“We know the place,” says the woman.
“We were in there,” I say. “I mean, I know we shouldn’t have been, I know that was trespassing, really. But the door wasn’t locked, and it was just so easy …”
“Don’t worry.” The man smiles, indulging me. “We aren’t about to tell you off, Mrs. Holmes.”
“And your friend?” says the woman. Her voice is smooth as Vaseline. “He—this is a he we’re talking about?”
I nod.
“He was with you?” she says.
“Yes.”
“And could you tell us exactly what you saw?”
“I could see out of the window. And I saw someone running along the path—I just thought there was something odd about him. To be honest, I was worried because I thought perhaps he could see us—I thought he could see in.”
A door slams shut upstairs. I flinch; my pulse races off. But I know it’s nothing, just a stray draft. I must have left a window open in my bedroom; the breeze will have sneaked through the window and slammed my bedroom door.
The woman reaches out and holds a hand an inch above my wrist, in a little gesture of calming.
“Just relax, Mrs. Holmes,” she says. “You seem a bit jumpy. But, trust me, there’s nothing to worry about. You said there was something odd about this person?”
“It’s hard to pin down. I mean, it was raining—so it wouldn’t be odd to be running, would it? It was like he was looking for something. He kept peering round, and I thought maybe he was looking for us. I mean, you do read about people hiring private detectives. When I thought about it afterward, I realized that was paranoid. That it could have been anything.”
“What was he wearing?” says the man.
I see him clearly in my mind, running between the river and the rowan.
“Suit trousers and a shirt and tie. Office clothes, really.”
They glance at each other. In the woman’s face there are sudden patches of red.
“And the time of day?”
“One thirty. We always met at one—it would have been about one thirty.”
“And you were actually inside this house you describe when you saw him?”
I nod.
“Have you talked about it with your friend?” she says.
“Yes. But he didn’t see anything, and he doesn’t want to speak to you. He has a family too.”
The man has put down his notepad; his elbows are on his knees. He rubs his palms together, like someone separating wheat. His face is focused, intent.
“How can you be so sure he didn’t see?”
“I asked him. He told me.”
“But if he was there with you?”
“He had his back to the window. I saw this man over his shoulder.”
It’s there in my head, the image: Will and me at the river house, wrapped around each other. I see it quite precisely. But I don’t want them to imagine this. I know how I must look to them in the unforgiving spring light that floods in through the window—the lines from my nose to my mouth that seem deeper every morning, the purple stains under my eyes. A middle-aged mistress. Having a last-chance affair.
“You didn’t remark on it at the time, or point this man out to your friend?”
“I told him, but by then the man had gone.”
“Right, Mrs. Holmes. Anything else you’d like to tell us?”
I shake my head.
The woman tucks her hair behind her ear. She has a slight, placating smile.
“We wanted to ask if you might be willing to make a statement?” she says.
“What are the implications of that?”
“It could form part of the prosecution case.”
Her voice is gentle, level.
I hear Max’s voice in my head: It would be hard to take just one step along that path and leave it there. I don’t say anything.
“It would be very helpful to us,” says the woman. She glances again at the piano, at the photographs. “You have lovely daughters of your own, Mrs. Holmes. You know just how vulnerable young people are. I’m sure you’ll understand how vital it is that we find the person who killed this young woman. …”
The man opens up his briefcase and finds a lined pad and takes my statement down. This seems to take a long time. I read it through and sign. My signature is rather wild: The pen seems alive, as though the paper is slippery, skating over the page.
“Thank you so much,” they say.
I stand. I’m desperate for them to go now.
“I guess you won’t need me anymore?” I say.
Again that quick, conspiring glance between them. The woman clears her throat.
“It’s possible we might need you to come on an identification parade. We’ll obviously have to confer with Roger, our boss.”
Roger: their boss. The little hairs stand up along my arms.
“But that wouldn’t be accurate, would it? If I think I might have seen Sean Faulkner on TV?”
“Well, it wouldn’t be watertight. But it might still help us,” she says.
“I’d much prefer just to leave it there,” I tell them.
“Really, you mustn’t worry,” she says. “It’s absolutely nothing to get concerned about.”
She picks up the briefcase she hasn’t opened.
“Mrs. Holmes, I can assure you, you did the right thing in coming to us,” she says. “So—are you still seeing your friend?”
“I’m not sure.”
What kind of woman doesn’t know if she’s seeing someone?
“Of course, if your friend would like to speak to us,” she says, “that would be very helpful. After all, a woman has died. But I can see it’s difficult.”
She gives me her card.
“Do get in touch if there’s anything else you want to say. If you remember anything.”
They shake my hand as they leave, and say how grateful they are.
I close the door behind them, lean with my back to it for a moment, breathing deeply. I tell myself it’s over—that I did what was right, what I owed to the woman who died: and now it’s over. Nothing more will happen: It’s such a little thing I saw.
