by Nicci French
I turned, shivering in the flurries of wind, drops of moisture threatening rain, that now blew against me. The black dress was pressed against my body, my sexually awakened body, the breasts and thighs now somebody else’s as well as my own. I felt a cold clarity of purpose. Cree’s Top was ahead of me, the river lapping down on the bank by my right foot. I began to run up the narrow, steep path and into the wood and gorse that covered this lump of nature. There were sounds, not of birds or of the wind or the stream but strange creakings and whistlings and groans. I paid them no attention. I ran and could hear myself panting and feel the pain in my constricted chest. The trees around me looked dead, the bushes bare, the river below me on my right, brown and sluggish. My duty now was not to think and reason but to proceed regardless. Branches scratched my face, thorns tore me, my clothes snagged. I had reached the summit of Cree’s Top and ran across and began to make my way down the slope on the other side. On Natalie’s side. Through the bushes ahead I saw movement, fragmentary glimpses between branches, I heard screams, unintelligible shouts. My decision had already been made. I ran forward and burst through the bushes into the sunlight.
For the first moment I could see nothing with the sun burning my eyes, nothing but speckled gold explosions. I narrowed my gaze and forced myself to look. It was clear. Simultaneous perceptions: A girl lying on the grass. Screaming and screaming. Natalie. Dark hair, flaming eyes. Held down. Above her was a man, his hands about her throat. Her arms and legs flapped uselessly, then slowed and stopped. I tried to shout but it was as if my mouth was stopped with ashes. I tried to run, but my feet were stone blocks. The girl was let fall and lay still. The man had his back to me. He was dark haired, not grey. He was slim not stout. He was clean-shaven, not bearded. But there was no doubt. It was Alan.
Suddenly, I was screaming and screaming and I was being gripped and it was Alex and he was holding me tight and whispering in my ear. I pulled myself up. My hair was streaked over my face. I was spent. I had been skinned and turned inside out. I said I was going to be sick, now, and Alex reached for the wastebasket and I retched and then vomited and vomited, emptying myself. I lay back on the couch, stretched out, helpless, snotty, spots of vomit on my face, tear-stained, groaning, crying, gasping. Utterly spent, disgraced, appalled.
I felt a voice, intimate in my ear:
‘You got there, Jane. You’re all right. You’re safe.’
Twenty-Seven
I woke up in my own bed, didn’t know how I’d got there. Yes, Alex had brought me in his car. Had I made a scene and scared his children? My bike must still be locked to a parking meter outside his house. I picked up the alarm clock. Almost ten o’clock. Morning or evening? Must be morning. If it was night, it would be twenty o’clock. No, twenty-two. There was something on the edge of my consciousness not wanting to be thought about. I made myself think about it. I had to be quick to get to the lavatory. I leant into the bowl and retched and retched, bringing up nothing but a few hot, stinging splashes.
I washed around my mouth with a flannel. I was still wearing my clothes. I let them fall where I stood and stepped into the shower. Very hot water followed by very cold water. I dressed myself in jeans and an old corduroy shirt. My fingers trembled so much I could hardly fasten the buttons. I decided that I should eat something and went down to the kitchen. There were two bags of coffee beans in my freezer and I chose the darker ones. I filled a large cafetière. After hunting round a bit, I found an unopened packet of cigarettes in the pocket of the coat I’d been wearing the previous night. I emptied the cafetière, cup by cup, and smoked my way through the packet.
The phone rang a few times and I heard various voices on the answering machine. Duncan, Caspar, my father. I would deal with them later, some other day. When I heard Alex Dermot-Brown’s voice, I ran across the room and picked up the receiver. He was concerned about me. He asked if I was all right and then said he wanted me to come round. Straight away, if possible. I said I’d be there in an hour. It was cold outside but bright, sunny. I put on a long napping coat, wound a scarf about my neck, put a flat cap on my head and set off for the Heath. The wind blew about me in gusts and when I reached the top of Kite Hill, London was miraculously clear at my feet. I could see right across it to the Surrey hills beyond. I walked down and left the Heath at Parliament Hill and passed the Royal Free hospital. Claud had told me about a mental patient there who had been possessed by a neurotic compulsion to count the number of windows. Since he never achieved the same figure twice, it was an eternal task.
