The First Cut

by Knight, Ali

  He had had no idea how the woman would react to a delay in the job, or, God forbid, to the publicity that might be generated. She was an unknown and he was exposed, which was not a feeling he liked. For the first time in a long time, Troy had felt fear. His attempts to cash in and gather that retirement fund were looking more delusional by the minute. Bloody Struan. He had begun to feel as stressed and irritated as any other manager trying to corral inefficient and under-performing employees. Troy couldn’t share others’ pain or feel their anguish, but he could put himself in other people’s shoes on a practical level. He suspected that once this got out the woman would want to cut all ties with him as soon as possible. And Troy knew exactly how he himself would tackle that task.

  And then there was the day job. Lyndon B was still his employer. Even though he was recovering from a heart scare and was in the south of France, and so Troy didn’t have to go anywhere by plane with him, things had a funny way of travelling back to Lyndon, and he was someone Troy never wanted to get on the wrong side of. Lyndon had known Darek, the supplier of the list of hits that had led him to the woman, but Troy had no idea how they all linked up, if at all, or how Lyndon might react if he discovered what freelance work Troy had been attempting to take on the side. Trying to think through the ramifications of this had given Troy a headache of monstrous proportions.

  This was not a moment to be weak; it was a moment to be ballsy. He had watched the metal arms of the tow truck begin to tighten round the belly of his motor, the man in Day-Glo adjusting the straps. Troy currently had one advantage: no one knew what had happened – yet. He had to turn that to his favour. As his car had been hoisted off the road and out of the hedge with a tearing, metallic judder, he had made his decision.

  34

  Nicky fled back home from Liz’s house to find Greg’s car being unloaded from a recovery truck. A cheery man in overalls made her sign some papers before revving the engine and driving away with a wave.

  She sat in the living room staring at Greg’s car in the street. Liz’s words wouldn’t leave her head; her abrupt transformation was . . . horrifying. She was a guard dog snapping at anyone who got close to her brother’s secrets. But Liz had made a mistake, and now Nicky was on a trail of discovery. I am his wife, she thought with outrage; you can’t keep me out. It was time to start digging.

  She started in the study, a room she never used as she preferred to work on a laptop on the kitchen table. Greg had imposed a kind of shambolic order and she knew the photos were stored in a filing cabinet. Her drawer was the bottom one, Greg’s the top. It opened with a dependable screech and she started sorting through the mess of dog-eared envelopes filled with negatives and photos, half the packets ripped through age or neglect, stray photos or negative strips popping up at odd angles. She began to dig back through the strata of Greg’s life, the ages before digital. As she sifted, years of her husband’s life seemed to be absent, and then she’d open a package and an afternoon or an evening of the thousands that had gone unrecorded and unremarked would jump right out of the past and make itself felt. She found a fat envelope filled with photos of a single afternoon on a foreign beach: fresh-faced twenty-somethings gurned and sprawled; there were blurry shots of people moving too fast or everyone looking the wrong way; a woman in a bikini bending over to adjust a towel. She recognized no one except a shockingly young Greg: skinnier, sometimes smoking, often in sunglasses.

  A few packs further down she found a series of moody, black and white shots of Greg in a fisherman’s hat and cropped trousers. He could have been no more than twenty-five. The rococo balcony in the background and the geraniums made it unmistakably Paris. Below that she found some photos of a woman’s pubic hair triangle, and there were two shots of Greg laid out naked on a bed in a brown room, a livid sunburn on the tops of his thighs. The next photo was a blurry close-up of balls and a dick. She turned it this way and that, resisting the urge to laugh. She didn’t know if it was Greg’s or not, surprised she couldn’t remember what her husband’s own member looked like. Underneath were a few professional head shots from his agency, and then right at the bottom, in a reversal of the fresher-to-the-older order of memories were the photos of his wedding to Grace, the ones that hadn’t made the cut into the album downstairs. A lump formed at the back of her throat. She closed the drawer quickly to choke off the flashbacks.

