The Lying Room
Page 32
And it was right. There had been so much deceit, so much obfuscation. She had lied to the police, she had lied to her husband, she had lied to her friends. She had lied to everybody except Mabel.
Almost every part of the police investigation was wrong or misleading, the crucial evidence had been removed or destroyed. Their narrative of events was entirely false.
But after all of that, the conclusions were correct.
Neve thought to herself that it could be seen as comic, except that it wasn’t comic at all, not in any way.
‘It was good of you to come and tell me,’ she continued. ‘I suppose I’ll miss you suddenly popping up in my life when I least expect it.’
‘I thought you’d like to know,’ Hitching said. ‘But that wasn’t the only reason I came.’
Neve felt a lurch of panic that had become horribly familiar. It was the sense that she might have forgotten something, made a mistake, said the wrong thing.
‘We’re going out for a drink this evening,’ said Hitching. ‘Two cases closed. Two results. My boss is a very happy woman. She’s very happy and she’s very happy with me. But do you know who isn’t happy?’
‘Me,’ said Neve. ‘I’m not particularly happy, just at the moment.’
‘Apart from you, of course. I know what you’ve been through. But I was talking about my colleague, Celia. The aforementioned Celia Ryman.’
‘Why isn’t she happy?’
‘She didn’t want to close the case.’
‘Why?’
Hitching made an expansive gesture. ‘Exactly. That’s what I said. I said to her, we’ve cracked two cases. Take the victory, I said. You know what worried her?’
‘No, what?’
‘The crime scene,’ he said. ‘I mean the first one. The way the whole flat was cleaned from top to bottom. She didn’t understand why Ziegler would have done that.’
‘Is this your colleague talking or you talking?’
‘A bit of both maybe.’
‘So are you saying that the case isn’t really closed?’
Hitching shook his head. ‘No, it’s closed. Signed off on. Everyone reassigned. There’ll be the inquest but that’s a done deal.’
‘So that’s that then.’
‘Kind of,’ said Hitching. He put his hands in his suit pockets and he took on an almost pleading tone. ‘You know, one of the difficult things you learn in my job is that the law isn’t about finding out what really happened. It’s about building a case, assembling evidence and seeing if it’s proved beyond a reasonable doubt. My first boss said to me that some cases you win and some cases you lose, and if you obsess too much about what really happened, it’ll drive you mad.’
‘You’ve got the right man,’ she said. ‘Why are you saying this?’
‘That’s what I said to Celia. We’ve got the right man all right. He told you all he’d just arrived in London. Turns out he’d been staying with a friend in Somers Town for almost four weeks.’
‘So he was there all along?’ said Neve.
‘All along. And we talked to the first wife. She confirmed your story. He was an angry man, she says. He had always been fixated on a girl from university, blamed her for everything.’
‘Renata,’ said Neve, careful not to make it into a question.
‘She didn’t know the name but it sounds plausible.’
He squared his shoulders slightly, like he was working himself up to say something. ‘I want to make it clear, Neve . . . Is it OK if I still call you Neve?’
‘Sure.’
‘Well, Neve, as I say, the case is finished. I’m done with it. I’m already working on something else.’ He took a step closer and spoke in a subdued tone as if he were worried about being overheard, even though there was nobody within thirty yards. ‘I feel like I’m missing something. Could you tell me what it is?’
‘Why? To make you feel better?’
‘To make me feel better, yes. And to make you feel better as well, maybe.’
Neve suddenly felt as if she were back in the flat, Saul’s body on the floor, back at that moment of decision. She looked into Hitching’s dark eyes, his unreadable face. The thought of unburdening herself at last, describing everything she had gone through and confessing her guilt, was so tempting that she could feel the words in her mouth. But Hitching wasn’t a priest or a doctor, he was a detective. She didn’t trust him. Mustn’t trust him.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said coolly. ‘Will Ziegler killed Saul Stevenson and tried to kill me and died when he fell. That is the truth; that is your case. I can’t say any more than that and I don’t know which bit of that is meant to make me feel better.’
His eyes seemed to become even darker in disappointment.
