The night Lucy had been so keen to distract him. ‘Never mind,’ he said, feeling himself begin to stutter.
It was you, Frank thought looking at Eddie, but he still didn’t know how or what or why and Eddie was smiling at him as if to say Not my style, mate, you should know that by now. I don’t get my hands dirty.
The guy picks up a married woman, climbs into a taxi with her and her mates.
The married woman happened to live out there not far from Eddie, out there in the suburbs, in all the green, in the woods. Frank knew that because she told him the station she was travelling back to when he helped her into a cab outside Fanelli’s.
And Georgie’s voice, on her answering machine.
This is Georgie Baxter. Please leave a message.
She was married to the accountant. The name on the headed paper of Eddie’s accountant had been ‘Baxter’. T. C. Baxter whose wife was called Georgie, whose daughter was called Tabitha, looking anxiously at Frank while he got a glass of water for her mum.
It had been a set-up. It came to Frank there and then. Some kind of sting, blackmail, a version of getting Frank on tape with Lucy’s hand down his trousers. He could see, if there were seven brothels in false names, that Eddie might need leverage over his accountant. And Holly must have been part of the set-up, and now she was dead.
Eddie was circling on the spot, taking the room in, as if assessing it for the bailiffs. Looking up at the damp patch in the corner, the handful of books on the shelves, the curtains. The bed. He was looking at the bed now.
Face down on the table Frank’s mobile pinged, as a text came in. Eddie stopped, eyeing it as if it was part of the deal, his to buy or sell.
‘That’ll be—’ Frank groped for someone innocuous, ‘That’ll be Mum,’ he said, pocketing it. Eddie’s eyes stony, like a lizard’s.
And Eddie’s hand was heavy on his shoulder. Careful, thought Frank, no fast movements but there wasn’t much chance of that. His brain felt like it had been put in the deep freeze, or hibernation.
Eddie sighed.
‘I’m off home,’ he said, lazily. His hand was still on Frank’s shoulder. ‘Got to look after the wife, if you know what I mean.’ His big fingers working at Frank’s trapezoid, gauging how much muscle there was there. ‘But how about a quick one, first. Just you and me.’ Smiling, but joyless. Grim. ‘Set the record straight, how about that, then?’
Frank tried to work out if he had a choice. He didn’t think he had.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The police station was as she remembered it from that other life, on a corner, anonymous as an office block except for the blue lamp. Behind the bland façade it was dingy and busy, a murmuring underworld in a neon-lit reception area contained by swing doors and two rows of grey plastic seats. Four or five of them were occupied by motionless figures.
Tentatively Georgie approached the reception desk, which sat behind a wire-reinforced security screen like you’d find in an all-night off-licence. There was a sign about the penalties for abusing the staff and an officer who looked like he worked out sitting behind it, blunt fingernails curled around his biro. He looked up at her with a brief smile. Georgie hesitated, and a man who could have been any age in rags started up from the seating beside her, scratching his groin savagely and beginning to pace. Gripping the counter Georgie held her ground, and he walked the other way, off towards the door.
‘I need to talk to someone about the death of Holly Walker,’ she said in a whisper, on tiptoe to get closer to the wire screen.
The desk sergeant had to ask her to say it again.
The officer who eventually came to get Georgie – DS Andrea Mills – was a woman of roughly her own age: solid but not fat, square-hipped in the uniform trousers, thick ponytail. Following her through the swing doors Georgie reminded herself it wasn’t likely they had allocated a woman out of consideration for her feelings, more like they got better results, women maybe would say more to another woman. Which was what she wanted, they wanted, everyone wanted, wasn’t it? To solve this, but that didn’t explain her sick feeling, her panic. The sense of guilt that threatened to flood her in the grey corridor, to make her blurt and flush. They headed down some stairs.
She focused on the policewoman’s back, instead. A bulge under the fabric of her shirt where her bra was too tight; Georgie sympathised, on safe ground. From behind Georgie could see she was wearing an incongruously bright scrunchie in her hair, too, like it might have been borrowed from an eight-year-old’s bedside table at the last minute, late for work.
