by Nicci French
The thought came to me that the right thing would be to stuff this bag into the nearest bin and go home to Adam, tell him everything I had done and had discovered, admit everything and ask for his understanding. If I was too cowardly to own up to what I had done, then at least I could draw a line under it and allow us to get on with our lives. I dared myself. I actually stood up, looked around for a bin and saw one. But I couldn’t get rid of it.
On the way home I went into a stationer’s and bought some cardboard folders. As soon as I was out of the shop I unwrapped them and wrote on one: ‘Drakloop. Conf: Apr 1995, notes.’ That sounded boring enough to repel anybody’s interest. I gingerly extracted Tara’s sad little clippings from the shopping bag, trying to avoid spilling grease on my clothes. I put them in the file and tossed away the bag. Then I got paranoid and wrote some more meaningless words on three of the other files. When I got them home I had them casually in my hand. They looked just like work stuff.
‘You look tense,’ said Adam. He had come up behind me and touched my shoulders. ‘There’s a stiff muscle just there.’ He began to knead the area in a way that made me groan with pleasure. ‘What is there to make you tense?’
What was there to make me tense? A thought occurred to me. ‘I don’t know, Adam. It may be those calls and messages, they were getting me down.’ I turned and took him in my arms. ‘But I’m actually feeling better now. They’ve stopped.’
‘They have, haven’t they?’ Adam frowned.
‘Yes. There’s been nothing for more than a week.’
‘You’re right. Were you really worried about them?’
‘They were escalating. But I wonder why they stopped like that.’
‘It all comes from getting your name in the papers.’
I kissed him. ‘Adam, I’ve a suggestion.’
‘What?’
‘A year of boredom. Not completely, of course. But below eight thousand metres or whatever it is. I want everything involving me to be completely dull.’
Then I gave a scream. I couldn’t help it, because Adam had picked me up in a sort of fireman’s lift. He carried me across the flat and then tossed me on to the bed. He looked down at me, grinning. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said. ‘And as for you,’ he picked up Sherpa and kissed him on the nose, ‘this is not going to be a suitable sight for a cat of tender years.’ He set him gently down outside the bedroom and closed the door.
‘What about me?’ I said. ‘Should I leave as well?’
He shook his head.
The next morning we left at the same time and went on the tube together. Adam was taking the train out of town. He wouldn’t be back until eight. I had a frantic day of meetings at work, which occupied my entire attention. When I emerged, blinking, out of Drakon into the shock of unfiltered air I felt as if there was a swarm of bees inside my head. On the way home I bought a bottle of wine and a prepared meal that needed nothing more than heating up and prising out of a foil container.
When I arrived back home the outside door was unlocked but there was nothing unusual about that. A music teacher lived on the first floor and she unlocked the front door on the days when she had lessons. But when I reached the front door of our flat everything was wrong and I let the shopping fall. The flimsy door had been forced open. There was something taped to it. It was the familiar brown envelope. My mouth was dry, my fingers trembling, as I pulled it away and roughly tore it open. There was a message in crude black capital letters:
HARD DAY, ADAM? TAKE A BATH
I pushed the door gently inwards and listened. There was no sound.
‘Adam?’ I said feebly, pointlessly. There was no reply. I wondered if I should just go away, call the police, wait for Adam, anything but go in. I waited and listened some more and evidently nobody was there. Out of some curious, automatic sense of neatness I picked up the shopping from the floor and walked into the flat. I put the bag on the kitchen table. I almost tried to pretend to myself for a moment that I didn’t know what I had to do. The bathroom. I had to go and look in the bathroom. The person had now gone further and had come and played some joke, left something, just to show that they could get in if they wanted. That they could make us see what they wanted us to see.
