Who else’s am I likely to use? ‘I was looking on a property website, Roundthehouses.’
‘What time was this?’
‘Late. Quarter past one.’
‘Do you mind if I ask why so late?’
‘Sometimes I have difficulty sleeping.’
A sneer contorts Kit’s face for a second; only I notice its fleeting presence. He’s thinking that, if it’s true, it’s my own fault for giving in to my paranoia: I’ve chosen to torment myself with imaginary problems. He is sane and normal, therefore he sleeps well.
How can I know him well enough to read his thoughts, and, at the same time, fear that I don’t know him at all? If I looked at an X-ray of his personality, would I see only the bits I know are there – his conviction that tea tastes better from a teapot and if you put the milk into the cup first, his ambition and perfectionism, his surreal sense of humour – or would there be an unfamiliar black mass at the centre, malignant and terrifying?
‘Why a property website, and why Cambridge?’ Sam K asks me. ‘Are you thinking of moving there?’
‘Definitely not,’ says Kit with feeling. ‘We’ve only just put the finishing touches to this place, six years after buying it. I want to spend at least that long enjoying it. I’ve told Connie: if we have a baby in the next six years, it’ll have to bed down in a filing cabinet drawer.’ He grins and reaches for a biscuit. ‘I didn’t do all that work only to sell up and let someone else get the benefit. Plus we run a business that’s based here, and Connie got a bit carried away with the headed stationery, so we can’t move until we’ve written at least another four thousand letters.’
I know what’s going to happen before it happens: Sam K is going to ask about Nulli. Kit will answer at length; it’s impossible to explain our work quickly, and my husband is nothing if not a lover of detail. I will have to wait to talk about the dead woman.
Connie got a bit carried away.
Did he say that deliberately, to plant the idea in Sam K’s mind that I’m an easily-carried-away sort of person? Someone who orders six times more headed notepaper than she needs might also hallucinate a dead body lying in a pool of blood.
I listen as Kit describes our work. For the past three years, Nulli’s twenty-odd full-time staff have been working for the London Allied Capital banking group. The US government is in the process of prosecuting the group, which, like many UK banks, has a long history of breaking American rules about dealing with sponsors of terrorism, and unwittingly allowing blacklisted people and companies to carry out wire-transfer transactions in the US in dollars. London Allied Capital is currently bending over backwards to right the wrong, ingratiate itself with OFAC, the American office of foreign asset control, and minimise the eventual damage, which will almost certainly be a multi-million-dollar fine. Nulli was taken on to build data-filtering systems that will enable the bank to unearth all the questionable transactions that lie hidden in its history, so that it can come clean to the US Department of Justice.
Like everyone Kit tells, Sam K looks impressed and confused in equal parts. ‘So do you have a base in London, then?’ he asks. ‘Or do you commute?’
‘Connie’s based here, I’m half and half,’ says Kit. ‘I rent a flat in Limehouse – a box with a bed in it, basically. As far as I’m concerned, I only have one home, and that’s Melrose Cottage.’ He glances at me as he says this. Does he expect a round of applause?
‘I can see that a small flat in London would have a job competing with this place.’ Sam K looks around our lounge. ‘It’s got bags of character.’ He turns to study the framed print on the wall behind him – a photograph of King’s College Chapel, with a laughing girl sitting on the steps. Does he know he’s looking at a picture of Cambridge? If he does, he says nothing.
The print was a present from Kit and I’ve always hated it. On the mount, at the bottom, someone has written ‘4/100’. ‘That’s not a very good mark,’ I said when Kit first gave it to me. ‘Four per cent.’
He laughed. ‘It’s the fourth in a run of a hundred prints, you fool. There are only a hundred of these in the world. Isn’t it beautiful?’
‘I thought you didn’t like mass-produced things,’ I said, determinedly ungrateful.
He was hurt. ‘The handwritten “4/100” makes it unique. That’s why prints are numbered.’ He sighed. ‘You don’t like it, do you?’
I realised how selfish I was being and pretended that I did.
‘My wife calls houses like this “camera-ready”,’ Sam K says. ‘The minute I stepped over your threshold, I felt inferior.’
