The little house came into view, its slate roof sagging, the sash windows silvery with age but retaining their panes of glass. No vandals, she supposed, way out here.
An expensive-looking bike was propped against the wall, a bright yellow helmet slung on one handlebar.
She could just imagine Beth and Jenny’s reactions to what she was doing, meeting a man she didn’t know, someone Nick described as ‘touched in the head’， in a lonely place like this. She didn’t even want to think what Nick would say.
‘Hello?’ she called tentatively, walking round the side of the house to an old courtyard of tumbledown outbuildings full of waist-high weeds. Someone, though, had recently trampled a path through them, and Lulu followed this through the courtyard, the wet vegetation soaking her jeans below the knees. The path led to an open doorway in one of the outbuildings.
She peered into the gloom of the interior. The floor was cobbled, the walls glistening wet and green with algae. This outbuilding looked much older than the house. Maybe it had been here for centuries, maybe right back to the time of The Debatable Lands, when the people who lived here could have locked their enemies up in this dank –
‘Lulu,’ said a voice behind her.
She gasped, a hand going instinctively to her breastbone, and wheeled round.
Andy Jardine was giving her his lopsided smile. ‘Wet out here. We can get into the house through the back door.’
Wildlife had been making itself at home inside the house. There were pigeon droppings everywhere, a thick crust on the floor, and Andy identified the pungent smell as fox. ‘Must have a den under the floorboards.’
It was a sad old place, with peeling layers of flowery wallpaper making Lulu think of all the people who had called it home through the years.
Andy went to one of the windows, so filmed with grime it was hard to see through it. ‘You’re sure Nick can’t have followed you?’
She supposed he wouldn’t want his friend to know about whatever issues he was having.
‘Yes. He was shut up in the study when I left.’
There were a couple of old wooden chairs in what would have been the kitchen, set companionably in front of the remains of the old black range built into a recess. Andy dusted them off with a tissue and they sat down.
‘Is Nick abusing you?’
Oh my God!
‘No, of course not!’
‘Sexually or physically?’
‘No!’ Where on earth was this coming from?
‘At Craibstone Wood, I saw him. I saw how angry he was with you.’
She remembered, then, that Andy had witnessed Nick storming off, after she’d got the phone call from the police about Paul. ‘That was a silly misunderstanding.’
‘You’re saying he’s never hurt you?’
‘Never! For goodness’ sake, Andy!’ Lulu didn’t want to talk about her marriage with this man. But she made her expression sympathetic. ‘Yvonne going missing is hard on him, as I’m sure it is on everyone. Have you been finding it hard? Is that why you wanted to talk to me?’
‘No. I want to talk to you about Nick.’
Andy, she suspected, was on the spectrum. If so, he would find people’s behaviour hard to understand. Seeing Nick angry like that, on top of the upset over Yvonne, could have been frightening for him. ‘You and Nick were good friends when you were young, weren’t you? Best friends?’
Andy stared at her.
She left a silence.
Eventually: ‘He terrorised me, Lulu. From when we were little kids. In fact, I can’t remember a time in my childhood when Nick wasn’t terrorising me. He hit me, he bit me, he cut me. But he soon learned that those things leave marks that have to be explained. So he would pull my hair. Give me Chinese burns. Make me eat sand. Do you know how painful it is to pass sand out of your arse?’
Completely inappropriately, laughter bubbled up in Lulu. She suppressed it, schooling her face. She knew, from growing up with two younger brothers, how horrendous small boys could be to one another. Andy probably hadn’t been diagnosed with Asperger’s as a child – had he been diagnosed, even now? – so the adults around him wouldn’t have known that he would find the normal rough and tumble of kids’ interactions extremely challenging. And the other kids, of course, would hardly have given him an easy ride. Quite the opposite. ‘That must have been awful. Did you tell your mum and dad?’
‘When you’re really young, three, four, five, you just go along with the status quo, don’t you? I did try to tell Mum, but Nick was always so convincing. Oh no, Andy fell over. I was trying to catch him, not push him. Andy ripped his arm on a nail – I don’t know why he’s saying I cut it. And Nick did this.’ He touched the scar running through his mouth. ‘With an adze from Duncan’s shed.’