‘If I’m honest,’ Clive continues, his brow furrowing, ‘I think I recognised something of David’s mother in Anna.’ His face hardens. ‘Which is what makes it all the more unbearable, what Anna did. It is why I find it so unforgivable.’
Harry
London, the day before Anna dies
Andrea.
Well, Harry had not been expecting that. He hardly flinches when Clive reveals that he has known about Harry for a long time, since Anna was spotted by Jorgos going into Clive’s office in Greece years earlier. But Andrea? They’ve been together more than a year. It is testimony to his own ego, he supposes, that he so readily believed a woman of her looks and status would come onto him just at the moment when he found himself so down on his luck, in need of the attention and the generosity of a woman like that. Perhaps he expected good fortune, perhaps he felt that he deserved it.
He has to hand it to her, not least for that performance the night they bumped into David and Anna at the charity event. To think, he had even lied to Anna later, suggesting that Andrea had been working for him when Anna probed about who the woman on his arm had been, after that surprise meeting. Even he could appreciate the delicious irony of that.
Had Andrea, under Clive’s instruction, planned for Harry to be there that night, for his and Anna’s paths to cross once more?
It is as if Clive has seen these questions circling in Harry’s mind as he peers triumphantly back at him, glee written across his face as he makes the big reveal: Andrea is a mole, he had paid her to infiltrate Harry’s life, to dig up whatever she could to hold over him. And it hadn’t taken her long.
‘That investigation that ended so badly for you,’ Clive says, sipping from his tumbler, taking his time as he replaces it on the table. ‘That was a strange thing, wasn’t it? The girl. Naomi, was that her name?’ He shakes his head and Harry feels himself tense.
‘Because that wasn’t the misdemeanour, was it? Or at least it wasn’t the one you knew about. Or perhaps you did. Perhaps you like them young – who can say and who am I to judge? But there was something else, something that should it have come out, would have been much harder to wriggle out of than screwing a fifteen-year-old.’
Clive looks up at him and smiles. ‘You know I really thought better of you. Until Andrea showed me the evidence, dug out of the bowels of your hard drive and confirmed when she spoke to those you had managed to bribe, I didn’t believe it. But when the truth is staring you in the face, sometimes it’s impossible to look away.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Harry says.
‘I think you do,’ Clive retorts. ‘I think you know exactly what I’m talking about. You bribed two of the charity’s employees, promising to keep their names out of the story in return for a substantial amount of cash. And as someone who understands the power of knowledge, I am going to make a deal with you. I won’t tell anyone – in fact, I won’t just keep my mouth shut but I’m prepared to cough up a decent amount of cash – half immediately, half in a couple of months to make sure you don’t leg it and draw any unnecessary attention to yourself – for your own good, really.’
‘And what do I need to do?’
Clive smiles regretfully. ‘I’m not sure you’re going to like it, but it’s for the best. For the both of us.’
Harry
London, the day Anna dies
It is dusk. The road is not yet dark but the early evening glow of the streetlamps casts pools of light, like fingerprints, along the pavement. Harry moves quickly, heartbeat rising as the house comes into view. The wisteria that had burst with new life just a few months earlier now clings to the brick like sinew, exposed beneath the skin of a corpse.
From his vantage point at the bottom of the tiled front steps, he notes through the panes of glass in the front door that inside the hallway is dark. Briefly he imagines movement in the kitchen, at the back of the house where a wall of glass overlooks the garden. He visualises the perfectly manicured lawn rolling down towards the Heath, bathed in moonlight, muted by the shadows of the trees.
The girls are not home yet, but they will be soon. There isn’t much time, but not much time is needed; what they are here for will not take long.
Hearing the faint sound of the doors closing behind him, Harry feels a brushing of rope against his arm as the figures from the car pass him on the steps and disappear into the shadows beside the entrance, just out of sight.
When their positions have been taken, Harry breathes in sharply, not allowing himself to pause. Stepping forward, he bends down and pushes open the letterbox with gloved hands.
His voice does not falter as he calls out.
‘Anna, it’s me. Open the door.’
As she does so, her expression churns, in just a split second, from confusion to anger to fear. ‘What are you doing here?’
And then her eyes widen further as she sees the men step out from behind him, the hand moving over her mouth before she can scream. Harry turns away, walking quickly down the steps, hearing nothing but the door close behind him.
It is almost a physical tearing sensation as a part of himself leaves his body forever.
There is no discernible noise other than the faint distant rumble of a train as he steps onto the street and turns right towards the Heath. Perhaps she had known it was coming, perhaps she doesn’t resist.
Reaching the entrance to the Heath at the top of Parliament Hill, Harry stumbles towards the nearest bush and vomits. Why hadn’t she just left, months ago, when he told her to? She nearly had – it had been so close. She had got as far as Greece before Clive and his men lured her back under the pretence of David’s death. At every stage, they had been one step ahead, waiting to make their final move.
He stands straight and reaches in his pocket for a cigarette, his gloved fingers trembling as he lights up. The colour is draining fast from the sky. Following his feet, he walks over the hill and pauses for a moment, drawing the fresh air deep into his lungs.
