by Tim Adler
Kate clinked his pint glass and they both took a sip. She needed that. "So how long have you been going to meetings?"
"Not as often as I should. There's a group up in Brum, where I come from. It's been a year since Kelly died. They were really helpful at first, and then I let things slip. It was the anniversary of her death last week, so I felt I ought to go. I don't really know anybody in London."
"How long have you been here?"
"I only moved down a couple of weeks ago. I work for a car dealership. We're buying a chain of garages in south London, expanding, like. I don't know London at all. Me head office just gave me the address of a flat and told me to collect keys."
"Which area do you live in?"
"Fulham. On Fulham Palace Road."
"We must be near each other. I only live around the corner. In a mansion block called The Cloisters. Do you know it?"
He shook his head. "So what do you do for a living?"
"I'm a textile designer. Seats on trains. Hotel furnishings. Car interiors. Perhaps you sell some of mine."
"Which manufacturer did you work for?"
She gave him the name of a Korean car firm.
"We only do Vauxhall," he said, taking another sip. "So you work from home then?"
"I have a desk at my husband's office. The thing is," she said, setting her glass down, "my husband only died three days ago." Priest said nothing, just looked at her.
She told him about how they'd gone to Albania for his uncle's funeral, and how her husband had thrown himself off the hotel balcony. She was gabbling, but she had this compulsion to keep telling people her story.
"I'm still in shock. You read about these things happening to other people, and you never imagine they're going to happen to you. I mean, there was nothing wrong with our marriage. One minute you're looking at a clear blue sky, and the next, it's like an aircraft has slammed into the side of the Twin Towers. There's nothing left. Everything's vaporised."
Priest contemplated her for a moment and then shook his head, as if to say, that's quite a story. "I'm amazed you're even out of the house. I didn't want to see anybody."
"My first thought was that Paul had been murdered. There was a dishwasher in the hotel who'd been stealing from guests, and I thought he was on the balcony. But he had a solid alibi and he swears he had nothing to do with Paul's death."
"Do the police believe him?"
"He has an alibi for the evening it happened. He was in a bar with his girlfriend watching a parade."
"So, if your husband jumped, why are you worried about the police not being able to investigate? If it's an open-and-shut case, like?"
"There are things that don't make sense. I was taking photographs from our hotel balcony the night Paul died. There was something niggling at me, but I couldn't put my finger on it until I got home. My downstairs neighbour was also in the square that night. How strange is that?"
"Have you spoken to him?"
"Yes. He says he was in Tirana visiting war graves. His brother died there. He had fought with the Partisans during the Second World War."
Priest shrugged. "Sounds like a coincidence," he said.
"There's no such thing as a coincidence. Here's another thing." Kate paused, wondering how much to tell him, but once she had started, she couldn't stop. "The moment before Paul died he got a text message. He looked at his phone, put it down on the table, walked outside and jumped."
"What did the text say?"
"It wasn't a text, it was a photograph. Of him and another woman."
Priest looked doubtful. "When Kelly died, I tortured myself looking for answers."
"Wait, there's something else. There was another man watching from a balcony across the square." She needed to tell somebody what she'd found – how all these coincidences added up. There had to be a meaning to everything, only she just couldn't see it yet. "What I'm getting at is … there's got to be a connection. The man on the balcony. The woman in the text message. My downstairs neighbour. I know somehow it all means something."
"It's all a bit over my head," Priest said dubiously.
"I believe everybody in the photographs had something to do with his murder," Kate said, coming to the realisation for the first time.
Priest looked at her for a moment. "Sometimes bad things happen and we don't know why. We look for reasons when there aren't any. Computers do it all the time. It's called pattern recognition. Except the patterns aren't really there. The computers are just seeing patterns where they don't exist, not really. Sorry, I can be a bit of a computer nerd sometimes."
"So you're saying I'm making this all up?"
"I mean, it's human nature, isn't it? Creating order out of chaos."
"I suppose it's a question of whether life has any meaning, or whether it's all random." Kate picked up her drink. "What you're really asking is, is there a God?"
"Sorry, that's a bit deep for me."
In her heart, she knew that what Priest was saying made sense, but she still wasn't convinced. Her companion asked if she wanted anything to eat and she shook her head. She hadn't eaten anything since the plane, but she found the idea of food nauseating, especially meat, since she had seen Paul dead in the street. Priest got up to order from the bar and left Kate brooding. He was wrong about there not being a pattern to anything. Now she understood something about Paul's death.
There was no way she could prove it, but deep down she knew it was true.
Everybody in the photograph was waiting for Paul to jump.
Tuesday
Chapter Fifteen
"Do you believe in ghosts?"
"No, I don't. Why do you ask?"
"Paul was standing in our kitchen last night when I got home. I only glimpsed him for a second, and then he was gone. It's not the first time I've seen him either. I catch glimpses of him here and there: at the top of the stairs or in the hallway. It's like he's just walked out of the room. Do you think I'm going mad?"
