“We were all close. After my mum died, I went to pieces. They looked after—”
“I saw them kissing. That first night. You’d gone to bed and they were beneath my window. In the moonlight. Her shivering in that ridiculous dress. They were arguing, but then they kissed and made up. I swear it.”
There were lambs in the field too. One of them was jumping for no reason, jumping and twirling its little tail. Em and Marcus.
Of course. Not possible. Of course. Pushed together. Marcus leaning on Em, confiding in her, despairing even. Em trying to comfort him—
“You really didn’t know?” Alice leaned back, not displeased by whatever my face revealed. “Well, I wouldn’t take it personally. People want variety, or the risk of getting caught, or just a bit of validation. So I don’t hate you, no more than I love David. There’d be something wrong with me if I did, after all these years.”
“Now you’re going to say I did you a favor.”
“Why not? It would be true. David and I weren’t together very long. It suited for a bit. Rob was always talking about him and he was charming. Nice-looking and charming, and just that little bit lost, and he listened—none of the men I knew ever actually listened to you—and he knew how to be entertaining. No, he wasn’t a bad man, but what else do you call someone who causes destruction wherever they go? That poor teacher at school. I doubt he ever taught again. And when you think about it, really think about it, what was he? Good with waiters. Charming to strangers. But it’s like a card trick. If you’re there watching all the time, in the end you’re going to see how it’s done. A man of no substance, my father would have said. Or did say in fact.
“I found all that charm a bore, and maybe that’s why he liked me, for a time. I was never enthralled. All that childishness you went in for, diamonds and hidden treasures and going on about how magical the manor was when it was a great, rotting, freezing money pit. Playing games then, and playing games now. I invited you down because Rob made me curious. How you’d changed. But I don’t see it. And it was all a cheat anyway.”
“What was a cheat?”
“That game. It was fixed.”
Alice reached out and took two more of the virtuous cakes from the rack. Without asking, she dropped one on my plate and ripped the paper casing from her own.
“I watched Em hide them. That morning, I snuck out of bed and watched her from the window, trailing about the grounds, leaving her footprints all over the place for us to follow. I wanted to win. I’m embarrassed to admit it now, rummaging around in all that snow like an idiot. Anyway, I was sure she’d hidden them somewhere out the front of the house; I couldn’t quite see where, not from where I was, but there was a difference in her step afterward; she wasn’t looking anymore for a spot to hide it, just leaving clues for us to follow. But you got to find them, you and David and not me, and it was funny, funny because I would swear she didn’t even stop at the temple, just swished straight through, kicked the snow about, and went on.”
The house was very quiet, not a ticking clock or a radio or a little dog for company.
“It bothered me, it did. When we were interviewed, I even wondered if I should tell the police about it. That there had been cheating in this silly game. Because someone must have moved them. And how was it you both suddenly knew they were in the statue? Ridiculous!” For all her accusations of childishness, Alice’s cheeks burned red.
“Maybe it wasn’t cheating. Maybe we found the real ones.” At that, Alice laughed in my face. It was all I could do to keep my voice steady. “Do you know where David is, Alice?”
“I wondered why he liked you. That first night Em was apologizing for how rude you were, poor Andy this, poor Andy that. But I could see you just didn’t care if you were liked. Maybe that was it. David was always so careful to not ruffle anyone’s feathers. Had to have people on his side.”
“I was used to it. My mother never liked me.”
“Were you nice to her?”
“No.”
Alice sighed, “At least you’ve tried to grow up, Andy. Or Andrea, I should say. Much better.”
I did not believe Alice knew anything that would help me find Peter; and even if she did, she would not tell me. With her, it did all seem ridiculous, and yes, childish. And yet what I said next surprised me.
“Perhaps childish is right. Perhaps you mean we believed in magic too long. I don’t know, Alice. My mother drank. She was odd and often angry. It was like living on the slopes of an active volcano. People who do are prone to religion, to wishing, to magical thinking. Sometimes I was not her daughter but the enemy. Later she brought home a man, a bad man, Alice. If I hadn’t believed in magic, I’d have died. Sometimes believing in magic is all children have.”
It’d been a long time since I had spoken on the subject of my mother or Joe to anyone. With friends, it never seemed the right time. With lovers it was even trickier. At the beginning of a relationship, when things were going well, there was the fear it would color how the person looked at you. At the end, it felt manipulative, a plea for exculpation, at worst an attempt to handcuff someone to you through pity.
Alice got up and took our plates to the dishwasher. I watched her steadily. When she turned, she acknowledged what I’d said with the smallest of nods. Her face betrayed neither sympathy nor disbelief, for which I felt a small, seeping gratitude.
Our eyes met and I realized Alice was wavering, was on the verge of telling me something.
“I lied to the police for David. I said he was with me from two a.m. After he was with you. But he wasn’t. I didn’t see him till breakfast. He had that criminal record, didn’t he? Not only the theft, but the assault would have been there, buried among the paperwork.”
“The assault?”
