When I see her standing outside the house, I stop in my tracks. I almost turn and go back the way I came.
She has seen me, though. She is holding flowers, a frail bunch of blue anemones – one colour.
‘Please, please, please,’ she says, thrusting them at me. ‘I’m so sorry. I know it was wrong. Let me explain. Please.’
I walk past her, without saying anything, and put the key in the door. ‘I don’t need flowers,’ I say. ‘I’d just like the laptop.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry. I know.’ The rucksack is hanging on her shoulder and she pulls it off and puts it down on the ground. She starts rummaging through. Items of clothing – a scarf, a black vest top – fall on to the path.
The laptop is finally extracted and, still crouching, she holds it up to me.
‘Thank you.’ I take it and am poised to close the door on her. It would be easier if she stood up. Psychologically, I don’t want to leave her prone at my feet.
She looks up at me. Her eyes wide, rimmed with black eyeliner, she looks like a strange woodland creature. ‘Please,’ she says again. She is stuffing her possessions back into her bag. The anemones are on the ground. ‘I know more than you think. I can be helpful. We should do this together.’
‘Do what?’
She stands up. ‘Find Zach, of course.’
Ten minutes later Onnie is sitting again on my sofa in the front room. She has cried a little bit – snotty tears that seem genuine – and told me how sorry she is. It was a spur of the moment decision. She just saw it, sitting there on the desk, and she thought if she just had a bit of time, she might be able to crack his password. She hadn’t, and now she knows I haven’t either, we should do it together. ‘Two brains are better than one,’ she says. ‘We’re not enemies. We should be friends, do it together. Between us we must be able to work out what he would choose, what was important to him.’
I haven’t said much. I am standing against the fireplace, holding the laptop to my chest.
‘I heard you,’ she says, ‘when you left Sand Martin that time you came to lunch.’
‘I didn’t come to lunch.’
‘OK, that time you didn’t come to lunch. I’d left them all in the drawing room and I was on the stairs. I heard you muttering as you ran out of the house. I couldn’t make much sense of it – something about having to find Zach. But now I know. All those things you said the other day, the way you talk about him.’
‘What?’
‘He’s still alive, isn’t he?’
I don’t answer straight away.
‘How could that be possible?’ I say eventually.
‘I’ve been thinking about it. All day yesterday, I just tried to work it out. He must have faked the accident.’
‘It’s very unlikely,’ I say carefully, in a slow, schoolteacherish voice. ‘Lots of people were involved in his crash. The farmer who called the fire brigade. The driver of the Asda delivery lorry who stood in the road to stop the traffic. The tow truck – three people involved with the removal of the wreckage. Witnesses, coroners, two different police forces. It was a big deal, Onnie.’
‘Have you heard of Jolyon Harrison? Do you know who he is?’
‘The name’s familiar.’
‘He disappeared. He went missing from Cornwall. The same week of Zach’s accident. Don’t you think that’s weird?’
I feel a racing, a tightening in my chest. ‘It’s a coincidence.’
‘The last sighting of him was in Bude. Kulon said he’d been in the bar before Zach came in.’
‘Zach was in the bar that night?’
‘Yes. It’s where I found him.’
I look past her out of the window. The new pane of glass has a different glint. Less dimpled. Flatter. I thought he had been in Exeter that night. What does it mean if he was already in Cornwall? I study the glass, try to keep calm.
‘Zach would be clever enough to have worked it out. He and Jolyon could have been in the car together. Zach got out in time – threw open the car door, rolled into the ditch and when the car went up in flames, he decided just to walk away. Or he was never in the car. Jolyon was driving. Jolyon died. Zach has kept under the radar ever since. He’s waiting until it’s safe and then he’s coming back.’
I say, testing her, ‘You can’t pretend to die and then carry on as normal. You need documents, a driving licence, a passport and National Insurance number. Ordinary things, like renting somewhere to live or getting a job – none of it’s possible without a legal identity. All those loopholes to do with babies who died the year you were born, applying for their birth certificates and pretending you’re them – it doesn’t work like that any more . . . It’s impossible to just start a new life.’