The things we do to give order to our lives. I had once read a poem about a man arrested for filling in the ‘o’s in library books. Did he think of all the ‘o’s that he had filled in, or all the ‘o’s that he hadn’t? It was a long, hard trek and I was out of breath by the time I knocked at Alex’s door. All the cigarettes. I almost laughed as I caught myself resolving to give up. Not yet. Not yet.
When the door opened, Alex surprised me, almost overwhelmed me, by taking me in his arms and holding me tight to him, murmuring comforting words in my ear as if I was one of his little children, scared of the dark. It was what I wanted more than anything else in the world. After the reassurance, his look turned serious as he asked me once more if I was all right.
‘I don’t know. I’ve been vomiting and I still feel sick. My head feels like somebody’s trying to inflate it with a bicycle pump.’
Alex smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s just what I would expect. It’s like a fever breaking. Think of it as your body trying to expel a quarter of a century of poisons and impurities that have been trapped inside you. You’re purifying yourself.’
‘Am I going mad, Alex?’
‘You’re becoming sane. You’re discovering the agony of a life without illusions.’
‘But Alex, can it be true? Can it really be true? Could a man like Alan have got his own daughter pregnant? Could he have killed her?’
Very gently, Alex held my face in his hands and looked closely in my eyes.
‘You’re the one, Jane, who has broken through all the barriers and lies to uncover this. You’ve made the journey, Jane. You tell me, do you think it’s impossible that he could have done this?’
It seemed an immense effort to reply. I stepped back and his hands dropped away from me. I slowly shook my head.
‘No,’ I said in little more than a whisper. ‘I don’t think it’s impossible.’
A couple of minutes later I was back on the couch and Alex was in his chair. I started trying to reconstruct the details of what had happened all those years before but Alex was firm. All that could wait, he said. Instead he talked to me softly, as he had so often before, and he took me back into my memory, back to the scene of the murder. During that session and again during another on the following day, and again on the day after that, he took me over and over the events and they became clearer and more precise. It was like a photographic image that already seemed satisfactory coming more and more into focus, bringing with it new details and nuances. I saw Natalie struggling, I could see what she was wearing, from that familiar braided hair-band to the black plimsolls that I always associate with her. I could see Alan, strong and heavy, holding her down, grasping her throat, tightening his grip until all movement ceased.
‘Couldn’t I have done something?’
‘What could you have done? Your mind saved you by shielding you from the horror of what happened. Now we’ve broken through that shield.’
I found the process of reliving the event unspeakably harsh. The crime was so vivid and violent, and I was so close – just metres away in the bushes – that I felt I could intervene, do something, maybe just shout. But I knew that I had not intervened and that it was now beyond my power and that there was nothing to be done. The shock and pain remained constant. There was no coming to terms, no catharsis, no getting beyond the pain or working my way through it. I achieved no distance from the events, I was not able to think about them in a balanced way. These were
days of sobbing, retching grief, of smoking instead of eating, of drinking on my own at home.
Sprinkle some celery salt into the jug, followed by a few twists of black pepper, three splashes of Tabasco, an improbable amount of Lea & Perrins, the juice of half a lemon and a shake of tomato ketchup. Always begin with the cheapest ingredients. If you are using a whole litre carton of tomato juice, as I was, you will need a good tumbler of iced Russian vodka. Finally, the secret ingredient: half a wineglass of dry sherry. A handful of ice in your chunky tumbler and you have a drink substantial enough to replace dinner. A middle-period Bartok string quartet would have suited my mood but I listened to Rigoletto. Woman is mobile. This one wasn’t. I had gone inside myself and been horrified by what I had found. Outside was cold and dark. I would have to go out there soon and deal with things in the world. That was next.
