It was Friday afternoon; the journey was peaceful in the sort of train where a person could sit alone at a table for four
without interruption until London loomed and the carriage filled with the smell of city pressures. Plenty of thinking time, the movement soothing, the constant stopping and starting nothing more than a light relief. Station names passed by like new acquaintances, passengers getting on and getting off: there was a flash of daffodils in a window box, reminding Sarah to regret that she had done nothing with Jeremy’s fresh herbs which would wither and die in a jar in her kitchen. It crossed her mind that Jeremy and his friend might take advantage of her house in her absence. The lack of a key was no barrier to that and she found she did not particularly mind. It was no longer her house, if it ever had been, and the thought that she might unwittingly provide refuge to a couple of potentially homicidal throwbacks was faintly satisfactory, and far preferable to the idea that the pair of them would be hounded over the cliffs by vengeful vigilantes.
She did not care where they were hiding, only that she knew they would be hiding, probably successfully. They would be hiding because Mrs Hurly had shrieked Jeremy’s name, blamed him, yelled at the police that he was the murderer, and the witch-hunt would be on for him. She was trying not to remember the callousness she had seen in his eyes, imagined the reactions of anyone reading his curriculum vitae. The natural killer, the man with a criminal record for possession of drugs, the man trained to slit a throat and bleed a large body, adept at the killing of small animals: a dispossessed bastard, half in love with someone he imagined was his half-sister, the perfect unbalanced candidate and yet, she was convinced, not the culprit, not the cold-blooded murderer, not even for a game.
He might have found her on the cliffs. He alone might have found her and treated the body with the same respect
due to a stunned beast in a slaughterhouse. You bled it dry to preserve it from putrefaction and keep it at its best, then you kept it somewhere cold. That way it remained sweet-smelling.
Jessica had been dead for two or three days, Sam had said. He would know that better than a pathologist. ‘There’s a minimum of two days before we get them from the abattoir, takes them that long to cool down. If the beef comes from Smithfield, it could have been dead for weeks. But there was no Smithfield delivery due, never on that day of the week: there was nothing ordered the whole week.’
‘But if there was, the delivery man would be able to get in, wouldn’t he?’
‘Yes, of course. He’s done it before but there was nothing ordered. He didn’t come.’
The notes Sarah wrote to herself on the train were only proof that she relied on the written word as much as the spoken. There were times when she regretted her own awful objectivity, but then, she had always had an ice chip resting in that large heart of hers. There was always a degree of resentment in herself that she could not cry instead of writing things down in quiet, cold anger.
Smithfield
.
Notes to self
.
There is no Hurly in the graveyard
.
The man at the dinner party? Jessica being seen . . . get Andrew to check, who saw?
If Jessica came back she would have come to me, surely? Or is that vanity on my part? Where else would she have gone?
Jessica living rough? Feasible: she could live anywhere
.
The only one with real motive to do this is The Lover
.
Sarah had stayed long enough in the village to get the local
knowledge, watched and listened during the day after the discovery, waited another night, made plans. For once the place was united in conversation and rumour and fear. They stood outside the closed butcher’s shop rather than going in, digested not meat but information, writing the headlines for the local paper.
The body of a young woman was deposited overnight on the 8th March in Brady’s butchers. Two local men wanted for questioning
.
A thrilling local murder, then. Definitely local. Revenge on local promiscuous girl who had never grown up, who had upset the smooth running of things and embarrassed so many. Plenty who did not want her back. Perhaps Jeremy had been paid to do it. No.
Sarah had talked and listened and looked at Mrs Hurly’s library. She had listened to the messages that Jessica had left on Jack Dunn’s phone.
Jack, I’ve pissed you off, sorry, I know you hate me, coming back to you like this, but please meet me. Tell me where and I’ll be there. Please don’t hate me
.
Wrong. Jack did not hate her, or mind when she phoned when she was in the shit.