On the bench at the top of Kite Hill, he spots a young woman, her knees pulled up to her chest.
‘Can I nick a ciggy?’ she calls out.
The mundanity of her request catches him off-guard and he moves towards her, pausing briefly to pass her a cigarette before moving down the hill towards Highgate Road.
Around him, London is just as it was, the lights of the city starting to twinkle in the distance, couples walking arm-in-arm over the brow of the hill. But something inside him has shifted, and will likely never re-centre. As he reaches the tennis courts, his phone rings.
Clive’s voice is calm. There is no hint of celebration, or even relief, in his tone.
‘Is it done?’
‘It’s done,’ Harry says, treading the butt of his cigarette into the grass. ‘It’s over.’
Meg had called it, that evening all those years ago in the flat in Bethnal Green. You think you can do what you want and that there will be no consequences – you destroy everything that is good. She had seethed at him, the rage pulsating through every part of her being.
She had been alluding to Harry’s attempt to draw her into this world – there was no way she could have predicted anything more than that, back then – but perhaps she had seen in him a certain recklessness, the ability and ultimately the willingness to crush out a life.
It had happened slowly, discreetly, on the periphery of his vision while he had been busy looking elsewhere. And yet, he was not the only one who would have reason to pause at the sight of his own reflection. How easy it is to list one’s intentions in a series of neat bullet points, to quantify, out of any context, the risks and chances one is willing to take; the values and beliefs one holds dear. This is who I am and this is who I intend to be.
But life takes place between the lines. In that space between the definable, the pure, the sacrosanct, that is where reality emerges: chaos born out of clarity; a murky cloud made up of the everyday choices we all make, the mistakes we have no way yet of knowing
were mistakes – polluting the space between those absolute truths, the smell of the lead unnoticeable until it chokes us.
PART THREE
Madeleine
London, the inquest
Madeleine arrives last, standing at the back of the courtroom, near the exit. From here her eyes scan the backs of heads. It’s busier than it was yesterday on the press benches, the sharks swarming in preparation for the final day, due to begin any moment.
The coroner rustles papers at the front of the room, ahead of the first witness statement of the morning. Why is she taking so long? This is partly why Madeleine hates coming to court; the whole bloody thing is so protracted. She should have finished her second coffee after all, but she had been worried she would be late. Again, she had struggled to sleep, thoughts rattling through her mind.
Her eyes move to the clock at the front of the room. Ten o’clock.
Time takes on new form in this room, and new meaning. Time is all they have, the dead whose final moments are sieved through and assessed in small, digestible pieces. Time and the prospect of justice, or – as often as not – no justice at all. Either way, whatever decisions are made in this room are only ever made after the fact, and what use is that to the dead?
As she looks away, a head turns from the press benches, and Madeleine blinks as though her eyes might be deceiving her.
Harry doesn’t notice her and instinctively she feels herself lean back, out of view. What the hell is he doing here?
There is a rustling of papers as the coroner looks up and Madeleine’s attention is drawn back towards the front of the room. ‘The court will now hear from Sarah Marshall.’
The woman taking the stand is in her early forties. She is what might be described as frumpy, the very opposite of the image of Anna, the elusive socialite, depicted in the papers. But then friends don’t have to be alike, do they? Madeleine’s mind slides towards Gabriela. They’d had hardly anything in common, besides their jobs. But then look how that friendship had ended … She blinks, blotting out the image of the children. How could Gabriela have let it happen? How could she have drawn her family into something so devastating? She thinks, then, of Ivan, trying to imagine what he must be feeling in his jail cell, awaiting trial. Does he feel an inch of remorse for all of this? Something tells her he is not the sort of man who would accept blame for anything, even the loss of his own child, and her mother.
‘Mrs Marshall,’ the coroner says, as the woman facing the court finishes her oath. ‘Could you please explain how you knew Anna Witherall?’
‘Our daughters were friends from nursery. I, too, had lost my husband, a couple of years earlier. After Rose and Stella’s father passed, I offered to help occasionally. Anna …’ Sarah pushes a piece of hair away from her eyes. ‘She didn’t appear to have a huge number of friends …’
‘And please could you tell us what happened the night Anna died.’
Sarah stops and closes her eyes, taking a moment to collect herself.
‘Anna had something she needed to do in the day. I took the girls; it was only going to be for a couple of hours but when I spoke to her on the phone to check in on her, I offered to keep them a bit longer.’
‘Check in on her?’
Sarah pauses. ‘I mean, I just wanted to see if she was all right.’
The coroner waits encouragingly. ‘And how did she seem?’
‘She seemed … I don’t know, I mean her husband had recently died and she had two young children to look after alone. I would say she seemed distracted, tired, maybe in shock?’
‘And what happened next?’
‘I offered to look after the girls a little longer and bring them home around six.’ Her voice cracks.
‘It’s OK,’ the coroner says. ‘Take your time.’
‘We live just on the other side of Hampstead, but it was freezing so I decided to drive. I didn’t want to risk Rose and Stella catching a cold.’ Sarah swallows at the memory of the girls, looking down at her hands.
‘Please, take your time,’ the coroner says.
