The Light of Day

by Graham Swift

  Watching me slide.

  It’s nonsense of course. She can’t see me. Even Sarah can’t see me. Though that’s different: I try to lift Sarah from where she is, I try to be her eyes.

  But Rachel can’t watch me. Why should she? How do we choose? The truth is we meet, we part, we go our way. There aren’t any laws, there aren’t any rules. We’re not here to follow each other, to guard each other’s lives.

  14

  I turn into the cemetery. It’s past an Asda superstore. There’s a slip road, a roundabout, a gateway. Then, inside, you double back along a narrow straight avenue. A sign says 10 mph, as if you might speed. As if the contrast with the frantic A3 wasn’t obvious. Here everything is slow. Not to say still.

  Putney Vale. In this dazzling light the gravestones look like bits of confectionery, wedding cake. But there’s the black taste in my mouth. The grass glitters, cobwebbed with melting frost.

  I remember the way. Along the avenue; park near the crematorium, which is already doing brisk business. A cluster of mourners emerging, another party gathering, waiting in the car park, nodding to each other, looking at me as I pull in as if I might be one of them. The inevitable comment, among the few comments available: a beautiful day. A beautiful day for it. Cold but beautiful.

  The crematorium doing a roaring trade. But he didn’t want to be burnt. He’d specified, apparently. You wouldn’t think it: a man of science, a doctor. His little bit of superstition.

  I step out, take my coat and scarf and the roses from the back seat, lay the roses for a moment on the roof of the car. The emerging funeral party, spreading out, looks cautious and dazed, like a coach party on a mystery tour finally put down at its destination.

  I pick up the flowers and start to walk. It’s not far but it takes me, by paths lined with trees, to where I seem to be the only soul around. Living soul. The leaves on the trees are bright as paint. The frost-chewed flowers on the fresh graves look like leftover party decorations.

  It’s a plain grave: a polished granite slab. It still looks as if it was put there yesterday. The name, and the dates. You’d say to yourself: not a long life. There’s nothing to indicate it’s the grave of a murdered man.

  I step nearer, slowly—as if there’s some line, some edge. I want to feel at least calm, at least considerate, but I feel the hate rising up, the same sudden mad hate—maybe it’s even fiercer—that I felt a year ago.

  The grass where the frost has melted looks rinsed clean.

  I pause, step forward, take the flowers from their paper, crumple the paper into my pocket, then lay them quickly, no fuss. No gestures, no words (what should they be?) muttered under my breath. But I can’t just turn away. I have to stand and look for a while, my chest working up and down, though I’m only standing still.

  The second time.

  I came. I came again. I’m here, for her sake. I marked the day.

  I’m paying respects, if that’s the right phrase, when what I’m really doing is hating him, accusing him.

  Look what you’ve done, look what you’ve done to her. Look what you did—letting her go and do that to you.

  The sun’s shining down on me and I’m black with hate.

  Perhaps in eight years, nine years—or however long it takes—when she’s served her time, I’ll come here and I won’t feel it. I’ll come in peace—or I won’t come at all. I’ll have served my time.

  The bunch of roses lying there looks like some accident, some freak. I think of the girl in the florist’s. Her smile.

  “Think of all the reasons …”

  The son—Michael—arranged it all. Two years ago, or not quite. All the way from Seattle, on compassionate leave that lasted over three months. I don’t know how many times he saw Sarah. I know he did see her, and I think it was bad, I don’t think it was compassionate. And I know I was jealous, because Sarah, all that time, wasn’t seeing me, wasn’t sending me any word. Though who was I, after all? A detective, hired for the day. I wasn’t a son.

  I know he saw her lawyer. What does a lawyer say to a son in such circumstances? I know he took his dad’s side. Why shouldn’t he? Like Helen took mine.

  And of course he never saw me—though I tried. But who was I? His mother’s spy.

  Jealous of a son who went his own way in the end, back to Seattle, and hasn’t done what I’ve done, every fortnight, for over eighteen months. No more word from Michael. Just me.