Sarah had considered giving the mobile to a waiting policeman, saying she had found it in the street and that would have been her civic duty, but she’d used the phone, too. Civic duty went against her nature: anyway, the phone would incriminate Jack and implicate herself. So far, no one but the vicar knew how well she had known Jessica, or who had been in her house. Sarah was going to be away before they got round to her. She did not trust the police to listen to the theories forming in her own mind any more than she trusted them to depart from what seemed obvious. She and Andrew had agreed to keep one another informed, becoming conspirators. Ah, the blessings of e-mail.
London loomed. She dreaded it and embraced it.
It was not a local crime. It had begun here, in this city, she was sure of it. It had begun with an obsession. It was all about too much love, rather than about hate.
She continued to Charing Cross so that she could take the longish walk home through Covent Garden to reacquaint herself with the city she had abandoned. The walk confirmed her decision to attempt another life, and yet it made her nostalgic. The city was at its best on a spring evening, with everyone setting forth for shopping, eating, arguing and loving, fresh from work, winding down like springs uncoiled. Such clothes, such silly shoes, such chatter into mobile phones, sparrows gathering for a flight into unreality. Sarah wore the sort of boots better suited for walking on cliff paths and felt better equipped. The crowds were irritating; it was a novel experience having to sidestep all the time in order to get up any turn of speed. She could feel her love of human nature slipping away – but then, there had always been times when it was more precarious than others.
She was concentrating on what to do, and in which order. The priority was to find out who had murdered her friend, not out of any wish to avenge her but because it enraged her to see someone else accused. Jeremy would never have done that to Sam Brady. This was a London murder. No one in the village could hate Jessica Hurly enough to kill her. Jessica’s promiscuity had been a social service.
S
arah’s flat was cold and unwelcoming, relatively undisturbed. Jessica had been given free range to use it if she wanted, although she had expressed reluctance to take advantage. She had been and gone long since. The signs of her presence were minimal but typical, such as scrappy notes
written on virulent pink Post-its, the aides-memoires of mobile-phone calls, a cup of long-dead coffee half-drunk and left. This was not home, either; already Sarah felt herself longing for the sound of the sea instead of the traffic noise reverberating outside. She turned on the lights and the heating and contemplated what she had never missed, namely a large and dusty place with marks on the walls where pictures had once hung, an apartment of many rooms, inhabited by the ghosts of many lovers, including the man who had left it to her. A slightly cursed place, but wonder of wonders, she could no longer smell the smoke of the fire which had haunted her. She remembered how Jessica had said
I want to be like you
.
‘Tart’ was a harsh description for Sarah’s chosen profession during the most recent decade of her varied life. It was a word which applied equally to less generous, less dignified and far more self-centred pursuits. Sarah was an elegant and charming companion to a coterie of nice if socially dysfunctional men of whom she was fond for as long as it took. The offering of sexual and social confidence didn’t seem such a bad thing to do. Most of the men remained friends. You had to like shy men to do what Sarah did. Jessica could not make friends of men: she needed them like a drug. She had needed one man with a destructive passion.
Sarah was sure that Jessica had not stayed overnight here: Jessica had drifted in and out a few times, leaving a small wake of mess, nothing more. No clothing, no kicked-off shoes. She had used it as a space to phone, to make black coffee or tea, and she had meant to come back. The spare bedroom was undisturbed; there had been no sleeping over, even though the location was so convenient. Jessica lived in a flat on the outskirts. The police would have combed it by now. To her shame, Sarah had never known where it was.
Whenever she had met Jessica and brought her home, Jessica had been en route to somewhere else.
Jessica’s mess was easily tidied away, unlike her body. Sarah had been afraid she might find blood.
She consulted the wardrobe she had left behind, which included the better clothes, the smart stuff, the vintage, the nothing-off-the-peg stuff, the interestingly modest stuff, the how-to-pass-muster-and-never-look-like-a-tart stuff, and finally selected what she had worn to the first dinner party where she had gone with one of her paying paramours who had needed an affectionate escort to get him through an evening with his so-called terrifying peers. Dear Jonathan, such a sweet, insecure man who no longer needed her. Together they had witnessed Jessica Hurly pour soup over the head of the host, watching it, she had to confess, with great pleasure, and Jonathan had lost his fear. The host had been a prick and quite probably was bankrupt by now. He was one man who would have been happy to kill Jessica then and there, to avenge his own humiliation. In Jessica’s case, there might well have been several such.
