The Necessary Deaths Page 3

  His relationship with Reginald Hanes did not last, however, and the auditions failed to bring Jonathan much more than small and sporadic chorus parts. After nearly three years of struggle, he decided to turn his back on London and return to the south coast, where he got a job working in the gardens at the Glyndebourne Opera Company. Finally he found contentment. He discovered that he loved gardening, and the director of the opera company was grateful to have someone he could call on at short notice to understudy for the chorus.

  As Dominic sat by the fire and removed his shoes, he looked again at the sepia photo of a laughing, carefree woman standing on the cliff top at Saltdean. It was the only photo Jonathan had of his mother, but there was a copy of it on display in every room of the little cottage. A curious obsession, but one that Dominic understood.

  “So who is the mysterious woman, then?” called Jonathan from the kitchen. “She must have some charm for you to break with routine and come down here midweek.” Jonathan emerged with two glasses and a bottle. “Wonderful of course that you are here, my dear.” He put the glasses down on the table, poured a generous measure of wine, and handed it to Dominic. “Cheers, my dear. It’s very good to see you. Is she going to be a rich benefactress who will save your ailing law practice and bring us riches beyond our belief?”

  Dominic recounted the events of the night before and his unsatisfactory conversation with John in the car. “So it’s all rather strange,” he concluded, “although probably easily explained as an emotional student’s experiment with drugs that went wrong.”

  “But you don’t think so, do you? And it’s one thing I’ve learned about you in our glorious two years together: your instincts are rarely wrong, if not a little infuriating on occasions. For someone who spends their time on legal logic, I’ve never quite understood how you can bear to give yourself over to raw gut feeling.” Jonathan squeezed onto the sofa alongside Dominic and put an arm around his shoulder.

  Dominic bristled and retorted, “Intuition and instinct are merely the superior level of your brain drawing conclusions based on the stimuli of multiple senses. We supposedly rational adults spend too much time relying on what we consider to be intellect—”

  “Oh my! I feel a Dominic moment of didactic discourse coming on,” teased Jonathan, but Dominic was now in full flight.

  “—by ignoring our intuition and instincts, we risk ignoring the sensitivity that we can have to other people’s behavior, particularly those we love, but because we are unable to articulate this sensitivity, we so-called intellectuals….”

  Jonathan sighed and removed his arm.

  “We so-called intellectuals,” continued Dominic, “too often forget that mothers know their children instinctively. Samantha is a sensitive person; there wasn’t a moment when she doubted her son’s behavior. She didn’t once say, ‘what if I’m wrong?’ And then there’s John.”

  “Ah, the housemate. Are they lovers, do you think?” mused Jonathan.

  “Why is it that you automatically think all men are gay?” asked Dominic in frustration. “Or is it simply that you wish they were?”

  Jonathan ignored the jibe. “You did say he seemed upset when you first arrived. Perhaps he’s formed some kind of attachment, even if it’s not reciprocated. Male teenage adulation is very common you know, even in boys who grow into full-blooded alpha males. Or maybe it’s a guilt thing. Maybe…,” he went on, warming to a theme. “Maybe he’s the drug taker in the house, and he persuaded young Simon to try something. The experiment went horribly wrong, and now Simon’s in a hospital ward and John’s got the police breathing down his neck.”

  Dominic took a sip of wine. “John said that none of them took drugs in the house. And he told me in a way that I believed. It was almost naïve the way he said it, but very credible.”

  “Is this your instinct kicking in again?” asked Jonathan. “You know I love you for it, but there seems to be a distinct lack of hard facts here just at the moment. We don’t even know what the young man overdosed on. Come on. You’re the lawyer, I’m the artist. Why am I the one telling you that you need more facts? You’ve got me completely intrigued, and you are simply going to have to find out a lot more. Do you have to dash back to Oxfordshire tomorrow morning? Can’t you find some reason to meet up with the mysterious and captivating Samantha again?”