I go into the living room and open the window wide to get rid of the scent of hair gel, so no one could tell that strangers have been here. Down the road someone is mowing a lawn, the first mow of the season. A scent of sap and crushed grass floats in through the window, the promise of summer, the freshest, greenest smell. I drink it in.
There’s a creak behind me. My pulse judders. I think it must be Greg—that Greg has come home and heard everything. I spin around.
Amber is there in the doorway.
“My God. Amber. You frightened me. Why are you here?”
She comes straight up to me. Her eyes are huge, like a startled child’s.
“They were police, weren’t they, Mum?” She’s frightened, her voice is high, the words tumbling over one another. “They had that look. They were so serious.”
Panic seizes me. I wonder how much she has heard.
“What’s happened, Mum?” she says. “Has someone died? I heard them say someone had died. Is it Molly, Mum? Just tell me Molly’s OK.”
I know then she can’t have heard it all. I wrap my arm around her. She’s tense and taut as a wire.
“Everything’s OK.” I’m trying to be calm, but my heart is pounding: I wonder if she can feel it as I hold her. “It’s nothing to do with Molly.”
“Everything can’t be OK,” she says. “You look awful.”
“I’m fine,” I tell her. “But, Amber—you shouldn’t be here.”
“It’s March the third, Mum.”
I stare at her blankly.
“You wrote it on the calendar,” she says. “It’s my course work. I came back for my course work.” She’s spelling it out patiently. “My Go-Between essay, Mum. I forgot it and it has to be in today.”
“Does Mrs. Russell know you’re here?”
She nods. “I got permission and everythin
g. Jamila wanted to come as well, but Mrs. Russell said she reckoned I probably knew my way home by now. You were on at me about it. Don’t you remember? You got really stressed about it. I thought you’d be pleased that I bothered. Anyway, for God’s sake, tell me, Mum.”
I tell her just the outline of it—that they came to ask me about the murder we saw on the television.
Her eyes are bright with astonishment.
“So why you exactly?”
“I went for a walk by the river,” I tell her, “before they found the body. And I saw this man who looked like the husband who made the appeal. And I thought I should tell the police—you know, just in case it was relevant.”
She stares at me.
“But this is just so random,” she says. “I mean, I just don’t get it. You didn’t say anything, Mum—when we saw it on television, when they found the body. You didn’t seem that interested.”
“I only thought of it later,” I say. “I only realized later it might be useful.”
There’s a deep frown stitched to her forehead. It’s the face she has when there’s something she can’t make sense of.
“So you’ll have to go to court and everything?” she says.
“I hope not,” I say. “Look, I’ll give you a lift if you like. I could take you to the bus stop.”
“OK,” she says.
But she just stands there, her perplexity written all over her.
“What were you doing there anyway, Mum? When you went for this walk?”
“It was to do with a work problem. A case, a child I was seeing. I wanted to clear my head about a case. …”
Her glance is sharp and glittery, like a blade.
“I didn’t know you were into that kind of stuff,” she says. “Going off for walks to think about things.”
CHAPTER 35
I GIVE AMBER A LIFT TO THE BUS.
“Don’t forget to hand in your essay,” I tell her. “After going to all this trouble.”
“I came home, didn’t I, Mum?” she says.
But she’s still preoccupied. I leave her at the bus stop with a troubled frown on her face.
When I get home, the post has come. I flick through—offers of credit; a flyer for a book by the Queen of Clean, which will tell me how to get pumpkin stains off my pine table with a little nongel toothpaste. And then a packet from Molly. As I open it, photographs spill out. There’s a note inside, in her rounded, studious handwriting.
“Hi all. Just got these back from Jessops. We came to London for Kev’s birthday trip—we went on the London Eye. We had the cake in Trafalgar Square, but the wind kept blowing out the candles. Hope you’re feeling better, Mum! xxxM.”
The pictures show a group of them in a glass bubble high in the sky, the spring sun shining bright on them. The girls have stripy scarves and poised and nonchalant smiles; the boys, a little self-conscious, are making faces for the camera. Molly’s face is flushed; she has gleaming licorice eyes. The city is laid below them like a great embroidered cloth flung out: You can see the silver trail of the Thames with its many intricate bridges. I will send these pictures to my mother: I think how she will love them, how proud she’ll be to show them around the ward. I look for a long time at these golden lads and girls with the world spread out at their feet.
I go to the kitchen. The cups that I put out for the police, for the drink they didn’t want, are still waiting on the tray. I make a coffee, but I don’t drink it. Everything is much as usual around me, yet it all looks different—like when you come back from holiday and the shapes and sizes of things seem to have subtly changed. ’Til I heard Amber there behind me, I still half-believed that I could limit the damage, and keep it all safe and secret. But I know now that I have to tell Greg—that I have to talk to him before Amber does. I’m dizzy with the sense that everything is slipping beyond my control.
When Greg comes in that evening, he goes straight up to his study. Amber is at Lauren’s, but she could come back anytime. I know I can’t postpone this.
