by Nicci French
‘And he died when he was about thirty-five,’ I said. ‘Worn out by it.’
‘He was twenty-nine,’ he said. ‘The same age as Shelley. And a better poet.’
‘I always had trouble getting over the tasselled shirts.’
‘He died in the back seat of a car on the way to another gig,’ said Hayden. ‘That’s the way to go.’ He laughed. ‘You don’t believe that. It’s the woman in you. You think it’s sad when someone doesn’t die at three score and ten surrounded by their family and household possessions, with a pension plan and lots of money in the bank.’
‘Don’t pigeonhole me.’
‘But it’s true, isn’t it?’
‘Is it so bad to grow old? Is it so bad to have things?’ I said. ‘You mean the sort of things you argue over when you break up with someone?’
‘You’re drinking wine I bought for you. You’re living in a flat I arranged for you.’
‘You’re trying to provoke me,’ he said, ‘but I won’t be provoked. Not today.’
‘Liza worked for this flat,’ I said. ‘At the end of the summer after she left college she got a job, and after a year she put down a deposit and bought this, and she’s been paying the mortgage ever since.’
‘And your point is?’ said Hayden. He leaned forward and picked up the little metal sculpture on the coffee-table. ‘She probably saw this in a gallery somewhere and paid fifty pounds for it. Or maybe someone gave it to her. And when she’s died some relative will look at it and say, “What the fuck can we do with this?” And it’ll either be a doorstop or it’ll be put on a skip.’
Hayden ground the butt into one of Liza’s ashtrays and then he kissed me, but I pushed him away, if only for a moment. I glanced around the room at the pictures, the ornaments, the books. ‘When I look around this room I see a woman who loved things, who took pleasure in them, even if they weren’t great works of art, even if they’d end up on a skip.’
‘Don’t pretend you’re like that,’ he said. ‘You know you’re better than that.’
‘Better? Better, Hayden? You’d rather die in the back of a car with nothing?’ I said. ‘With nobody to care for you?’
‘Why would there be nobody? Being free isn’t the same as being lonely.’
I knew Hayden took pleasure in me. Sometimes he even adored me, in his fashion. But I was the woman who was there at that moment. There had been others before and there would be others after. A thought occurred to me that I spoke out loud before I had time to stop myself: ‘What if you die in the back of a car and you’re not Hank Williams? Does that make a difference?’
He brought his hand up, the one that was still holding the metal sculpture, and touched my shoulder with it, almost playfully, but not quite. ‘Careful now,’ he said.
After
‘Right. We have to think. I can’t think. My brain isn’t working. It feels like bits have come loose in my head. Nuts and bolts.’
‘That would be the vodka,’ I said, holding up the bottle that was now only half full.
‘No. The vodka makes things clearer. Or slower or something.’
‘I feel a bit distanced from everything myself. Or insulated, maybe. It’s quite a relief, actually. As if I’m standing to one side of my life and looking at it as if it was happening to someone else. Which it isn’t, I know.’
‘We have to think, Bonnie.’
‘Yes. What about? I mean, what shall we think about first?’
‘I have a question.’
‘Another question?’
‘I’m not stupid, you know. I mean, I might be in love with you – don’t look at me like that, you know I am – and I might be a bit drunk and I might be in shock and I might have done something colossally foolish, but I’m still not stupid.’
‘I know you’re not.’
‘Then tell me.’
‘Tell you what?’
‘Who were you with?’
‘What?’
‘Come on, Bonnie. He was a big man. You didn’t get his body into the car and then into the reservoir alone.’
I closed my eyes and tried to sort through the jumble of my thoughts. Could I tell Neal about Sonia, or was that a further betrayal of the person who had helped me so unconditionally? ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘You mean, you don’t know whether to tell me?’
‘Right.’
‘Someone was with you when you found him?’
‘Not exactly, no.’
‘So you called someone to come and help you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you don’t want to tell me because – what?’
