by Dan Holloway
Think what comes next, he said to himself. Only one what’s one step ahead. Supper, cooking for Becky and Haydn. He was already at the entrance to the Covered Market. He smiled. It was Thursday, which meant the fish stall would have fresh sushi-grade tuna. The thought of Haydn’s sushi knife in his hand flashed across his mind and he closed his eyes. Cold and heavy, the soft tear of flesh giving way to the gentlest pressure.
Tommy opened his eyes and found himself in the middle of the press of people pushing to get the best and freshest fish. The ice granules sparkled like rhinestones on silver lamé sides of sea bream, and the gaping crimson tournedos of tuna flashed like open lips. If he’d had no sense of taste or smell he would have thought he was in Blackpool. Eventually he found himself pushed to the front of the crush and picked out the richest transparent red tuna and a few squid. He collected two heads of fennel and some lemongrass from Bonners’ fruit and veg stall opposite and headed home.
Tommy monitored every repetition of his light workout closely, leaving the music off so that he could hear for thoughts in his head and the sound of blood in his ears, as though he were waiting for the swoosh in his arteries to cut out audibly as his body went into shock. By the time he had bathed and dressed it was nearly time to leave. No, if he set out now on foot he would get there at just the right time, and he didn’t want to drive, so he slung a coolbag with the fish wrapped in an iced wine cooler inside it over his shoulder and turned to Penderecki violin music on his i-Pod, a challenging piece that he would have to focus on. Anything to occupy his thoughts.
Becky answered the door and threw her arms around Tommy before he could put the coolbag down. “Hey, you.” She kissed him roundly on the lips and beamed.
“Don’t you tell me I look terrible.”
“You look great,” she said. And, quieter: “It’s so good to have proper company.”
He heard a gentle cough from the end of the corridor. Haydn was wearing a fitted turquoise shift dress, with what looked like darts of jade running on the bias. Tommy slipped off his loafers and set down the bag. She offered him both hands, which he took and kissed her lightly on the cheek.
“I hope you don’t feel pressganged, Tommy,” she said.
“Not at all. It’s always a pleasure.”
“Let me put this into the fridge for you.” Haydn disappeared into the kitchen and re-emerged with a small bowl of green tea. “I didn’t hear a car.”
“It looks like it’s the last beautiful day of summer,” he said. I thought I should walk.”
“Then I’m sure you’ll want to sit down. Please.” She directed him into the reception room. “Let me see if I can guess what music you’d like.”
Haydn picked up a control and pointed it at what seemed like an empty wall. She moved her finger around and finally tapped the ceramic panel. The opening of Wagner’s Siegfried.
“Perfect.” Haydn smiled to herself.
“Mum loves Wagner,” Becky said. “It’s a compliment. Unless she puts on Tristan, which means she thinks you’re too like dad.”
Tommy looked rather awkwardly at Haydn, who was sipping her green tea calmly. He still couldn’t tell how much conversation about her former husband would upset her. Then again, he figured, even if he could see it worry her he wouldn’t know if that was because he was dead, or because he was her ex.
“Becky tells me there’s a woman in your life.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t be shy, Tommy. Everything about your taste intrigues me.” Tommy could feel her eyes piercing him. Her head wasn’t tilted. There were none of the usual signs that accompany the clawing tendrils of someone’s gaze. It wasn’t even that she didn’t blink. It was just that the gentle calm of her voice was reflected back from everywhere else except her eyes.
“You’ve met her, mum. The night dad died.”
Tommy watched for a reaction, but he couldn’t see one. He thought he had seen a hint of her father’s mischief in Becky’s eyes, but if he had it had gone.
“Chief Inspector Harris?”
“No,” said Tommy. “Rosie. Sergeant Lu.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” said Haydn dryly. “DCI Harris has no appreciation of Wagner.”
“Mum made an allusion to Tristan and Isolde,” Becky explained. “Emily didn’t get it.”
“I think DS Lu did.” Haydn smiled. “She’s from Hong Kong, isn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll have to bring her to dinner.”
Tommy sensed Becky beginning to fidget next to him. He wondered about dinner with Rosie and the Shaws. He remembered his first dinner at her flat, how she had felt nervous having an interior designer in the place. What would she say if he took her to dinner with a sociologist of China firing questions at her about Hong Kong? All it would have needed was afternoon tea with Dr Knightley the gynaecologist to make her feel completely at home.
Tommy waved his empty tea bowl. “Let me go and wash up,” he said, deciding that changing the subject would be politic. “And I’ll begin dinner.”
“Everything’s where you’d expect it to be,” Haydn said, “but I’d be happy to show you around.”
“I’ll be fine, thank you.”
Tommy felt the cooling floor beneath him, and his hands enjoyed the smooth surfaces. He felt himself slowly easing into an almost relaxed tiredness, and even the sushi knife sat easy in his hand. He wondered if he might kick start his mind back to life, but knew that it wasn’t the right time. There was too much to take in, and it would have to wait for morning. Becky would have at least another night to wait.