I looked around. Nothing had been disturbed. So, inevitably, numbly, I went to the bathroom. I paused outside. Could it be a trap? I pushed at the door. Nothing. I pushed it open and jumped back. Still nothing. I went in. It was probably stupid, nothing at all, and then I looked in the bath. At first, I thought that somebody must have taken a fur hat and splashed it in deep crimson paint for a joke and tossed it into the bath. But I leaned forward and saw it was Sherpa, our cat. He had been difficult to recognize because he hadn’t only been slit open right down his torso but it was almost as if an attempt had been made to turn the little thing inside out. He was a horrid disgusting bundle of blood, but still I bent down and touched the top of his stained head, to say goodbye.
When Adam found me I had been lying in the bed, fully dressed, my head under the pillow, for an hour, two hours, I had lost count. I saw his face, puzzled. ‘Bathroom,’ I said. ‘The note’s on the floor.’
I heard him go and come back. His face was icy but when he lay beside me and held me I saw there were tears in his eyes. ‘I’m so sorry, my darling Alice,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I sobbed. ‘I mean, don’t be.’
He shook his head. ‘No, I mean… I…’ His voice faltered and he hugged me. ‘I didn’t listen to you, I was… Police. Can I just dial 999?’
I shrugged, tears running down my face at an angle. I couldn’t speak. I dimly heard quite a long conversation on the phone, Adam insistent. By the time two police officers arrived, an hour and a half later, I had sorted myself out. They were large, or they made the flat look small, and they stepped inside awkwardly as if they were concerned they might knock something over. Adam led them into the bathroom. One of them swore. Then they came back out, both were shaking their heads.
‘Bloody hell,’ said one of them. ‘Bastards.’
‘Do you think there was more than one of them?’
‘Kids,’ the other one said. ‘Out of their heads.’
So it hadn’t been Tara, after all. I didn’t understand anything any more. I had been so very sure it had been her. I looked up at Adam.
‘Look,’ he said, giving them the last note. ‘We’ve been getting these over the last couple of weeks. And phone calls as well.’
The officers looked at it without much interest.
‘Are you going to be taking fingerprints?’ I asked.
They exchanged glances.
‘We’ll take a statement,’ one of them said, extracting a small notebook from his bulky jacket. I told him that I had found our cat cut up in our bath. That our door had been forced open. That we had received anonymous phone calls and notes, which we hadn’t bothered to report or keep, but then they seemed to have stopped. He wrote it down laboriously. Half-way his pen ran out and I gave him one from my pocket.
‘It’s kids,’ he said, when I had finished.
On the way out, the two of them looked critically at the door.
‘You want something more solid,’ one of them said reflectively. ‘My three-year-old could kick this open.’ And they were gone.
Two days later Adam received a letter from the police. ‘Dear Mr Tallis’ was handwritten at the top but the text was a blurry photocopy. It continued: ‘You have reported a crime. No arrest has been made, but we will keep the case on file. If you have any further information, please contact the duty officer at Wingate Road Police Station. If you require assistance from a Victim Support Group, contact the duty officer at Wingate Road Police Station. Yours sincerely.’ The signature was a squiggle. A photocopied squiggle.
Twenty-eight
Lying gets easier. This is partly a matter of practice. I became an actress secure in her role as Sylvie Bushnell, the journalist or the concerned friend. I had discovered also that other people generall
y assume that what you are saying to them is true, especially if you are not trying to sell them insurance or an industrial-sized vacuum cleaner.
So, three days after rummaging through the bin of a murdered woman I had never met, I was sitting in a house in a village in the middle of middle England drinking tea made for me by her mother. It had been so easy to phone up, to say that I had known Tara, that I was in the area, that I wanted to pay my respects. Tara’s mother had been eager, almost effusive.
‘This is very kind of you, Mrs Blanchard,’ I said.
‘Jean,’ the woman said.
Jean Blanchard was a woman in her late fifties, about the age of my own mother, dressed in slacks and a cardigan. Her medium-length hair was streaked with grey, there were deep wrinkles in her face that looked as if they had been chiselled in hard wood and I wondered what her nights were like. She held out a plate of biscuits to me. I took a small thin one and nibbled the end of it, trying to stow into a dark corner of my mind the thought that I was stealing it from her.
‘How did you know Tara?’