Thinking thus, Sarah went back into the kitchen, and only then smelt that smell of sharp decay. It penetrated beyond the fridge, leaking out all around it, so that Sarah had to marshal all her forces before opening the door. There was a terrible stink of dead fish, a sharp, accusing stench. Two once-fresh trout, two suppurating oily mackerel, wrapped in paper and bought fresh a long time ago. Perhaps Jessica had once intended to cook and eat here, a meal for the demon lover. Perhaps the fish had merely been forgotten.
Sarah wrapped it all in black bin liners, until the fish became a cumbersome parcel. She left the door to an otherwise empty fridge open and opened the window, too. In the
dim recesses of an eclectic memory she remembered a revenge story, about someone who posted dead mackerel through the letter box of a rival who was away for a fortnight so that by the time the rival came back the house stank and the windows buzzed with feeding flies. I only left her a gift, the perpetrator said. A womanly kind of crime, it was said. Sarah herself had never felt rivalry with another woman: it was not her style, even though her intervention might have saved a marriage or two.
Once the fish parcel had been neutralised, Sarah completely revised her choice of clothes. She had left in winter, come back in early spring, which made the choices difficult. She was going out to dinner at the restaurant where Jessica had made trouble. DK. Das Kalb. She did not know what the name meant. One step at a time. She was hoping that she would meet the man who had obsessed Jessica most of all. The man she had wept about in the kitchen and shrieked about on the phone; the one she adored, the one who had dumped her, taken her back, dumped her again. The man in the restaurant where Jessica had become such a nuisance, the man who was always on her mind; the same man who had once taken her shopping in the middle of the night, and the man she had been trying to find when Sarah had met her that time, on her way back from Smithfield in the early morning, when she had not made much sense at all.
Sarah dusted and tidied automatically, as if she was really home and not in an alien, albeit harmless place. Showered and dressed, clean and with gleaming washed hair, she sat, completely transformed from country bumpkin to urbanite. An emerald-green cashmere sweater for luck, wide black trousers and tiny sparkly earrings, minimalist clothes that belonged to any age and any decade. She could have worn
clothes like this when she was eighteen and might wear them still when she was sixty.
Her ally would approve – but then, Mike approved of almost everything she did.
Waiting, sipping a small whisky, she thought of sweet, hesitant Andrew the vicar, beset with secrets and sitting in his half-decorated room, wringing his hands and contemplating a dinner of beans on toast. Then she thought of Sam Brady, the butcher in this pack of cards, sitting in front of his fire, weeping at the enforced closure of his shop, wondering how soon he could open it again, and if he did, would anyone come back. Then she thought of the village that had lost its heart, and the sea which remained relentless. Let them eat fish.
Finally, she thought of Celia Hurly and the promises she had made at dawn.
Find him. Find out the truth.
T
he sea was loud down at the bottom of the village, crashing against the shore as if angry with itself and the world around it. The sky was clear and full of stars. There were only two lights in the row of houses that led from the main village down to the pub at the end and the sea itself. One light came from Celia Hurly’s bedroom window; the second was the light from the door of the pub at the end of the row. The publican was taking a last late walk across the beach with his Alsatian, leaving the door open behind him. The dog was excited and ran around in circles, barking, looking for a companion to play with. Her owner shushed it, even though there was no one to hear. Then he walked back and shooed her inside. She did not want to go; not enough exercise today.
Before closing and locking the door behind him, the publican took a carrier bag containing the day’s leftover food – bread, cheese, pork pies, sausage rolls and anything else he could find – and left it tied to the smokers’ bench. Plain snack food which was all the customers ever wanted, hardly haute
cuisine, but someone would find it if they knew where to look. The food would be gone before morning. He added a bottle of water as an afterthought.