“The teacher. They called him Badger. David blacked his eyes. He had to go to the hospital. Or that’s what he said at first. Then he withdrew it and said David had stolen his jacket when he was out having supper. Then later he changed his story again. Unreliable. Rob and his friends were always doing impressions of him, a funny, pathetic little man. David once said, and he wasn’t joking, that he loved him. Badger, that is, loving David. And he ruined him, didn’t he? I’ve always thought what happened to your friend was an accident. I mean, David wasn’t dangerous. Not physically, not in that way. I don’t think so…” Alice’s brow furrowed. “But then I don’t know what he was like really. Did any of us? Still, I lied for him and I’m afraid I kept it hanging over him. After the way he’d treated me. But I got tired of it in the end, dragging him about. April was the end of it. I dumped him. He got the boot from his job for conspiring with one of the dealers to rig an auction. He didn’t want what he was supposed to want, what he said he wanted—to do well, move in the right circles, get on. Or he wanted something else more. What can you do with someone like that? If I were you, I’d forget all this. Peter will turn up again, or he won’t, but it won’t be your fault.” She looked at the clock. “Time to fetch Tim from school. Sorry I couldn’t help more.”
At the door, Alice turned to me. Her face was unreadable. “I have that bag too,” she said, and she reached out and gently touched the strap.
* * *
It was a while since I had been in the countryside. The wind blew the rain right into my face. I heard a car driving up behind me and slowing down. A small hole opened in my chest, but the moment of horror was quickly resolved when I turned to see the grinning cabby raise an acknowledging hand.
His wife was on the phone and he had her on speaker while we navigated the narrow lanes.
“I’ve got a customer with me, Davina. Say hello!”
An Indian takeaway was agreed upon. There was a debate over a chicken balti or a rogan josh.
“Two naans.”
“One naan, Alan. We’ll share it.”
“But I never quite get half, do I, my darling?”
“That’s the price of love, babe.”
I wondered if Alan had ever had an affai
r with Davina’s best friend.
We ground to a halt. Ahead of us, the lane was flooded. We sat in the car looking at the water. Alan wanted my opinion if we should drive through it.
“Depends how deep it is,” I said.
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t be asking.”
“Is there a way round?”
“Yes, but it takes ages. Not that I’d charge you, mind.”
I pulled off my shoes and got out. The road was cold and wet. The puddle was twelve feet across, but at its deepest it was only up to my calves. I gave the cabby the thumbs-up and went and got back in.
From the glove box, he pulled out a tea towel and handed it to me in the back seat.
“There was me thinking you were a town mouse.”
And I wanted to do nothing more than to go home with them, with this nice man to his cheerful wife, to watch telly and eat a curry.
* * *
On the train, Hutchinson called. Floods were causing havoc everywhere. We had been late leaving and another service had been canceled, so the carriages were packed. Darkness was falling and the windows were occluded with steam. It was hard to tell how fast we were going. It could have been walking pace or a hundred miles an hour.
I struggled down the aisle and into an unoccupied space just in front of a toilet.
“What did you find out?”
“Well, his phone hasn’t been turned on for two weeks. But if he hasn’t been seen in nearly four that’s good news, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so.”
“But it was switched off before that too. Like he was switching it off for a few days and then turning it on for a few minutes at a time. He did that three times, before it went off completely.”
“Can you tell where he was?”
“London. Then the last time he made a call, just before it was switched off, he was out west, not far from Heathrow.”
“So maybe he’s abroad.”
“Could be.”
“Those last five calls, they were all to the same number. Shall I phone it? I can pretend to be a telemarketer if need be, just find out who they are for starters. If it’s his job, they might even be able to tell us where he is.”
I agreed, while trying to maneuver myself out of the way of a lady with a pram.
“Hang on a minute. There’s someone trying to get past.”
“You not at work then?”
“No, I—” The woman smiled apologetically at me. One of the handles was caught on my coat. “I’ve … I’ve been following my own leads. Speaking to old friends.”
“So we’re an investigative team, are we?” His voice was jovial. Hutchinson told me what else he’d achieved. Via Facebook he’d gotten hold of Karsten von Kloss and Anders. He was proud of himself, gabbling about the average person’s total lack of interest in his own privacy. “Fortunately for us! I messaged both of them, asking if I could give them a ring. Made myself out to be a concerned friend. That was right, wasn’t it?”
Before he rang off, he asked if he could bill me for two days’ work and assured me we’d speak again in the next day or so. He sounded pleased, excited even, and I felt an answering optimism all the way home.
I had lots to think about: whether my boyfriend had been cheating on me with my best friend. Whether Peter had, in fact, not been my friend at all. Forced to look at them, my own feelings were not unmixed. Peter had been my one constant, since I was very small, and yet that summer he was leaving me, eagerly, off to a life I wouldn’t have a part in. Peter had had the loving parents and the bright future, and in the beginning hadn’t that been part of David’s appeal? That Peter had wanted him?
Then there was the possibility—and perhaps this was the least strange thing I’d learned from Alice—that we had actually found Mortimer’s diamonds. But if so, why hadn’t Em said anything? It was unbelievable. And yet. I leaned against the window and closed my eyes. The truth will set you free.
