Lasting Damage

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘That depends. If I find out the truth, and the truth is that you’re not a liar, not a murderer . . .’ I shrug. ‘Maybe we can find a way back, but . . .’ I stop. It’s not fair to offer him false hope, even if it would further my cause. ‘I think our marriage is probably over either way,’ I say.

  ‘It’s what your average dimwit-on-the-street would call a “no-brainer”.’ Kit’s smile is shaky. ‘If my choice is between definitely losing the woman I love and only probably losing her, I’m going to have to opt for only probably.’ He stands up. ‘I’ll sign anything you want me to sign. Just say the word. You know where to find me.’

  Chapter 18

  23/7/2010

  ‘I need you to do something for me.’

  ‘Hello to you too.’ Charlie made a rude face at the phone. ‘I’m fine, thanks for asking. Where are you?’

  ‘Get hold of Alice Fancourt, arrange to see her as soon as you can. Alice Bean, sorry – she’s dropped the Fancourt. Find out when she last saw Connie Bowskill and what—’

  ‘Who-oa, hang on a minute.’ This was the sort of conversation that demanded the accompaniment of a glass of wine: cold, white, bone dry. Charlie hit the pause button on the remote control, hauled herself up off the sofa and pulled the lounge curtains closed, or as near to closed as they’d go. They didn’t quite meet in the middle; she’d made a pig’s ear of hanging them. Liv had said, ‘Take them down and rehang them, then – properly’, but as far as Charlie was concerned, curtains fell into the category of things that only got one chance. So did sisters.

  She would never have admitted it to anybody, but she was pleased to be home – queen once more of a small, badly decorated terraced house, no longer an outsider in paradise. ‘Connie Bowskill knows Alice?’ she said, swallowing a yawn.

  ‘Alice is her homeopath,’ said Simon. ‘I need to know when she last saw her, what Connie said, if she’s got any idea where Connie is now.’

  ‘At the risk of sounding selfish, what does that list of needs have to do with me? I was watching a DVD.’ So far it was brilliant. Orphan. It featured a psychotic adoptee protagonist called Esther who seemed intent on killing all her siblings. Charlie identified with her hugely, though she suspected that wasn’t the reaction the director had been hoping for.

  ‘I can’t talk to Alice, can I?’ Simon said impatiently.

  ‘You both have mouths and ears, last time I checked. You mean you don’t want to talk to her.’ Charlie poured herself a glass of wine, glad he wasn’t there in person to see her smile. The smile faded as it occurred to her that his not wanting to speak to Alice could be interpreted in a range of ways: dislike, embarrassment, an aversion to revisiting the past. Any of those would be okay, Charlie thought, putting the wine back in the fridge. Searing unrequited love – the kind that knows it would be magnified to greater agony by confrontation with its object. No. Ridiculous. It was clear from his tone that Alice was a means to an end. Connie Bowskill was the one he was interested in now. And no, Charlie told herself firmly – not in that way.

  ‘I don’t want to talk to Alice, no,’ said Simon.

  Neither did Charlie, but she knew what would happen if she refused: he would overcome his reluctance and do what he had to do to get the information he wanted. This was her opportunity to prevent a reunion. ‘Fine, I’ll do it. Where are you?’

  ‘In Cambridge still.’

  ‘Are you coming home?’

  ‘No. I’m going to Bracknell to talk to Kit Bowskill’s parents.’

  ‘Now? It’ll be midnight by the time you get there.’

  ‘They’re expecting me first thing in the morning. I’ll camp in my car outside their house.’ Anticipating her objection, he said, ‘There’s no point me coming back just to spend a few hours in bed. I wouldn’t sleep anyway.’

  As if there was nothing to do in bed apart from sleep.

  ‘So . . .’ He was going too fast for her. ‘Kit Bowskill gave you his parents’ phone number?’ Why would he do that? Why would Simon ask for it?

  ‘Directory Enquiries did. There was only one Bowskill in Bracknell – N for Nigel.’

  ‘But . . . you met Kit Bowskill?’

