CHAPTER 39
THE CALL COMES ON A THURSDAY, the day I used to see Will. Outside, the wind is blustering in my garden and ripping all the blossoms from the pear tree.
“Now — am I speaking to Ginnie?”
My pulse skitters off. I don’t recognize the number, but the voice reminds me of Will.
“Yes.”
“Ginnie, I’m so sorry to bother you. This is Roger. You remember? Roger Prior. We met in that bar in the autumn.”
“Yes, I remember.”
The wind sneaks in around the ill-fitting door of my kitchen; I feel its cold touch on my skin.
“So, Ginnie, how are you?” His voice is gentle with concern.
I tell him about my mother.
“I’m so sorry,” he says. “This is terrible timing then. You’ll have to forgive me.” I’m very aware of his careful courtesy. I remember Will once telling me that you have to be a bit of an actor to be a good detective. “Ginnie, what I wanted — I’d really like to have a chat with you about this case of ours. Maria Faulkner. I think Karen may have mentioned I’m involved?”
I swallow hard.
“I thought that was all over,” I tell him. “I went to the identification parade.”
“I know you did,” he says. “Well, thank you so much. You’ve already been extremely helpful, Ginnie. I just wanted to have a talk with you — just quite informally — about where we go from here.”
He waits for me. I don’t say anything.
“We could meet anywhere,” he says. “Any place that you’d be comfortable.”
“I wouldn’t be happy with you coming here,” I tell him.
“No. I understand. What I wondered — there’s a café in the main road, quite near where you live. Called Markham’s—it’s got little trees outside. Would that suit you?”
I know the place; I’ve passed it sometimes. It looks expensive, with white cloths on the tables and trim bay trees in metal tubs flanking the door. It enters my mind that he has chosen our meeting place with care: that he wants me to be at ease there. The thought chills me.
“I could do later this morning, Ginnie. Perhaps eleven thirty?”
I have no reason to refuse.
It’s stylish, as I expected. There are stripped, untreated floorboards, and bunches of lavender on the tables, and black-and-white photos of lovers on bridges in Paris, and over the sound system, classical guitar.
He’s sitting at a corner table: I guess that he’s chosen it so we won’t be overheard.
He reaches out and takes my hand. He’s just as I remember: the clever, self-deprecating smile, the scent of vanilla, the handshake that seems to last a little too long.
“Ginnie. I’m so grateful to you.”
We sit.
“I hope this is OK,” he says. He hands me the menu. “A coffee? Something to eat?”
I know I am being seduced.
“Just a cappuccino.”
He says he’ll have the same.
The waitress has a long red skirt with bits of ribbon hanging from it, and those flat, clumpy boots you have to be really beautiful to wear. He’s charming to her.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” he says to me.
“Well, she’d been ill, so it wasn’t a surprise.”
“It’s still a shock, though, isn’t it?” he says. “My father died last year, and I was pretty cut up about it. It’s that time of life for us, isn’t it? Our kids growing up, our parents getting frail. And we’re the ones caught in the middle. Keeping it all going.”
He’s resting his arm along the back of his chair. Everything about him says he’s so relaxed and casual, that this is just a friendly conversation without consequence. But his eyes never leave my face, eyes of an elusive color, between gray and green, like the leaves of olive trees. They narrow as he watches me.
The waitress brings the coffee. It’s strong, with bittersweet flecks of chocolate on top. I drink gratefully.
“You’ve got daughters, haven’t you?” he says. “Karen said how gorgeous they were — when she saw their photographs, when she met you.”
I nod. “Amber’s sixteen and Molly’s just starting her degree.”
He smiles, showing his perfect teeth.
“You must be very proud.” He tips sugar into his coffee. “My eldest lad just started college too,” he says. “It’s quite a wrench, isn’t it? You think you’ll be glad not to have that ghastly music playing, and then you miss them horribly.”
“Yes,” I say.
He sips his coffee. A little silence falls.
“So, Ginnie. About Maria Faulkner.”
He’s like me, in a way: He’s someone who watches people, I can see that. When I put my coffee down so carefully, trying to keep it steady, yet it still slops into the saucer, because my hands are shaking: I know he sees.
“To get straight to the point, Ginnie, your evidence is important to us. I want to ask if you’d be willing to go a little further for us.”
He waits for my response, those cool gray eyes on me.
“It’s difficult,” I say.
“I know it’s difficult, Ginnie. But you come across to me as someone who would want to do the right thing. Someone who’s very responsible. I think that’s why you rang the Incident Room — because you wanted to do the right thing. Even when it’s difficult.”
“Why does it matter? Why is it so important — what I saw?”
He’s leaning forward, his hands clasped loosely in front of him on the table: immaculate, a surgeon’s hands.
“OK,” he says. “I’m going to take you into my confidence. Let me tell you how this all fits together — let me tell you the story, Ginnie.”
“Yes. I think you should.”
In spite of everything, I feel a surge of curiosity.
“We’ve had our suspicions all along. About Sean Faulkner — the man you picked out from the lineup.”
He waits for me to respond. I ask him why.
