by Gytha Lodge
In short, Niall, it was the birth of Drunk Louise. She didn’t crawl out of some terrible depth like you might imagine; she emerged, butterfly-like, out of the drab, wilted chrysalis of my previous life. And God, I loved her.
You’ve told me how you felt the first time you saw me. How you were drawn to me, magnetically. Well, when you looked over at me and kept looking, it was this shiny new version of me that you were seeing.
I remember your expression. How you looked a little dazzled. And when you demanded to be introduced, it didn’t surprise me as it might have. Of course you would like this new Louise. She was so much fun.
Drunk Louise somehow knew what she was doing when she looked at you archly and asked if you were anyone important.
I loved how you laughed. And even more how you said, ‘I’m the second most important person in this room.’
‘Come on, at least third,’ I told you. ‘Me, April … you can be third.’ It wasn’t the kind of thing I’d ever said to anyone. But that new me somehow knew that she could.
‘I can deal with third,’ you told me, which made me feel a rush of warmth towards you. It only got better when we bantered on for a bit and then you asked, ‘Shall we do some shit dancing?’
You weren’t lying. It really was awful. I remember shaking my head at you in mock disappointment, while I couldn’t stop grinning.
In the middle of it I was summoned to perform. I hadn’t told either of you that Hannah had asked me to play a harp piece at the reception. I could tell that it added something to your liking for me, the fact that I was a musician, too.
I was getting on for being very drunk as I settled myself on the hard chair and started to flow into the Bach. But, as I have come to know since then, there’s a sweet spot that you hit, with alcohol. Where it loosens you up and makes you feel like you’re part of your instrument. When you get out of the way, and something else takes over. Someone else. Her.
And there was that other feeling, too. Of the way your eyes were on me during every touch of every string. I felt beautiful just then. Genuinely beautiful.
When you’d gone to the bar later on, April told me all about you and Dina. About how she’d lasted two months of marriage with you before deciding on an upgrade. April pointed out glamorous, hard-looking Dina and her new man to me. She did it too loudly, though, so that Dina looked over, and I cringed. But of course April didn’t care. She just called, ‘Hey, Dina! Looking great!’ and then steered us both away.
The story about Dina made me feel for you. It also made me admire you for having the courage to turn up to that wedding, when you knew your ex-wife would be there with her rich new boyfriend. It must all have been so raw. And when you were alone for any time, I could see the way your gaze would slide over to her. Each time it happened, you looked troubled. Confused, maybe.
It’s strange how I felt a surge of jealousy erupt in me, even then. Or at least how quickly it erupted in her. It made Drunk Louise burn with fury and a desire to win. She didn’t like being ignored, Niall. She didn’t like it at all.
I asked April if she thought you were a good choice. I was almost afraid of what she might say. I’d already started to think of you as someone in my life, and in spite of the alcohol, I could feel nerves rising as she hesitated before answering.
But in the end, she said, ‘You know, I think he’s a great choice. He’s a kind person. Sometimes too kind, you know? Like I think he’s been taken advantage of in the past, because he likes to take care of people.’ She gave a grimace. ‘And he’s probably a little hung up on what watch he’s wearing or what car he’s driving, but honestly, I think a lot of that came from Dina. I think he could shake it off.’
‘He isn’t still in love with her?’ I asked.
April gave this some thought. ‘No, I don’t think he is. I mean, I half worry that it’s too soon for him to move on, but actually, I think you’ll be the best possible thing for him. Someone with a good soul, to make him realise how shallow their relationship was.’
I didn’t know quite what to say to her amazing faith in me. But I stored it away and, in the way of stupid people the world over, decided that I could save you.
It was late on that the other thing happened. The thing I’ve always wondered if I should have paid more attention to. It was an argument between you and my new best friend. One I probably shouldn’t have overheard, and that I always doubted I’d got right.
