“What’s your guess?”
“Money seems to be what women usually want from me these days, but you don’t look very needy. All this time I’ve had it wrong. All these years, on the very rare occasions I’ve found myself at home during the day, and put the TV on and there was the usual trash on Jerry Springer or Jeremy Kyle, I found myself thinking of you and wishing you’d make an appearance.” Our drinks arrived and we paused to let the waiter put down two little white napkins and set the tumblers upon them.
“What would have been the show’s theme that day, do you think?”
“I’ll admit to a weakness for the paternity test ones. You know, is daddy Cousin Wayne or is it Uncle Kev? But you left all that behind, didn’t you?”
“You’ve googled me?”
“I have.” And he looked all fake bashful and fluttered his eyelashes. It was after six. Beyond the tall windows the day was giving up the ghost. A short time before I’d been in bed in a stained T-shirt with a multipack of Hula Hoops, but I’d scrubbed up for Rob, and now I was glad. Our armchairs were leather. Beneath a portrait of the Light Brigade, a cheery little fire burned. Rob was fatter now, and receding a touch, but otherwise little different. In return for my glance, Rob leaned in and gave me a very direct, very appraising look.
“It’s very good.” His eyes had come to rest on my face, like a surgeon admiring a particularly nice bit of work. “All utterly unexpected. If a little—”
“A little?
“Homogenous? Are you forty yet? Not quite. Well, it’s the new thirty, I hear. And fifty is the new twenty. And eighty is the new three, since you’re back wearing nappies being fed with a spoon. You know we sold the manor? It’s a care home now, a warehouse for the decrepit.”
“How are you, Rob?”
“Married. Divorced. Two children, a boy and a girl. Nearing the top of the queue for VP at work. Girlfriends, houses, cars, school fees, skiing holidays.”
“Well done, you.”
Rob curled his lip, upended his glass, and waved the empty at the waiter. I wondered how many he’d had before I arrived. “I’m so bored I could weep. And I don’t like weeping so sometimes I behave badly to be less bored.”
“Drink and women?”
“And rudeness. My ex-wife said it was the rudeness that was worst of all. That has to be a British thing, doesn’t it? A wife who will overlook you fucking her … well, no need to be specific, is there? But ultimately can’t bear the tone you take with waiters.”
“Poor old Rob.”
He closed his eyes. “Just don’t be boring. Please don’t be boring. I suppose you want to talk about David, or that friend of yours, that lovely girl who died.”
* * *
Rob held up the telephone box on the palm of his hand. His hands were surprisingly childish, soft-looking and small with pink, plump fingertips.
“And you found this in Peter’s flat? Perhaps he’s become an artist. It’s rather Banksian, isn’t it? I can see a whole series of them: a cricket bat with a dog turd on it, a giant dildo sculpted from Kendal Mint Cake, the corpse of a corgi wearing a diamond tiara. It’s too easy. Come on, you do one.”
“Last time I saw him, he said he’d seen David.”
“And this,” he indicated the box, “is relevant to Dave how?” Rob put the telephone box down on the table and wiped his hands on his napkin. I told him about the phone box outside my house, about the fire. How I was certain it was Peter who’d torched it.
“Because?”
“Because I had an affair with David that summer. Because he liked him.”
Rob raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure he’s not just in a dark room somewhere, ketamined to the eyeballs, having the jolly old chem-sex time of his life?”
I shook my head.
“I was at the same college as your friend Peter. I was a year ahead of him so we didn’t have tutorials together, never knew him well, but he stuck out. Odd, self-conscious, even the way he spoke, like it was still the 1920s. Always trying to insert himself, not a good drinker. Rumors about him wandering around talking to himself at night like a nutter. And then there was this one time when, well…”
My throat thickened. “What happened?”
“If he’d taken it in good spirit, it’d probably have been different for him.” Rob stood up and went to the long windows. Outside, Saint James Street was quiet, the day graying into evening. He tapped on the glass, and as if in response, the streetlights came on. Looking down at his hand, for a moment his face became foolish with delight.
