by Guy Ware
Gina’s home address is in my phone contacts, assuming that she has not moved. I discover that it takes only fifteen minutes of steady cycling to reach her street, which is broad and nineteenth-century in layout, with fat mottle-trunked trees and uneven pavements. The houses are tall and thin and lean on each other as they climb the hill. I wonder why it is that I have not visited before. She has not visited me. It occurs to me that I may have been wrong to consider myself her friend.
Gina’s house is number 56. I chain my bicycle to a lamppost outside number 67 – five doors up and across the street. I estimate that the next tree must be more or less opposite her house, and that its trunk is large enough for me to lean against, as if nonchalantly, with one foot up against the bark and a cigarette, perhaps, in my hand, if I smoked, which I haven’t since I met Gary, I could lean against the tree whilst remaining invisible to a casual glance from inside Gina’s property.
I walk down the hill to the tree. I lean. I imagine a cigarette. I consult my watch.
To my left a woman in a straw hat and trousers the colour of death is clipping a hedge that is not holly or privet or any shrub that I can name and which even now, at the end of June, has dark green leaves and bright red berries I assume must be left over from last year and which must, therefore, be wholly unpalatable and possibly even poisonous to garden birds. As she clips, the leaves and clumps of berries fall like spattered blood around her feet. It is early in the day to be gardening, it occurs to me. After a few minutes of this the flaw in my strategy becomes impossible to ignore: whilst I may be invisible to Gina, or to Alex, if Alex is indeed in Gina’s house, I remain nonetheless entirely visible to anybody walking down or worse still living on this side of the street, such as the woman with the hat and the shears, who regards me with evident distaste. I nod and smile the sort of half-smile one offers to strangers to reassure them that one’s intentions are not hostile but which, in practice, makes one look less like a cheerful, harmless suburbanite than a troubled psychotic who will, at some later point in the proceedings, rampage through the neighbourhood with an axe. The woman does not look reassured. She returns to clipping her hedge for a moment, and then abruptly swivels on her heel and walks into her house. I imagine that she is ringing the police, but that the police will not, absent the axe, be especially interested. Nevertheless, I now consider the time that I can reasonably spend leaning against the tree consulting my watch to be limited, and decide, instead, to saunter, to walk as if purposefully but without undue haste from my present location to the end of the street.
As I pass opposite number 56 I glance casually across the road in the statistically almost certain confidence that the probability of Gina and/or Alex glancing out of the house at the precise moment that I pass, glancing in, is incalculably small, and can, therefore, be disregarded. What I see, when I do glance, whilst continuing to walk, or saunter, down the opposite pavement, is that the curtains of Gina’s house (if it is, in fact, Gina’s house, and she has not moved without informing me since I recorded her address and other contact details, which must, on reflection, have been several years ago, that is, since she left the Office of Assessment) are drawn. Having recently consulted my watch I know it to be some time shortly after nine, perhaps five minutes after, and I consider it unusual and noteworthy, albeit I am unfamiliar with Gina’s daily routine, that all the curtains of her house remain drawn at such an hour, although whether they remain drawn as a result, or perhaps as an expression, of the grief of bereavement or of post-coital guilt, or even of some weird, distasteful combination of the two I cannot say with any certainty. Parked on the street outside the house is a small red car which does not belong to Alex, who does not drive and almost always travels by bus, and may not belong to Gina, given that there are cars parked bumper-to-bumper along both sides of the street and their owners must evidently park wherever they can find a space, not necessarily outside their own houses, even assuming that they live on this street, and have not driven from further away and parked here, in Gina’s street, at the end of which, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, is a train station. The small red car tells me nothing.
I turn my head back in order to preserve the casual nature of my glance at Gina’s house and continue walking. I reach a corner. At this point I have a choice: I can continue down the hill towards the station, as if intending to catch a train, or perhaps to meet someone getting off a train, albeit one that is not due any time soon, given the relaxed nature of my walking/sauntering up to this point; or, alternatively, I can turn and, by turning three times more, bring myself up, round and back to where I left my bicycle, the downside of which is that I will be out of sight of the house for the time it takes me to complete three sides of the square or (more likely) rectangular block. I can also, of course, simply turn around and walk back up the way I have come, but this would appear odd at best and, glancing back, I notice that the woman with the hat and the shears has returned to the pavement in front of her hedge and that she now has a dog at her feet. The dog is small but quite possibly noisy. If I continue to the station I will of course have to return at some point, without having either caught a train or met a disembarking passenger, and will simply be delaying the moment when I pass the woman and her dog, both of whom I judge now to be settled in for a full morning’s gardening/neighbourhood observation. I decide to turn. Once out of sight of Gina’s house I hasten my steps considerably, although not so much as to attract curiosity. By the time I make the fourth and final turn and descend towards my bicycle, which is still chained to the lamppost, I can see that the curtains in the upstairs room of Gina’s house are open and the small red car has gone.
