by Paris, B. A.
My stomach churns when I remember Leo’s insistence on knocking the two bedrooms into one. ‘I want to change things around a bit up here,’ he’d said. I bet you did, I think resentfully. I bet you wanted to change things around so that when I eventually found out about the murder, I wouldn’t be able to freak out about sleeping in the same bedroom, because essentially, it wouldn’t be the same. Except that essentially, it is.
According to one of the more detailed reports, there had been a struggle during which Nina Maxwell had put up a valiant fight before been rendered unconscious, then tied to a chair with belts from bathrobes belonging to her and her husband. As far as I could see, everything pointed to her husband being the killer.
A text arrives: Hope to be home by 7. I’ve got the Residents’ Association meeting tonight so I’ll only have time for a quick dinner. Can’t wait to see you xx
I text back: Message me when you arrive at Euston.
Had he noticed that I didn’t put my usual two kisses? When he texts from Euston at six forty-five, I take my courage, laptop, book and bag in my hands, and go home.
Home. This is my home now, I remind myself as I put the key in the door. In the few weeks that I’ve been here, I’ve made it our home, mine and Leo’s. What’s going to happen if I can’t bring myself to stay here?
In the hall, I try to think about the happy times Nina Maxwell must have had in this house. Because she must have been happy; she’d had friends and from what Eve had said, her husband was lovely. Except that he had ended up killing her. From the photos I’ve seen of him during my research and the testimonies I’ve read, he didn’t seem capable of murder. But then, not many people do.
Determined to think of them as Nina and Oliver, rather than victim and perpetrator, I walk around the house using memories of my sister and her boyfriend to picture their life together. I imagine them in the kitchen, chatting as they made dinner, then curled up on the sofa in the sitting room, watching a film, Nina’s legs hooked over Oliver’s, living a perfectly normal life until something terrible had changed their lives forever. Just as it had my sister’s.
By focusing on Nina and Oliver as people, I manage to lose some of the anxiety that has gripped me since yesterday. Wanting to test myself, I move towards the stairs. I’m fine when I get to the landing, fine when I go into the spare bedroom; it’s just a bedroom. But when I push open the door on the other side of the landing and peer into the room beyond, all I can see is what I’ve tried to block from my mind – Nina’s lifeless body tied to a chair, her long blond hair strewn on the floor around her. The image is so vivid I can hardly breathe. Slamming the door behind me, I hurry downstairs, clutching dizzily onto the handrail. Aware that Leo will be arriving at any moment, I go to the kitchen and scoop water from the tap onto my face, then sit down at the table, waiting to find out how it is that I’m living in a house where a woman was murdered.
I don’t have long to wait before I hear Leo’s key in the door, his footsteps in the hall, the thump of his bag as he lets it drop to the floor.
‘I’m home!’
The soft brush of material as he slips his jacket from his shoulders, the chink of coins as he hangs it over the newel post, the whip of his tie as he pulls it from under his collar, the sigh as he eases his neck – I hear them all.
‘Alice, where are you?’ he calls.
I can’t see the frown that crosses his face at the silence that greets him, I can only imagine it. He walks across the hall and into the kitchen, his shoes still on his feet, the frown still on his face, which quickly turns to relief when he sees me sitting at the table.
‘There you are,’ he says, a smile in his voice. He bends to kiss me and I twist away from him.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asks, alarmed.
‘Who are you, Leo?’
The colour drains from his face so fast that my instinct is to jump up and make him sit down. But I stay where I am and watch dispassionately as he grabs hold of a chair, leaning heavily on it as he tries desperately to recover his composure.
‘How could you? How could you keep something so – so terrible, so horrible, from me?’ I say, frustrated that I can’t find anything better than ‘terrible’ or ‘horrible’ to describe what happened upstairs. ‘How did you think I wouldn’t find out?’
‘Who told you?’ he asks, his voice so low I have trouble hearing him.
