Joanna’s mother sat up suddenly and pushed the duvet from her. ‘Vince?’
‘Yes, her name’s Rachel something. She’s waiting in the living room. Do you know her?’
Angela ran a hand through her hair. ‘What time is it?’ she said.
‘After eleven … I didn’t know whether to answer or not … it’s so late and … do you know someone called Vince?’
Her mother stood in the middle of the room and cast about her. She picked up a blouse from the back of the bedroom chair and then put it down again. Joanna took her dressing gown from a hook on the bedroom door.
‘Here – put this on,’ she said.
Her mother slipped into the dressing gown and tightened the belt. She sat on the edge of the bed and stuck her feet in her slippers. ‘She’s in the living room?’
‘Yes. I had to invite her in. She looked kind of upset … and I couldn’t leave her on the doorstep … not like that.’
Her mother nodded, took a deep breath and ran a hand through her hair again to flatten it. Joanna followed her from the room. Her mother paused at the top of the stairs and she almost walked into her.
‘Look, maybe you should stay here,’ her mother said.
Joanna hesitated. ‘Will you be all right? I mean … who is that woman? Why would she call so late?’
‘Just someone from the past … please, wait in your room, Joanna. I’ll explain everything later.’
Joanna nodded, but her mother didn’t look at her. With one hand on the banister and the other lifting the end of her robe she hurried down the stairs.
‘Rachel, you’ve rung me twice already. I’ve told you, I haven’t heard from him.’
‘I know. I’ve come to tell you … Vince, he’s … he’s dead.’ The woman’s voice wavered.
‘What … what do you mean? How could he?’
The living room door closed, and Joanna crept down the stairs in an effort to hear what followed.
‘They found him. This morning the guards came. They’d found his body in the canal, trapped beneath the ice. Some man out walking saw him.’
Joanna moved further down the stairs until she was almost in the hallway.
‘What happened? Did he fall in? Jesus, I … Did you see the body?’
‘No … Patrick went to identify him … he said it was better if I didn’t … the body had been in the water for at least a week, they said. It’s not how I want to remember him.’
Joanna listened, but she heard no comforting words from her mother. Instead there was silence, broken finally by the other woman. ‘That’s … that’s her isn’t it. That’s …’
‘Joanna, yes. My daughter.’ Ice in her mother’s voice. Then: ‘Why have you come here, Rachel?’
‘Because I thought you should know … because of her … it seems like the right thing, doesn’t it? I mean now that …’
‘Now that he’s gone, you mean? No, I don’t think it does. She need never have known, but you’ve decided to see to that, haven’t you? I think that’s why you’ve come here … to cause trouble … some kind of revenge, now that you don’t have Vince to stop you. My God … have you been saving it up all these years?’
Joanna descended the last few steps of the stairs. She had never heard her mother so angry. She wanted to intervene, to know who the woman was, and why the death of this man should concern her. She stood in the hallway and stared at the living room door, reluctant, yet willing herself to open it.
‘How could this possibly be revenge?’ Rachel Arnold said. ‘He’s dead, Angela. Don’t you get it? If you must know, then yes, there is a reason why I’ve come. It’s because of this … it was among his things and there’s only one place he could have got it.’
‘I don’t know anything about it.’
The woman said something else, but Joanna didn’t hear. There was silence then for a few minutes. Joanna wondered what they were doing, her mother and the woman. Were they carefully avoiding each other’s eyes? Was the woman wishing she’d never come?
‘What’s this?’ she heard the woman ask.
‘They’re Joanna’s. She studies photography. She’s putting a collection together for an exhibition.’
‘They’re good, very good. Did you encourage her?’
‘No. Must be in the blood, mustn’t it?’
‘Will you tell her?’ the woman said.
‘I don’t have much choice now, do I? If I know Joanna, she’s probably already heard half the conversation.’