“Sean Faulkner has a history of violence toward women, and a total failure to take any responsibility for it,” he says. “You know how these men are. The scum who beat up their wives. The pathetic excuses they make.” A flicker of anger moves across his face. I glimpse the toughness in him, which he’s seeking to conceal. “You’ll get a man who says, I was drunk, I couldn’t help myself. Well, how many guys did he beat up on the way back from the pub then? But you know about that, don’t you? You know about violent men.”
This shakes me. I’ve attributed such intuitive powers to him, such powers to read me, that I think for a moment that he is talking about my father.
“Through the work you do, Ginnie,” he says, as though responding to my confusion.
“Yes,” I say.
“Sean Faulkner had recently been abusive to a neighbor who—according to Sean, at least—had flirted with Maria. And there were inconsistencies in the story he told. Like, when we went to his house, after he reported Maria’s disappearance, he told us he hadn’t washed any clothes, but the washing machine had recently been used. But we’d nothing concrete, nothing to link him with the place where Maria’s body was found.”
He leaves a small, significant pause. I feel the thud of my heart.
“Where did he kill her?” I say.
“We think he strangled her at home during a row, then put her body in the garbage bag and drove her to the river.”
“Why there? Why that part of the river?”
“It’s where they used to live,” he says. “When people dump bodies it’s always somewhere they know—where they’ve once lived, or where they were brought up or something. They need to understand the lay of the land. … We think he changed into his trunks and sneakers and walked out into the river and sank her body. Probably more or less where she was found—there’s an eddy near the bank there, we don’t think the tide moved her much. I guess he didn’t realize the body would come to the surface. The river’s a great place to hide a body—but only for a while.”
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“And when I saw him?” I say.
“You saw him the morning after he reported her missing. Our theory is that he went back to check that her body was still hidden, that he hadn’t left any traces. Maybe he worried he’d left some evidence—clothing or footprints, perhaps. That’s why he went back in daylight. He claims he was at work then, but he doesn’t have an alibi, not for the time you saw him.”
His eyes rest on me, his enigmatic gaze.
“Yours is our only sighting that links him to the place where he dumped her body. And it was just the morning after Maria disappeared.”
The palms of my hands are wet.
“She was twenty-three, Ginnie,” he says quietly. He doesn’t say, Just four years older than Molly; but the thought hangs there, in the air between us. “Twenty-three and one week. Here, let me show you.”
He takes a photograph out of his wallet and places it in front of me: His hands are gentle, as though this image is a fragile, precious thing. It’s a color photo, rather blurred and amateurish, three women in a bar, their drinks on the table before them, the flash reflecting redly in their eyes.
He points to one of them.
“This is Maria,” he tells me.
She has Italian coloring—coppery skin, and crinkly Mediterranean hair, and dark eyes fringed with heavy, curly lashes. She’s all dressed up for her evening out, in a strappy top and embroidered jeans, the kind of clothes that Molly or Amber would wear. She has glitter at her wrists and throat, and lipstick of a sweet, ripe red. She’s vivid and gleaming, her face all bright with laughter, with an air of surprise about her, as though she looked up suddenly when someone called her name.
I stare at the image of her—her face on the edge of laughter and the soft, dark mass of her hair. Tears well in me. I try to hide this, but I know he sees.
“This was at her birthday party, the week before she was killed,” he says. “She’d been flirting with a neighbor. We think she was killed for flirting.”
He leans toward me, intent.
“Ginnie, I want to ask you to be a witness for us. I’m asking you to help us nail this man.”
I sit there a long time, not looking at him, staring down into my coffee. There are pictures in my mind, precise as something seen, as though these are things that have already happened. The pain in Greg’s face, all his confusion and bitterness; Molly—puzzled, reproachful; Amber in a wild mood, scratching her arms or cramming her mouth with pills.
Roger waits for me, just sits there patiently. I know he will wait forever.
“Could I give my evidence anonymously?” I say. “You know—behind a screen?”
“Ginnie, I wish I could say that I could make that happen for you. But it’s up to the judge. And judges have done that occasionally, but only in terrorist cases, when there are lives at stake.” He smiles at me a little. “Which we couldn’t really argue in this case.”
I feel ashamed that I asked.
“The person I was with,” I say slowly. “You know about that, don’t you?”
A slight nod.
“I know what you told Karen,” he says cautiously.
“Would I have to say who I was with? Why I was there?”
“It would make your evidence more solid,” he says. “But of course I quite understand that there are reasons why you might not want to talk about it. …”
He’s staring down at his hands, which are clasped on the table in front of him, as if he’s studying his skin for flaws.
“Ginnie, there’s something I need to tell you,” he says. Setting the words down carefully in front of me, as though afraid they could hurt me. “You need to know there are rumors in the office—I mean, people do talk, you know how people are.”
He leaves a silence, for me to ask the question.
My voice is thin, reluctant.
“And what do they say exactly?”
“The rumors are that it was Will Hampden—that you were involved with Will.”
My mouth dries up. I shake my head.
