‘What if we could persuade Seed to go and see Smith in prison?’ said Kombothekra.
‘Absolutely not.’ Simon turned to Charlie, sure of her support until he saw her face. ‘Don’t tell me you think it’s a good idea?’ he said. ‘After what that evil bastard put him through, we’re going to persuade him to pop in for a chat?’
‘It might be good for Aidan to see Smith face to face,’ said Charlie. ‘To tell him the truth and ask him to tell the truth. Look where lies and avoidance have got him. Ruth Bussey’s certainly in favour of having everything out in the open—he might listen to her, even if he’s reluctant at first. Why don’t we explain the problem to Aidan instead of trying to protect him as if he’s a kid?’
‘And if he can’t talk Smith into telling the truth? Then he feels like a failure on top of everything else he’s had to go through, and it’s our fault.’
‘I think it’s a reasonable idea,’ said Proust. He’d avoided the word ‘good’, reluctant to pollute Kombothekra’s mind with praise. ‘Don’t worry, Waterhouse. It won’t be down to you to do the persuading. I think Sergeant Zailer might manage that without your clodhopping assistance.’
‘I don’t work for you any more, sir. I work for—’
‘No,’ said Simon. ‘If it’s got to be done, I’ll do it. I know I’m not . . .’ He paused.
‘The list is endless, isn’t it?’ said Proust. ‘The list of what you’re not. Top of it is this: you’re not going to be concerning yourself with Aidan Seed from hereon in.’ Proust opened his desk drawer, pulled out what looked like a large book. Except it wasn’t. It was . . . oh, shit, it couldn’t be . . .
‘Yes, Waterhouse. Brand new, with shiny cover and unbroken spine. The Automobile Association’s latest road atlas of Great Britain. I bought it with a ten-pound note I found in the bin by the photocopier shortly after our last tête-à-tête.’
‘Sir, you can’t . . .’
‘There are two categories of people in this world, Waterhouse: those who admit to the mistakes they’ve made and attempt to compensate, and those who correct them retrospectively in their own minds by pretending they never happened. If something succeeds, they were behind it all the time. If it fails, they never supported it in the first place.’ Proust leaned back and folded his arms across his belly. ‘I like to think I belong in the first category. If I get something wrong, I put my name to it and do my best to atone for my mistake.’
Simon, Charlie and Sam Kombothekra stared at him, dumbfounded.
‘On this occasion, I’m pleased to say I couldn’t have behaved better and therefore have nothing to atone for,’ the Snowman went on. ‘Whatever our colleagues in London had to say about you, Waterhouse, I stuck resolutely to the view that you were reliable and would be proved to be so. While others doubted, I always knew you’d be back here where you belong. How would it have looked if you’d returned to discover that I’d reassigned Mrs Beddoes and her multifarious misdemeanours to Sellers or Gibbs? I did no such thing. I fought off many attempts, on the part of colleagues who shall remain nameless . . .’—Proust scowled at Kombothekra—‘. . . to purloin work that was rightfully yours. You all know I have my faults, but I’m happy to say disloyalty isn’t among them.’
He held out the road atlas for Simon to take. ‘Happy travels, Waterhouse. May the prevailing winds be with you.’
29
Tuesday 1 April 2008
‘Do you think he’s all right in there?’ I ask Saul for about the twentieth time. We’re in Sam Kombothekra’s car in the car park at Long Leighton prison, waiting for Aidan, Charlie and Sam to come out.
‘I think he’s more than all right,’ Saul says, as he has twenty times already. ‘What about you? Can you face what might happen? ’
‘If Aidan can, I can.’ Yesterday I donated my entire collection of self-help books to Word on the Street, where I’d bought most of them. This morning I took down my Charlie Zailer wall. None of that was real. The progress Aidan and I have made since that night at Garstead Cottage—that’s real. Substantial.
Saul pats my hand. ‘I’m going to tell you something Aidan made me promise not to,’ he says.
