by Nicci French
With a flash of memory, she remembered the poem she’d written out for him, because he’d pressed her for a memento he could carry around with him. He had been half serious and half ironic, ardent and performing being ardent, so that even in the first shock of passion she’d thought to herself, he’s done this before. She never asked him. It didn’t matter. Laughing, she had written out the only poem she knew by heart, the one she performed when tipsy at parties. ‘Jenny kiss’d me when we met,/Jumping from the chair she sat in . . .’ Jenny was Neve’s middle name so she had always felt the poem belonged to her. Where was it now?
She went into the hall and found his overcoat and his wallet. The rubber gloves made it hard to search but she didn’t dare take them off so she rifled clumsily through all the contents until she was sure there was no poem. Then she had a terrible thought: perhaps it was on him, in his pockets. Returning to the room, she knelt beside the body, half squinting so as not to clearly see the wound, and made herself pat at his pockets, then put her hands into them, first of his jacket and then on his trousers. His body shifted under her tentative hands. Was he already getting cold? Were his limbs stiffening and his blood congealing? No poem. Maybe it was at his home, tucked into some secret place. The police would find it and show it to his wife and to people at work, asking: do you recognise this handwriting? Or perhaps it was in the drawer of his desk at work. And they’d find it there as well, and everyone she worked with would know. And then Fletcher would know. And then . . .
She stood up. Perhaps he hadn’t kept it.
Another thought. His mobile. Where was it? She gazed around wildly. This flat was just a little pied-à-terre for him to stay in when he was working late or starting early, with few objects in it: a shelf of books, some work folders that were stacked on the side, a fridge with not much food, a freezer containing ice cubes, a change of clothes. At Neve’s house, it was easy to lose things because of the layers of clutter that had built up over the decades, but here it was hard. Neve understood that she wasn’t thinking clearly at all but was behaving like a drunk person trying to remember how to be sober. At the thought, terror pumped through her. Her movements became jerky and her hands were trembling. She could hear her blood thundering in her ears. She had been wandering around sluggishly, but she had to get out of here. She had to get out of here quickly. Every second counted. What did she have left to do? The washing. Yes. She practically ran into the kitchen and opened the drier. The bedding was still damp and she gave a little whimper as she turned the dial for ten more minutes.
The dishwasher. She opened it and pulled out the plates, the cutlery, the mugs. There was a crash as she dropped a glass. She picked up the shards and could feel one cutting in through the rubber of the glove and into her thumb. She swept up the rest and put them in the bin bag.
What was she forgetting? The kitchen looked spotless but she was suddenly convinced there was a mistake somewhere, so large she wasn’t seeing it. She went back into the living room and looked down at Saul, as if he was the mistake. His face was beginning to change, to darken. She felt that she couldn’t bear it, and yet there she was doing what she was doing.
Back in the kitchen, she took the laundry out of the washing machine: still a bit damp, but it would have to do. It took her far too long to put the cover on to the duvet, which became unmanageable and got twisted up and lumpy.
At last it was done. She peeled off the gloves, put them into the bin bag, which she knotted together. Saul had told her that in this area rubbish was collected every day of the year, even on Christmas Day. She was about to open the door when she realised she was still only wearing her bra and she almost laughed – or maybe she was almost sick, on the wooden floor of the disinfected flat where the smell of perfume and sex had been overlaid by that of detergent and bleach. She pulled on her jersey, then her jacket and scarf. She’d cut her thumb on the glass and she sucked at it, thinking how easy it would be to smear blood on the door as she left. Her hands didn’t seem to belong to her and her face was tight and rubbery, like a mask had been pressed over it. She pushed the door open a few inches, waited for any sound, stepped out on to the landing and closed the door.