‘Here,’ said the woman, opening a door, not into the kind of grey featureless cell Georgie had expected but a big bright room with two long tables in it, a man at the end of one who barely raised his eyes from his computer. No window: they were underground, but no privacy, less formality than she’d expected. When Georgie didn’t move with an audible sigh the policewoman – DS Andrea Mills, What had made her choose the police force? thought Georgie, frozen – pulled out a chair at the free desk. Georgie sat.
‘So,’ said DS Andrea Mills, planting herself in another chair across the corner of the desk, ‘I’m not quite clear,’ the trace of a frown, down at the paper form she had in her hand, ‘what it is you’re here to say, Mrs Baxter. Georgina, is it?’
‘Georgie’s what – people call me,’ said Georgie, wanting suddenly to change the subject, to talk about anything but this, How old’s your daughter, mine’s five? ‘I knew Holly Walker a bit, we went out a week or so ago. My friend – Catriona, Cat, she came too, she knows Holly better than me but she’s—’
‘Yes, I got that. Catriona Marston. She’s already called the station, talked to a colleague of mine. I believe Mrs Marston is undergoing treatment—’ Shuffling papers, peering down. ‘For—’
‘For breast cancer, yes.’ Feeling the lead weight that was the thought of Cat hooked up to a machine, Cat lying in the dark. But Holly. She made herself focus on Holly. ‘Holly was – Cat said she was in love with someone. Had been for years and years, Cat said not to judge a book by its cover, she looked like a party girl, you know, but—’ A frown notched itself above the bridge of Mills’ nose.
‘Look,’ she said, leaning back, ‘Ms Marston did also seem to think we were acting on the assumption Holly, Ms Walker was a – an escort, sex worker.’ A glance down the room at the man, who seemed oblivious, her voice lowered a little anyway. ‘But we aren’t. We can’t afford to make any assumptions at this stage. But she let someone in, or went there with him.’
‘A man,’ said Georgie but then she remembered, strangled then raped, wondering who, what kind of man could – just as the woman’s eyes flicked up at her, warning her. ‘Yes,’ said DS Mills. ‘A man.’ Curt but not unkind.
‘She wasn’t a – an escort,’ said Georgie, hearing her voice rise. ‘She had a job – I mean a real – a different job. She worked in … in advertising. Cat said, she had relationships – she—’ None of those things ruled it out, a secret life. For a second her own kitchen rose into view, Tim doling out housekeeping. Don’t judge a book.
‘All right,’ said DS Mills, holding her hand up. ‘Sure. But—’ a hesitation, ‘I’d like to know what you think. Not your friend Cat, we’ll get back to her eventually—’ So there’d been no need for her to come? No need to lie to Tim, to take the train. She could leave. But then she remembered, with a scalding rush – how could she have forgotten – that it hadn’t been just her, lying, her with a secret life and it looked so flimsy, so squalid, an evening of flirting with a man, getting too drunk to know— Not just her. All the time Tim had—
With the policewoman’s eyes on her she remembered standing in the hall, unable to move, hearing the sounds from upstairs. Tim with Lydia, on top of— the lasagne on the kitchen counter. She sat very still, obedient. None of this had anything to do with Holly’s death. Did it?
‘Don’t you have an opinion?’ said Mills, gently.
Holly was dead. Nothing else mattered. This was
what she had to do. ‘I didn’t keep up with her,’ said Georgie, haltingly. ‘It was years ago we worked together, me and my husband and Cat and Holly, but I left not long after she arrived. Before she died, before Cat told me – I only thought she was, you know, not after a steady relationship.’
‘So you’re telling me the impression you had of her was the direct opposite of Mrs Marston’s.’ Chewing the side of her mouth, perplexed.
Helpless, Georgie shrugged. ‘I didn’t really know her,’ she said. ‘Maybe she thought I was too – too boring, too married, I wouldn’t understand. Cat’s more – she’s more—’ More angry. And happier.
Not relevant: the state of her marriage against Cat’s was not relevant either. Georgie felt herself flush.
DS Mills nodded, thoughtful. ‘All right,’ hand up, ‘that’s fine, sure. But you went out together. After not having seen her in, what, years?’ Georgie nodded. ‘Whose idea was that?’
