She smiled, ‘Unlike him I can be bought with a burger. I’m Melody, by the way, Patrick’s new flatmate.’
‘Good luck with that.’ He smiled that toothy grin again. ‘I’m David, your next-door neighbour.’
The sound of the intercom makes her jump. From her bedroom window she can see out across the driveway to the gates. A woman is standing, driver’s door open, ready to speak into it. When no one answers, she looks up towards the house. Melody ducks down and crawls along to one end of the window, where she can peer out while using the curtain for cover. Even from this distance she notes a change in hairstyle; shorter, she thinks, and the colour is darker. The way she’s standing though, one hand on her hip, leg turning in slightly, removes any doubt. For months it was the way she stood in her parents’ kitchen, making cups of tea for the family and visitors that everyone cradled in their hands to give them something to do but no one really drank because there are only so many cups of tea a person can drink. She catches sight of herself in the mirror, curtain pulled around her, face mask crinkling on her skin. When did she become so pathetic?
Polly buzzes again. This time Melody goes downstairs to let her in, answering the door mask still intact.
‘Looking good,’ Polly says.
‘I like to try,’ she smiles and feels the mask cracking on her skin.
Polly makes admiring noises about the house – it is a conversation starter if nothing else – about the views, which she seems to appreciate despite them being obscured by a five-foot perimeter fence. ‘It’s like the Gaza Strip, who are you trying to keep out?’ Patrick remarked on his first visit after it was erected. Of course he knew very well who they were trying to keep out.
‘Do you like it out here?’ Polly was standing with her back to Melody, looking out of the window to the garden. ‘I’ve always lived in the city, but you know I think I could cope with this.’
‘I dunno, you’d miss the sirens after a while and the takeaways are rubbish.’
Melody makes tea. Polly doesn’t drink coffee. She likes her tea strong, the colour of teak with just a splash of milk and too much sugar. She is surprised by how she has retained these facts when it’s been so long since they saw each other.
‘The change must have been good, though.’ Polly comes over to the island, eyes the two mugs Mel has placed there. ‘Which one is mine?’
‘Do you need to ask?’
‘Just being polite. Two sugars?’
‘I remembered.’ Melody pulls a face. ‘I don’t know how you can drink it.’
‘Neither does my dentist, he hates me.’ She takes a slurp and lets out an ahhh. ‘You always did make a good cup of tea.’
Ideally the conversation would continue in this vein, the comfortable, easy banter of two old friends catching up. Although comfortable might not be the best way to describe it; the comfort you feel driving along knowing there is a cliff edge ahead of you and you are going to go careering off it, which on reflection, Melody decides, isn’t really comfort at all.
There’s a brief lull in the chat. This is where the danger lies. More questions, Melody thinks, running through the possibilities: How are the kids? or did she only have one? Maybe she has two now, or even three. Thanks to the mornings she’s spent with Siobhan and her mummy friends, she could sustain this line of investigation for some time. Of course she could always ask Polly about work, but she discounts this almost as soon as the idea proposes itself. She has no interest in her work. The wedding, she thinks. God, people can talk endlessly about weddings, even those (in fact particularly those) who are already married. The way they recall their own big day in forensic detail, the cut of the dress, the speeches, the quirky personal touches they added. She gets the impression that they like to talk about it because nothing since has ever fulfilled the promise and perfection of that one day. Without thinking, she holds her hand straight out in front of her to look at the diamond on her ring finger. One and a half carats, a flawless brilliant-cut, Sam said when he produced it eight months ago.
‘Woo,’ Polly says, ‘that’s some love.’
‘It could be fake for all I know.’ Mel pulls her hand away, suddenly embarrassed by the extravagance.
Polly looks around the kitchen once more, the hangar-like space of it. ‘Somehow I doubt it. When is the big day?’
