‘Did you see it, Dad?’
‘Yes, Max, yes, I saw it.’
I didn’t need to see it a second time, but I waited with Max anyway, afraid perhaps that what I had seen was a trick, the product of fatigue and of fear. And the next passing car confirmed it. Two sets of footprints. The same women’s shoes. The strange, hour-glass shape of them. Wedged soles, I guessed. How could Millicent have been so stupid?
We drank milk and ate biscuits in our own kitchen, me at the table, Max on the worktop.
‘Dad, were those the shoes that Mum has?’
I looked at Max. I didn’t want to have this discussion.
‘I don’t know. And how did you open the door, Max?’
He picked something from the ticket pocket of his trousers. ‘Catch.’
A slick metallic parabola. I fumbled the catch, and something fell to the floor near the foot of my chair. I reached down and picked up a key. It looked like one of Bryce’s. We sat there, the two of us, staring at it, and at each other.
‘The neighbour thought Mum lost it. I heard him shouting at her for a very long time. He said he wouldn’t give her another one, even though he did. He was really shouting. When do you think she went in there?’
‘Max,’ I said, ‘we don’t know that it was Mum.’
‘But when do you think it was?’
‘I don’t know.’
I did know, of course. It had happened the night I was in Edinburgh. That night Millicent had abandoned Max. It had to have happened then. I believed what she had told me: that she had sat in the park, in the rain; that the mud had ruined her shoes. That much was probably true. Although, I wondered now, had she actually told me she had sat in the rain in the middle of the park, or had she simply implied it? In any case, she was in the neighbour’s house before her shoes were covered in mud.
Those shoes were in our bin.
‘Are those footprints why the police arrested Mum?’
‘I don’t think they can be, Max.’
‘Why not?’
Because the police searched the bin and didn’t take the shoes.
‘I don’t know.’
‘But what do you think, Dad?’
‘Back to bed.’
‘But it’s almost time to get up.’
‘It’s four o’clock, Max.’
I was sure that the footprints weren’t the reason, that the police had been acting on a hunch. Unless there had been another forensic team in the house, shining lights at low angles across the floor, the police could not have seen Millicent’s footprints in daylight.
When Max was asleep I went to the front door. There was light in the sky now. I brought in the grey composite dustbin that stood jammed in front of the bay window, stood it in the middle of the floor in the front room.
I began to take out the bags one by one. I wasn’t completely sure what I was looking for. The smell of rot was over-powering, and it was all I could do to keep from retching. Serve us right for mixing food waste in with the recyclables. Everything was covered in a fine blue-green powder. I forced myself not to gag, tried to hold my breath.
Near the bottom of the bin I found what I was looking for: a tied Sainsbury’s bag through which I could feel Millicent’s shoes. I put the other bags carefully back into the bin, and wheeled it outside again.
I untied the bag. Inside were two more bags. In one were Millicent’s dress, bra and pants, the ones the rain had ruined on the night she abandoned Max. In the other were the shoes she had worn when she had returned to Bryce’s house. If she had been telling me the truth, if she had thrown her clothes away that night, she had gone to the trouble of removing them from the bin again before the police had searched the house. Otherwise, surely – surely – the police would have found these bags, and when they had found them they would have wanted to know what they were doing there. My wife had waited until after the police search to dispose of her evidence.
Then I found something else: inside one of the shoes was a small pair of soft leather gloves; inside one of the gloves was a small piece of heavy black adhesive tape, compressed into a ball.
23
Back in the white windowless room I waited, staring at the gunmetal door. The room was airless, and the dying fluorescent tube flicked uselessly on and off, waking some animal instinct in me for flight. There was nothing to look at, so I took out my phone. 11.06. No signal.
Millicent arrived, flanked by two officers I didn’t recognise. She was wearing the same clothes as yesterday; the tendons in her neck were drawn tight, and the corners of her mouth were dry and cracked.
‘Hey,’ she said.
She sat down, tried to smile, reached out for my hand.
I let her hold it for a moment, then drew away from her.
Your footprints in the neighbour’s house.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘everybody’s still really polite, but this was a long night. It got so I started wishing I had something I could confess to. Kind of like you said. But I think they started to realise I don’t.’
The door opened, and a uniformed officer showed in a young woman, pressed white blouse and knee-length twill skirt, tall and perilously thin. She introduced herself to me, her voice tremulous: Millicent’s lawyer. She was nervous behind her wire-rimmed glasses. I forget her name.
‘Millicent has been doing brilliantly, Alex.’ The young woman sat down beside Millicent, rubbed her hand encouragingly, looked expectantly at me. I said nothing, so she spoke again, as if to fill the silence. ‘We’ll have you out soon, Millicent. Won’t we, Alex? You can go home, have a little sleep, a nice long bath, and be fresh in time for your radio show this evening.’
What were you thinking?
I must have grimaced, because something stopped the lawyer in her tracks. Everyone in the room was looking at me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘You’re sorry?’ said Millicent. The young lawyer looked puzzled.
The abandonment of Max.
‘Millicent,’ I said, ‘I can’t do this.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m pressing charges.’
