She bites her top lip and nods. Her eyes are green, diamond-flecked with hazel. Her complexion is pale. When she lets go of her lip, color floods into her cheeks. She looks back at me. “You are so kind. Thank you.” She rests her hand on my arm, and I am aware of something dull and heavy diminishing. She believes me.
Jack interrupts now and explains that Christa’s husband, Pawel, is sleeping—he works nights as a security guard—and the plan was to walk to a café. He widens his eyes to remind me he is in a hurry to get to his other assignment.
“Well, it’s always lovely to go to a café. Not that I’m hungry. What about you, Jack?” I’m coaxing, as if to a child. “I’ve only just had breakfast.”
We are walking back down the hill toward the main road, through velvety shadows and squares of light. Lopsided buses congregate at the bottom, reverberating throatily. It’s a narrow sidewalk, and Jack walks a few feet behind. I ask Christa if she has spoken to the police, and she says yes, once, but had nothing to tell them. She was in Poland on her honeymoon when Ania . . . died.
A car pulls up. Miniature Union Jacks fly from the rear windows. Rihanna blares and abruptly dies. A young man with tattooed forearms emerges, clutching a helium balloon in the shape of a three. Christa nods at him.
“I had been home to Kraków, to get married,” she says after he has gone. “A big wedding with all my family. Ania came. It was the week before . . . the last time I saw her.”
“Did you have a nice wedding?” I ask gently.
“Yes. Big. My mother was very busy. She was very bossy.”
She gives a rueful smile, and I ask if she wore a lovely dress and she spends the rest of the walk describing it—the layers of tulle skirt and the lace bodice and the decorative beading. I mention a frock I saw in a magazine, which had a flower at one hip, fashioned out of the fabric of the skirting, and Christa, animated, says, “Yes, yes, exactly. My dress was like that.”
“How beautiful,” I say. “You’re so lucky. Mine was some cheap old thing.”
“Have you just had your wedding?”
“No!” I laugh. “My wedding was a very long time ago.”
“And your mother, was she bossy?”
“Not so much,” I say, smiling.
She rubs her eyes with the back of her knuckles. Goose bumps speckle her chest.
“Are you freezing?” I ask.
She laughs, rubs her arms.” My coat is in the room where Pawel is sleeping.”
The café is at the far end of a stretch of shops, between a posh florist and a Greggs bakery. It smells of bacon and fresh coffee and cheese toasties. A table has just come free in the window, and Jack leaps to secure it. Two middle-aged women clock me—I see something complicated cross their eyes—and an old man reading a newspaper glances at me and then away too quickly. It makes me feel both restless and exhausted. But Christa and I are at the front of the queue now and I’m ordering lots of tarts, because she looks like she needs feeding up, and a pot of tea and a cappuccino and—after calling over to Jack—a double espresso.
He leans forward the moment we sit down and clears his throat. He hasn’t spoken for a while. “About this remembrance book,” he begins.
“Yes.” Christa sits down. “I do not know quite what you mean, remembrance book?”
“It’s a scrapbook,” he explains.
“A scrapbook?” She takes a scoop of froth with a spoon and swallows it.
“Yes. A book in which you stick pictures and memories of a person.”
“No it isn’t,” I say.
They both look at me.
“I mean, it is, but that’s not why we’re here. Jack is a really good journalist and he wants to write a piece for a newspaper about Ania, what she was like, and what might have happened. It was an accident me finding her, Christa. It could have been anyone. But because it was me, I feel entangled, responsible somehow. I don’t know if that makes sense. But I want to find out how she died and bring her killer to justice.”
“She was very, very kind. She wouldn’t . . . what do you say? She wouldn’t kill a fly.”
Jack looks from me to her. “So you don’t mind talking to me about her?”
“You are kind people. Whether it is for a book or the newspaper, I know you tell the truth.” She picks up one of the custard tarts with long, tapered fingers and takes a small bite.
“The truth is always best,” I say, looking at Jack.