  ‘Yeah. Asked him three times what caused the rift between him and his folks. First two times he dodged the question. It was his third answer that convinced me he’s hiding something that matters. He gave me what sounded on the face of it like a full answer, but it was all psycho-babble – used a lot of words to distract me, so I wouldn’t notice he was telling me nothing. He said his mum and dad wouldn’t “rally round”, wouldn’t be a family to Connie when she needed them. That could mean almost anything.’

  ‘Might he have decided it was none of your business?’ Charlie asked. She could understand Kit Bowskill’s disinclination to discuss a traumatically severed relationship with a brusque detective he’d never met before.

  ‘No. He was scared.’ After a pause, Simon added, ‘He’s the bad guy. Don’t ask me to prove it because I can’t. Yet.’

  ‘You don’t even know there is a bad guy.’

  ‘He told me Connie doesn’t want to speak to me – she’s angry with me for going away without telling her. Does that sound likely?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Charlie. ‘I was angry with you earlier, when you set off to Cambridge without telling me. I could have come with you.’

  ‘What if he’s killed her too, and that’s the reason she isn’t answering her phone?’

  ‘Pure invention, Simon.’

  ‘How many people do you know who cut their parents out of their lives?’

  ‘You’re obsessed with Kit Bowskill’s bloody parents,’ Charlie grumbled.

  ‘From now on, it’s my guiding principle: any time I’ve got two people saying different things and I don’t know which to believe, if one of them’s disowned the two people who brought them into this world, I’m going to believe the other one.’

  ‘That’s . . . really absurd.’ Charlie laughed and took a sip of her drink.

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘Wow – what a convincing argument.’

  ‘Every day of my life I think about my mum dying – every single day. I think about how free I’d feel. And then I realise she’ll probably live for another thirty years.’

  Charlie waited. Counted the seconds: one, two, three, four, five, six . . .

  ‘The point is, I wouldn’t ever say to her, “Sorry, you’re out of my life,” ’ Simon went on. ‘Anyone with a heart knows how it’d make any parent feel to hear those words, anyone with the ability to empathise even a fraction . . .’ The breathing in between the words was louder than the words. Simon wouldn’t have been willing to have this conversation in person, Charlie guessed; only the distance made it possible for him. ‘No child should ever renounce its parents, not without a rock-solid reason,’ he said. ‘Not unless it’s life or death.’

  Charlie wasn’t sure she agreed, but she made a noise that would allow Simon to think she did. ‘If Kit Bowskill doesn’t want to tell you what happened, chances are his mum and dad won’t either,’ she said.

  ‘Risk I have to take.’

  Accept it, Zailer: he’s not coming home.

  Charlie carried her wine through to the lounge and flopped down on the sofa. Psychotic orphan Esther, fixed in place, scowled at her from the TV screen. ‘Even if the parents tell you what the rift was about, so what?’ she said. ‘How can it have anything to do with Connie seeing a dead woman on a property website? Assuming she saw any such thing. I’m still not convinced – I don’t care how many independent witnesses have come forward.’ Her camera was sitting on the sofa arm beside her. She put down her drink and picked it up. Since getting back from Spain, she’d kept it with her all the time – next to her side of the bed while she slept, on the bathroom windowsill while she was in the bath. She was addicted to looking at her photos of Los Delfines.

  ‘Independent,’ said Simon. ‘Interesting choice of word.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Charlie was staring a
t a tiny sweaty Domingo, leaning against the trunk of the upside-down lily tree.

  ‘Two people see the dead woman’s body on Roundthehouses: Connie Bowskill and Jackie Napier. No one else. Does it seem likely to you that the only two people to see this dead body on the website – for the brief half hour that it’s up there, before it’s replaced – happen to be these two people? Think of all the millions that might have seen it.’

  ‘Likely?’ Charlie made a ‘silent scream’ face. ‘Simon, we left likely behind several light years ago. None of this is likely. I still think it’s some kind of . . . bizarre practical joke. There’s absolutely no evidence – proper evidence, I’m talking about – that anyone’s been killed, hurt, anything. Oh, my God!’

  ‘What? What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s hideous. It’s fucking hideous!’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The face! In the mountain. It’s so obvious now that I can see it: eyes, nose, mouth.’ Charlie pressed the zoom button on her camera. ‘I asked you if it was attractive – why didn’t you tell me it was a complete minger? It looks like Jabba the Hut from Star Wars.’