I took a deep breath. But I had it all planned out. ‘I didn’t know her that well,’ I said. ‘I met her through a group of mutual friends in London.’
Jean Blanchard nodded. ‘We worried about her, when she went down to London. She was the first of the family to move away from the area. I knew that she was grown-up, though, and able to take care of herself. How did she seem?’
‘London is a big place.’
‘That’s exactly what I felt,’ Mrs Blanchard said. ‘I’ve never been able to bear it. Christopher and I went to see her and, to be frank, we didn’t enjoy being there, with the noise and the traffic and the people. We didn’t much care for the flat she was renting. We had plans to help her find somewhere, but then this…’ She faltered.
‘What did Adele think?’ I asked.
Mrs Blanchard looked puzzled. ‘I’m sorry? I don’t understand.’
I had gone wrong somewhere. I felt a lurch, almost of vertigo, as if I had been near a cliff edge and had stumbled. I tried desperately to think of what I might have misunderstood. Had I somehow got the wrong family? Could Adele and Tara be the same person? No, I’d mentioned her to the woman in the flat. Say something noncommittal.
‘Tara used to talk about Adele.’
Mrs Blanchard nodded, unable to speak. I waited, not daring to say anything further. She took a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her eyes then blew her nose. ‘Of course, that was why she moved to London. She never got over Adele… And then Tom’s death.’
I leaned over and put one hand on Mrs Blanchard’s. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘It must have been so terrible for you. One thing after another.’ I needed more information. ‘When did it happen?’
‘Tom?’
‘Adele.’
Mrs Blanchard gave a sad smile. ‘I suppose it’s a long time ago to other people. January nineteen ninety. I used to count the days.’
‘I never knew Adele,’ I said, which was almost the first true sentence I had uttered in Mrs Blanchard’s presence. ‘But I think I know, used to know,’ I corrected myself prudently, ‘some of her friends. Climbers. Deborah, Daniel, Adam… whatever he’s called.’
‘Tallis?’
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘It’s a long time.’
‘Yes, Tom used to climb with him. But we knew him when he was a boy. We were friends of his parents, long ago.’
‘Really?’
‘He’s become rather famous. He saved some people’s lives on a mountain and he’s been written about in the newspapers.’
‘Really? I didn’t see that.’
‘He’ll be able to tell you about it himself. He’s coming here this afternoon for tea.’
I was almost scientifically interested in the way that I was able to continue leaning forward with a concerned expression on my face, even as it seemed that the polished wooden floor was moving towards me and would strike me in the face. I had seconds to think of something. Or should I just relax and let myself go, allow disaster to take its course? A vestigial part of my mind, somewhere deep inside, survived, was still fighting for survival.
‘That would have been lovely,’ I heard myself say. ‘Unfortunately I’ve got to get back. I’m afraid I’ve really got to go. Thank you so much for the tea.’
‘But you’ve only just arrived,’ Mrs Blanchard protested anxiously. ‘Before you go I must show you something. I’ve been going through Tara’s things and I thought you might be interested to see her photograph album.’
I looked at her sad face. ‘Of course, Jean, I would love to,’ I said. I looked at my watch quickly. It was twenty-five to three. The trains arrived in Corrick on the hour and it had taken me ten minutes to walk from the station, so Adam couldn’t be coming on the last train. Could he be driving? It seemed unlikely. ‘Do you know when the train goes back to Birmingham?’ I asked Mrs Blanchard, who was returning with the photograph album clutched under her arm.
‘Yes, it goes at four minutes past…’ She looked at her watch. ‘Four minutes past three would be the next one.’
‘So I’ve got plenty of time,’ I said to her, with a forced smile.
‘More tea?’
‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘But I would love to see the photographs. If you can bear it.’
‘Of course, my dear.’
She pulled her chair closer to mine. All the time she spoke I was making calculations in my head. If I left by a quarter to three I would be able to get to the station before Adam arrived – and, of course, maybe he wouldn’t arrive at four, but if he did then I would be safely on the other platform and could find somewhere to conceal myself. Mrs Blanchard would mention that somebody who knew him had just been there but I couldn’t remember anything I had done to give away my real identity. As far as Adam was concerned I would just be one of those dozens, hundreds of girls in his past.
