by Nicci French
‘What is the weather like?’
‘Hot, really hot. Mid-afternoon. I’m in the shade under a line of elms which are on my right forming the edge of the wood. The stone behind me feels cool.’
‘Do you do anything?’
My mind went blank, I stuttered something.
‘That’s all right, Jane, open your eyes. We’ll leave it there.’
I started to raise myself up.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘am I supposed to know why Alan Martello’s novel is called The Town Drain? Is it a quotation or something?’
‘Haven’t you read it?’
‘It’s on my list.’
‘I thought everybody had read it. The title comes from something that the Reverend Spooner is supposed to have said to one of his undergraduates. It goes something like, “You have hissed all my mystery lectures and tasted a whole worm. You must leave by the town drain.” You know, the down train is the train from Oxford to London.’
‘I suppose the joke works if you’ve read the book.’
‘It’s not really a joke, it’s meant to stand for an anti-Brideshead sort of disenchantment.’
‘Well, thank you for the lecturette, Jane. Perhaps I should be paying you something.’
I raised an eyebrow.
‘Now that really is a joke,’ Alex added hastily.
Twelve
When we were little – eight or nine years old – Natalie and I used to lie in bed at night and discuss what we were going to be when we grew up. I can see her now, hugging her knees through her nightie. We were both going to be beautiful and adored and have lots of children. We would always be friends, and visit each other’s large houses in the country. Everything was possible. It never occurred to me, when I said I was going to be a singer, that my singing voice sounded like a bullfrog’s croak. An off-key croak. My mother used to play me notes on the scuffed upright piano that Dad sold after she died, and I would try to sing them back to her. When the look of encouragement on her thin face didn’t waver, but remained there like a bright flag signalling patience, I knew that I hadn’t succeeded. I relinquished the idea of being a singer, and started selecting things I was good at: drawing, writing, numbers. What could you do with numbers? Before I was ten, I knew I wanted to be an architect, like my dad. I made models from old cardboard boxes, and drew impossible plans on graph paper stolen from my father’s desk. I made futuristic apartment blocks from empty match boxes. It became my territory, the place no one else invaded.
Natalie said she wanted to be a ballet dancer at first; then an actor; then a television announcer. She wanted to be seen, looked at. As she grew older, she spent hours watching herself in mirrors, staring at her pale face, being her own audience. It didn’t seem like vanity so much as a cool self-assessment that was unnerving to someone like me. For me, mirrors were sources of rebuke or occasional consolation.
I thought of Natalie as I chose my clothes for the day. Detective Sergeant Auster was coming to see me at my office. Then I was having lunch with Paul. Would I mind, he asked me casually, if there was a research assistant there as well? His proposal had been accepted, the TV documentary was going ahead, the commissioning editor was right behind him and had already pencilled a slot into the spring schedule. I pulled a black waistcoat over a burgundy silk shirt, zipped up slim-fitting black trousers, and rummaged around for my black boots. Yes, I did mind. A panic had assailed me since finding out about Natalie’s pregnancy. Sometimes I could hardly breathe. I rode my bike along the London roads and thought, ‘No one seeing me would know that I’m living inside a fug of dread.’ I was in disguise.
When, standing in her hallway, I had told Kim about the pregnancy, her eyes had filled with tears. ‘Poor kid,’ she’d said, and her reflexive compassion had startled and shamed me. I had been trying to solve a technical problem. Had I really considered my childhood friend? Had I tried to imagine what she must have gone through? Kim interrupted my reverie.
‘There was a time when I was trying to get pregnant, you know. When I was with Francis.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘It seemed like a good idea. Nothing happened. We tried a few things, both had some tests which were inconclusive. Anyway, he’s married now with two daughters. You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?’
‘Why didn’t you tell me, Kim?’
‘I’m telling you now. It was important for me to tell you about it. I want you to know that you can lean on me because you can trust me to lean on you.’
‘But you didn’t lean on me.’
