When she finally asks a different question it catches Rachel off guard. ‘So, tell me what you know about Kaspar Kashani,’ she says. Her tone is almost casual, but not quite.
Rachel blinks, unsure of where the question is leading. ‘I don’t know him well,’ she says. ‘I mean, I’ve been in the same room as him a few times. At the club.’
‘But your sister has been involved with him, you said,’ Karen presses. ‘You must have spent some time together?’
Rachel half laughs. ‘It wasn’t that sort of relationship. And besides …’ She hesitates, not wanting to say anything that might turn these people against her. But surely if Kas is known to them already, it can only be in a negative context. ‘I don’t like him,’ she says baldly. ‘He’s an unpleasant, intimidating man.’
Karen regards her thoughtfully. ‘What basis do you have for saying that?’ she asks. And when she considers it, Rachel realizes that she has very little basis for it at all, or that she didn’t, until the brief snatched conversation with Sadie on the station platform. Her dislike for him has been instinctive, unarguably so. But now it has become something else. It’s justified. Validated.
Leaning forward with sudden forced intimacy, Karen speaks again, and this time it really is as if she has read her mind. ‘Are you aware that Mr Kashani is currently on bail?’ she asks. ‘That he’s been questioned in connection with murder, and that it’s quite likely he’ll be charged?’
Rachel doesn’t reply at first, and in the brief pause that stretches between them she’s acutely aware of the way the atmosphere has changed in the room. The young man is suddenly alert, sitting up in his seat, and the woman is watching her with all the avid concentration of a collector spying a rare specimen, keen for it not to get away.
‘I didn’t know that, no,’ she says. She thinks of the haunted look on her sister’s face, her hushed, broken words.
‘I’ll be honest with you, Rachel,’ the policewoman says, and now her voice is dripping with inclusive chumminess. ‘This is a separate conversation, really. We’ve been trying to pin Kashani down for some time. Various charges coming to nothing, you know? He’s got a lot of people around him that make it pretty hard to get to him. But it’s different this time. As I say, we’re very close to charging him. And there’s a fair bit of evidence, enough for a professional to look at and convict him.’ She pauses, as if for effect, and when she continues she leans forward, her eyes intently boring into Rachel’s. ‘The problem is, juries aren’t made up of professionals. They’re just ordinary men and women, people who tend to follow their guts and think with their hearts. You see?’
Rachel frowns, lost. She tries to piece together what the woman is saying. ‘They might get it wrong?’ she says tentatively.
The policewoman smiles, without much warmth. ‘Yes, they might. And then we’ll be back in the same place we were, waiting for him to slip up and using up our time and resources trying to get him nicked. You see, Rachel, what I’m saying is that a lot of people don’t care too much about evidence. They care about people. They’ll look at Kashani looking all handsome in his nice suit, and they’ll listen to a load of his mates waxing lyrical about what a great guy he is, and there’s a good chance they’ll fall for it. So someone like you …’ She pauses again, and now Rachel does understand. ‘Someone like you,’ the woman says, ‘if you did know anything and were prepared to speak out against him, could be invaluable to us.’ She waits with eyebrows raised encouragingly, clearly expecting an answer.
Rachel tries to think, tries to understand what she might be committing to. It is all happening too fast, and she realizes that she is very tired. It is gone three in the morning, and there’s a relentless ache spreading through her body, right up to the sharp nerves of her temples. She can’t quite make sense of this, doesn’t know if these people are for her or against her.
When Karen speaks again her voice is softer, and Rachel realizes that she has misinterpreted her silence. ‘I can understand that you might be afraid to speak about this,’ she says. For the first time, Rachel catches a flash of something human, almost warm. ‘As you say, Mr Kashani is an intimidating man. But there are measures that can be put in place. Police protection. In extreme circumstances, if it was felt that you were in serious danger, your case could be approved by the witness protection programme. Do you know what that means?’