  ‘What do you mean, you can see it?’ Simon sounded irritated. ‘You’re at home.’

  ‘On my camera.’

  ‘There’s no way a photograph could—’

  ‘It’s that panoramic one, the one I took from the top terrace. Pool, barbecue, gardens, mountain – complete with ugly face.’

  ‘The face I saw wouldn’t show up in a photograph,’ said Simon.

  ‘Simon, I’m looking at a face here. How many faces can one mountain have?’

  ‘You can’t tell anything from a picture,’ he said curtly.

  ‘Did the face you saw look like Jabba the Hut from Star Wars?’

  There was a pause. Then Simon said, ‘If you didn’t see it first-hand, you can’t claim to have seen it – not on the basis of a tiny photo.’

  ‘To whom can I not claim that?’ Charlie teased him. ‘The Board of Mountain Face Classification? What does it matter if I see it too? Does it make you less special?’

  ‘No.’ He sounded confused by her question. ‘I wanted you to see it, but you didn’t. Seeing it in a photograph’s not the same.’

  ‘No, it’s different. But I can still see it.’

  ‘Not in the mountain.’

  Charlie held the phone at a distance and blew a raspberry into it – a long, loud one. When she put it next to her ear again, Simon was talking so quickly that she couldn’t follow what he was saying. Something about someone called Basil. ‘Slow down,’ she told him. ‘I missed the beginning of that. Start again.’

  ‘Basil Lambert-Wall,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Professor Sir, the one who lives on Bentley Grove, Selina Gane’s next-door neighbour. He said he’d seen Kit Bowskill before, remember, when I showed him a photo? Said Bowskill had fitted a burglar alarm for him?’

  Charlie remembered. ‘And then you went to the burglar alarm company, who said they didn’t recognise Bowskill and he didn’t work there.’

  ‘You tell me you’ve seen a face in a mountain when you haven’t – you’ve seen it in a photograph.’ Simon’s words collided with one another, as they always did when he was excited. ‘Why do you make that mistake? Because you associate the photograph with the mountain – it’s such a strong association in your mind that you confuse the one with the other.’

  Charlie opened her mouth to protest, but it was clear he wasn’t stopping.

  ‘Basil Lambert-Wall was wrong about Bowskill being the guy that fitted his burglar alarm – we know that. But what if he was right about seeing him? What if seeing Kit Bowskill is strongly associated in his mind with the day he got a new burglar alarm? What if something else happened that same day, and the professor’s confusing the two things? Think about it – it’s got to be! Why else would he be so sure Kit Bowskill had fitted his alarm when he hadn’t?’

  Because he’s old and doddery and just plain wrong? Charlie didn’t bother to say it out loud. When Simon was like this, there was no point talking to him.

  She heard a click, then the line went dead. Dismissed. It was Professor Sir Basil’s turn to have his evening interrupted, poor old sod. It struck Charlie as odd that she knew what was about to happen to him and he had no idea. She hoped he wasn’t asleep.

  Sighing, she pressed play on the remote control and stretched out on the sofa to watch the rest of her film. Alice Fancourt could wait until tomorrow. If Simon could have a guiding principle, Charlie could too: people who ended phone calls without saying goodbye didn’t deserve to have their errands attended to immediately.

  ‘Sam.’ Kate Kombothekra took the phone out of her husband’s hands and put it down on the coffee table between them. She was wearing her yellow pyjamas, holding a roll of cling-film in one hand. ‘I need your attention for five seconds. Think you can manage it?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Did you remember to get paper for the printer?’

  ‘No. Sorry. I’ll do it tomorrow.’

  ‘Did you ring the council?’

  ‘Was I supposed to?’

  ‘Yes. To ask about skip hire, get some quotes . . .’

  ‘Oh, right. No. Sorry.’

  Kate sighed. ‘All right, just one more question, and only because I’m desperate to hear a “yes”: would it be fair to assume that you’ve neglected to do all four things you promised you’d do today?’

  ‘That was Connie Bowskill on the phone,’ Sam told her. ‘She wants me to ask Grint for Jackie Napier’s number.’ Not an unreasonable request, in the circumstances.

