It Was You

by It Was You (retail) (epub)

  I turned to one side, then the other. Andy was trying to bind me with string. ‘Josephine Thomas. Two women from the same building—’

  ‘Sorreee. DI Carpenter’s put that one to bed. Just today, I was going to call you. Good piece of police work. Picked up loads of junkies on possession charges and fingerprinted them. One matched with the wallet that was found. Young lad, lives on the next estate. Bloodstains on a T-shirt in his drawer, you believe? And what’s a simple mugging victim like Josephine Thomas got to do with this? A baby stolen from a pregnant woman?’

  ‘Ok, it hasn’t, but it was someone else, someone—’

  ‘It was Mike! Jealousy, it’s the biggy. A woman gets killed, look at the partner. And it happened close to home. In their bloody cafe! So what I want to know is did he say anything to you, about Ally, about any fears he might have? At the Tate, or the days before? Did he ever confide in you?’

  ‘I was there, in the cafe. I saw how he was. He didn’t know. And he was crushed. It wasn’t him.’

  ‘Not answering, huh? Well, I was there too. And my take on him’s different, probably because I’m not his mate. I even spoke to him. Whispered in his ear, with Ally lying there. She was a nice girl, Ally, I liked her. Great tits: those ones that point upwards if you really never did get to see them. I was there and I thought husband straight away. I probably shouldn’t have but I told poor Mike straight off I knew it was him.’

  I closed my eyes and opened them again. I knew that my world was different but I suddenly thought about Mike’s. His world was gone.

  ‘Bit cruel, I’ll admit, but honestly it just seemed right. Why should I be gentle with someone who could do that. That. “Pleased with yourself?” I said. I even asked him where the baby was.’

  The question hadn’t even occurred to me. Pictures came before I could shut them out.

  ‘Not going to ask me what he said? Well, he told me as a matter of fact. He told me straight away.’

  The silence in the room was so sudden and cold it stopped my heart. No. He couldn’t. Andy’s eyes were boring into mine, his face hard, the mocking levity nowhere.

  ‘In heaven,’ Andy said, answering his own question as he sat back in his chair. ‘You believe that? He told me it was in heaven. Been listening to too much Eric fucking Clapton if you ask me.’

  Chapter Twelve

  A nervous young PC ran me back up to Exmouth Market. It only took five minutes. I hadn’t expected it to be light, like when you come out of a matinee. A yawn shot through me as though it had been waiting for that moment to escape. I gazed out at the streets as they passed, staring at them like a tourist coming in from the airport. A young, exhausted-looking lad was pulling his sleeping bag from the doorway of a chemist’s, two uniforms standing over him. A lone artic pulled up at the lights and hissed like some huge animal. The PC didn’t say anything to me, pretending to concentrate on his driving. On Rosebery Avenue I told him where to pull over and then mumbled a thank you as I pushed myself out onto the street.

  I watched the car move off and then walked the few yards to Exmouth Market. Andy’s words were ringing in my ears. It was Mike. I remembered the feeling inside me when he’d told me Mike knew where the child was. The shock. The fear that Mike might really have done it. It was similar to the shock I’d felt when Mike had called me at the gym. His words, so unexpected. But no. Mike hadn’t left his wife in the end. He’d just been scared. And, whatever Andy said, he hadn’t killed Ally.

  None of which changed the fact still seared across the front of my mind. Ally was dead.

  Even though it was cold, I stood gazing down the empty street towards Moro. I had an image of myself from what seemed like a horror film: walking down to the restaurant. Then I saw myself and Nicky, joking as we came out. My phone ringing. The images continued into town, to the Sixty-Two club. All the way to the Lindauer Building. They continued into the lift, but that’s where they stopped. The doors wouldn’t open. I thought of Nicky, and of Heather and Ruth. I wondered how were they dealing with this. I allowed a wave of self-pity to run through me at the thought that this wouldn’t be so bad for them. Nicky knew Mike and Ally but not like I did, and the girls didn’t know them at all. I wanted to crumble, to fall to the floor right there. But I didn’t. I knew that if I did I’d be finished. Instead I took a deep breath and tried to focus.