‘Three months.’ She thinks that sounds too soon, can’t understand how at first it all seemed so abstract, a romantic idea too far away in the future to grasp, and now it’s almost upon them. She waits for Polly to start the reminiscing. She wasn’t long married when they first met, if Melody remembers correctly. But no such memories are forthcoming, so she continues sourcing a selection of treats from the cupboard. She wishes she wouldn’t call them treats; it’s a habit she’s inherited from her mother. Now look, I’ve bought you some nice treats, she’ll say when they’re on a rare visit, which immediately makes her feel eight years old again and deserving of a reward. Treats: she hates the bloody word but it’s like a verbal tic she can’t seem to shake. Laying them on the counter, she runs through the selection in detail as if Polly is unlikely to be tempted without knowing the individual ingredients and heritage of each.
‘This is made with oats, I say it’s a biscuit but Sam disagrees, he says it’s a flapjack, so it’s a moot point, but it’s organic, and these are Florentines, glacé cherries and dark chocolate, they’re really very good …’ Shut up, she thinks. Would you listen to yourself.
‘Shall I tell you what I know, then?’ It takes moments for Melody, who is lost in thought trying to remember where she bought the macaroons, to realise that she has just driven over the cliff edge and is now freefalling through the air.
Polly’s conversation doesn’t reach her in full sentences, but like a twisted game of word bingo, individual words and their attendant images. Body, buzz, woman, buzz, strangled, buzz. Gold chain.
David Alden. Buzz.
Mel thinks she’s suffering from a kind of inner disturbance that in the space of minutes has shaken up everything inside her. All the images and memories she’s worked hard to file and lock away come tumbling out. The neatness and order have been replaced by internal chaos in the time it’s taken for her tea to go cold.
‘Are you OK?’ They’re sitting down at the kitchen table now and Polly reaches across it to hold Mel’s hand. ‘I know it’s a lot to take in, but he is in custody, Melody, he can’t hurt you.’
She contemplates this, how ludicrous it is. It’s not Polly’s fault. She’s only doing her best by trying to reassure Melody that she is not in physical danger. But she doesn’t know, because no one gets it, really gets it, that each day presents a different kind of torture: the feeling of her lungs collapsing if she’s around too many people because she can’t see their individual faces and doesn’t know whether he is among them. Conversely being around too few people – so few you can pick out footsteps – sets off the noise in her head, like a microphone out of tune, and drowns out every other thought. The day after his release came the violent spasms deep in her stomach, followed by the bleeding, so much blood, the angry redness of it like nothing she’d seen before. She couldn’t hold on to another life because she wasn’t really alive herself. He had squeezed it out of her. As far as Melody is concerned, there is no line between physical and emotional hurt. They have blurred into one.
‘We’d like you to come to the station tomorrow and give another statement,’ Polly says. She’s still holding her hand, tightly, as if she suspects that once she lets go Melody will run.
She wouldn’t run, she wouldn’t trust her legs to carry her. Instead she is contemplating sitting in a police station tomorrow when she should be driving down to the wedding venue to choose the desserts and the flowers with Siobhan. How she’s been worrying about it, wishing Sam was able to accompany her because there are too many decisions to make and the issue of the flowers and desserts have become big decisions upon which the success of the day and their marriage hinges. Now they have shrunk
to insignificance next to what she is being asked to do. There is no avoiding it. She’ll be going back, swimming against the current of the last six years when she’s devoted all her effort to going forward.
The questions; she remembers them from last time, the feeling that she was disappointing everyone because she couldn’t remember enough. No, she didn’t see his face; no, she doesn’t know why she was walking along Uxbridge Road at 11 p.m., past the street where she lived. No, there is really nothing else she can remember that might help them.
‘Were you meeting someone?’ they’d asked, and all she could do was shake her head. She would have liked to have given them a straight answer, yes or no. But the memories of that night sat under a dense fog that wouldn’t lift. Sometimes she thought she could make out shapes and voices but there was nothing substantive, nothing she could say that beyond all reasonable doubt was true.