He gives a sheepish smile.
“The people she worked for said she used to bring the kids to Richmond Park,” he says.
“Yes.” She puts her hand over her mouth while she swallows. “Excuse me. She loved the park. When she lived with me, we used to go in every day last summer. She took the children to the pond, and afterward, we met here for tea and cake—Ania and Molly and little Alfie.”
“Did he bite you?” I say.
Jack makes a noise that is a bit like a laugh.
Christa says, “Oh, yes. I know Ania said he could be a very naughty boy, but with her he was very good. All children are very good with Ania. Were,” she adds. She pulls in the corner of her lower lip.
What if I had employed Ania, if she had been our nanny? If she moved in with us, would it still have happened? My chest feels tight. The pain of missing Millie and the pain of Ania’s death seem to get mixed up for a minute. I can’t entangle one from the other. It’s the cat dream all over again, a powerful need to keep something safe, the desperate fear of failure.
Jack continues to ask questions. How long had Ania lived with her? (Six months.) How long had they known each other before that? (Since childhood.) He helps himself to a tart—pops it in his mouth whole. He swallows it with a look of alarm—there is more of it than he thought—and afterward wipes his mouth with a paper napkin. “Was it expensive, the flat she found?” he asks.
She shrugs. “She had many jobs, and she was hoping to get work as a teacher in a good school, good paid job, when she was trained. But it is a very small flat, so maybe not so expensive. She has a cupboard here with some of her things—books, papers, her old diaries—that she didn’t need. I suppose”—she breaks off, looks slightly lost for a moment—“I should send them to her parents in Lodz.”
Her parents. Her poor parents. It’s just unbearable. I need to get back to work, pick up my normal life, forget all this. I should have stayed in the car.
But Jack looks at her intently. “Can we see them? The diaries, I mean?”
“Maybe.” She sounds doubtful. I wonder if he is pushing too hard.
“Her boyfriend?” I ask, forcing myself to focus. “Was he a good thing?”
“Yes. No.” She is biting her bottom lip again. “A good thing? I don’t know.”
“A bad thing?” Jack interjects.
“Tolek, he loved Ania very, very much.” She smoothes invisible crumbs from the knee of her dress. “Too much.”
“What do you mean?” Jack says sharply.
She studies me as if she’s thinking hard. Finally, she says quickly, “He wanted to marry Ania soon, but she was always talking about a career, her teaching. Tolek, he is good with his hands, a kind man. He wanted to have a wife who loved him like he loved her. It was difficult.”
“Was he excited about the baby?” I ask.
“Oh, yes,” she says vaguely. “So worried Ania was, with the baby scare. Blood spotting. Big relief for Ania and the baby father when the scan say it was okay.”
I see Jack start. He catches my eye. He noticed it, too. “The baby father.”
“Do you have a number for Tolek?” Jack says. “We would like to speak to him very much.”
“His English is not good. He was in Poland when she died. He is very angry, and so guilty.”
“And you’re sure he was in Poland?” Jack asks.
She makes a little movement in her seat, a squirm. “Yes. He is very angry with the police, asking and asking questions.”
“Angry?” Jack says. “Even though he is innocent? What
do you mean, angry?”
“He is a plumber, a hardworking man,” she says enigmatically. She runs her hands up each forearm, as if pushing up invisible sleeves, a gesture that says she wants to get going. She is rattled. She is looking anywhere but at us.
The old man at the next table has got to his feet, and I nudge my chair forward so he can get past. Christa is staring at the newspaper he has left on the table. In the bottom right-hand corner, there is tiny postage-stamp photograph of me.
Christa looks up and catches my eye. She stands. She wants to go out into the fresh air, but Jack clings to his empty cup. He has another question. “Had Ania come into any money recently? Her employers thought she had started living more expensively: new clothes, underwear, jewelery.”
“Ania worked hard,” she says. “Very single-minded. She always wanted the best.”
“Tolek?”
“He earn good money,” she says emphatically. “People in South London”—she waves vaguely in the direction of Wandsworth—“always want new bathrooms.”