  Dominic reflected for a moment. “I can’t help thinking there’s much more to this than a student’s moment of madness. I’m supposed to be seeing that awful client with his patent dispute tomorrow afternoon, but I could put him off until Thursday.”

  Dominic’s caseload, working in a provincial legal practice, had brought him a respectable income for several years. But work had declined recently. He knew it was down to something they called “dynamic marketing”—two words he dreaded. He felt anything but dynamic, and he hated the thought of marketing himself. He knew he was going to have to do something about it soon, but he had lost the ambitious hunger of his youth.

  His choice of a career in commercial law had started promisingly. After a first in history at Oxford, he had sailed through his law college exams and secured an internship with a prestigious London firm. But all too soon Dominic got bored. His clients’ legal battles over large sums of disputed money were for him esoteric and simply greedy. He felt unfulfilled. Weekend walks in the Chiltern Hills near Oxford gave him the inspiration to move to a country practice. The pace was slower and the work was more varied, if less well paid, and his colleagues in the small market town legal practice were altogether more pleasant and, well, gentlemanly.

  That feeling of contentment had lasted for more than seven years. Then he met Jonathan, who brought a new sense of fun and excitement into his life. Dominic felt dull and sedentary by comparison with his happy-go-lucky companion. It was time for a change, but he had yet to work out what form the change would take.

  “I’ll drop an e-mail to Gillian to clear my diary for tomorrow. Why not? The clients can wait one more day. Samantha did say she might have need of my services. I’d hate to appear like an ambulance chaser, but….”

  “But she’s woken up the macho male in you, and you’re intrigued,” Jonathan said as he stood up, glass in hand. “My dear, it will be the second impulsive decision you’ve made in twenty-four hours. It’s a first, and something to celebrate. Now come through to the kitchen, or the mussels will be steamed to extinction.”

  Chapter 5

  DOMINIC WAITED until the next morning to send a text to Samantha. He took time to phrase it carefully. On the one hand, he had genuine concern for her situation, but he was also conscious that his concern, coming from a lawyer, could be misconstrued as fishing for business. But what the hell, he was already painfully aware of his present lack of dynamic marketing skills.

  Whatever fears Dominic had were dispelled when he received a text reply almost by return. It read: Meet me at the hospital at 11. I need to ask your advice. Samantha x

  Jonathan had to leave early for a meeting about a landscaping project with a wealthy client who had recently taken over a rambling old manor house in acres of land on the South Downs. “She’s totally crazy, my dear, but loaded. If she pays the bills, then we can spend Christmas in Rio,” he had said cheerfully before leaving at seven thirty that morning.

  In Dominic’s e-mail to his secretary, Gillian, he not only asked her to clear his diary for that day, but also to field all his calls and ensure he was not disturbed. Like many experienced legal secretaries in small provincial firms, Gillian was more than capable of dealing tactfully with the demands of self-important clients. She was very fond of Dominic, and she was also the only person in the firm who knew the truth of his relationship with Jonathan. A mother of two grown daughters, she treated Dominic as the son she had never had and was often a source of advice, invited or otherwise.

  Dominic decided to drop by the shared student house where John lived on the way to the hospital. He was not sure what he might achieve by the unannounced visit, but at the ve
ry least, he felt he could discover more about the background to Simon’s daily life.

  As he walked up the path of the dilapidated Victorian house in Lowell Street, the front door burst open, and a young woman wrapped in multicolored layers of clothing flew out, almost colliding with him.

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry!” she said, clutching his arm as her feet skidded on the icy path. Her hair was braided in dreadlocks, and she wore a large pair of headphones. She slipped them off her ears and around her neck, looked at him more closely, and added, “Are you from the police? Only I’m supposed to be in a lecture at nine, and I’m late already, so if you want to ask any more questions, could I do it later?”