‘Alex, wait. What?’
The bottle arcing towards me through the air.
‘I can’t do this any more. I don’t know who you are.’ I looked at Millicent, pale in her crumpled shirt, the lines in her face etched deep by lack of sleep.
I leaned in to her, spoke softly so that only she could hear. ‘Your footprints. I found your footprints in the dust on the floor of Bryce’s house.’
‘Alex,’ said Millicent. ‘Alex, I’m going to need you to put our family first.’ She was trying to keep the pleading tone out of her voice, but to anyone who knew her, it was there.
I leaned in again. ‘I won’t tell the police what I found, Millicent. But I would like to know what they learn from you.’
I had given her the gloves as a present, years before, after a filming trip to Italy. Soft brown Florentine leather. They had cost a fortune; I had never seen her wearing them.
‘Alex,’ said the lawyer, ‘I wonder if we might go somewhere and talk this through.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘it’s already done.’
‘Good man,’ the detective had said when I told her of my decision. ‘Give us a little time to have a look at what’s going on here. Break down the resistance. Maybe see if my colleagues can’t get a little confession out of her.’
Was it Max’s book? Was it the footprints in the dust? Was it the gloves in the dustbin? Or was it just the grinding, gut-wringing exhaustion that came with each new discovery?
‘They won’t threaten her, will they?’
‘Alex, mate,’ said June, ‘this is all about what emerges through dialogue. We all need to know the truth about your wife.’
‘And you’re not pressing charges against me? I’m no longer helping you with your enquiries?’
‘Our focus is now on your wife.’
Some wiser inner voice told me that pressing charges
against my wife was like sleeping with her sister, that I was becoming a colder, crueller version of myself. But I pushed the thought away. I wanted to know the truth.
Although, as my wiser inner voice reasonably pointed out, if I was on a mission of truth then why wasn’t I telling the police about the footprints, or about Max’s book?
The police did not let Millicent ring the radio station. I found out later that her lawyer rang and spoke to someone who worked in sales. The lawyer did what she could, without explaining that Millicent was under arrest, said that her client could not appear on the radio that evening due to circumstances beyond her control. The radio station must have read between the lines.
An hour later the station manager returned the lawyer’s call, made it clear that the station would not be inviting Millicent back. The police had rung the manager, and the manager had told them Millicent had been there for no longer than forty minutes on the night of Bryce’s death. Millicent’s alibi had collapsed.
Still, said the lawyer, she didn’t think the police had much to work with; Millicent hadn’t directly lied to them.
I searched those parts of the house where I thought Millicent might have hidden something. I found nothing in her wardrobe, or in the backs of the cupboards in the kitchen, or under the sink. On top of our cigarette cupboard I found an old pack of Marlboro. I sniffed at it, felt the pull of nicotine, but threw it away, along with the rest of the rubbish.
There was nothing in the outhouse, as far as I could tell, and nothing in any of the drawers in the front room. I found nothing in Millicent’s office. I opened books, riffled through stacks, even opened the paper drawer of her printer. Nothing. What was I expecting to find that the police hadn’t found? I didn’t know.
I stared at the sofa bed, made up for Arla, and wondered for a moment whether Millicent might have slipped something in there; it seemed unlikely. A lustful, greed-driven voice deep within me whispered that I should search Arla’s bed, run my hands across her possessions, delve into her bags the better to know her, but I silenced the voice. Arla was a mistake. Arla must not happen again.
A low chirrup. The cat was on the banister outside Max’s room, looking up at me, eyes full of adoration. I hesitated at the door, wondered for a moment whether Millicent might have hidden something there. But to use her son to shield herself? Whatever she had done, I could not see Millicent deliberately betraying Max. And Max was organised enough himself that he would notice the slightest object out of place. We had long since stopped tidying his room for him.
The cat tapped gently at my elbow with her paw. I held out my hand to her, and she rubbed one cheek against me, then the other. She did not follow me downstairs, but sat chirruping on the banister, watching me go.
It occurred to me that Millicent might have buried something in the garden, but I could not think what. I looked around, wondering if I could spot newly dug earth – surely it would be darker? – but nothing seemed out of place. Our lawn, what there was of it, was yellowed and scorched from the remorseless London summer. The garden was uniformly unkempt. I looked under a few bushes, but felt foolish, and decided that Millicent would have felt foolish too. And besides, who knew who was watching?
For the third time in recent days I trailed the stepladder after me up the stairs.
The loft was dark as the grave, the heat oppressive.
An impression of shadows as I flicked the switch; something out of place; then nothing. The lightbulb had glowed orange for some small fraction of a second. Then it had failed. I retained the shapes, the moment stretching out through my brain. Persistence of vision. Something had changed. Something was out of place.
I stood in the dark for a moment. I was certain that Max had at least one torch, but I didn’t want to give myself away by taking something from his room. I would be sure to replace it wrongly. I went downstairs and found my phone.
The flashlight on the telephone was useless up here, really, if you didn’t know what you were looking for. But something was definitely out of place. I had seen it at once, in that first orange flash, some change in the silhouette of one of the piles. It was small, but I was sure of it. An edge that seemed to have hardened and shifted.
