‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning we can’t go on like this, covering it all up.’
‘Why not? It’s over. There’s nothing left to cover up.’
‘There’s everything left to cover up! We need honesty in our lives. I can’t live with this … this lie hanging over me. I can’t take it any more.’
He tilted his head, as if gauging the strength of my will. I felt a cool breeze and, from somewhere, the smell of nutmeg.
‘So I go to jail for God knows how long and Nell and Arthur hang their heads forever as the children of a killer because you are finding it hard to work? I thought the whole point of art was that you solved problems. You take life as you find it and distil it into your work, the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful.’
I didn’t answer. He took the opportunity.
‘And how do you think Nell and Arthur will view their mother in years to come? As someone who defended their childhood and their innocence or someone who took them away?’
‘I didn’t kill anyone.’
‘Nor did I. It was an accident.’
‘I didn’t sleep with anyone.’
‘Jesus, Alice, please, be reasonable, it was a mistake. I have apologized for that and I will go on apologizing. I can’t believe that I did it, and I hate myself for it, and I’ll do anything you want, anything I can, to make it up to you. But this isn’t some art project. This is real life and real people – the people we love more than anyone in the world – will be brutalized. I didn’t murder Araminta Lyall. So what’s so honest about me sitting in jail for fifteen years? Because I slept with her when I was too drunk to remember? You really want to put Nell and Arthur through what you went through that afternoon in the road? Just imagine what it’s like to be the child of a killer. Maybe you change your name and move to Sussex. Maybe you emigrate to Australia. But if you do they’ll still be the kids of a murderer, it’ll get out, and they’ll never see their dad, and if they do it will be in fifteen-minute bursts after a five-hour drive to some godforsaken, depressing, windswept, impossible-to-get-to visiting room with a warder listening in and saying what we can and can’t say to each other. Wherever they are, they’ll have to spend their whole lives denying who they are, which means they will have to stop being who they are. For God’s sake, where’s the honesty in that?’
He glanced around as if the answer was hidden in the room like a chocolate egg on a rainy Easter Day. I looked at the floor, the surfboard-shaped grain, and thought about that woman, the weight of his head on her pillow, my father at Beachy Head, his deep-dyed honour. I looked at Ed. This was the man who through his dedication to his work had taught me it didn’t matter what you didn’t do, it didn’t matter what you thought, it didn’t matter what you said, it only mattered what you did. I said,
‘It’ll be manslaughter at worst, especially given the character witnesses you’ll have and the good you can do when you’re out.’
‘I assume I can quote you?’ There was no humour in his tone.
‘You know it will.’
‘What I know is the police will see I had a motive, that I lied to them, that you did too, and they’ll go for it. Why not? High-profile case, big-cheese doctor, society portrait painter wife – you’ve seen how the papers lap it up, the web. What I also know is I will never work again afterwards.’
‘Of course you will!’
Ed’s face was gleaming.
‘How many convicted killers do you know who have passed the NHS integrity test?’ I swallowed. It sounded like thunder in the silence. His jaw was set, the muscles in his cheeks strained. ‘Or there’s another way. We can carry on and put things back together unless you choose – yes, Alice, unless you choose – to run a knife through me, through the children and through everything we’ve built up.’
‘There’s a fault-line running through it.’
‘There’s a fault-line running through millions of things. That’s how the world is.’
‘It doesn’t have to be.’
He snorted contemptuously.
‘That’s the difference between us.’
‘Alice, please think it through, all of it. Because once you’ve done this it’s out of our hands, however big it gets and however it goes in ways you may not have expected. There’s no turning back. I mean, what if they arrest you as an accessory after the fact or for perjury? What if you go to jail too? Where do the children live then? With Bridget? With your mother? With Matt?’
I didn’t answer. It wasn’t a question of logistics. It was a question of truth, of being honest with ourselves and our children. There was no future for us as a couple, a family, or myself as an artist or maybe even a human being if I didn’t go through with this. We had reached the point of no return. There was no way to cope with an infinite lie. There had to be an ending. That was what I knew. The rest was just talk.
‘We have to do the right thing. In the end it’s the only way the children will respect us.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake listen to yourself!’ His voice was low and controlled, which was scarier than if he shouted and screamed. ‘When did you get to be so perfect? OK, so you’re the great artist and you deal in universal truths. Well, not all of us are up to that. Some of us are only human. We make mistakes – yes, I admit it, terrible mistakes – and there are accidents, things we can’t turn round, and we have to learn to live with them, often for the sake of other people. This is one of those times. It’s about Nell and Arthur as much as you or me, and they aren’t going to thank you or respect you for fucking up their childhood, their whole lives, in the name of some ridiculous artistic ideal!’
For a moment I hesitated, thinking of the shape of their heads wrapped up in their pillows, Nell’s cat’s-lick, the curl of hair around Arthur’s ear. They didn’t deserve this. Who did? But the decision had been taken at Highlands and the moment I’d taken it I’d felt liberated, as if someone had opened a cell window and I had climbed through it into an empty square of sky. I had floated back to Bristol like a heroin-drenched saxophonist, needle dancing around a hundred, wheels scarcely touching the road. Ed’s anger and frustration were inevitable but it only made me more determined. Whose fault was this anyway?
