by Louise Voss
‘We’ve spoken to Mrs Allerton – Paula – and she’s sure her husband didn’t have any enemies. Although last week’s events might suggest otherwise. Do you know of anybody? Any sort of situation he might have tried to hide from her? An affair? Debts of some description?’
Meredith felt like she couldn’t breathe.
‘No,’ she said eventually, realising she was chewing her bottom lip. ‘Everyone liked Ralph. The only thing that he might have hidden from Paula, or downplayed, was his alcoholism. He was a functioning alcoholic, I guess. I feel bad that I didn’t talk to her about it before, because he admitted that he didn’t drink much at home. Only at work. Although it can’t have been anything to do with that, surely?’ She paused. ‘When do you think it happened?’
‘The pathologist will hopefully be able to give us a better indication of time of death. The post-mortem was conducted yesterday.’
‘Right,’ said Meredith, trying not to think of all the post-mortems she’d read about in crime novels; seeing in her mind’s eye the grim vision of the top of Ralph’s sawn-off skull, his organs bagged up to be weighed and put back, the tag on his toe…
‘We saw on the system that you’d recently had a suspected break-in at the shop. Our colleagues did take a look at the CCTV, but as you know, the main shop camera had been deactivated, and nothing suspicious showed up on any of the other nearby cameras, so that all seems to be a bit of a dead end. You don’t think there’s any sort of connection, do you?’
Apart from me, thought Meredith, her mind now swimming with images of dead rats, beheaded flowers, the splash of green paint…
Davis cleared his throat. ‘Do you mind me asking, Merr— … Meredith: what happened to your hand? That’s a nasty scar.’
Fucking hell. Meredith stuffed the offending hand further underneath a cushion, feeling two spots of colour flaring suddenly on her cheeks. How dare he ask her?
‘Yes, I do mind, as it happens. I don’t like to talk about it.’
Davis shifted from buttock to buttock, and Gemma’s eyes slid away, her expression unreadable.
20
Meredith
Paula turned up unannounced at Pete’s barge that afternoon. Meredith had been sitting in the sun on the roof, trying to read a battered paperback she’d selected from Pete’s bookshelf. It was Raymond Carver’s short stories; apart from the fact they were genius, she thought short stories might accommodate her current severely limited attention span, but she was still struggling to concentrate.
When she saw Paula swaying at the top of the steps to the pontoon, she leaped up. Paula looked as if she was about to topple head first down them. Meredith jumped off the boat, barefoot, and ran over to meet her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said as Meredith came up the steps, wincing as small stones pressed into her bare soles. Paula had put on make-up, but there was lipstick on her teeth and black blobs of eyeliner clogged the corners of her eyes, which were so red and puffy she looked as if she’d had an allergic reaction. ‘I had to get out. I remembered you said you were staying here this weekend. I hope you don’t mind. Will Pete? I can’t stand it at home. Ralph’s things are everywhere, and he’s not there. I feel like I don’t ever want to go back. I’m going to have to sell the house, aren’t I? I mean, how can I stay there now? Jackson doesn’t even live there anymore…’
Meredith took Paula by the hand, which felt dry and crepey in hers, and led her into the barge. ‘It’s fine. Of course Pete won’t mind. He’s at the workshop today anyway. Where’s Jackson now? He should be with you.’
‘He’s at his girlfriend’s in Guildford. He was so upset, I told him to go and spend some time with her. He can’t cope with me like this. And why should he? He’s twenty years old and he’s just lost his dad. But he’ll be back later, he said.’
Poor Jackson, thought Meredith as she steered Paula over to the sofa. The cushions still had two indentations from where the two cops had sat; DS Davis’s deeper than the one left by the woman with braces. Meredith couldn’t remember her name. She’d been so much nicer than DS Davis.
As she put the kettle on for Paula, Meredith thought about how creepy it was that Davis had fawned over her so much. It had been so awkward and inappropriate. He’d gone from a sneery sort of disdain to puppyish adoration that didn’t at all suit his sallow, stubbly face. If he hadn’t been a police officer and hadn’t spotted Pete’s bloody Cohen mug, she’d have lied and said she wasn’t Merry Heather at all. She was so far away now from that person, it was risible.