She was assailed once again by the feeling that she’d left something vital behind and stood motionless, one leg forward. The feeling wouldn’t go away. She opened up the little letter box and peered through but saw nothing. She got the key out again, managed to get the door open without dropping it, and went back inside. On the kitchen floor was the plastic bag with all her things in it: she’d nearly left it there, with perfume, book, tee shirt, tights. She picked it up and thrust it deep into her leather backpack, then went and took a last look at Saul. It seemed like his body was shrinking, or the room was getting larger. Had he once been Saul? She gazed at him as he receded.
‘Goodbye,’ she said out loud, but her voice sounded tinny and artificial. The flat was full of noises, rustles and creaks and the bang of a pipe. The air stirred around her. Her skin prickled, but when she turned round, no one was there.
Out on the pavement, Neve tried to jog away from the building, the bin bag banging against her, but her legs felt boneless and her breath was coming in painful gasps, as if the air was thin and she couldn’t suck enough into her lungs. She slowed, tried to walk calmly and look normal. The sun was in her eyes and nothing was real. That little room she’d left wasn’t real, but a set where violent death had been staged. The scene in front of her, that wavered and lost its outline in the golden light, wasn’t real. Her affair with Saul was just the fever dream of a woman in her forties who had grown weary of the slog of family life.
She left the bin bag outside a Turkish restaurant, in a pile of other identical bags. What now? She looked at her watch: twenty to eleven. For a moment she couldn’t think where she’d left her bike. Drury Lane, that was it. So she made her way there, walking very slowly, in her new underwater world. As she mounted it, she suddenly thought of the CCTV cameras that people are always saying you can’t get away from. Perhaps she’d already been filmed and soon detectives would be looking at grainy images of her going into the building at just before half past nine and leaving at shortly after ten-thirty, and all of this would have been for nothing. She pulled her scarf over the lower part of her face and cycled away, wobbling in and out of stationary cars, half blind.
On the canal towpath, she braked and got off her bike. The thought of simply heading home was unbearable, for what would she do amid the shabby clutter of family life? Fletcher might be there, or Mabel, or both, and she’d have to behave as though nothing had happened, stutter out her lines and act being herself. She wasn’t ready. The thought came to her, with the dull thud of truth, that she would never get over this. If she had just had an affair, a mid-life fling, she could have come out on the other side, guilty but intact. Gradually life would have resumed its old shape around her. A day would have come when the memory lost its dangerous edges until at last it was just a blurred soft thing in her mind, shuffled in with all the other memories. But this changed everything, made it more solid and more dangerous. What had been an affair had become a death. A murder.
There was a little café on the water and Neve locked her bike to the racks beside it and went inside. The only other occupant was a young woman with a rope of brown hair coiling down nearly to her waist and a buggy in front of her. For one crazy moment, she had the thought that the baby was Mabel; things were sliding impossibly together. It looked like Mabel used to: small and bald, with a curious expression on its round face. She had been such a placid baby, such a settled and enigmatic toddler. Fletcher and Neve used to congratulate themselves on the job they had done as parents.
She asked for an Earl Grey tea and took it to the seat by the long, low window. A burly man with a deep scowl on his face very slowly jogged past. She wrapped both her hands round the mug for the comfort of it and took a small, hot sip. The sludge in her chest eased a bit. She stared at the world outside but wasn’t really seeing it.
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Neve had met Saul nine months ago, when the large, successful company he managed took over the tiny, failing company she and her three friends had founded when they were in their late twenties and not long out of art school. His company was called ‘Redfern Publishing’; theirs ‘Sans Serif’. They used to design and typeset pamphlets; chap books; books that had tiny print runs but were beautiful objects with thick rough pages, carefully selected fonts and marbled inside covers; posters for music festivals and poetry readings. At Redfern, they still dealt with some of their old customers but they also designed conference brochures and trade magazines. Gary said that they had thought they could conquer the world, but the world had conquered them. Actually it had been a relief to finally admit that their exhausting glory days were over and they could be employees at last, with regular pay, working hours and a pension.
Neve felt she should have remembered her first meeting with Saul. It should have been something strange or romantic or funny. But there had been so much else going on. She and Fletcher were just getting to the end of that awful two years with Mabel, watching their daughter fall apart and then trying to put her together. They had more or less put her together, or, really, she had put herself together, but it still felt she might unravel at any moment.