• • •
We walk Christa back up the hill and say good-bye to her at the entrance to her flat. I hug her again. “When you find out,” she says, “you tell me.” Her mouth straightens into a fierce line. Her head is nodding; she is trying not to cry. “I promise,” I say. I nod, too, and at that moment I would love to bring back an answer, for Christa, Ania’s friend, if no one else.
Jack is fussing with his phone. He is checking something and fiddling. I don’t say anything. I just walk away, back up over the grass to where the car is parked. I’m trying not to cry.
I sit down in the driver’s seat and take the old man’s newspaper out of my bag where I stuffed it. It’s one of the Sunday tabloids—yesterday’s paper. The postage stamp photo is a teaser for an article inside. I turn to page six.
Mornin’ All Presenter Chucks It All In
Troubled Gaby Mortimer has resigned from the TV show that made her name.
“I’d rather not do the program at all,” the forty-two-year-old presenter told close friends. “It’s the wrong type of publicity.”
Colleagues say she has been behaving in an increasingly erratic manner since she stumbled on the dead body of Polish nanny Ania Dudek on Wandsworth Common a fortnight ago.
“Yes, we do feel left in the lurch,” says a representative at Mornin’ All, “but Gaby knows we are here if she needs us.”
Pictures of me on my doorstep and of that bruise, of Stan the Man—head on one side, handsome and concerned. I haven’t seen that photograph before. It’s newly taken: vain bastard. A head shot of India, “my replacement.” An old one, from Spotlight probably.
I hear the clunk of the car door and the scrunch of someone getting into the passenger seat. My head is on the steering wheel. He puts his hand on my shoulder.
I lean back. He takes his arm away quickly before I squash it.
“Did you know?” I say. “Yesterday? Had you read the papers? Is it in all of them?”
He nods.
“Why didn’t you say?”
“I was waiting for you to mention it, or to tell me you’d resigned. Then, when it became apparent that you didn’t know anything about it, and you hadn’t even seen the papers, that you were stuffing them under the sofa, well, it didn’t seem up to me. I thought somebody else would have told you.”
Did Philip know? Was that behind his forced jollity? Was he feigning ignorance as a defense mechanism, in case I burst into tears and made him come home? Or perhaps he didn’t know. Perhaps he is just in his own bubble, hedge-funded in, not reading the UK papers, or watching TV, or even opening texts. But Clara’s missed call—she was probably ringing about this. And Robin knew. The solicitude in her voice, the talk of yums, the way she tried to urge me to come and stay. And those people in the pub yesterday: the way they looked at me.
“It’s all lies,” I say. “I haven’t resigned. They’ve taken my words out of context. I told Stan I’d rather not do the program at all if it meant using Ania. And ‘wrong type of publicity,’ I meant me. I was giving the show the wrong kind of publicity.”
“I’m sure.”
“Is this their way of firing me?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.” He puts his hand on mine. It’s obviously one of those things he does.
We sit for a minute. “Do you still want the interview?” I ask after a bit.
“Yeah! The rehabilitation of Gaby Mortimer. I like a challenge.”
“Thank you,” I say dubiously.
He looks at his watch. “Look, I’m on a bit of a tight schedule. Is there anyone you can be with today? I ought to get on. We need to talk more about this. And Christa . . . Lots to say there. But later, yeah? Or tomorrow?”
“Of course. Do you want a lift?” I turn the key in the ignition. “Where do you need to get to?”
“Tottenham.”
“Oh. Not sure . . .”
“Any Tube station will do.”
I drive. I put my foot on the clutch and the car into gear. I click on the radio and check the mirror and keep my eye out for cars and for lights. But all the time I’m thinking, they’ve stitched me up. They’ve fed the papers all this stuff. How could they. After everything I’ve given them, all those years of soap stars and EC regulations and bloody bent bananas. Stan, the big cheeses, ambitious India: I don’t care about them. But Terri. I thought she was my friend.