‘You should see the insides of our cars,’ Kit tells him. ‘Or rather, our two dustbin-spillover areas on wheels. I’ve thought about leaving them on the pavement next to the wheelie bin on collection day, doors open – maybe the council’d take pity on us.’
I stand up. Blood rushes to my head and the room tilts, blurs. I feel as if the different parts of my body are detaching from one another, breaking off and floating away. My head fills with a woolly throbbing. This keeps happening. My GP has no idea what the cause might be. I’ve had blood tests, scans, everything. Alice, my homeopath, thinks it’s a physical manifestation of emotional distress.
It takes a few seconds for the dizziness to pass. ‘You might as well go,’ I say to Sam K, as soon as I’m able to speak. ‘You obviously don’t believe me, so why should we both waste our time?’
He looks at me thoughtfully. ‘What makes you think I don’t believe you?’
‘I might be delusional but I’m not stupid,’ I snap at him. ‘You’re sitting there eating biscuits, chatting about wheelie bins and interior décor . . .’
‘It helps me to find out a little about you and Kit.’ He’s unruffled by my outburst. ‘I want to know who you are as well as what you saw.’
The holistic approach. Alice would be on his side.
‘I saw nothing.’ Kit shrugs.
‘That’s not true,’ I tell him. ‘You didn’t see nothing – you saw a lounge with no woman’s body in it. That’s not nothing.’
‘Why a property website, Connie?’ Sam K asks again. ‘Why Cambridge?’
‘A few years ago we thought about moving there,’ I say, unable to look him in the eye. ‘We decided not to, but . . . sometimes I still think about it, and . . . I don’t know, it was a spur of the moment thing – there was no particular reason behind it. I look up all sorts of strange things on the internet when I’m restless and can’t sleep.’
‘So, last night, you logged onto Roundthehouses and . . . what? Talk me through it, step by step.’
‘I searched for properties for sale in Cambridge, saw 11 Bentley Grove, called up the details . . .’
‘Did you look at any other houses?’
‘No.’
‘Why not? What made you pick 11 Bentley Grove?’
‘I don’t know. It was third on the list that came up. I liked the look of it, so I clicked on it.’ I sit down again. ‘First I looked at the photographs of the rooms, and then I saw there was a virtual tour, so I thought I might as well have a look at that too.’
Kit reaches over and squeezes my hand.
‘How much was it on for?’ Sam K asks.
Why does he want to know that? ‘1.2 million.’
‘Would that be affordable for you?’
‘No. Not even close,’ I say.
‘So you have no plans to move to Cambridge, and 11 Bentley Grove would be out of reach price-wise, but you were still interested enough to take the virtual tour, even after you’d looked at the photographs?’
‘You must know what it’s like.’ I try not to sound defensive. ‘You find yourself clicking on one thing after another. Not for any good reason, just . . .’
‘She was wilfing,’ Kit tells Sam K. ‘Wilf as in “What was I Looking For?” – aimless web-surfing. I do it all the time, when I should be working.’ He’s covering for me. Does he expect me to be grateful for his support? It’s his fault that I’ve had to make up
a story. I’m not the liar here.
‘All right,’ says Sam K. ‘So you took the virtual tour of 11 Bentley Grove.’
‘The kitchen came up first. The picture kept turning – it made my eyes feel tired, so I closed them, and then when I opened them I saw all this . . . red. I realised I was looking at the lounge, and there was a woman’s body—’
‘How did you know it was the lounge?’ Sam K cuts me off.
I don’t mind the interruption. It calms me, pulls me out of the horror that’s still so vivid in my mind, and back into the present. ‘I’d seen it in one of the photographs – it was the same room.’ Haven’t I just told him I looked at the photographs first? Is he trying to catch me out?
‘But there was no woman’s body and no blood in the photograph, correct?’
I nod.
‘Let’s leave aside the blood and the body for a second. In every other respect, the virtual tour’s lounge was the same as the lounge in the photograph, yes?’
‘Yes. I’m almost sure. I mean, I’m as sure as I can be.’
‘Describe it.’
