by David Thomas
– WOW!
And so it went on. Mariana used to complain, only half joking, about what she called her ‘gigantic butt’. In reality, it was as perfect a combination of curves as any man ever beheld. One night, she messaged me having just come in from a party, a little drunk I suspected, judging by the way she wrote, complaining that yet another man had been grabbing her:
– HERE, I SHOW YOU WHERE HE PINCHED ME!!
Next thing I knew, she’d sent a low-resolution shot, presumably taken from her computer camera, showing the ass in question only partially covered by a pair of white hotpants Kylie Minogue might have thought twice before attempting. I got the strong impression she had nothing on underneath.
The following night, she gave me a frontal view. She was standing with her hips cocked in front of a full-length mirror in what I presumed was her bedroom, and I hoped to God it wasn’t anyone else’s, wearing black high heels, hold-up stockings, minuscule knickers and bra. Her left hand – I knew it was hers by the watch on her wrist, which she used to wear to work – was perched saucily on her hip. Her right was holding the camera to her eye. But her face had disappeared behind a blaze of flash, reflected back from the mirror to the lens. She was, effectively, headless.
It suddenly struck me that her face had not been visible in any of the pictures she had sent me. So I wrote back…
– SO HOT!! BUT WHERE IS YOUR LOVELY FACE?
– NOT TONITE. LOOK REALLY BAD.
– YOU COULD NEVER LOOK BAD!!
– HAIR DIRTY, SPOTS. I’M VERY VAIN, I KNOW!
– FACE! FACE! FACE! _ _
– NO! I LOOK SCHRECKLICH!!! TOMORROW MORNING, MAYBE
I looked up schrecklich on Babelfish. It meant ‘terrible’. I told myself that this was just typical female insecurity, that strange combination of vanity and self-loathing that makes even beautiful women see flaws where none exist. Next morning, to my surprise, she really did send me a picture as promised. She was sitting on the floor in her jeans, one leg crossed over the other, her face looking straight at the camera. There was just one catch. She had shot it in such darkness that she was barely visible. Even when I put it through an enhancer program, with the exposure banged way up, all I got was a pixellated image of a flash of blonde hair, the outlines of two huge eyes and a blurred, unreadable expression.
Now, when I thought about the compulsiveness with which Mariana had hidden her face in those photographs, it seemed to connect to her incredible suspicion of any therapist who might want to analyse her. Why does someone hide their face? Because they do not want to be recognized. Why would someone fear analysis? Because a shrink might get them wrong … or, even worse, the shrink might discover what they were really like. What was it that Mariana didn’t want anyone to see? Was there something terrible in there, in her head – something schrecklich – that she desperately wanted to be kept hidden? Was that what Andy had somehow stumbled upon – the secret shame that Mariana was willing to do anything to protect … including kill?
For a few days after she’d sent those pictures, we carried on as before. One night we spent three hours messaging one another back and forth, chatting perfectly happily. Or so I thought, anyway.
I sent her an email the next morning, following up something we’d been talking about. She didn’t reply. That night, she wasn’t online at all: same again the night after.
I assumed she was busy. Then a week went by without a word and I started to worry. The silence continued and the terrible realization dawned that it was all over: whatever ‘it’ was. I went through a kind of cold turkey, physically aching for want of her. I lay awake at night wondering what I’d done to put her off. I read and reread every word that had passed between us, trying to work out the point at which she’d decided to bail out. The craving for her became so bad that I seriously contemplated going down to Sheffield and just waiting by the architecture faculty until she showed up.
It drove Nick crazy. ‘Can’t you see that she’s just playing you? She’s having a good laugh, jerking your chain and seeing what happens. Open your eyes, mate. This is never going to go anywhere.’
I argued with him: ‘Look, I know this is crazy, but she’s worth it. And there’s a real connection between us, I know there is.’
‘You reckon? Well, if your connection is so good, how come you can’t even call her? It’s not just a little crazy, mate. Talk about a prick-tease …’
Two months went by and then, as suddenly as she had gone, Mariana returned. She sent me an email filled with apparent remorse. It read, ‘I hope you can forgive me some day. I’m sure you will never answer me but I want that you know this: I bitterly regret what I have done. If you hate me, I have earned it. It wasn’t in any way your fault, just mine. I have been thinking of you all the time and I wish you all the best and a lot of love, Mxx.’
I wrote back and told her that I could never hate her. I just wanted to see her again and talk face-to-face like normal human beings. If we could ever be lovers – for though we’d dated, we’d never actually had sex in the time she’d been at the practice – that would be fantastic, I said, but I would settle for being her friend.
‘OK, if you want real, natural friendship, you can have it,’ she replied. ‘But I must warn you I’m a very bad friend, often resentful and touchy. But if you really want that blonde bitch for friendship, she is here for you.’
Before I could reply, she added a postscript: ‘Help me move on, change my perception of the world, let me trust someone.’