‘What?’ My heart dips. ‘We agreed no more secrets. When did he . . .?’
‘He’s going to ask you to marry him. Later today, whatever happens in there. He’s got an engagement ring in his pocket. What will you say?’
I feel faint with relief. ‘Yes. Obviously.’
‘Good. I knew that would be your answer.’
‘Then why tell me and spoil the surprise?’
‘There have been enough surprises already,’ said Saul. ‘With any luck, there won’t be any more for a good long while.’
I open the car door, seeing Charlie walking towards us across the car park. Something’s not right. She’s looking purposeful, walking too quickly. ‘I need you both to come inside,’ she says.
‘I don’t want to see him,’ I tell her, panicking. ‘Aidan doesn’t want me to . . .’
‘You won’t see Len Smith. You’ll be nowhere near him.’
‘Is Aidan all right?’
‘He’s doing fine. He’s doing brilliantly.’
‘Then what . . .?’
‘It’s better if I show you. I’m assuming neither of you’s got your passport or driving licence with you.’
‘No.’
Saul shakes his head.
‘Then leave everything in the car—wallets, bags, the lot.’
‘But . . .’
‘Be quiet and listen. Until we get back here, your names are Tom Southwell and Jessica Whiteley. You’re both here for a job interview—English teacher, education department. You handed over your passports this morning—they’ve got them—and you’ve just nipped out for lunch. Right?’
I’m about to tell her I can’t do it when I hear Saul say, ‘Right.’ I make a face at him behind Charlie’s back, but he doesn’t notice. He’s busy mouthing, ‘Tom Southwell’ to himself.
When we reach the glass-sided hut that’s set into the high wire-mesh fence, Charlie says her name with confidence, for our benefit as well as that of the uniformed guard inside. ‘You’ve got my ID already. There I am.’ She points to her name on his list. ‘Oh, it wasn’t you before, was it? Sorry.’
‘No probs.’
‘Same with us,’ says Saul easily. ‘Tom Southwell and Jessica Whiteley.’
‘In you come,’ says the guard. He has to unlock three gates for us. Charlie tells him we know where we’re going and he leaves us to it.
‘Where are we going?’ I ask.
‘Patience, Ruth,’ says Saul. I give him a look. He’s the one who’s supposed to dislike surprises; he’s all talk.
‘To the education department,’ says Charlie.
‘I don’t want to teach English in a prison,’ I tell her. ‘What’s going on?’
Eventually, we come to a wide corridor with green-painted walls. I think of the last time I followed Charlie down. It feels like a lifetime ago. Like that one, this one has pictures on the walls, the prisoners’ artwork, some of it excellent. Charlie stops in front of a picture, and when I look at it, my heart surges up to fill my throat.
‘Her,’ I say, feeling the same horror I’d feel if she were to materialise in front of me, back from the dead. I’d recognise her style anywhere. I recognise the picture, too, from Aidan’s description.
‘We were right,’ says Charlie. ‘I’m sorry. I know it’s a shock, but you had to see it. I couldn’t not show it to you. We were right, and my boss was wrong. Ex-boss,’ she corrects herself.
‘The Murder of Mary Trelease,’ I say. ‘So she did do a copy. But . . . how did it get to be . . .?’
‘She visited Smith in prison,’ says Charlie. ‘It occurred to me on the way here that she might have. Why wouldn’t she? She wanted to get close to Aidan in any way she could, as long as it wasn’t too risky. She knew Aidan didn’t see Smith or have any contact with him. She couldn’t resist.’
‘You
mean . . . you asked Len Smith . . .?’
Charlie shakes her head. ‘Sam and Aidan are with him. I haven’t seen him. No, I asked one of the wardens if I could see a list of Smith’s visitors. There was a Martha Heathcote on the list. Heathcote was her house at Villiers. I checked. The warden I asked was very helpful. He remembered Smith being extremely distressed after the visit. It’s the only visit he’s had since he’s been here—everyone thought he’d be delighted but he wasn’t. The opposite. Ms Heathcote brought him two presents, both of which he wanted nothing to do with. He told the prison staff to burn them. One was this picture. The other was a book.’