“Did you see that?”
“I did.”
“Little victories.”
“What did you do to Peter? Bugger him? Made him lick your boots?”
Rob managed to look shocked for a moment. “It wasn’t me, Andy. I just happened to be there. He used to walk about nights, your friend Peter. Some of the lads bumped into him coming back from a few drinks. Chased him about a bit, had a go at stripping him off.”
Dimly, I recalled something similar happening in one of the books Peter had lent me as a teenager. A gay character turning the tables on a bunch of oafs, something about a fountain.
“They put him in the bins, Andy. Headfirst, I’m afraid. One of the big black ones on wheels at the back of the kitchen. He absolutely lost his shit. Shouting. Screaming that we didn’t know what he was capable of. Kept saying that. Then he started crying. Don’t look at me like that.”
“Do you know where David is? Where Peter might have seen him?”
“No, not a clue. Could be on the moon, for all I know. Takes me back, being invited to talk about the complex mystery of Dave to one of his admirers.”
A ruddy-faced man in a charcoal stripe swept into the room and came over to say hello. Rob introduced me as a great friend of his sister’s. When he finally pushed off, Rob turned back to me and said, “But of course, you’re going to stay and have dinner with me.” And then, “I’ll tell you everything.” He stopped. “Or will I? How about this? I will if you will. We can make a game of it.”
* * *
The game was we got a question each. Lying was cheating. Rob took my arm as we went into the dining room and tucked my chair in behind me. The menu was all Dover sole and Chateaubriand. We ordered, the wine came, and Rob hunched forward in his chair.
“You go first.”
“Why did you invite us that weekend?”
“Wasn’t the greatest idea, was it? Not since it ended with a dead girl in my garden and the house being crawled over by police. Let me see—” He closed his eyes, opened them, and shrugged. “Honestly, I suppose I thought your presence might prize my sister’s fingers loose from Dave. Call it a hunch. He’s always been suspiciously vague about his time on the run. And then, at the shoot, it was obvious there was something between you. He’d been funny about coming. Not my idea of an ideal brother-in-law. I thought I’d gotten rid after school, but no, a couple of years later he saunters in on my sister’s arm. Guess who it is?
“This was after all the business about him nicking the credit cards had died down. I think that’s how it started with Alice. Everyone was sick of him. I certainly was. He was on remand awaiting trial. No one else was going to step in, and he knew it—so he went to Alice. She’d have been what? Sixteen? But Alice knew a thing or two, even then, and she worked on my parents and some of the other students’ parents and a teacher here and there. You know, the right whisper in the right ear? Can’t see a promising young man go to prison for a foolish mistake. Golden boy had got himself off the hook again. I don’t know what happened to him after he was released. But I’m certain they were seeing one another on the quiet. When he reappeared, Alice said they’d just bumped into each other at Portobello Market. But they’d been biding their time. I’m sure of it.”
“You never liked him. Did you all bully him?”
Rob looked genuinely hurt. “He was my best friend! Yet in Italy, he dumped me and went off on his adventures without a word. Honestly, if you thin
k that, you never knew him at all. Far too cunning for that. Good at making friends. So amenable, so subtle. No deep, dark, painful secrets in David’s past, not one. Admittedly, not entirely easy being a scholarship boy, but hardly a Dickensian struggle. Nice parents by the look of it—saw them quite a few times. Mild mannered, mousey. They seemed to be a bit in awe of him. Like they’d have preferred something from Argos. And in the beginning never really standing out, just another little boy. But who gets to be nature-table monitor? Who gets whisked away to a private Serengeti hunting lodge at Easter with Rafe Fithern’s family?” He paused for a moment. “My turn to ask a question now.”
I waited expectantly. We were having salmon to start. Rob looked to the heavens, swallowed, and pointed at me with his knife.
“Tell me about your transformation. No, that’s not really a question, is it? Okay, tell me this. How does a hard-faced scrubber like yourself end up at Oliver March’s outfit? Last time we met, you weren’t exactly full of social graces.”
