Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [164]
Tim himself would have to talk to Kaveh, though. He’d have to go downstairs and find him and tell him that Gracie was outside jumping. But if he did that, Kaveh would probably just point out that there was nothing wrong with jumping on a trampoline, that’s what trampolines were for, weren’t they, and wasn’t that why they’d got one for Gracie in the first place, because she liked to jump? Then Tim would have to explain that when she jumped for an hour as she’d done so far, it was because she was hurting inside. Then Kaveh would say the obvious thing: Well, we both know why she’s hurting, Tim, don’t we?
Tim hadn’t intended. That was the problem. He hadn’t intended to make Gracie cry. Gracie was the only person who actually mattered to him, and the truth was she’d just been there, in his way. He hadn’t thought of what came after the moment when he snatched Bella up and pulled her arms and legs off. He’d only wanted to do something to make the boiling inside of him go away. But how could Gracie understand that when she had no boiling inside of her? She could only see the meanness within him that had snatched up Bella and dismembered her.
Gracie stopped for a moment outside. Tim saw that she was breathing hard. He also noticed something new about Gracie, which brought him up short. She was growing breasts and he could see the buds of them poking at the jersey that she was wearing.
This brought a searing sadness upon him. It clouded his vision, and when the cloud passed, Gracie had gone back to jumping again. And this time, he watched her little breasts as she jumped. Something, he knew, had to be done about her.
How useless would it be to pick up the phone and ring their mother? he asked himself a second time. Gracie growing breasts meant Gracie needing her mum to do something like take her to town and purchase her a baby brassiere or whatever it was that little girls wore when they started growing breasts. This went beyond just getting Gracie off the bloody trampoline, didn’t it? Yes, it did, but wasn’t the truth that Niamh would see this the same way she saw everything? Tell Kaveh about it, she would say. Kaveh can handle this little problem.
That was everything tied up with a bow: Whatever Gracie was going to face in her growing-up years, she was going to have to face without a mum to help her, because the one thing in life that was an absolute certainty was that Niamh Cresswell had plans for herself that didn’t include the children she’d had with her louse of a husband. Thus Tim knew it was down to him or it was down to Kaveh to help Gracie as she grew up. Or it was down to them both.
Tim left his room. Kaveh was somewhere in the house, and Tim supposed now was as good a time as any to tell him that they needed to take Gracie into Windermere to get whatever she needed. If they didn’t do it, the boys in her school would start to tease her. Ultimately the girls would tease her as well. Teasing her would turn into bullying her soon enough, and Tim wasn’t about to have his sister bullied.
He heard Kaveh’s voice as he descended the stairs. It seemed to be coming from the fire house. The door to the room was partially closed, but a shaft of light fell on the floor from inside and he heard the sound of a poker stirring coals in the grate.
“…not actually in my plans,” Kaveh was saying politely to someone.
“But you can’t be thinking of staying on now Cresswell’s dead.” Tim recognised George Cowley’s voice. He also recognised the subject. Staying on meant they were talking about Bryan Beck farm. George Cowley would be seeing the death of Tim’s father as his chance to sweep in and buy the place. Obviously, Kaveh wasn’t having that.
“I am,” Kaveh said.
“Thinking of raising sheep, are you?” Cowley sounded amused by the entire idea. He probably pictured Kaveh mincing