  It struck her that she didn’t recognize many people in this drawer and the most common subject apart from Greg himself seemed to be Liz. Greg didn’t carry friends through life. In all the time she’d known him she had never met a friend from school or an old university pal. Most of his work contacts were now in the States and she’d never met them. Greg wasn’t a keeper: he shed friends and created new ones without any sense of loss or pain.

  Did this tiny sample from the complexity and length of a person’s life hold any picture of Francesca? Nothing was written on the back of any of the photos; Greg didn’t collate or organize, he wasn’t the type to alphabetize or label.

  There were almost no photos of herself, apart from their official wedding ones. She knew why: those were on the computer, sealed up in a hard drive rather than in a drawer like this. She’d drawn a blank.

  She started a hunt through Greg’s desk, inspecting filming paperwork, his tax minefield. Finding a white A4 envelope she opened it and the funeral service for Grace fell out. She froze, that hideous day jumping to clarity in her mind. She was always holding someone’s hand at that service, and other hands continually patted her on the back or gripped her shoulder, as if everyone at that funeral needed the touch of another to survive it. The only time she had stood alone, physically unsupported by someone else, was when she had followed Greg’s funeral address with her own. She still to this day did not know how she had done it.

  Or how Greg had done it. He had seemed calm, in control, adjusting his shirt sleeves under his black jacket.

  The envelope was full and she pulled out the contents: correspondence from lawyers, the copy of a writ served on a national newspaper for insinuations that could prejudice a future trial, condolence letters.

  The dam holding the tears back was beginning to crumble. What was she doing, rifling through Greg’s stuff, digging through his history, feeling grubbier and nastier the deeper she went? Finally the dam burst and she sat in the study amid all the old and yellowed paper and she wept. She wept for Grace, for the people who had loved her, and in a good dose of maudlin self-pity she wept for herself and what had happened to her over the past few days at Adam’s hands. She began to pile the paperwork back onto the desk and that was when she found it: a funeral card inside another envelope that had been thrown in amongst everything else. Another life lived, another life ended. Francesca Connor, Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, Ca, 3 September 1999. And there was Greg, giving another eulogy. Nicky had to sit down on a chair because the strength in her legs drained away. Grace and Francesca. The room seemed to still, even the dust particles rising on the summer air seemed to pause on their lazy way.

  The man who lost two blondes.

  How had Francesca died? She looked at her dates on the pale yellow card. She had been twenty-five years old. Grace had been married to Greg so he got all the official correspondence, but Francesca had been Greg’s girlfriend so, according to the law, she was still the property of her parents and Nicky found nothing more than the funeral card. What was it Liz had said? Something about jumping. She did an internet search on Francesca’s name but came up with nothing. She phoned the library at the newspaper and insisted they look in their files, claiming it was research for a story, but that also turned up a blank. She was an American citizen; finding the truth wouldn’t be easy.

  She made a cup of tea and tried to put her thoughts into some sort of coherent order. She listened to the home phone’s answering service and found a message that shocked her more than she thought possible. Greg was coming home, he said; he’d be back in London on Saturday. Something uneasy moved deep inside her.
He must have spoken to Liz. She had the sensation of being in a pincer movement, closed in by Greg on one side and Liz on the other. What was so important that he’d abandon a film shoot and come home?

  She pulled out of her pocket the photo of herself that came from Struan’s car, and stared at it again. It didn’t reveal anything at the moment, but she began to wonder if it would.

  35

  The lift door hadn’t even shut behind Nicky when Maria saw her and was up from the desk and over in a flash. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘What, not even a hello?’

  ‘The managing editor was here, asking where you were.’ Maria spoke theatrically sotto voce, looking round the desks like she was an East German spy at Checkpoint Charlie.

  ‘I sprained my ankle.’

  Maria sighed and tapped the side of her head. ‘You left me a message that you were ill. At least keep to the right cover story.’