  “Oh, no, I’m not from the police. I was actually looking for John, but I suppose he might be at a lecture as well. I gave him a ride back from the hospital last night and—”

  “So you’re the one with the Merc with the leather seats! John was well impressed. No, he’s still in. Not sure he’s going in to uni today. He’s still really cut up about Si. Look, I’ve got to go, but hang on—I’ll let you in.” The young woman turned back to the front door and opened it with her key. “John!” she shouted into the house. “That guy’s here who gave you a ride. John?” There was a muffled response from the gloomy depths of the stairwell.

  “I think he’ll be down in a minute,” she assured him. “Wait in the warm. It’s freezing out here. Mind you, it’s not much warmer in there. Heating’s on the blink. I’m Gemma, by the way.” She held out a hand enveloped in a large woolen glove, and they shook somewhat formally.

  “Got to go. Great to meet you,” and she disappeared down the path.

  Dominic stepped into the hallway, and the front door slammed shut behind him. A smell of damp mixed with the slightly sweet smell of rancid carpet greeted his nostrils. The hallway was only slightly warmer than the icy December day outside. He thought back to his student days in Oxford and was grateful for the cozy, if smothering, college rooms he had lived in at Exeter College.

  A pile of unopened post lay on the threadbare carpet by the front door, together with three pairs of scruffy trainers, a bicycle wheel, and a row of empty bottles. Dominic bent down and picked up the letters. Being somewhat obsessive about tidying, he began to sort the advertising circulars from what looked like the regular post. There were three letters for Simon Gregory, one marked University of Brighton and two others marked with the logo of the drug company Barton Kane. As Dominic turned the envelopes idly in his hand, a voice came from the landing above.

  “Mr. Delingpole, hi. I didn’t know you were coming over.”

  Dominic looked up to see a sleepy-eyed John, wrapped in a duvet, standing at the top of the stairs. The disheveled figure began to walk down.

  “I was sleeping in this morning as I’ve only got a tutorial at two,” John said. “Do you want a coffee or something? There’s probably no milk, so do you mind it black?” The young man stopped at the foot of the stairs and eyed the handful of half-sorted post in Dominic’s hand.

  Dominic felt suddenly guilty holding the household’s post, as though he might be suspected of stealing it. “Don’t worry about the coffee, really. I just came over to see how you were. I’m on my way to the hospital, and I just thought I’d drop in.”

  John yawned and hung on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. “I’m okay, thanks. Bit hungover, actually. The others thought I needed a bit of cheer last night, so they topped me up a bit with some alcohol. I’m going to have a coffee. Otherwise I’ll never make it in to uni today.”

  He slipped past Dominic and along the corridor to the back of the house. Dominic followed him into a dingy 1970s-style kitchen with a grubby floor, overflowing worktops, and several cupboard doors hanging from their hinges.

  “Excuse the mess. It’s not Friday yet,” said John as he dug out a couple of mugs from a pile of dirty dishes in the sink and rinsed them under the tap. “Friday’s the day we blitz the house in readiness for the weekend, when it gets trashed again,” he added by way of explanation. “Are you sure you won’t have a coffee? It won’t take a second.”

  Dominic was not fond of instant coffee but thought it would be churlish to turn down John’s hospitality, despite the state of the mugs.

  “Well, maybe just a half. There are a couple of letters for Simon here. I could take them to Samantha this morning if you like.”

  “Sure. Actually, you could take a couple of other things in for him. They say coma patients should be surrounded by familiar stuff. I was going to take his iPod to the hospital yesterday but forgot. I thought that if they played his music to him, it might nudge him somewhere deep down. Hang on a minute. I’ll go and get it.” John tipped a heaped spoonful of coffee into each damp mug before disappearing up the stairs.

  Dominic wrinkled his nose as he looked around the beige-painted kitchen. There was a Formica-covered breakfast bar strewn with a mix of study papers and the remains of a takeaway curry. The walls were decorated with posters from several student theater productions and what looked like revision notes on the subject of Brecht.

