Chapter Twenty-one
Blue mohair wool, loose
Disclosure, noun. The action or fact of revealing new
or secret information; action of making something
openly known; an instance of this.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what happened after I left the hospital – or rather, not about what happened, but about how to report what happened. I had thought all along that I might miss it out of the narrative. The books Ailsa reads, her TV shows, they’re so often about ‘secrets’, as if secrets are something dangerous and invasive, like a deadly gas. Personally, I’ve always been of the belief that secrets are the natural state of affairs, simply an incident or action one chooses not to tell anyone else. Surely that is a basic human right? We all have our skeletons. So it is painful to tell this, though as I reach this point in the story, I realise anything that contributed to Ailsa’s mental state, so close to the murder, is relevant.
It was a surprise to learn it was raining in the outside world. Proper August monsoon rain. A warm, blustery wind threw the drops sideways, like a dog romping with a much smaller dog – playful, but threatening; that kind of wind, that kind of rain.
I half expected to see Ailsa waiting for me. Stupid, really. She had no idea what time I was leaving. Grateful for my cardigan, I half ran, half lolloped to the bus stop, just as the bus was drawing in. The T-shirt of the boy in front of me in the queue was soaked, clinging to his shoulder blades. Inside the bus it was warm and humid, all summer dresses and furled-up umbrellas, the floor muddy and slippery. A woman at the next stop got on carrying a paper bag full of oranges, but the paper was so wet it disintegrated and oranges spilt onto the floor. I helped her pick them up and then sat on the back seat, watching the rain-streaked backstreets flicker by, clutching my bag and a package of medicine on my lap. I’d been shown what to do with the inhaler; I’d been given iron to take for anaemia; I’d make a follow-up appointment with my GP. All would be well and all manner of things . . . And yet again I was filled with unnamed foreboding. Its focus was the dog, and probably at the back of my mind was delayed shock and a perfectly natural anxiety about my own health. But it was something else – call it instinct, or its plainer cousin, suspicion. I began to fiddle with the cardigan. It was loosely knitted in blue mohair. I’d found it on the station steps several months previously and it had become something of a favourite. But the mohair had become very bobbly and I pulled at the patches where the loose threads had bunched – which was easier to do because it was damp – until I had quite a sizeable ball in my hand.
When we drew close to my stop, I collected my things and stood up, and waited by the door until we reached it. As the door slid open, I glanced back at where I’d been sitting, and on the floor I saw a small patch of blue, the size of a robin’s egg – and it took me a moment to realise it was the wool I’d gathered. I must have dropped it as I stood up. Not that it mattered, of course; it was nothing. I stepped out onto the pavement but as I walked along the last stretch of road, the sense of dread I’d experienced was compounded. It sounds ridiculous, but I felt a pang of regret for the wool, as if I’d separated it from a parent, as if I’d left something precious behind.
The gate to my front garden was wide open. A plastic cup from McDonald’s had blown onto the path. A Tesco bag lay sodden, and I picked it up. In the porch the blue toolbox sat, innards exposed, lid cast aside. I saw immediately that both keys, the Yale and the Chubb, were missing. I put my own key in the lock, braced to exert the usual pressure, to force it open against whatever might impede its path. But it swung back easily.
In the hall, I expected to walk into post, junk mail, free magazines, bags of items, recent findings, including the stool and kettle, but a space had been cleared along the middle of the floor, and in it were two footprints, the outline pale brown against the dark wooden boards. No welcoming click of Maudie’s claws. Her absence set up a dull tolling of disquiet. I closed the front door and laid down the wet plastic bag on top of the small pile that had collected there. It was warmer inside than out, the house full of trapped air, and it smelt different. The meaty sweetness that had begun to turn my stomach had something sharper in it, too: basil or citronella. I took a step and felt the walls rustle, brace in alarm, or warning. A flurry of rain rattled against the sitting-room window. The nozzle of one of the vacuum cleaners resting next to a mirror slid sideways.
I should charge my phone. Ring Ailsa. Or I could knock next door. I was thinking all this, but I didn’t do any of those things. I took another step towards the staircase. I could tell, couldn’t I? I could sense her presence. The anticipation, the anxiety, the conviction I’d held all morning had reached its apotheosis. I knew her so well. How could I have ever thought she wouldn’t?