‘Because it doesn’t feel like my secret to tell. I promised to keep quiet.’
‘It might be a relief to them.’
‘I think this person simply wants to put it behind them,’ I said carefully. I was having trouble getting the pronouns right. Words would betray me, I thought, trip me up and expose me when I wasn’t paying attention to them.
‘Don’t you think that you and I and this person should get together and talk about what we know and what we should say?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I think.’
‘For instance, are we going to the police?’
‘The police?’
‘The police. For God’s sake, someone killed Hayden.’
‘Yes. I’m not forgetting that.’
‘But it wasn’t us.’
‘No.’
‘Now we know that, do you think we should go to the police?’
‘But look at what we’ve done.’
‘We have to think about it, at least.’
‘I am thinking,’ I said. ‘I’m thinking I’ll wake up and this will be a dream.’
‘We can’t even begin to make any decisions about it without this other person. Your third man. Or woman, of course.’
‘They did it for me,’ I said wretchedly. ‘Because I asked them to. How can we go to the police?’
‘How well did you cover your tracks?’
‘I don’t know. I wake up night after night in a cold sweat, remembering things I should have done.’
‘You say they’re suspicious of you already.’
‘I was having sex with him. I lied about that – and a whole lot of other things, of course, but they don’t know about that. Not yet, anyway. What shall we do?’
‘Do you want something to eat?’
‘I don’t know. Am I hungry?’ I put my hand against my belly. I couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten. Days had lost their normal structure, a wheel turning round and round and carrying me along with it, and had broken down into jagged, clockless episodes of fear, guilt, a dazed sense that all the time I’d thought I was running away from everything I was actually running towards it – helter-skelter into the arms of disaster.
‘How about a poached egg on a muffin? That’s one of my stand-bys.’
‘All right.’
I watched him while he cooked, proficient and domestic in a way that Hayden had never been, and I thought of how it could so easily have been different. I could have stayed with Neal and avoided my head-on collision with Hayden. Maybe he would still be dead, but it would be a story that had happened to somebody else, not to me, not to us. We ate in silence, knives and forks scraping against the china, and afterwards Neal made a pot of strong coffee. I drank two mugs, then said, ‘I’ll ring them.’
‘The third person?’
‘Yes.’
Day was turning to night, and Neal’s garden was soft with fading light and the blurred chortle of wood-pigeons.
‘Sonia, I have something to tell you.’ I heard her give a gentle sigh, as if she had been expecting this moment. ‘Neal knows what we did.’
‘Neal!’
‘He doesn’t know you were involved, just that someone was.’
‘What have you gone and done, Bonnie?’ Her voice cracked.
‘It’s hard to explain on the phone. Everything’s changed. Nothing means what I th
ought it meant. I’d like to see you as soon as possible.’
‘Where are you?’
‘At his house.’
There was a long silence that I didn’t try to break. At last she said, ‘I’m coming over.’
‘He doesn’t have to know it was you.’
‘I’m coming over, she said. Give me his address.’
When I went back, Neal looked up from his chair.
‘Before you say anything,’ he said, ‘there’s something I need to know.’
‘Go on.’
‘Did you love him?’
I replied before I had time to stop myself: ‘I don’t know. But sometimes I miss him so much that I’m not sure how to bear it.’
Before
I followed Hayden up the hill. I could see the muscles in his back working under his thin top. His shoulders were broad and strong. As if he could feel my eyes on him, he turned and his face softened in a slow smile.
People say ‘just sex’. They say just sex, just desire, just a physical thing. I don’t know what that means. Desire ran through me in a stream; sex transformed me and made me feel alive, every nerve in my body singing with the sheer physical joy of it.
I drew level with him. We didn’t touch but the space between us throbbed. My summer days, no before and no after, just now, just him.
After
At first it was awkward, almost embarrassed – as though we couldn’t confront the enormity and folly of what we had done and had retreated into a kind of social formality. Nobody seemed to know how to behave: Neal was solemnly pissed, Sonia was coolly impersonal towards him, and I was concentrating on not breaking into wretched fits of giggles again, although my eyes were stinging and my chest ached.