  ‘Oh, not this again!’ Kate whacked the cling-film rhythmically against the palm of her left hand in what would surely have qualified as a threatening gesture had the weapon been less innocuously domestic. ‘Forget Connie Bowskill. Come and help me get the boys’ stuff ready for tomorrow. I’ve nearly finished the packed lunches – if you could dig out their big rucksacks from the cellar. The camouflagey ones, you know.’ Kate performed a mime: a seated person springing up from a chair and breaking into a run.

  Sam didn’t move. ‘She’s staying at the Garden House,’ he said. ‘Same hotel as Selina Gane.’ He wasn’t sure why the idea of the two women in such close proximity disturbed him. Was he worried Connie might do something? No. She wasn’t violent. Desperate, though. Much of the violence Sam had encountered over the years had been born of desperation.

  He was fighting the urge to ring Grint and tell him to go to the hotel. And do what, once he got there? It was crazy. So was not wanting Connie to talk to Jackie Napier. Sam didn’t like to think of himself as a control freak – the sort of person who made decisions on other people’s behalf and justified it on the grounds that it was for their own good. He could easily have told Connie that Jackie worked for Lancing Damisz, that there was no need for him to bother Grint – Connie could contact Jackie via her work if she wanted to speak to her. It was natural that Connie should want to be put in touch with the only person in the world who would believe her for sure, the woman who’d seen exactly what she’d seen. In her shoes, Sam would also want to compare notes, go over details. So why were his instincts telling him to do everything he could to keep the two women apart?

  He couldn’t stop thinking about something Jackie Napier had said when he’d interviewed her, about the woman who pretended to be Selina Gane and put 11 Bentley Grove on the market. She knew all she had to do was talk about people not looking like they do in their passports. If she made me think about all those other people, she wouldn’t have to convince me – I’d do all the work myself. It’s one of those things everyone says, isn’t it? “He looks nothing like his passport photo, I’m surprised he’s ever allowed back into the country.”

  Had Sam misremembered? No, he was fairly sure that was what she’d said.

  He opened his mouth to ask Kate if he was imagining problems that didn’t exist, but she had already left the room.

  ‘Pick a number between one and thirty-nine.’
r />   ‘Sixteen,’ said Simon. His and Charlie’s wedding anniversary.

  Professor Sir Basil Lambert-Wall dragged his index finger along the books on the shelf closest to him, counting them off one by one. When he got to the sixteenth, he worked it loose from the row, hooked his walking stick over the back of the nearest chair and proceeded to try and take hold of the bulky hardback with both hands. Simon stepped forward to help, regretting the sentimentality that had led him to pick what was undoubtedly the heaviest book on the shelf – The Whisperers, it was called. The subtitle was Private Life in Stalin’s Russia.

  ‘Stay where you are!’ the professor barked. His voice was large and powerful for a man so small. ‘I can manage perfectly well.’ He made a series of huffing noises as he circumnavigated the chair and sat down in it. More huffing as he adjusted the book on his lap.

  Simon watched the effort, trying not to wince, hoping Lambert-Wall’s tiny wrists wouldn’t snap. He berated himself for not having guessed what the old man had in mind; if he had, he’d have gone for skinny number fifteen, Maxims of La Rochefoucauld. There was no shortage of books to choose from: every wall was covered. There were shelves above the door, above and below both windows – all full. In between the two armchairs and the sofa were three piles of magazines. One was topped with an issue of The Economist, another with something called PN Review. The third was supporting two empty mugs. Simon couldn’t see the name of the journal beneath them; it had a picture of the Statue of Liberty in one corner.

  ‘You chose well,’ said the professor once he’d got his breath back. ‘The Whisperers is an unusually excellent book. Now, pick a number between one and six hundred and fifty-six.’ He flicked through the pages.

  ‘You’re sure I’m not keeping you up?’ Simon asked. It was the red towelling dressing gown that was making him feel guilty, the grey striped pyjamas, the sallow tubes of calf protruding from the brown slippers. Didn’t necessarily mean bedtime, though; Lambert-Wall had been wearing the same outfit last time Simon had called round, at midday.