The Life I Left Behind

by Colette McBeth

  Melody tries to pinpoint the moment when their friendship disintegrated. It’s not the first time she has tried. The conclusion she reaches is always the same. There wasn’t a single, definable point in time when the fissure occurred, more a gradual separation that happened over months, almost imperceptible at first. The space between visits and phone calls grew longer with each week until there was no contact at all, only space between them.

  There was so much she wanted to say to Honor, to ask her. And yet she never found the courage. Was it too late now?

  She places her coat on the bed next to her, feels in her pocket for the hard edges of the card and pulls it out.

  Nathaniel Jenkins. 07954 735123

  What did Eve discover? Did she find the answers to the questions Melody hasn’t asked?

  Will Nathaniel be able to tell her anything?

  Curiosity burns through her. Her mind fills with thoughts and questions of her own. She doesn’t want to sleep tonight for fear that her dreams will erase them and come morning everything will be blank again.

  Much later, when Sam comes to bed, she listens to him stretching. You’re about to go to sleep, not run a ten-fucking-kilometre race, she thinks. She feels the covers being pulled back on his side, him slipping into bed, careful not to disturb her.

  Tomorrow, when she’s not talking to him, she’s going to talk to someone else.

  Chapter Fourteen

  DI Rutter

  EVERYONE HAS A computer; even her granny has one, and she’s ninety-four. She plays bingo on it, ‘only when it’s pouring down and I can’t make it to the Mecca,’ she claims. Victoria suspects it’s more of a habit than she cares to admit. And why not? If you get to that age, you can be excused a few vices.

  But Eve was thirty and there is no way she didn’t have a computer. They’ve found a warranty for a MacBook Air in a drawer in her flat, a spare charger too. But the actual laptop has not been located.

  Did she leave it at work? This is unlikely. She was a freelance producer who filled in on different programmes, rarely in the same place for more than a few days at a time.

  So far they know that Eve worked on a money show with the annoying guy who’s always telling everyone to switch their gas and broadband providers for a better deal (who has time for that, Victoria wonders), Watchdog, The One Show, and a few radio programmes. The point being you wouldn’t leave your laptop somewhere if you weren’t returning the next morning.

  If she doesn’t have the laptop, Victoria can’t read what Eve was working on for the last six months. And what she wants to know is whether Eve discovered something she wasn’t meant to.

  ‘Be careful you don’t get bogged down,’ DCI Stirling warned her yesterday when she mentioned it. ‘For all you know there might not be anything to read. Don’t get sidetracked.’ He shot her a look: trust me, I know best.

  Victoria has a lot of respect for Stirling, and not only because his clear-up rate is one of the best in the Met. He’s been a mentor to her, encouraged her to go for successive promotions. Who knows, without his support she could still be a detective constable trawling CCTV. Is it a blessing or a curse that her first big case as DI happens to be connected to one of his? Alden was Stirling’s first time round. A quick result, the kind that cemented his reputation. He expects no less from her. ‘This one’s hardly going to test you, is it, Rutter?’ he said when they brought Alden in for questioning. ‘Don’t cock it up,’ he joked.

  David Alden was the last known person to see Eve Elliot. He has no alibi for the night she disappeared. He has a conviction for an attack that is strikingly similar, almost identical, to this one. Eve’s fingerprints have been found in his flat. Then there’s the gold caged bird chain found in Melody Pieterson’s hand, placed in Eve Elliot’s hand too. It’s all pointing in one direction. Stirling hasn’t asked why Victoria hasn’t charged him yet, but she’s seen the question twitching on his lips a few times.

  So why hasn’t she charged him?

  She tells herself that none of Alden’s DNA was found on Eve’s body. No fibres matching her hair or clothing have been found in his car. There is another niggle too. More than a niggle. Why would you kill a woman who’s trying to clear your name?

  ‘She’d obviously come to the same conclusion as us,’ DCI Stirling said last night as she sat at her desk. Victoria wasn’t aware she had actually voiced her thoughts. It was eight o’clock in the evening. Did the man not have a home to go to? He was two months away from retirement. How was he going to fill his time? He was single, twice divorced. The flip side of his professional success. She thinks he might have children, a son at least. He used to keep a picture of a boy in an argyle sweater and a bowl cut on his desk, but she hasn’t seen it in years. She peered up from her desk, his bulky frame filling the doorway. ‘You should go home, Rutter, those kids of yours might want to see you now and again. You can’t get the time back, take it from me.’