  A second punishment, like a second death: you’re not my mother any more. She took it hard, I know, I can guess. If Helen had never—

  But could she blame him—she blame him? And how must it feel? Your father, your mother: to lose both. She should take it hard.

  Hard enough for him just to have been there—here, on this spot, two autumns ago—with his father’s relatives all around him, all in a state of shock. The body held in the morgue for nearly three weeks.

  Sarah wasn’t there, of course, wasn’t free.

  But I was here, right here. The mystery man who showed up from nowhere to watch things, then slipped away. To make his report.

  A day in December. Not like today. Moist and murky and mild. Wet clods of earth, trampled grass.

  I think of Rachel, as if her eyes are on my back.

  How can you hate the dead? Absurd. As absurd as supposing the dead can feel fire. But I do, I can, even after two years. Look what you’ve done to her, look where you’ve put her. I stand here and hate him, and never tell Sarah. Yes, I’ll take flowers. If he were alive I could kill him. Absurd, but I could. I’ll never tell Sarah that. I could kill him—but, now, I can’t.

  Yes, I went. I laid the flowers. A beautiful day, brilliant and clear. The rows of trees like flames.

  No, no message.

  And if he could speak he might even say, “No, you don’t hate me, do you? It’s not hate at all. It’s not hate you feel. You’re glad, aren’t you? I’ve done you a favour. You’re glad you’re where you are now, and you’re glad I’m here.”

  15

  How did it begin? And when? Even Sarah couldn’t answer that. Only that she knew it had—knew in the way that you first know things, in the nostrils, and then the signs come later, the clues, the traces, to confirm what your nose has already told you.

  For a little while she was like me, a detective, a private nose, on the scent, on the trail, but not wanting to be on it, not wanting to know what she knew.

  Then one day she gave him a look—gave Bob a look—the kind of look, she said, she never thought she would or could ever give. And he cracked under it, crumbled, had no choice but to confess.

  And the strange thing was that he made it seem like he was the helpless victim now, he was the one to be pitied.

  An old dodge perhaps. But was there a period at least, an initial stage, when he’d felt himself slipping, sliding, and tried to resist? That sweet good period—autumn slipping into winter, three years ago—which, for all of them, seemed to be about something else. This new presence in the house, this new soft mood. The urge to protect. He should have been tougher perhaps, more callous—more clinical. Wasn’t he used to that? Pity and charity sliding, melting into something else.

  Or was it just a single moment? Maybe. One of those moments that turn everything upside down. No preliminary period of veering, and arguing with himself, no watching her every day like some substitute father but at the same time like a spy in the dark. A moment, an opportunity. They were alone together in the house. The dead of winter. Curtains drawn. They caught each other like startled animals. A door left open. A look that passed between them, a look that wasn’t so much like two looks colliding and instantly bouncing away, but like a single bolt sliding shut, a look as unmistakable as that look Sarah would give him just weeks later.

  “I just gave him a look, George …”

  She didn’t demonstrate, but I think I knew what it was like. Like that look she gave me on my first visits. A look like a knife. Don’t play with me, George. I don’t need your pity.
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  If life puts something in your way, what do you do? Deny it? Close your eyes, turn your back? Pretend you’ve walked through the wrong door. This wasn’t for me, it was for somebody else …

  Pity crashing into something else.

  And afterwards the possibility that it was all a “moment of madness”—that old get-out, that tired old formula—and they might carry on as if nothing had happened. As if it wouldn’t be for him (and for her) like some infection that was inside him now.

  And, anyway, by then, the scent was thickening in the air.

  The charitable case: for him, for Bob. It hit him from nowhere, like wildfire. And he hadn’t wanted to be burned.

  And Kristina? So poor and helpless. She was twenty-two. Life had plucked her up and thrown her back into temporary childhood—perhaps—or made her grow up quicker than most. Older than her years. And so: an older man. And, in any case, she’d bloomed. Plucked up and set down in the land of comfort and plenty. Wimbledon.