She wanted to forget that Merry Heather had ever existed.
‘Don’t you have any wine?’ Paula asked, appearing next to her and making her jump. ‘I’ve had so much tea my tonsils are floating. Everyone keeps offering me fucking tea, like it’s going to make everything all better. I don’t want tea. I want alcohol.’
‘OK. If you’re sure.’
Meredith had a sudden flashback to Ralph’s purpled tongue and lips, and unscrewed a bottle of white from the fridge instead of the already-opened Merlot on the galley counter.
‘Did you drive here?’
Paula’s lip trembled like a little girl’s. ‘No. Can’t drive. The police impounded the car for evidence. God knows why. So I walked. I needed some air.’
Meredith poured her a glass, having a Pavlovian reaction to the greedy glugging sound. Sod the tea. She took down a second glass and filled that too. ‘Let’s go and sit on the roof.’
They took their wine, and the bottle, and climbed up on the roof of the barge, where Pete kept two folding garden chairs. It was a beautiful day, not as hot as the previous week, thanks to the bright white clouds scudding intermittently across the sun and diluting its bite for a few minutes, before it pushed them aside again to make the river sparkle. The towpath opposite was busy with families out cycling or walking.
Meredith picked the open Chandler paperback off one of the chairs and gestured for Paula to sit down.
‘Look at them,’ Paula said in a choked voice, watching a little girl scooting along the towpath opposite, two thin pigtails flying straight out behind her, a fluffy sort of dog cavorting next to her, barking its head off, and the girl’s parents walking behind, hand in hand, in matching sunglasses, laughing. The dog’s barks carrying across the river made a metallic scraping sort of sound. ‘Not a fucking care in the world.’
‘You don’t know that,’ Meredith said, as sympathetically as she could. ‘They’re probably going through all sorts of shit too.’
‘Her husband hasn’t just turned up dead in a pond,’ Paula said, and began to cry.
Meredith didn’t know what to do. She felt suddenly overcome by a huge wave of exhaustion. Probably guilt-induced, because she didn’t want to have to cope with Paula and her emotions. She knew she owed it to her, sure, but at that moment she felt an overwhelming urge to unburden herself. She could almost visualise the look on Paula’s face as she, Meredith, told her that she and Ralph had shagged in the bog at work just minutes before his death, and that someone must have taken his body and dumped it in the pond. Surely anything would be better than this torturous limbo.
Of course, she said nothing, apart from clucking and cooing – things that had never come naturally to her. She topped up Paula’s wine, which was already getting warm.
Meredith saw Andrea emerge from her barge with a very large lady who’d just had a perm, or a set and blow-dry, or whatever she’d done that had given the lady the resultant helmet of tight curls. Andrea was escorting the matronly woman over the narrow wire-sided gangplank.
‘Goodbye Mrs Macaulay,’ chirped Andrea, waving the lady off. ‘See you in three weeks.’
She turned and climbed back aboard, catching sight of them on the roof.
‘Hello up there Meredith! Lovely day to catch some rays!’ But then she saw Paula sobbing, and grimaced. ‘Oh … Everything is OK?’
Meredith made a face back at her. ‘All fine! You remember my friend Paula?’
‘Yes.’ Andr
ea gazed at Paula with sympathy. ‘Your husband he is still missing?’
This prompted a fresh outbreak of sobs.
‘I’ll fill you in later, Andy,’ Meredith said, and Andrea nodded sombrely, disappearing back inside.
Meredith took a long swig of the wine and handed Paula a tissue she found in her skirt pocket. ‘I had the police here again this morning,’ she said. ‘What do you think of that DS Davis? I don’t like him.’
Paula shrugged. ‘Didn’t really notice,’ she said, her voice thick with tears.
‘The other one was much nicer – the girl with the braces. How old do you think she is?’ She was trying to keep Paula talking, take her mind off things.