It is possible that the car’s departure is coincidental, that Gina and/or Alex have risen, drawn the bedroom curtains and are, even now, descending to the kitchen for a solitary/romantic/awkward breakfast whilst a neighbour with no connection to either of them drives to work or to the shops or to visit an elderly relative in his or her small red car; it is possible, but somehow I also know that this is not what has happened. I have missed Gina leaving the house, and have no way of knowing now whether Alex left with her. Ignoring the woman with the shears, I cross the road and approach Gina’s door. I pause momentarily – it is still theoretically possible that Alex will answer the door – and ring the bell. A muffled electronic chirrup sounds from deep inside the house. There is no answer.
I re-cross the street and approach the woman with the shears, who pretends to ignore me. The dog snaps half-heartedly from behind her legs. I beg her pardon. I hold out a card – another infraction for Lopez to add to the list – and tell her my name is Pitt and that I am a loss adjuster. She lets her shears dangle in one hand as she takes the card and reads it. She does not ask me what a loss adjuster is. She tells me she knew I was up to something. I concede the point and tell her that I am investigating a claim. I ask whether she knows Ms Spence at number 56; she says she might. I ask if she saw Ms Spence leave home a few minutes ago and she tells me that she minds her own business, unlike some. I ask if the small red car that isn’t there any more belongs to Ms Spence and she says she couldn’t say because, after all, it isn’t there. She seems quite pleased with this answer. I ask if her dog is a daschund and she concedes that there may be some daschund in him. I ask if Ms Spence has a dog and she says she wouldn’t know. I accept defeat and wish her a good morning. She does not reply.
I trudge back up towards my bike, ringing Alex again as I go. In one ear I hear my phone buzz to tell me his mobile is ringing; in the other I hear, faintly, a telephone ring. When his voicemail message starts I hang up. There is silence. I ring again, but this time it cuts straight to voicemail. I say: It’s me, Rada. I say: Where are you? I ask him to call me; I say Love you and hang up. I wonder why I said that now, because it is not a phrase I use much and almost never in respect of Alex although I do, obviously, love him, in a way. Not romantically, and not exactly like a brother, either, but all the same. He told me that he
loved me, once, when we were students on holiday and had to share a room because we couldn’t afford two. He didn’t say he loved me romantically, of course, that’s not something anyone would say, and he didn’t even say it that romantically, in the sense of candles or firelight or taking me in his arms or any of that, he just said it, but that is what he meant. He didn’t mean he loved me like a brother, or a father, or even like a friend. What he actually meant was that he wanted to have sex with me.
I unlock my bike and wrap the chain around the saddle stem. The woman with the hat and shears has gone but the dog is still there. I begin to freewheel down the hill and, being a dog, the dog rushes up to meet me, barking energetically. I swerve past and my foot catches its belly with a soft and satisfying thump, which I tell myself is accidental.
Later, after I have spent some hours cycling nowhere in particular and can no longer think of anything else to do, I ring work, hoping to speak to D, and for a long time nobody answers. There is no voicemail because the Office does not exist and we consequently do not get a lot of incoming calls. Then a voice I don’t know says Good morning. The voice is calm. In a manner that is calculated not to cause alarm, it asks who I am. Alarmed, I hang up, and ring D’s mobile. When he answers I ask where he is and he says he’s at work. I tell him I know he’s lying and ask why he isn’t there. He says, Why aren’t you at home? The answer to which he knows, really, and is only asking for effect. I say I know he’s lying because I just rang work.
Shit, Sis. That wasn’t clever.
I say, Someone answered.
He would.
Who?
Lopez. Who else? Tell me you didn’t speak to him.
Why aren’t you there?
He’s locked me out of all the systems. He says it’s standard procedure for an investigation of this magnitude.
He said that?
D says nothing.
I say, D? Did Lopez actually say, ‘of this magnitude’?
I’m sorry, Sis.
What does Theo have to say?
I haven’t seen Theo since yesterday. I think he’s keeping his head down.
I tell D to meet me in the café we sometimes go to on a Sunday when Gary hasn’t baked his own croissants.
When I get there D’s car is parked outside: inside D is eating something large and messy and drinking hot chocolate with whipped cream and marshmallows. He has his laptop out and there are sandwich crumbs on the keyboard. I tell him he is a pig and a child and order an espresso. He says he has been to the gym today, and work, and he has earned this, and what have I done? I say grown men do not eat whipped cream and marshmallows even if they have run a marathon.
Grown women don’t lie to their husbands.
Yes they do.
OK, they do. But you don’t.
I shrug. I don’t really see what else I can do because he’s right, and of course he’s also wrong in ways that he probably hasn’t even thought about, being a man and single and living with his sister at the age of twenty-nine. I ask D if he has heard from Alex although I know he won’t have because if Alex was in some sort of trouble or thought we might think he was in some sort of trouble on account of his not having come home all night, and he had access to a phone, I know and D knows that it is me that Alex would call, not D, and I and probably D also both know that if he, Alex, were not in any kind of trouble and had simply stayed out because he had in fact, as D suggested, spent the night with someone, Gina Spence or anybody else, he would not call either of us and would just go to work and would have answered the telephone when I rang.
D says, Don’t you want to know about Lopez?
