by Nicci French
She had cycled the route from Clapton into town and from town back to Clapton so often that it sometimes felt almost invisible. She’d done it on hot summer nights in shorts and a tee shirt. She’d done it in driving rain with hands so numb that she could barely shift the gears. She’d cycled to business meetings, to Christmas parties and birthday parties and leaving parties. She’d cycled to markets and to shops and to funeral homes. She’d cycled when she was so tired that she almost fell asleep in the saddle and she’d cycled on bright sunny winter mornings when she felt awake to every glimmer of light, every ripple of sound. She’d cycled sober, she’d cycled stoned, she’d cycled drunk and on one startling occasion had decided to get off the bike when she had the distinct impression that the passing cars were talking to her.
She passed the corner of Hackney Downs.
Two men walked past carrying tennis rackets. People were pushing buggies. And she was cycling into town to commit adultery, having also committed adultery the previous evening.
Through London Fields, little children running around, dogs running after sticks.
Yesterday, she had cycled home in the darkness with no lights in a fog of wine and aching pleasure and guilt. It had been after midnight, as Mabel had sourly reminded her, when she’d opened the door softly, taken off her shoes and tiptoed up the stairs. In the bathroom, listening out for any sound, she’d hastily taken her clothes off and then crept downstairs again in the darkness, put them in the washing machine, switched it on.
Last night had been a sort of farewell: he was going to a conference for several days. This morning was unexpected; clearly he had found a few extra hours. It had been so long since someone had wanted her like that, urgently, every minute counting.
At the canal, she joined all the other cyclists in their gleaming helmets and high-visibility jackets heading into the busy centre.
Last night, when she’d got into bed beside Fletcher in the darkness, felt him shift his position and heard a mutter from him out of his sleep, she’d wondered how could he not know. How could he not sense it, even in his deep sleep? It felt like she was giving off an electric charge, sparks that would jab and sting at anybody near her. She had always thought that if one of them had an affair, the betrayal would explode their marriage, blowing the life they had painstakingly constructed over the years into glinting, jagged pieces. Yet she had betrayed Fletcher, day after day, and nothing had happened. He still slept peacefully beside her at night and rose with her in the morning; the boys went off to school and returned; Mabel still perplexed the family with her restless moods, swinging between charm and rage; Neve still managed the chaos of the house, went to work, saw her friends, paid the bills. Life continued in its tracks. Perhaps, she thought, it would be like a building that is demolished, holding its shape after the button is pushed, only gradually losing its outline, wavering, folding in on itself with a roar.
Pedalling along the towpath, Neve tried to think clearly, if only to avoid steering into the canal. She had seen that happen once to someone else. She wasn’t sure whether the man had been pushed or whether he had swerved to avoid someone or whether he had just been inattentive and missed a curve. But she witnessed the aftermath: a man in a suit, knee-deep in the water, one hand clutching his bike, one hand on the bank. She’d stopped with several other people to pull him and his bike up on to the land. He kept apologising. Everyone said it didn’t matter, but he kept saying sorry, to someone, for something. She mostly remembered being surprised at how shallow the water was, just a couple of feet. She’d always thought it was deeper.
Leaving the canal, she cycled through the smart little streets behind the Angel and crossed City Road down past Sadler’s Wells and on to Theobalds Road. A glimpse of the huge plane trees of Gray’s Inn. A throb of anticipation, and the shivery feeling that nobody, apart from him, knew where she was. In the last few weeks she had travelled into another country, a country where everything felt different, where the rules no longer applied. She understood with absolute clarity that what she was doing was wrong. She was deceiving Fletcher but she wasn’t going to deceive herself.
She had to concentrate as she went past Red Lion Square, lorries and buses and building works and fumes that made her cough. At the lights, she waited next to a cyclist delivering sandwiches, and as the lorry behind them revved its engine, they exchanged dismayed glances: the nightmare of High Holborn. The lights changed and a taxi swung across, almost hitting her, and then she was across Kingsway at last. She pulled on to the pavement, got off and wheeled the bike down Drury Lane, where she locked it to a post. She checked her reflection in the window of a sandwich bar.
