by Tim Adler
Kate forced herself to shower and put some clothes on. Her mind felt thick with sleeplessness and drained of feeling. Burying herself in work would be the only answer. Work harder. Don't feel sorry for yourself. Get used to being on your own. That was the mantra for widowhood. She stared numbly at the computer screen. What did any of this matter now that the very worst had happened? She knew she needed to speak to somebody, a therapist perhaps, because she could not function like this. Even putting one foot in front of another seemed impossible. She picked up the phone and called her doctor's surgery.
Yes, the receptionist said, there had been a last-minute cancellation. Her regular doctor was away but she could see his temporary replacement. Kate told the woman she could be there shortly.
Half an hour later, she was sitting on a plastic bench between a heavily pregnant woman and a teenager holding a cardboard bowl to vomit into. He kept dry heaving and Kate wanted to move away, but no other seats were available. The waiting room was full even this early in the morning. A dot-matrix screen announced which patients were to be seen next. With nothing else to do, she studied the notice boards and pamphlets offering advice on contraception, how to spot a stroke and sexually transmitted diseases.
Dr Giri was standing in for Kate's regular doctor. She reckoned the Indian woman was in her mid-twenties. She had a round, moon face and warm, intelligent eyes. Kate liked her immediately. Dr Giri looked up from her computer screen and gestured for her patient to sit down.
"Good morning, Mrs–"
"Julia. Kate Julia. I usually see Dr Muir."
"Please. Sit down. How can I help you?" she asked, running an eye over Kate's notes.
The widow cleared her throat. "My husband died this weekend. I'm not sure that I can cope. I need to speak to somebody. A therapist–"
Dr Giri's voice softened. "Oh, I am so sorry. Have you been sleeping, eating?"
"Not really, no. I thought if I could talk to somebody–"
"Of course. You need to see a grief counsellor. How did your husband die?"
"He killed himself."
"Suicide?" Dr Giri's eyes widened, and you could see her wondering about her patient. "How terrible. When did you find out?"
"I saw him jump, when we were at a family funeral in Albania. I don't think I've actually accepted it yet. Nothing seems quite real. I think I'm still in shock. It's as if there's nothing to hold on to."
The locum doctor moved her PC mouse around and peered at her screen. "The problem is that you can't see anyone immediately. There's a waiting list."
"I was hoping to see somebody today."
"That's impossible. The earliest somebody could see you is in three months."
"Three months?"
"Of course, you could see somebody privately. I could prescribe something in the meantime."
"I don't want pills."
"Anti-depressants can help in the short-term." Dr Giri wrote out a prescription on a pad. "The pills might make you feel funny for the first couple of days, but keep taking them. They will help."
"I told you, I just need to speak to somebody."
Dr Giri looked at Kate sympathetically. "There are also counselling groups. People who've been through similar experiences to yours." She returned to her computer and typed something into a search engine. Google, really? "Yes, here we are … family support for those dealing with murder or manslaughter overseas. You're in luck. I mean, they've got a meeting tonight."
She wrote down an address on a Post-It note and slid it across her desk. Support After Death Overseas was meeting that evening in a church hall in north London. Kate, crumpling the note into her bag, wondered what kind of people would be there.
"Thank you for seeing me," she said, standing up. "I don't want to take up any more of your time."
Dr Giri smiled encouragingly. Most people stepped back from suicide, treating it as if it was a contagious disease. "Please. Call me if you need a repeat prescription. And go to the group tonight. Talking to other people can help. You can always speak to a private therapist. I can find you the name of somebody if you like."
"That would be very kind. Yes, I'd like that."
The chemist handed Kate the cardboard box. Walking back home, she read the tiny wording on the packet: side-effects could include nausea and sleeplessness. "Do not take if suffering from acute depression or having thoughts of suicide." What a joke. That's exactly why she wanted the pills.