  I remembered something I’d seen once. I’d stopped my car on the motorway, fascinated to watch a bridge being built. Enormous cranes were being used to pour liquid concrete into huge, cast-iron moulds. In spite of the way I was feeling, that’s what I had to do. Seeing Ally had emptied everything out of me. Clay and Andy had finished the job, leaving just a shell. I wanted to fold in on myself but I couldn’t. I had to fill myself with concrete. Mike could do the pain. He could do it for both of us. His grief would be big enough. What would mine be compared to his, anyway? No, I had to harden myself. Let the concrete make me strong, let it help me do the only thing that was left, the only thing that would make the future anywhere near worth living.

  Identify him.

  Find him.

  Not just that.

  Find him before anyone else could find him.

  I stood on the Market a little while longer, wondering why it was so quiet, before realizing that it was Sunday. The only sign of life came from the Catholic church to my right, a red-stone edifice with a bell tower that on a sunny day makes you think you’re in San Gimignano, if you squint just right. The doors were ajar and there was movement inside. A young priest came out to sweep the steps, clenching his jaw against a yawn, his eyes watery. He looked up when he saw me and smiled. He said good morning but then straightened, the look on his face changing. He held his broom by his side.

  ‘Do you need to talk to someone?’ he asked.

  Yes, I thought, the bastard who did that to my friend. I turned away from the priest and walked towards my flat.

  * * *

  I spent most of the morning sitting at my desk, pointing my eyes out of the window, across the junction at the end of Exmouth Market to the Mount Pleasant sorting office. I was paralysed. I thought with scorn of the naive, fired hope that had been my sole emotion for the past few weeks. I watched people walking past, some with their arms full of the Sundays, and self-pity came back as I wondered how they could have escaped so lightly. Why my life had been blown apart like it had. I felt vindictive towards them. I saw a man answering his mobile and hoped that it was news, news that would crumple his face, send a huge shard of grief into his guts like the one sticking into me. The wish only made me feel worse, ashamed. I thought again about Ally. How drunk I’d been, how I’d defiled the fact of her death by being too pissed to really take it in. The shame grew, paralysing me even more.

  I wanted to break free from it but I didn’t know how. Clay had told me not to go anywhere near my office. He was heading the investigation, with Andy as his number two. He said that he was keeping my name, as well as the other witnesses, out of the papers. He said he’d get Andy to fill me in on what the tech boys came up with, what the CCTV showed, knowing I’d only get someone else to tell me anyway. And he said that he wasn’t going to waste his breath telling me not to go after whoever I thought was responsible. He knew me too well. He just told me not to get in his way. He also wanted to know what I came up with. Whether it pointed away from Mike, or right to him.

  Even though it was Sunday, red postal vans still shot in and out of the depot. A shift changed. Sunday city silence bellowed round my flat. I saw Max opening up Fred’s, hands on hips as he inspected another daubing of graffiti. At some point I heard the bells of the Catholic church, backed by a distant peal from St Paul’s, like a memory that sits beneath a repeated moment. I thought of Mike, whether he was still at the hospital. Just as he had been in the cafe he was still in a different space from me, far, far away. Andy would come back to me with the forensics report but until he did I tried to think of something, anything, that would be worth doing. I couldn’t. There was
no space for me, no roads to walk down that weren’t full already. The machine I’d once been part of would be rolling. Police officers would be swamping the Lindauer, grilling the few people who showed up on a Sunday to work. Others would be fingertipping through gardens, nearby school grounds, scrabbling through the bushes in Highbury Fields, praying that they wouldn’t be the one to put their hand behind a dustbin and find it.

  I found it strange to think of so much activity only a few miles away. I pictured the residents of the streets surrounding the Lindauer waking to find police officers at their doors, asking if they had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. Gathering their dressing gowns around them when they were told what had happened. I saw the reporters who would be hassling detectives for comment, saw them perk up as Ally’s body was removed. I saw people, with nothing better to do, stopping to watch before getting bored, looking back in case they missed something. I was very aware of myself, doing nothing, listening to each breath go in and out of my body, aware that somewhere, maybe somewhere not too far away, someone else would be going over the events of the previous night. Would be seeing it all again. Somewhere someone’s mind would be as full of it as mine was.