In retrospect, of course, I came full circle once again to Andy’s original question: why had I not seen that there was something seriously wrong with Mariana? Well, I had – in part. Of course I thought it was bizarre, the way she acted. Not to mention frustrating, infuriating, painful and a total waste of time. But as a man you expect a certain amount of crazy, hormonal, emotional manipulation from a woman, just as women, I imagine, expect all the things that most men get hopelessly wrong in their relationships. But we all put up with the drawbacks of the opposite sex when we think the other person is worth it. And Mariana was. Not only that, she proved me right and justified my tolerance of everything she’d put me through by what happened next.
The games stopped. She came back to work with us again. Within a week we were sleeping together and from that moment on she was never, ever, anything but wonderful to me.
‘Of course she’s changed,’ Nick said. ‘She wants a job and you’re a partner. She’ll be wanting a ring next. You’re her meal-ticket, mate. Get used to it.’
I didn’t think that was a fair explanation back then and I still didn’t, even after everything that had happened. If anything, Mariana was our meal-ticket, not the other way round. She had been our way into the footballer market. She’d made us rich. But quite apart from that, the psychology wasn’t right. There had always been something true and pure between us, hidden away beneath all the game-playing and manipulation like a diamond in a seam of black, volcanic rock: I was absolutely sure of it, right from that first conversation in my car. And that, it occurred to me now, might have been what bothered Mariana. She felt it just like I did. She wanted it too. But at the same time something about it scared the hell out of her. So she did everything she could to drive me away, until, in the end, she’d run out of tricks and I was still there, waiting for her. And that’s when she finally came to me.
At that point I set everything that had happened before to one side. I’d never really known love before: not from my family, nor my first marriage. Mariana gave me the real thing, pain and all. And for that I’d forgiven her everything.
But how could I forgive the killing of my only brother? I had told Vickie Price that I would have nothing if I lost Mariana. But there was no possibility of our marriage surviving unless I could come to terms with what she had done. In that respect, the detective mission on which I had embarked was not just aimed at convincing a judge. First I had to convince myself. And on that thought I finished the last glass of wine, s
igned my initials to the bill for a meal I’d barely noticed and wandered back up to my hotel room. I wanted a decent night’s sleep. I’d be back to work in the morning.
21
SATURDAY
Two days earlier, I’d discovered how much blood a human body can pump out into the open air before the heart gives up and dies. That same day, in the hours between Mariana’s court appearance and my visit to the secure psychiatric unit, I’d learned how that blood is cleaned away.
Yeats had called to inform me that the house was no longer a working crime scene. I could therefore take possession of my property again. He gave me the number of a specialist cleaning company that dealt with crime scenes. I called them up, fixed an appointment, told them to collect the house keys from the hotel reception desk and asked what I could expect to see when I went back to the house.
‘It’ll be totally clean,’ the man said. ‘You’ll never know anything had happened. We start at the centre of the crime scene and work out from there: absolutely every surface, object, bit of furniture, draperies, you name it. The last thing we do is the inside of the front door as we go out. We get rid of any odours, too. All you’ll detect is a very slight, fresh, lemony scent. Very pleasant, many of our customers say.’
The lemony freshness of my house awaited me on Saturday morning. But not before I’d checked out of the hotel and gone round to my office. I had expected it to be empty, but Nick was there, wearing a shirt that looked suspiciously as if it had been slept in. He rubbed his hand against eyes as black-rimmed as a panda’s.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve come to lend me a hand?’ he asked as he saw me walk in.
‘Afraid not. I just came to get hold of all Mariana’s personnel files. I’m going through every scrap of information I can find.’ A thought suddenly struck me, ‘Oh sod it! Don’t tell me the cops took them all …’
‘Copied them,’ said Nick. ‘Twice. One set for them and one for the defence. Apparently any evidence the police see, the defence has to see too.’
‘Well then, I’ll take a copy as well.’
Nick looked at me: ‘Honestly, Pete, are you sure you want to be doing this? Wouldn’t you be better off here?’
‘I know you mean well, but I can’t come back. Not yet. I’m not trying to be a hero or anything. I just have to find out the truth about Mariana. I’ll never have any peace, any closure in my life, until I’ve done that.’
Nick nodded in grudging acceptance that I was not going to be swayed. Then he looked at Mariana’s files. ‘Are these going to get you back to work any quicker?’
‘I hope so.’
‘In that case, bollocks to copying, just take the bloody originals.’
The man from the cleaners was right about the scent: it wasn’t entirely unpleasant. He was wrong, however, to say that I would not be able to detect that anything had happened in my living room. The blood on the floors had entirely disappeared. The glazed far wall sparkled. The dining table and kitchen units were spotless. But there were pale, ghostly marks on the wall – a thinning of the creamy white surface – that indicated where the chemicals that had removed the blood had taken away the top layer of paint as well. And on the sofas you could follow the blood spatter by the way the leather was very slightly faded.
