by Nicci French
The lower pane in the window was broken. If I removed the jagged remains of the glass, I would be able to squeeze through. Perhaps. I started to pull shards from the pane.
Then I chucked my coat through the hole. I pulled a trunk under the window and, standing on it, swung one leg through. The window was too high: I couldn’t touch the ground on the other side. Painfully, I manoeuvred myself through the hole until my toes touched a firm surface. I felt a spike of glass I had failed to remove pierce my jeans and puncture my thigh. I hunched my body and pushed through, head emerging into bright daylight. If anyone caught me now, what would I say? Second leg out. There. I bent down and picked up my coat. My left hand was bleeding. There was dirt and cobwebs and dust all over me.
‘Alice?’
I heard his voice in the distance. I took a deep breath. ‘Adam.’ It sounded steady enough. ‘Where are you, Adam? I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’ I slapped dirt off me, licked my forefinger and rubbed it over bits of my face.
‘Wherever did you get to, Alice?’ He came round the corner, looking so eager and handsome.
‘Where did you get to, more like?’
‘You’ve cut your hand.’
‘It’s nothing serious. I ought to wash it, though.’
In the cloakroom – an old-fashioned affair, where the guns were kept, as well as the tweed caps and the green wellies – I rinsed my hands and splashed water all over my face.
His father was sitting in an armchair in the living room, as if he had been there all along and we had simply failed to notice it. He had a fresh glass of whisky by his side. I went over and shook his hand, feeling the thin bones under the loose skin.
‘So you’ve got yourself a wife, Adam,’ he said. ‘Are you staying to lunch?’
‘No,’ said Adam. ‘Alice and I are going to a hotel now.’ He helped me into the coat that I still had bundled under my arm. I smiled up at him.
Twenty-six
One evening, about fifteen people came round to the flat to play poker. They sat on the floor, on cushions, and drank large quantities of beer and whisky, and smoked until all the saucers were overflowing with fag ends. By two in the morning, I was about three pounds down, and Adam was twenty-eight pounds up.
‘How come you’re so good?’ I asked, after everyone had left except Stanley, who was crashed out on our bed, dreadlocks spread over the pillow and pockets quite emptied of cash.
‘Years of practice.’ He rinsed a glass and put it on the draining board.
‘Sometimes it seems so strange to think about all those years when we weren’t together,’ I said. I picked up a stray tumbler, and drained it. ‘That when I was with Jake, you were with Lily. And you were with Françoise, Lisa and…’ I stopped. ‘Who was before Lisa?’
He looked at me coolly, not fooled at all. ‘Penny.’
‘Oh.’ I tried to sound nonchalant. ‘Was there no one between Lisa and Penny?’
‘No one special.’ He did his shrug.
‘Talking of which, there’s a man in our bed.’ I stood up and yawned. ‘Sofa do you?’
‘Anywhere will do me if you’re there too.’
∗
There’s a large difference between not revealing something, and positively concealing it. I rang her from work, between two wrangling meetings about the delay on the Drakloop. This, I promised myself, would be the last time, the very last time, that I would poke around in Adam’s past. Just this one thing, and then I would lay it all to rest.
I shut my door, swivelled round in my chair so that I was facing my window, with its view of a wall, and dialled the number at the head of the letter. The line was dead. I tried again, just in case. Nothing. I asked the exchange to test the line, and they told me it was no longer in use. So I asked if they could give me the number of Blanchard, A., in West Yorkshire. They had no Blanchards at all there. What about Funston, T.? Nothing under that name either. Sorry, caller, they said blandly. I almost howled in frustration.
What do you do when you want to track someone down? I read through the letter again, hunting for clues, which I already knew weren’t there. It was a good letter: straightforward and heartfelt. Tom, she wrote, was her husband and Adam’s friend. Their affair was never free of his presence. One day he was bound to discover, and she wasn’t prepared to hurt him that much. Nor could she live with the guilt that she was feeling at the moment. She told Adam that she adored him, but that she couldn’t see him again. She told him that she was going to stay with her sister for a few days, and he was not to try to change her mind, or to get in touch with her. She was resolute. The affair would remain their secret: he must tell no one, not even his closest friends; not even the women who came after her. She said that she would never forget him but that she hoped one day he would forgive her. She wished him luck.