I looked up to the first floor. I craned my head, trying to see round the bend of the bannisters but I could only see the bathroom door and it was closed. And then I heard a sound; not an accidental sound – not an object slipping or sliding, or blown, not a rattle. This sound was purposeful, and human: the deliberate clunk of a cupboard being closed.
My chest tightened; I found it harder to fill my lungs, and I used the bannister rail to help myself up, the dirty wood rough beneath my palms. The row of books on the top stair had been disturbed, one of the A–Zs I’d found in Oxfam kicked sideways, lying open at a map of Southall, and I could see as I approached that the blanket that ran along the bottom of Faith’s door had been rolled aside. The door was ajar, revealing a triangle of artificial light – surprising, I thought, even in my agitation, that the bulb still worked. Small, studied sounds came from in there: a shuffle, a rustle, a click.
I stood and waited. The ferns on the landing wallpaper were hands gesticulating, faces gurning in warning.
From my own bedroom on the next half-landing came the sound of water, the soft thud as each drop landed on the newspaper under the bucket.
I was about to write that my heart was in my mouth, but that is such a silly phrase. It would mean blood and liquid, pulsing life. My mouth was arid, empty, completely dry. I tried to swallow and I couldn’t. My throat had seized up. The tightness was back in my chest; my hands gripped either side of my ribcage. I’d left the bag with the inhaler by the front door. I thought about going down to get it, but I knew if I did, I might leave the house, and I might never come back.
I put my hand against the panel and pushed.
It had been such a long time since I’d been in that room. It smelt of wet wood and apples and sweat and old perfume. The terrible smell, the one that got into your nostrils and set up home there, had long gone, though the Glade air fresheners were still strategically placed. Dust lay on every surface, as thick as underlay across the top of the chest of drawers, the desk, the surface of the pictures. Water had crept in through the broken window; seeped into the walls, peeling the wallpaper back, brown spreading to black below the cornice. One of the curtains had fallen away, the other hung in disintegrated loops from its hooks. Along the mantelpiece were nubs of an eerie yellow mould structure, which were the ends of the scented candles I’d lit. There were a lot of dead flies, too, but I didn’t like to look at those.
A long thin mirror leant against the wall by the bed. It was an early skip find: it had plaster stuck to the back of it in swirly patterns. I used to sit on the floor next to it, watching Faith do her hair. I could see my reflection in it now; so pale it was as if death was coming into the room. Except death was already in the room.
She was sitting on the single bed, between me and the mirror, with her back to me. At first, I thought she didn’t know I was there, but she spoke without turning round. ‘Verity,’ she said. She made my name sound like a groan.
I didn’t want to look at what was on the bed next to her. I crossed my arms over my chest. I tried to make space in my airways, to clear my throat.
She twisted her head then. Her face was in the grip of what looked like a tremor. The lines above her eyebrows were pulled tight. Sh
e seemed to be fighting against something internal.
‘What is this?’ she said.
Thinking back, it shocks me that I didn’t ask her the same question. Because she was the one who had let herself back into my house, who had watched and taken the key from its hiding place; she was the one who was trespassing. She was the one who had entered this, my most private place.
I took a step towards her. Her neck was twisted to face me, but her body was still rigidly turned away. I could see the sinews in her neck. Both hands were on the sides of the crate; knuckles white, clinging on. She was wearing a dark-coloured top, black leggings; I thought of her as a big black crow then, standing guard, a barrier, and I fought the urge to push her out of the way, to knock her sideways and gather up the contents of the crate, and hold it in my arms.
I still couldn’t speak. My face felt as if it were swelling, my features like pinpricks, slashes, rough marks drawn on by a child. A flood, huge and unmanageable, unassailable, was waiting to gush through me. I tried to concentrate on her face, not on what was on the bed next to her. I managed to force my jaw to unhinge. My mouth was open, and a sound came out that I didn’t recognise as belonging to me; a long drawn-out cry between a groan and a whimper. It didn’t sound human, except I knew that it came from the most human part of me.