Aside from any visible evidence of what had happened here, my mind kept detecting, or perhaps imagining, other, less tangible signs of Andy’s continued presence in the building. It wasn’t just downstairs that I could still see his body lying on its mattress of blood: it seemed to follow me everywhere. He died in every room in the house.
I wanted to stay, though, because Mariana was present for me in the sight and scent of her clothes hanging in her wardrobe and the framed photographs of us scattered about a random assortment of mantelpieces, bookshelves and walls. All those memories of her stabbed me like acupuncture needles wherever I went, one after the other, all the time. But at least I had that tangible evidence of her. For all my mental images of Andy there was just one picture of him, and then only in a group shot, taken at a party years ago. It was one more indictment on the list of charges against me, one more example of the carelessness with which I’d treated our relationship.
There’s no point feeling guilty, though, unless you do something about the source of your guilt. I’d come back home for a purpose. I had to look at my house as a resource. This was where Mariana had lived. This was where her belongings all were. So this was where I would find the most material from which to excavate and reconstruct her past.
There was an outbuilding at the back of the house that I had converted into my personal home office-cum-studio. I took all the files I’d removed from Crookham Church in there, then went back through the house and gathered a pile of Mariana’s old diaries, letters, postcards, photographs, address books, her German and UK passports – anything at all that might possibly contain a clue.
I started with the whole question of her birth certificate. According to Andy, none had been issued in the name of Mariana Slavik. Yet I had a nagging memory of seeing just such a certificate, and logic dictated that it must have existed at some point. After all, Mariana Slavik was the name under which she had married me. In order for us to do that, she had to produce her German passport in that name. And to get that original passport she, or her parents, must have had to produce a birth certificate. So I started looking for it.
There was nothing in Mariana’s personnel file. The passport had been good enough for us. But looking through a boxfile I’d found at the house, filled with old bits and bobs, I came upon the certificate. True, this was only a photocopy, but it was, or at least purported to be, an official document clearly stating that Mariana had indeed been born on 14 June 1980 in Berlin, the daughter of Fräulein Bettina Slavik. The father was listed as ‘unknown’.
If the document was genuine it explained a lot. It was no wonder Mariana never talked about her father: she didn’t even know who he was. In a society as ordered as East Germany, with the state snooping into every corner of its citizens’ lives, who knew what stigma would be attached to the illegitimate child of a promiscuous young woman?
Of course, the birth certificate could be a fake. That raised the question of how easy it was, or had ever been, to get false papers in East Germany. Andy had concluded that the most likely candidates were the Stasi: the same Stasi that Mariana hated with such a passion. But if there had been criminal gangs in East Germany they could have done it just as easily. Alternatively, suppose the certificate was genuine but someone had managed to remove the original from the archives in Berlin? I wasn’t sure who could do such a thing, or why they would want to do it, but it was possible.
So, it suddenly struck me, was something else. Mariana might never have known that her identity was false. If it – whatever ‘it’ was – had all happened when she was still a small child, she’d have been none the wiser.
That was certainly the impression given by the original CV, still preserved in her personnel file, that she had shown me at her very first interview. It stated that Mariana Slavik had attended a gymnasium (the German equivalent of a British grammar school) in the Bavarian city of Augsburg. She took her Arbitur exams, entitling her to attend university, in 1998. There was a photocopy of her Arbitur certificate attached to prove the fact. Her first degree had been taken at the Technical University of Munich, and she had a certificate of graduation dated June 2002. That was genuine, I was sure. Mariana’s ability as an architect was beyond dispute. I’d followed her every step of the way through the later years of her qualification process, and through all that time she’d proved it to me time and time again: she was the real thing.
That’s not what Andy had thought, though, and I was rapidly developing a serious posthumous respect for his investigative abilities. I owed it to him to honour the work he had done. So I planned to go through everything of Mariana’s that I’d collected and see whether there was a name, an address, anything at all, that correlated to something Andy had unco
vered. Maybe then I could work out what had made her kill.
22
A bundle of unopened letters, addressed to Mariana, had been sitting under a paperweight on one of the kitchen work surfaces. It was the usual stuff that gets sent to a prosperous, middle-class woman. A subscription copy of Vogue; some bills; catalogues flogging Toast and Boden clothes, White Company linens, Designers’ Guild furnishings and Sarah Raven seeds. Mariana had recently decided to create a vegetable garden. She’d said she was looking forward to getting her hands dirty. She wanted to grow the food that we ate. She liked the thought of bringing a garden to life.
I remembered, exactly, where Mariana had been standing in our garden when she told me about her plans, and the light that had shone in her eyes. She had hugged me tight, just from the pleasure of thinking about it all, and the smell of her hair had filled my senses just as the memory of her was doing now.
When I’d brought the letters into my studio, I’d put them on the table quite close to my chair. So when I’d finished with Mariana’s office files they happened to catch my eye. Once I’d discarded all the commercial stuff there was only one actual piece of genuine correspondence: an envelope with the logo of a private hospital in Leeds printed on the front, postmarked the day before the killing.