I make a huge effort to remain pleasant. ‘Feel free to do whatever you like with it,’ I say. ‘Really.’ And I reach for the forms to sign. He snatches them from me. I cannot sign those, he tells me, until I have signed over the old phone. He produces a new sheaf of papers and starts to ask me my details all over again for this new form.
I break. I simply snap. The grief, the frustration, the fear, the lack of sleep of the last two weeks, combined, it seems to me, with the disappointment, disillusionment, anger and guilt of a lifetime, rise up uncontrollably in me and I dump the lot on the hapless head of this spotty boy. I stand up. I snatch up the forms, signed and unsigned, and I rip them in pieces. ‘I have bought houses in less time than it’s taking to buy this sodding phone,’ I yell, and I pick up the phone, in its box, and hurl it at him.
His reactions are quick, I will say that for him. He catches it, which is fortunate, I think, as I stomp out of the shop, because otherwise he could get me prosecuted for assault. He is not short of information about me to give to the police if he can be bothered to piece the forms back together.
I regret my rage the moment I step out of the shop. How do I expect to manage without a phone? There may be another phone shop in Dover but I don’t know where it is, and I have missed the bus and there won’t be another until four-thirty. I could weep. There are plenty of closed shops around here. It is tempting just to sit down in a doorway and wait for the night to come, when I might, with any luck, be carried away in the gentle arms of hypothermia. On the other hand, people might toss coins at me, which would be embarrassing, and despair is a bad habit to get into at the age of fifty. I have a better idea. There is a question I want to ask Eva. I intended to phone her when I’d got my new phone but, instead, I shall go and see her.
It takes twenty minutes to walk to the hospital and that gives me time to justify my phone rage, to consider the possible pleasures of the phone-free life and to resolve to behave better on this visit to Eva than I did on the last one. By the time I get to the hospital, I am quite cheerful.
There is nothing in the hospital shop that Eva wouldn’t shudder at so I buy her a really terrible-looking murder mystery, which might make her laugh, and find my way to her ward. She is looking much better than she did three days ago. She is sitting in a chair beside her bed, looking perfectly soignée in a silky dressing gown and full war paint. Her hair is in its smooth silver coil and the dressing on her head has been replaced by a smaller plaster. In spite of my last visit, she actually seems pleased to see me.
‘This is a flying visit,’ I say, kissing her. ‘I won’t wear you out, I promise.’
‘I’m delighted to have the company,’ she says, putting on her glasses and examining the book’s lurid cover and unpromising blurb.
‘I thought it might give you a laugh,’ I say. ‘Better than chocolates, I thought, and the toiletries in the shop were well below your standard.’
‘It will get me through this evening nicely,’ she says. ‘And they are releasing me tomorrow.’
‘Will you be able to manage at home? It’s surprisingly difficult to manage with one arm. I sprained a wrist once and I couldn’t even pull my knickers up.’
‘Lesley has kindly invited me to stay with her. Peter will be away next week so we shall live quietly.’
‘She’ll want to feed you up,’ I warn.
‘And I shall indulge her for a day or two. The food here has been quite inedible.’
‘Will you be nervous?’ I ask. ‘After what happened to you?’
‘Nervous? No. I don’t think I am in any danger.’
‘You don’t think your attacker might want to keep you quiet?’
‘I don’t think that what I experienced was an attack. More of a… collision, I would say.’
I lean forward, coming in with the question I really want to ask. ‘Eva,’ I say, ‘I know you didn’t see anything and I know this is an odd question, but did you smell anything?’
She looks at me with her old, shrewd eyes under their wrinkled, cosmetically green lids and she says, ‘Oh, yes. I did. And it was the same both times.’
‘Both times?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t underst —’
‘You will,’ she says.
‘But what was the smell?’
‘That,’ she says, ‘is my affair.’
Tea comes round after that and I am amused to see that she has trained them to bring hers black. I leave soon afterwards and spend the bus journey home reflecting on the same both times. When I am stalled there, my mind wanders to the first lines of Medusa, highlighted in the book on the beach:
A suspicion, a doubt, jealousy
grew in my mind,
which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakes,
as though my thoughts
hissed and spat on my scalp.
My bride’s breath soured, stank
in the grey bags of my lungs.
I’m foul mouthed now, foul tongued,
yellow fanged.
There are bullet tears in my eyes.
Are you terrified?
Be terrified.
And now I know.
Chapter Nineteen
LAST ORDERS
Sunday 23rd February 2014
Paula
DI Paula Powell came out of interview room two and stood leaning against the wall with her eyes closed. She was an hour into her interview with Matthew O’Dowd and she still could not decide whether he was very stupid or very clever. This was his second interview. They had brought him in the previous evening and he had seemed annoyed rather than guilty or fearful. He had had a bit of a rant about officers searching his mum’s house again when she had only just got it straight after the last time, but he did not seem to be worried about what they might find. Otherwise he had been quite ready to answer questions. Aaron Green had led the initial interview, just to soften him up, and, in spite of the duty solicitor’s demand that they charge him or release him, they had kept him in overnight, justifying his detention by evidence from his phone and computer that his relationship with Kelly had been unstable and aggressive.
