by Nicci French
‘Ellie, you didn’t!’
‘I told this woman officer I was convinced my husband wasn’t having an affair. She didn’t seem to believe me. I don’t think she thought it even mattered whether he was or not. The case was closed. This wasn’t something she wanted to hear about. But if I showed those charts to the police, do you think it would make a difference?’
Gwen frowned at the charts for a long time. ‘Honestly?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘This is amazing,’ she said. ‘Scary but amazing. I don’t think the police would pay much attention to it, but if they did, they might say, “Perhaps he was seeing the woman while he was doing other things. Perhaps she met him while he was buying his sandwich, perhaps she went with him in the car to his meetings. Or you might be right. Maybe they didn’t meet in that month. She could have been away and they were meeting up again on the day they crashed.”’
I took a deep breath. My first impulse was to be angry with Gwen, to shout at her and show her the door, but I stopped myself. She might have humoured me. Instead she had said what she really thought.
‘And if they said anything,’ Gwen continued, ‘it would be that you’re ignoring the only piece of evidence that really matters, which is that Greg and the woman died together. What in the end can you really say to that?’
I thought for a moment. ‘That it’s difficult to be innocent,’ I said. ‘And to prove you’re innocent is impossible.’
Chapter Eleven
I knew before I rang the bell and knocked with the heavy brass ring that no one was there: there were no lights on in any of the windows, no car parked in the driveway; the house had an unoccupied look. But I stood, stamping my feet in the cold, waiting to make sure. I opened the letterbox and saw only the polished floor. I peered through the downstairs window and saw the tidy, empty living room, the swept hearth, the gleaming top of a grand piano with photographs on top in silver frames. It was too arranged and perfect, like a stage set rather than a home. I wondered what Hugo Livingstone was feeling now. Was he lonely, angry, sad? Did he think about Greg as I thought about Milena, with hatred, jealousy and puzzlement? Did he think about me? Did he know something I didn’t?
That morning, when I had sat over my unsatisfactory breakfast of slightly stale bread and the last scrapings of marmalade, I had decided I needed to look at the picture from the other side. I had examined Greg’s life and found nothing, but what about Milena’s? Although to say that I had ‘decided’ is inaccurate, because what had actually happened was that I had drifted round the house, at a loss as to what to do with myself, picking things up and putting them down, opening the fridge and closing it, shuffling out through the garden, which was neglected and piled with soggy leaves, unlocking the shed door and gazing at the furniture waiting for my attention. Then I’d put on my coat, wrapped a scarf round my neck and walked to the Underground station, without even saying to myself that I was going back to the Livingstones’ house and certainly without knowing what I hoped to find there. Silvio, smiling sarcastically, a signed and dated love letter from Greg to Milena, with a photo of the besotted couple together? His father, assuring me that his wife had never had an affair with Greg and he could prove it with – with what? Nothing could prove that.
There I was, on a damp, grey November morning, staring at the blank windows of the large house and wondering miserably what to do next. Because I couldn’t return to my own small, cold house and deal with the things that were piling up: bills, letters, phone messages, laundry, dead leaves, broken chairs, dust, dirt and drabness. I found myself consulting my map and walking the half-mile or so from the Livingstone house to the address of Party Animals, the business Milena and her partner had run together.
I’d looked at the company website, read about parties at the Tower of London and the zoo, fancy-dress balls, colour-coordinated golden weddings, Burns Night celebrations, with haggis created especially for people who didn’t like haggis, and dinners for your most valued clients with six elegant courses. I thought about the parties Greg and I had had – you invite people round at the last moment to squash into the front room, ask them to bring wine, then cook chilli con carne and garlic bread, put on some music and see what happens.
