“I won,” he said.
“I guess you did.”
“How was the ice?”
“A bit bouncy,” I said.
His gaze fell on me gently, and he took a quick step forward, and then stopped to look over my shoulder. I turned and saw the others coming up the path, Marcus at the front and Rob bringing up the rear.
“He got there first?” Priss asked. I nodded.
“You nearly died out there on the ice and he still got there first?” Rob said. “Oh that’s just priceless.”
“Win some, lose some,” I said.
“Spoken like a loser.”
But I was glad of his prattle, and for the fuss Zack and Priss and Alice made of David. It made less of Marcus’s silence. Em and Peter were not saying anything either.
“You both worked it out at the same time,” Alice said. Her eyes flicked between us suspiciously.
“No, he was first.”
“So how did you—”
“I kind of just knew. It was a good hiding place,” I said.
“It was,” Em said, but the look she gave me was strange. “But it’s not—”
There was another crack, loud enough to cut her off. We all turned to look at the lake. It was snowing more heavily. The scene was beginning to look like a black-and-white TV with bad reception. Between the flying flakes, it was possible to see that out in the middle a large sheet of ice had broken into pieces, one was sinking beneath the water, and a black hole was visible, gaping wide, where I had stood only minutes before.
“You know, Andy, you are completely fucking insane. How do you feel when you look at that? You could have died,” Rob said.
Priss, Zack, and Alice were looking at me curiously. Perhaps they thought I was capable of anything.
“Longing,” Marcus said. “She feels longing.”
* * *
In the boot room, I stripped off my outer layers and my wet socks. My ankle wasn’t entirely good, but I couldn’t really feel it. In the library, Zack built an enormous fire and while the others stood turning themselves before it, I took up a place in an armchair, jamming my bare feet beneath me. Away from the fire, the house was cold, but I was unbothered by it. My eyelids felt heavy and when I closed them for long moments, I found that I was still out on the ice, its frosted surface passing beneath my feet like a treadmill. Each time I felt the ice crack, I opened my eyes to see everything going on around me as before.
At one point a mug of coffee was thrust into my hand and then a ham sandwich.
I closed my eyes. The ice cracked. This time would I fall?
Peter and Marcus were at the window, looking out and discussing whether we should head back. “Must be four inches,” Marcus said. “We should go.”
“Up Burlip Hill?” Peter’s voice was doubtful.
“No one’s going anywhere. You have to stay. Besides there’s a mad man out there. It’s far too dangerous to set foot outside.” Rob had come to stand beside them. “Yes, a mad man, a slobbering, ax-wielding, staggering cliché of homicidal mania, with a suitcase full of wrath and an encyclopedic knowledge of sex crimes.”
“Are you sure?” Marcus asked.
“Oh, quite sure,” Rob said, clapping him on the back. “He’s practically family.”
So we stayed, drinking steadily, first whiskey in the coffees, and then wine. Priss bustled in and out with the glasses and later there were canapés. “I got them from Marks,” she said. “You just throw them in. What will you do with your prize, David?”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought about it.” David was by the fire and I saw him take the necklace from his pocket and hold it idly in one hand.
“It’s only glass, isn’t it, Em?”
“And if the necklace was real,” she said, “what would we all do then?”
“What would that even mean? For it to be real?” I asked.
“It would mean you could exchange it for lots and lots of money,” Alice said.
“Perhaps you should have them, Alice.” And David held them out to her, dangling between finger and thumb in the firelight. I saw Priss smile innocently at the gesture.
“I don’t take fake.” Alice swung round and plopped down in a chair pouting, but David made no move toward her. I watched as he lay the necklace down on the mantelpiece. He did it deliberately; the necklace was unclasped and he laid it down in a line, adjusting it till it was quite straight.
The evening was a little subdued. Perhaps they were tired. Were they happy? Bored? I can hardly place my friends in the room, nor our hosts, nor Priss or Zack. In my memory, I can barely make them out. My attention was elsewhere.
Again, I was the first to go up. The bed was stone cold. I lay on top of it in my clothes, listening and waiting. The curtains were open and when I looked out it was upon a dream world, the velvet night, the nacreous glow of the moon. Beyond the pane, flakes of snow were rising on an updraft so that it gave me the peculiar feeling that time was running backward.
As I told the police, it was about one a.m. when I went back down. You forget how it is to move quietly, to creep. I was out of practice and my ankle was still throbbing from earlier. The whole house seemed to creak at my footfall. The dark was total, and once I had let go the bannister, I had to walk like the cartoon image of a sleepwalker, my arms stretched out before me. The door to the library was open and since there were embers still smoldering in the hearth, there was the merest murky, reddish glow by which I found my way to the fireplace. The necklace was there, on the mantelpiece where he had left it. My hand closed over it and a piece of the darkness detached itself, stepped forward. A hand closed over mine.