She had left him to stew for most of the morning and then, ducking out of family lunch at her sister’s on the grounds of an emergency, she had come in to question him herself. Asked about the attack on his girlfriend the previous year, he admitted to it although she had not, in the end, given evidence against him and he could have taken refuge behind that. Instead, he said he had been stupid and learned his lesson and claimed that he was focusing on his sport now, and getting through his English exam, and was hardly drinking at all. Asked about his relationship with Kelly Field, his answers were so unappealing that she thought they had to be true. With Kelly it was just sex, he said. After her morning swim, Kelly liked a quick shag (sorry about his language but that was what it was) and he had no objection. He didn’t see her otherwise – they didn’t go out or anything. She was annoying, really. If their relationship was aggressive, it came from her. He was an easy-going guy when he wasn’t drinking but he was never good enough for her. She kept comparing him with some boyfriend she’d had before. No, he didn’t know the boyfriend’s name. He wasn’t sure there had really been one, actually. He could have been all Kelly’s fantasy. If he was so great what would he have been doing with Kelly, because Kelly was a bit of a dog, to be honest.
Paula had fought down her dislike and asked him about The World’s Wife. How was it, she asked him, that two of the books that had been returned to the library had his fingerprints on them? He looked at her with his guileless, flat, blue eyes and said he had handled Kelly’s copy, which he had taken back to the library, and he was pretty sure he had picked up Gina’s, which had been lying around on the coffee table when he went for his coaching. No, he couldn’t tell her anything about the poems. He wasn’t
into poems and, anyway, it was women’s stuff, wasn’t it?
It was at this point that she had come out for a break, sunk in gloom. He was all testosterone, swagger and a good candidate for a knee in the balls but he was also, she was pretty sure, telling the truth. He was a big, healthy, stupid boy without a gram of sensitivity or sympathy, but he didn’t care enough to have killed Kelly. In all the text and email exchanges on his phone, the heat came from Kelly. She was the one raging and demanding, while he sent the briefest of replies, hardly bothering to disguise how little he cared.
Paula opened her eyes. They would have to release him though there was still a question mark over the fingerprints on a second book. She had always believed that the book on the beach was Gina’s, stolen by Farid or by Matt. Still, other books were missing, so who knew? Who knew anything, actually? They seemed to be back at square one, though that wasn’t an expression she liked – it suggested that this was a game. Well, it wasn’t. Whatever Kelly Field’s faults, she had been a healthy young woman with a life ahead of her and she had been brutally killed. Finding the man who did it was as serious as it got in this job.
She straightened her back and returned to the interview room. ‘You are free to go for the moment, Matthew,’ she said, ‘but don’t go anywhere. We may want to talk to you again.’
He stood up. ‘And what about my mum’s house?’ he asked. ‘Who’s going to clear that up?’
‘How about you?’ she said. ‘Celebrate your homecoming.’
She watched him walk along the corridor with Aaron Green and then went to her desk. Trust Gina’s instincts, David had told her, and in the absence of any other direction to go in, she decided to go back to the book group which Gina thought lay at the centre of everything. Paula did not buy the Agatha Christie model of the book group members being picked off one by one by some crazed hater of literate women, but the book on the beach was some sort of signal and a second look at the women themselves would do no harm.
She had hardly called a list up on her screen before Aaron Green arrived, panting and brandishing an evidence bag.
‘Handed in at the front desk a few minutes ago,’ he said. ‘The woman who found the body – Gina Sidwell.’
Paula took the bag. Clipped to it was a note in large, bold letters.
Found this among
Lily Terry’s books.
Have not investigated it.
Over to you
Gina
She looked at Aaron Green. ‘What do you reckon?’ she asked.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s an iPhone.’
‘It is. And what we would like would be for it to be Kelly Field’s missing iPhone, but it was found among Lily Terry’s books – she’s the young woman who fell off a ladder and died in St Martin’s just before Kelly was killed. Gina – Mrs Sidwell – has always claimed that she was actually killed, too. So it is possible that this is Lily Terry’s phone and she has sent it to us because she thinks it will have evidence on it about Lily Terry’s death.’
Aaron Green looked puzzled. ‘We could just look at it,’ he said, ‘I mean, rather than speculating…’
‘And we will.’ She opened a desk drawer and took out gloves. ‘But this isn’t the first time Gina Sidwell has been involved in a case of mine. I’m just preparing myself for the possibility that she’s right.’
She switched the phone on and waited, with Aaron Green hovering behind her.
‘Don’t loiter, Aaron,’ she snapped. ‘You must have stuff to get on with. I’ll call you if there’s anything.’
He backed off, looking wounded, and she focused on the screen, turning first to the email inbox – nothing much there – and then to the sent box, which she rolled through, hardly breathing. Only when she moved on to sent text messages did she start to mutter ‘Oh my God!’ until it became a mantra and she stopped and closed her eyes. ‘She was stalking him,’ she whispered. ‘And then Lily – and then – Jesus!’ She went to the inbox. Just the one message back from him in all that time. Just the one, dated 13th February, and just one word, Medusa.
