justin remembered that his mother had never shown to him any curiosity about the barn where he had occasionally housed animals in transit. And Pettison had always been around, ever since he was a child. He had taken him for granted, and Father had talked of him as a business associate. Had Mother known all along what his father and Pettison, old school chums, were up to? Father must have told her, years and years ago. She would expect Robert to be here.
An old friend and business associate. Was that it? Justin began to shower and dress, and all the while he was thinking how he could get Pettison to tell him the truth. He reckoned that his father had not become an associate willingly. He had been a strictly law-abiding person in every other respect, and a regular churchgoer. But Pettison had exercised a hold over him in some way. That was his specialty!
“Justin! Breakfast’s ready!” His mother’s voice brought him back to the present, and he vowed to find out from Pettison exactly what the relationship with his father had been.