Until it's Over

by Nicci French

  Sometimes it’s too easy. Like when I told Leah about Pippa and Owen. I was in the kitchen when she came in, and without asking her, I handed her a cup of coffee, black and no sugar, the way she liked it, then sliced up a mango for her: she didn’t eat things like bread or cereal, but she liked fruit, I’d noticed.

  ‘You look a bit tired,’ I said to her. She didn’t, really: she looked glitteringly awake and elegant as ever, but the sympathy in my voice softened her.

  ‘I am, I guess,’ she said, sliding a slice of mango into her mouth, then dabbing her lips with a tissue.

  ‘It must be hard for you, Leah.’

  ‘What must be?’

  ‘This house. I mean, it’s hard for me, and I’m just a tenant, not the landlord’s boyfriend. For what it’s worth, I think you’re being very impressive.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I do,’ I said solemnly.

  ‘To be honest, sometimes I feel like throwing in the towel and leaving Miles to sort out his own stupid mess.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘Why do you find it hard, though? You seem to get on so well with everyone.’

  ‘I think I do. But it’s all so complicated, isn’t it?’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘Like, I can’t quite get the hang of who goes with who. Pippa, for instance.’

  ‘Ha – that’s easy. She goes with everyone.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I know about Mick.’

  ‘You mean she’s…?’

  ‘And then there was Owen, of course.’

  ‘Owen!’

  ‘Yeah – you knew about that, didn’t you? No? Oh, God, I’ve put my foot in it, haven’t I? I thought people knew. It was only a fling, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘So, Pippa and Owen.’ I could see her eyes gleam.

  ‘You won’t mention it, will you? Especially not to Astrid. I think Astrid and Owen, you know… But I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’ I struck the side of my head lightly. ‘Stupid me.’

  She put a hand on my shoulder. Her manicured nails shone scarlet on my blue shirt. ‘Not stupid at all, my dear Davy.’

  I gave Pippa’s thong and Astrid’s lip-gloss from the parcel to Melanie, who behaved as though I’d given her a diamond ring. I decided I’d use Owen’s condoms. And I started to watch everyone in the house with a new vigilance. I saw that everything was gathering to a head. The police wouldn’t think it was a coincidence that Astrid was at both murders. They wouldn’t understand how that had come about, how she had become my fate, my beloved destiny. But they would scrutinize her and everyone in her life. I had to be ahead of them.

  Above all, I watched Astrid until I felt that there was nothing I didn’t know about her. What was in her drawers, what texts were on her mobile, how many times a week she washed her hair, what shampoo and conditioner she used, what deodorant and face cream, whom she met after work, what vegetables she planted in her garden and how many times a day she watered and weeded the small plot. Once or twice, while looking in her purse, I helped myself to some money. I knew her gestures and habits: the way she pushed her hair back impatiently, the way her nose crinkled when she laughed, how she would kick off her shoes and tuck her long legs under her on the armchair, how she would blow on her coffee twice before sipping it, the colour of the varnish on her toenails. I stored every piece of information inside me. I had to be ready.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  A couple of days later I was lying on my bed, entangled with Melanie, when there was a frantic knocking at the door. ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘Wait,’ said Melanie, but it was too late. The door opened and Dario came in. He didn’t pay any attention to her attempts to rearrange her clothing.

  ‘Have you heard?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a detective,’ he said. ‘He’s in the kitchen talking to Astrid.’

  I didn’t answer. I was trying to think of some mistake I’d made, some connection I’d forgotten. That was the problem with lying. You had to remember how it all fitted together. Reality was easy. It took care of itself. But then I looked at Dario, sweating, eyes wide, and relaxed. Leah, Owen, Pippa, Mick, Miles, even Astrid. We all had our secrets. I felt Melanie’s arm slip through mine.

  ‘So, what’s the problem?’ she said.

  ‘I’m going downstairs,’ said Dario. ‘We should all act as if nothing’s wrong.’

  ‘But nothing is wrong,’ said Melanie.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Dario, half to himself. ‘Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s fine.’

