by Nicci French
‘Renata’s birthday party.’
‘Oh fuck, that’s right. Do we have to go?’
‘Yes, we have to go. We don’t have to stay long.’
‘But isn’t it inappropriate? With Saul having died?’
‘We didn’t really know him.’
‘Have you bought her anything?’ said Fletcher.
‘I asked you to. This morning. Remember?’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes. Didn’t I?’
‘No. I think you said you’d do it. Can’t you get something out of your store?’ said Fletcher.
Neve kept a box full of possible gifts in case of emergency. But a series of birthdays and unexpected events had gradually emptied it and when Neve went up to her bedroom and pulled it out of the cupboard, all she found was a man’s belt and a tee shirt that was at least three sizes too large. She looked around desperately and then had an idea. She took a hardback novel from the shelf. She had been given it for her last birthday by Fletcher’s sister. It had won a prize and was highly regarded. Neve had meant to read it but as yet she had not even opened it. She examined it from every angle. It looked completely new. She checked to see if Fletcher’s sister had ruined everything by writing in it but fortunately she hadn’t.
Suddenly she heard a crash followed by the sound of something breaking. She ran out on to the landing. Robbie and Mabel had got the chair inside the house and were now pushing it up the stairs. It was teetering on the edge of the bannister. Neve could see behind them a framed photograph that had been knocked off the wall and was lying on the hall floor surrounded by broken glass.
‘I’ll clear it up later,’ said Mabel. Her face was flickering with rage as she looked at Neve.
‘Stop,’ said Neve.
‘I can’t stop,’ said Robbie’s voice, from underneath the chair, further down the stairs, where he was holding it up.
Neve shouted at Fletcher, who emerged reluctantly. Neve managed to squeeze under the chair and then position herself next to Robbie, pushing it upwards while Fletcher dragged it from in front. They tipped it round the corner and reached Mabel’s doorway. However they twisted the chair, it was just a centimetre larger than the gap.
‘This time you really are going to have to take the door off the hinges,’ said Neve.
‘Can you help?’ Mabel hissed to her mother.
‘I can,’ said Fletcher.
‘Fletcher can’t help,’ said Neve. ‘He’s going to a party with me.’
Renata opened her front door wearing a tight-fitting purple dress and was swathed in a feather boa and clutching a glass of wine. Neve handed her the present, which she had wrapped in brown paper that Renata greedily ripped off. She looked at the book with the bleary attention of someone who was already a little drunk.
‘Isn’t this the one that won a prize?’
‘I haven’t actually read it,’ said Neve. ‘But it’s meant to be very good.’
‘I’ll read it,’ said Renata. ‘I need to improve my mind. Go through, go through. Mingle.’
Fletcher stayed talking with Renata while Neve walked past people she didn’t know and poured herself a glass of white wine in the kitchen. She briefly got into conversation with a man who said he was a neighbour of Renata and Charlie’s and that in the last ten years he had earned more from the appreciation in value of his house than he’d earned from his salary.
‘What about that?’ he said, and then Neve noticed Gary standing just outside the kitchen door in the back garden. She excused herself and walked over to join him. He was smoking a cigarette.
‘You OK?’ she said.
Gary gave a slow smile and kissed her on her cheek.
‘Can we make a deal?’ he said.
‘What kind of a deal?’
‘Since I’ve been here, I’ve had three people come up to me and ask if I worked for the company where someone was just murdered. It’s like I’ve got a tiny, tiny bit of celebrity and they want some of it.’
‘So what was the deal you were talking about?’
‘Shall we just take it as read that we’re sad and shocked and not dine out on it.’
Neve took a sip of her drink. ‘That’s all very well. But he was murdered. It’s going to be a big thing.’
Gary made a dismissive gesture with his cigarette.
‘He was probably killed by a burglar,’ he said. ‘Or a jealous lover. It’ll be cleared up quickly.’ He looked over Neve’s shoulder and pulled a face. ‘Someone’s not in a good mood.’
