by Nicci French
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t know anything about that. You’ll have to ask the police.”
“The only police I see are uniformed officers. There’s one supposedly lurking around somewhere. They don’t know anything. I feel—I feel in the dark.” He rubbed his face.
“I don’t think there’s been any large step forward.”
“They won’t catch anybody,” he said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Isn’t that what they say? If they don’t find the murderer straight away, then mostly they don’t find him at all?”
“It gets harder,” I conceded.
“So what can I do for you?” he asked.
“I’m extremely sorry about your wife.”
“Thank you.” He blinked, as if he couldn’t see very well.
“It must have been a terrible shock. Where were you when you heard about it?”
“I’ve said all this before. I’ve said it so many times it no longer feels like the truth to me.” He paused, then managed a sad smile. “Sorry. I’m not my normal merry self. I was at home. I usually work from home at least one day a week.”
“Was Philippa distressed? I’m sorry, is it all right if I call her Philippa? It sounds strange talking like this about someone I never met. It’s just that if I call her Mrs. Burton I feel like a tax inspector.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“For asking. You know, in the papers they call her Pippa. She was never called Pippa in her life. I called her Phil, sometimes. Now it’s the tragedy of Pippa—Pippa this, Pippa that. I think they use it because it fits into a headline. Philippa’s got too many letters.” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “And the answer is; no she didn’t seem distressed. She was happy. The same as always. Nothing was different. It was just life as normal. We were happy together—though sometimes now it seems as if I can’t remember anything properly anymore.”
“Mr. Burton…”
“What I really don’t understand is what Phil’s mood could have to do with her death.”
“I’m interested in patterns of behavior. Maybe I’m asking the same question you must be asking, which is, why her?”
“Everything was normal…,” he said, sounding not resentful but just puzzled. “Normal mood, normal state of mind, normal patterns of behavior. I say that and you look at me like that, and it all sounds suspicious and strange. Anyway, what does normal mean?”
“Did she have a routine to her life?”
“I suppose so. She looked after Em, looked after the house, saw friends, saw her mother, went shopping. Ran our life together, I suppose. We were quite a traditional couple, you know.”
“Did she see friends during that last week?”
“I’ve already told the police, she saw her mother and she went out with Tess Jarrett.” I made a mental note of the name.
“If anything had been troubling her, she would have told you about it?”
“Doctor…”
“Quinn. Kit Quinn.”
“Right. There was nothing troubling her. She went out and got killed by a madman. Everyone says so. Look, I don’t know what you want from me. Everyone wants something. The police want me to cry on television, or to break down and confess that I did it. The press wants God knows what. Emily wants—well, she wants to know when Mummy’s coming home again, I suppose. I don’t know.” He sighed and looked at me out of his bloodshot eyes. “I don’t know,” he said again.
“What do you want?”
He rubbed his eyes. He looked tired and sad. “To go home with Emily, and go back to work, and be left alone and let everything get back to normal.”
“Except of course it can’t.”
“I know that,” he said wearily. “I know. What I really want is to wake up one morning and find it’s been a dream. In fact, every morning now I wake up and for a moment I don’t remember, and then I do. Do you know what that feels like? To have to realize all over again?”
I was silent for a moment, and he stared down at the grass.
“Was your wife ever involved in any kind of social work? With foster-children, that sort of thing?”
“No. She worked for an auction house when we met, but she gave that up when she had Emily.”
“She had no connections with the Kersey Town area?”
“She may have caught a train from there.”
I went around in circles several more times, always coming back to the same point: What was the use of asking Jeremy Burton about his wife’s character and mood when she’d been the victim of a random attack? At last I stood up. “I’m grateful to you for talking to me,” I said, holding out my hand. He shook it. “Sorry, my questions must have sounded a bit strange.”
“No stranger than most of the other things I’ve been asked. You know, one newspaper has offered me fifty thousand pounds to talk to them about what it’s like to have my wife murdered.”
“What did you say?”
“I couldn’t think of anything. I put the phone down. You want to talk to Emily. She hasn’t any connections with the Kersey Town area. I can tell you that straight away.”
“I’ll only be a minute.”
“Pam will show you. That’s my mother-in-law.”
A handsome gray-haired woman was hovering by the French windows that led into the kitchen. There was an ashen pallor to her face, the color of a woman who had experienced intense grief. Jeremy Burton introduced us. “I’m very sorry about your daughter,” I said.
“Thank you,” she replied, with an inclination of her head.
“Dr. Quinn wants to see Emily,” Burton said.
“What for?”
“I’ll only be a moment.”
Pam Vere led me along the corridor. “Emily’s got a friend here at the moment. Is that all right?”
“Of course.”
Pam opened the door and I saw two little girls crouched on the carpet arranging some stuffed animals in a circle. Two girls, one with dark brown pigtails, the other with light brown curls and just for an instant I didn’t know which was which, and I felt a pang. It was like a lottery. Which of them was going to be picked out as the one whose mother had been brutally killed? Pam stepped forward to the darker girl. “Emily,” she said, “there’s someone to talk to you.”
