The Lying Room

by Nicci French

  ‘It’s therapy,’ said Renata. ‘At least that’s what she says. What about you?’ She looked at Neve. ‘Is cycling therapy?’

  ‘I don’t know about that. It’s quite stressful.’

  ‘Your bruise is turning yellow.’

  ‘I know.’ She wished people would stop saying that.

  ‘Are you sure you weren’t in a fight?’ asked Gary.

  ‘Quite sure.’ Neve put her coffee down on her desk.

  ‘Hey,’ said a voice behind her.

  Neve turned round. It was Tamsin, damp hair tied back, a flushed face, denim skirt and a cotton shirt half tucked in and trainers. Again, she had the eerie sense that she was seeing her friend clearly for the first time in years: the weight she’d put on (and was now trying to run off), the frown marks, the way she chewed her lip when she was anxious. It seemed such a short while ago that they’d been young and reckless and full of a radical optimism. Neve had a sudden memory, so vivid she could almost have been back there, of the four of them sitting in the cemetery just near this office one lunchtime, eating cherries and spitting the pips and laughing. She couldn’t remember what they’d been laughing about but she could remember the feeling of it, carefree and joyous. For a moment, she felt bewildered.

  Suddenly Tamsin’s expression changed. ‘Fucking hell,’ she said.

  Neve had knocked her coffee over. It had gone everywhere, across her papers and a file and book and it had even splashed across the keyboard of her computer. They all rushed across, making such efforts to be helpful that they pushed her out of the way. Gary picked her papers out of the pool of coffee. Renata ripped some sheets off a kitchen roll and started wiping the surface.

  ‘Did any get on the computer?’ asked Tamsin.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Neve. She wanted to cry. No, she wanted to howl and shout and let the strange and ghastly feeling that was burrowing its way through her guts out into the open. She bit her lip. ‘I think it splashed a bit.’

  ‘I know this is irritating to say,’ Tamsin continued, ‘but you need to keep liquid away from computers. It’s the one thing that just utterly destroys them. I know it’s not much comfort now, but it might be a wake-up call.’

  Neve stopped herself from saying that, yes, Tamsin was being irritating. Things were going badly enough already. She swallowed hard and thanked them all and said they should all just get back to their desks and carry on with the work they were doing.

  What they were doing was preparing a brochure for a pharmaceutical conference. It wasn’t the sort of job they were used to. Gary had complained about the whole idea from the outset.

  ‘In the old days we would have been standing outside the conference with placards, not doing their propaganda for them.’

  Renata had tried to soothe matters by saying that they needed to show that they were team players but Tamsin had taken Gary’s side.

  ‘What’s next?’ she’d asked. ‘Arms dealers? Tobacco?’

  Neve had tried to stay out of these arguments. Saul was part of the management and she didn’t want to take sides either for or against him. When Tamsin had called on her to give an opinion she just said that the issue wasn’t worth discussing. This was a job they had to do and that was that. It also happened to be true, as even Gary grumpily admitted.

  He contemplated Neve’s computer. ‘Actually, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If we accidentally’ – he made scare quotes with his fingers – ‘spilt coffee on a few strategic computers in the building. That might ease our hurt feelings.’

  Renata shook her head. ‘Is it going to ease your hurt feelings to get us all fired? Or arrested?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Neve said. ‘I was stupid. You get back to work and I’ll clean it up.’

  She found a box of tissues and wiped her desk and shook coffee off the papers on the desk. None of them seemed particularly important. When she was finished, she sat for a moment and stared at the screen of her computer, then she looked around at her colleagues. It was like a bomb was set to go off and everybody’s life was going to be changed by it and she was the only person who knew. Almost the only person.

  Tamsin was talking loudly on the phone. ‘And then he only went and . . .’ She realised that everybody could hear what she was saying and her voice dropped to a murmur. Neve assumed it wasn’t a work call. Gary was hammering on his keyboard as if it was a manual typewriter. Renata was just staring at her screen. Neve thought of the old days, in their old rackety office. Usually you could tell what people were doing. You could see them sketching, designing pages, marking up copy. Now everyone was bent over their computers; they could have been accountants or they could have been poets.