  ‘But why would he kill her? Why repeat the crime when he was already free?’

  ‘Because he’s an evil bastard. Now go home. That’s an order.’

  That’s the other thing she has a problem with: black and white, good and evil. As far as she can tell, the boundaries are never that clearly defined.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Eve

  NAT HADN’T GONE to my mum’s house alone before. His body pushed against a force field that thrust him backwards. Every step hurt. The task of walking onwards required superhuman effort and he wasn’t up to it. He was halfway through the estate of 1960s detached houses and already spent, empty. The last time he was here we had remarked on the manicured lawns and hanging baskets and shiny cars on driveways.

  ‘The closest we’ll get to a garden is one of those herb pots that you sit on your windowsill,’ he’d said. No one built homes like this close to London any more. Just flats, blocks and blocks of apartment buildings. No one our age could afford a house, detached or otherwise. Not unless they were bankers or drug dealers. Neither profession had ever inspired us.

  ‘You might get lucky,’ I said. ‘Who knows, in ten years’ time you could have a balcony, with enough space for a deckchair to peer down at the roundabout below.’

  Nat hated the hanging baskets at number 32 today. He wanted to rip each brightly coloured pansy from the rockery at number 28. Smash up the Renault Megane in the driveway of 25. Eve should be here. It was wrong, all wrong. She should be here. He paused for a second, drowning in thought. What was he doing anyway? Would my mum really want to see him?

  I heard myself shouting at him. ‘She would want to see you, don’t you dare turn around.’ Couldn’t he remember me telling him how when my dad died, hardly any of my mum’s friends called around? ‘People are so worried of doing the wrong thing they don’t do anything at all,’ I’d said. ‘They don’t know what to say so they stay silent.’ For weeks the phone barely rang. We’d have killed for a distraction, any intrusion. We would have clung on to the person who was brave enough to ring the doorbell and not let them go. We were desperate for anyone or anything to stand between us and the total desolation of grief. Instead we got cottage pies and lasagnes steaming on the doorstep with polite notes: Thinking of you.

  When he started to move again, I wanted to dive down and kiss him. He approached my mum’s door with trepidation. He noticed its colour, light powder blue. I had chosen it a few months ago. Nat remembered the discussion vividly, in the back garden of my mum’s house. He had a beer in his hand. I had a glass of Pimm’s, sipping it as I pored over the colour charts.

  ‘You can’t have bottle-green gloss,’ I’d told my mum.

  ‘But it’s what we’ve always had.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘It’s not exactly current,’ I said, pointing her to Farrow and Ball’s Blue Grey.

  ‘I don’t need my front door to be current.’ She looked down at the chart, then up at Nat to exchange a conspiratorial smile. ‘I might have known you’d choose one of those colours too. You might be stupid enough
to pay those prices, but I’m not.’

  We came to a compromise over Dulux First Frost.

  Had he called me a colour fascist? He smiled when he thought of this. ‘You need to be careful, Eve, or you’ll turn into one of those people.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘One of those people we’ve always taken the piss out of.’ He laughed. I opened my fingers in a V and drew them down my face.

  He rang the doorbell expecting no one to answer, or for Steve to tell him my mum wasn’t up to visitors.

  It was my mum who came to the door.

  She stopped for a moment, gazed at his face as if she couldn’t quite remember who he was and why he might be there. Then a flare of recognition lit up her eyes.

  ‘Oh Nat,’ she said, coming out on to the path to embrace him. ‘Oh Nat …’ but she couldn’t say anything else. All the words were choked off in her throat.

