‘Now you’re back down to Nottingham?’ I say.
‘Yes, yes I am …’ he checks his watch. ‘If I get a clear run I think I’ll be back by tea time.’
‘Oh. What a coincidence, so are we?’ I say to Finlay, who nods. We’d expected to have to do some persuasion, we’d thought we’d be ahead of Mr Hart in this whole Edinburgh encounter game plan, and the reversal has left both of us gawping.
‘Race you!’ Mr Hart says, in jolly fashion. ‘Ah, thank you!’ as Waldorf staff appear.
‘Drive safely!’ I say, and watch uselessly as a white-gloved doorman signals he has his car keys. I look to Finlay for objection or confirmation and he raises, and drops, his shoulders.
‘Well, “Visit Scotland”, Operation Recover Iain Hart was a thunderous success?’ Fin says, as we watch his dad head for the revolving door. ‘I dread to think what would’ve happened without us being here.’
‘Should we try to stop him?’ I say.
Finlay shrugs. ‘He’s got a valid driving licence and the wish to go, and how are we getting his car back anyway? The main aim was to get him home again in one piece and having not signed up to any pyramid schemes. As far as we know, that’s going to be the case.’
The detachment in his tone tells me that the Finlay Hart who told me I could boss my life if I wanted, and showed me old photos on his phone, he’s gone, at least for now. The shutters have come down again. I took Tricia’s side by doubting him, it seems.
‘I guess so.’
There’s a literary word for what I’m feeling: bathos. Anticlimax. This is the end of our pursuit, but it doesn’t feel the way it was meant to. Did I want a struggle, a sense I’d saved Mr Hart from harm? No, thinking it through, of course I didn’t.
‘Can you pack fast, and meet back here in fifteen minutes?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘OK, you go ahead, and I’ll check us out.’
As I get the lift up to my room, I should feel lighter.
Instead my stomach has a stone in it, a rock, like a dragging weight.
I keep hearing that word, over and over again. Almost like a taunt, asking me if I’m going to believe it or not. Asking what I’m going to do with it.
I jab the button for the first floor.
Nothing. I’m going to do nothing with it, because I’m hours away from never having to see Finlay Hart again in my whole life, and this is a puzzle I will never solve. I feel sure Susie took the last pieces to her grave. The lift pings, first floor.
Poison.
The mood on the journey back to England is suitably subdued. We don’t have to meet each other’s eyes, and we have a shared purpose, at least. I fiddle with the radio, or the air con, and Finlay makes the occasional banal remark regards the traffic, and all in all, the satnav probably says as much as either of us.
‘I feel ridiculous at having dragged you all this way for a two-minute chat with my dad,’ Finlay says abruptly, as we pass Leicester, and I know what he also means is: you saw all that dirty washing, and for what?
I recall how much he hated me being in the family home, that week before Susie’s funeral. Trips to nice restaurants were making a virtue of necessity.
‘Honestly, it’s fine,’ I say. ‘I don’t have tons of amazing uses for my holiday allocation from City Nights anyway. Change is as good as a rest, as they say.’
‘I don’t think when they said “change” the meaning was so elastic as to encompass getting a full-bore blast of my dysfunctional family,’ he says, with a grimace.
Oh, he’s still dwelling on the aunt encounter the way I am, too. That has to rate as one of the strangest fifteen minutes of my life.
‘Think you’ll stay at … what’s it called? City Nights?’ Fin says.
‘I will for now, I have a mortgage and a cat to raise. It’s more whether City Nights will stay at me. There aren’t many ways to make a living from typing snappy things these days, are there?’
‘What would you like to do? What’s your dream job? Writing, presumably?’
‘Yeah, you know those Long Reads in the NYT, or like they used to have in Vanity Fair? Thousands of words, really brilliantly written, and the journalist got months to research the subject. You know, like old Hollywood scandals involving the Pickfair Mansion, or some true crime investigation thing. The sort that ends up getting turned into a book. Like the one about the Golden State Killer.’
‘You’ve got a sunny nature, eh?’ Finlay says.
‘Well, there are Cure songs about me,’ I say and then regret it.
Fin looks gratified, but pinkens slightly. I wonder if he wishes he’d not told me that. I wonder what he’s said and done out of spontaneity. I wonder where all that do you ever wish you could drop the act conversation came from.
‘Seriously, yes, I do know what you mean,’ he says. ‘About the writing. That sounds really good. So how do you get into that, then?’
‘I have no idea,’ I say. ‘Plus you’d need a time machine for a golden age of print media and proper budgets.’
‘I have uses for that time machine,’ Fin says. ‘Does it seat two?’
‘I’m not sure I’d trust what you’d do with it,’ I say, and smile, to defuse any insult.
‘I’m not sure I trust what I’d do with it.’
A meaningful silence ensues. I feel I have to break it, especially given this is likely the last time I’ll ever see Susie’s brother.
‘We’d both head back a few months and tell Susie to look the other bloody way though, right?’ I say, bluntly, the pain of this thought making me graceless.
‘Yes,’ Finlay says, throwing me a glance. ‘We both would.’
After another brief silence he says: ‘Thank you.’
‘What for?’
‘Assuming I didn’t want my sister to die.’
‘That’s … obvious, isn’t it?’
‘The relative of mine we met, prior to my father, would beg to differ,’ Fin says, as he adjusts his grip on the steering wheel, and narrows his eyes at the road. He made such a good model in that picture because of his ability to turn into a hardened blank. You never know what he’s thinking.
‘She accused you of neglect but she wouldn’t think you’d want Susie to …?’ It’s such a grotesque idea, I can’t finish the sentence.
‘Yes, the bar’s really that low,’ Fin says, voice thick. ‘I thought this was the basis of our conversation afterwards. The Spanish flu killed lots of people.’ He takes his sightline off the road to give a wry smirk as he says this.
I begin to heat at my words in emotion being repeated back to me, out of context.
‘That was your analogy, I didn’t mean you were literally capable of murder! I’ve never thought for a moment you wished harm to Susie,’ I say, glad this at least is true, if not the ‘Finlay Hart’s a killer’ insinuations, made in coffee shops, only half in jest, and only a few short weeks ago. I was privately likening him to an assassin on the drive up here. ‘That’s mad.’
Fin glances and smiles, sadly. ‘As I say, sorry to expose you to my family,’ he says, diplomatically drawing a line, as he changes lanes.