Jack is talking, but I’m not listening. He’s trying to take my mind off things. He’s saying something about today’s commission, how he’s hoping the piece will make the magazine cover.
I pause at the lights. “What did you say it’s about again?” I manage to ask, to show I’m grateful.
“The father of the teenage boy from Tottenham killed in that hotel bomb a few months ago on the Red Sea. Do you remember? There’s an appeal: British families are awarded compensation if loved ones are lost in terrorist attacks on home ground, but not abroad. He wants to change things.”
“Poor man,” I say, chastened—what’s a job to this? “Losing a child, the worst thing.” Ania’s parents in Lodz. “Unimaginable.”
“Bit of a tough assignment,” he says, with a little edge of self-importance.
“I always feel—felt—guilty interviewing people who have suffered appalling trauma. They want to talk—that’s why they’ve agreed; it’s a sort of therapy, I suppose. As a journalist, though, you know you should get the quotes, the story . . .”
“You have to disassociate,” he says shortly. “Be who you need to be. Play a kind of game. Chop a bit of yourself off.”
“Poor you. Poor him.” I check my mirror and turn left onto the A3, speeding into the middle lane of the highway.
A police car is parked up some way ahead at an angle, with its lights turning. Two policemen are standing next it, one of them holding out his arm. I slow down. A white van almost jackknifes across the lanes in front of me and skids to a halt on the hard shoulder.
I drive past slowly. In the rearview mirror, I see the policeman approach the van. I close my eyes, fleetingly, shake my head. It takes a few minutes for my nerves to steady. Are the police going to spook me now for the rest of my life?
At the roundabout ahead, Jack lets out a laugh. “You are a terrible driver. I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you really are.”
“What?”
“An extraordinary combination: simultaneously bullish and insecure.”
“Am I? I’m not. I am not a terrible driver! Am I?”
“You are. The way you cut up that Chrysler just then, pulled in front of them and then slowed right down.” He’s having another playful go at me, trying this out as a means of distraction.
I turn onto West Hill. “I’m not sure I will take you to a Tube station now. I’ll just dump you here, and it’s a very long walk.”
“Sorry. I won’t say another word. In fact, I’ll close my eyes.”
And he does close his eyes. He actually does. He makes himse
lf comfortable and leans back in the seat. This is distracting. He has pushed the hair away from his face, and I can tell by the slight movement of his head that he is listening to the radio. The song is one Philip doesn’t like, catchy with rude lyrics—Millie hums it all the time. If Philip were here, he would have changed the station and I would have felt a tiny bit judged. It is shocking how on edge I have been with Philip recently, how I have imagined every gesture held up against some distant ideal and found wanting. How much easier it is to have been, temporarily, cut loose from that.
I have reached the Tube and pull into the bus lane to stop.
“Have a nice day, then,” I say, imagining for a moment I am a Somerset housewife—the one, if things had been different, I might have turned into—dropping her husband at a rural station, before going home to an armful of kids.
Jack opens his eyes and looks at me. His mouth moves softly. “Don’t worry about your job,” he says. “It’ll be fine. It’s just a blip, a misunderstanding. You’re too valuable to them. You’ll sort it.”
He steps out, bag over his shoulder, and gives the roof a little double bang.
• • •
I scoop the newspapers out from under the sofa when I get home, yesterday’s and today’s: I read the lot. The broadsheets are the worst: their prurient disapproval, like a high-court judge sneaking a peek under a lavatory door. They use the passive voice like tweezers. “Sources close to the troubled presenter . . . ,” “Doubts have been raised . . .” Am I really that interesting? If I were a producer of a midmorning current affairs show, would I put myself forward as a subject? I suppose I would. Murder and celebrity: it’s a delicious cocktail.
One of today’s tabloids has a photograph of me in the pub, “enjoying a drink with a mystery male companion.” Someone clever took it with their phone. I didn’t even notice. More dangers of the modern world. You’re never alone with a Samsung Galaxy.
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