Until it's Over

by Nicci French

  ‘Show him your bruises,’ said Dario.

  ‘No!’

  ‘But you’re clear it was around eight?’ Prebble seemed puzzled. There was a deep ridge running between his widely spaced eyes and he ran his hand over his bristle. I watched as it flattened, then sprang back into place.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said.

  ‘We just thought we ought to report it.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It’s probably not relevant.’

  ‘No,’ he mused, chewing the end of his pencil and gazing down at the single line of writing. ‘But it’s good of you. You can never tell what will be helpful and what not.’

  ‘Have you got any idea who might…?’

  ‘We’re gathering information. Did any of you know Mrs Farrell?’

  ‘Not really,’ Dario said.

  ‘I don’t remember even seeing her before,’ said Davy. ‘But, then, I haven’t lived there long.’

  ‘Ms Bell?’

  ‘She was just Peggy,’ I said. ‘Part of the street, a bit out of place, maybe, although I think she’d lived there for ages. Much longer than all of us, at any rate.’

  ‘In what way out of place?’

  ‘She just looked, well, like someone who should be living in the suburbs or something,’ I said. ‘In a neat house surrounded by orderly neighbours. She seemed respectable, as if she belonged to an old England that’s disappeared. Certainly from round here anyway. She wore what Miles calls coffee-morning clothes.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning clothes to go to a coffee morning in, casual but smart, you know. I don’t think there are many coffee mornings round Maitland Road.’

  ‘So she didn’t belong?’

  I was beginning to understand what it would feel like, being a witness in a trial. The casual, vaguely gossipy remarks we’d made about poor Peggy were being pinned down, scrutinized and given a weight they simply didn’t possess.

  ‘Maybe none of us belongs. People come and go. Everything’s changing, shifting, all the time. That’s why I like it. It’s like a film, not a photograph. You know?’

  Prebble chewed his pencil, then carefully picked fragments of wood from the tip of his tongue. ‘Hmm,’ he said at last. ‘So are you aware of her being a victim of racist attacks?’

  ‘No!’ I wished I’d stayed silent. ‘I’m not really aware of anything.’ I turned in desperation to Dario. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Why me?’ asked Dario, shiftily. ‘Why should I know?’

  ‘She was a neighbour,’ said Davy, ‘but we didn’t know her. That’s London for you, isn’t it? We just happened to see her on the day she died.’

  ‘Was murdered.’

  ‘Yeah. And that’s it. We’re not much help.’

  Prebble didn’t look particularly surprised or disappointed. Just tired and a little bored. We trooped out and stood on the pavement in the drizzle.

  ‘Well, we’ve done our duty, for what it’s worth,’ said Davy. ‘Let’s go and have coffee and talk about something else.’

  Chapter Five

  Two days later, when I returned from work, I took my bike down from the hooks and looked it over. It was a sorry sight. The front wheel was buckled and wouldn’t even rotate, the front fork was bent and the chain was draped round the pedals. But that was about all. I quickly removed the damaged fork, popped it into a plastic shopping bag and cycled down to Essex Road where my friend, Gerry, ran his own bike shop. He wanted to sell me a carbon-fibre replacement that cost more than the whole bike.

  ‘Is the other person paying?’ he said.

  ‘She said she was going to,’ I said.

  ‘Well, then,’ he said.

  ‘I’m going to have a problem collecting the money.’

  He looked puzzled, then rather sad when I chose a run-of-the-mill fork off the rack. He cheered up when I bought a new wheel, a chain and a helmet as well. He said he’d put it all together for me, but I don’t trust anyone else near my bike, so I wobbled home with the wheel and fork balanced precariously on Campbell ’s handlebars.

  It was still warm and sunny, so I laid the bike down in the back garden along with the new parts and my tools. I unwound the chain from the pedals and detached it from the gears. I was going to enjoy this. Then I heard a voice: ‘Need some help?’

