by Monica Ali
Hank was at the window. “Car trouble, Lydia?”
“Hank,” she said, trying to steady herself, “you have to give me a ride home. Please.”
“I never heard you swear before, Lydia,” he said, rocking back and forth on his sandaled feet.
“I’m sorry,” she said, scrambling out of the car. “I just really need to get home now.”
Hank drove his Volvo like a hearse. It was all she could do not to scream. “Could we go a little faster, please, Hank?”
He notched it up by three miles an hour. “Someone’s in a hurry,” he said.
Her first instincts had been right. Why hadn’t she listened to them? It would still have been too late to stop him, whatever he’d got he’d use it anyway. But all this time she could have been running, and she was still here, telling herself she was crazy. Telling herself there was nothing to fear.
“That English fella,” said Hank, “had a border collie when he was a boy. Got run over by a truck. Its name was Zorba, same name as my first dog. Now, what are the chances of that?”
“Not high,” said Lydia.
He dropped her off in the driveway and Lydia thanked him and ran for the door. She ran back toward the car, shouting and waving. “Hank! Hank! Stop!”
“Need some help with something?” he said, poking his head out of the window.
“Can you give this to Esther for me?” She pulled the check out of her purse.
He whistled as he looked at it. “Ain’t that so kind of you. Giving out presents on your birthday.” She sprinted off and she heard him hollering behind her, “You take it easy now, Lydia.”
Chapter Twenty-six
All night long as he staked out the house, Grabowski tried to imagine what it was that she could be thinking. After he’d watched her taillights disappear down Albert Street, he’d run back to the bed-and-breakfast knowing he had to act fast. His initial decision had been to get the first available flight back to London. By the time his foot hit the front steps he’d realized that would be a mistake. He knew what he had to do. He grabbed his computer and his camera bag.
Now he couldn’t make sense of her inaction. He was shivering behind a thick stand of viburnum at the perimeter of the yard, wishing he’d thought to pick up his jacket. He couldn’t work it out. Either he was missing something or else she was barking mad. She’d tried to kill him, or at least tried to scare him off. That meant she knew he was on to her and since she didn’t have the bottle to run him over, she would have to take her passport and leave. If he pursued her to the airport and through security he’d be able to get a shot of her waiting at the gate. Even if she spotted him, it would make the story more sensational. It didn’t matter that as soon as she landed she’d be on another plane to somewhere else. There’d be a paper trail behind her that the authorities would follow.
The boyfriend had arrived and then left. She’d summoned him to say good-bye for the last time. After that, the light had come on in her bedroom and she was surely packing a case. He was paranoid that somehow she’d slipped out without him hearing or seeing a thing. He crept back and forth, keeping watch on the house front and back, then repositioned himself at the side. The car stayed where it was on the drive. It was nearly morning now and she still hadn’t gone anywhere. Maybe she wanted to get caught, after all. In that case, why try to crush him beneath her wheels?
He snapped a twig off the viburnum and broke it into pieces. It didn’t make any difference what her motivations were. He was a photographer, not a psychiatrist. But to be truly excellent at this job, you did have to know your subject. There were times when he’d felt like he knew her better than he knew his wife. He could predict her mood swings more accurately and knew more about the structure of her day, her shopping habits. To be fair, he’d devoted more time and thought to her than he ever had to Cathy.
What the hell was going on? Why wasn’t Lydia leaving? An insect crawled over the back of his hand. He brushed it off and there was another crawling underneath his sleeve. He tried to shake it off, undoing his cuff to let it fall out. It was still there. He rolled up his sleeve and slapped his hand along his arm, but he could still feel it crawling, tickling, nesting among the hairs. He rubbed and scratched.
He checked his watch. Even if she was going to get a morning flight it would still have made more sense for her to drive off in the night and go to a more distant airport. He’d had enough of this waiting around, he wanted the final chase, the final photos, the adrenaline pumping. He wanted to be on the flight home. Within the next forty-eight hours he’d be meeting with The Sunday Times. He’d be meeting with Rupert Murdoch.
Just before seven o’clock she appeared at her bedroom window, and shortly afterward the back door opened. He sprang to attention. This was it. Time to roll. She came out in her bathing suit. God, she looked great, but what on earth was she doing? He reeled off some pictures.
For close to an hour she swam lengths and he didn’t know what to do. Somehow he had the feeling that she was jerking him around, as if she had developed some elaborate plan, and he was only a pawn in her game. The stakes were so high it was making him paranoid.
After the swim she went back inside and out of view, presumably upstairs. When she finally appeared in the kitchen, which he was watching through his long lens, she had got dressed and she pottered around, apparently making breakfast. Surely after that she was going to leave.
She didn’t eat a single mouthful, just sat at the counter with her head in her hands. It was nearly ten o’clock. What was she doing? If she was going to carry on as normal and pretend nothing was happening, she should have been at work about an hour ago. He pulled out his cell phone, rang the dogs’ home, and asked to speak to her. Lydia, he was told, would not be coming in today.