  Neve could barely force herself even to look at her screen or at the papers on her desk. She looked through her email, deleting the offers of car insurance and wealth from Nigeria and Eastern Europe. All the time she thought of what was happening in Covent Garden and she wondered how they would learn the news. The police would alert the family. But would they alert his place of work? And if so, who would they alert? Would they contact the CEO? Neve couldn’t even remember his name. He was Canadian and had only been appointed a few months earlier. Saul’s wife might reach out to someone in the company, most likely Katie.

  Saul had avoided talking to Neve about his wife. Even so, she knew she was called Bernice and she knew things about her that she didn’t think she had a right to know. She had once been introduced to her at some office function, when they had first joined Redfern, but that was all.

  Renata had met her once or twice. She had got talking to her at a company event. She described her as glamorous, a bit brisk, chilly, looking over her shoulder for someone more important. Gary had never met her and he had had little to do with Saul since the takeover. He was angry about what had happened to their company and contemptuous of the people who now had power over them. He projected much of that anger on to Saul and the other suits. Neve had spent an evening with him a few weeks ago when he’d drunk about three drinks for every one of hers. As the drinks had gone down, he had become increasingly lacerating about everything, including himself. He should have resigned as soon as this takeover started being talked about. In fact, he should have left years ago and formed his own company. He should have gone freelance, like Fletcher did. Now there was a man of integrity. Nobody told Fletcher what to do. Nobody told Fletcher what time to turn up in an office. (Neve thought to herself that this was part of Fletcher’s problem, but she didn’t say it aloud.)

  Neve could remember particular things Gary had said when the alcohol was really kicking in.

  ‘You can tell a lot about this country,’ he said, jabbing his finger at Neve in a way that made her move backwards, ‘by what men like Saul Stevenson have done to men like me.’

  Remembering that, with a sickening lurch, Neve started to think about something she had tried to avoid. Who could have done this to Saul? Gary disliked Saul. He more than disliked him. For Gary, he was a symbol of everything that had gone wrong with his life, of everything that had stopped him from being the person he had wanted to be. But could he possibly have killed him? Neve tried to imagine a scenario in which the two of them might have met and got into an argument that turned violent and Gary had struck out at Saul and perhaps he’d fallen and hit his head and so it was almost an accident.

  But it was a laughable idea. Even Tamsin, even Renata, would be more likely to get into a fist fight than skinny, anxious Gary. And this meeting that supposedly turned nasty – why would Saul meet Gary in his flat? And if it were Gary who initiated it, why would he turn up at the flat when Saul was supposed to be at a conference? And if all that had happened, why would Gary be bad-mouthing Saul in the office, drawing attention to his hostility? And then she remembered the hammer.

  Neve told herself to stop thinking about that. It was a distraction. At some point, today or even tomorrow, everybody would know. She needed to prepare herself. She needed t
o act the way people acted when something completely unexpected happened, something shocking. She tried to think about how she would have behaved if she hadn’t known about it in advance. Would she have cried? Sworn? Laughed in the nervous way people do at funerals? She had never been good at acting, even in school plays. She must be glacially calm. That was often the way people reacted to terrible news. Yes, that’s what she would do. Be mute, expressionless.

  She resumed typing an email when she sensed someone was near her. She looked up. Gary was leaning on the side of her desk, slightly too close, with a large, odd smile on his thin face. She suddenly felt tired and she looked away. This all felt too hard.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m in the middle of something.’

  Gary spoke as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘Do you know this friend of mine, Jill Blaine? I knew her at college.’

  ‘I think I’ve met her. Why are you grinning at me like that?’ His smile was wobbling and changing; it looked like there was a live creature in the middle of his face.