Still she doesn’t speak, but this time it’s shock that silences her. It’s as if someone has reached inside her head, grasped hold of her brain and altered everything – a decisive, one-hundred-and-eighty-degree rotation that makes it all seem bright and clear. All this time, she’s been secretly, shamefully wishing that her sister would disappear from her life. She has never even thought about the possibility that she, Rachel, could disappear from hers.
She thinks about this life and its building blocks: a decent but uninspiring job; a distant family she barely sees; friends who do little more than scratch her surface; a flat that she’s living in rent-free which belongs to somebody else. She’s sat curled up in front of the television countless times, thinking that without Sadie’s corrosive presence her life would be fine, but in reality there’s very little of substance to hang on to. She has heard of witness protection – has read anonymized interviews with women who say that they are traumatized by their ordeal, still pining for the life they left behind. She tries to think about whether she would feel that way.
She nods uncertainly. ‘I think so. I’d like to know more.’
‘Well, that can be arranged.’ Karen straightens up, clearly sensing a breakthrough. ‘So, is there anything you’d like to talk to us about?’
Slowly, Rachel nods again. Her head swims lightly with tiredness, but she can feel a little pulse of excitement beating through her veins. And she knows that she hasn’t properly considered this, weighed up the pros and cons and the possible implications and reverberations, but it feels right. It feels like fate.
It’s almost half past four in the morning when she finally gets back to the flat, and by the time she lurches through the door she’s dead on her feet, so desperate to sleep that she can’t think about what has just passed. She flings herself down on her bed and it’s instant – a swift vertiginous loss of consciousness that overtakes her and blacks everything else out.
Two hours later she opens her eyes again, still fully clothed, with the sickly, clinging aftermath of a headache. She’s still tired, but her mind is whirring, replaying the night’s events in Technicolor. She drags herself to her feet and goes to the kitchen, fills the kettle on autopilot and stands waiting for it to boil. Dawn is starting to creep through the dark clouds outside the window, casting a faint sheen of grey light on to the room. Her hands look pale and other-worldly. She watches them grasp a mug and hunt through the cupboard for a teabag, as if they are separate entities. When she has finally made the tea she carries it carefully across the room and drinks it standing in front of the window, looking down on to the street. She realizes she’s shaking, unsure if it’s the cold or some kind of delayed shock.
There’s an image flashing statically in her head, again and again. The twisting of a high-heeled shoe on the platform, the skid and slide of a body falling like a stone, and then a micro-second’s worth of horror, the blood and the swift obliteration of everything that held that body together. Even in her mind’s relentless re-enactment of the scene, she can barely process it. A morbid part of her wants to slow it down, so that she can better understand it. She didn’t know this woman. To feel sadness seems disingenuous somehow; to feel sympathy too easy and pat. She doesn’t know how she is supposed to feel.
She has been sitting there long enough for the streaks of light between the clouds to widen and spread and for the streetlights to switch off, when a movement at the end of the road catches her eye. A young woman is approaching the flat. She can’t see her face yet, but there’s something in the way the woman walks, a kind of recklessness and looseness in her stride. Sadie is home.
Sadie
January 2000
SHE HAS NO money left in her pockets and her card has been declined again so she walks all the way home from the police station and it takes hours – she walks through the dark, through the sunrise and into one of the coldest mornings she can remember. The ground is thinly covered with frost, sliding beneath her shoes with treacherous softness.
She’s used to people looking at her. As early as four or five, she felt spotlit, marked out from the crowd. Women would gaze at her in the street, their features softening into delight and admiration. Such a lovely girl. She knew even then that she had been given a gift. That it made her somehow special. And then later, when she was twelve or thirteen and she changed almost overnight – her cheekbones sharpening and slanting, her body snapping into new provocative curves – she was still under observation, in a different way. The strange women on the street would look at her once, quickly, then away, tugging at their hair or clothes. It was their husbands who focused on her now, but there was nothing soft or sweet in their gaze. She understood that they wanted something from her that she was not allowed to give. A couple of years later, she started giving it anyway.