  ‘Dario,’ I said, ‘have you been smoking?’

  I hardly needed to ask. His pupils were like black pinpricks.

  ‘Just to settle myself,’ he said.

  He disappeared down the stairs. Melanie’s face nuzzled into my neck.

  ‘Shall we go down?’ she said, with a smile.

  I looked at her. ‘Neaten yourself up a bit first,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘Sorry. I was going to.’

  When we walked into the kitchen, arms round each other in our swinging lovers’ pose, it looked as if a party was getting going. At the centre of things, seated at the table, was the detective. He was wearing a suit with the tie loosened and the top button of his shirt undone. His greying hair was brushed back over his head. His face was narrow, with quick, smiling eyes that darted round the room observing everyone, taking everything in. I disliked him immediately. Distrusted him. Be careful, I told myself. Mustn’t put a step wrong. Melanie and I sat at the table and grabbed a glass each of the wine Pippa was pouring. Melanie immediately started talking in a flirtatious, blushing way to him. I asked him if he was here to take statements. He looked at me properly for the first time, sizing me up. ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Have you got something you want to say?’

  Fuck, I thought. Fuck, fuck. I’d been trying to blend into the crowd and now I’d drawn attention to myself. ‘Not exactly,’ I stammered.

  ‘But some people have,’ said Leah.

  I had to stop myself grinning. The attention had shifted to other people’s secrets and it was all my doing. Leah was like an evil little toy I had wound up and set going and now she was trundling around stirring things up and generally muddying the water. It culminated wonderfully with her dropping a bag of Dario’s weed on the table in front of Detective Chief Inspector Paul Kamsky. The evening went downhill from there.

  The only good news was that Kamsky left without arresting Dario, or even cautioning him. But from then on it was meltdown.

  Over the next day and the next I was a spectator as the house started to pull itself apart. I could hardly go anywhere without seeing people whispering together, making plans about people who used to be friends or lovers. Sometimes it was just cold stares across the kitchen. The best was when one of Pippa’s ex-lovers came and shouted on the doorstep, then threw a brick through the window at Leah. One by one, the secrets that had been suppressed so that these people could put up with each other were exposed for everyone to see.

  Mostly I found it funny to watch what they were doing to each other but sometimes it got too much to bear and I felt as if it was happening inside my head, as if Dario had drawn a line across my brain, as if Leah’s manipulations and Pippa’s negotiations with Miles and whatever Astrid was up to with Owen and Mick and all of them, as if they were just voices jabbering away at each other. I felt like I should get drunk to shut them up and give me some peace, except I knew I had to think clearly. A single mistake, one word said in the wrong place, and I’d be done for.

  Instead I left the house and walked away through street after street until I got to a park where I looked at couples arm in arm and mothers pushing buggies and a small boy failing to fly a kite. I felt like trying to help him because it irritated me, the way he was jerking the strings at the wrong moment, but then I remembered bad things happened to people who went up to small children in parks. I wondered how the two murder investigations were going. I tried to r
emember what Kamsky had said, or what people said he had said, and then I tried to make myself stop thinking about it. Because it was like dealing with women. The way to get away with it was not to care. Thinking too much was the way to get caught. But thinking was how I’d get myself out of this. Get to Brazil where the sun shone. That was the really stupid thing. I’d done a murder for money and got no money from it. No money, just this anxiety and the tightness in my head.

  When I arrived back at the house, I felt worse than I had before. My brain was buzzing with the thoughts I was trying to suppress. I ran up the stairs and walked into my room. Melanie was there. She gave a little jump. She gave me an uncertain smile. I looked around. The room seemed different.

  ‘You startled me,’ she said.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Dario let me in,’ she said.

  ‘But what are you doing here?’

  ‘Look,’ she said, handing me some tickets. ‘They’re tickets for the Chelsea Flower Show. Someone at work gave them to me. We could go.’

  I stared at them blankly. ‘Why would I want to go to a flower show?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I thought…’

  I looked again at the room. ‘What have you done?’