“We just had a drink together. We had a case in common. We were talking about a case.”
I try to think back to that moment in the wine bar, when I first met Roger. Were we sitting too close together? Did we have a hungry look? Roger would have been able to read us: I know that.
“Anyway, Will’s a family man,” I tell him. “I certainly had that impression. I don’t imagine … I mean, it wouldn’t be like him, surely, to be involved with someone. His family matters too much to him.”
His eyes on me, the slightest knowing smile.
“That’s much what he said about you,” he says.
My heart lurches.
“So Will knows this—that this is what people are saying?”
“Ginnie, he works there. … I felt you ought to know.” Gentle, as though he’s seeking to protect me.
I don’t look at him, though I know his eyes are on me. I would like to be anywhere but here.
“We all have something unsatisfied in us,” he says. “There’s no shame in that, Ginnie.” His voice is very quiet: I can only just hear him above the sound of the guitar. “Most of us have been there, or somewhere pretty close.”
He sits there for a moment, waiting for me.
“Tell me where you are now,” he says then. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I don’t know what’s right,” I say.
“I’m no philosopher, Ginnie,” he says. “That isn’t where I’m coming from. I deal with what’s in front of me. I’m here to try and get justice for people who’ve been silenced, and for their families.”
“I know that.”
“A woman has been killed, Ginnie. Doesn’t that take precedence over everything?”
“I just need to think my way through this,” I tell him.
“I know you do,” he says. “I know you’re a thoughtful person.” He’s relaxed again, as though he has all the time in the world. “Let me try and tell you where I’m coming from, Ginnie. While you think it through. You know, I’m a romantic, in a way. Hard to believe, perhaps.” He shrugs, with that self-deprecating smile. “But I’m passionate about our criminal justice system—with all its failings. That we seek to get justice for wrongs done to strangers—isn’t that a wonderful thing? That excites me still. That’s a hell of an achievement, don’t you think? To seek justice on behalf of strangers …”
His words hang in the silence between us.
“If I do this, people will get hurt,” I say in a small voice.
“Yes,” he says. “I can’t protect you from that. I would if I could, but I can’t.” And when I don’t say anything, “Think it over, Ginnie.”
He hands me his card, closing my fingers down over it in one of those intimate gestures he likes, his smooth, cool skin against me.
He pays. We part on the pavement.
I walk down the road to my car. The wind is stronger now, banging at the awning outside the café. I pass under a blossoming tree, white petals sleeting down. Glancing back, I see how briskly he walks, as though he has made himself late for something important, though when he was talking to me he seemed to have forever. Maria’s image burns into my mind.
I turn. I have to run to catch up with him.
“Roger.”
He turns sharply to face me.
It’s hard to talk. The wind keeps pushing my hair into my mouth, and I’m out of breath from running. White blossoms fall on us.
“I’ll do it. I’ll go to court. I’ll give evidence.”
He puts his hand very lightly on my shoulder; I sense how everything eases in him.
“Thank you,” he says. “Thank you.”
“There’s something else I wanted to say. The person I was with. He didn’t see anything. It’s stupid, but I just can’t remember if that came out in our conversation. He had his back to the path, I know he didn’t see.”
“It’s OK, Ginnie. You told us already,” he says. He keeps his hand on my shoulder, as though afra
id if he lets me go that I will change my mind. “Now, remember. Any doubts or worries, you ring me. I’ll always be happy to hear from you. Any time, it doesn’t matter, day or night, just ring.”
CHAPTER 40
I’M SITTING AT THE KITCHEN TABLE when I hear Greg come through the door. He comes straight into the kitchen. He puts his briefcase down on the table.
“I’ve got something for you,” he says. He’s smiling.
He opens his briefcase.
“Your book,” I say.
I recognize the pattern on the cover—the tangle of branches, the dragons. But now it’s richly colored, blue and purple and green, the colors of forests and seas. There’s a fragment of pattern on the spine to catch your eye on a bookshelf. I take all this in at a glance, everything sharp, clear. I wish this hadn’t happened today.
He’s about to hand it across to me. But he sees my face, pulls back. He puts the book down on the table between us.
“Ginnie. What’s going on?” A thread of alarm in his voice.
“Greg, I need to talk to you.” My voice is slow, dull.
He has that wary, beaten look I’ve noticed before on his face. He sits down heavily at the table. The wind has dropped. It’s very quiet.
“Someone rang me today,” I tell him. “The detective who’s leading that murder case. I had to go and talk to him.”
His mouth is set in a hard line.
“You told me that it was all over,” he says. He stares at me. His pupils seem tiny and needle sharp through the lenses of his glasses.
“They said my evidence was crucial to the case.”
He has his hand in front of his face, as if he’s shielding himself from a blow.
There’s a moment you can’t go back from. Everything will change with what I am going to say.
“Greg—what I need to tell you … When I said I was there on my own, that was a lie.” My throat is thick, clogged up. “I wasn’t there on my own. I was with a friend.”
He’s just looking at me, not saying anything. I wish he would say something. He makes a little gesture with his hand, as though to ward this off or push it away.
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