  Frustrated by my inactivity, I eventually stood up. I moved the table I was sitting at further into my living space, back beneath the other window. That left the entire west-facing wall blank, but for a framed Salgado print Sharon had given me for Christmas once. I took that down, slid it behind my sofa and fetched a ream of white A4. Using Blu-Tack I covered the now empty wall with it, from the floor to the ceiling. When I was done I did what I’d done so many times in the incident room at Calshot Street. I fetched a magic marker and uncapped it. In the centre of the blank space I wrote a single word. The victim’s name.

  Ally

  I capped the pen and stepped back, thinking of what to write next. Other words, words that were connected to Ally, could perhaps be connected to her death. Words that might lead my thoughts somewhere, begin to open them up. I stood for ten minutes. I couldn’t think of anything. Not one word. I couldn’t see anything reasonable, rational, work-outable, that could lead back to what had happened. So I wrote nothing, Ally’s name sitting there on the wall alone, surrounded by emptiness.

  But I had to do something. Turning from the wall, I picked up the phone and dialled Nicky’s number. The phone just rang. I looked around the flat and was aware, for some reason, of the state of it. Old newspapers littered the floorboards and I could see fluff balls where the table had been, clinging on to the phone cable. A line had been crossed without my having noticed it. I threw out the newspapers before dusting the table and the window sills. After that I Hoovered, hoping that I wasn’t waking my downstairs neighbour, currently a film maker whose career seemed to consist of sitting in Fred’s drinking cappuccinos.

  With the living room spick and span, I had a go at the kitchen, washing the sides down and cleaning the hob. I tipped out a year’s worth of crumbs from the toaster and pulled from my message board countless fliers and cards for concerts and private views that had happened months ago.

  When I was done I sat by the window again, looking out onto the street. It was pre-dark, that empty, graphite stillness that always used to frighten me as a child. I felt like I should get some air, but I found that I couldn’t. Nor did I have any desire to eat. What I knew I needed was sleep but that was the worst idea of all. Awake, I was in control. I didn’t know what sleep would bring.

  Instead I tried to call Sharon. Even the thought of her voice was like a salve spread on my heart. I dialled her number. Her last message had said that she was away, in the north of the country, but she might have come back. I looked at my watch, trying to remember the time difference, wondering if it was fair to tell her about Ally on the phone. I didn’t get a chance to find out: the phone just rang, that long, international purr, repeated. I knew it was no good but I didn’t hang up. The sound was comforting. I couldn’t speak to Sharon but somewhere, halfway round the world, I’d made a phone ring, ring in a room that held her things. I tried to picture her clothes, her bed not made, some of the books I’d sent her. I lay on my sofa listening as Sharon’s phone called to her like a hatchling, looking at the sky.

  I closed my eyes and imagined that Sharon wasn’t away at all. That she was in the other room. Not just that but we were living together. She’d moved in with me. I’d never had that thought, not even two years ago when we were a lot closer than we were now. But as soon as I had it, it seemed so right. We lived here, or somewhere else, it didn’t matter. Sharon was in the other room. She was working on a brief for the morning, her glasses on, shrouded by orange lamplight. She’d come through in a minute and settle next to me, in time for some documentary she wanted to watch. She’d try to concentrate but I’d be bored. I’d put my hand inside her top and then I’d push it up and she’d say, oh, Billy, stop it! but I wouldn’t stop it because I’d know what she really meant. And then I’d be kissing her stomach and her thighs and pulling her pants down as she tried to set the video and we’d be laughing and joking and wrestling with each other and then we’d stop the joking and be kissing and she’d be calling out my name.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I came to suddenly but without drama, the way you sometimes do when you didn’t know you’d fallen asleep. My eyes were closed and I kept them that way, staring into a hot red. I tried to remain still, not wanting to do anything to break the spell, the amber stillness encasing me like a prehistoric fly. But already I could feel it fading. I opened my eyes, surprised by the amount of light flooding into my flat. Then my eyes locked onto the word, sitting on its own in the middle of the wall in front of me.

