What to Do When Someone Dies

by Unknown

  ‘That I had something to do with it,’ I finished for her. ‘Yes. That I was taking revenge on my husband and his presumed lover… So, are you going to ask if I’ve got an alibi?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Mary, in a shocked tone.

  ‘Of course it’ll never come to that,’ I said. ‘But I sort of do.’ I tried to recall the day in accurate detail. The terrible news had been such a blow that it was as if it had eliminated everything that went before. But I could remember. ‘I’d had a good day, funny as it may seem. I’d been working on a rather beautiful Georgian chair. It had taken longer than I’d expected so in the end I had to jump in a cab and take it down to the company who had hired me to do it for them. It was a solicitors’ office just off Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I remember the time because I was in a rush to get there before they closed. It must have been just a couple of minutes before six. When I handed it over, I had to sign a receipt for them, showing I’d delivered it. I wrote the date and the time on it. So I couldn’t have been in East London tampering with my husband’s car, if that’s what was required. There we are. Too much information.’

  There was another awkward silence.

  ‘But why are they even looking at the scene of the crash?’ said Joe.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘It was an accident. We were at the inquest.’

  ‘God knows,’ I said. ‘I’ve caused so much trouble with my blundering around that the police don’t know what they think any more. It doesn’t bother me. I’m finished with it all. I’m going to do what I should have done a long time ago, which is get myself sorted out, be good, do some useful work.’

  And so I did. Or, at least, I made a start. I helped carry the cake back into the midst of the baby celebrations. I picked up Ruby, who looked drunk after her feed, like a spaced-out old woman with blurry eyes and a milk blister on her lower lip, and held her in my arms, terrified I would drop her. I offered her my little finger to grip in her fist, and pressed my face to her neck; she smelled of sawdust and mustard. Then I handed her over for someone else to coo at and left.

  The previous day, a man had dropped off six dining chairs at the house. They had been in his shed for years and he had forgotten about them. Could I do anything with them? Yes, I could. I could strip off the surfaces with wire wool and white spirit. I could replace broken slats and balance the legs so that they sat flush. I could arrange for the seats to be re-covered, and then I could smooth and polish the surfaces. I had given a quote that would have paid for a reasonable second-hand car and the man had seemed happy enough. I was happy too. The chairs would give me days of tricky, fiddly, messy, scrapy, lonely, lovely, satisfying work. It gave me a possibility of happiness. Well, maybe not happiness, but something to lose myself in, somewhere to escape, or so I thought.

  If I had known who it was, I would never have answered. I had just come in from the shed to make myself a cup of tea and was caught off guard. I picked up the phone automatically, without thinking it might be someone I wanted to avoid, and when I heard his voice I was so shocked that I slopped scalding tea over my wrist, then dropped the mug, which shattered on the floor. I stared at the receiver, thinking I might simply put it back in its holster and shut myself up in the shed, where no one could get at me.

  ‘Hello.’ The voice was cool and uninflected; even now, he wasn’t going to show his emotions. I imagined him at the other end: his greying dark hair, his impeccable clothes and manicured hands, his languid air of slightly contemptuous amusement; above all, his watchfulness.

  ‘David,’ I said at last, trying to match my voice to his. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Straight to the point.’ He gave a small laugh that held no mirth. ‘I want to see you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m surprised you need to ask. There are certain things that need to be made clear.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you that I haven’t already told the police.’

  ‘I, on the other hand, have things to say to you. And I’d prefer not to do it over the phone.’

  ‘I don’t want to come to your house.’

  ‘I imagine not.’ At last I heard the current of anger in his voice. ‘Shall I come to yours?’

  ‘No, I don’t want that either.’

  ‘I have a cast-iron alibi, you know, Eleanor.’ He gave a light emphasis to my name, to remind me that I had been an impostor. ‘If you’re imagining that I might be a murderer, you needn’t trouble yourself.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ I said, although of course I had thought about David murdering Frances, and had found it very easy to picture: he was a cold, clever, ruthless man, rather than a messy creature of conscience. However, the reason for keeping him out of my house was not fear but an instinctive, deeply felt revulsion at the idea of him setting his well-polished brogues in my own shabby, Greg-haunted world.