  John returned, no longer clutching the duvet but dressed in some shabby tracksuit bottoms and a singlet, carrying a small plastic bag. He handed it to Dominic. “Do you mind? It’s Si’s iPod, headphones, charger, and some photos of us—the house, that is. We had a party the other week, and it got a bit crazy. Si was on good form and we took loads of pictures. I printed some off at uni. If you could….”

  Dominic took the bag and dropped the three letters addressed to Mr. Simon Gregory into it. “Of course. It’s no problem.” He watched as John busied himself with the coffee for a moment and then said, “Look. It’s really not any of my business, and you can tell me that if you want. But just how well do you know Simon?”

  John turned around. “What do you mean?” he asked shyly.

  Dominic looked steadily at John. “I think you know what I mean. You’re very close, aren’t you?”

  John returned his gaze. “Si’s mum doesn’t know anything about us. He wasn’t ready to tell her. I don’t want you to go blurting stuff out to her. Look….” John turned away. “I’m his first boyfriend. It kind of happened the first week we arrived in the house. He was really shy about it all at first and didn’t want the others to know. He said he’d known for a while, but meeting me….”

  John turned back to Dominic with tears welling in his eyes. “He’s an amazing guy, and we were—we are—incredibly happy. There’s no way he was thinking of killing himself.”

  Dominic resisted the impulse to give John a comforting hug, conscious of his professional standing and the fact that it would embarrass them both. He thought back to the night before and what John had called the residents of this shared student house: the outies. It was suddenly a very appropriate choice of word, he thought.

  “We have to be practical here, John,” Dominic said. “If the police continue their investigations, which they will, then they’ll start to dig deeper into Simon’s personal life. Think about it. Do you really want the police revealing the reality of your relationship to Mrs. Gregory? It could be a much more difficult surprise for her.”

  John stared gloomily at the floor and then looked back at Dominic. “I don’t know. It was up to Si. I can’t break a promise to him, even after what’s happened. Not yet anyway. Maybe if….” He broke off, as if not wanting to say the unthinkable.

  Dominic suddenly felt surprisingly in command.

  “It’s all right, John. You’re right to respect Simon’s wishes, so you should say nothing for the moment. Besides, Mrs. Gregory has quite enough on her mind as it is. But the question remains, how did Simon come to take a drugs overdose? You say this household is drugs-free, but you did say last night that you took ‘the odd smokes.’”

  John opened his mouth to say something, but Dominic, now in full flow, continued, “Look. Both you and Mrs. Gregory seem convinced that Simon is not the type to commit suicide. Lots of people have said that about friends and lov
ed ones who kill themselves, but for some reason I think there’s more to this. John, I’m not the police. Why don’t you tell me exactly what happened when you discovered Simon?”

  John took a long pause and looked hard at Dominic. Then it was as though a switch had been flicked.

  “I’m usually the last one back to the house in the evening. Because of the labs I have to do in the afternoon. Si doesn’t seem to have many lectures at all. I always say it seems like a bit of a doss. Gemma—she let you in this morning—she does English, and that seems just as dossy. She’s only got to be in a few days each week. Me and Jay—he’s the one doing the postgrad in pharmacology—we’re the ones who seem to work the hardest.

  “Anyway, Si was supposed to be meeting a guy about a summer job he wanted with some flakey production company here in Brighton. He’s desperate to get into TV. Then he sent me a text to say that the guy had blown him out. He said he was coming back here and why didn’t I come back early too? It seemed like a great idea as my lab was all going wrong, so I got the next bus.

  “When I got back here and went upstairs, Si was lying facedown on the bed. He was naked, and I thought for a moment it was like a come-on, but then….” John paused for a deep breath. “He was just completely still. His breathing was normal but like, really slow. I couldn’t wake him at all. Then I saw he’d thrown up, and I was dead panicked that he could choke if it happened again, so I checked his airway and got him into a recovery position and covered him with some bedclothes and then called the ambulance.”

  The young man seemed to be exhausted from the effort of telling his story, and he paused, his chest rising and falling in rapid, shallow breaths.