The shoebox. The scraps of pale-pink eiderdown, so soft, now rotted, darker. The white pillowcase I had used: grey. The bones.
‘Verity?’ she said again. It was still a question, more insistent than before.
I sank to the floor, falling forwards, my head in my hands. I dug my nails into my forehead. My hands were like claws. I wanted my forehead to bleed.
‘Is it an animal?’ she said.
Is it an animal? She didn’t know.
‘Is this a body?’
Tiny matchstick bones, tendons, muscles, the palest dark sheen of skin.
‘Verity. What is this in the box?’
The head large, the limbs fragile. Veins. Blood: the mass and mess of it.
‘Verity.’
I still didn’t speak. I couldn’t. I had begun to cry. I really didn’t want to. My head bowed, my body convulsed. I was gasping for breath between sobs. She touched my shoulder as I did so, and I wished that she wouldn’t, that she would take her hand away.
I began to intone the word.
‘I can’t hear what you’re saying.’
When I raised my head, she said, ‘You’re going to have to stop crying. I can’t understand what you’re saying.’
The sobs had taken on a terrible rhythm, and even though I had forced them under control, they continued to rise.
I’d never said it out loud before, the word so round and full, so real. And my stomach clenched as if trying to draw him back. I wished I could bring the word back too, as soon as I had said it, because it wasn’t right. I didn’t deserve it.
‘A baby.’
She stood up then; I sensed her tower over me. She knocked my thigh with the edge of her shoe as she passed. A noise at the back of her throat – disgust and horror, maybe trying to say something and failing – and then her steps across the floor, a clatter, almost a tumble down the stairs, through the hall and finally the slam of the front door.
I don’t know how long I sat there with my forehead pressed into my knees; minutes, an hour? If I could have turned myself to stone I would have; anything but standing, picking up a life. All this time reality, and the exposure of it, had been waiting and I’d known it and yet I’d carried on. I had got up and gone out, and worked, and inhabited days and met people with whom I felt I could be friends, and at night I had slept. I didn’t know how I could have done any of that. I was monstrous.
Eventually, I pushed my head off my knees and sat for a bit with my eyes closed. And then for a while I sat with my eyes open. And then, gradually, I began to wrap the bones back up in the pillowcase and laid it again in the shoebox, and I gathered the bits of the dried flowers that hadn’t turned to dust and I scattered them on top. I put the lid back on the shoebox and I carried it through to my room and pushed it under my bed, way at the back against the wall. I wasn’t hiding it this time; I just didn’t want the police grabbing it straight away. I wanted them to take care. I wanted to know, when they did come, that I’d have a little more time, a few more minutes, to make sure of that.
The kitchen table was inaccessible again at that point so I sat at my desk in the front room. I didn’t know how long it would be, whether she would ring 999 or 101, whether they’d come in a squad car or on foot.
When – how long later? An hour? Two? Time had extended, stretched, or suspended, perhaps I was beyond time – I heard the front door open, I was just sitting there, with my hands on my lap, crossed as if already in handcuffs, calm now, waiting.
She stood in the doorway to the sitting room. I could see the back of her head in the mirror behind. The space behind her expanded and hung, empty. The sounds in the street were normal, cars and vans, a single thundering lorry. I got to my feet.
She stared at me, calmly. ‘I’ve been for a walk. Tom’s at work or I’d have . . . I couldn’t stay. You do understand. I had to get some air. I’m not sure what has happened here, or what I should do about it, but as I was walking, Verity, I thought I should perhaps first give you a chance to explain. I’m not sure I want you to, but we are . . . we’ve been friends. I’ve become fond of you and you’ve done so much for Max and I owe it to you to listen at least.’
I nodded, hands still clasped. ‘Yes. Yes. I will explain. I can.’
‘So please could you tell me what that is up there? What’s happened?’
I stood up then. ‘Do you want to sit down?’ I began to move the books and the piles of newspapers, the bags of clothes from the sofa.
‘I’m fine here,’ she said. ‘I’m OK standing.’
‘OK. Right. Yes.’