  It was Miles. He came out from the kitchen holding a bottle of beer and sat on the slightly rickety bench that Dario had promised to repair. Miles had a not very funny running joke about how impractical he was at anything mechanical or electrical. It wasn’t really modest: because he worked in the City as an analyst, it was part of his pose that he lived on a superior abstract plane while the rest of us did squalid, inferior things like unblocking the lavatory and replacing the fuses.

  ‘I could help you strip down the gears,’ he said, grinning. ‘They probably need realigning. I could adjust the sprockets. I’m a bit worried about your cranks.’

  I looked round at him wearily. ‘Are you going to keep this up all evening?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But I like watching you work. You look so…’ He paused, staring at me. ‘So very competent. Do you want a beer?’

  ‘I was going to have one as a reward when I finished.’

  I attached the fork and, with some reluctance, got Miles to hold it while I replaced the handlebars, then the star nut, the compression bolt and the stem cap.

  ‘How do you remember where everything fits together?’ he asked.

  ‘Because I’m interested in it,’ I said.

  ‘I just care about getting from A to B. Preferably in a car.’

  ‘How long have we got?’ I asked, as I inserted the new wheel.

  ‘Until when?’

  ‘Until you throw us out.’

  ‘I’m not throwing you out.’

  ‘Well, whatever it is you’re doing to us.’

  ‘You know,’ said Miles, softly, as if he was speaking to himself, ‘sometimes I find myself thinking of the alternative world I could have been living in.’

  For a moment I thought he was talking in a philosophical way, about quantum physics or something. I frowned at him.

  He leaned closer towards me so that I could see my own face reflected in his dark brown eyes. I felt myself tense; it took an effort not to draw back from him or look away. ‘Don’t you ever feel that, Astrid?’

  ‘Feel what?’

  ‘You know. Haunted by what might have been, could have been.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Should have been.’

  ‘I need to finish this now.’

  ‘That’s what I used to imagine when we first moved in. We were all so poor, but it didn’t matter. Do you remember the anti-war march? And we came back all triumphant and had that barbecue and lay on the grass and got stoned.’

  ‘Apparently we failed to stop the war, though.’

  ‘And do you remember what it was like when we were first together? We’d known each other for years and then suddenly, there we were, a couple. Astrid and Miles. Miles and Astrid. I’d know you were in the room without even turning. I’d feel you. I still do, you know. They were good times, weren’t they? I still remember them and can’t work out why they had to end. I always believed that one day it would be just the two of us here.’

  I put down the screwdriver and stared at him. Several emotions went through my mind at the same time. The first was a kind of familiar bewilderment that we could have such different versions of what had happened. In Miles’s version, we had had a passionate love affair and only my contrariness and misguided, youthful desire to be independent had thwarted it. But in my version, the relationship had been flawed from the start. When we first met, he had been some kind of eco-warrior, the first person I’d ever known who was interested in politics. He represented a new world to me, and at first he had seemed glamorous and mysterious. He fell for me because he thought I was carefree and light-hearted, then spent his time trying to turn me into a different kind of woman altog
ether, one who was responsible, domesticated and ready to settle down. It was as if he was trying to steer me into a future he had already planned, but I didn’t want to go there. I was happy in my present.

  The second emotion was anxiety, because Miles was my friend: he’d been my straightforward friend before we became lovers, and my complicated friend after we were no longer lovers, and I could see now what I had been trying to ignore for months: that I had made him suffer and was still making him suffer. When the affair was finally over, I had offered to move out but he had been adamant that it wouldn’t be a problem if we didn’t let it be and I had allowed myself to be persuaded. My third emotion was simple anger. That was much the easiest to cope with, so I gave way gratefully to it. ‘Is this why you’re throwing us out?’ I said sharply. ‘Because we broke up?’

  ‘We didn’t break up. You ended it. But sometimes I feel that it’s not over. Not really. There’s too much still there. You must feel it too. I know you do.’

  ‘Miles, no,’ I said urgently. ‘Please don’t do this.’