The anonymous brick building in the small side street must have been a warehouse once but now, like everything else, it had been converted into apartments. Neve punched in the code and walked up the stairs. She took out her purse, easing the key out from where it was discreetly stowed behind a credit card, opened the door and stepped inside.
‘Hey,’ she called.
There was no answer.
‘Saul.’
No answer. Perhaps he had stepped out to buy something like coffee or milk. It was half past nine. She took off her jacket and hung it on a hook by the front door.
She walked along the little corridor and into the living room and suddenly there was too much to take in, like she had been blinded by the light or deafened by an explosion and then punched at the same time. She stepped back away from it until she felt the wall behind her, holding her up.
He was lying on his back and he was dead. Somehow she’d never even known the meaning of being dead until she’d seen those open eyes. They weren’t staring eyes. They were just things now, open and exposed. His mouth was also gaping open, as if in vast, unending surprise.
His head was framed by a pool of blood, dark red, smooth. His face looked dead but every bit of his body looked dead as well. His arms and legs were splayed in unnatural positions. His right elbow was caught under his body, which made his hand stick up. It was as if he was halfway through the process of turning over. It looked uncomfortable and Neve felt an impulse to make him comfortable, to pull the arm free, like when they had been entangled in bed together, sweating, out of breath and she helped him ease his hand from under her bare back.
The front of his grey suit had ridden up, exposing his belt and the lower part of his white shirt. One of his knees was slightly raised and a sock was visible, an improbably garish red and yellow. She knew those socks. Once they had stumbled into bed blindly and passionately and unthinkingly and afterwards, lying across him, she had peeled them off, belatedly, and he had laughed.
She looked around the room. At the far end, away from the street, was a small dining table. One of the chairs was lying on its side and she thought she could see what had happened. He had stood on the chair for something – to hang a picture? To change a light bulb? – and had slipped and fallen heavily, catching the edge of the table, tried to raise himself, failed and fallen back and bled to death.
Just for a moment she had the thought: what a terrible, stupid way to die. Then she saw something else, lying on the floor, but not within his reach. It was closer to her, near the street side of the room. It was a hammer, a big one. The handle was bound in blue vinyl; the shaft was silvery steel. But the head was dark, wet. She leaned down to look more closely. It was clearly blood. She stepped towards the body and almost immediately recoiled. The far side of his head, the side she hadn’t been able to see, wasn’t properly there. It was caved in. It was a dark mush. She could make out the fragments of bone.
As she raised herself up, she felt a swirling dizziness, as if she might fall over or be sick. She took a few slow breaths to steady herself.
She looked at the hammer and she looked back at the body. At Saul’s body. It was hard to think. It felt impossible to make sense of anything, but one thought slowly emerged and hardened and took shape. This was a murder. Saul had been murdered. She turned the sentence around in her head: so
meone had murdered Saul. He had texted her – what was it? An hour ago? More like two hours. And in that time he had been murdered.
She took out her phone ready to dial 999. She had never found it so hard to dial a number before. Her fingers were trembling over the keys and then she stopped, looking back at the table. It still had the remnants of the dinner from the night before, the dinner they had eaten together. Plates, cutlery, a half-empty salad bowl. But no wine bottle and no wine glasses. She didn’t need to look for them, she knew where they were. She walked back and along the corridor where they had staggered last night, entangled in each other, clutching the glasses and the half-full bottle, and she opened the bedroom door and was hit by the smell of perfume, her perfume, and other smells, the smells of bodies.
The bed was unmade. There was a glass on each side of the bed. The empty bottle was lying on the carpet.
