Page 130 of Playing By Ear

“What about them?”

“They used the curtains to wrap…to wrap him up.”

Perry’s hand stilled on Jamie’s back. “Christ.” He struggled to control his own breath. “Did you phone the police?”

Jamie’s scoff was as forceful as a sneeze. “Grass up my own family? Are you daft?”

“But a man was killed.”

“Even if I wanted to report my dad for murder—which is madness—half the cops are on his payroll, and the other half are useless.”

“So you didn’t tell anyone?”

“Not that day. My sister was at a friend’s house for the night.”

God. Young Jamie had had to lie awake alone with such cruel memories while a murderer slept in the next room.

“When Belinda came home the next morning, Dad sat us down and said Ritchie’d turned against us, that he’d been sent abroad forever. He said if we heard he was dead we weren’t to believe it, that that was just a story to protect Ritchie from other folk in the business.”

“Christ,” Perry said again.

“He gave us ten quid and sent us to Rita’s Sweeties.” Jamie’s voice had taken on a singsong, almost childlike quality. “We sat on a bench next to the loch, watching the swans, and I told her everything.”

If Perry recalled correctly, Jamie’s sister would have been sixteen or seventeen at the time. “What did she say?”

“At first she didn’t believe it.”

“She called you a liar?”

“No, she believed that I believed it, but that I’d misinterpreted what I heard. Dad wouldn’t kill Ritchie, she said. Ritchie was family.”

“But how could she explain what you’d heard?”

“She said maybe the murder was faked. Like, Dad shot the gun so his toadies downstairs would hear it and spread the word. With the silencer it would’ve been heard in the house but not outside. Not that any of the neighbors would dare phone the polis.”

“Hold on. So his toadies would spread the word to who?”

“Anyone who might think Dad was weak.” Jamie lifted his hands, then dropped them into his lap. “Belinda mapped out this whole theory on the bench, talking a mile a minute. But then she stopped and looked at me. I suppose she saw in my eyes how truly I knew Ritchie was dead. Then she started crying. Absolutely greetin’ her face off. Honestly, that scared me more than anything, and she saw that, too. So she stopped.”

Perry waited a few moments before prompting him. “Then what?”

“I remember it like it was an hour ago. She opened her bag and pulled out her makeup. Fixed up her face—mascara, lippy, blusher, everything—while I drank my cocoa and ate my biscuits. When she’d put herself together again, she took my hand and said, ‘I will get us through this.’ And I suppose she did.”

“I’m grateful you had someone to support you.”

Jamie nodded. “She did, even after I telt her I was leaving the family. She never tried to convince me to stay.” He kneaded the softening ice pack in his hands, the gel making a squelching sound. “But things changed, bit by bit, over the last ten years. Now I’m not sure she believes me about Ritchie at all. How could she believe it and still work for my dad?”

“That would take superhuman cognitive dissonance. Have you asked her lately?”

“I never ask a question if I cannae handle the answer. She would try and convince me I was mistaken. But she wasn’t there that day.” He pounded his fist on his knee. “I cannae tell you how I know Ritchie’s dead. I just know it. I know it.” His voice broke. “I know it.”

Perry whispered his name and pulled him close again, to ease the ache in his own chest if nothing else. “How have you lived with this secret for fifteen years? How has it not driven you mad?”

Jamie shrugged in his arms. “Once I got away and made a life for myself, everything with my dad felt like a bad dream.”

“But now you’re back, and you feel you’ve no choice but to be there.”

Jamie went still. “Would you make me choose?”