  Enough to make her burst, at first, into girl’s tears. In that kitchen. But what did she care now, when she’d lost so much? What did she owe the world? A stateless person, only half within the law.

  All those months, years—all the time—she must have thought it: I might have been there and not here. I might be dead too, worse than dead. I might have had to watch while they shot the others first, raped the others first, then shot them. She’d always know it. But here she was in a warm bed in Wimbledon. Lawns and trees. What were the rules now? The feeling of protection sliding, for her too, into something else.

  A rebound: you were robbed, now you take. And are the young so easily damaged anyway? So soft? Helen: she knew she was hurting me. You’re only young once and there’s a kind of savagery in it. That brother, the dead soldier, the handsome waiter. He’d been gunned down. But he’d fucked all those foreign girls, as many as he could, as if he knew he didn’t have long.

  “I asked her what she’d thought, George—of her brother just having his way like that, treating them like prey. You know what she said? She said it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like that at all. She said if he hadn’t been her brother she’d have joined the queue.”

  I still think of these things, still on the case. The job that never stops. It’s not enough sometimes just to watch and note. You have to put yourself into the picture, into their shoes.

  His shoes—the man lying under this slab, under a bunch of roses. I think of him falling through his life.

  How did it begin? How did it carry on—once Sarah knew and before there was, by tight-lipped agreement, that flat in Fulham? They—she—couldn’t just kick her out. She was an asylum seeker: she had their asylum. The rules of charity. But hadn’t they been smashed?

  A simple question. Where did they do it—Kristina and Bob? You have to ask it (Sarah must have asked it). You have to ask, in my job, these simple squalid mechanical things. And put yourself in the scene.

  Under their roof? Hardly—not any more. In his office? In his gynaecological consulting room. In Harley Street. In the Parkside Hospital. Signing on as some bogus private patient? The strictest privacy. It always teeters (I know, I’ve seen) into farce. A senior medical man with his trousers down.

  In the black Saab? Or, for God’s sake, wherever they could. On Wimbledon Common for God’s sake. Just up the hill. Handy. Just over the road from the Parkside. It’s big enough, you can get hidden enough. Enough thick trees. And even a relish in it, the danger of it—now their cover was blown anyway. An extra thrill. They might have fucked against a tree like people who own nothing. Part of her wants it, likes it like that, and he understands. (It also drives him crazy.)

  On Wimbledon Common. Why not? Things happen there, in broad daylight. People get mugged, raped, killed. Or pump themselves full of chemicals. These chunks of wilderness.

  Just a stone’s throw from his grave—just over there, beyond the cemetery fence. Wimbledon Common next to Putney Vale. He’s smiling at the thought now, at my thought, he’s reading my thoughts. Yes, just over there, like mad things. In the woods, in spring. Don’t give me flowers.

  I’m standing in a cemetery thinking of two people fucking. You have to picture the scene. Even when they had that flat in Fulham. Because of the mad thrill of it. Even that last autumn, after the picture had changed—after the Croats had won. A last walk in the woods.

  They shuffle through last year’s leaves. September: this year’s leaves still form a screen. He brushes bits of leaf, twig, bark from her back. A sort of ritual by now. She’s wearing that old outdoor jacket. It’s his. They’re still wet and bruised with each other. And she’s already aware how this may be a memory soon. An English wood. Bracken and brambles and silver birch. There was a reason once why she came to this country. But she’s still a student of English words—and he’s her teacher now.

  She scuffs at something at her feet and stoops and looks. The hair parts from her neck. She knows the word “mushroom” but she’s forgotten, if she ever learnt it, the other word. “Toadstool,” he says, and they both have to think about it while he explains a bit more.