When I had drained the last watery little puddle from my glass, I decided to go outside. Everything had to be done with utmost care. It was cold. I put on a sweater. I put on a coat and a hat. I found my keys and my purse and put them in the pocket of the coat. Outside, the icy air cleared my head a little. I had destroyed my marriage. I had done God-knows-what to my children. I had damaged my own mental health. I had uncovered horrors. People I loved were already appalled by my actions. What catastrophe was I now going to inflict on the family that meant more to me than anything in the world? The wind was blowing stingingly cold drops of rain into my face. Life had become horrible for me.
I was walking past shops now. A man, his hair in long matted ringlets, sat outside the supermarket with a mangy pathetic-looking dog of indeterminate breed. His hand was extended towards me. This was what happened to people who removed themselves from the world of family and society and work. I opened my purse and found a coin which I gave him, holding it precisely between two fingers so that I wouldn’t fumble it.
I knew that I was projecting my misery out onto the world – however miserable some of its individual components might have been in their own right – so that I wasn’t all that surprised when I stood in front of the TV rental shop and saw images of Alan mouthing silently on a dozen screens. There was the patriarch, justifying himself in words that I couldn’t understand. For a moment, I thought that I had gone entirely mad, that the real world and the worlds of my memories and my nightmares had become one and that Alan had defeated me, utterly and finally. Then I remembered.
‘Oh, fuck.’
I looked around, dazed but shocked into action. I saw a yellow ‘For Hire’ sign and flagged the taxi down. I gave a Westbourne Grove address. As we drove towards Swiss Cottage, Paddington and beyond, I held my face against the ferocious blast at the open window.
‘All right, love?’ the driver asked.
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak coherently. When I knocked at the door, Erica let me in.
‘It’s almost over,’ she said. ‘Drink?’
‘Water,’ I replied as I followed her up the stairs.
‘Off the drink?’
‘On it.’
She ushered me into a dark room, lit only by a vast television screen. The chairs were all occupied by indistinguishable silhouettes and I found myself a spot on the floor. Erica handed me something that rattled. My water. I held the damp glass against my forehead. I had thought of Paul’s documentary about our family as a series of interviews. I hadn’t prepared myself for what it would actually look like. When I started to pay attention to what was happening there was a photograph of Natalie on the screen, a hazy blow-up of a class picture that didn’t do her justice. Someone was saying something about the lost spirit of the sixties, Jonah, I think, but it may have been Fred. From Natalie, the image changed to a picture of the Stead, seen, I guessed, from Chantry’s Hill. At first, I thought it too was a photograph, but there were tiny things, a tremble of the camera, barely distinguishable flutters of leaves, shimmers of light, that showed this was being filmed. The camera began to move until it settled on Paul. He was looking down on the house, his face hidden from us. Then he turned and began to walk, accompanied by the camera. He addressed it as if it was a friend. What a pro.
Paul talked about the family as home and home as the place where, when you go there, they have to let you in; the family as the symbol of our affections; and the family as the symbol of society with its ties and obligations. I found it a bit difficult to concentrate, befuddled as I was, but I understood that he was telling some story from his golden childhood. At the moment he finished the story he came to a halt. The camera pulled back from his face and we could see that he had reached the spot where Natalie’s body had been discovered. The hole was still there and he stood looking soulful. The camera pulled back and back until it could take in the whole scene: pensive Paul peering into the hole, the Stead, early morning sunlight, a tweeting bird. Some Delius-style music struck up and the credits began to roll. Someone switched the light on.
‘Where were you?’ Paul nudged me from behind.
‘Sorry.’
‘I’m glad you saw the final sequence though,’ he said. ‘That was a real tour de force. Four and a half minutes without a cut. I walked all the way down the hill, and hit the mark at the moment I finished the reminiscence. It’s the most technically demanding thing I’ve ever tried. When I said cut, even the technicians applauded. But I want you to see the whole thing. I’ll get a tape sent round.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to go now.’