There was a little chair in the corner and, for the first time since she had entered the flat, she sat down and made herself think: not about herself, not even about Saul, who she had loved, or been in love with at least, and who was dead and she would never see again or hold again. No. She thought about Mabel, about her terrible last years, everything that she’d come through. She’d been such an eager little girl, optimistic and vulnerable, but in her teenage years that had changed; the house had slowly darkened and dread had gripped the family. Perhaps it had been because of the drugs; perhaps because of the boy she had lost her heart to in that agony of first love; perhaps just because she was a teenager and full of turbulence and longing. As Neve stood there, her phone in her hand, she remembered those times: Mabel crouched in the corner of her room, her knees drawn up under her chin, vomit on the floor beside her, staring at Neve with dull eyes. Mabel not coming home. Mabel coming home at dawn, lipstick smeared across her face and her clothes ripped. Mabel in hospital on that awful night, tubes in her arm, her face almost yellow. There had been days when Neve and Fletcher had thought she wouldn’t survive. Every time the phone rang Neve’s heart would thump wildly. But she had. What would happen when she discovered that her mother had been having an affair, that her beloved father had been betrayed? Would everything unravel, the life that had been so painstakingly stitched back together?
Neve stood up and walked through and looked at Saul lying on the floor.
He was dead. He had been murdered. But it wasn’t about her or them. That was irrelevant to whatever it was that had happened here. She looked at her watch, understanding that she needed to make up her mind and then she needed to act. The blinds on the windows facing the street were closed. Nobody could see in from the office across the street.
She decided.
First things first. In the bedroom, she pulled the sheets off the bed, the cover off the duvet and rolled them up. She fetched the towels from the bathroom (they were still damp from last night). She fetched the little hand towel from the second lavatory. She pushed them into the washing machine in the little kitchen. Was there anything else? She couldn’t think of anything. She put it on a quick wash: twenty-eight minutes.
She slid off her bangle and put it on the surface near the sink, then found some kitchen gloves under the sink and pulled them on. She took a series of trips between the table and the kitchen, loading the plates and glasses into the dishwasher. She’d cleared the table and all the surfaces. Was there anything she’d forgotten? Again she walked around the flat. In the bathroom was a glass with the two toothbrushes in. It was so stupid, but suddenly she couldn’t remember which was the one she had brought, so she took them both.
She closed the dishwasher and put it on the shortest wash: thirty-four minutes. The larger items, the salad bowl, a saucepan, serving spoons, were in the sink. She scrubbed them thoroughly and laid them out to dry.
This was only the beginning.
She pulled the black plastic bag out of the kitchen swing bin. It was about a quarter full. She tossed the two toothbrushes into it. Then, standing there in the kitchen with a dull ache that started in her chest and spread up into her throat, her ears, her head, like a low hum of pain, she made herself think. She had to do this systematically, room by room, making sure she didn’t miss anything. She had to remove every single trace of herself. Saul was dead but Mabel was alive. She had to hold on to that.
She took a second plastic bag from under the sink for the things she would take away and started where it was easiest: the bathroom. Taking off her soft jumper, she laid it in the hall with the vague sense that she mustn’t spread fibres around. In the medicine cabinet, there was a packet of condoms: she dropped it into the bin bag. Her hand cream, her migraine tablets and the little round bottle of perfume: she’d keep those. She slid the cotton-wool balls and the half bottle of shampoo standing on the side of the bath into the bin bag. The stub left over from the candle they’d lit, lying in the warm water together in the guttering light, and she blinked away the image. Later, that would be for later. Not now. Bin bag.
She sprayed detergent into the tub and scrubbed it thoroughly and even sprayed underneath it. Wiped the taps. Threw away the nail brush and the soap, just in case. Sprayed and scrubbed the sink. What had she touched? She tried to remember. Had she put a hand on the little mirror where now she saw her face and was startled by the pale severity of her expression, the puffy bruise, and the ghastly absurdity of the new black bra? She sprayed the glass till she was only a misty blur.