  “Toadstool.” The mystery of words. Toadstool. Foxglove …

  But which ones are these? The safe ones or the poison ones? He’s not sure, he doesn’t know. And she pretends to pick some up and cram them into her mouth. Then steps back, clutching her stomach, rolling her eyes—pretends to be sick. A joke: she laughs, but sees the look in his face and stops. He thinks (maybe she reads his thought, maybe she has the same thought at exactly the same time): suppose she got pregnant. What then, what then?

  16

  Marsh said, “What was it to you?”

  But maybe he had the scent already in his nostrils too. Maybe I was giving it off in clouds, along with (I could see the phrase in his report) my “evident state of distress.”

  “… witness in evident state of distress …”

  An interview room. The smell of stale smoke. From down the corridor the muffled ring of a phone. How strange to be there, to be back.

  “It looks pretty odd, you see. Our officers are barely on the scene and then a third party, a member of the public, turns up, in an agitated state, demanding to be let through. And, what’s more, saying he has a right because he’s really one of us. Meaning, as it turns out: was, once.”

  A quick flinty stare.

  Sandy-haired, greying around the ears. Grey, watery eyes—with the hidden flint. Late forties. The type who can look harmless and mild and then come on strong. The type that’s well placed for being a detective because he doesn’t look like one. He might be a schoolteacher. And he must have done his homework. A bell ringing somewhere—or he’d have chased it up, as soon as he knew I was ex-CID.

  He leant back a little. A simple, tired expression. Had he finished with Sarah yet? He held his tie like a referee holds his whistle.

  “This must be the first time that two DIs have sat down on either side of this table.” The soft approach that can suddenly bite. “And the last—so far as I’m concerned. I’m being let out in four weeks. My time’s up.”

  So: this was his last case of any consequence. And only his because it looked wrapped up. Confession and arrest within minutes of the deed. Hardly four weeks’ work. But then—there was me.

  Your last case. How would it work? You’d want it to be no bother, you’d want an easy ride? Or you’d want to make a meal of it? Chew every detail.

  And he knew what my last case was. I could read it in his eyes.

  “But it seems”—a quick smile at his own joke—“you want to be let back in.”

  Had he finished with Sarah yet? What was it to him? She was just a case. And you don’t get involved.

  But his last case. He hadn’t had to tell me that. Maybe he was proud. His last case, and it was a murder. Going out with a bang.

  “You weren’t exactly ‘let out’ the first time, were you? You didn’t exactly just leave.”

  So there it was. Another flash of flint. He might
even be more interested in me (since Sarah was in the bag), in playing games with me. The way you needle a suspect (I remember) you already know is marked down. Your last case. Make a meal.

  Grey, weary eyes. Soft then sharp, then soft again. A touch of the headmaster, a touch of the dad. A family man. A wife and kids (I guessed right), the kids grown up now. He’d made it through—and so had they. They didn’t see him in police mode: leaning on a suspect, stepping round a corpse. He’d come home and somehow make the switch. Soon he’d be home for good.

  I might have been him (he might have been me). Two DIs. Except he had the seniority—by years of service—and I wasn’t even a real DI.

  Though he had to call me “sir,” technically speaking. But didn’t that much.

  And if I’d been him I’d have made DCI. He’d got where he was—which wasn’t so far—by graft and slog mostly. I could tell. He could tell I could tell. And if he’d made DCI he might have been talking to me differently, he might really have pulled rank. Instead of being so keen to let me know that in four weeks he’d have no rank at all.

  “Eighty-nine, wasn’t it?”

  This might have been me. Raking over old dirt and thinking of my retirement while some poor sad cow was in on a murder charge.

  He let it drop, for now: ammunition he could bring out later.

  “So—what was it to you?” he said.

  “Mrs. Nash was my client.”

  “But you’d done the job—more than done the job. The job was done when you watched Miss Lazic go through to Departures and you phoned Mrs. Nash to tell her.”

  “Lazitch,” I said. He kept saying it wrong.

  “Lazitch. That was all Mrs. Nash had asked you to do.”

  “What she actually said was ‘Watch them.’ ”