For now he was content to get to know a new kitchen. He could get a feel from the way it was laid out of how Haydn occupied the space, of her elegant movements from one cupboard to the next, gathering ingredients and utensils in just the right order as she went, and the progressing from work surface to hob. He imagined the lines she formed as she cooked and, having a feel for the forms she liked to make, he felt instinctively where everything should be, and smiled each time he was right. With ease he found the chopping boards, the paring knife to clean the squid, the flour dredger, the oils, and the different strengths of soy. He wondered on which principles she had designed the kitchen, whether it was the tenets of feng shui, or Greek geometry, or simply elegance.
Soon everything was nearly ready. The squid ink pasta dough was sitting waiting to be rolled out – he thought that a raviolo of coriander and pine nut on each plate, speckled with calamari and draped around the edge with tuna sashimi would appeal to her aesthetic.
Tommy lowered the ravioli into water that was boiling at a gentle roll and chopped a shallot for his dressing. He felt his hand gliding to a drawer for a shaker to mix together some oil and rice wine vinegar with a little lime juice. In one movement he pulled on the handle that gave way with ease. He smiled again as the light caught the rows of shakers and stoppers, little moulds and cutters.
His hand stopped a centimetre above the drawer. For a moment he didn’t know what had made him stop, and then he saw it. Just a few centimetres long, a little piece of flexible rubber that had the consistency of a mould. He shook himself again. Oh God. Bags, where are they? He opened drawers at random but the rhythm was gone. He hadn’t seen any and he had no idea where they would be.
Come on, he said to himself, don’t start clattering. Think. He scanned the side. Kitchen towel he had used to pat the squid dry. It was the best he could think of. He tore a piece off. It felt as though his nails were an inch long as he ripped the first sheet. He tore frantically at another and held it, shaking, in his hand.
He fumbled with the handles that refused to open for him. Yanking first one and then another until he ripped the second sheet of kitchen towel. He was aware of the sound of a rolling boil above him. The ravioli would be overdone and dry, and she would be sure to suspect something was wrong. Come on. He tore off another sheet, trying desperately to force his breathing slow and shallow. Too much oxygen. Slow down. He touched at the dra
wer with his free hand. It opened. He reached inside and cupped the tiny spoon without applying any pressure. Mustn’t wipe any prints. Eased the drawer shut.
What now? The chrome glint of the bin caught his eye. He reached inside and found the slimy plastic that had held the squid. Good. Not too badly ripped. He laid it on the side. Ravioli still boiling. Can’t make a mess of dinner or Haydn would notice straightaway. He dropped the mould, swaddled in kitchen towel, into the plastic, rolled it up, and threw it into the coolbag, which he zipped shut. He washed his hands and reached the runcible spoon into the pan, skimming out the ravioli one by one.
Now he tore some coriander by hand, and as he tossed the squid for 20 seconds in steaming oil he was glad that his mind was still shut down, but knew that he couldn’t sit through dinner.
He took two exquisite plates through to the dining room and returned to the kitchen as though to bring the third. He ran water loudly to mask the tap on the keys and texted Rosie, “pick me up NOW. Becky’s. T”
He checked his breathing. It was raised more than was seemly for having prepared a delicate Japanese dish and he shallowed it again before calling Becky and Haydn to dinner.
“Dinner is on the table. Haydn, I’m so sorry. I’m afraid I can’t stay. Rosie just texted. I’m needed on ferry duty.”
“Of course.” Haydn smiled. If she was suspicious he couldn’t see it.
He took her hand and led her through to the dining room, trying to feel any tension that might suggest she sensed something was wrong. He felt nothing.
He went back for Becky, who had hung back in the reception room. He didn’t want to give any detail away. Not yet, but he needed her onside. He bent forward as if to kiss her goodbye, “Cover for me tonight,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything in the morning.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
____
65
Tommy heard himself draw in an enormous breath as he sank into the front seat of Rosie’s car. His hand kept flexing on the handle of the coolbag to reassure himself that it was still there.
“You’re lucky I hadn’t started on the wine yet,” Rosie said as she did a rapid three point turn and shot up North Hinksey Lane. “What the hell’s going on?”
“I need to tell you something.” Perhaps it was good that his mind was shot. He wasn’t capable of thinking anything through, so all he had to go on was instinct. His instinct that said even if she walked out she’d still take the fingerprints off the mould.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” she said. “Let’s go to yours. Then I won’t have to kick you out if I never want to see you again.”
“Want a drink?” Tommy asked as they sat on the sofa at the top of his house.
“No, Tommy, I want the truth.”
Without allowing himself time to think he told her everything, from the moment Charteris collapsed on his doorstep to the moment he bagged the mould. It was good to run everything through, made it feel less like he had leapt on some wild hunch. He was able to see the logic build towards its inevitable conclusion.
“It all happened because Becky wanted to get to know her father,” Tommy concluded. “Haydn must have known. She told me that Becky had changed since she got back from her travels, as though she were hiding something. But it wasn’t her travels that changed her, it was her father.”
