Chapter 50

Cullen

Cullen shuts the front door and reaches for the wall to steady himself. He takes a deep breath before stumbling into the living room and going over to the drinks cupboard, then decides that now would be a good time for that bottle of Macallan after all. The still deep of the cellar is as comforting to him as death. Finding the bottle, he comes back up into the living room and takes a long swig, waiting for the burn to do its job. He thinks about calling Maddy Ince. A week or two ago he would have. Now, he’s not so sure. Maddy has always been about Maddy.

He’s standing in the narrow hallway again now, the whisky bottle clasped in his hand, feeling the world closing in on him. He can’t think straight. His head is screaming. Fleeing might be an admission of guilt. Staying might risk arrest. What to do? Has he ever felt this alone? He is on a frozen sea in a tiny boat. He takes a swig and lets the alcohol burn some sense back into his brain.

The only person left in his world is Amanda. The moment this thought comes to him he sees the sense of it. Right now, like a dying soldier slung over barbed wire, he needs a mother, any mother, even one as disastrous as Amanda. But what does he want from her? Advice? Love? Courage? Maybe all of those things. But mostly hope, he thinks. I need hope to be able to carry on right now. Will he get it? Who knows, but there’s no one left to ask. He puts down the bottle of whisky, thinks better of it and picks it up again, swipes his keys from the hallway table and goes to his car. A fifteen-minute drive brings him to Wychall’s. He parks, inexactly, in the visitors’ area and walks across the threshold into the blanketing heat of the nursing home. In the office off the hallway, Maura gives him a cheery wave. He proceeds through the living room, past the Christmas cactus and the hand sanitiser dispenser, through the double doors into his mother’s cucumber-green corridor.

He finds Amanda in bed with what she claims is a terrible headache, watching a rerun of a baking show on TV. He pulls up a chair beside her and pretends to be engrossed for a few moments.

‘Mother, I wonder if you’d like a whisky? It might help clear that headache.’ He feels mildly tipsy but not drunk enough to be able to summon the courage to tell her what is going on. ‘I bought a bottle of Macallan.’

Her head spins around ninety degrees and creases her brow into an anxious inverted V.

‘I thought you’d been drinking. I can smell it,’ she says. ‘I suppose you realise it’s not yet dinner time?’

He slips the bottle from under his jacket.