I don’t. I mean, I do, obviously, because it’s important and he has my job and my future in his hands, and I’m not sure I now accept my own explanation that Theo asked for Lopez just so that when he cleared me I would be above reproach, that seems far-fetched now and like grasping at straws, but the fact is that at this moment I actually don’t care about that as much as I want to know where Alex has got to and whether he’s OK. I realise this and am actually quite proud of myself in a way that immediately undermines the selfless value of the feeling and so undermines the pride. So I say that I want to know that Alex is OK, and D says he told me: Alex got his end away and that’s all there is to it. I don’t believe this, or think it at all likely, but there’s no point in arguing the point, so I ask D if he knows what else Alex was doing yesterday, apart from visiting Gina Spence, but D ignores my question and instead answers his own. He says, Lopez is like Theo: ancient. I see I’m not going to get an answer straightaway, so I say: What did you tell him about me?
Nothing.
I find this barely credible. D is my brother and is at some level fond of me and would probably not wish me any actual harm other than in a professional sense where that professional-type harm could in some way benefit him and his prospects, but I am aware that this is a professional situation in which, with Theo on the verge of retirement and D regarding himself as his natural if not only acceptable successor, an opinion we all know Theo does not actively share, D regards my alleged fuck-up as a helpful step in the right direction, and while he might not actually go so far as gratuitously to volunteer damaging information or opinions or speculations about my performance he is unlikely to have resisted giving them if asked. I say, Nothing?
D runs a finger round the edge of his mug and scoops the last of the whipped cream into his mouth, and says, He hasn’t asked.
Don’t you think that’s odd?
No.
He’s supposed to be investigating me.
He didn’t ask anything, Sis. He was just showing off.
I nod because I think it’s possible, probable even, although I don’t know the man; there was something about his voice. I ask D again if he knows what else Alex was doing yesterday. D thinks for a moment during which he picks up his plate, tipping and shaking it so that most of the toast crumbs fall into the palm of his hand, while some fall on the table and the floor. He throws the crumbs into his mouth while I wait. He says, Bodkin . . .
I say, Rodkin?
D nods and says, Suicide. Two kids. Slit his own throat with a breadknife.
He enjoys saying this, as if he’s proving that he can think about this now, about fathers who kill themselves with knives, that it doesn’t bother him.
I say, It was my case. It should have been Alex’s anyway.
It should. I have thought about this and I can only assume that Theo thought it was time, that he knew he was going to leave and couldn’t protect me forever.
I point to D’s laptop and say, You could get the address from the files.
I told you, Sis. Lopez locked down all the systems.
What if the file’s on your hard drive? Or on that?
I point to the memory stick beside his laptop, but D says there’s no way because it’s not his case, remember?, it was mine and now it’s Alex’s, and there’s no way Rodkin is going to be there. He says Theo should never have given me the case, and then he catches himself. He says the memory stick is just for Likker, nothing else, and he starts telling me about Lifetime Value and the presentation he would have given on Monday if I hadn’t spent so long boring on about the old professor-type guy in the bank who wasn’t even dead, and I ask him to check because you never know, maybe Alex had used the stick or the laptop before D, or when D wasn’t around or by mistake and somehow there might be something; and D says you do know, it isn’t going to be there, but in the end he has to prove it to me because I make a point of saying it could happen, and D (being D) can’t let himself be wrong or even not demonstrably right. He searches the hard drive and there’s nothing. He plugs the stick in and searches that and I don’t believe there will be anything there, either, it isn’t really possible, but there is. Not the Rodkin file, of course, but Rodkin’s name in Likker’s file. Because Likker, it turns out, made an ap
pointment to see Rodkin a week before he died. There is a note of Rodkin’s address in Likker’s diary, which it turns out Alex had been right about, there being no reason why he shouldn’t, and was very close indeed to Gina Spence’s house. A short walk, in fact. It was the main road from which Gina’s quieter street was a turning. I had probably passed it this morning.
Sis, there’s something else.
D is pointing at the screen. The day before the appointment with Rodkin, Likker had made an appointment with a “Mr Pitt”. The quotation marks are there, in the diary.
That wasn’t you?
How could it be me? He wasn’t even dead then.
There’s a number for this Mr Pitt which I ring, from right there at the café table, with my own mobile, despite D telling me not to. He says I’m in enough trouble already, and he doesn’t want me dragging him into to it, too, and even though he’s saying this I can hear something in the way he’s saying it that tells me that he’s actually concerned about me, about my trouble, and I look up at him, surprised, as the phone rings and a calm voice, a voice I have heard before this morning, on the telephone, says: Good morning.
I hang up.
A moment later my phone rings and the number I just called lights up the screen. I switch it off without answering, and I’m saying, Shit, D, shit, while I switch it off, and he’s saying, What is it, Rada? and not calling me Sis, I notice that even while I’m taking the back off the phone and pulling out the sim card and bending it, which turns out to be harder than I thought it would be, as it’s small and I can’t get much leverage, but in the end it snaps, and I feel like I’m about to cry but instead I pull myself together and I say, Who was Likker?