The tiny little girl looked up with a fearsome frown. I sat down next to her. “Hello, Emily. My name’s Kit. What’s your friend called?”
“I’m Becky,” the friend said. “Becky Jane Tomlinson.”
Becky immediately started chatting away. I sat as I was introduced to the toys one by one. Last of all were the good bears and the bad bears.
“Why are the bears bad?” I asked.
“Cos they’re bad.”
“What do you do with the toys?” I asked.
“Play,” said Emily.
“Do you ever take them to the playground?” I asked. “Do you take them on the swings and into the sandpit?”
“I dunnit,” said Emily. “I dunnit all with Bella.”
“Did it,” said Pam.
I laughed, outsmarted.
“You’re a clever girl, Emily,” I said. “And I am sorry your mummy died.”
“Granny says she’s with the angels.”
“What do you say?”
“Oh, I don’t think she’s gone that far. She’s coming back.”
I glanced up at Pam Vere and saw on her face an expression of such fierce anguish that I had to look away again. “Well, can I come back again one day? If I think of a new thing to ask you?”
“Don’t mind,” said Emily, but she had already turned away. She lifted up a sad-eyed koala and pressed her lips to its black plastic nose, crooning gently. “I’m so proud of you,” I heard her whisper. “So proud.”
16
I was tired as I drove back to my flat through the fumes of the rush-hour, and glad that Julie wasn’t home. She’d said something about an interview with a record company�
��although what she, a math teacher and world-traveler, knew about the music industry I didn’t know. I opened the windows to let in the evening freshness. Children’s voices floated up from the garden at the back. I went into the bathroom, turned on the taps, and tipped some bath oil into the water. Then I took off my clothes, which felt dirty after my day, and slid into the tub. The water was slippery and pungent, and I lay back and closed my eyes. Then the telephone rang. Damn, I hadn’t turned on the answering-machine. Why did phones always ring when you were in the bath? I waited, and it went on ringing. So I clambered out, wrapped a towel round myself and dripped into the living room, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind me.
“Hello?” Little soap blisters burst along my arms.
“Is that Kit Quinn?” the voice crackled; he must be calling on a mobile.
“Speaking.”
“It’s Will Pavic here.”
“Oh,” I said, into the silence that followed this announcement.
“I wanted to apologize for the other night.”
“Go on, then.”
“What?”
“You said you wanted to apologize.”
There was a splutter at the other end, which might have been outrage or amusement. “I’m sorry I was unsociable. There you are.”
“You were obviously tired, and it was a stupid invitation anyway. Forget it. It doesn’t matter, really.”
“Maybe there’s something I can tell you about Lianne.”
I felt a jolt of surprise. “Yes?”
“It’s not much, really. But… well, I’m about a mile away from your flat, and I thought I might as well call round. Just for a few minutes. If you haven’t got company.”
“Fine. It’s just me.” I thought about my bath of silky water. “See you, then. By the way, how come you found my number?”
“You were right. It wasn’t so hard.”
__________
I pulled the plug on my bath and dressed in a pair of ancient jeans and a vest top. I wasn’t going to make any effort for Will Pavic. While I was waiting for him, I flicked on the television news to see if there was anything more about Philippa Burton. She’d dropped from the main story to the third one: detectives still searching the area for clues; flowers and soft toys still being left at the place where her body was found. There was a new photograph of her being shown, one of her on a hilltop in baggy canvas shorts and a T-shirt, laughing, her silky hair blowing in the breeze, her arms around her little dark-eyed daughter.
I thought of Emily burying her face into her koala and whispering words to it that her mother had said to her: “I’m so proud of you.” Maybe my mother had said things like that to me before she went and died. My father had never been very good on details like that—he’d just say, frowning, “Well, she loved you very much, of course,” as if that was enough. I’d always wanted so much more: all the daft diminutives and terms of endearments, the games she’d played with me, the way she’d held me and carried me, the things she’d wanted for me, the hopes she’d had. All through my life I’d made them up for myself. Every time I had done well at school, I’d told myself how pleased my mother would have been. When I became a doctor, I wondered if she would have wanted that for me. Even now, when I look at myself in the mirror, with my mother’s face, my mother’s gray eyes, I pretend it’s not my reflection that I am gazing at, but her, standing there at last, smiling at me after so many years of waiting….
The doorbell rang.
Will was in a dark suit this time, no tie. His eyes were red-rimmed and his skin chalky. He looked as if he needed to sleep for a hundred years.
“Do you want a drink?” I asked.
“No thanks. Coffee maybe.” He stood in the middle of the living room, ill at ease.
I made a coffee for him, and poured myself a glass of wine. “Milk? Sugar?”
“No.”
“Biscuit?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Why don’t you sit down? Unless you want to deliver your information like that and bolt.”
He managed a brief grimace, then sat on the sofa. I took the chair opposite him and resisted the urge to make small-talk, to fill in the silence that flowered in the space between us. He stared at me, frowning.
