In Chapter 4 of this exciting novel, Harv has now discovered the identity of her biological father, or at least she thinks she has. Her feelings in a turmoil, she leaves her parents’ house without saying goodbye and sets off to at least get a glimpse of the last place where her father was seen alive. The plot thickens. Enjoy this new chapter.

Chapter 4

I slumped back down against the box, thinking about him, about my mother. I was confused, overwhelmed by a vacuous, empty sensation like something fundamental was being sucked from me. My head felt like a polythene bag full of water, blood thumping in my ears, I was holding myself tight, my forehead fretted until my head ached.
I knew I had to get away before Angie came home and without Ken seeing the trouble in my face. There was no way I could face them and a worse thought was swilling horribly into my consciousness; that it could have been Angie who had stabbed him.
It was crazy, but it would explain why she had refused to tell me anything, when it was now so clear that she had known the truth all along. It was not possible that she could have had sex with a man who was murdered almost immediately after he had supposedly dropped her off and that she would somehow forget about it. The press cutting in my hand, and the ones which I knew must have appeared afterwards, informed me of this truth. It must have been all over the papers at the time, including pictures of him. This murder would have been the total talk of a small town like Scarborough. There was no way that she could have missed it.
From the diary entry, it seemed perfectly possible that nobody who Angie knew, either friends or parents, had seen them together. No one had seen them as they drove through town and she had waited in the car while he went into the B&B. They had gone to a pub, but not locally, and had sat where no one could see them. The rest of the time they had spent in his car, her arriving home so late that her parents would not have seen her return, possibly on foot, possibly covered in blood.
These thoughts seemed ridiculous and dramatic but why had Angie not gone to the police with information? If she had, it would have become part of our shared history, something she could not have kept hidden from me; a huge and horrible and very public legend in her life. She was a key witness, maybe the last person to see him alive and definitely the last if she had been the killer.
It was possible that they had got into a fight in his car on South Parade, he might have pulled a knife, tried to rape her and she had somehow turned the knife on him, stabbing him and stabbing him until she managed to run from the car and home under the cover of late night, empty streets.
Maybe she had fabricated the details in the diary, so if the police discovered that she had been with him that night, she could show them the diary where she had already cleverly written her own girlish alibi, a clean and safe version of events, just in case.
I pushed these thoughts away; Angie was too lightweight, too transparent to have held or maintained a lie of this magnitude. But murderers came in all different guises and as long as no one had seen them together, Angie would have been a piece of hay in a haystack so far as anyone identifying her as the killer went. As long as she had kept her head down and clear, acted normal and said nothing to anyone, it was perfectly feasible that she could have got away with it.
No one would suspect a seventeen-year-old girl. She had washed away the evidence and the passing of time would calm her and allay her fear of being caught.
Angie must have calculated that to have come forward, would have splashed her face all over the papers to identify her with Myra Hindley style mug shot, as the cheap girl who had fast sex with a stranger in the back of a car four hours after meeting him in a Spar shop and that four hours after leaving him, according to her story, he was brutally murdered. If guilty, she would have been branded by the press as some kind of black widow spider; seventeen years old and pregnant by the man she had executed immediately after their casual mating. She would have gone to prison and I would have been born there. How would they have branded me? It was unthinkable.
If Angie had killed him, I wondered how she would have behaved the next morning, or where she would have hidden her blood soaked clothing. I imagined her sitting at the breakfast table, Brian reading the paper while his daughter ate toast and cereal self consciously wondering whether what she had done was written all over her face. Whether what she had done had made the early edition, and any minute now, her father would push the paper across the table at her to show her what she already knew. After breakfast she would have gone to work, measured feet and chatted about the weather, with the colours of a hideous death still hanging like a fresh bruise in her aura and perhaps, a crescent of dried blood screaming her guilt from under a torn fingernail.
Innocent or guilty, those few weeks of Angie’s life must have been intolerable. I wondered how a seventeen year old had found the resource to cope in the face of what had unfolded two days after that final diary entry.