She’s still being watched, as she walks the streets of London, but she’s no longer sure why. It doesn’t seem to be just about her looks anymore. It isn’t lust she sees in the eyes of the passers-by who slip through her vision like scurrying ants, but something else – something closer to fear. People veer towards her, then catch themselves and move quickly away, training their attention intently elsewhere. It’s as if they know what she’s done.
One foot in front of the other, for miles on end, and with every footstep she’s turning it over in her head, replaying those few minutes on the platform. She remembers the way her arm shot out towards Melanie – the decisive, sharp action of it, almost as if it were outside her control. Almost, but not quite. She pushed her. She pushed her towards the tracks. She pushed her towards the tracks and she fell. She pushed her towards the tracks and she fell to her death. Every thought nudges a little further towards the truth of what has happened, but it feels less and less real. It feels theoretical, conceptual. Like she’s done nothing at all.
She thinks about the police too, the way they questioned her. The swing in their attitude that she can’t quite understand – that she thinks she might be able to make sense of, if she was just a bit less drunk and had had a bit more sleep. They started off solicitous, gentle. This must have been a horrifying experience for you. Tissues, a steaming cup of tea. Grave, acquiescent nods when she told them that it had been an accident, just a silly little argument that got out of control – and even now, that doesn’t feel so far from the truth. And then, at a certain point, the tone had changed. So, tell us more about your relationship with this woman’s husband. Keen, inquisitive eyes raking her face. How much do you know about his activities outside of work? The sergeant leaning forward in the darkening lamplight, pushing the tape recorder imperceptibly closer. And then the last words she’d wanted to hear. Do the names George Hart and Felix Santos mean anything to you?
She had kept her face straight and denied all knowledge. She knows that this is what Kas will expect of her, and she is determined to do what he wants. She regrets the silly things she said to Rachel, when she was overwrought and stressed. Of course he isn’t going to kill her. He will know that what happened to Melanie was an accident. And even if he doesn’t, some small, secret part of her thinks, he isn’t like other men. He respects people who go all out to get what they want. He likes people with no boundaries. That’s her. These thoughts flood her head and on one level she knows she’s being crazy, but she can’t slow herself down, can’t get back to normality now, and so she just keeps repeating these things to herself and she keeps walking, resting her hand lightly on her stomach where her baby is slowly, slowly growing.
By the time she’s finally reached Covent Garden and the building where she and Rachel live is looming in front of her, she’s talked and walked herself into a kind of brittle exhilaration. Somehow, this is all going to work out. There’ll be a way forward, because there always is. She shoves the key into the lock and stumbles through the door, catching sight of herself in the hallway mirror. Her hair is sexily tousled around her face, her tight red T-shirt smoothly hugging her curves. She stares at herself, and half smiles. ‘I’m baaaack,’ she croons up the stairs, raising her voice. There’s no response, so she hurries upstairs and she finds Rachel in her bedroom, sitting on the bed hugging her knees to her chest.
Her sister looks washed out, the light cutting through the window and highlighting the sallow pallor of her skin. She carefully picks up a mug of tea beside her and sips it. ‘You were a long time. What did they say to you?’
‘What didn’t they say to me?’ Sadie fires back, coming forwards into the room and throwing herself down on to the bed, pillowing her hands behind her head. ‘God, it was boring as shit. Going over the same thing again and again.’ She hasn’t realized until this moment that she’s going to play it this way; this kind of hard levity is guaranteed to rub Rachel up the wrong way, but somehow it seems the only thing to do.
Rachel watches her, narrowing her eyes. ‘What did you tell them?’ she asks.
Sadie shrugs and exhales. ‘The truth. I think it’ll be OK. Obviously they’ll have to investigate it all a bit more, but I’m pretty sure they believed me. I told them that I’d started the fight with Melanie, but that that’s all it was, a fight. If it had happened in the middle of the street rather than – where it did, that would have been the end of it. It wouldn’t even have been on their radar. But she slipped and fell. Boom.’ She stops momentarily and frowns, the ripple of an unpleasant thought running through her. ‘I mean, that’s what you told them too, right?’ She props herself up on the bed and looks straight at her sister. It’s a question, and a challenge.