Tulser Road was a quiet residential street just down from Vauxhall Bridge. It didn’t look like the kind of place for offices and, indeed, number eleven was clearly just a house, like the other houses on either side: large and semi-detached, with a side alley leading to its garden, a basement floor and bay windows. There was only one bell, and no sign saying that this was where exciting and original happenings, tailor-made to suit every individual customer, were organized. But there were lights on in the downstairs window; someone was there, at least. I raised my hand to ring the bell and saw my wedding ring. I looked at it for a moment, almost dispassionately, as if it had suddenly appeared. In fact I hadn’t taken it off since – with a great deal of effort – Greg had pushed it over my knuckle in the register office. I had thought it would be difficult to get off but I’d lost weight and it made no resistance. It was an object now, not part of me. I put it into my purse and rang the bell.
The woman who answered the door was slightly older than I had expected; she was tall and slender, with long legs and unexpectedly full breasts. Her highlighted blonde hair was cut short in a chic style with soft wisps framing her triangular face. Her pale skin was just beginning to line, and she wore thick, rectangular specs. She had on beautifully tailored black trousers and a pale blue linen shirt, tiny studs in her ears and a thin silver chain round her neck. If she was wearing makeup, it was the invisible kind. There was a classy look to her, a restrained and intelligent attractiveness that I liked immediately.
‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Can I help you?’ Her voice was low and husky; her manner was polite, but a little impatient. From somewhere in the house there was a loud bang, the sound of something dropped. I saw her wince and bite her lip.
‘Is this where Party Animals is run from?’
‘That’s right. Are you planning an event?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve come about Milena Livingstone.’
I saw her eyes widen and then she made a visible effort to control herself. She reminded me of me. I recognized the weary sense that the story would have to be told yet again.
‘Are you a friend of hers?’ Without giving me time to answer, she said, ‘Didn’t you know?’
There was a fraction of a moment when I could have said, yes, I knew, because the man she died with was my husband. But something stopped me. ‘Know what?’ I said.
‘Come in for a second. Sorry, my name’s Frances Shaw.’
She held out a hand and I shook it. Her grip was warm, strong; I saw that her nails were painted the palest pink. I stepped over the threshold and she shut the door behind us, then led me along a corridor.
‘Better come downstairs into the office, if you can call it that. I’m in total chaos, I’m afraid.’ She led me into the basement, a large room with a long table in the centre; on its surface were several roughly stacked heaps of paper and files. There was a sofa covered with brochures and a desk pushed up against the wall, also piled high with folders.
A phone was ringing and a young woman, with dramatically dark eye-shadow and very high-heeled boots, came out of the adjoining room. ‘Shall I get that?’ she asked.
‘No, let the machine answer it,’ said Frances. ‘I tell you what, though, Beth, perhaps you could make us a cup of coffee. If you want coffee, that is,’ she added, turning to me.
‘Coffee would be lovely.’ I was a bit dazed.
‘Have a seat.’ Frances scooped up the brochures from the sofa, looked at them helplessly, then laid them on the floor. ‘When did you last see Milena?’
‘I don’t want to give you the wrong impression…’ I said.
The phone rang again and then her mobile, which was lying on the table. ‘Damn. Sorry. I’ll be with you in a second.’ She flipped it open and turned away from me
. I heard her murmuring something. Upstairs, cupboard doors banged and Beth’s heels clicked across the floor. I sat on the sofa, taking off my jacket. The warm, cluttered room was like a nest.
Frances snapped shut her mobile and sat beside me. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t heard. I’m so sorry to have to tell you that Milena died.’
That was my last chance to say who I was, but I didn’t. I wasn’t even sure why. Perhaps it was a relief to be the onlooker for a while, rather than the victim.
‘Oh!’ I said, and rubbed my face because I wasn’t sure what my expression should be.
‘This must be a shock.’
‘I wasn’t exactly close to her,’ I said, which was true.
‘She died recently in a car crash.’
‘How terrible,’ I muttered. I felt like an actor, saying lines that made little sense to me.
‘It was awful. She was with a man.’ There was a pause. ‘Someone nobody knew even existed.’