If Angie was the killer, then the horror of her crime would have been painfully internalised along with the terror of being caught, scared that she would trip herself up with the lies which would have sounded to her so thin and obvious as she sidled them cautiously from her tight mouth. Every morning and night, her fingers panicking through rattling newspapers which appealed for the information that only she could give. Angie, wide eyed and waiting for the knock at the door.
If she was innocent, then she would have probably been scared and bewildered, her initial hurt at his not calling exploding to a heart sink of horror as she read the front page splash in the local evening paper. Maybe she had heard about the murder as a flutter of delicious gossip on the street. I wondered how she had found out and how she had set her face at that moment to mask her inner turmoil and how she had then decided what to do. Four weeks later, or thereabout, she would have been sure that she was pregnant. But what was she? A scared victim or a murderous receptacle?
I was horrified by the thought of his body cooling with death while his still warm and vital sperm were squirming and fighting their way toward Angie’s seed; bloated and ready in her hot, fertile young belly. Tiny energetic specks of half-life seeking to create a whole, as his own force ebbed away. I wondered if it were possible that he had died at the very second that the remarkable fusion had made me alive. It chilled me.
It was a lie. “I can’t remember. It was dark.”
I had to get away, to get some perspective. I felt raw, my emotions seething at the surface. I couldn’t grieve for a man that I didn’t know but I could grieve for the lost possibility and I could make Angie pay in some way. I didn’t know how yet.
Fuck her and fuck her lies. My rage toward her felt tight and white. Something had broken that would never be mended. Her lies had undermined the very foundation of our relationship. I was no longer sure of who she was and what I believed about her.
I tore the two pages from the diary, folded them around the newspaper cutting and pushed them into my shirt pocket. I wiped my face roughly on the striped cloth and wrapped the diary back in it, then repacking her Pandora’s Box, as accurately as I could remember, I pushed it deep into a corner, obscuring it with the heavy carton of pigeon magazines.
Grabbing the carton of photographs, I closed up the loft and quickly packed my weekend things into my small bag. I could see Ken with two friends in the garden; he was holding a bird, spreading one wing to full span while the other men bent intently, gazing at the fan of feathers as he explained something to them.
I scribbled a quick note and left it on the kitchen table saying that Philip had called and that I had had to get back to York quickly. I said that I hadn’t wanted to disturb Ken as he was busy and then I hurried like a thief to the car, chucking my stuff like swag into the back seat.
I revved the engine a little too hard, my tyres spinning gravel and pulled into the road, terrified that Angie would be just turning into the street to see me leaving, my face a seething sneer of resentment and my eyes flashing too much white.
At the end of the road, and without a plan, I turned my car away from York and toward South Parade burning up the hill toward the tourist side of town, the little engine screaming in third gear. I wanted to see the scene of the crime, sit outside The Golden Sands and walk over the pavement where he had stumbled to see if I felt anything, maybe a shudder or a warm connection.
I drove into South Parade and was confronted by a skein of painted signs, which stood at the gate of nearly every property, both right and left. They stretched the length of the straight road with the air force blue sea in the distance, a tiny block of horizon, like a full stop.
I drove slowly, my head scanning to and fro, and there it was, about half way down on the right hand side; The Golden Sands, painted toffee and white and insinuating itself boldly and bay-fronted onto the street.
I found a parking space just beyond it and pulled in, switching off the engine and turning to stared up at the windows, trying to make myself feel something. It was everything a Bed and Breakfast should be; a glass porch with a ‘vacancies’ sign and a spider plant, a small breakfast table in the front window and a compact and healthy palm tree in the gravelled front garden.
I sat there for about ten minutes wondering if he might have parked his car in this exact spot and sat exactly where I was sitting now, his eyes seeing the same view that my eyes were now seeing. Was this where he had defended himself from the cutter, scrabbling and struggling for his life? I got out of the car and went to the door.
As I turned the brass doorknob, I could imagine his hand unable to find traction, blood and liquid fingers sliding on smooth metal. Red smears and droplets on gold.