‘A neighbour.’ I don’t care that I’m lying. I’ll tell him about Thomas Grainger once I’ve got to the bottom of his deception.
He looks up, shock visible beneath the anguish on his face.
‘A neighbour told you?’
I hold his gaze. ‘Yes.’
‘But—’ He runs a hand through his hair, keeping hold of the chair with the other. ‘Which neighbour?’
‘What does it matter who it was?’ I say impatiently. ‘How could you lie to me, Leo?’
‘I -I—’ He sounds close to tears and I feel a twinge of alarm, and also a little ashamed. He must have been living in dread of me finding out. But I can’t forgive him, not yet.
‘What’s almost worse is that you lied about me, not just to me.’
‘What do you mean?’ he mumbles.
‘You insinuated to Ben that I was fine about living here, because it meant that I could keep my cottage in Harlestone.’
He stares at me for so long that I think he’s going to deny it, or tell me that Ben misunderstood. After what seems an eternity, he pulls out the chair he’s been holding onto, and sinks onto it.
‘I’m sorry.’ The relief on his face tells me he’s glad it’s out in the open.
‘What were you thinking? Were you hoping that I wouldn’t find out?’
He studies his hands. ‘No, I knew you would. I was hoping that you wouldn’t before I could tell you.’
‘And when were you going to tell me?’
‘I – I just wanted you to be a bit more settled here.’
‘Why?’
‘So that you’d find it harder to leave. It’s why I didn’t tell you before I bought the house. I knew you would refuse to live here and—’ he raises his eyes to mine, ‘I really wanted to.’
‘So much that you were willing to overlook that a woman had died here?’
‘It’s not the same house, Alice. It’s been redecorated and renovated, and I’ve changed the layout upstairs.’
I slam my hand down on the table. ‘It’s exactly the same house! I don’t understand how you can’t see that! It’s still the house where a murder took place!’
He gives a helpless shrug, which does nothing to calm me. ‘Then maybe it’s just that I’m able to live with that. I know it might sound callous, but it doesn’t really bother me. And I remember you saying once, when someone pointed out that people must have died in your cottage, given that it’s two hundred years old, that it wouldn’t bother you if they had.’
‘There’s a huge difference between someone dying peacefully in their bed of old age and being brutally murdered at thirty-eight years old!’
‘We can’t always know the history of the houses we live in. Somebody might have been murdered in the cottage in Harlestone.’
I hate that he has a point.
‘I mean, if somebody phoned you tomorrow, and said, “Hey, I’ve just discovered that fifty years ago, somebody was murdered in your cottage”, would you leave immediately and never spend another day there?’
I hesitate. I love my cottage. Noticing, he leans forward.
‘You would still stay there, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t sell up.’
‘Yes, actually, I would. I’d put it on the market. Even fifty years is too close.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ he says, rubbing his face with his hands.
My anger flares again. ‘Since when has this become about me? And since when have you started not believing me? I’m not the one in the wrong, Leo, you are!’
‘I know, and I’m sorry.’ He reaches for my hand but I move it away.
&n
bsp; ‘What must people have thought on Saturday, when I offered to take them upstairs to see the changes we’d made? They thought I knew about the murder.’
‘I never expected you to show people around.’
‘That’s why you didn’t want to have people over, isn’t it?’ I stand up, needing to put distance between us. ‘You were worried someone would mention what had happened here.’ I move to the other side of the kitchen and lean against the worktop. ‘I don’t understand, I don’t understand how you thought you could get away with it.’
He opens his hands, pleading with me to understand. ‘I wasn’t trying to get away with it. I was going to tell you, as soon as the time was right.’
‘And until then, you didn’t mind people thinking I was a callous bitch.’
‘I’m sure no-one thought that.’
‘Tamsin did.’
‘The redhead?’
‘Yes. I overheard her say that she couldn’t believe it didn’t bother me. I had no idea what she was talking about. Now I do.’
He sighs. ‘What do you want to do?’