  ‘I thought time would alter everything in the end, the way it’s supposed to, but I haven’t changed. Not deep down.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Just don’t close the door.’

  ‘The door closed long ago,’ I said, as firmly as I could. ‘And it’s my fault if I didn’t make that clear. Listen.’ I put my hand on his arm for a moment, then hastily removed it. ‘You know I’m not right for you. You could do so much better than me.’

  ‘I don’t want to do better than you.’

  ‘You don’t mean it. Look at the two of us. We live in different worlds now. You’ve got a job you love, a fantastic future ahead of you. You’re grown-up, Miles, you know what you want to do with your life. I’m not like that. I don’t know where I’m going with anything. I just cycle round London delivering parcels and waiting to find out who I am.’

  ‘So it’s just that? Our circumstances?’

  ‘No, it’s not just that. I don’t understand why you’re suddenly saying all of this now. You’re with Leah, Miles. She’s bright and beautiful and you’re going to live together. You shouldn’t be saying these things to me. It’s not fair.’

  ‘If you told me that there was a chance, the smallest chance, then I’d tell Leah that -’

  ‘Hello,’ said Leah, cheerfully, appearing like a gleaming apparition before us in her smart work clothes, a briefcase in one hand and a paper tucked under her arm. ‘Hi, my love.’ She pulled off her jacket and sat next to Miles, leaned over and kissed him lingeringly on the cheek. Then she smiled at me, her teeth white, her skin smooth. She smelled faintly of apples, while Miles smelled of beer. I smelled of sweat and bike oil. ‘That looks terribly clever. I can’t even repair a puncture. I just take it into the shop. I used to feel I ought to learn, and then I worked out that if I priced my time, I was actually losing money by doing repairs myself.’

  ‘I suppose it depends how you price your time,’ I said, winding the new chain round the chain-ring. I was trying not to look at her. Had she heard any of the conversation?

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It does.’

  And that was the end of that. Miles sat and watched me work. Leah read the paper, glancing up frequently to watch us through narrowed eyes. I felt as if I was in a cage in a zoo with people staring at me through the bars.

  ‘You don’t have to move out until you’re ready,’ said Miles, eventually answering the question that had sparked off his declaration to me.

  ‘Three months, wasn’t that what we agreed?’ Leah spoke without raising her head from the paper.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ muttered Miles.

  ‘I mean, you’re not still students,’ said Leah. ‘You can’t go on living like this for ever. I think it’s amazing that Miles has let you live here all these years.’

  I didn’t speak but I did cast a look towards Miles that had an element of sarcasm in it.

  ‘Strictly speaking,’ said Miles, ‘they paid rent and helped out with things.’

  ‘If you mean Dario’s DIY, I’m not sure it was necessarily adding value.’

  The chain was attached and I sprayed the moving parts with lube. I lifted the bike so that the back wheel was off the ground and worked the pedal so that it spun in a blur of silver. It was a beautiful sight. Time for that beer.

  ‘What was that woman called?’ said Leah. ‘The one who was murdered.’

  ‘Peggy,’ I said.

  ‘Farrell,’ said Miles. ‘Margaret Farrell.’

  ‘They’ve arrested some people.’

  Miles grabbed the paper and scanned it. ‘There’s not much,’ he said. ‘Four teenagers, who “cannot be named for legal reasons”. They’ve been arrested in connection with the murder and robbery of Margaret Farrell. Well, it’s not hard to guess where they’re from.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Leah.

  ‘They’re those feral kids from the estate. They’ll probably get two weeks’ community service.’

  ‘Why couldn’t they just have stolen her purse?’ I said. ‘Why did they have to kill her?’

  ‘That was part of the thrill,’ said Miles, grimly. ‘They probably filmed it on their mobiles.’

  ‘It’s funny being so close to something,’ I said. ‘And we don’t really know anything about it and we probably never will. I guess they’ll plead guilty in a few months’ time and that will be that and we’ll never hear anything more about it.’

  ‘There’s nothing to hear,’ said Miles.