‘So young,’ I said. The possibility of putting Frances straight receded, and then – as she told me Milena’s husband and her step-children were coping as well as could be expected and I expressed sympathy – it vanished altogether.
‘Hence the chaos,’ said Frances, gesturing at the room.
‘It must be hard for you,’ I said. ‘Were you close?’
‘When you work together the way we did, you have to be close.’ She grimaced. ‘For better or worse. She wasn’t exactly…’
Frances stopped herself. I wondered what she’d been going to say. What wasn’t Milena? I wanted to ask what she had been like, but I was supposed to know that. So instead I nodded and said, ‘Yes,’ in an I-know-just-what-you-mean kind of way.
The door was flung open and Beth tottered in, carrying a tray on which there were a cafetière, two mugs, a milk jug, a bowl of sugar lumps and a plate of biscuits. As she approached she stepped on a file and stumbled. She tried to keep control but disaster was inevitable, as in the seconds after a building has been dynamited from beneath. There was a moment of quiet and then it got noisy and messy. The cafetière banged on to the wooden boards and exploded, sending arcs of coffee everywhere; the jug shattered and a river of milk ran across the floor towards Frances; the mugs broke on impact and shards skidded across the room; sugar lumps bounced up at surprising angles.
‘Fuck,’ said Beth, from the floor. ‘Oh, fuck and fuck.’
‘Are you hurt?’ said Frances. She didn’t seem particularly surprised, just very, very tired.
‘Sorry,’ said Beth, scrambling to her feet with an expression of almost comical surprise. ‘It’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it?’
‘Let me help,’ I said.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Frances.
I took Beth’s arm.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Show me where your cleaning stuff is.’
‘Would you? That’s really kind. There’s a mop in the tall cupboard in the kitchen, paper towels in a dispenser, and a dustpan and brush under the sink.’
We went upstairs into the long kitchen that smelt of coffee and fresh-baked bread. When we returned, Frances was on the phone, protesting about something. When she’d hung up, she took off her glasses to rub her eyes.
‘Trouble at work?’ I laid wads of kitchen towel over the puddles of milk and coffee and started to pick up pieces of glass and china and drop them into a bag. Beth hovered round me, avoiding broken china.
‘What I need,’ said Frances, ‘is the world to stop for about a week while I get the backlog sorted out and my life in some kind of order. Milena – may she rest in peace – wasn’t the most organized of women. I keep discovering things she’s done or promised that there’s no record of. At least,’ she glanced round the room, ‘no record that I can lay my hands on.’ She watched me as I picked up the sugar lumps one by one, swept up the biscuit crumbs, picked up the mass of sodden kitchen roll and dumped it in a bin-bag. ‘You shouldn’t be doing this.’
‘I quite like clearing up mess,’ I said. ‘With your work, though, you should chunk it up. You can’t clear it all at once. Maybe you should get extra help in, for the time being at least.’
‘I can’t do any more,’ said Beth, grumpily.
‘I wouldn’t expect you to,’ said Frances.
I gathered some loose sheets of paper from the floor. ‘What do you want me to do with these?’
‘Nothing. You’ve done more than enough as it is. I’ll sort them out later.’
‘I can put them into piles for you, if you want. I’m quite good at organizing stuff.’
‘I couldn’t possibly ask you to do that.’
‘You’re not asking. I’m offering. I’m not doing anything right now. I’m…’ I hesitated… ‘between jobs.’
‘You’d do that?’ For a moment she looked as though she was about to burst into tears or hug me.
‘Just to sort this lot out. After all, it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t offered me coffee.’
Beth pottered around to not very much effect while Frances and I sorted the papers: venues, catering companies that Party Animals used, parties being planned, quotations. There was nothing that gave me any hint of the personal life of Milena Livingstone, although there were papers with her dashingly scrawled signature, and Frances referred to the dozens of sympathy letters she’d received and hadn’t yet replied to.