She had moved a box. There, on the right, near the bottom of a formless pile near the hatch. It was close enough to the ladder that she could reach it without stepping into the loft. I tracked the light beam across the floor, saw only my own footprints. She must have assumed that I wouldn’t look up here, or that if I did, I would find nothing. If she stood on the ladder, she could come and go without leaving a trace.
I shone the light around the edges of the box. A ream of budget paper. The box was made of stiff cardboard, bright blue and white. VALUE PACK. I ran the light around the top edge of it. There were boxes above it, but they didn’t fully cover it. I put the torch in my left hand and I reached out with my right. I hooked my fingers around the furthest edge of the box, and nudged it gently. It moved easily. It did not seem to be carrying the weight of the boxes above it. I shone the torch in front of the box, and saw from the path in the dust that it had recently been moved.
I drew the box towards me; the boxes above it teetered, like a child’s tower. Perhaps it was part of this pile. Perhaps it had always been a part of this pile. But my hands were shaking, and I guessed that I had knocked it slightly against the boxes above as I pulled against it.
I stood at the top of the ladder, swaying slightly, holding the box in two hands, my phone clamped in my left; I hoped the tower of boxes in front of me would not fall. I didn’t want Max to find me surrounded by debris on the landing below; I didn’t want to have to explain myself.
After ten seconds I decided that the boxes would not fall. With my left hand I slid my phone up the side of the box I was holding and on to the top of it. Something inside clinked. Glass?
I climbed carefully down, put the box on the bed in our room. Then I went back up the ladder and carefully fetched the envelope from on top of the beam. I closed the hatch on the way down, and carried the ladder out to the back garden.
I burned Caroline’s letter and the non-molestation order in the grate in the living room. I went back upstairs. I was no longer the one with something to hide.
Baubles. Hand-blown baubles that my mother had given Millicent shortly after we had married. Edwardian glass for our little Edwardian house. They had belonged to her own mother. I had been sceptical, but Millicent had treasured them, had seen in them a transmission of something important, a contract between my mother and her. We had never hung them on a tree – people like us don’t decorate like that at Christmas – and I had never given them a thought, never wondered what had happened to them. They were carefully arranged in even rows, with little balls of red tissue paper separating them from each other. I lifted each one carefully out on to the duvet of our bed. It was the imperfections that made them beautiful; they refracted tiny rainbows across the room, splitting the sunlight. If you held them to your eye, you could see tiny bubbles, minute variations in the thickness of the walls. They were far too exquisite for people like us.
Fifteen of them, then a layer of red tissue paper, then another fifteen. I lifted out the second row of tissue paper. There, underneath, was what Millicent had hidden from me.
I shook the box out on to the bed. Envelopes: some were curled, their hard edges frayed, their creams and whites softened and greyed by the years; the addresses seemed to dissolve a little where the old ink had edged imperceptibly outwards from the crisp clean strokes of the fountain pen. Others were stiff, bowed outwards by the paper inside, full of the promise of news and love.
We had that in common, then. We had each kept a stack of letters from our past.
Except. I looked at the names and addresses.
Paul Weitzman
Vera Weitzman
Arla Weitzman
Thaddeus Ackerman
All in Millicent’s beautiful, flowing copperplate. Letters to the people she loved. I wonde
red for a moment why they had given the letters back to her, before realising that I wasn’t thinking clearly. The letters were stamped, but not one of them had been sent. I turned over a few of the envelopes. They were sealed.
Sarah Mercer
She had written to our unborn child. This envelope did not carry an address. Write a letter, they tell you. OK, you say, I will try to write what I think. No, not what you think, what you feel, they tell you. What would you say if you could speak without consequence?
I turned the letter over, wondering when Millicent had written it, wondering what she had said to our little daughter, to little Sarah who never was. I wondered if opening the envelope would teach me anything I didn’t know, whether to know what she had written – believing that it would never be read – would bring me closer to my wife. Or would it just leave me empty and full of regret, knowing once and for all that Sarah’s death had opened up a gulf that could not be bridged? Two parents, divided from each other by grief.
Bryce
Two letters to Bryce. I turned them over. These were different from the others. They had been torn open, and doubtless read by Bryce. Funny that he hadn’t used a letter knife. I put them on the pillow on Millicent’s side of the bed, then began slowly to repack the box.
Rosie
I hadn’t noticed the card at first. It had been trapped in a corner seam, and hadn’t fallen out when I had shaken the box. The envelope was stiff, smaller and lighter than the others. It looked new: the ink on the front was crisp and dark. I turned the card over. It had not been opened. I put it with the letters to Bryce and repacked the box. I took great care with the placement of the baubles; I didn’t want them to break, and my hands were shaking.
I thought about fetching the ladder and replacing the box at the bottom of the pile, but Max would be home soon. Instead I put the box at the back of my wardrobe. I could worry about what to do with it later. Then I put the three envelopes into the inner pocket of my rucksack, and began to pack for Edinburgh.
A Line of Blood Page 63