Finally, she lifted her head. Now she was going to move. But she didn’t. She sat there staring into space, her lips parted slightly, her eyes red, her entire demeanor catatonic. He gave it a while longer but then he decided he had to revise his plans in light of the strange way she was acting. If she was going to try to sit this out then fair enough, but he had to get moving. He’d go and get his “interview” with the old woman at the dog sanctuary. Then he’d check back at the house. If she’d gone, good luck to her, he’d have plenty already, and as he crept along behind the bushes toward the road he felt a little dizzy from lack of sleep and from knowing that at long last he was counting down the final hours.
Lydia flew upstairs as soon as Hank dropped her off. Her mind was racing so fast she could barely make out a single thought. Her arms and legs seemed to know what to do, as though they were receiving clear instructions from elsewhere. She was pulling out clothes from her closet. She was pulling out a suitcase. She was in the bathroom, picking up her toothbrush and random items from the shelf and running back to the bedroom and throwing it all in the case.
Now she was kneeling at the window and opening the wooden seat and digging around for she didn’t know what. Whatever else that she needed was in the box in her closet. She sat on the floor and checked through the items. Her passport, and the other passport that she had never used, the papers for the savings account in that name which had so far lain fallow, thank you, Lawrence, for thinking of everything. The photographs of her boys that she’d cut out and collected over the years, she would take them of course. All her letters. The gun she would leave here, she couldn’t take it on an airplane. It couldn’t protect her anyway. Where was she going? It didn’t matter. She’d take the first flight available, and then there’d be time to work it out. Her driver’s license was already in her purse. Oh God, she was stupid. She sat on her heels and closed her eyes. She was back at the bed-and-breakfast, walking into the sitting room and seeing him for the first time. Now she was opposite him, sitting in the Queen Anne chair, making polite conversation. They were standing together on the stoop and he was telling her about the highland terrier that he’d loved, and she was touching his arm. Hadn’t he told Hank it was a border collie? Oh
God, she was stupid, wasting time. She didn’t have the car. She should have called a taxi first, and the minutes were slipping away.
As she began to dial the number she heard a noise, the shattering of glass downstairs.
Esther, the old woman, hadn’t been as talkative as he’d hoped. Lydia was a good worker, that’s about all that he’d got, a few comments about her dog-handling skills. The fact that most days she ate Esther’s chicken rice salad for lunch. As he drove back to the house he turned it over. Every word about her spoken by her employer would still be printed, each worth its weight in gold. Esther hadn’t exactly been cagey but she had steered the conversation ever inward to the workings and finances of the shelter, to how his proposed substantial donation would be used so carefully. She’d posed for a photograph.
It crossed his mind that Esther was deliberately going out of her way to protect her employee’s privacy. But what did she imagine there was to hide? It was impossible that anyone knew Lydia’s true identity. Over the years she must have woven the most incredible web of lies.
He parked a distance down the street and approached the driveway on foot. The car had gone. She had finally come to her senses and left. Taken the sporting chance that he’d given her.
About three hours had passed and she could be stepping onto an airplane soon. The passenger manifests would turn her up, unless she’d chosen simply to drive off and hole up. Maybe she had other aliases. It would all come out in the end. He approached the front door. It was locked. He tried the back door and it was locked as well. Then he tested each ground floor window to see if she’d left any open. A few interior shots would cap it all off brilliantly. It was worth searching the rooms as well for any clues she’d left behind in her haste. It wasn’t as though she’d spent the morning preparing.
There was a stack of firewood by the shed. He jogged over and selected the largest, heaviest piece. Standing at the kitchen window he hesitated for barely a second. In the maelstrom that was about to explode, the detail of a little breaking and entering was not going to be high on the agenda. He smashed the window and heaved himself up and inside, straight onto the counter.
The ground floor was open plan and he’d already shot it through the window. He wasted little time, quickly reeling off a few more angles. The best place to start searching would be the bedroom. The best shot to get would be of the bed that she had slept in. As he walked upstairs he was working out which way to turn on the landing. He’d seen her several times at her bedroom window so he already had a mental map of the interior geography. This humble home, he thought, captioning the photograph of the simple beech wood kitchen cabinets, this humble home . . . he reached the bedroom door, began to turn the handle. This humble home has witnessed . . . no that wasn’t right. He walked into the bedroom. For a moment he thought he must be hallucinating. He let the camera fall from his hand and it swung on the strap around his neck and hit his chest with a thud.
“Hello,” she said, leveling the gun at his head. “Were you looking for me?”
There was no hurry now, that was the thing. It was a relief. She waited patiently for a reply, and while she waited she looked him closely up and down. His pants were torn across the right thigh, his shirt was crumpled, one of his cuffs hung loose and the other was buttoned. He was unshaven and although his hair was gray, his stubble was black as an old bruise across his jowls. There was a leaf sticking out from the sole of his loafer. Grabowski had never been what she’d call a sharp dresser but today he looked as if he’d spent the night in the bushes. That wasn’t unlikely.
“Were you looking for me?” she repeated.
He raised his arms slowly, responding to the gun she supposed. It hadn’t occurred to her to say, put your hands up.