‘Well—’ Georgie hesitated. ‘Cat’s. I thought there’d be more of us, I didn’t – I didn’t really know who would turn up, I was mostly interested in seeing Cat.’
‘Is it the kind of thing you do often? Going up to London for the evening?’ Georgie shook her head. In the policewoman’s faintly perplexed questions it all sounded – odd.
‘You know, these girls’ nights out,’ she said. ‘They can be – a bit random. Whoever’s free.’ It didn’t sound convincing, but DS Mills nodded.
‘And how was she? How was Holly, that night? Up, down, wired, anything odd?’
Georgie made herself think: if she just focused on the question, she’d be safe. ‘She was cheerful,’ she said finally. ‘She was really upbeat.’
Mills nodded, thoughtful. ‘Did she meet anyone she knew, when you were out?’
‘I think she knew the hat-check girl. You know, the cloakroom girl.’
Mills wrote something down. ‘And her mood?’ she asked, without looking up.
Georgie thought, shrugged. Frowning. ‘She did seem happy. I mean, she had – a relationship had just ended, a man had ended it, she even had her things still with her, her suitcase, she looked like, well, maybe a bit rough round the edges the next morning but she didn’t seem – depressed, the opposite.’
‘The opposite.’ Mills paused, pen in hand, and looked up, questioning as if she didn’t know what the opposite of depressed would be.
‘Excited?’ said Georgie. ‘Cheerful anyway.’ The policewoman reclined in the chair, leaned back, removed the scrunchie and put it back in, sweeping back her hair, watching Georgie.
‘There are three missed calls from your number on her phone,’ she said. ‘So you hardly knew her but you were in touch three times? Keen to talk to her?’
‘So you do have her phone,’ said Georgie, too quickly.
‘We’ve got a phone, yes,’ said Mills, regarding her warily. ‘It took us a while to track it down. It had been left in the postbox attached to the apartment.’
‘A phone? You’re not sure its hers?’
‘It’s hers all right. What I meant by that was plenty of people have more than one,’ Mills explained, patiently. ‘People with – people who want to keep parts of their life separate. There’s a certain amount of evidence that Holly had another phone.’
‘Such as?’
Mills hesitated a second as if considering the wisdom of giving any information to Georgie: Georgie held her gaze: it came to her in that moment that whatever it was that was making her feel guilty, she wasn’t. She wasn’t guilty. Had Tim had a second phone? In case she picked his up from the kitchen table or the bedside, while he was in the shower, or mowing the lawn? ‘Such as a receipt from a pay-as-you-go top-up, in her purse.’ She leaned forward, elbows on the table. ‘So why did you call her? Three times. Once late that night, the Friday night?’
‘We were supposed to meet again,’ said Georgie, faltering. ‘Just me and her. I phoned to organise that. She – well, it was the Saturday afternoon. She never – never turned up.’ She didn’t know what Mills was getting at. ‘Have you got any other leads from her phone?’ she asked. ‘The one you found?’
Mills just shook her head briefly without looking up, not saying if she meant, no, or that she wasn’t going to say. Making more notes. Then she lifted her head. ‘So when she didn’t turn up you tried to call her?’
‘No,’ said Georgie, heat rising under her collar with embarrassment, ‘I just left. I – my daughter was tired.’ It sounded lame: it sounded implausible. ‘I’d been regretting – coming to London, it was too much for Tabs, she’s only five—’ her voice pleading for sympathy but DS Mills just looked at her incuriously. Maybe she had no child after all, no daughter waiting at home. ‘I wanted to get home,’ she said. ‘I thought Holly – I thought she maybe—’
‘You thought she was flaky?’ Mills laid down her pen: Georgie felt tears coming into her eyes.
‘No,’ she said, cleared her throat. More firmly. ‘No. I thought she’d been delayed somehow and I just didn’t want to wait. I was being the flaky one. Just running off home. London’s – it – I’m not used to London any more. The tube—’
And quite suddenly she was thinking of him. Mark. That was what a secret life was, when you didn’t want anyone to see inside your head, when you didn’t want to give names to people and make them real. Mark. She thought of Mark, on the tube, of Mark putting her hand on his groin, and that kid, that boy smirking down at them.