‘Don’t be silly, Jane, I’ve always depended on you.’
We hugged and I left her standing in the doorway with her funny sheepish grin on her face, but I felt dissatisfied by our talk. I thought back over our friendship of weekends away, lunches, cups of tea in greasy spoons, long walks. Was Kim right? I wondered if our relationship had consisted of me seeking support and Kim giving it to me. Even her revelation, long after its importance had passed, seemed a sop to me to encourage me to depend on her. As I cycled along the canal towpath I constructed a version of our relationship in which I was always the fallible, needy one and Kim was always the resilient free spirit. Was this what even the closest friendships were like? One who gave and one who received?
Helen Auster was alone this time. She came up the stairs to our office looking touchingly ill at ease, panting at the length of the climb and the weight of her bulky shoulder bag. We shook hands and then I led her across to my desk. She was immediately impressed by the view and I pointed out the wharf below, by the canal, showed her the direction I cycled back, then took her across to the other side to show her the tower over on the Isle of Dogs which, I told her, had somehow single-handedly managed to make the skyline of London look frivolous.
‘I like it,’ she said.
I poured us both a coffee and we sat at my desk.
‘What do you want to talk about?’ I asked. ‘Talking to the police always makes me feel guilty.’
‘I don’t think this meeting will be anything like that,’ said Helen.
‘It must be difficult to start up a murder inquiry again after a gap of twenty-five years.’
‘Between you and me,’ said Helen, ‘we’re starting from scratch. The CID back then went on considering Natalie to be a runaway. And so,’ she gave her bulging case a pat, ‘we’re doing it now.’
She unzipped her case and removed a slim file. She handed me two lots of paper, each stapled together.
‘These are two lists of names,’ she said. ‘The first is of people who were present at the party for Alan and Martha Martello on Saturday 26 July, 1969. The second is of people who were present – I mean staying at the house or in the vicinity or just visiting for the day – on the following day, the Sunday, when Natalie was last seen.’
I looked through the names. There were pages of them.
‘This is extraordinary,’ I said. ‘How did you get all these names? Was there a guest list?’
‘No, we’ve been talking to various members of the family. The most help was from Theodore Martello. I’ve seen him a few times now. He’s got the most amazing memory.’ Was she blushing?
‘He certainly has. There are names here I’ve completely forgotten. I don’t think I’ve seen William Fagles since the party. It says here that the Courtneys now live in Toronto. They were the parents of one of Natalie’s best friends. Can I have copies of these lists?’
‘These are your copies. If you could just have a look through, it may jog your memory. You’ll see that some of the guests are only identified by their first names and you may be able to complete them. You may think of some others as well.’
‘Well, for a start, the Gordon here must be Gordon Brooks. He used to be a friend of the twins.’
‘I haven’t gone through the list with them yet. But just write it in.’
‘It sounds a terribly dull process.’
‘It’s more exciting than what some of the other officers are d
oing, I can tell you.’
‘Have you talked to Alan yet?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Helen said. ‘Let me show you what I’m reading.’
She reached into her case and pulled out a bright new Penguin edition of The Town Drain.
‘Are you enjoying it?’
‘It’s wonderful. Not that I know very much about literature… but I think it’s terribly funny. Alan Martello’s so grand now, it’s hard to imagine him writing something that’s so… well, disrespectful.’
‘I don’t think he’s really all that grand.’
‘He was quite stern with me when I asked him what he was writing at the moment. You’re quite a family, aren’t you?’
‘People have always seemed to think so. If you’re going to read all the books written by members of the family, you’ll need to take a sabbatical. For a start, there are all the children’s books that Martha has illustrated. They’re quite wonderful, some of them. All the time that Alan was noisily, theatrically blocked with his writing, Martha was steadily and quietly working away.’
‘I think I’ll stick with Alan Martello for the moment. Are the rest of his books good?’
‘There is only one other novel, and a couple of short story collections. Nothing that comes near to matching up to The Town Drain. But don’t dare tell him I said so.’