And there was all the business of moving offices, from a ramshackle place just off Seven Sisters Road to a bright sparkling space next to the Old Street roundabout. There was the emotional baggage, of course, but most of all there was real baggage, years and years of stuff that they’d accumulated: cabinets full of letters and documents and original designs and pieces of artwork. Some of it was beautiful and really deserved to be framed, some of it was financial documentation that needed to be preserved, some of it was a sentimental reminder of old times and a great deal of it was rubbish. The problem was deciding which was which. It felt like they weren’t just being taken over. They were leaving home and moving house and having a nervous breakdown at the same time.
Meanwhile, Saul was just one of the suits. Before the move, Neve and her three friends had had many meetings where someone in a suit or some people in suits talked through issues with them, lectured them, rebuked them, instructed them. Saul must have been there sometimes, but it was all a blur and she couldn’t actually remember which ones were him and which ones weren’t him.
Once they were installed in the Old Street offices, he was just one of the people they’d see around, like the disapproving woman in the office next to theirs or the various men and women at the front desk or at the coffee machine.
But as she gulped at her tea, burning her mouth as a way of shocking herself back to life, she couldn’t stop herself thinking of him that first proper time. She was alone in the office, working late, when she heard a voice behind her.
‘You should go home.’
Neve looked around; he was leaning in the doorway. ‘Is that an order?’
He stepped inside. ‘I’ve always thought you can get everything done by six,’ he said.
For the first time, she looked at him properly. He was tall, with short dark hair touched with silver and a very light grey suit that had a sheen to it. She remembered thinking that he was so not her type. She’d always gone for the outsiders, the lost, the tormented. Saul did not look like any of those. Nice eyes, though. Grey-blue, slightly amused. Sitting in the café, she thought of those eyes staring up at the ceiling.
‘When we first started,’ she said to Saul, ‘when we had a big project, we’d sometimes work right through, the whole night. At three or four in the morning, someone would go out and buy bagels and we’d eat them and drink coffee and just carry on working.’
He gave a smile and leaned against the desk opposite her. ‘When you first started,’ he said. ‘So what happened?’
‘We got older, got married, had children; well, I had children anyway. Some of the magic goes out of working late if you have to arrange a babysitter. And the idea becomes a bit tiring and you don’t really feel like a bagel in the middle of the night.’
‘And yet you’re here,’ he said.
‘My husband’s at home. Don’t worry. I’ll turn the lights off when I leave.’
He turned to go and then stopped and looked at her again. ‘I used to do that too,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean work. I’d never work all night. That’s insane. But when I was at college, I remember going to parties and doing stuff and afterwards I’d get back to my room at seven or eight in the morning and go to breakfast and have a fairly normal day. If I had a time machine, I’d go back to myself and say, enjoy this while you can, because when you’re fifty – actually I’m not yet fifty, that’s next year, but even so – when you’re fifty you won’t be able to do this.’
‘The worst bit,’ said Neve, ‘is that at fifty, you won’t even want to do it.’
‘Stop,’ he said. ‘That’s enough gloomy observations about being old. By the way, you can’t turn them off.’
‘Turn what off?’
‘The lights. When you leave. It’s all done centrally. It’s some rule I never quite understood.’
Neve thought of his words now, talking of when he would be fifty, an age he would never reach.
It wasn’t much, looking back on it, that meeting, but from then on they nodded at each other in the lift or if they passed in the corridor. When the other people in the office criticised him in the way they criticised everybody and everything at Redfern, she didn’t join in.
She bought another mug of tea.
How could this have happened? Who could have done this to him?
A week or two later, she was coming out of the office and found herself in the lift with him and they started talking.
‘I’m surprised to see you at this time,’ he said. ‘When I think of you, I think of bagels at three in the morning. I just can’t help it.’