Joanna moved back from the door and furtively made her way up the stairs. She was trying to understand what she’d heard. She had a feeling that she knew who Vince was, but she needed to hear her mother say it. She sat on the top step of the stairs and waited to hear the living room door open. She wanted to listen to the rest of the conversation, but she didn’t dare. It was unlikely that the two women had much more to discuss now that the woman had said what she’d come to say.
When the door eventually did open, Joanna withdrew into the shadows of the landing. Her mother spoke in a low voice as the woman stepped into the cold night.
‘I’m sure you wish I hadn’t come,’ the woman said.
‘Too late for that now, isn’t it?’
‘He’s being released tomorrow. The funeral’s on Tuesday if you want to tell her … I don’t expect you to come.’
‘No, I’m sure you’d rather I didn’t.’
The woman said nothing to deny it, and the next sound Joanna heard was the woman’s shoes on the tarmac before her mother closed the front door. Joanna waited for her to call her, to say something, to explain, but there was silence from downstairs and when she looked down through the banisters, the hall was empty.
Slowly, she descended the stairs. Her mother was sitting in her armchair in the living room with her head in her hands.
‘Are you all right, Mum?’ Joanna said.
Her mother shook her head and looked at her hands clasped in front of her.
‘How did you know this Vince then?’
She waited for an answer. Her mother cupped her hands to her mouth and exhaled a breath that she must have been holding. It hissed through her fingers and a sound like a sob broke from her throat.
‘He was your father,’ she said.
THREE
Oliver picked up one of his wife’s blouses and folded it carefully before tossing it in a bin liner. He had taken all of Mercedes’s clothes from the wardrobe and they were strewn in a pile across the bed and in the black bags that lay scattered at his feet. He picked up a sweater and held it to his face. It smelled of Mercedes’s perfume – a rich, woody fragrance that had seemed always to linger in the room long after she’d left it. It was that scent as much as the sight of Mercedes’s clothes that evoked, unbidden, the memories that tormented him. He threw the sweater in an almost full bin liner, and knotted it tightly, trapping the scent of his wife inside.
That morning, when he had opened the wardrobe to take out a clean shirt, he was accosted, as he had been every morning for the past three weeks, by the sight of Mercedes’s clothes. He had decided at that moment that the only way for him to move on was to rid the house of any sign of her. Immediately after breakfast, he’d begun the clear-out. Apart from her clothes, which he would donate to a charity shop, Mercedes had owned few possessions. There was a music box that had belonged to her grandmother and a collection of porcelain dolls that she’d had since she was a child. Both had been of sentimental value to her and, because of this, he didn’t have the heart to pack them away with the rest, so he left them on a shelf in the living room where they had always been.
When the phone rang, Oliver clambered across the bin liners to reach it, but then seeing the international number on the display screen, he let it ring out until the answering machine clicked in. His heart beat wildly as he heard the voice at the other end, that husky Spanish accent that had fascinated him so much in the beginning and, if he were completely honest with himself, still did.
‘Merc
edes, soy yo. Te sigo llamando y llamando …’
He got the gist of Carmen’s words. She wanted Mercedes to call, they could sort things out, she said. There was a pause as she considered what to say next, and clearly deciding that there was nothing else she could say that would make any difference to her sister, Carmen hung up, leaving Oliver staring at the phone. He’d lost count of the number of messages she had left. Sometimes she phoned and hung up before the machine had kicked in. He wondered how much longer he could avoid her. He expected her to call his office any day. She had already tried his mobile, but he hadn’t answered. He suspected that she wanted to speak to Mercedes before she spoke to him. It must have been killing her not knowing the result of the bomb she had dropped on her sister.
Well, he would not alleviate her anxiety. He suspected that eventually she would turn up looking for answers. Carmen was not the type to shy away from any situation. She would pay no heed to the fact that she had been the instigator – that she had been responsible for everything. He didn’t trust himself to meet her. What she had done was stupid, unforgivable, and he didn’t know what he might do if they met. If it hadn’t been for Carmen, that horrible night would never have happened. He and Mercedes may have grown slowly apart as so many couples did, but it would not have ended like it had. He would never forgive Carmen for that.