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t stop myself. It’s not funny.’ He swallowed; she saw his Adam’s apple rise and fall convulsively. ‘It’s a complete coincidence, but a few years ago she worked with Bernice Stevenson. It was on a magazine. Actually that doesn’t matter. But they became quite close. You know that Bernice Stevenson is Saul’s wife?’

  Neve felt a ringing in her ears; everything went blurry so that she had to rub her eyes. She felt a strong feeling of nausea. This was it. This was it. It was happening now. She thought of that moment when you put your hand in boiling water and the pain hasn’t arrived yet but you know it’s coming.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she managed to say.

  ‘I just talked to her. I mean Jill. And she just got off the phone with Bernice.’ He paused for a moment and when he spoke it was in a puzzled tone, not believing what he was saying. ‘He’s dead. Saul died.’

  There was a pause. Neve’s mind suddenly went blank. She didn’t know what to do, what to say. She wished she could see what Tamsin and Renata were doing and she could copy them but Gary was in the way so she couldn’t. She gripped her desk with both hands as though to keep herself in place.

  ‘My God,’ she said. It didn’t feel enough. ‘Who would do that?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Neve felt a flash of horror and shame at her stupidity. The very first thing she had said and she had given herself away.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Dead?’ said Tamsin. ‘Fucking hell. Did he have a heart attack? He’s too young.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Gary. ‘I don’t think so. Jill said everyone at the house was crying. But there were police there. That doesn’t sound like a heart attack.’

  ‘It must have been an accident.’ Tamsin looked at Gary. ‘Or was it you? Were you sticking pins into a doll?’

  Gary looked at her. His smile faded. ‘That’s not funny.’

  ‘What?’ said Tamsin. ‘Are you pretending to like him now?’

  ‘Stop.’ Neve found her voice at last. ‘A person has died. Someone we know.’

  Then they heard a sob and looked round. Tears were running down Renata’s face and she was wiping them with her sleeve.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m being stupid. I can’t stop myself. Oh dear.’

  Neve walked over to Renata and put her arms round her. She could feel the squash of her breasts and the soft tickle of her hair.

  ‘You’re just reacting the way we all should.’

  ‘You seem pretty calm,’ said Tamsin.

  ‘I’m just in shock,’ Neve said. ‘Like all of us.’

  For several minutes they were the only ones who knew. Outside their office the rest of the company went on as normal, staring at computer screens, talking on phones, drinking coffee out of cardboard cups, staring into space. And then everything changed: all of a sudden, groups were forming, people standing up and walking across to other desks. It was as though the place had been brought alive, Neve could see the same look on several faces, a kind of avid excitement. But other people were crying: Saul’s assistant Katie was openly sobbing and several colleagues clustered around her, pushing glasses of water and handfuls of tissues towards her.

  ‘Come on,’ said Tamsin. She stood up and opened the door. Her shirt was still only half tucked in.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Gary.

  ‘We shouldn’t just stay in here, as if we weren’t part of this.’

  ‘We aren’t part of it.’

  ‘Yes, Gary, we are.’

  They went into the hubbub together and it was like being at a party. Voices rose and fell, people made animated gestures, leaned towards each other, put hands over mouths, cartoonishly distressed. Neve looked from face to face. She saw mouths open and shut, eyes blink. Saul, she thought, this is about you, but you’re not here. You’re the great absence. What would you make of it? She had a sudden vision of him, raising his eyebrows at her across the room, that ironic smile.

  No one knew the cause of death yet. Someone said to her, passing on fresh information as if they owned it, that he had been found at his flat, not at his family home. Neve felt her mind skitter. Would she have known about the flat? Did other people know? She had never understood how intricate and delicate the act of communication was, how many cues and contexts there were. She’d taken it all for granted but now she’d lost her grip on all the unwritten rules. She had no idea how to speak. If she opened her mouth, perhaps the truth would vomit out.

  ‘Flat?’ she managed.

  That’s what she would do. If she had to say anything, she would simply repeat what others said.

  She removed herself from the huddle of people and went towards the door. No one saw her go.