  ‘We could meet in my club, if you want. There are private rooms.’

  ‘No. Somewhere outside, public.’

  ‘All right, Blackfriars Bridge. North side. In one hour.’

  ‘It’s raining,’ I said stupidly.

  ‘Indeed. I’ll bring my umbrella.’

  I hung up and ran my wrist under cold water for several minutes until it went numb. I considered changing out of my work clothes but in the end I didn’t. After all, I no longer needed to pretend to be anyone other than myself. I searched in the cupboard under the stairs for an umbrella, but only found one with a broken spoke, which flopped uselessly when opened. I would just have to get wet.

  I arrived wet and cold, smelling of glue and dressed in paint-spattered canvas trousers under a streaming waterproof. David was as dry as a bone under his large black umbrella.

  I stopped a few feet from where he stood on the deserted pavement, and gave him a stiff nod. His beautiful camel-hair coat was familiar, as were the brown shoes that shone like new conkers. I couldn’t have pointed to any particular change in his appearance, yet I was struck by a difference in him. His skin seemed to be drawn tighter over his bones than the last time we’d met, giving him a pinched, sharp expression.

  ‘This won’t take long,’ he said.

  I waited. He had asked to see me and I wasn’t going to be the first to speak.

  ‘My wife trusted you,’ he said. I didn’t respond. There didn’t seem to be anything I could say. ‘She liked you,’ he went on. ‘For once she showed bad judgement. Catastrophically bad judgement.’

  ‘I didn’t kill her.’

  David gave a shrug. ‘That’s for the police to decide,’ he said indifferently.

  ‘Did she trust you as well?’

  ‘You mean, because I was unfaithful to her? I know, of course, what you told the police.’

  ‘I told the police what was true – that you had an affair with Milena.’

  I had also, I thought, told them that Frances had had a lover. Did David know that? I stared at him, his unreadable face. Had he discovered that, and was that why Frances was dead?

  ‘You disapprove of me,’ David said. ‘Of course you do. After all – and let’s put the whole thing with Johnny to one side, just for the moment, shall we? – you think you’re living in a romantic novel where husband and wife marry and live happily ever after, where first love doesn’t fade, where your precious husband couldn’t possibly have deceived you because he loved you so much. What makes you think Frances didn’t know?’

  ‘Did she?’

  That dismissive shrug again.

  ‘I’ve no idea. If she did, she would have had the good sense not to muddy the waters. She was sensible. We understood each other. We suited each other.’

  ‘You mean you turned a blind eye?’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it. Another is to say that we didn’t snoop, pry and poke around in each other’s worlds, thinking we had a right to know everything about each other. We treated each other like grown-ups. There are worse ways of being married.’

  ‘Are you saying she would have understood about you and Milena?’<
br />
  ‘You’ve no right even to ask that. You were an outsider who came blundering into our house, putting your nose into business that didn’t concern you.’

  ‘Did you love her?’

  Real anger flared in his face and suddenly he stepped out of the circle of his umbrella so that large drops of water splashed on to his coat. ‘You want to know what I felt?’ he said, his face a few inches from mine. ‘You still want to find things out? Frances was a good woman and Milena was a bitch. A hard-core, monstrous bitch. Bitches always win. She played with people. She played with me, lured me, hooked me, pulled me in, and when she was done with me she threw me back into the water. She never loved me. She was only interested in me because she could use me to get back at Frances. Yes, yes. I know there was another man in Frances’s life. Milena told me when she dumped me that I had been her revenge on my wife, who’d stolen someone from her.’

  As I watched him, he seemed to crumble. His mouth trembled, and for a moment I thought he was going to cry or hit me.