It was David, of course. We stood like that for a little bit. At least I can say that on this occasion he touched me first. His hand over mine, mine clutching the necklace. But after that first touch, I have no defense. My mind went dead, like a phone line had been unplugged. Something else was taking over. He smelled the same, and his skin was warm and I could feel under my fingertips the stubble coming through. David put an arm around me and drew me in, chest to chest, cheek to cheek. A spreading shudder. Still holding the diamonds, I put my arms around his neck and kissed him. It had always been gentle between us, but it was not so gentle now. There wasn’t any of me left that didn’t want him. Still, I didn’t let the necklace loose from my fist, not through any of it, not until the very end when I had to let it go, to press down both of my hands on the small of his back, such was the moment.
And, while it may sound like a stretch, for a time, that night with David in the library, I succeeded in finding what I had looked for that afternoon, that dark place on the other side of the ice. The great fall with no landing.
* * *
Peter was playing the piano. I could hear him from upstairs. A little jagged melody picked out with one hand, over and over, throbbing like a toothache.
There was a pot of coffee and some bacon sarnies on the side. I couldn’t see Em or Marcus, but the others were there. David didn’t look up as I came in.
“Morning, Andy,” Rob said. He looked cheerful, buoyant, like he’d won the pools. No one else was smiling.
“Where’s Em and Marcus?”
“Not sure. I suppose we should wait for them though, since it’s traditional.”
“Traditional for what? You’ve lost me, Rob,” I said.
“I mean the gathering of the suspects before the great detective—Poirot, Marple, in this case me—reveals the guilty party, or parties.”
“Someone steal the diamonds again?” They weren’t on the mantelpiece. I threw a quick glance at the rug in front of the fire.
“No, we’ve got a new mystery. I’m calling it the bodies in the library.”
With that, I knew what he was getting at and experienced a wave of horror, so like desire when you come to think of it, in the way it gripped you, made you feel like your organs were melting.
I poured out a coffee, the pot chattering against the rim of the cup. “Pete, where are Em and Marc
us? We should get going.”
“Marcus went to look for her.” Peter was still picking out the little tune.
“Can you stop that? It’s driving me nuts.” His hands froze and then he set them down gently in his lap.
“Thing is, Andy,” Rob went on, “yours truly passed out last night on the couch in the library. Not that you’d have known that, because you went up so early. Dave too, when I think about it. Anyway, so there was I passed out on the couch and then about one, maybe two, I wake up. It’s pitch-black so I can’t see anything, but I’m hearing these noises. Can you guess what it was? No? Don’t want to take a guess, a wild stab in the dark?”
I heard the front door slam.
“Why don’t you shut your fucking mouth?”
“Rob, what are you talking about?” Alice had gotten to her feet.
For a moment, the impish mask slipped and Rob looked almost sad. “Sorry, sis,” he said. “But better you find out now than later. Better you know him for what he is.”
David still didn’t say anything. His eyes followed Rob. He didn’t even look particularly surprised.
Turning back to me, Rob went on. “It was a couple, Andy. Two people. Fucking. At it. Hammer and tongs. On my parents’ best Persian rug. Sixteen bedrooms to choose from—”
Marcus came in. He had his boots on and they were caked in snow.
“Shut up, Rob. Just shut up!” And I made a move toward him like I was going to cover his mouth with my hands and stop the words from coming out.
“Just in time, Marcus. We’re reaching the denouement! I’m about to reveal … where’s Em? She should be here for this too really. I’m just about to tell you how I caught Andy and David fucking last night.”
“Em’s outside.” There was something wrong with Marcus’s face. He didn’t look right, or sound right for that matter. “Em’s out there.” He looked at each of us in appeal. “She’s out in the snow. I’m pretty certain—” and his face collapsed, collapsed unbearably. “I think Em’s dead.”
* * *
She was not, as Mortimer had been, in the rose garden. She was at the end of the drive, near but not quite at the road. Later the police would ask how many sets of footprints there had been in the snow. Were there two? Or three? Or more even? I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell them. My gaze was fixed on the dark heap in the snow up by the gate. At some point, I started running. I got there first, but the others were there soon after, all apart from Marcus and Peter. I don’t think Marcus ran at all. He was clutching Peter’s arm and coming up over the snow like an old man afraid of falling and breaking every bone he had.
Em was lying on her back. Her coat was open. She had on her nightie—a Patti Smith T-shirt I knew she wore in bed—and her jeans and boots. I took up her hand, but there was no life in it.
“That’s my coat,” I said. “Why’s she got my coat on?”
“I’m not a doctor,” Zack was saying. His voice had a rising intonation as though one of us was insisting he was. “I’m not a doctor but I think she’s dead.”
But how could she be dead?
I heard myself saying her name, over and over. I heard myself crying. Not normal crying, something much worse. It was like coming apart.
Priss had called an ambulance straightaway, but it took a long time to come. There had been an accident on the M4 out by Junction 16 and all across the region, people were slipping over on pavements and breaking arms, elbows, collarbones, losing control of their cars and ending up beached on roundabouts or in ditches. When it finally swung up the drive in the wake of a police car, it felt like an insult. They confirmed what we knew. No signs of life.
“Aren’t you going to do anything? Shock her or something? I mean it can’t hurt, can it? Do something! Do something!” Marcus’s face was liverish. He looked big and angry and I could see the police sizing him up. Peter moved to stand between him and the medics.
On TV, people would often seem dead for minutes—a week even, between episodes—only to revive at the last possible moment.