But there was something strangely comforting about being a threesome. I knew it was dangerous. Perhaps it meant the secret would spread out through the cracks. But for the time being, sitting in Neal’s cosy house, I felt less afraid, as if the fear had been shared out. I looked at them both – Sonia in her grey soft-cotton trousers and a white T-shirt, her face grave and handsome, Neal, sitting with his head propped on his hand and his fingers pushing his dark hair into comical tufts – and thought about what they had both done for me, or in Neal’s case, what he had thought he was doing for me.
When Sonia had arrived, I could almost feel the passion coming off her. It was all the more powerful for being contained. She seemed to pulse with it. ‘Tell me,’ she said, when I met her at the front door.
I took her into the garden because I wanted to be alone with her when I told her. Through the lighted window I could see Neal sitting in the living room. I told Sonia everything, leaving nothing out: the brief fling with Neal, which she half knew about anyway, the affair with Hayden, the violence and obsession of it, my certainty on discovering the body that Neal had done it, and done it for me. It didn’t take long, after all, and when I had finished there was a silence between us.
‘I was protecting you,’ she said at last.
‘I know.’
‘You let me think you’d killed him.’
I didn’t say anything. She was right, after all.
‘You misled me, Bonnie.’
‘I didn’t want to but I couldn’t tell you. You see why, don’t you?’
‘Maybe.’ Her voice was still very controlled. ‘So I did all this for Neal? Who I hardly know?’
‘I’m sorry, Sonia.’
Her face was closed and inscrutable in the half-light.
‘I guess we need to talk,’ I said.
‘You want to go to the police?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘“Want” is the wrong word. But maybe it would be for the best, in all ways – for a start, and this is way the most important, they could concentrate on the real killer. We’re in their way. They’re suspicious of me. They know I lied to them. It’s better if I tell them before they discover it for themselves. Better for all of us, I mean. Neither of you needs to be involved. I can just say I found the body and got rid of it because I panicked.’
Sonia shook her head. ‘How are you going to explain doing it all by yourself?’
‘I can say I helped.’ Neal leaned forward in his chair. ‘It’s almost true.’
‘You’re worrying about the lies you’ve already told and now you’re planning more. It’ll never work.’
‘So what do you suggest we do, Sonia?’
She was silent for a long while, her face heavy with thought. ‘Nothing,’ she said at last.
‘Nothing?’
‘I don’t want you to tell the police. You keep finding new ways of getting yourself deeper and deeper into the mess. And me with you.’
‘This wouldn’t be a new way. This would just be the truth. We can’t obstruct their investigation. Someone killed Hayden and they need to find out who.’
‘Yet you didn’t think that when you believed it was Neal.’
‘Because I thought Neal had done it by mistake – and for me,’ I said miserably.
‘It’s complicated,’ she said. ‘And I’m scared.’
I looked at her in consternation: somehow I’d thought Sonia was never scared. She was my rock and I leaned on her, knowing she wouldn’t give way.
‘I’m so sorry about everything,’ I said. ‘I wake up every night feeling as though there’s a great boulder on my chest that’s stopping me breathing. I don’t know if I can bear it much longer.’
‘I don’t want to stop the police finding out who did it, of course I don’t, but I don’t want to go to prison for you either.’
‘You won’t have to.’
‘You can’t know that, Bonnie.’
Neal stood up and went to the window that gave out over his garden. ‘Let’s try and see this from another angle,’ he said. ‘I tampered with the evidence and then you two didn’t just tamper with it, you got rid of it, including the body.’
‘That’s not a different angle,’ said Sonia. ‘That’s just restating our position.’
‘What did we see?’ asked Neal, as if she hadn’t spoken.
‘We saw Hayden.’ I didn’t say that I saw him still. He had become my ghost and was haunting me. I woke at night and he would be standing at the bottom of my bed, looking down at me.