It was a grown-up kind of letter. I laid it down on my desk and rubbed my eyes. Perhaps I should just let it go now. Adele had implored Adam never to tell anyone, not even future lovers. Adam was simply honouring her request. That fitted his character. He would keep a promise. There was something scarily literal about Adam.
I picked up the letter again and stared at it, letting the words blur. Why did I feel a faint tug of memory at her name? Blanchard. Where had I heard it before? Maybe from one of Adam’s climbing cronies. She and her husband were clearly climbers. I fretted for a few minutes longer, then went into my next meeting with the marketing department.
Adele wouldn’t go away. Once you start being jealous, anything feeds that state. You can prove suspicions, but you can never disprove them. I told myself that after I knew about Adele I would be free from the grip of my sexual curiosity. I rang up Joanna Noble and asked if I could use her professional expertise.
‘What now, Alice? More wifely paranoia?’ She sounded weary of me.
‘Nothing like that.’ I gave a brisk laugh. ‘This is quite unrelated. It’s just – I need to track someone down. And I think she was mentioned in the papers recently. I know that you have access to newspaper files.’
‘Yes,’ she said cautiously. ‘Unrelated, you say?’
‘Yes. Completely.’
There was a tapping sound at the end of the line, as if she were bouncing a pencil against her desk. ‘If you come first thing in the morning,’ she said at last, ‘nine, say, we can pull up any mentions of the name on the computer, and do a printout of anything relevant.’
‘I owe you one.’
‘Yes,’ she said. There was a pause. ‘All fine on the Adam front?’ It sounded as if she were talking about the Somme.
‘Yup,’ I said cheerily. ‘All quiet.’
‘See you tomorrow, then.’
I got there before nine, and Joanna hadn’t arrived. I waited in the reception area, and I saw her before she saw me. She looked tired and preoccupied, but when she noticed me sitting there she said, ‘Right, let’s go then. The library is in the basement. I’ve only got about ten minutes.’
The library consisted of rows and rows of sliding shelves filled with brown files, categorized according to subject, and then alphabetically. Diana, Diets, Disasters/natural, that kind of thing. Joanna led me past all of these, to a largish computer. She pulled over a second chair, gestured for me to fill it, and then sat down in front of the screen. ‘Tell me the name, then, Alice.’
‘Blanchard,’ I said. ‘Adele Blanchard. B-L-…’ But she had already typed it in.
The computer beeped into life; numbers filled the top right-hand corner and on the clock icon a hand ticked round. We waited in silence.
‘Adele, you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘There is no Adele Blanchard coming up, Alice. Sorry.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘It was just a long shot. I’m really grateful to you.’ I stood up.
‘Hang on, there’s another Blanchard coming up, though. I thought the name was familiar.’
I looked over Joanna’s shoulder. ‘Tara Blanchard.’
‘Yes, this
is just a paragraph or two about a young woman who was fished out of a canal in East London a couple of weeks back.’
That was why the name sounded so familiar. I felt a stab of disappointment. Joanna pressed a key to call up any further items: there was only one, which was more or less identical.
‘Do you want a printout?’ she asked, with a touch of irony. ‘Adele might be her middle name.’
‘Sure.’
While the printer was stuttering out the single sheet about Tara Blanchard, I asked Joanna if she had heard anything from Michelle. ‘No, thank God. Here you are.’
She handed me the printout. I folded the paper in half, then half again. I should really just chuck it in the bin, I thought. I didn’t, though. I pushed it into my pocket, and caught a taxi to work.
I didn’t look at the cutting until lunch-time, when I bought a cheese and tomato sandwich and an apple from a café up the road and took them back up to my office. I read the few lines again: the body of twenty-eight-year-old Tara Blanchard, a receptionist, had been found in a canal in East London on 2 March by a group of teenagers.