"People see what they want to see," the therapist replied. "In your case, you've suffered a terrible loss. It's only natural that you project what you want to be real. Your husband has died quite suddenly, not giving you any time to grieve, but that's all it is, only a projection. You do understand that, don't you?"
"He looked so real, as if I could touch him."
"That's very common at this stage of grief. We all do it. When my mother died, I was convinced I saw her one night on the lawn. Perhaps it's where the idea of ghosts comes from, our longing for somebody to come back."
Kate had taken Dr Giri's advice and had contacted a grief counsellor. This woman therapist specialised in counselling the bereaved. Better yet, Liz Gilchriest lived nearby, in one of the bigger houses off Fulham Palace Road, and in one of the streets known locally as the Alphabet Streets. Even better, she could see Kate first thing.
The woman who answered the door had a purple flattop haircut and overlarge clear white Ray-Bans that made her look like an early Eighties pop singer. She radiated a warmth, though, that made Kate want to unburden herself.
Kate continued. "They talk about the stages of the grieving process – disbelief, anger, then acceptance – happening one after the other, but for me it's like they're all happening at the same time. I feel different emotions each second, then this blankness, this nothingness, as if I'm dead as well."
The therapist shifted on the sofa, doing that irritating thing of sitting cross-legged on a normal seat. Kate looked round the room, which was furnished in high-end hippie chic: Indian carvings and esoteric images on the walls, good furniture and shelves crammed floor-to-ceiling with books.
"What would you do if your husband was sitting right here in that chair?" Gilchriest said.
"Tell him that he was a coward. That he took the easy way out."
"What makes you say that?"
"He's left me to pick up the pieces. As his executor, I have to wind up his company. He has a business that is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. How do you think
it makes me feel, having to make all those people redundant? Paul couldn't face it – I believe that's partly the reason he jumped."
"Do you know what another reason might be?"
"Yes. I suspect he was having an affair."
"That must be really hurtful."
"You could say that," she said acidly. "If I'd suspected, I would have asked him why he had to go outside our marriage. Whatever was missing, we could have found a way forward. I believe that."
"A leg that's been broken is often stronger after the fracture heals," the therapist said, nodding.
"I'd also tell him that I forgive him," Kate said. "Many people have affairs; they don't end … like this." Her chin wobbled and she felt herself going again. An ominous-looking box of tissues was ready on the carved wooden table.
"What about forgiving his mistress? Could you do that?"
"I don't understand. What do you mean?"
"It might help you understand. Why he did what he did. If you talked to her, I mean."
"Are you suggesting that I speak to her?"
"That's up to you. I'm just trying to give you tools to cope."
"I don't even know who she is. She's just a woman in a photograph." Kate felt that she was in a highly suggestible state, that the wrong course of action might set her down a path she would later regret. "I'll think about it," she said.
The next thing she had to do was the one she had been dreading.
When and where had she been happiest? On her wedding day. It was a spring afternoon, and the sun had come out just as they were posing for photographs. Relatives chatting as the wedding photographer motioned for them to stand closer together. She remembered how cold Paul's hand had been as they stood in front of the tree in Bishop's Palace, lilies draped over her arm, squinting in the breezy sunshine. And now here she was, spreading her husband's remains around the stump of the tree. She poured the line of grey-black ashes around the knotty base. Completing the circle felt like a full stop.
Most people haven't got a clue about grief, she thought. Not real grief. Kate used to think that grief was something inside that you could fight and overcome. Like cancer. Your grief would shrink and shrink until one day it wasn't there anymore: you had conquered it by zapping it with chemo and radiation or dropping it into a jar labelled "shrinking liquid". That wasn't true. And it wasn't going to go away either. You just had to accept that it would always be there, sitting on your shoulder, a monkey on your back.
Suffering was slowly destroying her; Paul's suicide was never going to go away. Looking in the bathroom mirror that morning, she had barely recognised herself, she looked so dreadful.
Walking back home, relieved to have got the ordeal over, she thought, this must be my fixed point – my grief will get smaller the further I move away from this moment. It has to. She kept on seeing him lying there. Oh, Paul, tell me what to do. My life was stolen that night. The best part of me was killed, too. What did you mean when you asked if we would always be together? Was it a clue? A message? What if he hadn't died at all, and the body she saw in the hospital was somebody else's?
Stop being so ridiculous, she thought, you've watched too many TV thrillers. Yet her downstairs neighbour was adamant that he'd seen Paul fall from the balcony below. But why? And even if it was true, and Paul had somehow found somebody else to take his place in the morgue, why on earth would he do that? Questions drummed like rain on a roof. What he did must have something to do with that photograph, the one of him and that woman, the text message sent moments before his death. Wait, that didn't make sense either. Doing something like faking your own death would take days or even weeks of planning. She dismissed these thoughts as grasping at straws, but something still niggled at her.
Kate carried her cup of coffee through to the sitting room and switched on her MacBook. Quickly she trawled through social media looking for any other photographs from people who had been in the square. She found several photos on Instagram showing the square from different angles, then some snaps posted on Facebook taken in the café. She printed them off, along with her own photographs and Charles Lazenby's, Blu-Tacking them to the wall to create a rippling, distorted Hockney-esque collage of who was exactly where that night.