  ‘If you want to know who he was, I can’t tell you. I never asked. I didn’t want to know. I’m not like you. Some things are best kept hidden. We depend on that; we’d go mad if we knew everything. So if this had anything to do with your precious husband, I can’t tell you. Nobody can now. Everyone’s dead.’

  He snapped his mouth shut and stepped back under his umbrella. We stared at each other.

  ‘I liked her a lot,’ I said at last. ‘I felt very guilty that I deceived her.’

  ‘Her, me, Johnny, everyone.’

  I walked all the way home in the rain, barely noticing the Christmas lights, the festive shops billowing out warmth through their open doors, the brass band on Camden High Street playing carols and collecting for the blind. Cars and vans thundered past, spraying water from puddles all over me. David must have arranged to see me because he wanted to prod me, taunt me, play with me, scare me. Had it just been sadistic revenge or something else?

  I sat in the living room and stared at the empty grate. Greg used to love making fires. He was very good at it, very methodical. He would never use fire-lighters, saying they were a cheat, but started instead with twisted pieces of paper, then kindling. I remembered how he would kneel and blow on the embers, coaxing them into flames. I hadn’t lit the fire since he died and I thought about doing so now, but it seemed too much effort.

  Out of the blue a thought occurred to me that was both trivial and irritating. I tried to brush it away, because I was done with my botched attempts at amateur sleuthing, but it clung like a cobweb in my mind: why hadn’t Greg written down his appointment with Mrs Sutton, the old lady I had met on the day of his funeral? I was sure she had told me she’d arranged to see him on the day after his death, but it hadn’t been in his diary.

  I told myself it didn’t matter, it was meaningless. I made myself a cup of tea and drank it slowly, sip by sip, then rang the office.

  ‘Can I speak to Joe?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m afraid Mr Foreman isn’t here.’

  ‘Tania, then?’

  ‘Putting you through.’

  After a few seconds, Tania was on the line.

  ‘Tania? It’s me, Ellie.’

  ‘Ellie,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine. Listen, Tania, can you do me a favour?’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘I need the number of one of Greg’s clients.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘I met her at the funeral. A Mrs Sutton, I think – I don’t know her first name. She was very nice about Greg and there was something I wanted to ask her.’

  ‘All right.’ There was a pause and then her voice again: ‘It’s Marjorie Sutton and she lives in Hertfordshire. Have you got a pen handy?’

  ‘Hello?’ Her voice was crisp and clear.

  ‘Is that Marjorie Sutton?’

  ‘It is. Who am I speaking to?’

  ‘This is Ellie Falkner, Greg Manning’s widow.’

  ‘Of course. How can I help?’

  ‘I know this sounds peculiar, but I was tying up loose ends and there was something I wanted to ask you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You told me you were going to see Greg the day after he died.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You’re quite sure about that? Because there’s no record of an appointment in his diary.’

  ‘He’d only arranged it the day before. It must have been just before the accident. He was very insistent that he should come and see me.’

  ‘Do you know what it was about?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. Is there a problem?’

  ‘No problem,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much.’

  I put the phone back in its holster and returned to my chair by the empty grate.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  I saw a nature documentary once that showed a baby seal lying in a little hole in the Arctic ice sheet. Above, in the outside world, it was about fifty below but in the hole it was warm, at least by baby-seal standards. It must have felt safe as well. But it wasn’t. Miles away, a mother bear, desperate to feed its cub, had caught the scent of the subterranean baby seal and smashed her way through the snow and ice to get at it.

  That was more or less how I felt when DCI Stuart Ramsay came to see me in my work shed. It felt wrong. The whole point of me being there was to pretend that people like him didn’t exist.

  ‘I was working,’ I said.

  ‘That’s fine,’ he replied. ‘Don’t mind me.’

  ‘All right.’ I continued with my sanding while he wandered around the room, picking up tools, occasionally glancing at me with a look of puzzlement, as if I was doing something unimaginably exotic.

  ‘What are you working on?’

