The Casual Vacancy

know how to keep our mouths shut by now?’
    It was like trying to read a wild animal. He could see the muscles working in his father’s jaw, but he could tell that Simon was considering Andrew’s words.
    ‘When was that put on there?’ he roared at Ruth. ‘Look at it! What’s the date on it?’
    Still sobbing, she peered at the screen, needing to approach the tip of her nose within two inches of it, now that her glasses were broken.
    ‘The fifteenth,’ she whispered.
    ‘Fifteenth … Sunday,’ said Simon. ‘Sunday, wasn’t it?’
    Neither Andrew nor Ruth put him right. Andrew could not believe his luck; nor did he believe it would hold.
    ‘Sunday,’ said Simon, ‘so anyone could’ve – my fucking
toe
,’ heyelled, as he pulled himself up and limped exaggeratedly towards Ruth. ‘Get out of my way!’
    She hastened out of the chair and watched him read the paragraph through again. He kept snorting like an animal to clear his airways. Andrew thought that he might be able to garrotte his father as he sat there, if only there was a wire to hand.
    ‘Someone’s got all this from work,’ said Simon, as if he had just reached this conclusion, and had not heard his wife or son urging the hypothesis on him. He placed his hands on the keyboard and turned to Andrew. ‘How do I get rid of it?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘You do fucking computing! How do I get this off here?’
    ‘You can’t get – you can’t,’ said Andrew. ‘You’d need to be the administrator.’
    ‘Make yourself the administrator, then,’ said Simon, jumping up and pointing Andrew into the swivel chair.
    ‘I can’t make myself the administrator,’ said Andrew. He was afraid that Simon was working himself up into a second bout of violence. ‘You need to input the right user name and passwords.’
    ‘You’re a real fucking waste of space, aren’t you?’
    Simon shoved Andrew in the middle of his sternum as he limped past, knocking him back into the mantelpiece.
    ‘Pass me the phone!’ Simon shouted at his wife, as he sat back down in the armchair.
    Ruth took the telephone and carried it the few feet to Simon. He ripped it out of her hands and punched in a number.
    Andrew and Ruth waited in silence as Simon called, first Jim, and then Tommy, the men with whom he had completed the after-hours jobs at the printworks. Simon’s fury, his suspicion of his own accomplices, was funnelled down the telephone in curt short sentences full of swearwords.
    Paul had not returned. Perhaps he was still trying to staunch his bleeding nose, but more likely he was too scared. Andrew thought his brother unwise. It was safest to leave only after Simon had given you permission.
    His calls completed, Simon held out the telephone to Ruthwithout speaking; she took it and hurried it back into its stand.
    Simon sat thinking while his fractured toe pulsated, sweating in the heat of the wood-burner, awash with impotent fury. The beating to which he had subjected his wife and son was nothing, he did not give them a thought; a terrible thing had just happened to him, and naturally his rage had exploded on those nearest him; that was how life worked. In any case, Ruth, the silly bitch, had admitted to telling Shirley …
    Simon was building his own chain of evidence, as he thought things must have happened. Some fucker (and he suspected that gum-chewing forklift driver, whose expression, as Simon had sped away from him in the Fields, had been outraged) talking about him to the Mollisons (somehow, illogically, Ruth’s admission that she had mentioned the computer to Shirley made this seem more likely), and they (the Mollisons, the establishment, the smooth and the snide, guarding their access to power) had put up this message on their website (Shirley, the old cow, managed the site, which set the seal on the theory).
    ‘It’s your fucking friend,’ Simon told his wet-faced, trembling-lipped wife. ‘It’s your fucking Shirley. She’s done this. She’s got some dirt on me to get me off her son’s case. That’s who it is.’
    ‘But Si—’
    Shut up, shut up, you silly cow
, thought Andrew.
    ‘Still on her side, are you?’ roared Simon, making to stand again.
    ‘No!’ squealed Ruth, and he sank back into the chair, glad to keep the weight off his pounding foot.
    The Harcourt-Walsh management would not be happy about those after-hours jobs, Simon thought. He wouldn’t put it past the bloody police to come nosing around the computer. A desire for