Adele’s letter had mentioned a sister. I hauled the residential telephone directory off the shelf and flicked through it, not expecting to find anything. But there it was: Blanchard, T. M., of 23B Bench Road, London EC2. I picked up the phone, then changed my mind. I rang through to Claudia, said I was going out, and could she take my calls. I wouldn’t be long.
Twenty-three Bench Road was a thin, beige, pebble-dashed terrace house, squashed between others, and exuding a general air of neglect. There was a dead plant in one window, and a pink cloth instead of curtains at another. I rang the B bell, and waited. It was one thirty and if anyone had lived here with Tara they were probably out. I was about to press the other bells to see if I could unearth a neighbour or two when I heard footsteps and saw, through the thickly ribbed glass, a shape coming towards me. The door opened on a chain, and a woman stared through the crack. I had clearly woken her up: she was clutching a dressing-gown to her, and her eyes were puffy. ‘Yes?’
‘I’m really sorry to bother you,’ I began, ‘but I’m a friend of Tara’s, and since I was just passing…’
The door closed, I heard the chain being slid back, and then it opened wide. ‘Come in, then,’ she said. She was a small, plump woman, young, with a mop of gingery hair and tiny ears. She looked at me expectantly.
‘I’m Sylvie,’ I said.
‘Maggie.’
I followed her up the stairs and into her kitchen.
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
‘Not if it’s a bad time.’
‘I’m awake now, aren’t I?’ she said, quite amiably. ‘I’m a nurse, on nights at the moment.’
She filled the kettle, then sat down opposite me at the grubby kitchen table. ‘You were a friend of Tara’s?’
‘That’s right,’ I said confidently. ‘I never came here.’
‘She didn’t bring people back.’
‘I really knew her from childhood actually,’ I said. Maggie busied herself with the tea. ‘I read about her death in the papers and I wanted to know what happened.’
‘It was awful,’ said Maggie, standing up to drop two tea-bags into a teapot and pour on the boiling water. ‘Sugar?’
‘No. Do the police know how it happened?’
‘A mugging. Her purse was missing when they found her. I always told her she shouldn’t walk along the canal when it was dark. But she always did. It cuts half the distance from the station.’
‘Awful,’ I said. I thought of the dark canal and shuddered. ‘I was mostly a friend of Adele actually.’
‘Her sister?’ A wave of exhilaration rushed through me: so Tara was Adele’s sister, after all. Maggie plonked down my cup of tea. ‘Poor thing. Poor parents too. Imagine what they must feel. They came here to collect her stuff a week or so ago. I didn’t know what to say to them. They were so very brave, but there can’t be anything worse than losing a child, can there?’
‘No. Did they leave their address or phone number? I’d love to get in touch with them to tell them how sorry I am.’ I’d become too good at deceit.
‘I’ve got it somewhere. I don’t think I wrote it in my book, though. I didn’t think I’d need it. But it’s probably in a pile. Hang on.’ She started rummaging through a stack of papers by the toaster – bills in black and red, junk mail, postcards, take-away menus – and finally found it scrawled on the telephone directory. I copied it down on a scrap of used envelope, then put it in my wallet.
‘When you speak to them,’ she said, ‘tell them I’ve thrown away all the odd stuff they left, like they said I should, apart from the clothes, which I gave to Oxfam.’
‘Didn’t they take all her things, then?’
‘They took almost everything; all the personal things, of course, jewellery, books, photos. You know. But they left some bits. Amazing how much rubbish one has, isn’t it? I said I’d deal with it.’
‘Can I look at it?’ She stared at me in surprise. ‘Just in case there’s a memento,’ I added feebly.
‘It’s in the dustbin, unless the binmen have taken it.’
‘Can I have a quick look?’
Maggie seemed dubious. ‘If you want to go through orange peel and cat-food tins and tea-bags, then I guess it’s your look-out. The bins are just outside the front door – you probably saw them on your way in. Mine is the one with 23B painted on it in white.’