‘All right,’ he said softly and deliberately. ‘I suppose we’re done. By the way, you’ll get a letter in a day or two. It’ll say that you could be offered counselling for what you’ve gone through. They say it can be helpful, you know, to have someone to tell things to.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
Hitching nodded. ‘See you then. I’ll miss dropping in on you.’
‘It always made me feel a bit nervous.’
‘Nervous?’
‘Don’t police officers make everyone nervous?’
‘You don’t need to think of me as a police officer anymore.’
She met his gaze and held it. ‘I will always think of you as a police officer,’ she said.
He nodded slowly.
‘I guess that’s that then,’ he said.
‘I guess it is.’
He turned and made his way back through the allotments. Even from behind, he didn’t look like a man who had just been congratulated on a successful case.
When he was out of sight, Neve squatted and with her trowel made a small, deep hole in the earth. She took off the little gold necklace and for a moment held it in the palm of her hand, staring at it. Then she dropped it into the hole and covered it, standing to press down the earth with her foot.
Suddenly she smelled something. She realised it was from a bonfire of branches at the other end of the gardens, the end near the Lea River. It was the reek of autumn, the reek of change, the ending of the year.
She took hold of her spade, put her boot on the top of the blade, pushed it into the dark soft soil and started to dig.
11
Time, You Thief
He saw her first coming down the stairs that he was going up. She was with a crowd of other people who were talking and laughing, but they were all just a blur. She was quite tall, not thin but not plump either; strong-looking. Her hair was dark and as he drew closer he saw that her eyes were a pale kind of brown, like pond water. She was wearing jeans, a blue tee shirt and white pumps. She was looking straight at him. She smiled. She smiled at him.
Then she was gone.
But he stood still on the stairs and let the people flow past him.
‘My name’s Will,’ he said.
It was a party. He didn’t normally go to parties but he’d found out she was going to be at this one. He’d worried she wasn’t going to turn up but then there she was, at the end of the room, talking to a thin man with glasses. He made his way towards her. She was wearing a long, high-necked dress and had an over-sized watch on her wrist. And now at last he was next to her. She had a sprinkle of freckles on the bridge of her nose.
‘Neve,’ she said.
He held out a hand and she took it.
‘Join us,’ she said and made a space for him in the circle.
He sat beside her on the grass. She introduced him to everyone. Tamsin, Renata, Gary, Alison, Jackie. Other people whose names he quickly forgot.
She was wearing a yellow dress and she had grass in her hair. She held out a punnet of strawberries. He took one and put it in his mouth. Cool and sweet.
Renata was a mistake. Anyway, when it came to it, it wasn’t really a betrayal of Neve because he couldn’t do it. She didn’t seem to mind at
all. She laughed and kissed him on the cheek and said it was because they were both drunk and maybe it was just as well. They could be friends instead. She lit a cigarette and said friends were more important than lovers in the end.
He asked her to dance with him and she left the man she was talking to and stood opposite him, lifting her skirt in one hand. She often wore long skirts and dresses, brightly coloured, quite torn and patched up. Her feet were bare. He wasn’t a practised dancer but he tried to copy other people and it seemed all right. She was moving to the music and smiling at him. She took his hands and made a complicated twirl.
It was just for a minute.
They were talking about love and fidelity. Gary was against it. He said it was a patriarchal invention to subjugate women and Tamsin didn’t know how you could ever want to stay with one person for the rest of your life – or rather, she said gloomily, no one would want to stay with her. Renata said that love was one thing and fidelity was something else.
‘It’s about making a choice,’ said Neve. ‘About making a promise. However hard it is.’
Someone said that didn’t sound very romantic and Will shook his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I agree with Neve.’
In the little café they always went to, they were discussing the weekend they were going to spend in the country. It was Jackie’s idea because it was Jackie who knew of a house they could borrow. They were going to take board games and gin. A man called Fletcher, who Will hadn’t met before but who was funny and lugubrious at the same time, said he would bring fireworks. Renata said they should dress up in fancy clothes for dinner.
‘It sounds fun,’ Will said at last.
A silence fell.
Then Neve put a hand on his arm.
‘Why don’t you come with us,’ she said. ‘There’s room for one more.’