He looks up, surprised, as I open his door.
“I was going to come and find you,” he says. “There’s something I want you to see.”
He takes a piece of shiny card out of his briefcase and hands it to me. He looks happy.
“It’s the cover for the book,” he says. “It only came today.”
It’s a drawing taken from a Celtic carving, a tangle and twist of budding branches and foliage: You can see the curl of a fern frond, the patternings of leaves. You can’t make out where the shapes begin or end; everything is entwined with everything else, nothing separate: It might all be drawn with a single elaborate line. And as you look, you begin to see creatures emerging from the foliage, as though, by some enchantment, the plants are also animals—a tendril of ivy writhes like the coils of a dragon, a stag sprouts antlers like the branches of trees.
“It’s beautiful,” I tell him.
He misreads the hesitation in me.
“Are you really, really sure?” he says. “You don’t sound convinced. I need an honest opinion.”
“Really. I love it. You can see so much in it.”
“Fenella wanted me to get your response,” he says. “You’re the nearest I’ve got to your average punter in the bookshop.”
“You can tell her I really like it,” I say.
“You don’t think it’s too abstract?” he says. “I mean, they did have some other ideas too. You don’t think it would be better to have some diaphanous woman on it?”
“I think it’s lovely,” I say. “Well done.” I hand it back to him.
I think of the passage I read from his anthology, the woman looking at the man called Froech, and how she used to say of any beautiful thing she saw, that she thought it more beautiful to see Froech in the dark pool. I think how that moved me. I don’t know the way from here to where I have to get to.
I go to the window, glance down over the gardens. The sun is setting, lavishly red. Cotton-wool clouds soak up the colored light like a stain. The river dazzles.
“Greg, there’s something I need to tell you.”
He’s quite still suddenly. His face darkens. I move on quickly.
“Some police came here today.”
“Police?” He’s baffled.
“Has Amber said anything?” I ask him.
“No, I haven’t seen her. Why would she anyway?”
“Because she saw them,” I say. “She’d come back for her course work. She was worried. I thought she might have mentioned it.”
His expression is strained, as though he’s peering at something that’s just out of sight.
“Ginnie, could you just tell me what this is all about?”
“They came because I rang them.” Laying the words out before him like little stones, precise and irrevocable. “It was about that murder—the woman they found in the river.”
“Good God,” he says. “You mean you saw something?”
I tell him what I told Amber. That I was by the river. That I went off for a walk because I needed to think about a case.
He frowns.
“Why didn’t you ring them straightaway?” he says.
“I couldn’t decide how significant it was. Then I saw the TV appeal, and it made me feel I should do something. Because this man I saw—he was like the man on the appeal, her husband. I mean, I can’t be sure, of course, but I think that it was him.”
“Well, it’s often the partner, isn’t it, in these cases? You’ve always said that.”
“Pretty much.”
“That poor woman,” he says. “Well, I’m sure you did the right thing.”
“I hope so,” I say.
He’s quiet for a moment. He takes off his glasses and puts them down on his desk and rubs his eyes. It’s an old man’s gesture. He looks tired suddenly. His head is bowed; he isn’t looking at me.
I turn to go, breathing a little more easily. I’ve done what I had to do, I’ve told him, and nothing has been destroyed.<
br />
“You were by the river, you said?” His voice is light, level, as though this is just a casual inquiry. My heart lurches.
“Yes.”
“That’s quite a long way to go just for a walk, I’d have thought. From your clinic.”
“I had a bit of time to spare,” I say.
His head is bent; I still can’t see his eyes. In a moment of cold, it enters my mind that he suspects me: that he suspected me long before this moment, before I told him these things.
It’s quiet between us for a moment. In the stillness you can hear the smallest sounds, the ugly chime of an ice-cream van, a pigeon that startles in the pear tree in the garden, with a sound like something torn.
“I like it there,” I say. “I used to take the girls there.”
“Yes, I remember,” he says.
“So—anyway—I just wanted to tell you what happened.”
He looks across at me then. In the strange red light of evening, his eyes seem bright, too bright, as though they’re full of tears.
“Will it go any further?” he says.
“I hope not. I really hope not.” Cheerful, confident. “I’m just assuming that’s the last I’ll hear of it. That it’s all over now … I’ll leave you to get on then,” I say, and turn and go.
But I know that nothing is over. Not even this conversation.
CHAPTER 36
I WAIT AT MY FAVORITE TABLE BY THE WINDOW. The bar is empty except for the barmaid. Today her hair is tied with velvet ribbon. There’s jazz playing. I look out into the garden. It’s changed so much since first we came here. The drifts of dark leaves have all been raked from the lawn, and bulbs are coming up in the grass, little slivers and blades of fresh green. But it’s pouring with rain, fat silver drops that rattle and bounce on the terrace and wash the topsoil out of the flower beds. You couldn’t go out in this weather; in a minute you’d be soaked through.
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