Beth made coffee in a jug and brought it in mug by mug, with an air of triumph. I felt strangely, absurdly relaxed, even though I was there under false pretences. It was a relief to be helping someone instead of being the one in need. Maybe it also felt good to have a holiday from being me, the grieving widow and ‘betrayed wife’, pitied friend with a great big bee in her bonnet. When the time came for me to go, Frances, seeming slightly embarrassed but also a bit desperate, asked if there was any chance I could pop back. I replied, trying to sound casual, that I’d be glad to help out and suggested the next day.
‘Yes, great,’ said Frances. ‘Oh, Lord, that’s amazing. You’re my saviour. I was on the point of – Hang on, I don’t even know your name.’
And I answered, without a beat, ‘Gwen. Gwen Abbott.’
Chapter Twelve
As soon as I arrived home, I looked up Gwen’s name in the phone book. It wasn’t there, probably because she teaches maths in a secondary school. If her name was in the book her phone would never stop ringing: what’s the homework for tomorrow? I can’t do question three. Why did my child fail his exam? And, now, baffling messages from the party-organizing company she didn’t know she worked for.
Then I looked up Hugo Livingstone and, before I could stop myself, punched in his number. On the second ring it was answered by a woman with a strong Eastern European accent.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Could I speak to Hugo Livingstone?’
‘He’s not here.’
‘When would be a good time to call back?’
‘He will be away for many days. He is in America.’
‘Oh. Sorry to have troubled you.’
I put a baking potato into the oven, poured myself a glass of wine and then another as I thought about what I had done. Had I committed a crime? I didn’t think so. As long as I wasn’t doing it to perpetrate a fraud or theft, I couldn’t actually be arrested. Was that right?
Was I being dishonest? Well, obviously.
Was it morally wrong to give a false name, and not just a false name, a name that belonged to somebody else, in fact, to one of my best friends? But, then, borrowing a name wasn’t like borrowing a sweater without asking. I wasn’t depriving Gwen of it. I wasn’t going to damage it or get it dirty. I had misled Frances and Beth. But if I had been open about who I was, they might have thought I was insane. Which brought me to the question…
Was I insane? Or had I just done an insane thing? Or both? Or neither? And if I was insane, could I myself tell – from the inside, as it were?
After an hour or so, I took the baked potato out of the oven and mashe
d it with lots of butter, then sprinkled it with salt and pepper. I ate the soft inside first, then the crunchy skin. It was delicious. The phone rang.
‘Where the hell are you?’ Mary said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re coming here for dinner,’ she said.
‘Am I?’
‘I asked you several days ago. You said yes.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘We’re all about to sit down.’
‘All?’
‘There are seven of us. Or, rather, there will be when you get here.’
‘Ten minutes,’ I said. ‘Fifteen at the most.’
I was absolutely sure Mary hadn’t asked me. On the other hand, such was the chaos of my life, the fact that I was absolutely sure didn’t necessarily mean she hadn’t asked me. Every impulse in my mind and body was screaming at me not to go. What I really wanted was a bath, bed and hours of heavy, dreamless sleep. What was more I had already eaten a solid meal and drunk several glasses of wine. I cursed obscenely and loudly as I had a thirty-second shower, pulled on a dress and ruffled my hair in the hope that it would look artfully arranged. I put a coat on, ran out of the house and got a taxi at the end of the road.
Mary greeted me rather frostily as she opened the door, but she couldn’t shout at a widow in front of Eric and her four other guests. I knew two of them: Don and Laura were old friends of Mary and she always seemed to invite us together so that we could become friends with each other, but for reasons I didn’t understand it had never quite happened. Then there was Maddie, who worked in Mary’s office, and Geoff, who explained to me that he had met Mary and Eric on a cycling holiday in Sicily a couple of years back and that they’d stayed in contact. I wondered, with a touch of resentment, if Mary was already trying to set me up, then quickly became cross with myself. What was she meant to do? If she had invited two couples, I might have been cross at being excluded.