  ‘It’s a storage chest Greg and I found in a skip months ago. I said I’d repair it and they could have it in the office. It’s really quite nice – look at the carvings on the top. I thought, after Greg died, I wouldn’t bother with it, but now I’ve decided I’m going to do it for them anyway. Joe will like it.’

  Ramsay picked up a plastic squeezy bottle and sniffed at the nozzle. He pulled a face. ‘What’s this?’ he said.

  ‘It’s a laminate,’ I said. ‘It’s the sort of thing teenagers sniff and then go to hospital.’

  He put the bottle down. ‘My gran used to hate old furniture,’ he said. ‘She said she hated the idea of sitting in a chair that a dead person had sat in.’

  ‘It’s a point of view,’ I said.

  ‘When people got married, they were supposed to buy themselves nice new furniture. That was the tradition then.’ He knelt over one of the chairs I had dismantled. ‘This is the sort of thing that would have been put on a bonfire in the old days.’

  ‘I guess you haven’t come to hire me,’ I said, ‘so why are you here?’

  ‘I’m on your side, Ms Falkner,’ he said. ‘You may not think so, but I am.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking about it.’

  ‘It’s just that you make it difficult for someone to be on your side.’

  ‘You’re a policeman,’ I said. ‘You’re not meant to be on anybody’s side. You’re meant to investigate and find out the truth.’

  He looked dubiously at my workbench, then leaned back on it, half sitting. ‘I’m not really here,’ he said. He consulted his watch. ‘I finished work half an hour ago. I’m on my way home.’

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ I said. ‘Or a drink?’

  ‘My wife’s waiting at home for me,’ he said, ‘with a drink. Cold white wine, probably.’

  ‘Sounds nice,’ I said. ‘But if you’re not on duty…’

  ‘I just wanted to tip you off that things might get a bit messy.’

  ‘Why do you want to tip me off?’ I said. ‘And why should they get messy?’

  ‘Obviously it’s all rubbish. You – Well, it sounds stupid even to say the words, but I’m going to anyway. You obviously couldn’t have been involved with the death of your
husband, could you?’

  I’d been carrying on intermittently with my piece of sandpaper, but now I stopped and stood up. ‘Are you waiting for me to say no?’ I said.

  ‘You’ve been going around making yourself look suspicious but it still doesn’t work.’

  ‘It doesn’t work because it isn’t true,’ I said.

  ‘We don’t work on truth. We work on evidence. Even so. The death of your husband was recorded as an accident. You were the one who was going around screaming that it wasn’t. I’ve tried to think about it as a double bluff, or a triple bluff, but I can’t make it work. And then not only did you claim you didn’t know about your husband’s infidelity, you actually made a bloody… Well, you kept claiming it was all a mistake, that they weren’t even having an affair. Even when you found evidence that they were.’

  ‘But the evidence doesn’t work.’

  ‘Evidence is always messy.’

  ‘Not messy,’ I said. ‘Impossible.’

  He was rocking himself back and forth on the bench. ‘You really didn’t know about the affair?’ he said. ‘I mean before your husband’s death.’

  ‘I don’t believe he was having an affair.’

  ‘Did you have an argument on the day of your husband’s death?’

  ‘No.’

  Ramsay stood up and walked across the room to look out of the window. ‘Do you need planning permission for a shed like this?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Interesting,’ he said.

  ‘Is that relevant?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking of buying one,’ he said. ‘Somewhere to go that’s out of the house. To get back to what I was saying, you’ll notice I’m asking you these questions informally, not taking an official statement. If I had been, it might have seemed I was trying to catch you out.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We’ve been talking to various people.’ He took a notebook from his pocket and flicked through several pages. ‘Including people in your husband’s office. Mr Kelly, for instance, who was in the office that day doing a software update. He said that early on the afternoon of the day your husband died, he heard one end of an argument on the phone between your husband and someone Mr Kelly assumed was you. Perhaps it wasn’t you.’