Neve was surprised by the idea of his thinking about her at all, but as they emerged on to the pavement, he suggested going for a drink. He immediately held up his hand.
‘Before you answer,’ he said. ‘I’m going to say that this is not about work. I won’t be talking about business plans. I won’t be asking you to evaluate your colleagues. It’s not a secret interview.’
‘All right,’ she said.
What did she remember about that first drink together? She remembered the bottle of wine on the table. He looked at the menu and said that if they were going to have more than a glass then it was cheaper to get a bottle. Even so, it felt like giving in to something. What did they talk about? She could only remember what they didn’t talk about. They didn’t talk about work. They didn’t talk about children and the difficulty of having teenagers. Neve knew he was married and he knew she was married but they didn’t talk about it. He didn’t say his wife didn’t understand him. They didn’t talk about getting older and putting on weight and going grey and becoming invisible. They just talked. It was easy. Nice.
Now, sitting at that table with his body on that floor a mile or so away, Neve remembered that evening almost like a silent movie. His smile. His surprisingly smooth, hairless hands. Almost delicate. She remembered his alert look. She didn’t remember what she said but she remembered him nodding, paying attention, laughing. She didn’t remember what he said either, only that as he spoke he had lifted his hands eloquently and looked at her, properly looked at her. And perhaps it was then that she had understood that she had been starved of that intimate, urgent sense of being looked at, noticed, recognised – or perhaps that came later.
The only bit of conversation she remembered was afterwards, when they left the bar and he accompanied her to where she had locked up her bike.
‘I had to see that you really had one,’ he said. ‘That it’s not an imaginary bike.’
‘I really do have one.’
‘Where’s your helmet?’
‘I don’t have one of those.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I don’t want to.’
‘Why?’
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nbsp; ‘I want to feel free.’
‘Free and brain-damaged?’ he said.
‘They don’t necessarily go together.’
Brain-damaged. Brain-damaged. At that moment, he may have pictured her, sprawled on her bike under a lorry or a bus. And now she could picture him.
‘We should do this again,’ he said.
‘All right.’
Another of the things Neve remembered from that evening is that he didn’t crowd her. He sat opposite her, didn’t press himself against her, didn’t lean over her. He didn’t touch her arm or put his hand on hers.
But, after she had unfastened her bike and was holding the D-lock in her hand, he kissed her goodbye, first on one cheek and then the next. And then – somehow this wasn’t initiated by him or by her but by both of them – they kissed on the lips, at first softly, then more urgently. She opened her lips. He tasted of the wine they had drunk together. Neve didn’t feel twenty-five again, but fifteen, with everything in front of her. It had been so shockingly intimate that she felt faint. They moved apart and looked at each other, a little dazed.
‘Fucking hell,’ she said.
‘I don’t,’ he began. ‘I don’t usually do this.’
Even then, Neve was certain that wasn’t true but she didn’t mind. He was just trying to be polite.
She didn’t remember anything specifically about what happened when she got home. Perhaps Rory was reading and Connor was playing football in the tiny garden, banging the ball into fragile shrubs and ploughing up the grass into muddy runnels. She probably cooked dinner. Maybe she had an argument with Mabel. She couldn’t even remember if Mabel had been there. Fletcher would most likely have been in his room. They would have all eaten together – something they’d always done even during the worst times.
Afterwards, perhaps they looked at something on TV, one of the series they watched as a family, or perhaps they played cards, or maybe everyone retreated to their own spaces, Rory to read, Connor to play a computer game, Mabel to do whatever Mabel did in her room: brood and stare at her pale face in the mirror and huddle under her bedclothes and cry. Sometimes the house felt happy and full of light and comfort, and sometimes, no matter what Neve did, it was heavy with gloom. She and Fletcher would have gone to bed together. Did they have sex? They still did fairly regularly, even after all these years and his bouts of depression and Mabel’s more flamboyant, even lethal, form of despair. They had tried to keep holding on to each other, despite the temptation to turn away from each other because of the pain. But she couldn’t remember that night.