The two of you were outside, where April had gone for a smoke. I’d finally, belatedly remembered to congratulate the bride, after realising I hadn’t spoken to her once all day. By that time Hannah was reeling, and spent some time hugging me and kissing me on top of the head and telling me how glad she was to know me. Once I’d finally escaped, I came to find one or the other of you, not expecting to find you both together.
April was standing facing the gardens, on that little raised, gravelled terrace at the back of the house. I don’t know if you remember it that clearly, but I do. It was beautiful, that place. Part of a night that seemed universally beautiful.
There wasn’t as much to see now that it was dark. Just a few solar lanterns scattered through the grounds. But April was looking out at the view anyway, twisting her lower lip to blow smoke into the air.
And I’m positive you were saying to her, ‘Whatever you’re scheming, I want you to leave her out of it.’
‘Oh, please,’ April said, dismissively. ‘I have a right to talk to anyone I want.’
And I remember that you made a frustrated huffing noise. You said, ‘What about everyone else’s rights? Don’t they matter?’
For a moment April just inhaled and exhaled, and then she said, ‘No, not really.’
‘Please,’ you said next, in what I now know to be a very rare tone of voice for you. ‘Please don’t.’
And April turned towards you and said, very slowly and clearly, as if she’d been play-acting with her tumbling sentences all evening, ‘I’m going to do exactly what I want.’
Then she started to walk inside. And in the fraction of a second I stood there – before pretending I’d just arrived and greeting you both with false enthusiasm – I saw your expression. You looked desolate. Like a man who had just lost something.
3
The team held a miniature briefing outside the front garden of number eleven, their breath billowing into the air. Jonah kept it as swift as possible in the bitter cold, for his own sake as much as theirs.
‘I’ll take Juliette to see Alex’s girlfriend,’ he told O’Malley and Lightman. ‘Domnall, you take Louise Reakes to the station to give her statement. And make sure she mentions the car engine on the record. I’d like Ben to check with this friend of Louise’s to find out if she saw anything strange when she left the house. Louise thinks that was at about midnight. And, Domnall, see if you can find out when it snowed last night. We have footsteps probably belonging to the victim that were made after the snow stopped. Hopefully some of that might narrow our window before we get on to traffic cameras. Currently we’re looking at twelve until four, and we’ve so far got two references to loud engine sounds last night.’
Lightman nodded. ‘The neighbour in number nine also says he was woken by a door slamming at two. He thinks it was at the Reakes house, but I wouldn’t rule out it being a car door.’
‘As far as Louise has said so far, there were no exits or entrances from her house after midnight,’ Jonah said. ‘So that could be interesting.’
They ran for their cars after that. Jonah started up the Mondeo and watched his two sergeants manoeuvre their way out of the close before he eased out into the road ahead of Hanson. Policing was, as Jojo frequently liked to tell him, a very carbon-intensive job.
The traffic was on the verge of becoming busy by the time Jonah drew up outside Alex Plaskitt’s house. It was on Alma Road, barely a mile from where Alex had died.
Jonah always found this part of the city disorientating. Like the Polygon, across town, most of the streets here loo
ked basically the same, with identikit pairs of semi-detached houses set close to the road, each of them red-brick and touched with white details.
They were definitely a step down the ladder of affluence from Saints Close, but Jonah infinitely preferred the effect of these older, more modest buildings. Many of the owners on this side of the road had filled their tiny walled front gardens with brightly coloured garden furniture and pots. In today’s snow they looked Christmas-card pretty.
Hanson followed him up to the front door, looking less nervous than he had expected. This was only the second time his detective constable had broken the news of a death. Assuming, of course, that Alex’s girlfriend actually lived here. The messages seemed to suggest so.
Having to give the worst news possible was gruelling, and it never really stopped being gruelling. You just found ways of distancing yourself.
Hanson seemed to have clocked some of those quickly. She was looking methodically at each detail of the house and street, noting it all, and clearly keeping her mind off what was about to come.