Slowly, Rachel nods. ‘Pretty much. It’s what I saw. What I think I saw.’
That one lingers between them for a few moments. Sadie wonders if it’s as straightforward as it sounds. If she should make something of it, or move on. At last she shrugs again, nodding mildly. ‘It was a shit thing to happen,’ she says, ‘but, well, I know this sounds bad but it might not be so terrible, all things considered. He didn’t love her, you know. He loves me. And when the dust settles he’ll realize that what with the baby and all …’ She can’t resist but spill out a little of what’s been passing through her head, but as soon as she does so she realizes that it’s pointless. Rachel’s face twists with incredulity and horror, and she shakes her head.
‘I don’t think that’s going to happen,’ she says bluntly, ‘and even if it did, why on earth would you want it to? After what you told me?’
Sadie sits up fully now. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean,’ Rachel says. ‘What you told me, on the platform at the station.’
She feels a fleeting cloud of panic, but it’s gone as fast as it appears. They were just words, that’s all. She can’t be held to them. ‘I don’t remember,’ she says. ‘Whatever I said, it didn’t mean anything.’
Rachel looks as if she might press the point, but she shuts her mouth again abruptly, and her eyes flick back and forth, as if she’s thinking. ‘Did they say anything to you?’ she asks at last. ‘The police. Did they say anything to you about Kas?’
Sadie stays quiet, weighing up possible answers. The chemical ebullience that she felt when she came into the room is gone; everything feels slowed down, and very still. When at last she speaks her voice sounds different to her own ears; there’s a kind of world-weariness in it that she doesn’t think she’s ever used before. ‘Someone like Kas is always under suspicion for something or other,’ she says. ‘No one understands people like him. He’s successful, different. It’s natural for people to want to bring him down.’
‘So you didn’t tell them anything,’ Rachel says. It isn’t really a question, but it seems to demand an answer.
&nb
sp; Sadie stands up, wrapping her thin arms around herself. She raises her chin slightly, and she catches sight of herself again, in the little mirror that hangs by Rachel’s dressing table. The light that filters softly through the half-open curtains settles lovingly on the beautiful planes of her face, making her look like a film star. And she sees Rachel watching her, sees something unmistakeable in her look, even now: something like love, something like awe.
‘There’s nothing to tell,’ she says clearly. ‘There will never be anything to tell.’
She leaves the room then, closing the door very quietly behind her. The catch clicks softly as she pulls it shut. She walks into her own bedroom, pulls a blanket over herself and hugs a cushion to her chest, listening. There’s no sound except for the infrequent passing of cars below. She doesn’t think she will sleep, but her body takes over and before she knows it she’s wrenching her eyes open in bright winter sunlight and glancing over at the clock to find that over six hours have passed.
Gingerly, she gets to her feet and moves softly down the corridor towards Rachel’s bedroom, pushing the door open to peer inside. Rachel is sleeping, lying motionless with her face pressed into the pillow. She tiptoes back to her own room and pulls the large suitcase from underneath the bed, starting to pile possessions in it almost at random. Clothes and jewellery and bottles of nail varnish, stacks of paperwork that have sat there ever since she carted them out from their parents’ house years ago, a few half-read books. She isn’t exactly sure why she is doing this, but after the conversation last night, she knows she can’t stay here. The battle lines have been drawn. No matter what she might say, her sister obviously isn’t on her side. And now that she’s sober and her head is clear, she’s starting to wonder about exactly what Rachel said, in her own interview room. She thinks again of the way the sergeant’s attitude towards her changed. She can’t quite link the two together yet, but she has an instinct, a queasy tug of premonition or foreboding.
The Second Wife Page 19