  She started to stammer. ‘I brought some things round. Wind chimes. Some flowers. I did a bit of tidying, got some things out.’

  I walked over to her and put my right hand round her neck, quite gently. I pushed her backwards slowly. Then, when she was close to the wall, I gave her a shove, so that she banged her head. Not so that any damage was done but quite hard. Her eyes became wet with tears. I did it again.

  ‘Davy,’ she said, barely able to speak.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said.

  I let her go and she started to cough.

  ‘Get out,’ I said.

  ‘No, Davy, please.’

  Now I spoke more quietly, touching her cheek as I did so in very gentle slaps, little more than a whisper against her flesh. ‘You don’t touch my stuff.’ Slap. ‘You don’t come in without asking me.’ Slap. ‘Understand?’ Slap.

  She nodded.

  ‘Now get out. I’ll call you.’

  Almost in a dream she left and I heard her footsteps on the stairs. I lay down on the bed but jumped up almost immediately when there was a sharp knock on the door. I opened it. Astrid was standing there. She was wearing three-quarter-length brown jeans and a red top. She looked concerned. ‘I saw Mel on the stairs,’ she said. ‘Is anything wrong?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Come in.’

  She stepped inside and prowled round the room, looking as if she was scarcely conscious of where she was.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I said.

  ‘I’ve just been seeing a mad psychiatrist,’ she said.

  I tried to look sympathetic. ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘The police sent me. He’s supposed to be an expert at profiling murderers.’

  I felt a shiver. I tried to think of how an averagely interested person would respond. ‘How did he…’ I began. ‘I mean what does he think?’

  ‘A scarred leather worker,’ she said. ‘If you meet one, let me know.’

  I almost laughed with relief, then looked at my left hand. I was still holding the stupid tickets. Astrid was the only person I knew who was interested in gardens. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ I said. ‘I thought it might cheer you up.’

  I made up a story about having been given the tickets at work. She seemed about as unexcited by it as I had been when Melanie gave them to me, but she was quite polite. She asked if she needed to wear a hat, as if she were looking for an excuse to get out of it. Then she gave an obviously forced smile and leaned forward and gave me a kiss on the cheek, the sort you might give an old aunt, and said thank you. I knew she wouldn’t go. She’d find an excuse. It was probably for the best. What if she met Melanie and mentioned it to her? I wondered if it would have been different if I’d been disdainful of Astrid. Would that have made her want me? The trouble is, it doesn’t work like that. You have to really not care about them to make them like you. If I had pretended not to like Astrid, she would have been exactly as she was now: treating me as part of the scenery. She would be nice enough to me but she wouldn’t notice if I wasn’t there.

  As she walked round the room, she touched things and commented on them. She flicked at the wind chimes, she picked up a silk scarf Melanie had left and ran it through her fingers. She stopped in front of the mantelpiece and only at that moment did I notice that, in tidying my room, Melanie had found the glass paperweight I had taken from Ingrid de Soto ’s house. She had taken it from the drawer and put it in full view. All I needed was for Astrid to move on and I could put it back out of sight. But she stopped in front of it, as if lost in thought. I was about to say her name, to distract her, but before I could speak she picked it up and rotated it in her hand, holding it up to the light, as if fixing it for ever in her memory. The colours shimmered.

  ‘Paperweights never have paper underneath them, do they?’

  I mumbled something noncommittal. We talked nonsense for a few seconds. I think she said something about looking for a place to live. I couldn’t really hear. The words were drowned by the hiss of static in my head. She handed me the paperweight and I put it back carefully on the mantelpiece, her eyes on it all the time. She said she was going dancing.

  ‘Nice,’ I said, and stayed silent. I wanted to tell her that she mustn’t let Owen touch her again. Not a kiss. Not a caress. Nothing. Or else.