‘I’ll have a look on my way out, then. And thanks a lot.’ ‘There’s nothing there. It’s all bits of old rubbish.’
I must have looked crazy, a woman in a smart grey trouser suit rooting through a bin. What did I think I was doing, trying to find out about Tara, who was nothing to me except a shabby means of finding her parents? Whom I’d already found, and who were also nothing to me, except as a way of finding the woman who might be Adele. Who should mean nothing to me. She was just a lost fragment of someone else’s past.
Chicken bones, empty tuna and cat-food tins, a few lettuce leaves, an old newspaper or two. I was going to reek when I got back to work. A broken bowl, a light-bulb. I’d better do this methodically. I started pulling things out of the bin and piling them on to the bin lid. A couple walked past and I tried to look as if this was quite normal behaviour. Tubes of lipstick and eyeliner pencils: this had probably belonged to Tara. A sponge, a torn bathcap, several glossy magazines. I put them on the pavement, beside the overflowing pile on the bin lid, and then peered back into the nearly empty bin. A face stared back at me. A familiar face.
Very slowly, as in a nightmare, I pushed my hand down and picked up the scrap of newspaper. Tea-leaves were stuck to it. ‘The hero returns,’ read the headline. By the bin, crammed in a corner, I found a plastic shopping bag. I unfolded it and put the newspaper inside. I scrabbled around in the bottom of the bin and came up with several more scraps of newspaper. They were dirty and sodden, but I could make out Adam’s name, Adam’s face. I found other sodden papers and envelopes and transferred them all to the shopping bag, cursing the smell and the damp.
A tiny old woman, with two enormous dogs on a double lead, came past and looked at me with distaste. I grimaced. I was even talking to myself now. A madwoman, going through dustbins, scaring herself to death.
Twenty-seven
My hands were oily and stained. I couldn’t go back to the office, not like this, and I wanted to go home and scrub everything about this experience off my body, out of my hair, out of my brain. I couldn’t take this bag of sodden paper back to the flat. I had to find a place to sit down where I could straighten out my thoughts. I had fabricated so much, concealed so much from Adam, that it was now impossible for me to go spontaneously to him. Always I had to think what it was that I had previously told him, what my story had to be in order to fit in with previous lies. That was the advantage of telling the truth. You didn’t have to concentrate all the time. True things fitted together automatically. The thought of this gap I had created b
etween myself and Adam suddenly made the grey day seem even greyer and less bearable.
I walked aimlessly through residential streets looking for a café or anywhere I could rest and think, plan what to do. I saw nothing but an occasional corner shop but eventually I came to a small patch of grass next to a school with a drinking fountain and a climbing frame. Some young mothers were there with babies in prams and raucous toddlers teetering on the apparatus. I went over to the fountain, drank from it then rinsed my foul hands in the dribble of water and dried them on the inside of my jacket.
One bench was free and I sat on it. It must have been Tara who had made the phone calls and left the messages and tampered with the milk, all out of some sick infatuation with Adam that was a hangover from his relationship with her sister. I might once have thought that such behaviour was inconceivable, out of all proportion to the emotion, but now I had become something of an expert in obsession. I tried to calm myself down. For a time I hardly dared to look into the bag.
When I was at school, one of my boyfriends had had a cousin who was in a punk band which became famous for a year or two. Every so often I would notice a mention of his name, or even a picture of him in a magazine and sometimes I would tear it out to show to a couple of my friends. What could be more natural than that Tara should be interested in newspaper articles about Adam? That she should tear them out? After all, almost everybody I knew in any capacity had been fascinated by the Adam they read about in the press. Tara had actually known him. I lifted my fingers to my nose. There was still a sweet, rancid reek to them. I considered the image of myself secretly rummaging in the dustbin belonging to the dead sister of an ex-girlfriend of my husband’s. I thought of how I had deceived Adam over and over again. Was this any different from my earlier betrayal of Jake?