  She walked to Bunhill Cemetery, where all those years ago the four of them had eaten their bag of cherries. That must have been in June, she thought, or even July – cherries always come later than you think. Of course she’d been here many times since. She would wheel her bike through it on the way to work or come with sandwiches in the lunch hour. It was a small, crowded space – the religious dissenters had been buried in tightly packed rows, their stones tipped towards each other, as if the dead made up a community, still in conversation. John Bunyan was here, and William Blake, on whose memorial stone Gary sometimes laid wild flowers he picked from the verge on his way in. ‘What would William Blake think?’ Gary had asked about some Redfern proposal. ‘William Blake died in fucking poverty,’ Tamsin had responded.

  Neve sat on the grass beneath one of the great plane trees whose leaves were turning coppery. She closed her eyes. She tried to breathe normally; it was as if she had forgotten how to do that too. In and out. She felt the banging of her heart, like something trying to escape. Saul had been killed, and she had removed evidence – evidence of their affair at least – and then someone else had gone in after her and removed even more. The hammer. Maybe other things.

  She let herself remember his dead body. The hardening of it when she went the second time. What would he look like now? Was he even a ‘he’ any longer, or an ‘it’, a corpse? She imagined him lying on a slab now, in the cold and the glare of lights. Pathologists turning him, examining him, prodding his limbs, his chest, moving his head from side to side, forcing open his mouth, slicing through his soft skin.

  ‘I have to see you,’ he had said, the morning after that first kiss, stopping by her desk, asking her into his own office as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world, speaking to her in plain sight, everyone could see them through the glass walls, not touching her, not even the graze of a hand against hers, not smiling at her. Just: ‘I have to see you.’ She had nodded. No use pretending: this was going to happen.

  ‘Will you come to my flat?’ he asked.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now. I’ll leave at once. Follow in, say, half an hour.’

  She told Tamsin, Renata and Gary there was an emergency at home and they nodded, barely
noticing. They were all used to each other’s emergencies, and anyway, Neve usually worked harder than the rest of them, arriving earlier, leaving later, dependable. She sent a message to Fletcher saying she might be a bit late; there was an emergency at work. She added that Connor had swimming after school and needed picking up. She cycled to the address Saul had given her. There was sun on her face, she could feel it now, and a warm wind. She was young again, the years and the burdens falling away until her body was light and rippling with desire.

  Nothing mattered except this. A door opening. Blinds pulled down. Silence except for the traffic outside. Clothes taken off, garment by garment. Barely touching each other, holding back, waiting until at last the waiting was over and it felt to Neve, that first time in the flat, that she had been dying of thirst in the desert for a long time but she hadn’t even known it until Saul had kissed her.

  ‘I’ve never done this before,’ she said afterwards, lying together in a knot of sheets. Then she added into the pulse of silence, ‘You don’t have to say anything.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Don’t be so modest.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  He looked at her then, frowning slightly. At last he said, ‘I don’t know, Neve.’

  ‘Oh.’ But she felt oddly elated at his answer.

  ‘I’m not good with words,’ he said, which was a lie. He was very good with words; he always knew how to turn them to his advantage. ‘I’m smitten.’

  ‘Smitten will do,’ Neve said. ‘For the time being.’ Turning towards him, drawing him closer. That first time, when she let the world go hang.

  She opened her eyes to the gravestones and autumn trees. Her mobile was giving a succession of pings and she pulled it out of her pocket. It was Tamsin: Come back! Then: He was killed!!!! Then Gary: The police are coming to the office. Where are you?

  On my way, she sent. She stood up, brushed the grass and dry leaves off her clothes and steadied herself. Now you’re for it, she thought.

  Detective Chief Inspector Alastair Hitching was tall and solid, with the heft of someone who worked out. Neve guessed he was probably about her age but it was hard to tell because he was completely bald which made him oddly ageless. His pale skull shone under the strip lighting as he walked through the office. He wore a dark grey suit and a white shirt and his black shoes were polished.