  Nicky stood and drank in the image of Maria, stressing before 9.30 a.m. She reached out and gave her a spontaneous hug. ‘You have no idea how happy I am to see you and to be back.’

  ‘It’s too early for sarcasm,’ Maria snapped. ‘Now put your back into that limp, Nics. Wince a bit more. Oh, and your phone’s finally arrived. It’s on your desk. That bloke with the pimples in Accounts brought it up. Isn’t that nice?’

  Three hours later Nicky was editing the early career of a lord who founded an ethnographic museum in Cairo. It really was good to be back. She craved work to stop her mind going crazy thinking over the madness of the past week. Last night had been sleepless as she tossed and turned, trying to process the revelations about Greg’s previous girlfriend, and Adam’s actions and her reaction to them.

  Maria clunked the phone receiver back into the cradle and groaned. ‘It’s a freelancer chasing a late payment. It’s all bloody Accounts’ fault. I don’t write the cheques, but they phone me when their money hasn’t arrived.’

  ‘And you get shouted at.’

  ‘Oh, quite the contrary. She’s always so polite, so apologetic that she’s bothering me, which makes me feel even worse. We both know that underneath she’s seething with resentment that her pay has stayed the same for the last ten years. She should be giving an earful to Bill Gates, or online news sites, or Twitter or something, though I’d like her to find a phone number for them any time soon.’

  ‘Any more rumours while I was away?’

  Maria waved her hand dismissively. ‘Oh the usual threat of further “reduced head count”. We’re not even complete bodies any more.’

  ‘We’re the past, aren’t we?’ Nicky said, looking with regret round the office.

  Maria waved her finger in a note of caution. ‘Careful. The past can be more trouble than you might think.’ She leaned forward, a glint of defiance in her eyes. ‘And it fights dirtier. This old dinosaur would love to be too much trouble to sack.’

  Nicky was thinking about past secrets, was thinking that she needed to talk to Maria and unburden herself, when she saw Bruton, the news editor, leaning on the back of an office chair and pushing it like a Zimmer with wheels across a large area of carpet where a phalanx of sub-editors used to sit before their work was outsourced to Shipton-on-Stour. Bruton was back from a fag break. She got up and joined him.

  ‘Feeling better, Nicky?’ he asked half-heartedly, his voice like a stone grinding flour.

  ‘Yes, I sprained my ankle, but it’s much better now, thank you.’ He nodded. ‘I need a favour.’

  ‘Mm?’

  She followed him and the office-chair Zimmer back to his desk, which was dominated by a large ornamental glass ashtray brimming with paperclips and bits of gnawed pen and chewing-gum wrappers. It looked almost insulted at being used as a receptacle for desk junk. ‘I really need your help.’

  Bruton looked up at her, she was much taller than him, or maybe he was just so stooped that it seemed that way. ‘That’s a first.’

  ‘Indeed.’ She smiled. Bruton didn’t suffer fools so it was better simply to ask. ‘You used to work the crime beat, I hear,’ she said, pulling up an office chair and sitting across the desk from him.

  ‘Crime beat! You make it sound like I was here back in the 1930s!’

  ‘You weren’t?’ He began coughing in reply. ‘I need to find out where someone lives.’

  ‘Is this for work?’

  ‘No.’

  Bruton shook his head. ‘You know I can’t do that, Nicky. There are processes, security procedures—’

  ‘Get a contact of yours to do it.’

  He paused to sit down in his chair, twisting slowly this way and that. ‘Why do you need it?’

  ‘So I can kill them, of course.’ She paused for a beat. ‘But I didn’t say that.’

  Bruton smiled and tapped the edge of the ashtray with his finger, as if knocking ash off a phantom fag. ‘I really can’t do it, Nicky.’

  ‘Of course. But you’ll do it anyway.’