  I was left alone, staring at the paperweight. Melanie wouldn’t remember it, but Astrid would. It wasn’t fair. This wasn’t the way I’d planned it. I wasn’t like this. I wasn’t really a murderer. All I ever wanted was to begin again, and be allowed to be myself at last. No, it wasn’t fair.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  There was so much to do and so many small details to attend to. It was my job to hold everything together in my head, and I knew that if I let one thing slip, that could be my undoing. And once I had started, the clock was ticking and I couldn’t stop it. I found that I was good in a crisis.

  As the household fell apart, it became comically easy to carry out what I had planned without being noticed. I was invisible. Leah was glaring at Miles. Miles was looking at Astrid and trying not to pay any attention to Leah. Owen was looking at Astrid too. Astrid was looking back at Owen and, although she didn’t yet know it, she was also witnessing the spectacle that was being played out in front of her eyes. Pippa was watching herself, as usual. Dario wasn’t looking at all, and when he was he clearly wasn’t noticing. He was even worse after he was beaten up. Fear made him even more addled. Who knew what Mick saw? Mel was looking at me, all right, but Mel was a fool: she only saw what she wanted to see. I was looking at everything, at everyone. I was waiting, poised to strike when the time was right. In the meantime, it was me who called the journalists about Astrid, me who stirred up Leah’s hatred. I was calling the shots now.

  On the evening of the house sale, it seemed to me that everything was working out. I provoked some suspicion here and created some hostility there, all the while pretending to be nice Davy, peacemaker Davy, dull, dependable, sweet Davy. I almost felt like telling them the truth, just to see the expressions on their faces. I was like a magician who wanted to show them how the trick was done, how easily they had been fooled.

  I steered Pippa towards Leah’s bag of clothes and Dario towards Miles’s shoes. As the noise grew and the violence started to turn ugly, I casually pushed Astrid’s bike into the middle of the yard, where it was whisked away. As an afterthought, I stuffed the takings into my pocket – much more than I’d expected, thanks to the run on Leah’s clothes – and threw the box into the bushes.

  In front of the house where the sale was out of control, it felt like a forest fire. I just had to stand back. Leah struggled with a large black woman in the middle of a crowd. Dario and Pippa watched her, enjoying the disaster. Owen was taking
photographs. I stepped forward and put my hand on Leah’s shoulder, Davy, trying to help. I felt something jingle at my feet and looked down. Carefully I knelt and picked up the bunch of keys Leah had dropped. I put them into my pocket. Now, what could I do with them?

  It got better. Because Leah told Astrid about Pippa and Owen. Right in front of everybody. Like a little bomb tossed into the already maimed and dazed group. And when Astrid walked out of the room (chin up, that’s my girl), with everyone’s eyes following her, I knew now was the time to strike.

  That night I didn’t sleep, couldn’t sleep, didn’t want to. I knew that this was a watershed in my life, and that after tomorrow everything would be different. I needed to savour the moment and not waste it in unconsciousness. After I had made everyone large mugs of tea and told them it would be all right, we just needed to take a step back from what had happened, they wandered off to their rooms one by one, shamefaced and miserable. I heard them shuffling along corridors, gargling and coughing in the bathroom, tossing and snuffling like animals in their beds. I heard Miles snoring. I heard – much later – Astrid returning. She came up the stairs quickly and lightly, and I could imagine her face, serious but not distraught, her jaw firm. For an instant I considered joining her. Perhaps she would tell me her feelings and weep on my shoulder. I could hold her against me and kiss her at last along her jaw line or that small hollow of her neck. Slender neck. No, it wouldn’t do.

  At last the house was dark and silent, and I could tell that only I was left awake, sitting upright on my bed with my hands in my lap, my breath steady, and my eyes fixed on a point on my wall, just above the door. I could feel myself growing taller and stronger as I sat there, each breath making me more powerful, readying me. My past self was dropping away: the Davy whose dad didn’t want to know him, who was bullied at school, who had flattered his cow-eyed mother, who was eager to please, who had been humiliated by Pippa, who went out with someone like Melanie rather than someone like Astrid, who had to pretend all the time to be someone else. Those days were ending.