‘When we got to the house I left Mabel, my daughter, in the car. The lights were off, which I thought was a bit odd, I suppose.’
Sarah breathes deeply.
‘I don’t know how to explain it, but I felt something wasn’t right as we approached the house so I told the girls to get back in the car with Mabel. I can’t explain it. It was just a feeling. And then, I knocked on the door and there was no answer. When I tried Anna’s phone, I could hear it ringing inside so I looked through the letter box to see if there was a light on in the kitchen or …’
There is silence as Sarah stops, moving her hand to her mouth. Tears stream down her cheeks and the coroner says nothing, leaving the witness to gather herself.
‘I could see her, hanging from the stairs.’
She nods, as if confirming something to herself.
‘If I hadn’t offered to keep the girls later …’ Her voice cracks and there is a cry from the front row that Madeleine can’t place. ‘I called the ambulance, but I could already see that it was too late.’
* * *
Madeleine waits outside the courtroom for Harry at recess while they prepare for the coroner’s conclusion but he is nowhere to be found.
She hasn’t seen him since Gabriela. They had spoken briefly on the phone but they hadn’t met face-to-face: what would be the point? She knows exactly what happened to them, and she has told herself it is understandable that Harry would want to keep as much distance as possible from the case.
She tries his phone but it is off. As she slides the handset back into her bag she looks up and another face in the crowd catches her attention.
‘Isobel?’ The reporter looks up at Madeleine as she approaches, smiling in recognition.
‘Madeleine? Oh wow. How are you doing? I didn’t expect—’
Madeleine’s mind returns to the article she had read in the Camden News, before Sean mentioned the connection between Vasiliev and Witherall. A month of digging later, they were hardly any further than they had been, though that was hardly surprising with a case such as this – everywhere they turned, walls seemed to rise up in front of them, blocking any kind of meaningful progress. Even with the testimony of Popov’s maid, things weren’t exactly progressing. Still, the years of work on breaking the phone encryption was at last appearing fruitful and if they could pull that off, there would be hope …
It is unlikely that Isobel will hold any meaningful answers, but it’s worth a shot. From the little she knows of the young reporter, she is nothing if not tenacious.
‘Would you be free for a chat later?’ Madeleine asks.
‘I can’t today.’ Isobel takes a drag of her roll-up. ‘I’ll have to run straight off to file my copy as soon as the conclusion is announced, but I can manage tomorrow. This is my card …’
‘That’s fine,’ Madeleine replies. ‘Actually, I’ve got to look for someone quickly—’
She is interrupted by the sound of the coroner’s officer calling them inside.
‘Oh,’ Isobel says, grinding out her rollie with the sole of her Converse boot. ‘Sounds like we’re going back in.’
Artemis
London, the Nineties
It was one of those crisp mornings that London did so well, the sky beaming, the shoots in the trees signalling new possibility through every window in the house. But as Artemis stepped out of the front door she was stung by a bitter chill in the air.
Hearing the door click closed behind her, carried by a sudden gust of wind, she moved quickly down the steps. Without David, she felt naked. But now he was two and a half, he was potty-training and there was already plenty of opportunity for accidents without adding public toilets and a padded all-in-one to the mix. Besides, Clive could hardly complain about having his son there with him while she popped out to buy ingredients for a Rick Stein recipe the pair had selected for their monthly lunch with Jeff and May.
Still, he had complained.
He was so snappy at the moment, so distracted with work, that even when he was in London it was like he was in another world. She scolded herself as she walked along Queen’s Crescent. She should be grateful that he was working so hard to provide for his family, and she was, but she was allowed to be annoyed, too. Wasn’t she?
The fishmonger looked up as she stepped into the shop, the smell instantly transporting her back to the island. Briefly, she faltered, picturing the drop from the mountain to the sea, the sky stretched out like a blanket.
The fishmonger’s voice interrupted her thoughts and she was grateful for the distraction.
There was no point longing for something she couldn’t have. Besides, she didn’t want to go back there. Hadn’t she been desperate to get away?
She walked home quickly, met by David’s voice as soon as she let herself in the front door, watching him for a moment from the doorway of the living room, before stepping inside. He was using a collection of old toilet rolls sticky-taped together as an aeroplane, swooping it over his head with an extended hand. When she moved towards him, she saw that his trousers were sodden. As she approached, he started to cry.
Careful not to scold him – she knew more than anyone how easily accidents could happen – she stripped off the wet clothes, cursing Clive silently for having left him untended.
After just a moment’s comforting, David calmed and returned his attention to his toys. Not wanting to disturb his game, Artemis left him there for a moment while she went to find clean trousers. As she reached the top step of the first flight of stairs, she heard Clive’s voice from the study. He was strict about interruptions when he was on a call and even though she would have loved to throw open the door and reprimand him for working up here whilst David was left alone downstairs, something told her to remain quiet.
Slowing her movements, Artemis stepped carefully across the carpet, Clive’s voice growing clearer with every pace.
‘May, I’m not doing it,’ she heard him say. ‘I’ve told you. I’m not comfortable with any of this. I have a family to think of. You and I are not—’
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