‘We didn’t see the same things.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘What you saw wasn’t what I saw because I messed everything up and made it look different. You didn’t see the real crime scene, but the artificial one.’
‘You’re right.’
‘And why is this important?’ asked Sonia.
‘I don’t know, but it feels relevant to me. As if all this time everyone’s been looking at the wrong picture.’
‘There isn’t a picture at all any more,’ I said. ‘Sonia and I saw to that.’
Before
Once again Guy didn’t turn up, and Joakim, when I asked him where he was, mumbled something, avoiding my eyes. Amos wasn’t exactly bad. He’d practised, I could see that. He didn’t make all that many mistakes. He didn’t come in at the wrong moment all that often. But he was playing music as if he were filling out a form, slowly, laboriously. Neal was all thumbs. He really was playing badly. He was obviously angry with Hayden and wanted to make some sort of point, but whatever the point was, it was doing nothing for his music. What made it worse was that Hayden didn’t respond. He didn’t make sarcastic comments. He didn’t point out wrong notes or suggest improvements. He had clearly given up on them and that was the greatest insult. He seemed bored, as if his mind was elsewhere. The only time he was engaged was when he and Joakim retreated into the corner and worked together on a piece that had nothing to do with what the rest of us were doing. I left them to it.
After
Sonia left and I was going to leave but Neal poured me another glass of his vodka. We didn’t discuss it any more. I wasn’t capable of it. I just needed to go away, preferably to an uninhabited island somewhere, and think about it, get it straight in my head, dr
aw diagrams, make connections, and then I would be able to sort out what I had really done, and when I had that clear, I might start to have ideas about what I should do next. What was the rational thing to do. What was the right thing, if that had a meaning any more after the pile-up of wrong things. As I was drinking this last glass, I saw Neal hovering in a solicitous way and wondered if he thought that this was going to bring us together somehow.
Slowly and laboriously, as if my tongue had doubled in size and didn’t properly fit into my mouth, I tried to explain the situation. ‘I think I’m a bit drunk,’ I said. ‘And I’m in a state of shock. I’m not sure if the shock has made the being drunk worse or better. What I’m going to do is lie on the sofa for a bit and if you could just turn the light off, that would be great, and go away. When I’ve gathered myself together, I’ll get off the sofa and walk home.’
He did switch off the light and leave the room, then came back with a blanket, which he laid across me, and left again. I lay in the dark and thought in a maudlin fashion about how I’d got involved with Hayden and not Neal when Neal was clearly a better and more suitable and more decent person in every imaginable way. I almost started crying and then I wondered if I was ever going to sleep, and then I woke with a start and looked at my watch and saw that it was almost six thirty.
I felt terrible, much worse than before. My head ached, my mouth was dry, my brain felt like it had been left out in the rain and had rusted, and my clothes had that irritable, scratchy feel they get when you’ve slept in them. I couldn’t face Neal. I just wanted to escape. I let myself out and walked home. The freshness of the early-morning sunlight and the sight of people heading for work made me feel even more stale and grubby. When I got home, I had a shower, then crawled into bed and pulled the duvet over my head. I didn’t have a plan. It was more like a reptilian instinct deep in some primitive area of my brain to sleep for a whole day and then a whole night.
I was having a dream where I was trying to catch a train and I was unable to pack, and when I’d packed I couldn’t buy a ticket and I couldn’t get to the right platform, and then there was a whistle of the train coming or about to leave, but I couldn’t find it and I couldn’t find my luggage and, anyway, somewhere along the way I’d lost my ticket and the whistle changed from being a whistle to something I vaguely recognized and then realized was the doorbell. Still half in my dream I hoped someone else could answer the door. My mother, maybe, or Amos. But then I pulled the duvet off my face and remembered that my mother was two hundred miles away and Amos didn’t live with me any more. The light hurt. I got up and opened the door and two uniformed officers were standing there.