So I sketched out for him my career trajectory, skipping over the first few years, of course. When I finished, he smiled.
“Pulled yourself up by your bootstraps. Maggie would be proud.”
I shrugged. “Evening courses were next to free when I did them. Night school. All those people coming in after work to do A-Levels or bookkeeping or what they used to call computer programming. Doing Access courses so they could go to uni, which they could also do part-time, which was also free. But I was used to working—at school I had to keep up with Peter.”
“Funny, you liking him so much. I didn’t get the feeling he liked you a huge amount.”
“What do you mean?” A cold tingling in my flesh, almost like pins and needles. I could accept we had grown apart, even that I had alienated Peter. That we mistrusted, as well as loved, one another. But the thought of Peter not liking me was hard to bear. “Give me examples.”
Rob shrugged. “Just a feeling.”
For someone unwilling to talk about David, Rob didn’t need a huge amount of prompting. He was bitchy and unguarded. David the manipulator, David the professional mirror, so plausible, such a void.
“I know I say I’m bored, but I wasn’t then, not when we were at school. I truly wasn’t. Lessons were dull, but there were all those rules to be broken, and there was getting caught and getting away with it. Fun. And then the grown-up world looming on the horizon. Everything we weren’t allowed, soon to be ours. It was an optimistic feeling. Soon we would be given the keys to the city. Only when you get there? What’s inside? Girls, and he was good with them as well, of course. Nothing was ever enough for David. It all came too easy. Maybe that’s what attracted him to Alice. She wasn’t nice to anyone. I mean I love my sister. I really do. I didn’t want to see her hurt. But what do they say? High maintenance. Touchy. Having people treat her like she was thick because of the dyslexia, watching our father trample all over our mother her whole life. I think perhaps David liked that. I’ve no idea what she saw in him. Maybe she liked having rescued him.”
“What happened afterward, after that weekend?”
“After the police had finished with us? We went back to London. Hunkered down. Got on with it. I mean, we hadn’t known her well. Well, I suppose David had a bit. But I didn’t see that much of Alice and David. I hoped she’d straight-out chuck him, but they limped on for a bit. I think there was some trouble about the job at Christie’s. Left under a cloud, shall we say. I’m not sure of the details. I expect he was up to something shady. Alice chucked him, or he chucked Alice a few months later. It did occur to me that he might be with you.”
“No.”
“Not a dicky bird? I heard you, you know. The bodies in the library! I woke up and, of course it was dark and I was still pissed as a fart, head already thumping, longing for a glass of water and my bed, only there are these two people clearly banging the life out of one another. So I just lay there trying to work out who the hell it was. It didn’t sound like you. Although it didn’t sound much like him either. Very romantic, very touching. I must say it made me feel a bit lonely, and horny of course. Which is why, after you’d sloped off, I had the crazy idea of going off to find your friend Em. I had the notion that if I knocked on her door and told her, I don’t know, that I couldn’t sleep? That I was feeling a little sad? Well, I thought she might invite me in for a cuddle, or at least invite me in and let me lay out my sorrows, after which…”
“And did you?”
“I did, but as I told the police, she wasn’t there, or wasn’t answering. It wasn’t Rob’s night, I told myself. But then it wasn’t Em’s night either, was it? It sort of ruined things for everyone, didn’t it? Zack babbling about getting rid of his half a gram of coke before the police came, like that was the most important thing. He and Priss didn’t last. Alice was all right once she got clear. Sad little interlude, echoing down the years. Shame because it shouldn’t have ended like that. That game, the diamonds. Because it was beautiful, wasn’t it? I remember you running out over the ice and my heart just went with you. The wildest thing with your hair flying…”
For a moment Rob seemed lost in reverie. The waiter came and bore our plates away. After he was gone, Rob turned to me.
“I held her hand, you know, while we waited for the ambulance. And she was like a stopped clock. That laugh she had…” His eyes were wet, and he rubbed them with the back of a hand. “What really happened to her? To your friend Em?”