‘Children survive. They’re resilient. Whatever happens becomes the norm. They live their own lives.’
‘That makes you feel better?’
‘Better than our relationship with them and each other and everyone else being built on a lie? Yes. It does. They have a right to know and to understand.’
‘They’ll understand that their childhood, maybe their life, was wrecked because their mummy was too wrapped up in herself to think about them and their needs. You’re the one pulling the plug. This will only happen if you want it to. Not because you need it to or they need it to but because you want it to. No other reason.’
He blew out air and turned away angrily, momentarily staring at his reflection in the inky glass. I hated the way it was going but I had to hold on to see it through. If I wavered everything would be over.
‘Ed, it’s about who we are, the people we want to be, the example we want to set to Nell and Arthur, them knowing what we stand for, what we believe in. It’s about them knowing the truth, understanding the narrative of their lives. Honestly, there’s no other way.’
‘Of course there’s another way. It’s just that you don’t want to take it.’ He ground his teeth angrily as if he’d suddenly understood an angle he’d missed all along. ‘And the reason you don’t want to is because this isn’t about me at all, is it? And it’s not about the children either. It’s about you. It always has been. Maybe everything always was.’
I was shaking my head, that was ridiculous, but Ed continued, his tone desperate and bitter, gaining weight and force.
‘No one has ever matched my perfect wife before, because she’s always been the prettiest most talented loveliest cleverest smartest most creative person in any room and all the men have only ever had eyes for her. But now her husb
and has slept with someone else, someone younger, maybe as pretty, perhaps as clever, by all accounts as talented, maybe even more so, and, forgetting everything that happened afterwards, she can’t handle that because she’s never had to. A world that has always and only ever revolved round her has suddenly had to expand to include someone else. No wonder all my apologies are not enough. I should have known they never could be. Because this isn’t about me at all, it’s about you.’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. How could he twist the truth like that?
‘ “Forgetting everything that happened afterwards”?’ I couldn’t keep the derision out of my voice. ‘That’s magnificent! If nothing had happened “afterwards”, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’
Ed leant forward. His voice was bitter, his pale cheeks aflame.
‘Oh yes, we would. We were always going to have this conversation one day. If it wasn’t about this it would have been about something else.’
I almost laughed out loud.
‘Do you mean “something else” like sleeping with someone and killing them?’
It was as if I hadn’t spoken. He carried on like a battering ram.
‘And the reason we were always going to have it is because you’ve been so fucking self-obsessed all your life that you can’t cope when something happens in the real world that affects real people and that isn’t about you. Well, it did. I didn’t mean it to, but it did, and I have to deal with it. I can’t theorize it away. I can’t just paint it in pretty colours. That’s what’s happened here and deep down you know it.’
I looked away. How had he made it sound as if the whole problem was all to do with me? Maybe she had been right and his sleeping with her was an expression of things being subliminally wrong between us? When he saw I wasn’t going to reply, he continued:
‘Oh, it’s not just you. It’s all of you, your whole family, probably has been for generations. Look at your dad. It didn’t suit him to spend time with his family so he stayed in London. Your mum? What has she actually done for anybody, ever, including her children? Particularly her children! Bridgey? She always pretended life happened between the pages of a book. Matt? I mean … Matt? Please! Has he ever thought about anyone but himself? Oh yes, of course, poor misunderstood Matt, he’s always been dealing with his issues and doing “his thing”. Only his thing turned out to be nothing. Have any of you ever loved anyone else? Have any of you ever come down off your mountain and actually taken responsibility for something? Have any of you ever engaged with real life?’
I didn’t even try to answer. I could have told him about Matt and Jo but this wasn’t about them and I certainly wasn’t going to defend myself or my family in this kangaroo court. The decision had been taken and the way he had reacted almost served to calm me down, which meant I knew I could see it through. I could sit here and take the abuse for as long as he needed to dish it out, and – don’t get me wrong – I understood why he needed to. I could see why he was bitter. I would have been if I was in his place. But this time I was going to engage with life. This time I was going to do the right thing.
It was quarter to four by the time I reached the police station but I wasn’t tired. Not at all. My adrenaline was running so hard I could have gnawed off my hand and not felt a thing.
There was no one behind the counter. I rang the bell and waited. I was more nervous than when they brought me here in the back of a police car. Then there was a chance, hope, a game to play. That had been extinguished. I wondered how it would pan out. Would I be held here while they picked up Ed? What about the children? Would they wake to find a policeman in the house? Maybe I should have thought of all that, but I knew I had to get out of the house and do it in case my nerve failed. If I was held overnight I could always ask the police to call Bea. No need to hide from Radio Bea-for-Bristol now. The world would look completely different in the morning.
I’d never seen Ed as angry as he was when I wouldn’t budge. He simply didn’t get it that I had to do it for all of us, that in the end there was no way I – we – could live forever under the strain of the infinite lie and therefore risking being apart was the only way we could stay together as a family. There was a moment when I did wonder whether there was a sliver of truth in his accusation that this was only happening because I was jealous of that woman – a younger version of me! – and it was the adultery rather than the killing driving me. But I was sure in my heart it wasn’t.