She turned, realising that Aaron Green was sitting across the room watching her.
‘Get the team in, Aaron. Whatever they’re doing. I need them here. First two to get here go with us to the house. We arrest him if he’s there, and we search the house. Why did we never do that? What made me rule him out?’
She stopped. Why was he just standing there gawping at her? ‘Don’t stand there with your mouth open,’ she shouted. ‘Go on! Scoot!’
He turned and picked up the phone. ‘Are you going to tell me where we’re going, boss?’ he asked.
‘What? Cliffe Cottages. Number Six. Where else?’
Chapter Twenty
THE REMAINS OF THE DAY
Sunday 23rd February 2014
It is completely dark by the time the bus drops me off and the wind has got up, carrying sleety rain. Still reeling from my Damascene moment on the journey I forget to be nervous as I put my head down and hurry past Simon’s door. When I get to my own door, though, I know something is wrong. For a start, in the pale glow of the street lamp, I see Ariel crouched on the scaffolding that disfigures the empty house to the left of mine. She looks like a cartoon of a scared cat, wild-eyed, with her fur on end in the brisk sea wind. She yowls at me, an eloquent expression of fear and outrage. I open the front door cautiously and am assailed by a smell of burning, an acrid, chemical smell. I almost trip over Caliban, who is standing, whimpering softly and staring through the open doorway to the sitting room, from where a faint light leaks. I stand, frozen. If Simon has got into my house and is intent on burning it down, why isn’t Caliban savaging him? What is keeping him here, grizzling?
I step into the room and make out a man, so intent on his work that he doesn’t hear me, kneeling by my logburner, pulling smouldering objects from it. I switch the light on.
‘I can see why you might want to burn the books, Jack,’ I say, ‘but why in my stove?’
He glances at me once as the light goes on but then goes back to his task.
‘Not the time of year for a bonfire,’ he says. ‘And not many people have real fires.’
‘How did you get in here?’ I ask. ‘I’m sure I took the back door key out.’
‘Latch on your back window’s loose,’ he says, still not looking at me, focused on the job in hand. He is beating the smoking books on the hearth now, sending sparks flying. Although he is wearing his thick, window cleaner’s gloves, I fear for his hands, as well as for my rug, where sparks are beginning to smoulder. ’Lotta play in that latch,’ he says. ‘Easy to slip it up.’
‘Spot all the weak spots, do you,’ I say, ‘cleaning windows? I suppose that’s how you got hold of the books.’
‘Got to tear these up,’ he says. ‘They won’t burn like they are. Nearly put the fire out.’
He starts ripping pages from the books and, though it goes against the grain of forty years and more, I let him do it.
‘Didn’t you feel bad,’ I ask, ‘breaking into our houses? Stealing from us? Getting us suspected by the police?’
‘It was almost like old times,’ he says, almost smiling. ‘Used to do a bit of pilfering back when I was a bad boy, before Lil.’ He gives an extra tug at the pages of the book he is holding and crams them into the fire.
‘I don’t mind the paper so much,’ I say, ‘but the plastic smells disgusting when it burns.’
‘Sorry about that,’ he says.
I sit down on the arm of the sofa, trying to look relaxed, but poised to run if need be. Caliban sidles into the room and stands beside me, hackles up, looking from Jack to me, wondering what happens next. No idea, I tell him in my head. Making it up as I go along.
‘So, it was Lily’s book on the beach with Kelly, wasn’t it?’ I ask. ‘And Lily highlighted the poem about
Medusa. She liked highlighting – I’ve seen her school books.’
‘She said it could have been written about Kelly, that poem. I didn’t get it, but I could see the thing about her hair – the snakes.’
‘And Kelly was jealous of Lily. I’d never have thought of that. She was years older than you. What made her think she could have had you?’
He shoves a plasticised book cover into the stove, where it shrivels and burns, sending out another belch of foul smoke.
‘I had sex with her,’ he mutters, coughing in the smoke. ‘I was fifteen. I’d been drinking cider and I was off my head. She took me down on the beach and we did it. My first time. And then there were a few more times. When you’re fifteen you’ll take anything that’s offered. I never told, though. And I made her swear not to tell. I’d never have lived it down with the lads.’
‘Why?’ I am genuinely interested. ‘Wouldn’t they have been impressed at you having sex with a grown-up woman?’
‘Gotta be a better-looking one than Kelly,’ he says. ‘She was an ugly old slag.’
For a moment I am filled with rage. It flows into me like molten lava. How dare they, these boys? How dare they, these pimply, sweaty, grubby adolescents? What do they think gives them the right to pick and choose – thumbs up or thumbs down – wouldn’t mind getting into her knickers or ugly old slag? I didn’t like Kelly. She wasn’t likeable, but she never had a chance to be. It’s easy to be likeable if you’ve got good skin, shiny hair and a white dazzle of a smile. If you’re plain, it takes real character to be likeable, and the chances are you’ll still get disregarded. Kelly decided that if she couldn’t be wanted then she would make sure she wasn’t ignored, and just for the moment I admire that.
‘And then you dumped her,’ I say. ‘And she didn’t like that.’
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