Next, the bedroom. She took the two bags in there and for a moment stood, quite slack and dismayed. Was she really doing this? She reached under the blind and opened the windows wide. This room needed wind blowing through it, to get rid of the smells of the night before. There was a tumbler on the floor by her side of the bed – as though they had sides of the bed, she thought, and been a settled thing, a couple. She took the tumbler to the kitchen, washed it and put it on the draining board, then returned to the bedroom. First, she looked under the bed. There was a tissue, an old train ticket, a receipt for a takeaway they’d had a week ago, a pen without its top. Into the bin bag.
Every new object set off a small, sharp hit of memory. Neve felt like her body was being jabbed, over and over. By his side of the bed was a postcard she’d given him of a Modigliani painting she’d always loved; she hadn’t written anything on it. They didn’t write to each other. Why would they? They had seen each other most days, walking past each other, pretending not to notice, looking in the other direction. How did nobody realise? She would keep the card. And the lip gloss, the deodorant, a pair of tights. From the wardrobe, where a few of Saul’s shirts hung alongside one good suit, she found a favourite tee shirt that she had no memory of wearing there but which needed to return home. She knelt to make sure nothing had rolled under the chest of drawers and as she did so heard a faint sound. She didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Her whole body was locked in terror: someone was in the flat, moving softly around. But the sound died and she understood with a loosening rush of relief that it was simply the wind blowing through the open window and shifting the blind. She returned to her hunt. She was sure she had left some underwear here, but although she looked everywhere, in each drawer, under pillows, even under the mattress, she couldn’t find it.
In the kitchen, the dishwasher had seven minutes left to run and the washing machine two. Neve stared at the little red light in impatience, willing it to go faster, watching the tangled sheets and towels coil past in the round window. The machine gave a small judder. One minute. She put away the saucepan, the salad bowl and serving spoons. When would he be missed? When would someone come looking for him? Just thinking of a knock at the door made her break out in a prickling sweat.
The washing machine gave a bright ping and she pulled the door open, hauled out the wet sheets and towels and crammed them into the dryer, turning the dial and hearing it chug into motion. She thought of her own clothes from last night billowing on the line at home.
She spotted her bike lights on the hall windowsill, next to a trophy Saul had been given just l
ast week for ‘innovation in management’. It was a modernist block of rough stone with his name engraved into it. He’d said the only place it could go was in the lavatory, but it hadn’t even got that far. She picked up the bike lights and dropped them into the bag.
Now for the living room. He was in there. He. Saul. Saul was in there with his mashed-in head and his empty eyes, but she still had to do it. She took a deep, heaving breath and entered. At first, she tried not to look, but somehow that made it worse. She could feel him there, this dark mass of blood and body, solid and cooling. Suddenly she wanted to touch him, but she mustn’t touch him, not in rubber gloves like a professional, handling the body; and not without gloves like she was his intimate, leaving her prints on his skin. She gazed down at him, at the body that used to be him, and for a brief moment let another version of the story play in her mind: Saul opening the door in this grey suit and white shirt, taking her hand, drawing her in, closing the door, giving her that smile and then not smiling anymore. They had both known what harm they were doing – and Neve wasn’t someone who did harm, not like that. She was the wife, the mother, the worker, the friend, with silver threads in her hair and lines gathering on her face.
At last she turned away. There was a drawing she’d done here, when she was telling Saul what she grew in the allotment. She’d made little sketches of the vegetables as she talked, pencilled doodles of courgettes, squash, garlic, green beans, chard, beetroot. She screwed the paper into a ball and dropped it in the rubbish bag. A book of short stories by women that she’d left here and would take home with her. The drier was rumbling in the kitchen. She moved around the room, around the body, picking things up, leafing through books, looking under cushions on the sofa. She glanced at the stack of work-related things on the table, folders, invoices stapled together, brochures that Redfern had produced, then left them.