‘What’s the point?’ I ask, frustrated. ‘You can log onto Roundthehouses and see it for yourself. Why don’t you ask me to describe the woman?’
‘I know this is hard for you, Connie, but you have to trust that anything I ask, it’s for a good reason.’
‘You want me to describe the lounge?’ I feel as if I’m at a kids’ party, playing a stupid game.
‘Please.’
‘White walls, beige carpet. A fireplace at the centre of one wall, tiles around it. I couldn’t see the tiles in detail, but I think they had some kind of flower pattern on them. They were too old-fashioned for the room.’ I realise this only as I hear myself say it, and feel relieved. Kit might choose tiles like that for our house, which was built in 1750, but never for a modern house like 11 Bentley Grove that can’t be more than ten years old. He believes new buildings should be wholeheartedly contemporary, inside and out.
Therefore 11 Bentley Grove is nothing to do with him.
‘Go on,’ says Sam K.
‘Alcoves on either side of the chimney breast. A silver L-shaped sofa with red embroidery on it, a chair with funny wooden arms, a coffee table with a glass top and flowers in a sort of horizontal display case under the glass – blue and red flowers.’ To match the tiles. There was something else, something I can’t call to mind. What was it? What else did I see, while the room was slowly circling? ‘Oh, and a map above the fireplace – a framed map.’ That wasn’t it, but I might as well mention it. What else? Should I tell Sam K there was something else but I don’t know what? Is there any point?
‘A map of?’ he asks.
‘I couldn’t see – it was too small in the picture. In the top left-hand corner there were some shields – about ten maybe.’
‘Shields?’
‘Like upside-down gravestones.’
‘You mean crests?’ says Kit. ‘Like when a family has a crest?’
‘Yes.’ That’s it. I couldn’t think of the word. ‘Most of them were colourful and patterned, but one was empty – just an outline.’
Was the empty crest the missing detail? I could pretend it was, but I’d be kidding myself. My mind took something else from that room, something it won’t put back.
‘Anything else?’
‘A dead woman in a pool of blood,’ I say, hating the belligerence in my voice. Why am I so angry? Because you’re powerless, Alice would say. We manufacture anger to give ourselves the illusion of power when we feel weak and helpless.
At last, I hear the words I’ve been waiting for. ‘Describe the woman,’ Sam K says.
Words begin to pour out of me, an uncontrollable flow. ‘When I saw her, and all that blood, when I realised what I was looking at, I looked down at myself – that was the first thing I did. I panicked. For a second I thought I was looking at a picture of myself – I looked down to check I wasn’t bleeding. I didn’t understand it afterwards – why would I do that? She was lying on her front – I couldn’t see her face. She was small, petite, my size and build. She had dark hair, same colour as mine, straight like mine. It was . . . messy, sort of fanned out, as if she’d fallen and . . .’ I shudder, hoping I don’t need to spell it out: dead women can’t make adjustments to their hair.
‘I couldn’t see her face, and I imagined – just for a second, until I got my bearings – that she was me, that I was the one lying there. Stop writing,’ I hear myself say. Too loud. ‘Can’t you just listen, and make notes afterwards?’
Sam K puts down his notebook and pen.
‘I don’t want to build it up into more than it was,’ I say. ‘I knew she wasn’t me, of course I did, but . . . it was as if my perception played a trick on me. It must have been the shock. She was lying in the most blood I’ve ever seen. It was like a big red rug under her. At first I thought it couldn’t be blood because there was so much of it, it covered about a third of the room, but then I thought . . . Well, you must know. You must have seen dead people lying in their own blood, people who’ve bled to death.’
‘Jesus, Con,’ Kit mutters.
I ignore him. ‘How much blood is there, normally?’
Sam K clears his throat. ‘What you’re describing doesn’t sound implausible, in a bleeding-to-death scenario, though I’ve never seen it first-hand. What size is the lounge?’
‘Twenty foot ten by eleven foot three,’ I tell him.
He looks surprised. ‘That’s very exact.’
‘It’s on the floorplan.’
‘On the Roundthehouses website?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know the dimensions of all the rooms?’
‘No. Only the lounge.’