Neve looked round. Renata’s husband, Charlie, was coming through the kitchen, collecting empty glasses and putting them in the sink. He was behaving as if the party was ending rather than beginning. Gary boisterously waved him across. Charlie frowned.
‘Have you seen Renata?’
‘She let me in,’ said Neve. ‘She seemed to be having a good time. She might be having a cigarette in the garden.’
‘Could you do me a favour?’ Charlie asked.
‘What?’
‘Could you keep an eye on her and make sure she doesn’t drink too much?’
‘You mean in general?’ said Gary cheerfully.
‘Tonight. At this party.’
‘It’s her birthday,’ said Neve.
‘And I don’t want her to spoil it.’
For the next hour, Neve drifted around the party and people talked to her or at her animatedly: about their children’s education, about Brexit, about the generally terrible state of the world. Several people had heard about the murder. Neve just nodded and murmured and people seemed satisfied. People kept topping her glass up and she was feeling quite blurry when Renata staggered into her and put her arm around her, almost dragging her down.
‘What did he mean?’ Renata said.
‘What did who mean?’
‘About the flat? About who had been to the flat? And you’d been to the flat. Why did you go to the flat?’
‘We’ll have a proper talk about this tomorrow,’ said Neve, looking round, a little desperately. She saw Charlie on the other side of the room. She had an idea. She detached herself from Renata and walked across towards him, tapping her glass as she did so and calling for quiet. The hum of the party stopped. She gave a cough.
‘Hi, everybody. My name is Neve. I’m an old friend of Renata’s. We all want to wish her a happy birthday but first I’m sure that her husband, Charlie, will want to propose a toast.’
She looked across at Charlie and saw his pale, round, unsmiling face and at that exact moment realised that she had also had too much to drink. But it was too late. Everyone had turned and was looking expectantly at him and he was looking at her with an expression that was difficult to read except that it clearly did not represent gratitude.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Well.’ And he cleared his throat.
‘Someone get him a drink,’ said a voice.
‘I’ll do it.’
That was Renata’s voice, coming from behind Neve. Neve didn’t dare move or look round or say anything. She was just looking at Charlie with a sort of creeping horror. Then she heard a sound. A terrible sound, starting with a cry and turning into a smashing clinking tumble. Now she looked round. Renata was sprawled on the ground and as she had fallen, she had clearly grabbed at the tablecloth. The tablecloth on which the glasses and bottles had been standing. And she had brought them down with her. She had screamed as she fell but now she was laughing. Neve looked round at Charlie. He was not laughing. He turned and left the room.
Neve and Fletcher were silent on the Uber ride back from the party. Neve was aware that she was more drunk than Fletcher. Perhaps Fletcher wasn’t drunk at all. He was certainly in a bad mood. As they entered their house and stepped into darkness, Neve put her finger to her lips.
‘They’re probably all asleep,’ she said.
‘You don’t know anything about being quiet,’ said Fletcher in a murmur. ‘You usually wake me when you tiptoe in late at night.’
Neve so hoped that wasn’t true. Fletcher
started to climb the stairs and she followed him, stepping with exaggerated care. She didn’t feel particularly in control over her movements, especially in the dark. The house seemed to be rotating, very slowly, around her. She reached the top of the stairs. The grey shape of Fletcher’s back moved in front of her. Suddenly, in the darkness, there was a sound of banging and tumbling and a shout. It came from slightly beneath her, down on the floor.
‘Fuck,’ said Fletcher’s voice. ‘Fuck. Fuck.’
She looked into the darkness and saw the dim shape of something ahead of her, something that Fletcher had fallen over. It was the armchair still stuck in Mabel’s doorway.