“So what made her flip? Do you think she was frightened he’d do to Becky what he did to Carol?”
“Maybe. Maybe she just didn’t want Becky near someone who could do that, and didn’t want her to have to know why.”
“But she didn’t know.”
“Didn’t she?” Tommy could see exactly how she would have found out; or where, at the least, the suspicions would have come from that would make her look for the answer, “Who were the two people closest to her? Hedley Sansom and Stephen Knightley. The only person who had always known what really happened the night Becky and Carol were born, who followed Haydn around like a lost puppy because it was the only way he could bring himself not to kill himself; and the man who lost his wife because of what happened and devoted his life to finding out why.”
Rosie sat in silence, thinking over what Tommy had said. “Not even Haydn’s that imperceptive,” she said finally.
“She’s not imperceptive at all,” said Tommy. He was astonished, as he said it, that it had taken him so long to figure her out, to connect the coldness that seemed to run in her blood with the veil that he had spent the last decade presenting to the world. Shutting everything out was the only way she had of not letting everything in. She was exactly like him. Her empathy was too strong. And when she spent her time with people who knew what Knightley and Sansom knew it must have felt as though she was being stung through every pore of her skin every time she met them, with no way to make it stop.
It was no wonder she was so good at her research, so good at interviewing people, collecting data about what was really going on in their heads, in their communities, he thought. And then he stopped in his tracks. Haydn had a far more selfish motive for wanting Charles dead.
“What is it?” Rosie asked.
“Something Becky said. Something her father told her. Something I’ll bet she let slip to Haydn, without even knowing it.”
“What?”
“She told me that the day Val died, Charles saw her cleaner leave early. That was when Val killed herself, when she was finally alone.”
“And?” She clearly couldn’t see where this was going.
“And her cleaner was Chinese.”
“So?”
“So Haydn’s work is all about interviewing members of the Chinese community is England.”
Tommy saw Rosie’s face light up in recognition. “So Val’s cleaner left early that day so Haydn could interview her for her research.”
“And Charles found out.”
“And what? He tells Becky half the story and Becky lets it slip to her mother in passing, not knowing it’s not common knowledge.”
“Haydn guesses at once that she can only have got it from Charles,” Tommy concluded. “And she thinks that with Hedley about to retire, maybe Charles will twist the knife one last time.”
“And Hedley would never speak to her again. She’d lose her only real friend.”
“Nor would her daughter,” Tommy said. “She’d lose her daughter to a man she knows is a monster.”
Rosie put her hand on his cheek. She closed her eyes and kissed him. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to go and see your boss.”
Rosie smiled. “I’d still love you. Even if you left the choice to Becky.”
“Old wine and seduction.” Tommy smiled back, “Wait here. I think it’s time to celebrate.” He got up and headed for the doorway. He put his head back around the door as he left. “I love you too, by the way.”
Tommy made his way through the labyrinth of his house to the enormous wine cellar at its heart. He lifted the already opened lid from the first case he had brought from Shaw’s and took out the 50 centilitre bottle of 1864 Eszencia. He had thought about waiting to share it with Becky. He imagined Shaw telling him to wait. He thought of all the reasons to follow the Professor’s advice. He was upset, his mind was shot, probably his senses too. Once it was opened it would be gone forever. Sometimes you just have to get on and do it, he whispered back.
He returned to the sitting room with two small crystal Tokaji glasses and a corkscrew.
“What’s that?” Rosie stared at the faded and worn label.
“It’s something perfect for a very special occasion.”
Tommy set the bottle upright on a table. He felt his hands steady as he set the corkscrew on the neck of the bottle and lowered the blade through the wax. He turned slowly and withdrew the cork in one motion, beckoning Rosie inwards, their heads just a few inches over the nape as it came out and released the richest smell of burnt fruit and toffee. He watched as the thick amber fluid slid into the glass
es, passed one to Rosie and held his to the light. His eyebrows furrowed slightly, and as he lowered his nose over the glass he wondered how badly his senses had been damaged. He was sure he made out a slight sherry hint of oxidation.
He lifted the glass to his lips. It was one of the most exquisite tastes he had ever known. Rich, creamy, caramelised flavours that lingered for a minute on his tongue. The unmistakeable, slightly oxidized caramel of an Eszencia from 1972.
Tommy went white.
“Tommy, what is it?”
“I was completely wrong,” was all he managed to say, and for several minutes he repeated it over and over to himself in disbelief. “He wasn’t murdered at all,” he said finally. “He killed himself. Just like Emily thought all along.”
“How do you work that out?”
“The wine. The wine was why I knew he was murdered. For his last meal he drank two fabulous wines. But he had two better ones in his cellar. He would never have done that if he was going to kill himself. He would have ended his life on the highest note possible, so it had to be murder.”
Tommy picked up the bottle and stared at it. “This is one of them, one of the finest wines ever made, only it’s not. It’s the wine I thought he’d drunk the day he died. He switched the wines. Chose the same wine so I couldn’t tell from glancing at the shape of the bottle.”