If I’d got it wrong? What would happen if Adam arrived while I was still there? I made dismal half-formed attempts to plan something I might say, but I dismissed everything as disastrous. I needed all my concentration just to stay upright, to remain capable of speech. I had known nothing of Tara Blanchard except that her body had been found in an East London canal. Now I saw her as a cherub-cheeked toddler in the sandpit at her nursery school. In pigtails and blazer. In swimsuits and party dresses. Adele was often there as well. She had looked dumpy and cross as a small child but then became long-legged and beautiful. Adam was consistent, I had to admit. But it was going too slowly. I looked at my watch repeatedly. At eighteen minutes to three we seemed to be about half-way through the book. Then Mrs Blanchard paused for a story I couldn’t make myself listen to. I pretended to be so interested that I had to turn the page to see what was coming up. A quarter to. We were still not at the end. Thirteen minutes.
‘There’s Adam,’ said Mrs Blanchard.
I forced myself to look. He was much the same as the Adam I knew. The hair was longer. He was unshaven. In a smiling group with Adele, Tara, Tom, a couple of others I didn’t know. I looked for a hint of complicity between him and Adele but saw none. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I must have mixed him up with someone else.’
It might even stop Mrs Blanchard from mentioning me to Adam. But I mustn’t make too much of it. Ten to. With a sudden desperate relief I saw Mrs Blanchard reach a blank page of the album. The book wasn’t full. I had to be firm. I took her hand. ‘Jean, that was…’ I stopped, as if the emotions were too great to be expressed. ‘And now I must go.’
‘Let me drive you,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said, trying to stop my voice rising into a howl. ‘After this, all this, I would like to walk on my own.’
She stepped forward and took me in her arms. ‘Come again, Sylvie,’ she said.
I nodded and within seconds was walking down the path. But it had taken longer than I thought. It was six minutes to. I considered going in the other direction, but that seemed even worse. As soon as I had turned out of
the driveway into the road I broke into a run. My body was not ready for this. After a hundred yards my breath was coming in gasps, there were sharp pains in my chest. I turned another corner and saw the station ahead, too far ahead. I made myself run but as I reached the car park, full of commuter vehicles, I saw a train pulling in. I couldn’t risk entering a station and running into Adam. I looked around desperately. There seemed to be no cover. All I saw was a phone-box. In desperation I ran inside and took the phone from the hook. With care I turned my back to the station but I was directly beside the entrance. I looked at my watch. One minute past. I heard the sound of the train pulling out. Mine would be here in another minute or two. I waited. What if Adam came out of the station and wanted to make a phone call?
I was probably making a fool of myself. I became sure that Adam hadn’t been on the train. The temptation to turn around became almost irresistible. I heard the footsteps of several people emerging from the station and then descending to the gravel of the park. One set of footsteps stopped behind me. I could see the fragmentary reflection in the glass in front of me of somebody standing outside the box waiting for me to finish. I couldn’t make it out properly. There was a rap at the door. I remembered myself and spoke a few random sentences into the phone. I turned very slightly. There he was, looking a little smarter than usual. He had put on a jacket. I couldn’t see if he was wearing a tie. He had passed the phone-box and was down in the car park. He stopped an old woman and said something to her. She looked around and pointed up the street. He set off.
I heard another train arrive. Mine. I remembered with horror that my train was on the other side. I would have to cross a bridge. Don’t look round, Adam, don’t look round. I replaced the receiver, ran out of the phone-box and actually collided with the woman. She gave a shout of annoyance. She started to say something but I was gone. Had Adam looked round? The automatic doors of the train were closing as I reached the platform. I pushed my arm between their snapping jaws. I assumed that some central electronic intelligence would take note of this and re-open them. Or would the train leave regardless? I had visions of being dragged under the wheels and found horribly mangled at the next station. That would give Adam something to puzzle about.