What was it Hutchinson had said? A feeling, a certain feeling …
But Hutchinson didn’t get back to me, and when I called him there was no answer, and when I went to his office above the chicken shop, no one came to the bell, and the young men behind the deep-fat fryers said they hadn’t seen him, the man from upstairs, not for days.
* * *
Without Hutchinson, I was at a loss. I checked my credit card, but he hadn’t even billed it. Like Peter, he was gone, and I was torn between fear that something awful had happened to him and the conviction that he was an opportunist, a fraud, a failure who had never been any kind of real detective at all.
In the end, I phoned Patricia and told her it was time to report Peter missing to the police. It was what you were supposed to do, after all. After delivering the news, I hung up and watched two films in a row that left no discernible trace in my mind whatsoever. There were explosions. That’s literally all I can tell you. But films with explosions weren’t enough. On YouTube, I hunted for footage of molten lava, volcanic eruptions, showers of magma. From a drone, I looked down on Plosky Tolbachik in Russia, Marum Crater on the island of Vanuatu, on Nyiragongo Volcano, Congo. I saw uninhabitable landscapes of roiling fire, flowing lava rivers that destroyed everything in their path, and I couldn’t look away.
Back at work, as ever, there was much to be done, the never-diminishing list of tasks. But I couldn’t feel it anymore, the hounding urgency. It was like my job had gone the way of other games, crazes we had indulged in at school, like marbles or cat’s cradle, until the day we suddenly didn’t. I sat at my desk and did nothing. Sometimes I signed off without reading what I was signing off on. At night, I watched the volcanoes, waiting to see what would come next. Something was coming free, underneath the surface, somewhere under my skin, away, out of sight, because how else can you explain it? The quickness with which I responded to Alice’s email, the fact that within nine hours of receiving it, I was on a plane.
The email came at about eleven in the morning. It’d been two weeks since I’d seen her. I paused before opening it, wondering if Alice was perverse enough to send me a thank-you note. The message took less than twenty seconds to read. There was an attachment. Around me, my colleagues tapped at their keyboards with lowered eyes. The air-conditioning droned. My skin prickled all over, like I was being stung by a swarm of microscopic bees. I clicked, and the file opened to show a color scan of a cutting from a newspaper. The writing wasn’t in English—a Romance language. Spanish? No, Italian—but there was a picture, a photograph underneath the headline. It took a few seconds before I saw what Alice was getting at.
Standing to the right, only just in the frame, was David. His arms were folded, his head inclined to hear what the dark-haired man standing next to him was saying. At the photograph’s focal point was a painting, a grand Renaissance job showing something biblical in an ornate gold frame. There were a number of other people in the shot and if I hadn’t been looking, I wouldn’t have noticed David among them, although I might have taken note of the man he was in conversation with. Extreme wealth announces itself. Or maybe it was the incline of David’s head, the suggestion of deference before power.
David was not bald yet, despite Mrs. East’s prophesying. His hair was shorter and perhaps a little darker, and he was more solid. Unlike the dark-haired man, he was not wearing a blazer, only a light blue shirt. I looked at the photo for quite some time, carefully, as though memorizing it, as though it would vanish the second I looked away, and then at some point I went back and reread Alice’s email.
A friend had sent her the clipping. It was from a Florentine newspaper, from the previous summer, and, recognizing David, she had passed it on to Alice, who was now sharing it with me. The article, as far as she could translate it, was about an art fair, and the purchase of a recently rediscovered painting by a Russian oligarch via a local art and antiques dealership, Galleria Vittorio Buono. On balance, Alice thought I probably shouldn’t try and find David, because of sleeping dogs and all that, but of course it was up to me
. She signed off by saying that it had been interesting to see me and that she wished me well.
There was no subtext, no clue other than the unexpected gesture itself. It occurred to me that I had never known Alice, that I had constructed her, made her into what I wanted her to be. By the gesture, she had become someone else and escaped me entirely.
CHAPTER 17
APOCALYPSE IV
Hutchinson phoned just as we were being called to board the flight to Florence.
“Where’ve you been?”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It was my mother. She’s very old and I had to go to Bournemouth.” He said something about a care home, a broken hip, a missing power of attorney. His voice was breathless, as though he’d just run up a flight of stairs.
“Two weeks and you couldn’t leave a message?”
“I’m sorry.” A voice came over the PA system asking for priority boarders. “Where are you?”
“At Luton. I’m going to see someone. Listen, did you ever call that number? The one you said Peter phoned a bunch of times before he stopped using his mobile?” There was a moment’s silence in which I thought we’d been cut off. “Hello? Mr. Hutchinson? Are you still there?”
“Sorry. No. I mean, yes, I called it, but nothing doing. A dead end. Who are you going to see? Is it about Peter?”
I was nearing the front of the queue. “I have to go.”
“Where are you going? Please—”
But the lady in the uniform wanted to see my boarding card and passport, so I said I’d call him when I was back and cut him off.
It was the last flight of the day. The earth dropped away and with it came a feeling of unrealness, of unreality. We flew into evening and evening embraced us, the light fading gently, the clouds flowing over the wings like a movie signal for a dream sequence. I turned the little reading light on while around me my fellow passengers napped or read or fingered coins in anticipation of the snack trolley.
Before the Ruins Page 19