I realized it was the question I had been waiting for him to ask. Perhaps I had come here so Rob would ask precisely this question.
“She fell?” I said.
“Really, do you think so?”
“Why would anyone hurt her?”
“And yet, Peter goes missing and you’re here asking questions about something that happened nearly twenty years ago.”
“The telephone box. And he said he’d seen David.”
“Tenuous, Andy. Very tenuous. Have you ever thought it was you they were after?”
“She was wearing my coat.” I hadn’t expected to say the words. They just came out. It had always stayed with me, that Em had been wearing my coat, that and the sad little melody Peter had been playing on the piano.
“What about that Marcus of yours? You’d just cheated on him. Maybe I wasn’t the only one to hear you. You didn’t look that different, not from behind anyway.”
I shook my head. “Punch someone out in the pub, yes. Start a fight on a football pitch … but no. Marc, I pushed him at times. Four years we were together and if he was ever going to hit me, he’d have done it. I wanted to know if he could, to find out so I could feel safe, but no. Not once. He wanted to see himself as a white knight, a good guy. It was everything to him.”
“Or maybe Em and David had been at it all those years ago too, ever think of that? They might have had a bone to pick with one another. And your friend Peter didn’t have the best mental health, I would say.”
I stared down at my plate. Eventually Rob tried to lift the mood. “In all honesty, it probably was an accident, Andy. I’m sure Peter will turn up. You’ll see.”
I ate my way through a steak and a tarte au citron, putting my hand over my glass every time Rob tried to fill it with wine. I kept up the questions about David and in return he asked me inappropriate questions, to which I gave boring, bland answers because the truth was boring and bland.
“You got domesticated. Is it only outwardly? Secretly are you someone else?” When I looked at my watch for the third time, Rob put his hand on top of mine. “Not too late for us, Andy.”
With my other hand, I reached over and bent his finger back. But gently.
“Alice might know,” Rob said. “Alice acts like she knows something. But then she always does. I’ll have a word. If I ask her, she’ll meet you. She’s in the Cotswolds. You’ll probably have to go down.”
* * *
In the vestibule, I waited while my coat was brought.
“Would you like me to cal
l a cab?”
“I think I’ll walk.”
The cloakroom attendant looked dubious. “It’s still raining. Norfolk’s flooded, Chepstow too. Even worse on the Continent.” He was in his early sixties, with an honest, affable face. Glancing around to see that no one was in earshot, he leaned forward. “Tell you what, we’ve stacks of umbrellas, hundreds of the things. People leave them behind all the time. Just wander off home without them. Some have been here decades. I’ll fetch you one.”
He came back with a rather fine navy blue affair with a wooden handle.
“You know, you could sell them off on eBay.”
“I couldn’t do that,” he said, and blushed as though I’d suggested something indecent. It was a gift, I realized. He’d been inspired to give me a gift, and I regretted what I’d said.
After that, I felt obliged to walk a little. Instead of Green Park, I headed for the station at Saint James, which took me across the park where Peter and I had fallen out only a few weeks before. The rain pitter-pattered on the canopy above my head and as I crossed the Mall, passing cars splashed through puddles, sending up waves that spilled over onto the pavement.
The clouds were so low they seemed to touch the trees. Visibility was poor. I saw myself moving down the wet pathways as though through a stranger’s eyes, and I was a dark shape, an indistinct human figure hurrying along with an obscure purpose. I wondered what it was, beyond finding Peter, or finding out what had happened all those years ago. Didn’t we all have a purpose really, bundled up inside us like a secret?
I hadn’t lied to Rob, but I had not told him the whole truth, if there was such a thing. My progress had been less linear than I let on. London keeps no accounts. Two streets away from home, there’s a blank slate and you can start again. I imagine it’s harder now, but once it was the same with jobs. When I came to London, companies were computerizing their payroll systems. I knew the software from working for Darren. It was simple, but people were scared of it. The temp agencies I signed up to practically threw their arms around me. In those first years, I lost count of the desks I sat at, the rooms I stayed in.
Before the Ruins Page 17