We chatted for a few minutes about other things. Helen asked me about architecture and I asked her why she’d joined the police. She told me that she’d studied physics at university and then had had a vision of a life spent in a research laboratory and had suddenly rebelled against it. I liked her for that. She drank the last of her coffee.
‘I think I’d better go,’ she said. ‘Once you’ve looked through that, we could meet again, if you like. I’m down in London quite a lot at the moment.’
‘Doesn’t your husband mind?’
‘He works harder than I do.’
I walked with Helen to the top of the stairs. I had to say something. ‘Helen, twenty-five years is a long time. Is there any point to this?’
‘Of course.’
‘I thought you might be able to do a DNA test on the… you know, the baby, but Claud says you can’t after all that time.’
Helen smiled. ‘That’s right.’
‘So there’s no forensic evidence.’
‘There are one or two other possibilities. No substitute for good old-fashioned police work, though. As our Chief keeps telling us. Goodbye, Jane, see you soon.’
My father was refusing to have anything at all to do with the programme. Paul had begged and blustered, and even sent Erica round – bearing bulbs for Dad’s garden as her excuse – to put the case on his behalf. Yet it never occurred to me to turn Paul down.
I biked hurriedly through the damp air that was becoming thin drizzle to the Soho restaurant that Paul had selected. His research assistant was a young woman called Bella – very tall and skinny, with a halo of red hair and large, kohl-rimmed eyes that she kept fixed adoringly on Paul. She smoked acrid cigarettes lighting each one off the one before, drank mineral water and picked at a side salad.
Over poached eggs, I asked Paul who else he was seeing.
‘You know Dad’s not talking to me?’ I nodded. ‘But Alan’s being marvellous. I’ve already had two sessions with him. My God, he can talk. He’s grown his beard and hair longer, you know, and he’s looking gaunt and wild. He quoted poetry at me, and talked a lot about the weakest being the strongest, or something like that, and when he described our summers together it was like hearing a novel being read out.’
I pulled a face. ‘He’s spent the last couple of decades in pubs and restaurants like this, talking his novel away.’
Paul, dipping brown bread into his egg yolk and gulping red wine, took no notice.
‘He wouldn’t really talk much about Natalie, but he gave me some photographs. Martha didn’t exactly say she wouldn’t talk to me, but when I turned on the tape recorder and asked her questions, she just sort of smiled at me – this really sad, wispy smile – and shook her head. She doesn’t look a happy woman, Jane.’
‘She’s ill,’ I said, and then asked, ‘What about the others?’
‘They’ll all talk. Everybody wants to be on television. Theo considers himself real tele-guru material. Alfred and Jonah seem all set. Claud is being helpful.’ He glanced sideways at me and Bella also looked at me with curiosity. ‘It’s going to be interesting, Jane. And big too, I think. We’ll be like the Waltons.’
‘I think I will have some of that wine,’ I said. ‘What are you going to ask me then?’ Bella leant forward and clicked on the tape recorder.
‘Is that all right?’ she asked, but it was a rhetorical question. This was TV. What could I have against it?
It’s strange, alarming really, how we will talk to a tape recorder and a potential audience of anonymous unthreatening millions, the way we won’t, can’t, talk to a friend or a lover. Or a brother. Paul asked me about my memories of the Stead (‘Just tell me them at random, as they occur to you,’ he said), and as the spools on the recorder whirled, and Bella’s pen scratched busily in her notebook, I plucked forth memories I hadn’t known I’d kept. Croquet on the lawn; wild games of tag; expeditions through the woods with Claud being the leader, secret midnight feasts with food pilfered from the Stead’s generous larder, the dribbly, slack-mouthed retriever the Martellos used to have (was Candy his name?), who would jump clumsily into the stream for sticks; raspberries under a green net that we would pick on hot afternoons; jam-making days (gooseberry, blackberry, strawberry, loganberry, damson, plum), stinging sunburn when we would rub lotion into each other’s shoulders; loud lunches when we’d all show off and Alan would egg us on. I remembered early mornings, when the dew was still on the grass, and long evenings, when the grown-ups were eating their supper and we could hear the chink of knives on plates, the murmur of conversation, and we would pull wellingtons on over bare legs and run down the garden to the swing in the great copper beech tree. In these memories, we children moved as one group, the adults were always in the background, and it was always sunny. It wasn’t really what Paul wanted.