She pondered what she'd told the doctor about not wanting to take anything, but she needed to numb this grief. Kate busted open the foil package and swallowed two anti-depressants right there in the street.
Chapter Thirteen
There was a rich stink of fox shit from the hedge as Kate walked back home. The sun tried to shine through the witchy-fingered branches. The days were getting short. A black van was parked along with the usual cars and Kate noticed something odd about it: its windows were mirrored. And, as she got closer, she saw a plastic novelty dildo on the dashboard, the kind of thing you wound up and it clattered around on plastic feet. You could see it where the silver mirroring had worn away. It gave her the creeps.
Yet when she got home, she couldn't face being alone. Spending the rest of the afternoon within those four walls would truly drive her mad. Please, somebody just call me, she thought – her mother, anybody – willing the telephone to ring. She longed for some human contact, anything to stop this pain. Kate's thoughts turned to the old man who lived downstairs, and she wondered what he had been doing in Tirana on Friday night.
She decided to find out. Kate went and knocked on his door.
A dog barked inside. The distinguished-looking man opened up but kept the chain on. He held a pipe in one hand.
"Yes? How can I help you?" he said.
"Hi, you don't know me, but I live upstairs." Kate glanced around. She didn't want to get into this standing in the hall. "Please may I come in? I need to speak to you."
"Can you tell me what this is about?"
"Not standing on your doorstep, no. It's personal."
The old man must have decided that the young woman looked presentable enough. He put his pipe in his mouth and slid the chain off.
"My name's Kate, by the way. Kate Julia." The dog reached up to be petted and she stroked its fur.
"Charles. Charles Lazenby," he said, gesturing down the hall.
Lazenby's sitting room looked as if the contents of a much larger house had been crammed into it. There were big chintz armchairs and a sofa facing the fireplace. Photographs were everywhere: on the occasional tables and the mantelpiece. Kate had been right in thinking he was a widower who'd moved somewhere smaller when his wife had died.
"Would you like some tea? I was just making some."
Kate said no, studying one photograph. It showed a much younger Lazenby standing in a khaki uniform beside a pretty woman in a sundress shielding her eyes. Wherever they were, it looked hot.
Lazenby sat back on the sofa while his dog jumped up beside him, yawned and stretched out its front legs.
"So how can I help you?"
"It's none of my business, but were you in Tirana on Friday night?"
The old man frowned. "Why yes, I was. How do you know that?"
"What were you doing there?"
"I don't see what business it is of yours."
"Please. It's important."
"Visiting some war graves, if you must know. My brother was a special agent during the war. SOE. He died in Tirana helping the partisans, as did many of his friends. There's a memorial to them in the park. A sentimental journey, I suppose. Why do you ask?"
"I was in Tirana as well. Don't you think that's a coincidence? Us both being in Tirana on Friday night, seeing as I only live upstairs?"
Lazenby started to light his pipe, sucking in two or three times before he got it going. He waved his spindly blackened match before placing it in the ashtray. "I suppose so, yes. These things do happen."
The kettle began to whistle in
the kitchen. Lazenby stood up and the dog, wondering what was going on, jumped down. He asked her again if she wanted some tea, and this time Kate said yes.
While he was out of the room, she studied some of the other photographs on the walls: mostly they were in black and white, and Kate suspected he had taken them himself. Clearly her neighbour was something of an amateur photographer. One showed a cool, mini-skirted blonde surrounded by City gents in bowler hats holding umbrellas – she guessed he had taken it in the Sixties.
Kate was studying the photograph more closely when Lazenby returned carrying mugs of tea.
"Did you take all of these?"
"Yes, I did. It's always been a hobby. My wife used to get cross at the amount of money I'd spend. That's why it's the perfect man's pastime. There's always another bit of equipment to buy." He laughed with a crackly smoker's cough.
"I saw you down in the square opposite my hotel. What were you doing there?"