3
The Reunion
The chair was still there the next morning when Neve clambered out of bed, with a heavy head and dry mouth, and went on to the landing. She stooped to look under it into Mabel’s room. The thick curtains were closed but the little lamp next to the bed was on, casting a dim circle of light on to a scene of utter chaos. It was as if a team of burglars had run in and turned everything over in the effort to find some missing object. Clothes lay in drifts on the floor and hung from the open drawers of the chest, among them several things that belonged to Neve. There were books in teetering columns, splitting folders of papers and multiple towels (Mabel rarely used a towel more than once); in one corner a rickety pile of shoes, a tangle of chargers, a wastepaper basket overflowing with rubbish, an empty wine bottle, several crushed cans and on the window six or seven mugs. And there, almost hidden from view by the chair, Neve saw Mabel herself. She was crouched near the wardrobe and was scrabbling through a bulging bin bag, tossing things behind her. The sight reminded Neve of something and after a few seconds she realised what: the scrappy terrier they’d had when she was a child, who used to love digging in their small garden, earth spraying out in all directions. It was an oddly unsettling sight and made even more so when Mabel suddenly paused in what she was doing and looked up. She stared straight at her mother; her face was round as a button and her lips bloodless. Neither of them spoke. Neve straightened up and went down the stairs.
For once, the staff all arrived early at the Redfern offices. Nobody wanted to miss out on anything, even if it was only rumour and guesswork. There was no pretence that anyone was working. People stood in groups, drinking coffee, gesturing, busy with their expert opinions on the life and times of Saul Stevenson. Murder had made them neighbourly. They asked each other how they were, what they’d heard, put arms around virtual strangers. Doors to the glass-partitioned rooms stood open and people walked in and out without knocking. A woman called Ellie wandered around with an enormous tin of shortbread biscuits she’d brought in. ‘Terrible, isn’t it?’ she murmured with each biscuit she handed out.
Neve and her friends found themselves part of things in a way they had never been before. Even Gary was drawn into an animated huddle by the coffee machine, where he stood for a while, visibly uncomfortable but unable to extricate himself. At the centre of the hubbub was Saul’s assistant Katie, who looked like she had barely slept and who moved slowly in a daze. Yesterday she had wept but this morning she was dry eyed, her mouth a thin straight line. She had worked with Saul for years and Saul had referred to her as his ‘dragon’: orderly, stern, plain speaking and loyal. Neve looked at her nervously: it suddenly seemed impossible that Katie didn’t know about Saul’s personal life, about Neve herself.
At last, with the arrival of Bob who was from senior management, people started to drift reluctantly back to their desks. Neve, sitting in their small space, looked at her friends and suddenly saw what an odd little group they made. Gary looked scrawny and drab, with his fuzzy, untrimmed beard and his favourite grey jumper that the moths had feasted on. Tamsin hadn’t run in that morning, but had gone for swim in the London Fields Lido instead; her hair was still wet and she had tied it back in a high, lopsided ponytail. There was a pencil stuck behind one of her ears, and she had a dark smudge on one cheek. And Renata – well, Renata was clearly suffering the after-effects of the night before. Her coppery hair was a dishevelled halo, her normal brightness was smudged and grimy, and she kept groaning under her breath, pressing her slender fingers against her eyelids. She was wearing a shapeless jumpsuit and when she stood up to make herself more coffee, she looked like a worn rag doll.
When she caught Neve’s eye, she grimaced. ‘I feel like crap. Your turn next.’
‘My turn?’
‘Your birthday. Two weeks’ time, right?’
‘Oh, that. I’m going to go to bed early with a mug of tea.’
She needed to think about Rory’s birthday though, which was a few days after hers. Mabel would be gone by then – unless she meant what she had said about not going. Neve thought of her angry face staring up at her from the floor. An ill wind was blowing through everything, she thought.
The phone on her desk rang loudly. Renata grunted in pain.
‘Hello?’ Neve said.
‘Is that Neve Connolly?’ It was a woman’s voice, clipped and middle-class.
‘It is. How can I help you?’
‘This is Bernice Stevenson.’
For one ghastly moment, Neve could only sit in silence. She knows, she thought. She knows about me.
‘Hello,’ she managed at last. Then she managed to pull herself together. ‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ she said. She glanced wildly at the others; no one seemed to have noticed that her world was caving in. They bent over their screens, oblivious.
‘I know this is out of the blue,’ Bernice was saying. ‘But I’d like to speak to you.’