She was twisting her fingers, her eyes skittering about the room. The house was pressing in on her. ‘So there’s a baby there. A dead baby. Verity. Whose baby is it. Was it?’ Her face scrunched; she was beginning to lose control. ‘Was it Faith’s?’
‘No.’
‘Whose, then?’
It came out, piercingly, like a cry. ‘Mine.’
‘Yours?’
‘Yes.’ I clamped my hands to my mouth.
‘You killed your baby?’
‘No. No.’ I looked into her face, saw her expression: the terrible doubt, disbelief, but also a kind of savage, naked distress; and I realised what she thought, and it was so horrific I forced my eyes away. But I couldn’t deny it. It was the truth, too; life and death, the line between them so fine.
I began to speak, hoping she would hear, that she would follow, that she would make sense of the hideous, dark, painful fragments in the wrong order, too linear, but it was the only way I could bring myself to say it. I told her about that night with Adrian Curtis, we’d slept with each other, the beast with two backs, when you know you know, and how I’d ignored him at work the following day and didn’t answer the phone when he rang, and how I’d prayed that would be the end of it, and it seemed perhaps it was, and I’d put it out of my mind, thought nothing of consequences, and cause and effect, and then a few months later, I’d been changing Mother’s dressings when I’d felt a terrible pain.
Her frown deepened. She thought it was a digression, a bid for sympathy. ‘A pain?’
I kept going, despite the revulsion in her face: how the pain had stretched up and across my abdomen, and how it came out of nowhere and I’d believed it to be indigestion, not the curse, as my mother called it, because I was forty-four and I’d believed that to be over. I didn’t tell her how frightening it was when it began to happen, when I realised what it was, sitting on the toilet on my own in the bathroom, because it didn’t matter what I felt. Someone told me once you should grip the soft bit of flesh between your thumb and forefinger to keep an emotion under control and I did that when I was telling Ailsa.
The
re were pauses and long silences.
And at the end, when there seemed to be nothing else to say, I said: ‘He didn’t have a chance because he only had me and he was so small. I tried to keep him alive. I wrapped him in a towel and I pressed his chest and I held him, but he never even made a sound. I couldn’t see a breath. His skin was translucent – you could see the light through it, but it got darker, like blood, like rust, as I held him and colder, and then he got even colder, even though I’d done everything I thought – I’d used nail scissors and tied the cord, and I wrapped him next to my skin, and tried to keep him warm. His eyes were tight. He was no bigger than . . .’ I held up my hand, though I still gripped that soft bit of skin between my fingers. ‘I tried to keep him warm,’ I said again.
I looked across at her. She had sat down at the far end of the sofa. ‘Oh, Verity,’ she said. Her mouth had slackened, her shoulders slumped. ‘Oh, Verity,’ she said again. ‘You had a baby. You lost a baby.’
Lost. Lost. It’s a verb I held on to.
‘I knew Mother would want her bath so I cleaned the floor. I used toilet roll and all the towels that were in there to scrub up the blood, and I held him to my chest the whole time. I didn’t want to put him down. He was so light there was almost nothing to him. I was crying and bleeding and I was trying to keep quiet. And when I heard her moving downstairs, I took him into my room, and swaddled him in a pillowcase and laid him on the bed while I found a clean towel for her. I put a wash on then, while she was in the bath. And I cooked supper because she was expecting it, and later I put him in a shoebox and put that in the plastic crate. I’d filled it with soft things, and teddy bears.’
‘Oh, Verity.’ She had moved while I was talking and was sitting on the sofa in front of me now. ‘How old was the baby? How many weeks pregnant were you?’
I knew what she was asking. ‘Twenty-three weeks,’ I said. ‘We only did it the once. It was easy to calculate.’
I saw the relief in her face then. ‘It wasn’t your fault. He was too little. He couldn’t have survived. Oh, Verity. You didn’t tell anyone? You did it all on your own?’ Her eyes were wide and full. ‘You should have rung for an ambulance. You wouldn’t have been in trouble. They’d have given you counselling. And you’d have had support. They’d have, you know . . .’ She was squeezing her hands. ‘. . . taken the body.’
Finders, Keepers: The mesmerising new thriller from the author of LIE WITH ME Page 23