‘Ice on the Sun,’ I murmur.
‘Yes. Which is now in the prison library,’ says Charlie. ‘Resources are finite, here like everywhere else. They weren’t about to throw away a book that could go in the prison library or a painting they could stick on the wall.’
‘It’s not signed,’ I say, staring at the picture. Aidan has described it to me, but seeing it—or rather, seeing Martha’s replica—is something altogether different. The painting is of a bedroom at night. The room’s dark, but some light’s coming in through the curtains. It looks as if it might be the early hours of the morning. There are three people in the bed: an older man, asleep, wearing a sweat-stained vest, turned on his side, a yellowing pillow beneath his head, a dribble stain by his mouth. Then there’s a naked woman in the middle of the bed. Her eyes are wide open and there are faint bruises on her neck. I’m not sure anyone would say with certainty that she was dead unless they knew. On her other side, there’s a young man, or an old boy, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, sitting up, hugging his knees and crying, looking at the person looking at the picture. Aidan. She’s captured him perfectly: how he must have looked, how he must have felt.
‘He needs to see this,’ I say. ‘Can he use it to prove what happened if . . . if his stepfather won’t . . .’
Charlie’s shaking her head. ‘He won’t need to, though. Smith will do what Aidan wants him to do. It’ll be okay, you’ll see.’
‘It will,’ Saul echoes, squeezing my arm.
‘Even if she’d put the right title on it . . .’ says Charlie.
‘What do you mean, the right title?’ I look carefully, but can’t see a title anywhere. There’s no writing at all on the picture.
‘I thought she’d have called it The Murder of Mary Trelease,’ says Charlie. ‘I can’t understand why she didn’t. It’s as if she hasn’t quite got the courage of her convictions.’
‘What did she call it?’ asks Saul, leaning in close to the wall to look at the back of the picture. Of course: that’s where the title would be, if it were anywhere.
Carefully, with both hands, Charlie lifts the painting off the wall and turns it round so that Saul and I can read the label on the back. Tears spring to my eyes as I read Mary’s handwritten words, words that make no sense to Charlie or to Saul, and won’t to Aidan either.
Words that make sense only to me. Four, in total.
The Other Half Lives.
Acknowledgements
During the writing of this book, I received a lot of help and inspiration from the following people: Lisanne Radice, Jenny Hewson, Anneberth Lux, Mark and Cal Pannone, Guy Mart-land, Tom Palmer, James Nash, Steve Mosby, Wendy Wootton, Dan Jones, Jenny, Adèle and Norman Geras, Susan Richardson, Suzie Crookes, Aimee Jacques, Katie Hill, Dominic Gregory and Rosanna Keefe, Nicky Holdsworth, Vikki Massarano, Chris Tulley, David Welsh, Anthony, Susan and Ben Rae, Jo Colley, Rebecca Hossack, Ana Finel Honigman, Fiona Harrold, Jill Birch, Christine Parsons, Morgan White, John Silver, Nicholas Van Der Vliet, Alison Steven, Nat Jansz, Anne Grey, Debra Craine, Adrian Searle, Neil Winn, Tony Weir, Swithun Cooper, Paula Cuddy, Hannah Pescod, Will Peterson.
I am particularly grateful to my superb agent Peter Straus, and my fantastic and lovely publishers, Hodder and Stoughton, especially Carolyn Mays, Kate Howard and Karen Geary, without whose expertise and support I hope never to find myself, and Alasdair Oliver whose jacket designs are to my books what Gok Wan is to frumpy women.
Finally, I’d like to thank all the readers who have written to me—your letters, more than any other inducement, keep me motivated to write the next book.
The ‘Future Famous Five’ article took its inspiration from a real newspaper feature with the same title written by Imogen Edwards-Jones and published in The Times in 1999.
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The Dead Lie Down: A Novel Page 49