  Miles was wrong and I was wrong. After three more days, cleaning, shopping, a couple of parties, a movie with Saul, and three more nights, I found myself sitting in a room with a detective. PC Prebble had met me at the desk and led me through. I sat alone in the room and looked around. There was almost nothing to see. No windows, no pictures. The walls were painted beige. There was speckled lino on the floor, the sort that is easy to clean and doesn’t show dirt. There was a table with two moulded plastic chairs, and two more piled up against the wall.

  The door opened and a head poked round. ‘Miss Bell?’

  ‘I’m Astrid Bell.’

  The man came in. He was middle-aged, large, made larger by a grey suit very slightly too small for him. He was almost bald with his remaining hair cut very short. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Mitchell,’ he said. ‘Thank you for coming.’

  ‘I was surprised,’ I said.

  He walked over and sat opposite me. ‘Why?’

  ‘I talked to the policeman and told him I had pretty much nothing to say, and then I heard that some people had been arrested so I thought that was the last I’d hear of it all.’

  He leaned back on his chair with his hands laced behind his head and looked thoughtful. ‘This morning we charged the four young tearaways…’

  ‘So why…?’

  ‘With breaking and entering. Namely Mrs Farrell’s car.’

  ‘If they did that, they must have killed her as well.’

  ‘Did someone offer you coffee?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ll probably be asked to fill in a form so that we can improve our service to the public. It asks questions like were you made comfortable, were you offered refreshments.’

  ‘Well, I was.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  ‘You were telling me about the murder.’

  ‘Was I?’ said Mitchell. ‘Oh, yes. We have CCTV cameras rigged up at various entry-points at the William Morris flats. We clocked these four gentlemen wandering past the Dyson Street camera at eleven forty p.m. on their way out of the estate, and fourteen minutes later we clocked them coming back, passing between them a bottle of Bacardi rum they had lifted from Mrs Farrell’s car.’

  ‘So they did it.’

  ‘They didn’t force entry to her car, because it seems to have been unlocked – perhaps because of damage done to it during your collision. They didn’t bother with the CD player. You can’t give them away now. But they emptied her shopping and
took two bottles of spirits and her mobile phone, which was attached to the in-car charger.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound worth killing someone for.’

  Mitchell shrugged. ‘The first murder I ever worked on, a kid was killed by a classmate because he wouldn’t hand over his lunch money. Anyway, the receipt was still in one of the bags. It showed that Mrs Farrell completed her purchases at Tesco at seven twenty-eight p.m. What time was it that you saw her?’

  ‘It was a bit before eight.’

  ‘You’ll see the problem. We found Mrs Farrell’s body partially concealed behind the dustbins in the area down by the basement at the front of her house. She had been strangled and there were some signs of robbery. Her purse was missing, and so, according to her husband, were her watch and necklace. She had left her car unlocked and the burglar alarm inside her house was still engaged. You see?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  At that moment the door opened and PC Prebble came into the room with a plastic mug of coffee. He placed it on the table with two small plastic milk capsules, two sachets of sugar and a dish on which lay two digestive biscuits. ‘I didn’t know if you took sugar or milk,’ he said, ‘or if you were hungry.’

  ‘Just black is fine,’ I said, and took a sip. It was stewed and lukewarm.

  Prebble didn’t leave. He took one of the seats in the corner and sat on it. Mitchell gave a sign and continued: ‘At about eight o’clock, Mrs Farrell opens her car door and you collide with it. She helps you and is profusely apologetic, but your housemates appear on the scene and take over. Is that right?’

  ‘Dario and Davy were sitting out on the steps having a… er… just chatting and they saw what happened and came and helped me.’

  ‘Mrs Farrell has her shopping in the car. She leaves you to be helped into the house. What is she going to do next?’

  ‘Go into her house, I suppose.’

  ‘Collect her shopping, take it inside. But from what we can tell, she never went back to her car to take out the shopping and never opened her front door. Her husband was away that night, and the lads from the estate didn’t arrive until four hours later.’