I grab a cloth and start wiping the worktop, which is already clean. ‘I can’t stay here, not now.’
‘We could go and stay in a hotel for few days.’
‘And then what? Come back here and pretend the murder never happened?’
He flinches. ‘Not that it never happened, no. But maybe accept that it happened, and move on. I think you should give the house a chance, Alice.’
I stop wiping and turn to look at him. ‘What do you mean?’
He leans forward, fixing me with his eyes. ‘Make new memories for it. Be happy here.’
Resentment bursts out of me. ‘Be happy here? How can I?’ I throw the cloth angrily into the white enamel sink. ‘She was called Nina, Leo!’
‘I know, and that’s another reason I hesitated about telling you.’ His voice, quiet and reasonable, is designed to calm me. ‘I was worried that, just when you’d decided to try and let go of the past by leaving Harlestone, it would bring everything back. You’ve done so well by actually agreeing to move here. Can’t we build on that?’ He waits for me to speak but I can’t because what he said about making new memories for the house has struck a chord. He rubs at his face again. ‘What do you want to do? Do you want to go back to Harlestone? Do you want me to put this house up for sale and rent a flat in London while I wait for it to be sold? Because that’s what I’d have to do. I couldn’t take all that travelling from Harlestone to Birmingham each day so I’d have to live in London during the week and see you at the weekends – sometimes, occasionally, just like we did before we moved here. Is that what you want?’
He sits there, waiting for my answer, the fine lines around his eyes deeper than before. But I can’t give him one. I want everything he suggested and none of what he suggested. I don’t want to stay – but I don’t want to go. I want him to leave – but if I’m going to stay here in the house, at least tonight, I don’t want to be alone. The only thing I’m sure about is that, for the moment, I don’t want to be anywhere near him. Or anywhere near the room upstairs.
I move towards the door. ‘I don’t know what I want,’ I say, my voice tight. ‘And until I do, I’ll be sleeping in my study.’
It’s only when I’m making up the sofa bed that I realise I didn’t ask him why he wanted the house so much.
Thirteen
‘Why did you want this house so much?’ I ask Leo the next morning. We’re standing in the kitchen. It’s spotless, because neither of us bothered to eat last night and the early morning light is bouncing off the pale marble surfaces.
‘Sorry?’ He looks tired, but not as tired as I do.
‘Yesterday, you said that the reason you didn’t tell me about the murder before moving in was because you knew I’d refuse to live here and you really wanted this house. I’m asking you why you really wanted this house. It’s a nice house but not so nice that anyone with a conscience would overlook a murder.’ I know I’m being harsh but I barely slept and fatigue is dragging me down.
He walks over to the black and chrome coffee machine.
‘Coffee?’
I’m dying for one. ‘No thanks.’
He makes his coffee before answering my question, as if he’s hoping I’ll tire of waiting. But I’m prepared to give him as much time as it takes.
‘I wanted this house because it’s in a secure environment,’ he says eventually. ‘I like that nobody can get in unless they live here, or they’re let in by someone who lives here. It makes it safer. And because I could afford it. I’d never have been able to afford it if it didn’t have a past.’
‘Since when have you become security conscious?’
‘Since I started getting harassed by clients.’
‘I wasn’t aware you’d been harassed by clients.’
He glances at me. ‘That’s because I chose not to tell you.’
‘I know you had unwanted calls,’ I say, remembering the times he answered his phone only to hang up straightaway, and the way he sometimes stared at the screen before deciding not to answer, then telling me it was a wrong number. ‘I didn’t realise they were from clients. But nobody actually came to the door, did they?’ I pause as a memory resurfaces. ‘Except that woman, the blond one, in Harlestone. I asked you about her at the time and you told me she wanted to know what it was like to live in the village. Was she one of your clients?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘The point is, if a client had wanted to find out where I was, they could have. I’ve never given anybody your address but if somebody had turned up in Harlestone looking for me, every single person in the village would have taken them right to your front door and on the way, told them what I’d had for dinner the previous evening.’