There was also the photo that had been texted. There was no doubt in her mind that this really was Paul. He was wearing the cashmere hoodie she'd given him for Christmas under his leather bomber jacket. His arms were raised as if he was arguing with the woman. Who was she? Even though her back was to the camera, you could tell that she was slight. Not very tall. Why was he so angry? The thought crossed her mind that he was breaking up with her, telling her that they had no future together. Yeah, right.
Marina's words came back to her, how Paul had been so unhappy being married and that he had wanted a way out. Part of Kate still hated him for this humiliation, yet she nonetheless felt a keening loss. Her seesawing emotions kept getting worse – waves of grief and then anger, back and forth. Everything they had talked about, all their dreams, had been based on a lie. Had he been fucking this woman all the time? Things he'd said, things she hadn't understood at the time, suddenly made sense. Had they been making love in their bed while Kate was out drumming up work? The thought made her want to claw her face and tear herself into a thousand pieces.
Still, what the therapist said about contacting this woman, trying to find out why Paul had been so unhappy, came back to her.
The key was the photograph.
She uploaded the CCTV image into Photoshop and started playing around with it, increasing the DPI until the pattern of the carpet they were standing on became crystal sharp. Her guess was that they were in a hotel: you could see the carpet had an unusual deco-style tulip print. Somewhere at the back of her mind, she knew she had seen this design before. Kate's Pinterest board was where she clipped photos for inspiration, other people's interiors and fabric designs. She trawled through hundreds of images but came up empty-handed. Tapping her pen against her teeth, she then went through iPhone photos she had taken of places she had visited and Facebook updates showing travel destinations, as well as her Instagram timeline. Nothing. She couldn't find anything in her older scrapbook ring binders where she kept clippings, stapled fabric swatches and Sellotaped magazine pictures. But she was still convinced she'd seen the carpet somewhere. It was just maddeningly out of reach.
Her friend Rachel worked for a carpet manufacturer down in Wiltshire. The firm specialised in hotel carpets, and Kate had placed a big order with Rachel for the Albania hotel and others in the past. The carpet in the bar of the National came from that company. Surely they would have access to thousands of designs. Kate zoomed in on the carpet, cut-and-pasted the close-up and emailed it to her friend. Had Rachel ever seen it before?
The computer clock said it was half past twelve in Tirana. She had better phone Inspector Poda, telling him what her downstairs neighbour had said. Somehow she doubted the Albanian police were going to take a man in his eighties with failing eyesight seriously. And what that man last night, John Priest, had said about them shutting down the investigation came back to her. She berated herself for having been so naive.
"Hello? Inspector Poda? It's Kate Julia in London."
Was there the faintest sigh in his voice? "Hello, Mrs Julia. How can I help you this time?"
"I found somebody who was in the square on Friday night. He was taking photographs. It's my downstairs neighbour. Isn't that amazing?"
"Your downstairs neighbour was taking photographs?"
"Yes, he was visiting Tirana as well."
"What a coincidence." The police chief went silent. There's no such thing as coincidence, Kate reminded herself. "So, how can I help you?"
"Well, he's convinced that Paul fell from the balcony below ours, not the top floor."
She let her words hang, realising how mad they sounded. "This neighbour. Did he see the accident?"
"Not exactly, he says it all happened too quickly. But he's convinced that Paul fell
from the sixth floor, not the seventh."
"It's not possible that your husband didn't kill himself. The dental records match. The man who died was your husband."
"I'm not saying that my husband didn't kill himself, but I think there are too many coincidences for you not to reopen the investigation."
"Such as?"
"Well, there was another man in the square on Friday night. Watching us from another balcony. He was staring right into our room."
"It was White Night. There were fireworks. Everybody was looking up at the sky."
"So you're not going to investigate, despite what I've told you."
"All you've told me is that a witness got confused as to which balcony your husband fell from."
"Put like that, I suppose you're right."
"I told you. Our investigation is finished. We have no other lines of enquiry."
That's what you think, she thought. If Poda was not going to investigate her husband's death, then she would do it herself. Kate would be the one who brought her husband's killer to justice, so help her God.
Even as she was thinking this, an email dropped into her inbox. It was from Rachel:
Hi Kate,
Nice to hear from you. Yes, the hotel carpet is one of ours. It's the Savile Hotel on Park Lane. They had a big refit about a year ago. It was a major order for us. Let me know if you want me to send you a sample for your next job. The hotel was very pleased with it, and we can do a deal on the price.
Hope the Albanian hotel launch was successful, and that everything's going well for you.
Best regards,
Rachel
Chapter Sixteen
Kate dug her hands deeper into her pockets for warmth as cyclists and a few hardy joggers overtook her. The bare branches lining the avenue receded in infinite perspective above her head. She had decided to walk though Hyde Park to the Savile Hotel, which was above the Dorchester on Park Lane. It was one of those big international hotels that, living in London, you never really notice. Its Chinese owners had opened hotels in Shanghai and Dubai before taking over this venerable institution.