  I let the knowledge rush in, not trying to stop it, to fight it with disbelief. My mouth felt dry and the back of my throat was burning. The presence of the hangover felt rude, disrespectful. I blinked into the light and then sorted the sounds I could hear into pieces. Traffic, like a BBC tape. A car horn. People laughing on the street, their laughter moving past. Something else? I reached around for the phone and found it on the floor by the side of the sofa. It was still ringing. They can’t have had the cut-off we do. The wall clock told me that it had been ringing for twelve hours straight. I hit ‘end’ and then pushed myself up onto an elbow, feeling so heavy I was barely able to make it.

  I hadn’t dreamed but my mind can’t have been idle while I was out of it. I knew this because, sitting in the centre of my mind, there was a realization which I’d had no hand in coming to. It was as if someone else had snuck inside my head and left it there for me to find. I looked at it, turning it round and round, amazed that it was there, but more amazed at its simplicity. It stunned me. I tried to turn away from it but I couldn’t. It was too obvious. However much I wanted to, I was unable to deny it. I’d been a policeman long enough to know that people are capable of acting way out of character. Or within characters they’ve kept perfectly hidden for years. What other feeling could have driven someone to such a double murder other than the belief that both parties had done wrong? Not, as Andy had thought, by committing adultery, or being the product of it. But by being pregnant and being the product of that. Think like a copper, Billy, think like a copper. I saw Clay and Andy looking at me with that expression on their faces. I didn’t know if they were right, but I did know how I must have sounded to them. I thought what I’d have been like ten years ago. I wouldn’t have done it the way Andy had, but I would have thought what he thought. I knew I would. And even if I hadn’t been certain, I’d have had to accept the likelihood of it, the possibility. What had changed? I suddenly remembered something Andy Gold had just said to me. He’d called Mike my best mate. But Mike wasn’t that. He was a good friend, yes, but without Ally what was he?

  I got up shakily. I walked towards the wall with Ally’s name written on it and I stood for a minute, thinking about it. Again I tried to turn from it, deny it, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I picked up the magic marker and next to Ally’s name I added Mi
ke’s. As soon as I began to write a heavy plumb line of disappointment began to sink right down to the bottom of me. When I was done I looked at the two words, together as usual. Horrified to my core that they were together in this way.

  Stumbling into the kitchen I pulled the blind and set the kettle on the stove. I felt sick, leaden, as though I’d woken up on a different, far bigger planet. While the kettle creaked up to the boil I thought once again of the Lindauer Building. Monday morning. All those people showing up to work. I thought about pretty, sunny Jemma, a confused look on her face as she approached the cordon. What now? Then thoughts of Mike deepened the sickness inside me. What was I going to do? When I’d been sure that Mike was innocent I’d known exactly what I intended doing to Ally’s killer if I found myself in a position to do it. The certain knowledge that I wouldn’t flinch had been comforting. But what would I do to Mike? If it was him. I didn’t know. I didn’t even know if he’d been interviewed yet. For all I knew, forensics could already have proved he’d done it. I suddenly realized that he’d never actually denied it. What I’d seen as grief could easily have been remorse. Had he already confessed? I walked back into the living room and picked up the phone.

  Andy had just got into the station. He asked me what I had and I told him that I hadn’t even left my flat since I’d seen him. He told me there was no trace of Ally’s baby. So far. CCTV was still being gone through. Mike was still at UCH and forensics were ongoing but Ron, on the gate, had been able to establish Mike’s presence at the Lindauer at about the time Ally had been killed. I nodded. Then Andy asked me again if I was sure that Mike had never expressed any concern about Ally to me, any sort of jealousy or problems with his wife. I held the phone in my hand for a long time, taking deep breaths in and out, until Andy asked if I was still there.