Читать книгу Dirty Little Secret - Jon Stock - Страница 33

Marchant walked into the high-ceilinged hall, stood still and listened. Somewhere far above him, he could hear the sound of a muffled voice. It wasn’t Dhar’s. He had heard it before, a long time ago, but he couldn’t place it at first. Then he remembered. What was Dhar doing?

He looked around and saw the old phone on a corner table. Above it, numbers had been written in ink by his father on a piece of paper stuck to the wall. He went over and saw his own mobile number next to the word ‘Daniel’. His father had never called him ‘Dan’, despite all his friends using the name. There were no work colleagues on the list, unless his father had given them codenames, which wouldn’t surprise him. He noticed, though, that the ink was green – a private joke.

Slowly, he moved up the stairs, thinking back to those times when, after a night out as a teenager, he had tried to reach his room without waking his father. He had always heard him. Marchant liked to think the reason was his father’s training, but he knew now that it was his own unsteady legs. Sebbie had died when he was eight, in a car crash in Delhi. They’d never got to share the teenage years, the parties, the dope, the girls. Sometimes Marchant wondered if that was why he had consumed so much alcohol in his life: he was always drinking for two.

He reached the landing, and listened again. To his right: the guest room, the bathroom, his father’s bedroom. He preferred to call it that, even though he had shared it for a while with his mother. She had played only a small part in his childhood, retreating into herself with depression, and was dead by the time he was seventeen. His father’s brief affair in Delhi with Dhar’s mother can’t have helped. Or perhaps it was a reaction to his wife’s illness. He had never found out.

His and Sebbie’s bedrooms were on the top floor, where the voice was coming from. He knew what it was now, even though it was still muffled. It was the first record his father had ever bought him: Sinbad the Sailor and Other Stories. Dhar must be playing it on the old wooden-cased HMV player in his room. The door was shut, but he could see that Sebbie’s was open. It hadn’t been a conscious intention to turn it into a shrine, but he and his father had decided to leave it as it was when he had died.

Marchant crept up the last flight of stairs, stopping to look at a photo of his father, Sebbie and himself. They were standing in front of the Taj Mahal. As he passed the leaded window, he thought he saw a flash of light over by the chapel, on the far side of the garden. It was a tiny Norman chapel of rest, where the hamlet gathered for services on special occasions. His father’s funeral had been at the bigger church in Rodmarton, down the road, but he was buried here.

He waited to see if the light appeared again, but there was nothing. Dawn had broken but it was still difficult to see clearly. He carried on up the stairs, thinking of Sebbie and how they used to race down them, bouncing on their bottoms. At the door he paused, listening to the story of Sinbad, and glanced behind him. He could see Sebbie’s bed, a toy tiger propped up on the pillow. Taking a deep breath, he turned and opened his own bedroom door.

Dhar was sitting on a pile of brightly coloured Indian cushions, his back to the wall. He had an unusually shaped bottle in one hand, a gun in the other. An empty bottle of vodka was lying on the carpet beside him.

‘You took your time,’ he said, pointing the gun at him.