‘What if you get there and the police arrest you because someone has just rung in anonymously and said you killed Araminta?’
‘No way.’
Ed stared impassively at me.
‘It wouldn’t be the first time. Wife jealous of mistress and wants to save her marriage. There’s motive.’
‘Ed, please.’
‘As far as we know, no one saw you on Sion Hill that evening, and you obviously weren’t spotted on Brandon Hill.’
‘That’s totally ridiculous. I didn’t even know about her at that stage. She was just some woman who owned a flat where you crashed after a party. You were never going to see her again. Why would I care?’
‘Because you found out what had happened between us? You worked it out. The flowers. The weird call. The blue ribbon. Changing my mobile password. There were plenty of clues. In some ways I’m amazed you didn’t pick up on them earlier.’
‘I trusted you.’
‘But say that you did. Say you were a typical wife, wondering why I needed to go on “overseas charity trips” and “medical conferences”. A lot of wives would have. The reason you didn’t is because you were so wrapped up in yourself and your art it never occurred to you. But say it had. Say you found out. So you went to her flat to confront her, to tell her to back off your man, but things turned ugly, you argued, she pushed, you pushed, she tripped … it’s your word against a dead body.’
‘I’ve never been in that building.’
‘Tough to prove a negative.’
‘No fingerprints.’
‘Gloves.’
‘In May?’
‘Took care not to touch anything, rubbed down what you did.’ He wiggled his fingers as quotation marks. ‘ “I left our house at six to go to lie on Sion Hill and then went straight to book club.” In other words, unaccounted for between six and eight. Murder time? Between six and eight. Did anyone see you? What do you say – remembering anything you do say will be taken down and may be used in evidence against you?’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Stranger things have happened.’
‘I’d tell the truth.’
‘What is the truth if it’s unprovable?’
‘You’d never get away with it.’
‘Don’t tempt me.’ Ed’s jaw was set. ‘It’s no more ridiculous than what you’re proposing. Let the genie out of the bag and no one knows what will happen. Maybe you should think about that?’
And so the argument had rolled on into the night, one step forward, half a step back, but the outcome was no longer in doubt. It couldn’t be. The status quo was untenable.
There was the poster at the police station warning me to look after my valuables. Surely that was the one place they might be safe? It must be true what they say about bent coppers. I had to ring the bell twice. Bristol criminals can sleep soundly in their beds at night. A policeman finally appeared. He was in his late fifties, the size and shape of a Big Mac with a complexion like Monterey Jack and a rugby prop’s ears. He tried unsuccessfully to look as if people showed up of their own volition every morning at 3.45 a.m.
‘What can I be doing for you?’
His head was as bald as a cannonball and twice as large, but he had kind eyes which he rubbed with a big red knuckle as if he’d just woken up. He’d been doing this too long. A low-slung tie formed a slack Y below his bowl-shaped jaw and his sleeves were rolled up above the elbow. He had arresting forearms. I momentarily lost my nerve as he pulled a clipboard from under the counter and looked around h
opefully for a pen. I felt myself shaking.
‘I’ve come about the death of Araminta Lyall.’
There. I’d done it. There was no going back. I felt like a long-distance swimmer in sight of land, but Mac was having none of it. He didn’t holler ‘Hallelujah!’ He just grunted and frowned and wheezed through his nose and looked like a man who wished I’d shown up on someone else’s shift. He stole a look at his watch. Was someone wasting police time?
‘I know it’s an odd time to come. But that’s how it is. I know who killed her.’
A grunt and a suspicious frown. My voice sounded reedy. The wannabe-famous crew would be well known here.
‘And you are?’
‘Alice Sheahan.’
He looked at me as if the name was faintly familiar.
‘Right then, will you step this way?’
Big Mac moved heavily to the far end of the counter and lifted a flap. I dipped my head and went through, looking back briefly at the empty foyer – a copper’s-eye view of humanity in its lowest moment – as he pushed open a door that led into a cream-painted corridor with olive doors on the right at regular intervals. It wasn’t the corridor I’d been taken through for questioning. You get a better class of room when they think you might help.
‘Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea? Water?’
‘A glass of water?’
‘No glasses in here. Here we go then.’ He opened the first door. ‘Make yourself comfortable. Back in a minute.’
The room was small and square and the bricks were shiny. There was a wooden table and three wooden chairs. From inside, the glass in the door was opaque, one-way. Make yourself comfortable. He’d cracked that one before. I sat in the single chair facing the door. I should have been exhausted by my mother’s revelation, the long drive, the argument with Ed, but my heart was pumping like a big-game hunter closing in on the kill.
The door opened without a knock. Big Mac stood aside to allow a lean man in his early thirties to come in. He had liquorice hair and self-regarding sideboards tapering into a point. His Prince of Wales check suit and natty boots looked out of place and time, as if he’d been called from the racetrack to identify a dead aunt. He seemed almost comically self-assured. He favoured Mac with a superior nod as he entered.
What Alice Knew Page 25