  Bruton opened a new chewing-gum pack and put one of the rectangles into his mouth. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Because you and I are very similar.’ Bruton guffawed loudly. ‘I’m an addict.’ Bruton looked surprised. ‘I’m addicted to passion, intrigue, pointless high and lows, fleeting romances, none of which are good for me.’ She paused. ‘And I know you know all about addiction, Bruton.’

  It was cheesy and lame but she hoped he’d go for it, and deep down she wondered if there was a grain of truth about what she was saying. Why else would she have gone on such a mad and reckless test of her marriage if she wasn’t some of those things? She had been, at least, very severely punished for it.

  Bruton grunted and coughed. He held up his right hand so she could see the yellow stain between his fingers no soap or pumice stone could remove. ‘I’ve smoked forty a day since I was probably sixteen years old. I once worked out that I must have smoked at least half a million cigarettes in my lifetime. I’ve spent about three years of my life smoking.’ He paused and shook his head slowly. ‘And by God, I’ve enjoyed every single minute.’

  Nicky picked up the glass ashtray and tipped the cluttery contents into the waste bin next to the desk. She buffed the glass with the edge of her shirt and put it back, pride of place on his desk.

  Bruton shifted slowly in his chair. ‘You know, that ashtray was given to me by a famous footballer back in the days when I covered sport. We must have put fifteen cigarettes in it during that one interview alone.’

  Nicky stood up, reached across the desk and patted Bruton on the shoulder. ‘If we can’t beat it, at least we can enjoy it,’ and she handed him the bit of paper with the name on it.

  Two hours later he passed her desk on the way to the lift, an unlit fag dangling from his lips, and wiped down a Post-it with an address in Hackney on it. ‘This is ten years of purgatory for me,’ Bruton said.

  ‘I’ll buy you some duty-free when I next go through,’ she said. For the first time all day, her biceps didn’t ache.

  The flat was in a red-brick mansion block with iron railings leading up a small flight of stairs to a communal door. The door was once fitted with small coloured squares of glass but the panes near the lock were a variety of cheap clear-glass replacements after numerous break-ins. There were eight doorbells on a panel on the left, with various surnames taped next to some of the bells. Nicky rang but there was no answer so she waited across the street in an entrance to some public gardens. She heard the slap-slap of flip-flops on a variety of young women, then a couple of young men in Hawaiian shorts strode by, followed by a hobbling wino. Windows screeched open, doors banged. There was activity aplenty in this street, a contrast to the quiet opulence where she lived with Greg. She had never even seen her neighbours on one side. She once saw a Daimler slide out of their car parking space, and that was the sum total of her interaction with her neighbours. She was trying to decide if this was a problem when a moped drew up and a girl in hot pants and ballet flats flicked down the stand and got off. Nicky peeled he
r back off the wall, her senses tingling.

  The girl took off her helmet and ruffled her hair back down. Caught unawares Bea looked like an extra from Roman Holiday. She picked her hot pants out of the crack of her bum, then did a little youthful jump up the steps and unlocked the door. A moment later Nicky crossed the street and rang a variety of doorbells until she found someone to let her in.

  Bea’s flat was on the first floor. Thrash metal blared out from behind it. She had to knock loudly three times before Bea heard her and opened the door. Nicky jammed her foot in the entrance before Bea had a chance to slam it back in her face. Bea’s mouth was a mean line, her eyes narrowing dangerously.

  ‘Get your foot out of my door.’ She had to shout over the music.

  ‘Let me in.’

  ‘Piss off.’

  ‘You’re lucky you’re not in jail,’ Nicky shouted. ‘I could have had you arrested for that stunt you pulled at the river. You’re going to talk to me, however long it takes.’ Bea tried to stare her out, but after a long moment she gave a sarcastic little laugh and opened the door. Nicky followed her into a living room and watched as Bea sank into a low sofa covered by a throw, under a dirty window. She tucked her legs underneath her like a fawn and started fiddling with an earring.

  ‘Turn the music off.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Turn the music off.’ Nicky said it louder this time.