  My mum loved Nat, right from the first time I introduced them. He’s gay, so he didn’t suffer any of the awkwardness a new boyfriend might have on meeting the parents. He just bowled in and won her over. He laughed at her jokes, and not politely, but raucously, like they were the funniest thing he had heard. I love my mum, but she’s no comic. Nat, though, always did have a strange sense of humour. On subsequent meetings he’d say, ‘Nice haircut, Mrs R,’ or, ‘New top? That colour suits you.’ For her part she was always trying to find him a girlfriend, in the same way she would try to convert vegetarians to meat: but you’ll eat a bit of chicken, won’t you?

  Now her small bony frame clung to him. He was the first of my friends she had seen in the flesh since she’d heard, and she held him with a desperation that broke me, as if the touch, the association, could itself bring me back.

  They were both crying, a cry that ran so deep it was barely audible. Thin, stretched noises carried on the air around them. Neither of them understood what had happened; the enormity of it toppled their minds. How could they make it real? In the right circumstances, at the right time, death could be a blessing, a release. But not like this. Not snatched and stolen. That sort of death leaves little parcels of guilt with your friends and family that oppress them and taunt them during the night when they hunt sleep. They should have, they could have, what did they miss? What could they have done? Why didn’t they see?

  They weighed me down too.

  If anyone should have seen it coming, it was me.

  You couldn’t have done anything, I wanted to scream.

  Nothing at all.

  After her initial reaction upon seeing Nat, my mum didn’t behave how you might have expected her to behave; you know, the way you see people in the immediate aftermath of death, staring out of the window, popping tranquillisers to dull the pain, wading through days unable to speak. Firstly, there was no way she was going to start popping pills to knock herself out. Why should she be spared the agony when her baby had been murdered? However much it hurt, she needed to feel. Secondly, as I mentioned before, my mum had turned talking into an art form. She drew on it heavily now for its defensive qualities.

  ‘They’ve arrested him. D’you know that, Nat? Did they tell you?’ She dipped her voice. ‘Paula in there has told me all about it.’ The Paula she was referring to was a family liaison officer, now hanging back in the kitchen talking to Steve. My mum leant in to take her mug of tea from the coffee table then gave a small shake of her head. She had always loved tea, couldn’t get out of bed without two cups of it in the morning. Now that it was thrust upon her for want of anything better to do or say, its appeal had gone.

  I watched the pair of them sitting in a room that was achingly familiar. I knew if you moved the leather armchair just an inch you’d see a stain where I’d spilt red wine last Christmas. ‘You are drunk, Eve!’ my mum had claimed. ‘S’Christmas,’ I’d replied with a smile and hugged her.

  The cushions were brown and cream geometric prints that I’d bought her last year when she had the house decorated. Now, every time she puffed and rearranged them – which she did regularly – she would be reminded of me. When she looked in her wardrobe to get dressed in the morning, she’d see the items I had picked out for her and she’d wonder, who the hell is going to steer me away from the comfy slacks now? Who was going to buy her cushions and laugh at her burnt roast dinners? From the most banal and mundane to the bigger picture – never seeing me again or hearing my laugh or holding me tight – every single part of her was saturated with loss.

  ‘She was helping him, Nat, this David character. Well I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, no doubt you’ll know more about it than I do. But tell me this, why would you do that to someone who was helping you?’

  Nat shook his head slowly, absorbing the information. He had suspected the police were interested in David Alden from the interview with DC Chiverton yesterday.

  ‘What was the last thing she said to you about the case, Nat?’

  ‘She thought she had got somewhere, with evidence; she thought she could prove he was innocent.’

  ‘Right.’ My mum looked wired, sleepless eyes glinting, clenching her jaw when she wasn’t talking. ‘And how often have you known Eve to be wrong? Hmmm? I mean, even when you thought she was out left field, it always worked out, didn’t it? She was a good judge of character. She’d been working on this for what … six months, seven months? And she gets to the point where she thinks there’s a breakthrough, and she’s killed by the man whose conviction she’s trying to overturn?

  ‘You know, when I first heard who it was they had arrested, well, if you had let him near me I would have torn him apart with my bare hands. But since it’s the only thing I can think of, I’ve been going over it, over and over. And I just can’t believe she got it so wrong. I won’t believe it. I want to know where all her information is, because she must have left something. And what if she was right and this man didn’t do it, what if he’s convicted again? You’re telling me Eve’s death will be for nothing?’