The house was huge and beautiful, with outhouses, a swimming pool, a long lawn and shady wooded spaces. They drew lots for rooms. Will’s was a poky box room at the top of the house under the eaves where he thought he could hear mice scuttling and scrabbling. Neve got the nicest room, though she protested to everyone she didn’t need it. It was on the ground floor with French windows that opened out on to fruit trees and roses.
‘It’s far too big for one person,’ she said.
Will understood.
They cooked sausages for breakfast. They drank gin and threw a Frisbee. They swam in the pool in the hot afternoon. They dressed up for dinner, ate pies, consumed vast quantities of wine. Gary played the piano, badly, and everyone sang.
Jackie found bottles in the back of a cupboard and mixed everything together into an orange-coloured lethal brew.
They played Scrabble. Fletcher won. He was wearing a shirt belonging to Neve and she was wearing his hat, which was too big for her and slanted over one eye rakishly. When Will looked at her, he felt like he was watching a film or listening to a song.
They made a fire in the old fireplace and when a spark spat out and landed on the rug, Tamsin threw her whisky at it and it exploded into life. Everyone ran round shouting and laughing and pouring water over it.
They went into the garden and danced to the music in their heads.
Jackie took her clothes off and jumped naked into the pool. Everyone followed. Will turned his head so he didn’t have to see their gleaming shapes in the water.
There were fireworks, bright petals falling towards them. A half-moon hung above them. Gibbous moon, said Gary, lying on the grass. Even when he was drunk he was pedantic.
‘We must always remember this,’ said Renata. She started crying.
Will touched Neve’s fingers and she smiled at him. Her eyes were bright.
He was going to say something but then she was gone.
Just before dawn, everyone gathered in the kitchen. Jackie plundered the chest freezer and came out with pizza.
But Neve was no longer there. Will knew where she had gone. He made his way towards her room, which was just across the hall. The house was full of creaks and the rattling of old pipes. Neve’s door was closed. For a moment he stood in front of it, gathering his courage. Then he turned the handle and pushed.
It swung inwards. A ghost moon hung in the window; its insubstantial light lay over the bed, the puddle of sheets, a tangle of naked legs.
He took a blind step forward and stopped. For a second he saw Neve’s pale face; then she leaned forward and her dark hair fell like a curtain over her and Fletcher, shutting him out.
He stumbled from the room and into the kitchen.
‘Neve and Fletcher,’ he said. As if there was another fire that needed to be put out.
There were roars of laughter all round him. He looked from face to face. His cheeks burned. Everyone was laughing. Howling with laughter because it was a great big joke. Laughing and laughing, young and happy and hopeful. But not him. He was the joke.
He left the house, went down the lawn, past the pool, into the wood. He was worried that they might come after him but nobody did.
He lay curled up under a tree, nauseous and shivery. The night was over. The sun rose like a terrible red ball that swung through his skull. It was all over and it was only just beginning.
About the Author
NICCI FRENCH is the pseudonym for the writing partnership of journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. The couple are married and live in London and Suffolk. They have written 21 books.
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Praise for Nicci French
“Fabulous, unsettling, and riveting.”
—Louise Penny
“Complex. . . . Intriguing. . . . Truly unique.”
—Tami Hoag
“Searing. . . . In the rich vein of Kate Atkinson.”
—Joseph Finder
“Unforgettable. Psychological dynamite.”
—Alan Bradley
Also by Nicci French
FRIEDA KLEIN NOVELS
Blue Monday
Tuesday’s Gone
Waiting for Wednesday
Thursday’s Child
Friday on My Mind
Dark Saturday
Sunday Silence
Day of the Dead
OTHER NOVELS
The Memory Game
The Safe House
Killing Me Softly
Beneath the Skin
The Red Room
Land of the Living
Secret Smile
Catch Me When I Fall
Losing You
Until It’s Over
The Other Side of the Door
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE LYING ROOM. Copyright © 2019 by Joined-Up Writing. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Published as The Lying Room in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Simon & Schuster.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
Cover design by Ploy Siripant
Cover photograph © Elisabeth Ansley / Trevillion Images
Digital Edition OCTOBER 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-267674-0
Version 08142019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-267672-6
ISBN: 978-0-06-267673-3 (library hardcover edition)
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