‘You’ve only just arrived, Jane. There are people I want you to meet.’
‘I’ve got to go now.’
I hadn’t even taken my hat or coat off, so I walked straight down the stairs and out. I thought I might have spent the last of my money on the taxi but I didn’t check. I walked all the way home. I went through Regent’s Park on the way. It took me an hour and a half and I was bleakly sober by the time I unlocked my front door.
Twenty-Eight
When I got up the next morning, after a night of lurching dreams, I felt so dizzy and sick that I had to hold onto the edge of the bed and breathe deeply for several seconds. In the long mirror facing me I saw an ageing and distraught figure with a chalky face and unwashed hair. I hadn’t eaten properly for days, and my mouth tasted of decay. A week before, I had kissed Caspar and felt my body come alive. This scrawny woman staring at me was a different person altogether, shuffling and sickly, belonging to dark corners.
The image of Alan’s stooped figure wouldn’t go away. I saw him; I saw him as clear as ever. I didn’t need Alex’s help any longer. The monster had come out of its hiding place, into the glare of day. I wouldn’t be able to push him back again. I remembered everything. I had witnessed a murder, a double murder, and now I witnessed it once again. I could watch myself watching. I took shallow, queasy breaths, and saw Alan standing over Natalie, triumphant and appalled.
I put on my dressing-gown, and went to the kitchen, where I ground coffee beans and made myself two pieces of toast. I smeared them with butter and marmalade, sat at the table and stared at them. After five minutes, I took a bite. Then another. It felt like grit. I chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed. Nausea hit me again, and beads of sweat broke out on my cold forehead. I rushed to the bathroom, where I was sick until my throat hurt and eyes stung.
I ran a bath and scrubbed myself. I brushed my teeth, but could still taste the vomit and the panic in my mouth. I lit a cigarette and filled my lungs with ash. Ashes to ashes.
I dressed in black jeans and a black polo-neck sweater. I brushed my hair back from my face. I sat on a chair in the kitchen and drank cooling brackish coffee, smoked another cigarette and stared out of the window at the rain which made the untended garden look grainy. It was nine o’clock and I had no idea how to get through the rest of the day. The rest of my life.
I rang Kim at work. She was busy with a patient, so I left a message to call. ‘As soon as possible. Please,’ I said. My voice was a croaky whisper. The receptionist probably thought that I was dying. Another cigaret
te. I heard the mail plop through the letter box onto the hall floor, but I didn’t move. My body was heavy and hollow. The phone rang.
‘Jane.’
I opened my mouth but I couldn’t speak.
‘Jane. It’s Kim, Jane, tell me what’s happening.’
‘Oh Go-o-o-od!’ Was that thin wail coming from me?
‘Jane, listen, I’m coming over. Don’t move. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. All right? Fifteen minutes. It’s going to be all right.’
‘I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you. Oh God. I can’t.’
‘Drink your tea, Jane.’
I sipped obediently and grimaced: it was milky and sweet, food for a baby.
‘Now, I’m going to ask you some questions, okay?’ I nodded.
‘Is it to do with Natalie?’
I nodded.
‘Do you think you know something about Natalie’s death?’
I nodded again.
‘Do you think you know who the murderer is?’
Nod.
‘Have you arrived at this through your therapy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Listen, Jane, will you tell me who you think murdered Natalie, but remember, telling doesn’t make it any truer.’
‘I – I – oh Christ, oh Jesus Christ, Kim, I can’t.’
‘You can. Is it one of your family?’
‘Of my extended family, yes.’
‘Tell me the name, Jane.’
I couldn’t say his name. I used a word that didn’t seem to fit him: ‘My father-in-law.’
My father-in-law. My father’s best friend. My sons’ grandfather. The man I had known all my life, and who, until a few weeks ago, I casually would have said that I loved. As I gasped it out to Kim, I could see his leering face.