‘Of course,’ said Neve. Get it over with, she was thinking.
‘I mean, in person.’
‘Oh. But I don’t—’
‘I’m a few minutes away from you,’ Bernice continued. ‘In a café called Roundabout.’
‘I know it.’
‘I’m downstairs.’
Neve hung up. When she stood, her legs felt like water. She made an aimless gesture. ‘I’ve got to just go.’
‘Sorry?’ Tamsin’s eyebrows shot up.
‘Something to attend to,’ said Neve absurdly. She never used words like attend to.
‘Trouble?’ asked Renata sympathetically. She meant with Mabel.
Neve made an indeterminate noise in the back of her throat. ‘Back soon,’ she said as she picked up her old jacket.
She went to the Ladies, and stood in front of the long, speckled mirror. Her battered old jacket, her scuffed shoes, her face tired and bare of make-up, her hair that could do with a cut. She knew that Bernice was thin and elegant and glossy. Soignée, that was the word. But she – and she leaned towards the glass so her breath was misting it, scrutinising her little wrinkles and blemishes – she was workaday, practical, not glamorous; decidedly not classy. She wore flat shoes, bought her clothes from market stores and vintage shops, and rode a bike.
Suddenly Neve felt ashamed of herself. Saul was dead and his widow – the woman she had wronged – was downstairs waiting to speak to her and she was worrying about what she looked like. She washed her face and her hands, looking at the ring on the wedding finger. It hadn’t been expensive and over the years had got a bit bent so it was hard to remove. She remembered Fletcher, in the register office, pushing it over her knuckle and his face working slightly – on the verge of laughter or tears, or maybe both. So long ago, thought Neve; so much water under the bridge. Why had no one warned them how hard it would be?
Neve bought herself a flat white and carried it downstairs to where Bernice was sitting on the sofa in the corner with a glass of mint tea in front of her. She hadn’t touched it. She looked composed and impregnable – and of course, that was probably the point. Her hands were folded in her lap, her legs were crossed. Her dark gold hair was arranged in a prefect coil. Her face was like a beautiful mask: shaped eyebrows, smooth skin, glossy lips. Neve, looking at her from the foot of the stairs, thought how strange it was that the morning after her husband had been found mur
dered, Bernice Stevenson had carefully applied her make-up, done her hair and put studs in her ears. Even her dark blue jeans looked like they’d been freshly ironed – and who irons jeans, thought Neve, especially the day after you discover your husband has been murdered.
She knew that Bernice used to be an assistant editor on a woman’s magazine but several years ago had given up work. Saul had once referred to ‘ladies who lunch’ and Neve had rounded on him: ‘I hate it when men say things like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘You’ll be telling me soon that she doesn’t understand you.’
He hadn’t done that. But he had told Neve that Bernice had once said, in the middle of their lovemaking, ‘Remember we have to put the recycling out tomorrow morning.’ Neve wondered if that was really true or whether it was a way of Saul feeling better about himself. And if was true, she didn’t want to know it. She wished she hadn’t talked to Saul about Fletcher’s depression, like she was making an excuse for her infidelity. She felt shabby and underhand and ashamed. But perhaps it would all be out in the open in a few moments, and then what?
She walked towards Bernice, not smiling and trying to meet her gaze. Should she shake her hand?
‘Neve.’ Bernice didn’t smile either.
‘I’m so very sorry about your husband.’
Up close, Neve saw Bernice was older than she looked from a distance, little marks above her mouth, a looseness in her skin, and she felt an unwelcome surge of pity for her. She sat on the other end of the sofa and took a sip of her coffee before putting it on the table.
‘You must have been surprised to hear from me,’ said Bernice.
‘Well—’ Neve began but Bernice interrupted her.
‘My husband is found murdered and I ring up someone I don’t know. That must seem very strange to you. Why would I do that?’
Neve waited. Her throat ached and her eyes were sore. Every part of her felt tight to the point of breaking and flying apart. Get it over with, she thought. It would be a relief really to be done with this.
‘I’m going mad in a way,’ said Bernice.