“I told you I didn’t really know Lianne.”
“Yes, you did.”
“And it’s true. Dozens of teenagers come through my doors every week. They are given shelter if they need it, information about their options if they require it. We put them in touch with various organizations if that is what they want. But no questions are asked. That’s the whole point—in a way, that’s why I set up Tyndale Center in the first place. We don’t try to tell them what is best for them. We don’t make any judgements—everyone else does that, not us. We lay down certain rules, but outside that we make no demands on them. That’s what the center is—a place where they are free to think for themselves, even if that means making painful mistakes about their lives—” He stopped abruptly. “All that’s beside the point.”
“No, it isn’t, as a matter of—”
“Lianne had been to the center three times in the last six months or so,” he cut in. “The first two, she was quite optimistic about her future. She said she wanted to be a cook—you’ll find that about a fifth of children in care seem to want to be cooks. We gave her some leaflets about catering courses, that kind of thing. But the third time, the last time we saw her, she was depressed. Very subdued indeed. Withdrawn and listless.”
“Do you have any idea why?”
He drained his coffee and stared into the bottom of his cup. “Her best friend had killed herself a few weeks earlier.”
“How old was she?”
“Fourteen or fifteen. Maybe sixteen. I don’t really know.”
“How did they know each other?”
“No idea. They came to the center together once, but they’d obviously known each other before. They probably hung about in the same places.”
“Why did she do it?”
He shrugged. “Pick a reason. Why don’t more of them do it, is a better question. Daisy.”
“That was her name?”
“Daisy Gill. Sounds a happy sort of name, doesn’t it?” And for the first time since I’d met him he gave me a proper smile—rueful, quick to fade, but genuine while it lasted. I smiled back and he looked away, staring out of the window at my grassy plague pit.
“Do you want a glass of wine now?”
“So now you’ve got another fact,” he said, ignoring me. “I mean, to add to the one you already knew. One: Lianne was troubled. Two: Lianne was killed.”
“Maybe. Wine?”
“No. No wine. That’s enough. Goodbye.”
He stood up in a single movement and held out his
hand. I took it. “Thank you,” I said, and it was at that moment that Julie sailed through the door, with her glossy and excited face; her mouth open to tell me something. She stared at us, startled.
“This is a surprise,” she managed finally.
Will nodded at her. “I’m just leaving.”
“Glass of wine?” she gabbled. “Beer?”
“No,” he said. “Thank you.”
At the door, he turned. “I wanted to say…” He stopped and threw a glance at me. “I am sorry for my rude behavior at your dinner party. The food was delicious.”
And he was gone.
“Well,” said Julie, turning on me. “You’re a sly one.”
“He came for about two minutes. He wanted to tell me something about the young woman who was murdered.”
“Yeah, yeah. Well, I’ve lost interest in him anyway. He’s too grim for me. Do you want to hear my news?”
“Go on.”
“I got the job.”
“No!”
“Yup. Starting in a month’s time—I told them I had other commitments before then.”
“Do you?”
“No, of course not, but you can’t seem too available, can you?”
>
“Congratulations, Julie. I’m sure you’ll be brilliant at it—whatever it is.”
“I don’t really know myself.” She giggled. Then: “So I’ll start looking for a place to live.”
“No hurry,” I said, before I could stop myself. I’d have to get used to being alone again. I closed my eyes briefly.
“Why don’t you try and get him back?” Julie said.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Don’t shout so. Albie. I bet he misses you too. Anyone in their right mind would miss you.”
“I don’t want him back.” To my surprise, it wasn’t so much of a lie anymore. He’d left of his own accord, and if he was missing me, he was sure to be missing me in the arms of another woman; missing me while holding someone else’s face in his hands. So I didn’t want him. I wanted someone who would just belong to me. I wanted to be the best beloved. That’s what most of us want, isn’t it?
17
I was tired, I had mildly swollen glands, a sore throat that felt like glass when I swallowed. I didn’t feel much like going to work, so I lingered over my breakfast of toast and honey and strong tea. The kitchen table lay in a pool of sunlight. I would have liked to sit there all day, hands round a warm mug, feet in warm slippers, listening to sounds coming from the street, maybe even watching daytime television. But then the phone rang and it was Oban. He said he wanted to talk to me. “We are talking.”
“I mean in person.”
“When?”
“Could you be here by ten?”
I looked at my watch.
“I suppose so. I’ll have to cancel a meeting.”
“Good.”
“Has there been a development?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Then what’s it about?”
“We’ll talk about it face to face.”
__________
I was puzzled all the way over, constructing good scenarios and bad scenarios in my head, but mostly bad ones. I didn’t come up with anything as bad as what I found when I was shown into Oban’s office at exactly ten o’clock. Oban was sitting at his desk, clearly not working but looking expectant. I saw he wasn’t alone. A woman was standing with her back to me, looking out of the window. She turned round. It was Bella. She caught my eye, then looked away. And sitting on the sofa against the wall was Rosa from the Welbeck.