‘Tell him what you did last night, once I’d gone back to bed,’ says Kit.
‘First I rang Simon Waterhouse, then, when I couldn’t get him, I rang you,’ I tell Sam K. ‘After talking to you, I went back to my laptop and . . . looked at 11 Bentley Grove again. I studied every photograph, I studied the floorplan. I watched the virtual tour over and over.’ Yes, that’s right. I hereby declare myself obsessive and insane.
‘For six hours she did that, until I woke up and dragged her away from the computer,’ says Kit quietly.
‘I kept closing down the internet, then opening it up again. A few times I turned off the laptop, unplugged it, then plugged it in again and rebooted it. I . . . I was exhausted and not thinking straight, and . . . I kind of got the idea into my head that if I persisted, I’d see it again – the woman’s body.’ Am I being too honest? So my behaviour last night was out of control – so what? Does that make me an unreliable witness? Do the police only listen to people who take mugs of Ovaltine to bed at ten o’clock and spend the rest of the night sensibly asleep in their flannel pyjamas? ‘I’ve never seen a dead body before. A murdered body, that then disappears. I was in shock. I probably still am.’
‘Why do you say “murdered”?’ Sam K asks.
‘It’s hard to imagine how she could end up like that by accident. I suppose she might have plunged a knife into her stomach, laid herself face down on the floor and waited to die, but it seems unlikely. It’s not the most obvious way to commit suicide.’
‘Did you see a stomach wound?’
‘No, but the blood looked thickest around her middle. It was almost black. I suppose I just assumed . . .’ A deep tarry blackness, thinning to red. A small window, rectangles of light on the dark surface . . .
‘Connie?’ Kit’s face is swimming in front of mine. ‘Are you okay?’
‘No. No, not really. I saw the window . . .’
‘Don’t try to talk until the dizziness passes.’
‘. . . in the blood.’
‘What does she mean?’ Sam K asks.
‘No idea. Con, put your head between your knees and breathe.’
‘I’m fine.’ I push him away. ‘I’m fine now. If nothing else I’ve said has convinced you both, this will,’ I say. ‘I s
aw the lounge window reflected on the surface of the blood. As the room turned, the blood turned, and so did the little window. That proves I didn’t imagine it! No one would imagine such a stupid, pedantic detail. I must have seen it. It must have been real.’
‘For Christ’s sake.’ Kit covers his face with his hands.
‘And her dress – why would I have imagined a dress like that? It was pale green and lilac, and had a pattern that was like lots of hourglass shapes going down her body in vertical lines, curved lines going in and out, in and out.’ I try to demonstrate with my hands.
Sam K nods. ‘Was she wearing shoes, or tights? Any jewellery that you noticed?’
‘No tights. Her legs were bare. I don’t think she was wearing shoes either. She had a wedding ring on. Her arms were up, over her head. I remember looking at her fingers and . . . Yes. Definitely a wedding ring.’
And something else, something my mind’s eye refuses to bring into focus. The more I try and fail to identify it, the more aware I am of its hidden presence, like a dark shape that’s slipped off the edge and out of sight.
‘What happened when you saw the body on your laptop?’ Sam K asks. ‘What did you do, after you’d examined yourself to check you weren’t bleeding?’
‘I woke Kit and made him go and look.’
‘When I went in, there was a rotating kitchen on the screen,’ Kit says. ‘Then the lounge came on, and there was no woman’s body in it, and no blood. I told Connie, and she came in to look.’
‘The body had gone,’ I say.
‘I didn’t reload the tour,’ says Kit. ‘It was still running when I walked into the room, the same one Connie had started, on a repeating loop. I’m not saying changes can’t be made to a virtual tour of a house – of course they can – but they wouldn’t affect a tour already playing. It’s just not possible—’
‘Of course it’s possible,’ I cut him off. ‘You’re telling me someone can’t arrange a virtual tour so that once in every hundred or thousand times, a different picture of the lounge comes up?’ Come on, Kit. Aren’t you proud of your pupil? It’s thanks to you that I no longer underestimate what’s technically possible. A computer, instructed by the right person, can do almost anything.
Lasting Damage Page 4