"Watching the fireworks. I speak some Albanian. I must tell you something. There was a little boy at the next table also watching the fireworks, who said to his father, 'Dad, I must be dreaming.' Very sweet, really." He coughed again. "You must have been there when that dreadful business happened, the man who fell from the balcony."
"Yes." She paused, not sure how much to divulge. "The man who died was my husband."
"Oh, my dear, I am so sorry," Lazenby said, sitting up. The dog, disturbed, opened its eyes but didn't move.
"The police first thought my husband had discovered a burglar. Now they think it was suicide." They sat there in silence for a moment, listening to the gas fire bubble. "Did you take any photographs that night? It might help the police."
"Yes, why yes, as a matter of fact I did. I was too busy photographing the fireworks, though, to see what was going on. I glimpsed what was happening, but by then it was too late."
"But you were using your camera." Her heart thumped. Combined with her iPhone photos, she could start making a collage of who was exactly where right at the moment of Paul's death. Her mind was gabbling ahead. Using social media, she could make a huge Cubist collage on her wall, an almost 3D mosaic showing where everybody was in the square that night. The police did the same thing. Except they called it a murder wall.
"Do you have them here?"
"They're on my computer."
A laptop and what looked like a digital projector were standing on a folded-down oak table. Kate shifted some candlesticks and opened up the table while Lazenby unhooked a painting from the wall.
They sat back down as the old man pointed to the wall with a clicker. The slide show began: a bleak out-of-season seafront ("That's Durres, a jolly cross between Miami and Blackpool. Macedonians go there for cheap holidays."); the crash-landed spaceship of the Enver Hoxha museum; the war memorial that Lazenby had gone to Tirana to visit. More photos showed dusk over the city. Here was the White Night parade, excited children walking past, a man on stilts, men holding flaming torches. "Here we are in the square," said Lazenby. It was exactly how she'd remembered: whistling rockets and then a pause before the boom, blossoming jellyfish of pinks and purples, swags of gold evaporating into nothingness. Oh, Paul, why did you leave me? She could just see the top of the National roof in one photograph. Then another shot, further back this time, showing the hotel frontage.
"Stop. Can you hold it here?" Kate stood up and put her finger on their balcony, creating a long, deep shadow. "Here's where our room was. On the top floor."
"I think you're mistaken. The man I saw fell from the sixth floor. The floor below."
"But we had a penthouse suite."
"Then the man I saw didn't fall from your balcony. He fell from the floor below."
"I don't understand."
Lazenby shook his head emphatically. "I'm sorry. I'm quite certain about this. The man I saw fell to his death from the balcony beneath yours."
Chapter Fourteen
Google Maps was wrong. It took an hour and a half to reach the address on the Post-It note the doctor had given her, a church hall in north London. Cross with herself for being so late, Kate hurried towards the ugly Thirties building, fretting because the meeting had already started. She pictured the church hall full of people sharing the pain she was going through.
Instead, there were just three people sitting in a circle of nearly empty seats. So this was the London branch of the overseas bereavement group. A young man who seemed to be in charge acknowledged her as the door swung shut. "–a few housekeeping notes. Jean has offered to become treasurer," he was saying. Jean was a warm-looking woman in her seventies wearing a coral cardigan. Another woman looked up gravely, with sorrowful eyes hidden behind her fringe. Kate sat down and apologised for being late, wondering what was going to happen next.
The young man was about to speak when the swing door banged shut again and a second latecomer hurried in. He lifted off his hood as he sat down, also apologising. "I can see we have some new faces tonight. Welcome," the group leader said. Her fellow laggard was black and had a hunted expression on his face. He, too, was out of breath. "As I have the heart card tonight, I thought I would start things off," the leader continued. He began telling a story about how he'd had a perfectly all-right day, and then felt guilty about not thinking about his sister, who'd drowned over a decade ago on a beach holiday. Kate became impatient. She could not see what any of this had to do with actual bereavement. What she needed was practical help as to how she was going to get through the next hour – and the next day and the day after that. How she was going to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
The room lapsed into silence and the atmosphere became so reverential she had to fight rising hysteria not to take her clothes off and run screaming round the church hall. It was like being at a funeral. Finally, the other latecomer spoke.