Jonah rang the old-fashioned push-button bell, and immediately heard rapid sounds from within the house. The door opened with some difficulty. It made a sliding sound and jammed, and whoever was behind it apologised.
When it finally opened, it was to reveal a fairly short, lightly built man of thirty or so, who was in the process of returning some car keys to the top of the hall table. He was dressed quite formally for this early on a Saturday, in an open white shirt with a subtle stripe, and a pair of stone-washed jeans. Dark, tired eyes. Black hair gelled until it stood up. A bronze complexion.
He put his left hand up to the door frame, and Jonah saw that there was a wedding band on his fourth finger.
Issa, Jonah thought, unsure why he had assumed Alex’s partner would be a woman.
The dark gaze darted between him and Hanson, and Jonah said quietly, ‘I think this is Alex Plaskitt’s house.’
Jonah saw the almost non-reaction he had grown used to. The stillness of Issa’s body, and the very slight brightening of his eyes.
‘Would you be Issa?’ Jonah tried next.
‘Yes. What is it?’
‘Might we come in?’ Jonah asked.
Like almost everyone in this situation, Issa already knew what Jonah was going to say. Jonah could see it from the sagging of his body against the door frame, and then the uncoordinated way he turned to lead them into the colourful sitting room.
Any doubt that they had the right person disappeared as Jonah sat on the cushion-laden futon. A chrome-framed photograph on the table beside it showed Issa and their victim in wedding garb. They were grinning at the camera, Alex’s head a good six inches higher than Issa’s. He had one arm over the smaller man’s shoulder. Alex looked about twice as wide as his husband, too.
Jonah focused on Issa and took a breath. ‘I’m very sorry to have to tell you that Alex was found dead in the early hours of this morning.’
Issa’s brow creased, and he put a hand up to his mouth. ‘How?’
‘It looks like he was attacked,’ Jonah said. ‘The pathologist will conduct a full post mortem, but it seems clear that he was a victim of violence.’
Issa took a large, unsteady breath. ‘Was it at a club?’
‘We’re unsure where the attack took place,’ Jonah said, carefully. ‘He was found outside a residential address.’
Issa gave him a strange, sharp look. ‘What residential address?’
Hanson said, soothingly, ‘A house on Saints Close. Do you know it?’
Issa shook his head, immediately, and then stood up and went rapidly over to a desk. He picked up his phone, his hand shaking badly.
‘He was supposed to come home,’ he said. ‘I tried calling him.’
And then he started to cry.
‘You settle yourself here, so,’ O’Malley told Louise Reakes, who was now fully dressed in a jersey dress with a fur-lined parka over the top. He placed an oversized mug of tea down on the interview-room table. ‘We’ll get your statement done as soon as Detective Sergeant Lightman is back.’
‘Thank you,’ Louise said to him. Her hand went to the mug, but then dropped to the table. She stared at the steam, unmoving.
‘When will your husband be home?’ O’Malley asked, thinking of her going back to her house alone after this, and having to walk past the place where the young lad had died. She could do with some support, he thought.
She looked up at him slowly, and said, ‘I’m not quite sure. Sometime in the afternoon, I think.’
‘Where’s he coming from?’
‘Geneva.’
‘Ah, so a fair distance.’ O’Malley nodded. ‘He must be worried about you.’
There was a moment where Louise just stared at him, in apparent incomprehension, and then she said, ‘He won’t be worried. I haven’t told him yet.’
O’Malley found himself looking back at her with much the same expression. ‘Did you not send him a message or so?’
Louise shook her head, glancing down at the phone she’d placed on the table in front of her, and then, in an agitated movement, folded her arms over herself. ‘No. I wasn’t sure I should.’
‘Well, I’d do that,’ O’Malley said, quietly. ‘You’ll feel better once you’ve talked about it.’
She didn’t look at his sympathetic smile, but instead angled her head to look towards the floor.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ he said.