You didn’t seem very married last week, darling. And Holly the only one who knew what he meant. Only Holly knew what happened that night.
And him.
‘So you went home without attempting to contact her again.’
‘There was a missed call from her,’ she said, numb, because she had forgotten that. ‘I tried to call her back but there was no answer.’
‘Ah,’ said Mills, looking down. ‘Yes. Yes, that’s right.’ Tapping her teeth with her pen. Georgie could see the policewoman hadn’t washed her hair, it was thick hair with a dusting of scurf at the centre parting.
And then something about the room, the strangeness of it, of being in a police station, entering another world where bad things happened and must be dealt with and Georgie’s mind crept back again. She was confined here under the flicker of the striplighting, the smell of disinfectant over grease, fast food carton in the bin and it crept back – she crept back. Back to that night. She had told herself she had no clue what had happened – but that wasn’t quite true. There were clues. There were signs, at those crossroads in her brain, those neural pathways. If she sat very still, there was something, if she worked backwards: if she forced herself.
What she had needed to know was that Mark was not a good man. He was not a gentleman. Putting her hand on him in front of people: she had wanted to cry. She had looked around, horrified, and people had turned away.
She remembered the cab. Flashes of street lighting as they passed under the lamps. The memory of a sensation, a bruise on her shin, the railings along an area.
An old railing. Georgie saw her hand on the old railing outside the cheap hotel, but she was walking down, not up to the room, down into the dark. Down into the old building’s lightwell.
A gentleman. Had Cat said that, or Holly? Not Holly, with her sleepy look, her side-sliding eyes, her amusement. Georgie had seen him out of the hotel. She had gone down the stairs with him, Holly had told her that much. Georgie’s hand crept up to her throat as it came back, it invaded her: she couldn’t stop it, whether the policewoman chose that moment to look up, to examine her or not. Not a conscious memory, nothing her brain had processed but something more indelible. His hands on her shoulders, fingers digging into the soft space above her collar bones, pushing her down.
Down below the pavement, stone steps and a sharp smell of piss. Where are we going?
She must have been completely out of it, drunk or – or something. The whisky, his back to her and then he turned and gave her the glass. Out of it, and yet Holly had let her go
with him. When she got back upstairs Holly had been witness, to whatever had happened, to whatever state she had been in. At best, too out of it to take off her own clothes.
And Holly was dead. Witness Holly. Maybe more than a witness: it had been Holly had reached into her bag for the brandy.
She thought of him, when she’d last seen him, cheerfully handing money to a kid in a baseball cap on the tube platform, his eyes flat and uninterested, his hand on hers, thrusting it between his legs. A man who would do anything. He’d known Holly, all along. Pretending not to know each other had been part of the game.
‘There was something,’ she began, making the mistake of beginning to say it before she knew what would come out. DS Mills raised her head: had that been a trick, too? Looking away to lull her into a false sense of security? ‘Something happened—’ and then she stopped.
What was he going to do next? Mark.
Georgie had never really understood before, about those women who didn’t go to the police when something bad had happened to them, because they don’t think they’ll be believed.
The policewoman was looking at her, curiosity hardening into something else.
‘Something?’
Georgie froze, gave a stiff little shrug, forced herself to sigh, reluctant. ‘Oh – nothing. Just the next morning, she was very kind, I was hungover.’
DS Mills was very still. ‘Right,’ she said, and it was clear to Georgie that she had not been believed. True and yet not true at all. The next morning Holly had been kind. She had told Georgie nothing had happened, but her eyes had said something different.
They both waited, and finally Mills sat back.
‘Well, you’ve been very helpful, Mrs Baxter,’ she said, clapping her notebook shut and Georgie felt a kind of desperation, as if with the sound of the book closing her chance had gone. But she was frozen, her throat choked with something. ‘Really very helpful. Would it be all right—’ a hesitation, a tiny sideways look, ‘would it be all right for me to contact you at home, about this? If I think of anything else?’
A Secret Life Page 22