There’s something about his reasoning that doesn’t ring quite true. He’s not telling me everything – but what is it that he’s holding back?
‘But this – The Circle – is a small community in the same way that Harlestone is,’ I say, perplexed.
He gives a tired sigh. ‘That’s exactly why I chose it. I would have preferred an anonymous block of flats with a built-in security system, something like I had before. But you made it clear you weren’t going to live somewhere like that so I looked for a way to keep both of us happy. Here we have the intimate set-up that you prefer and the security that I need. It’s a compromise, Alice, another damn compromise.’
‘Isn’t that what relationships are about?’ I say, stung. ‘Compromise?’
He takes his cup from the machine. ‘I’ll let you have your breakfast in peace. If you want to talk, I’ll be in my study.’
Tears sting my eyes. I’d lain awake most of the night and I still don’t know what to do. I’m tempted to go back to Harlestone but if I do, I’ll have to ask Debbie if I can stay with her for the next few months, because I can’t move my tenants out without notice. But where will that leave me and Leo? He’s right, we’d have to go back to how we’d managed before, only seeing each other at weekends when the whole point of moving to London was so that we could spend more time together. And I can’t get what he said about making new memories for the house out of my mind. It’s created a feeling of obligation that I resent, because if I don’t take up the challenge, I’ll feel as if I’m turning my back, not just on Nina Maxwell, who I feel bound to in some inexplicable way, but also my sister.
‘I meant to ask.’ His voice comes from behind me and turning, I see him standing in the doorway. ‘You said a neighbour told you about the murder. Was it Eve?’
‘No.’
‘Who was it, then?’
I have no choice. I have to tell him what I told Eve.
‘It wasn’t a neighbour, it was a reporter,’ I say, horribly aware that there are too many lies creeping into our relationship.
‘A reporter? You mean, a journalist?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did they come here?’
‘No, it was a phone call.’
�
��A man or a woman?’
‘A woman.’
He rakes his hair, a sign that he’s riled. ‘Did she say which newspaper she was with?’
I turn to the coffee machine and start pressing buttons. ‘No.’
‘Didn’t you ask?’
‘No, I was in too much shock to care.’
‘Did you get her name?’
‘No.’
‘What did she say, exactly?’
‘She wanted to know what it was like to live in a house where someone had been murdered.’ I stop abruptly, wondering if he’s noticed that I used almost the same phrase as he did when he told me about the woman who came to Harlestone – She wanted to know what it was like to live in the village. Which means we’re both lying.
‘Did she say anything else?’
‘No.’ I look at him curiously. ‘Why?’
‘No reason.’
He leaves and I sit down at the table. Something isn’t adding up. Leo seems paranoid about my fictitious reporter. And his behaviour yesterday when I first confronted him had been over the top. He’d looked as if he’d been about to pass out. But his reason for not telling me – that he wanted this house because it provided him with security – doesn’t stand up.
I go to my study, closing the door behind me. Since last night, it has become not just my workplace, but my haven. The bed is now a sofa again, the quilt folded neatly into the bottom of the cupboard, because I can’t work in a mess. I sit down at my desk. I need to phone Ginny, and a message has come in from Eve, checking that I’m alright. I text Eve back and tell her I’m fine, and that I’ll see her after the weekend. If you need me before then, just let me know xx she replies and I feel lucky to have made a friend so close to home. Home. Again, the word resonates in my brain. Can it ever be my home now?
I call Ginny.
‘How are you?’ she asks.
‘Not good.’
‘Did you speak to Leo?’
‘Yes, he said he didn’t tell me because he really wanted the house and he knew I wouldn’t want to live here once I knew about the murder. He was right about that.’ I pause. ‘It’s the reason he gave for wanting the house that doesn’t ring true. He told me it was because it’s in a gated residence and nobody can get in unless they are let in by a resident. He said he’d been harassed by some of his clients.’