  I had taken a look at my mum and thought she was beaten. I’d seen a woman of sixty, five foot three inches (and a quarter) who hadn’t slept in days, red veins threading her eyes, a woman whose skin was papery, almost translucent. I had underestimated her. Stubborn? That was me. But if you wanted to know where I got it from, all you needed to do was look at my mum, feel the determination radiating from her. It rendered Nat speechless. He hadn’t expected this madness, the raw fury. She believed me and wouldn’t be persuaded otherwise until she saw some hard evidence.

  Until that moment I had always thought we were different. But the silk scarves, the court shoes, the domestic perfection had just disguised the truth. At our core my mum and I were the same.

  ‘And another thing,’ she leant in and dipped her voice, ‘they can’t find her computer, which is where I imagine she kept all the information. What if she’d discovered something that someone wanted to keep hidden? If the file is lost, it’s unlikely we’re going to find out.’

  Nat’s body straightened in the armchair. He had the sensation of waking from an extended sleep, disorientated, and unsure whether it was day or night. How could he have forgotten? Or not forgotten, just not made the connection? His brain must have gone into crisis mode allowing him only to deal with the information in front of him.

  He took a swig of his tea, pulled a face when he realised it was stone cold.

  ‘I have it,’ he said slowly. ‘She emailed it all to me as a backup.’

  My mum regarded him for a moment as if he wasn’t quite right in the head. ‘You have it? You have the file? When did she last send it to you?’

  ‘I’ll have to check. But it was recently, probably close to when …’

  ‘Well you had better tell them.’ She pointed in the direction of the kitchen before lowering her voice to a whisper. ‘But make sure you take a copy first, just in case.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Eve

  YOU KNOW THOSE people who are always losing things: keys, phones, a fob for the office, a boarding pas
s at the airport? That was me. I used to think how much easier life would be if I was more like my friend Kira, who was OCD when it came to organisation. Sometimes, as I was chucking my keys down on the nearest surface, I’d catch myself and say, what would Kira do? And then place them somewhere easily locatable like in the door. But invariably it didn’t last. So yes, I should have had a memory stick as a backup for the file, but honestly, I would have lost it within days.

  When Mark was around we had a cloud where we (or he) would store documents, but when Mark went the cloud went too. Or maybe it didn’t. Either way I had no knowledge of how to access it. The safest way for me was to email documents to myself and to someone else. Old-school, yes, but effective all the same.

  At first I did this sporadically, mainly when I remembered, which wasn’t all that often. It was during summer that I upped my game. When I got the distinct impression someone didn’t like what I was doing.

  One of the disadvantages of being prone to mislaying objects is that I can’t say definitively when it started. Sometimes a belt or a pair of jeans or an important letter would go missing for weeks and then turn up in the very place I had been searching. I do remember Glastonbury though, the last weekend of June, Kira’s farewell before she took off on a six-month trip to South East Asia (not the Middle East). It rained on the first night but the next morning, to everyone’s delight, blue sky appeared and a glorious three-day stretch of sunshine ensued. I remember gazing at the makeshift city (the size of Sunderland, apparently) spreading out as far as the eye could see, throbbing to the bass under a haze of heat. Food stalls, smells, cider in the sun, Mumford & Sons thunderous on the Pyramid stage closing it down. A long journey home, caked with mud and happiness. Opening the door to my flat, flinging my bags down, three things on my mind: tea, shower and sleep. I went into the kitchen on automatic, opened the cupboard to find a mug, but the mugs weren’t there. They were in the next cupboard along. Perhaps I had drunk too much cider over the weekend. I thought no more of it. Until I went to the cupboard to get a fresh towel for the shower. The towels were folded and neatly stacked, alternating white and grey (the only two colours I owned). Magda my cleaner must have been. But Magda came on a Tuesday and wasn’t the type of person to seek out extra work. She did her hours, minus fifteen minutes, had a cup of tea and a biscuit, took her money and left. No, this, I thought, had my mum’s hallmarks all over it. Anger surged inside me. How dare she come into my flat and rearrange my cupboards. Ok, so my standards might occasionally dip below her minimum levels, but this? I called her number.