I notice that I have raised my voice.
Onnie stands up and takes a step towards me. Her eyes are glittering. ‘What if you don’t want a new life?’ she says. ‘What if you just want to mess with the old one?’
Zach
February 2012
She’s better. The fever broke. She says she’s given in her notice, but I don’t believe her. She’s lying, as she always does. It’s changed again. I can tell. I can feel the slippage, sand slinking under my feet like a tide on the turn. I don’t know what she does there, all day, up in that school. She’s like a fish. I can’t hold her. I have to press so hard to keep her in one place. It was the flu that made her love me, I realise now, not her heart.
When she’s late, I lose it. Shouldn’t. Can’t help myself. I start drinking too early, pacing the rooms, fiddling with plugs. Checking and double-checking. My hands are sore from washing. It all goes wrong. The pills, I think. She watches me. I feel judged. I love her so much I can feel emotion rise until I want to spit in her face.
I’ve invented a gallery in Exeter. The dealer is mad for me, I told her. Nothing like that waste of space in Bristol. This bloke’s serious. There’s a meeting in the diary. It’s the abstract landscapes he likes – he wants more. We’ll have to move down to Cornwall sooner. She thought I wouldn’t see the horror that came into her eyes, but I did.
Howard, old chap: I’m afraid your time has come. I have finessed my slow poison campaign. I bought some marrowbone in Pets at Home, which I hacked into slivers, inserting a pill into each section. I’ve hidden them in a bin bag hung from a discreet nail under an unravelled tarpaulin in the garden shed. She never looks in there.
Chapter Twenty-one
Lizzie
On Friday, Jane appears in the doorway just before the final bell. She plans to pop down to St George’s and wonders if I want to come too. I stare at her. I’m so tired, my mind so fractured, I don’t know what she’s talking about. ‘See how he’s doing,’ she says. ‘Show him a friendly face.’
‘Who?’ I say.
‘Sam! Who else?’
I have left Onnie at home trying to crack Zach’s password. I have reluctantly accepted her help. We are dubious accomplices. It seems bizarre – his wife and his schoolgirl mistress joining forces to work him out. We spent the evening brainstorming possible combinations. I would have given up. ‘It could be anything,’ I said. ‘A random assortment of letters.’ But Onnie is tenacious. She’s convinced Zach would have been as careful with this as he was with everything he did. ‘It will be something that is meaningful to him.’
She told me not to worry about Xenia. She is still trying to get in touch with her.
I think she is stalling but I don’t know what else to say.
I wonder whether it would amuse Zach or annoy him, our complicity, or whether it has been his plan all along. I feel uneasy about it and slightly sick, but at the same time defiant. What is the worst he can do now? Kill me? Kill us both?
Onnie has promised to keep an eye on the dog, to ring me if he seems any worse.
‘OK,’ I tell Jane. ‘Life goes on.’
She drives us there in her beaten-up estate. The back seat is laden high with boxing gloves and fold-up chairs, props for Bugsy Malone. I can’t se
e out the back to see if we’re being followed.
‘You’re quiet,’ she says. ‘Feeling a bit . . . ?’
‘I’m fine.’
I text Onnie to tell her I’ll be home a little late and then switch off my phone.
We find Sam in one of the men’s surgical wards. He is lying, dressed but without shoes, on a bed at the far end. His head, bandaged, is propped on several pillows and he is reading a book entitled Evil Genes. He doesn’t see us approach and I think two things as we walk towards him. The first is how nice it is to see him, how uncomplicated he is. And the second is how odd it is to see a colleague horizontal. And without footwear.
‘Ah,’ he says, putting his book down and smiling. ‘A delegation from work.’
Jane says: ‘Is that any way to greet your fellow workers, the providers of buns?’ She kisses his brow, just below the rim of the bandage. It’s tinged with greyish yellow, Magic Mustard, the iodine ointment they used to put on our scrapes at school. I had imagined a bump. I hadn’t envisaged a cut. I don’t kiss him, but it’s not because of that.