‘DI Rutter is leading the investigation. I should warn you that she’ll be talking to the press tomorrow.’
Melody can picture the headlines. They’ll say it’s exactly seven months since he was released, which isn’t true. A glance at the kitchen clock tells her it is seven months, two days and three hours since he walked out of prison a free man. Justice: what did that even mean anyway? The upholding of what is just, that’s what the dictionary would tell you, but in reality it was nothing of the sort. He was found guilty of grievous bodily harm with intent, which made it sound like a scuffle outside a pub at closing time. He got nine years. Which didn’t mean nine years at all. More like five and a half for good behaviour. Justice, they say.
It is seven months, two days and three hours since he was handed back his clothes and belongings and the doors were unlocked and he stepped out to walk under the same sky that sat over her house. Back to his Shepherd’s Bush flat to play his music so loudly the bass seeped through the walls.
Her one-time friend and next-door neighbour David Alden. The man who tried to kill her.
Polly is still there when Sam returns. ‘I’m home,’ he breezes as he dumps his bag in the hall. He bursts into the kitchen. It’s the smell that probably tells him something is wrong, she thinks. No dinner cooking, just a selection of treats almost untouched. He looks at Polly. He doesn’t recognise her, Melody can see that. In Sam’s world everything is still running on track. The job of derailing it falls to her.
‘You remember Polly, don’t you?’ She sees his eyes narrow, as if trying to zoom in on her face without the disguise of her new haircut and colour.
‘Polly.’ He extends his hand in a jaunty social way. He hasn’t made the connection, Melody thinks.
‘Polly was our family liaison officer, Sam.’ She says his name slowly, with emphasis, and fixes him with a stare. This is not a social visit.
It happens, finally, the slackening of his jaw, the smile falling from his face. He comes over to Melody and puts his arm around her as if to protect her from whatever information Polly is about to impart. Too late. Three hours too late.
Then he turns to Polly and she begins the story all over again.
When she’s gone they say nothing, not at first. He holds her to his chest, a bear hug that is almost too tight. She likes this, the feeling of safety, the feeling that no one else can get to her when he’s holding her this close. This morning’s deodorant has lingered on his shirt, mixed with the smell of the hospital, reheated food: mass-produced cottage pie, she thinks, cake and lumpy custard.
She stays there until the need for air forces her to pull away. He strokes her hair, kisses the top of her head.
‘You should have called me,’ he says.
‘He’s in custody, they’re questioning him already. There’s nothing you can do.’
‘I could have been here for you.’
He towers over her, six foot three of him, her head level with his chest, face pressed into it. She looks up and sees his eyes worrying, the light leaving them the way it does when he’s troubled.
‘It’s probably a mistake. Why would he …’ Sam pauses, as if trying to work it out himself.
Something snaps inside her, a rage she wasn’t aware of until the moment it bursts to the surface. ‘For fuck’s sake stop pretending.’ She surprises herself with the swearing. There was a time when she swore a lot, once giving her mother a lecture on the versatility of fucking as an adjective. But it’s not the kind of language she resorts to now.
Maybe it should be. His eyes are wide, locked on to her. He’s ready to listen.
‘All right, Mel, I was just trying to say that it’s early days. Even the police won’t know exactly what has happened. It could all go away.’
‘It’s never gone away, Sam.’ He holds her at arm’s length and stares at her the way he sometimes does. As if the person before him has all the right features but somehow they don’t quite add up to the Mel he knows.
‘I’ll make us some dinner,’ he says. ‘What do you fancy? I could do noodles, chicken katsu.’
‘One thing Polly forgot to tell you.’
‘Yes?’
‘They found a chain in her hand.’ No one has shown it to Melody but she knows what it will look like, she knows every detail of it.
She sees his stomach expand, air sighing out.
‘This time,’ he says, ‘I hope they throw away the key.’