She was rubbish at this, she thought, but then, what did you say to someone whose husband had just been murdered, and you were withholding what was probably crucial evidence?
‘Don’t know. She looks young. Late twenties maybe.’ Paula gave a long, hard sniff and wiped her finger underneath her eyes. ‘Too young. Everyone’s too young. But do you know what, Meredith? I don’t know how I’m ever going to carry on. I can’t even kill myself because of bloody Jackson. I’m trapped here, in this body, in this life, and I don’t want to be here without Ralph. I spent thirty years with that man, for all his faults, and I spent twenty with Jackson and now he’s at uni, he probably won’t ever live with me again. I’ve got nobody and I’m nothing without them.’
Meredith rushed over and put her arms around her. ‘Oh please don’t say that! You have your friends. You have me. Jackson will always need you, even if he’s not at home.’
Paula remained sitting bolt upright, not relaxing into the embrace, and Meredith felt awkward and devastated for her. This, she thought, was why she didn’t hug people, apart from Pete. And Ralph … And look where that had got them…
‘I don’t have you,’ Paula said. ‘You’re my friend, but you’re not going to be there in the middle of the night when I wake up and can’t get back to sleep, or when I’m sick and need someone to rub my back. Or to cuddle when I’m sad, or go on holiday with, or…’
‘I can do the last two,’ Meredith said miserably, not pointing out that Paula was sad and she was currently trying to cuddle her. ‘But I know what you mean. I don’t have anyone for those things either, if it’s any sort of consolation. Living on your own is fine once you get used to it. Really. It’s all in the mindset.’
Meredith saw Paula’s face and hastily backtracked. ‘Not that I’m saying grin and bear it, or be positive, or any of that shit. You need to give yourself time to mourn Ralph, but it will get better. It will…’
Paula gave her a perfunctory hug back, then pushed her away to drink more wine. Leaning forwards in her chair she stared at Meredith through her bloodshot and swollen eyes, her mouth in a tight, angry line. Meredith wondered if, subliminally, she knew that it was her she was quite right to be angry with.
‘Have you ever lost anybody you really, really loved, Meredith?’
Meredith gave it some serious thought. She’d loved her parents, especially her dad. She thought she’d loved the various partners she’d had over the years, although she’d barely given any of them a second thought once they’d broken up. ‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘Pete’s the only one who would break my heart.’
Then: a sudden memory of freckles like sunshine and red hair that smelled of wheat and lavender, a smile as wide as a country mile and a sexy midwestern accent…
‘Actually. There was someone once, when I was young. I was really in love with … her.’
It was the first time she had ever admitted to anybody other than Pete that she’d been in a gay relationship.
‘Her?’ Paula’s face relaxed a little, and Meredith thought, Well, at least that’s taken her mind off Ralph for a second or two.
‘Yeah. I was only about seventeen when we met – in fact, it was my seventeenth birthday. I met her the day I went to a Greenham Common protest and got arrested. We went out for a couple of years after that, but nobody really knew, apart from Pete, and he only found out near the end that we were anything more than friends. I moved to a squat in London to live with her.’
Paula’s eyes were like saucers. ‘Really? I didn’t know you were bisexual.’
Meredith shrugged. ‘I don’t know that I am – it was a lifetime ago. If she hadn’t come on to me in the first place it would never have occurred to me to want a relationship with her. She was just … very hard to say no to, and I was young and impressionable.’
‘What happened?’
She hesitated. Samantha had been locked in a small, dusty box in the recesses of her memory for decades now. ‘Nothing that dramatic … I haven’t thought about her in years.’
Paula nodded. ‘That was one of the things I loved about Ralph.’ Her eyes brimmed again. ‘He drank too much but apart from that he was so … dependable. He’d never have let me down or cheated on me. I always knew where I was with him. And now he’s not there, it feels like I’m losing my mind. I even thought there was someone in the bloody house yesterday, creeping around! I heard something, and the back door was open … I thought I was about to be murdered. Crazy, eh? If Ralph was still alive, he’d have gone to check and then given me a cuddle and told me I was safe with him.’