"My name is John, and I lost my wife a year ago," he said in a strong Birmingham accent. The others muttered "Welcome".
"It were all my fault. We went on holiday in Sicily and it were cheaper to fly back from Naples than from the island. So we got the ferry to Naples, and I thought we could spend the day wandering around. I dunno why we did it. After breakfast we started walking, and that's when I first noticed him. My wife looked so pretty that day. She was wearing a white dress she'd bought special, like." He stopped and sniffed, rubbing his eye with his finger. "I knew we were being followed, but I didn't want to say anything. Didn't want to frighten her, I s'pose. We took a wrong turn down a side street, and I remember looking up at these lines of washing, thinking there must be another way out, when it happened. This bloke grabbed my wife's bag. I were too frightened to move. He ran off, and I remember turning to her and asking, 'How much money was in it?', when I saw the stain. She looked down, and we both saw this dark circle spreading. She looked at me and then she fell on her knees before toppling over. I'll always remember that. She never said a word." He stopped, shook his head and blew out his cheeks, as if the memory was still too raw for him to cope with. "Anyway, the Italian police couldn't wait to have her cremated. No body, no investigation. They weren't interested in solving the murder of a British tourist. I didn't know any better. And the authorities couldn't care less either. As far as they were concerned, this had all happened in a foreign country."
The others muttered agreement, and a yawning chasm of dread opened up beneath Kate. "What did you mean when you said there couldn't be any police investigation?" she asked. "Once you'd cremated your wife's body, I mean."
The group leader interrupted. "We don't allow cross sharing," he said.
Sitting there, Kate realised they were all trapped in their own grief, each of them banging on the glass, trying desperately to get somebody's attention. What had happened to her was entirely without precedent. People's husbands just don't throw themselves off hotel balconies. There were no comforting truths to be found, and suffering was not going to ennoble her. Kate was alone. That was why they were all here, straining to hold hands with blind-worm hunger
. She needed to speak to this stranger whose experience so closely matched her own. Jean, the woman in the coral-pink cardigan, told an interminable story about her legal battle with the New York police after they threw her husband in the drunk tank when he had had a stroke in a hotel lobby. They had assumed he was drunk and that's where he died.
The meeting ended with them all holding hands and affirming that together they were stronger. Kate felt acutely embarrassed and self-conscious linking hands with these strangers. It all seemed so childish.
She got her chance to talk to the other newcomer once the meeting was over and he was stacking chairs. "Excuse me, my name's Kate," she said. "I was wondering if I could have a word."
The man turned around and she registered how handsome he was: he had a strong, masculine jawline and warm, sensitive eyes. The tight curls of his hair were cut short. He also looked very fit.
"My name's Priest. John Priest. Pleased to meet you."
"What you were saying just now, about the police wanting your wife to be cremated, what did you mean?"
"Foreign police always want you to cremate. It saves them having to investigate. I didn't know it at the time."
"I think I've done something really stupid. My husband died, and I was the one who pushed for cremation. We were in a Muslim country, and my husband's family wanted his body in the ground quickly. It was a way of punishing them, I suppose. I was angry. The coroner's report had come back, so I thought, 'Well, that's it then.' None of what you said even occurred to me."
"They know that you're vulnerable." He looked at her warmly and smiled. "Listen, do you want to go and get a drink or summat? There's a pub over the road."
Her immediate instinct was to say no, and then she thought, why the hell not? "Yes. I'd like that very much."
Priest ordered a dry white wine for Kate while she took in the hideous swirly carpet, Sky Sports and tinny cascading bleeps from the fruit machine. The place smelled of stale beer.
"There you go. Cheers. I'm still not used to these London prices."