The hallway was bright and clean; practical patterned carpet and textured cream and white wallpaper. I thought about the smeary handprints, the ‘traces of blood found in the entrance’, which would have drivelled along the walls and up the stairs. They might still be there, hidden under layers of old paper and paint.
A gilt half-circle table with a glass top held a couple of letters and a silk flower arrangement in shades of peach. There was a small desk, more like a lectern with a lower shelf and a small brass bell with a galleon handle standing on a laminated sign, which directed you to ‘Please Ring for Attention’. I picked it up and shook it; its silvery ringing was strident in the deathly quiet and I waited. A fire door swung open from what I guessed was probably the kitchen and a middle-aged woman came out wiping her hands on her apron and smiling a smile of welcome. Now, I didn’t know what to say. I was aware that I was gaping and probably appeared confused and weird. We stood like this, for a moment, each of us waiting for the other to begin. She was pink and breathing heavily.
“How can I help you?” she eventually asked, still smiling. She wiped a clean red hand across her dewy forehead, “Sorry, I’ve just been kneading bread. Takes it out of me these days”
“I wondered if you had any rooms available next week?” I lied.
“Next week, next week, now let me have a look. Is it a double or a single, arriving when and for how many nights?” She reached a booking diary from under the counter and flopped it open to the following week.
I thought quickly. He would probably have stayed in a single, “A single, for two nights from next Wednesday if that’s possible?”
“Yes, we have a couple of rooms, but they may fill up quite quickly at this time of year.”
“Is there any chance I could see one of the rooms?”
“Of course.” My heart was thumping as she reached under the desk again and pulled out some keys.
As we climbed the stairs I built my story, explaining that the room was actually for my parents who were coming to stay in Scarborough for a few days. I was lying with the confidence of a used car salesman now but in my desperation to get up here, I had tripped myself up.
“Won’t they be wanting a double then?” she asked, looking bemused by my inconsistency.
“Yes, how stupid of me, sorry, they probably will. Well, they definitely will. Yes”. I felt foolish, was aware that I had flushed, and consciously decided to offer no explanation.
I was desperate to see the single rooms but at this point I didn’t really care what I was shown; I just wanted to be upstairs in this house, to get an eyeful of as much as possible. I kept talking and the woman kept answering, but it was as if the words were coming from outside of me, like I was narrating the scene from offstage.
I was detached, my eyes scanning the décor like I was scrutinising the accommodation for cleanliness, the woman obviously thinking that I was acting peculiarly. I was looking for a sign; a speck of blood on a skirting, a smear on a door casing or an indelible stain seeping through wallpaper. If I had found one there, what would I have done – asked if I could scrape up this tiny DNA daddy on a flake of paint and keep it close to my heart in a matchbox? Suddenly I felt mad.
The woman opened the door into a street facing room with plain nets blowing at the open window. I stood, wondering now what the hell I was hoping to feel or connect with. It was probably not the actual room and might not even be the right house. The original Golden Sands could have disappeared in a change of ownership, the name re-emerging here in a completely different property.
“My parents stayed at the Golden Sands on their honeymoon, twenty four years ago, and they asked me to see if it was still here. That’s why they’re coming back, for their anniversary”. This was my best lie so far and I hoped it would lead me neatly to the question which would confirm whether this was the right house.
“Oh, that’s nice,” she said, “I wonder which room they stayed in?”
“I’m not sure about the room but I think they said it was a Mrs Carr who was the landlady.” I tried to look convincingly vague.
“Yes, that’s right, she was the owner two before us; I think she went to live with her daughter in Sheffield when she sold up. That must be what…” she counted mentally,
”twenty years ago now, because we’ve been here nine and the people before us had it for about seven”.
I wanted to leave. Now I was here, the location confirmed, I felt nothing except sad. I asked for a business card and said that I would let her know about the reservation later in the day after I had spoken to my parents. Leaving the house, I felt a tugging and a pang of abandonment but I think that was because I felt obligated to feel something.

Stay tuned next week for the next installment of what is fast becoming a nailbiter. See you soon

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