It looked as though he was trying to speak and she encouraged him by nodding.
He managed a single word. “No.”
“I see. Not looking for me.” She lowered the gun to her lap. His arms floated down in slow motion.
She raised the gun again, her finger on the trigger.
“No,” he cried, this time in alarm.
“Why are you here?”
Beads of sweat were beginning to pop up on his forehead. “I’m . . . I’m . . .” he stammered.
“Sit down on the floor with your legs crossed,” she said. “And put your hands behind your head,” she added. Since she was seated on the bed, it would be better if he was down lower and in no position to spring at her.
When he was down, she continued, “You were saying?”
“I wasn’t looking for you,” he said. He never took his eyes off the gun.
“Then what are you doing in my house?” she said. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“I mean, I wasn’t looking for you before . . . before I found you. You were dead. It was an accident.”
He was quite handsome, she’d always thought. He was getting a bit of a belly. A drop of sweat had run down into his eyebrow. She had to concentrate. “You’re not explaining very well.”
“I was here by accident. I’ve been traveling around and I saw Kensington on the map, and then . . . and then I saw you.”
His right eye was stinging with sweat but he didn’t dare move his hand to rub it. As he’d walked up the stairs to her bedroom he’d thought he was high on adrenaline. That was nothing. Right now he was so pumped he could feel his pulse in every limb, every finger, every toe.
“But I’m dead,” she said. “You can’t have seen me.”
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, in her faded jeans and a pale pink shirt. Her hair was clipped back off her face and she was side-lit from the window and she looked calm and beautiful.
“I’m dead,” she repeated.
She was crazy. She was still pointing the gun at him.
“Okay,” he said, “that’s right.”
She started to laugh, a small giggle, then another and another, until she was holding her free hand to her stomach, shaking and laughing and bobbing the gun up and down. If it went off she could kill him. She couldn’t mean to kill him. He twisted away and ducked his head as her hand wavered around.
“I’m sorry,” she said, drawing her feet up onto the bed and steadying the gun on her knee. “It’s not funny.” She wiped away a tear. “I don’t know why I was laughing. The tension. All the tension. Me saying I’m dead, you thinking I’m crazy and you have to agree so I don’t shoot you.” She paused. “I’m not, you know.”
He didn’t know whether she meant not dead or not crazy. “I know,” he said. “I know.”
She gazed at him intently. The tiny flecks glinted in that deep blue iris. At this instant they shone not green but gold. “That’s our whole problem, isn’t it?” she said. “Until a few minutes ago it was only my problem. The fact that you know. But now it’s your problem as well.”
How the fuck had he walked into this? Is this what she was setting up? How had she lured him in here? Always the manipulator, always pulling strings. His mouth was dry and his heart was still racing. It was difficult to think with that gun pointing at him. Why the fuck hadn’t he gone straight back to London?
“You know what they say,” he said. “‘A problem shared is a problem halved.’”
“Does it feel like that to you?”
“I feel like there’s a lot to talk about,” he said. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a little white and gold heap on the bed vibrate. Her dog had stood up and was giving himself a good shake. He’d been so focused on her and the gun that he hadn’t even noticed the dog was there.
“Like old friends?” she said. “Like old friends catching up?”
As soon as he’d said it, she realized that of course that was what he would want. There was no end to her stupidity. When she’d watched him walk into her bedroom and seen his face convulse with disbelief, she’d thought that at least she could slow down and think, that he wasn’t in charge of her anymore.
Of course he’d want to keep her talking. He’d sent all his pic
tures of her to the newspapers and they’d all be on their way here.
“When did you send them?” she said.
“What? No, I haven’t. I swear I haven’t. I haven’t sent anyone anything.”
“Get up. I want you to stand up.”
“I have to use my hands to help me,” he said. “Is it okay to put my hands down?”
He didn’t look in the best of shape. He’d probably hurt his knees if he tried to get up from cross-legged without giving himself a push. “Yes, but move slowly. Don’t make my finger twitch.”
When he was up she said, “Okay, hands behind your head again. Now two slow paces towards me. I don’t want your body blocking the door when you fall.”
“I swear to God,” he said. “If you let me go I’ll give you my camera. You can wipe the memory. No one else has got anything.”
How would it feel to kill him? If she pulled the trigger now it would be done. “The problem is,” she said, “you have no way of proving that. It’s difficult to prove a negative.”
He looked a little unsteady on his feet, and there was a vein crawling down his temple like a fat green caterpillar. “My camera and my laptop,” he said in a creaky voice. “It’s all on there. I didn’t e-mail. I was going to fly home today. I didn’t e-mail because . . .”
“Why not? Why didn’t you do that?” If he believed she was going to kill him would that force him to tell the truth? Would it force him to lie with all his might?
“Because I don’t trust anybody,” he said. “It’d be all round the Internet before I’d even touched down at Heathrow.”
She remembered something from one of their little chats in the early days. “You’re Catholic, aren’t you, John? Would you like to say your prayers?”
“I’ve got a rosary in my pocket,” he said. “Is it okay if I get it out?” It would give him time to think as he pushed the beads through his fingers.