Tears dropped down her cheeks unchecked. Meredith thought again of the break-in in the shop, the beheaded flowers, her own sense of unease. Should she tell Paula to be careful? Maybe there had been someone in her house. But she couldn’t bear to risk upsetting her even more.
‘And there was definitely nobody there?’ she asked cautiously.
‘Of course not. Can I have some more wine?’
21
Meredith
Pete returned half an hour later, smelling of mastic and sawdust, looking tired. His expression didn’t betray anything, but Meredith could tell from the slight droop of his lips that he wasn’t best pleased to have to deal with a grief-stricken Paula on his barge – although of course he was far too kind to let her see that.
He joined them on the roof, glancing at the empty wine bottle and their flushed cheeks.
‘Nice day for it,’ he commented after he’d said hello, giving Paula a warm hug then sitting down and tipping his face to the sun. Meredith noticed he hadn’t offered Paula any verbal condolences, but she knew him well enough to understand that the awkwardness of it all would probably have brought him out in hives. And it would only have set Paula off again, so on balance it was just as well.
‘Yeah. Did you get your cabinet finished?’
He nodded. ‘Yup. Just got to let the glue dry and then varnish it tomorrow. Deliver on Monday. I’m knackered. It’s looking good, though. Check it out.’ He took his phone from his back pocket and brought up a photo, turning the screen so they could see it. It was an intricate mahogany Chinoise-influenced cupboard with inlaid mother-of-pearl cranes and flowers.
‘Wow, Pete, that’s amazing. Really beautiful,’ said Meredith. ‘Isn’t it, Paula?’
Paula didn’t say anything. She was just twirling the stem of her empty wineglass round and round, perhaps as a hint that she wanted yet another drink.
Meredith didn’t want her to carry on drinking. It would only make her more maudlin.
‘Do you fancy a walk down the towpath, Paula? I could do with stretching my legs and clearing my head. I’m not used to drinking in the daytime.’
Liar! she shouted at herself. It was at almost the same time of day that she’d been knocking back Jack Daniels with Paula’s dead husband during the last couple of hours of his life.
‘Not really,’ Paula said in a small voice.
Meredith shot Pete a glance. She could tell that he was reluctantly wondering if he had to invite her to stay for dinner. She felt guiltily relieved that she was at Pete’s rather than in her own cottage, because if she’d been home there’d have been no excuse not to extend the offer.
‘What time did you say Jackson’s coming back?’ she asked, as gently as she could.
Paula shrugged. ‘He’s going to cook dinner. Not that I could eat anything.’
‘Oh that’s so nice, he’s cooking!’ exclaimed the twins in tandem, and Meredith hoped Paula didn’t pick up that their enthusiasm was as much for their own sakes as hers.
Grief did strange things to people. Which of them knew how they’d react in that situation; become maudlin and morose, quiet and withdrawn, inconsolably tearful – or all of the above? When their dad died, Mum had been like Paula was being right now – tetchy and unbearable, and Meredith remembered it felt to Pete and her as seventeen-year-olds that their mother just wanted to make everyone else suffer the way she was.
That was partly what had driven Meredith away. That, and Samantha of course. The fact that Pete had forgiven her for abandoning him to deal with Mum was yet another testament to his kind heart. Even if it had taken him a few years…
Would Paula ever forgive her, though, for what she’d done to her? Of course she wouldn’t, if she ever found out, and who could blame her?
Meredith looked over at Paula. She’d put the wineglass down on the roof and was biting her nails, working at them with her teeth, trying to pull off bits of cuticle, a vacant expression in her bloodshot eyes.
‘What time are you having dinner?’ Meredith asked, tentatively.
‘Are you trying to get rid of me?’ Paula bit back.
‘No! Of course not, Paul. Honestly, you can stay as long as you want. Can’t she, Pete?’
Pete nodded, looking faintly terrified.
Then Paula burst into tears again. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she sobbed. ‘I just … I can’t … it’s all … have you got any more wine?’
