Read Online Rocking Horse Road by Carl Nixon - Free Book Online

wryly confess to relieving
our tension up to twice, or even three times a day back
then. It is a stamina we wish we had now. We had also
known our share of violence, most of it on the rugby
field, but nearly all of us had been in a fight or two off
the field as well. Roy Moynahan once took a softball
bat to the head of a guy he thought was picking on
Emma, his younger sister. It was just good luck he
didn't kill the guy.
    So really it was not impossible for us to conjure
up an image of some man, with feelings similar to
those we had experienced ourselves, going out of his
way to see Lucy in the dairy. Maybe he followed her
home from school a couple of times. Surely not much
harm in that. It also wasn't so hard for us to imagine
those same feelings eventually swamping a man and
driving him to terrible deeds. It's not that we could
imagine ourselves raping or killing a woman. The
action was fundamentally abhorrent. But let's just say,
in the name of truth, that at fifteen we could stand at
the beginning of the path that Lucy's murderer must
surely have walked down. We could loiter at the start
of that shadowy way and see as far as the first bend
among the trees. We had an idea what it would feel
like to walk down that path ourselves for at least a
while.
    We looked at the faces of the men and older
boys we saw on the street and on the beach. No
one was innocent in our imaginations. Was it him?
we wondered. Or him? Him? Or him? But because
we didn't have any plausible alternative Mr Asher
remained our prime suspect. Jase Harbidge had done
some research and could trot out the names of fathers
(and even a few mothers) who had murdered their
kids in all sorts of gruesome ways. Admittedly the
cases, like our favourite TV shows, were mostly from
the States, but that wasn't to say it hadn't happened
closer to home. Sitting around our dinner tables in the
evenings with our families, we examined the faces of
our own fathers and mothers in a new and disturbing
light.
    Mr Asher was the only person we knew on whose
behaviour we could pin the tag 'suspicious'. We
speculated endlessly about what it was that Matt had
seen him throwing into the channel in the middle of
the night. Possibly some object or piece of clothing
that would incriminate him in Lucy's murder? That's
the direction our talk swung around to. Mr Asher's
habitual silence now seemed to us to be a form of
camouflage, allowing him to move unnoticed and
unsuspected.
    When the idea first surfaced Al Penny had tried
to argue. 'But what about the sex? Lucy was raped,
right? Fathers don't do that to their daughters.'
    It was another hot afternoon and we were
meeting in the Turners' garage with its bench-press
and wonky pool table. Jase Harbidge was lining up
his shot. He paused and looked across the green felt
at Al and raised his eyebrows in a way that showed
that he couldn't believe what he was hearing. 'Wanna
bet?' was all he said. And then he took his shot. The
weights hovered in the air and the balls bounced off
the cushion and eventually came to rest while we all
thought about the unthinkable.
    We received our School Certificate results in the mail
on the Monday of the third week of 1981. Our marks
were average, which is exactly what we had expected.
We scraped through into sixth form and avoided
the shame of having to repeat the fifth form. Only
Al Penny's marks were outstanding. They were so
good that he became uncharacteristically cagey when
asked how he had done and would not show anyone
the official form. On the same day the Asher's dairy
opened again. We felt that opening up for business
was somehow disloyal to Lucy's memory, but as Roy
Moynahan, who was always the pragmatist of the
group, said, 'The Ashers have gotta make a living,
don't they? Just like everyone else.'
    But by then it wasn't much of a living. Business was
noticeably slow. People suddenly seemed to prefer to
go the extra distance to the dairy up on Bridge Street.
It had recently changed hands and smelt of