He is looking at me as if he knows I’m embarrassed. ‘Carter,’ he says. ‘Nice of you to drop by.’
He offers us chocolate muffins from a swan-shaped wicker basket and tells us what happened, or as much of it as he has pieced together. He left me at the edge of the common and walked along the diagonal path towards the railway bridge. That’s all he remembers. He assumes he must have crossed over, because an hour later he was found on the other side of the tracks, in the bushes, with a head injury and two broken ribs. ‘Random attack,’ the police think. ‘Mistaken identity perhaps, or robbery gone wrong.’ He is due to be released today when the relevant nurse brings the relevant paperwork for him to sign in the relevant places. Paula, his ex-wife, is driving down from Hackney to take him home. Jane asks if he will be all right, looking after himself, and he says Paula is going to stay the first night just to check he doesn’t wake up foaming at the mouth.
‘Oh?’ she says knowingly.
‘It’s not like that,’ he says and gives me a quick look.
I hardly speak. I’m no company for anyone. But as we are getting up to leave, he says, ‘I’m sorry about this’ sweetly, as if it is his fault. Our eyes meet. There is a dark fleck, like a comma, beneath one of his pupils, and deep smile lines around his mouth. He is wearing a checked Viyella shirt, open at the neck. His collarbone is pale, with a thumbprint of a bruise.
Jane persuades me back to her flat in Tooting after the hospital. Sanjay is working late and she could do with the company. I expect she’s checking up on my state of mind, but I go anyway. I want to stay out of my house, and away from Onnie, for as long as I can. I don’t mind her being there, I feel responsible for her, but I’m reluctant to spend too much time with her. She will ring, she promised, if she gets anywhere. In the meantime, I need to get a grip on something firm, calm my mind.
Jane and Sanjay live in a flat that takes up the top two floors of a large house behind the Broadway, decorated like a Victorian bordello, full of rich drapes and chaises longues and red velvet screens. We have a cup of tea in their little kitchen and then a glass of wine. Jane rustles up some microwaved baked potatoes and cheese. We talk about work – whether Michele’s boyfriend will propose and whether Pat needs Prozac and whether Ofsted will come next week now instead. My mind has split into parallel lines. I’m disconnected from my friends. This is what happens when you keep things back. It becomes impossible to bridge the gap. I’m not going to mention Zach, but I do tell her a bit about Onnie – to try and explain how distant I have been. I don’t go into details – just say the daughter of an old friend of Zach’s has turned up and is behaving erratically. Jane says she sounds like she needs professional help. ‘She’s not really my problem,’ I say casually and I wish I meant it.
Before I know it, it’s past nine. I could get a bus, but I decide to walk – along Garratt Lane and up Magdalen Road. It’s stopped raining for the first time in months. The wine has gone to my head. It’s a forty-minute stomp and I stride past the shops, out in the open, under the street lights. I turn round and stop a lot. I wonder who he is watching: Onnie or me? Is he confused? Erotically stirred? I say, under my breath: ‘I’m ready. Where are you?’
He’s too clever for that.
Standing outside the house, I hear the strains of familiar music. A voice, half-sway, half-boom, over drums and an electric guitar. It’s Elvis Costello: not Goodbye Cruel World, but a song from an earlier album, My Aim is True. ‘Alison’, a song about betrayal that’s pretending to be about love. I fumble for my key and jump when I realise Onnie is next to me, in the bay window, the other side of the glass, staring at me. Her face is a pale moon, her hair drawn across her shoulders like curtains.
She comes out of the sitting room into the hall when I open the door. ‘You’re so late,’ she says, her head on one side. ‘Where have you been? I’ve been so worried.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I texted you. I went to visit a friend in hospital.’
‘You didn’t answer your phone.’
My mobile is in my pocket and I take it out. ‘Damn. Sorry. I switched it off to go into the ward. I must have forgotten to switch it back on.’ I press the top button and the screen illuminates. Five missed calls. Four texts. ‘Sorry,’ I say again.