He pressed the button on the machine and erased Carmen’s message. Then he looked at the bags at his feet and decided that it would be better to leave some of her things hanging in the wardrobe. Should Carmen arrive unannounced, he would have some explaining to do if everything that belonged to her sister had vanished. It was unlikely that Mercedes would have taken everything with her so fast had she simply moved out.
Oliver untied one of the bin liners and pulled out a silk skirt. As he did so he imagined the cool swish of it against Mercedes’s tanned and shapely legs. She had worn that skirt to a wedding they’d attended in Barcelona just months after they’d met. He remembered slipping his hands beneath it later that night on a beach lit only by the lights of the fishermen lined up along the shore. Her legs were bare and he had run his hands along her silky thighs and pulled her to him as the fishermen, oblivious to the lovers, stared out at the black sea and waited for the fish to bite.
Oliver’s hands were shaking as he hung the skirt in the wardrobe. He hadn’t allowed himself to think of his wife like that for a long time. He had resented their lack of physical contact – a sex life that seemed to have petered out before it had run its natural course. Things had been strained between them long before Carmen had said anything. He tried to justify his actions by blaming Mercedes. If she hadn’t become so cold, so indifferent, would any of it have happened?
He spent the next hour sorting through his wife’s things – re-hanging some of them in their shared wardrobe and packing the others away. By lunchtime, he had finished. He took the bags and loaded them into the boot of the car. He wondered if any of the neighbours were watching – prying eyes peering from behind lace curtains. He was thankful that neither he nor Mercedes had struck up any friendships with their neighbours. They were private, passed themselves off with a ‘hello’ or a ‘nice day’, but that was as far as their contact had gone. Generally, he liked to avoid people who asked too many questions about his private life, and Mercedes had shared that feeling.
It was freezing despite the thaw. Oliver felt rather low as he drove into the city to unburden himself of Mercedes’s clothes, but he knew that it was the only way forward. Mercedes was gone, and his problem was far from over. There was Carmen to deal with. Not to mention the rest of Mercedes’s family. Soon, people would begin to ask questions and he’d better have his answers ready.
The shop was small and had a sign over it that read Mrs Quinn’s Charity Shop. He’d never been there before, but he figured that rather than going in with the stuff it’d be better to leave it outside. No point in drawing attention to himself. He pulled up close to the door and took a couple of bags out of the boot. Just as he put them down, the shop door opened and an elderly woman appeared.
‘Are they for us?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I have a few more to go.’
The woman, surprisingly agile for her age, grabbed a bag and made towards the door. ‘Bring them on in,’ she said, leaving him no choice but to follow her.
When he returned with two more bags, the woman was examining Mercedes’s clothes. She held a blouse up to the light and viewed it appraisingly. ‘This is nice stuff. Are you sure she wants to get rid of it?’ she asked.
Oliver panicked. ‘My wife died,’ he said quickly, thinking that would put an end to further questions.
The woman put down the blouse. ‘I’m terribly sorry.’ Her eyes narrowed in sympathy. There were deep lines etched at the sides of her mouth. She moved her hand as if to reach out to him and then didn’t.
Oliver nodded and tried to block out Mercedes’s voice in his head. Because of you. ‘I’ll just get the rest of the stuff from the car,’ he said.
The woman smiled sadly, and he left her sorting through Mercedes’s things, fingering the cloth, searching for any imperfections. He felt a strange sort of emptiness as he watched her examining the things that Mercedes had worn. That she would never wear again. He hadn’t expected to feel that way, as though there were a void somewhere inside him.
He leant into the car boot to take out the last bag. He’d forgotten to knot it and the contents were spilling out where it had toppled over. He was shoving the clothes back in when he heard someone calling his name.
‘Oliver. Oliver Molloy, is that you?’
He looked up. There was a woman hurrying across the street. He didn’t recognize her at first. He stood there, at the open boot, trying to figure out who she was.