Louise’s face seemed to grow, if anything, paler as she nodded. By the time O’Malley left, she’d made no move to pick up her phone.
Lightman had tried calling Louise’s friend April a few times with no joy. In the end he’d decided to drive over to her flat on Admirals Quay. It made up part of the very modern Ocean Village development on the dockside, and Lightman knew from having looked idly at the brochure once that the flats were well beyond his price range.
The ground floor was like a hotel. There was a bar, a concierge service, and a lift that you needed a key fob to operate. Lightman persuaded the concierge to rouse April Dumont and grant him access to the lift. The greying man leaned in and pressed the button for the top floor before inclining his head and turning away. The whole process made Lightman feel awkward.
It turned out that April’s flat actually occupied the whole of the top floor. He stepped out of the lift into a hallway with a single door. The space was lit in gold colours and featured what Lightman thought of as show-home furniture. It didn’t display many signs of anyone living there. This was an entirely different world from Louise Reakes’s solid suburban semi, and Lightman wondered what April did for a living.
The door opened before he’d got there, and a messy-haired blonde woman wearing a very short negligee with a silk dressing gown slung over it asked hoarsely, ‘What’s going on?’
‘I’m so sorry to wake you,’ he said, coming to stand a little in front of her. He felt the inevitable discomfort of standing in front of a woman wearing very little. So he did what he generally did and reduced the experience to a cataloguing one. He noted her accent, which had the drawl of an American from the deep south or Midwest. He saw the make-up smudged below her eyes. The glazed expression. The tattoo visible just above the line of the negligee. ‘I just need to ask two or three very brief questions about yesterday evening.’
‘Yesterday?’ April asked.
‘A young man was found dead in the garden of a house on Saints Close this morning,’ Lightman told her. ‘I believe you were there last night.’
‘What the hell?’ April asked. She stood back, suddenly, and said, ‘OK, come in for a second. It’s just me …’
He followed her into a huge, light living area with blocky modern chairs, floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of the harbour on two sides. Like the hallway, it looked almost unlived in. Only a pair of used tumblers, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter on the coffee table spoiled the show-home effect.
April flung herself onto one of the sofas, with a very q
uiet groan.
‘OK. Better.’ She brushed some of her hair back out of her eyes. ‘Sorry. I may have overdone the tequila yesterday. Please speak slowly.’
‘Of course,’ Lightman said. ‘It shouldn’t take long. We just wanted to confirm what time you left the house, and whether you saw or heard anything strange.’
April continued to fiddle with her hair as she thought. ‘The cab must’ve arrived at eleven fifteen. I booked it just before eleven, and there was a little wait.’
‘Was there anyone outside at that point?’
‘Not that I saw,’ April said, and then she looked at him with more focus. ‘Hey, is Louise OK? You said this dead guy was in the front yard? Garden?’
‘Yes. Louise seems all right, but finding him was obviously a bit of a shock.’
‘Jesus.’ April’s expression was dark. ‘I’ll drop her a line.’
‘Did you hear anyone driving around?’ Lightman went on. ‘Any strange sounds?’
There was another pause, and April shook her head. ‘No. The cab was sitting there with its lights on and the engine off, so you’d think we would have heard anything … Does Louise remember hearing something?’
‘Nothing definitive,’ Lightman replied.
April nodded, very slowly. ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘This is the last damn thing Louise needs. The last.’
4
Louise
So. You know, now, how Drunk Louise was first born. It may surprise you to know that I almost turned my back on her the next day. I’d never had a hangover before, and this one was so intense that I honestly thought I’d damaged myself irreparably. I was sick all day, right up until four p.m., and for all of that wretched time I could only look back on every single thing I’d done with nauseated regret.
But then April got in touch to arrange a coffee, telling me she needed me in her life. And you messaged me later on, as you’d promised. You told me how much fun I was, and how much you’d like to see me again.