“She’s not even hurt,” I said. And it was true. Em had no injuries that I could see. Only when they moved her, there was a pink patch, not big, no pool of blood or anything, on one of the stone markers that bordered the drive.
“You need to all go inside now with my colleague.” It was one of the police, a female officer. Another car was arriving, unmarked, with two men inside. Soon, they’d be joined by a photographer and the forensics officers. She turned to me. “Listen, love, you’ve only got your socks on. You’ll catch your death.”
But it was Em who had caught her death, caught the death I had called up, the one I had summoned from beneath the ice, and there was no bringing her back from it.
* * *
We were interviewed. First at the house, again at the station. I told the police how I knew Em and for how long, how we’d come to be there, and what we had been doing and how I knew all the others. They wanted to know about the game and when I had last seen Em, and what time I’d gone to bed and where and with whom.
“You say it was about ten-thirty p.m.?”
“Maybe nearer eleven, but I was up in the night. I came downstairs.”
“Time?”
“About one.”
“And did you see Emma?”
“No.”
“Why did you come downstairs?”
“I wanted the diamonds, the one we used for the game.”
“The necklace David Graves had won.”
“He had left them on the mantelpiece, but I wanted them.”
“And did you see anyone?”
“I saw David.”
“And how long were you downstairs.”
“Perhaps an hour…”
I told them. It was all going to come out anyway.
“And you’re in a relationship with Marcus Fisher?”
“Yes.”
“And what about Emma?”
“What about her?”
“Was she in a relationship with anyone?”
“No.”
“She had not fought with anyone? She wasn’t angry with anyone as far as you knew? There wasn’t a lover’s quarrel?”
“No,” I said. “Em wasn’t in love with anyone.”
A week or so later, I was called back. It was the same two detectives. They were interested in the footprints. It was like a puzzle, I could see that. They had photographs of the drive, color shots and some black and whites.
“Bit arty,” I said. I felt ill, like a lifetime of eating rotten things had caught up with me. There was one of the house, a black and white. The door was open. It looked like a maw. Black door and windows and everything bleached and unutterably sinister, like a lunatic park and all the love I’d ever felt for it was a knife twisting in my heart.
Some clever soul had painted each set of footprints a different color. Detectives Tailor and Vincent showed me various photos. There was one of the area around Em’s body. You could just see Em’s boot in the top corner. The snow was all mushed up from where we had kneeled over her. There were lots of pictures of the footprints in the snow leading to and from the house. One of the detectives, Vincent, seemed to think there was an extra set. Em had gone out, but not come back. Marcus has gone out once and found her, and then come back to fetch us, then he had gone out and eventually back again. The rest of us had gone out and back once. An extra set—boot prints. They were the same pair that Zack had been wearing, one of the pairs left by the door.
The other detective was less convinced. In places the tracks were obliterated, they crossed and disappeared and some could have been from the day before, and while new snow had fallen, it’d been an inch or two at most.
The cause of death had been confirmed. Em had died from a bleed on the brain caused by a blow to her head, this and hypothermia. It would have taken her a few hours to die. She would not have been in pain. But would she have known? Would Em, lying there, have known she was dying, known that she was alone?
I wan
ted to take a knife and cut the thought out of myself. To go further, to find the home of grief itself, the site where it was lodged and hack it out of my body before it killed me. In the middle of the night, I thought about joining Em, and the thought of being dead gave me comfort, gave me relief and allowed me to sleep. When I awoke it was to all the terror of a nightmare, but the thing you were scared of, already happened.
The detectives wanted to know what I thought she was doing out there.
“Was she leaving? Had she gone for another walk? Perhaps to meet someone? Or was it another game?” The necklace had been in Em’s coat pocket. Detective Tailor slid it over the desk in a plastic Ziploc bag. I looked at it dully.
“She must have come and taken it from where I left it on the rug, after David and I had gone back up, after Rob had gone to bed.”
What about this game? The detectives knew about Mortimer and the diamonds. It was odd, wasn’t it? The parallel—that was the word Detective Vincent used, parallel. Who had started it, all this business with the necklace? And would I say I took it seriously, more seriously than the others, so much so that I had risked my life running over a half-frozen lake? He’d even dug out a statement I’d given to the Marlborough police when I was fifteen and they’d caught me climbing on top of the supermarket.
“You like games, don’t you, Andrea? You said that was part of a game. But they have a tendency to get out of hand, don’t they? Some games, that is.”
“We used to play cops and robbers too,” I said.
“And which were you?” he asked.
“I was always a detective. I thought they were the clever ones.”
Detective Tailor went back to asking how much we’d all had to drink, whether there had been any drugs. If Em had argued with anyone, if anyone could have wanted to hurt her? Had we fallen out? Was she trying to walk home?
I couldn’t help them. Even if I could, it wouldn’t have brought Em back.
Detective Vincent caught me up on the steps outside. His demeanor was different outside the interview room, softer, like he’d been putting on a show and now it was over. A family was smoking furiously on the pavement: the parents, two older boys, and a small scowling creature who was eyeing the cigarettes jealously.
Before the Ruins Page 15