‘It is you,’ she said, as she got closer. ‘My God, it’s been such a long time!’
Finally, he recognized her, but couldn’t think of her name. She was an old friend of Mercedes; someone she used to work with.
‘Hi,’ he said, as he slammed the boot closed. ‘I’m sorry I can’t remember …?’
‘Adrienne,’ she said. She smiled and extended her hand.
‘Adrienne. Of course, I’m sorry, like you said it’s been what … three … four years?’
The woman called Adrienne laughed. She hadn’t let go of his hand, and he was aware of her fingers squeezing his. ‘I know, it’s hard to believe … I mean … God, how are you? How’s Mercedes doing?’
Oliver cast a quick look at the door of the shop. ‘Yes, she’s fine. We’re both good …’ he said. ‘And you, how are you doing? Are you still at Abacus?’
Adrienne laughed, a tinkling kind of laugh that reminded him of the C note on a piano.
‘No, I left soon after Mercedes did. I don’t know if you remember I was studying acting at the time … well, I’ve been trying to make a go of it. It’s difficult, of course, no money in it, but I get a bit of work doing ads and stuff …’
‘Really … wow … an actress.’
Adrienne smiled and he smiled back. She had a very pretty mouth; there was a dimple at one corner and her lips were coated in a shiny pink lip-gloss. He had no doubt that this girl would get parts.
‘It’s so good to run into you like this. Mercedes and I should never have lost touch … we used to have such laughs. I must get your number, maybe we can arrange to meet up like we used to …’
Adrienne began searching in her bag and took out a mobile phone.
He gave her the house number and then Mercedes’s mobile number. ‘You won’t be able to get her at the moment. She’s away in Barcelona. Her father’s not so well,’ he said.
Just as he’d said it the shop door opened behind him and the old woman came out. Christ – that had been close. Adrienne was busy saving the numbers in her phone.
‘Oh, I’m really sorry to hear that. I’ll give it a few weeks then … hopefully, everything will be okay,’ she said.
‘Yeah, it’s hard you know.’
He glanced at the old woman who was standing feet away examining the display in her shop window. He thought fast of something to say to change the topic from Mercedes. ‘Hey, what ever happened to that guy you used to bring round for dinner … did you?’
Adrienne started laughing. ‘Norman? My God, I haven’t thought of him in a long time …’
Oliver laughed. ‘I could never see what you were doing with him.’
Adrienne looked away. ‘Yeah, well, I didn’t know either in the end.’
‘And now, is there someone special?’
‘No. I’m just concentrating on my acting … trying to make it work, you know?’
Her coppery hair fell in her eyes. She flicked it back, and when she looked up there was a moment of awkwardness. He had always thought she was attractive. The old woman, to his relief, had gone back inside. Adrienne smiled at him.
‘I’m really glad I saw you. I’d better go, but please tell Mercedes I was asking about her and that I’ll call her soon.’
‘I will. It was great to see you.’
He leaned down and kissed her cheek. Her face turned a shade of pink to match her lips, and he wondered if he’d been right all those years ago when he’d suspected she’d had a thing for him, and if he should have taken advantage of it.
He watched her run across the road and get into a silver Renault Clio. She waved to him as she passed. He waved back and made as if he were searching for something in the glove compartment. When he was sure she was out of sight, he got out of the car, went round to the boot and brought the last black bag into the shop.
The woman was sitting at the counter now, reading a magazine. She nodded and got off the stool when he entered. ‘Just put it over here, love,’ she said, pointing to a pile of bags yet to be sorted. He was about to turn away when she spoke again. ‘It’s a difficult thing having to get rid of someone’s belongings. When my husband died, I couldn’t bring myself to clean out his wardrobe. I’d take out a shirt and I could smell him off it. It was like he was in the room with me. But it’s better that you do it, you have to move on. She wouldn’t want you mourning.’
The Girl Behind the Lens: A dark psychological thriller with a brilliant twist Page 2