‘It’s interesting,’ said Paul, ‘that you’re only remembering when you were very little. What about later, when you were a teenager?’
Suddenly the wine turned sour in my mouth. Why was I going along with this? I wanted to stop it. ‘Do you want to talk about the summer when Natalie disappeared? Is that what you’re focusing on?’
‘Talk about it if you like.’
‘I remember your pain, Paul. I remember watching your humiliation by Natalie and wondering what to do about it and…’
‘What are you going on about?’ said Paul sharply, and Bella clicked off the tape recorder and laid down her pen. ‘What do you think you’re doing, Jane?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t play the innocent with me like that. You know, what I mean. You’re deliberately destroying the memory, aren’t you? Well, aren’t you?’
‘No,’ I replied. I pushed away my plate, sipped some more wine and lit a cigarette. I felt a bit more in control now, not so seduced by the gentle golden light of my imagined past. ‘Are you going to ignore your crush on Natalie and her cruelty towards you? It was complicated, wasn’t it? There was you and Natalie, and then Natalie and Luke, and me and Theo, and then me and Claud, and there were the twins who were so odd really, playing silly jokes, and there was Alan fucking girls while Martha cooked our meals and put plasters on our knees, and there was Mum being unhappy, and who knows what Dad felt about the whole thing?
‘And then I remember’ – I couldn’t stop now, words were spilling out of me – ‘I remember that when I was sixteen and you were eighteen, Natalie disappeared. You see this as the end of our innocence. It may be good television. Do you really believe it?’
At some point, Paul had switched on the recorder again. I could see that he was torn between personal confusion and professional interest. I w
as delivering the goods, all right. Then I said something terrible. The words were out of my mouth, and lying between us like a sword, before I’d even thought them:
‘When did you last see Natalie, Paul?’
To my surprise, Paul didn’t react with hostility. He looked at me for a few seconds, considering me, and then rolled a pellet of bread between his fingers, before leaning towards the recorder and speaking directly into it:
‘I can’t remember. It was a long time ago.’
We had coffee and Bella and I smoked another cigarette: Paul sat between two bluish clouds of smoke and asked me other questions, but the real interview was over. Soon I put on my leather jacket, kissed Paul on the cheek, nodded at Bella and left. London was grey and shabby in the wet wind, and bits of paper lay over the pavements. A woman and her child asked me for money and I gave them five pounds and she asked me for ten. Wretched world.
Thirteen
‘There’s a little bit of Alan that’s enjoying all of this.’
I was cooking supper for Kim, who’d arrived from her surgery looking exhausted and clutching two bottles of wine and some squishy packets of cheese. The potatoes were mashed, a green salad was prepared, there were fresh flowers on the table: I had someone to cook for. Kim had taken off her shoes and was padding round the kitchen in a dazed fashion, lifting up pan lids, peering into my fridge. I’d been to the supermarket on my way home from work and the fridge was satisfyingly full: tomatoes that looked suspiciously off-red, fennel bulbs, some lettuce with a funny name, a slab of Parmesan, tubs of yoghurt, fresh pasta, a packet of smoked salmon. I had resolved to be good. No more of those dinners that only had to be lit and inhaled. Most mornings, I went swimming on my way into work; most evenings, I prepared myself a proper meal.
‘How do you mean?’
She pulled a cork and poured us a glass of wine each. I took a gulp, then threw some chopped onions into a pan and started to pull the snotty slime out of a squid with my finger.