They eat at the table. This is a rare occurrence, saved for visiting guests and family. When it’s just the two of them, they have their supper in front of the TV, watching whatever is on, usually a property or cookery show, although the latter makes her feel like she does in a restaurant when she spies what someone else has ordered. I’d rather be eating that than this. Sam always has his phone by his side, flicking through emails or Twitter. Eat, flick, eat, flick. He’s never told her what is so interesting that he can’t stop for ten minutes to eat dinner.
Maybe that’s why he sets the table, to give her his full attention. ‘Sorry it’s just chicken noodles, not katsu, we didn’t have any panko breadcrumbs.’ She would have told him this if he’d asked. Her head is an interactive inventory, like one of those supermarket systems that tells them when they need to replenish. We are all out of panko breadcrumbs.
He dims the lights. He has a thing for lighting: uplighters, downlighters, mood lightning. When they were building the house, he enlisted the help of a light designer at considerable expense who told them there were layers of lighting – ambient, task and accent – and that no house was properly decorated without all three. They even have motion sensor lights in the skirting boards in the hallway. At night when she goes upstairs and the lights illuminate her path, she feels like she’s on a runway, except she never manages to take flight.
They start eating. Occasionally his phone, which he has placed on the table directly in front of him, announces the arrival of a new email with a ding. He’s itching to look, she can tell from the way his eyes dip down towards it every time he hears the noise. It must be taking all his willpower to stop him checking. Is she supposed to be grateful? Isn’t he missing the point? Spectacularly. If he’s not going to piss about on his phone for her sake then he surely should go the whole hog and actually speak to her.
She is overcome by the urge to talk. Not about the wedding or panko fucking breadcrumbs or his work itinerary for the week because she already knows it will involve a lot of hours and that it will probably run into the weekend when he does the lucrative private operations. Not about problems that need fixing around the house: a dripping tap; ‘Can you call the plumber?’ Those conversations just hang limp in the air between them, without the power to penetrate and engage. When Melody talks to Sam, to anyone, the words she really wants to say are sugared, couched in niceties or disguised as something else entirely. She’s drilled herself not to tell the truth, not to show her feelings, but all she’s got in return is this suffocating, oppressive loneliness that comes from being in the same room as someone but only orbiting them, never connecting.
This time it’s her phone that ring
s from the living room. She gets up to answer it, grateful for the intervention.
It’s Polly again. With news.
When Melody returns, she pushes the food around her plate. There is a light refracting on her fork; low-level ambient light falling on her noodles. When she prods them with her fork, they move like worms. And then there is the light that falls on Sam’s face, casting a half-shadow over it. She watches him chew slowly and methodically with his mouth closed as if he is trying to impress her with his impeccable manners.
‘That was Polly. They’ve identified the body.’
Chapter Eight
DI Rutter
Location: Richmond Police Station. Date Thursday 19 September 2013.
DI Rutter: Yesterday we identified the body of a woman found in Ham Common Woods next to Richmond Park on Sunday as Eve Elliot, a 30-year-old television producer from London. The investigation into her death is now a murder investigation. A post-mortem has been carried out and the pathologist has concluded that the cause of her death was compression to the neck, in other words strangulation.
As a result of the findings of the post-mortem we have established that her body would have lain at the site close to Richmond Park for almost a week. We are therefore keen to hear from anyone who saw any individuals acting suspiciously in the vicinity of the park, particularly around the Ham Gate entrance between 7 and 15 September, when Miss Elliot’s body was discovered by a member of the public walking his dog.
On Monday evening, a 37-year-old local man was arrested and brought in for questioning. He is still being questioned at a London police station.
I’m happy to take a few questions. If you can tell me your name and what organisation you work for. Yes, you, the man in the grey coat at the back.
Man in grey coat: Paul Tilsely, Evening Standard. Can you confirm the identity of the man who has been arrested?
DI Rutter: I’m unable to do that at present. The lady in the purple shirt in the second row.
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