She looks at me and slightly shakes her head. ‘It’s OK. It’s not spoiled.’
The dog has pushed his way out of the kitchen and has come to greet me. The music is louder with the door open. Spoiled? I can smell cooking. I stroke Howard and say: ‘I would have thought you were a bit young for Elvis Costello.’
‘Just like it, that’s all.’
‘It was Zach’s favourite.’
‘I know.’
I push down the small wave of jealousy and follow her into the kitchen, where Elvis Costello is playing from an iPod dock. The table is laid. Onnie is opening the oven and pulling out a tray containing two chicken breasts. She lays them on separate plates and adds mashed potatoes and peas from saucepans on the hob. ‘Tra-la,’ she says. ‘I bet you didn’t know I could cook, did you?’
‘How lovely,’ I say. I should be able to tell her that I’ve eaten. It shouldn’t feel so insurmountable. But I can’t. It’s how I used to feel with Zach, trapped in his expectations, controlled. I have the same loss of perspective, too. I don’t know what I’m allowed to feel, whether I am in the right or in the wrong. I fetch a glass of water and drink it, leaning against the sink. I can sense Onnie watching my every move.
‘Nice, isn’t it?’ she says, when I have put the glass down. ‘To come home to a cooked meal?’
‘Lovely.’
‘Have you been drinking?’
‘Hardly at all.’
She laughs and wags her finger at me.
‘No, really, I haven’t. One or two glasses.’
She passes my plate to me and we both sit down.
‘So who were you visiting?’ she asks as we start to eat.
‘Just a colleague from school.’ I swallow down some chicken. It feels like punishment.
‘Sam Welham?’
‘Yes! How do you know that?’
‘I remembered, that’s all. You told me about him, the other day.’
‘Did I?’ I put my fork down and stare at her. How odd that she would pick up on that.
She carries on eating, but, feeling my eyes, looks up and smiles at me. ‘So you haven’t asked how I got on today?’
‘How did you get on?’ I realise as I’m asking that this is a mistake. I don’t want Onnie looking inside Zach’s laptop without me being there. I don’t actually want her looking inside his laptop at all. I hope she hasn’t found anything.
‘I didn’t work it out, she answers quickly. ‘But I have been thinking hard. One in five people apparently use their pet’s name. I tried “Howard” but it didn’t work. Did Zach have any pets when he was growing up that you know about?’
An image of Zach’s cold chi
ldhood home comes into my head. A large house, with empty rooms, and a small unloved boy in a corner, ducking the blows. He longed for a dog – Zach told me that early on – but he would never have had the courage even to ask. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘First girlfriend? The love of his life? He would have chosen something that meant the world to him. He was such a romantic man.’
‘Was he?’ I stand up and surreptitiously scrape the rest of my potato into the bin and wash my plate under the tap. Now she thinks I’ve accepted their affair, she’s talking as if we’re equals. ‘Well, I suppose his first girlfriend would have been on the Isle of Wight, when he was growing up.’
‘The Isle of Wight! We should go.’
I turn round and laugh in mock horror. ‘We can’t. I promised Zach I’d never set foot in the place. He didn’t want me corrupted by it. He had sworn never to go back.’
‘He made you promise never to go to the Isle of Wight?’ Her expression, pinched around the cheeks, is baffled, and a bit pitying.
‘It was no great hardship,’ I said. ‘Until I met Zach, I don’t think I properly even thought about where it was. And, to be honest, it wasn’t on my itinerary.’ An idea is taking root, even as I’m talking. The Isle of Wight. Of course. I’ve been fixated on the thought of him nearby. He could be waiting at a distance. The Isle of Wight: yes. It’s the last place he’d expect me to look. It would be the perfect place to hide.
‘You’re funny,’ Onnie says. She’s looking at me quite fondly. ‘It wasn’t on your itinerary!’
‘It wasn’t that funny.’
‘Thanks for letting me stay. It’s OK now, isn’t it? I think when Zach finds out, he’ll be so glad that we’re friends.’
Remember Me This Way Page 25
