‘Now then,’ said Mick.
‘Your self-pity makes me sick.’ Hayden’s voice was horribly amiable. He put my hand against his face and held it there.
Jan’s face became mottled with anger. ‘You took the advance – our advance – and spent it. Sounds like theft to me.’
‘Have you ever heard of expenses?’
‘You mean you pissed it away.’
Hayden shrugged. ‘I did what was best for the band,’ he said. ‘Get over it.’
‘What? Losing my money and my girl to you? That’s your advice, is it?’
‘It worked all right for me.’
It seemed to me that Hayden was asking to be attacked. Certainly, he didn’t move when Jan hurled himself across the room, and when Jan’s fist hit him in the stomach he merely gave an approving grunt. I held on to Jan’s arm but he shook me off and hit Hayden twice more, once on his head and then, clumsily, his neck, before Mick and Nat dragged him away. Hayden sat back and smiled at me, a very sweet smile that frightened me. There were tears in his eyes.
‘Leave now,’ I said to the four men, and they shuffled out, leaving the flat like a demolition site. I turned to Hayden. ‘You’re an idiot.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Did you steal the money?’
‘Of course not.’
‘But you spent it?’
‘It went. The way money does.’ He rubbed his face and when he took his hand away the smile was gone and he just looked tired. ‘If you’re telling me I’m hopeless, of course I am. I told you at the beginning not to get involved with me.’
‘And I told you I’m not involved.’
‘No?’
‘No. This is my summer interlude.’
He gave a soft laugh. ‘You think?’
After
I woke up with a start. What was it? Was someone in the flat? I listened for a few seconds. A car drove past. I heard voices but they were far away, out in the street somewhere. No. It wasn’t that. Something in my dream, but not just a dream, something important. Suddenly it came to me out of the dark. The key to Hayden’s car. Why had I kept it? It was unbelievably stupid. That it was in a clever place made it even more stupid. If the police searched my flat and found it just lying around, I could pretend, just about pretend, that during our affair Hayden had lent me a spare car key. But if they found the key in the bottom of a jar of sugar, there could be no possible innocent explanation. And they probably would find it. I was a panicky, amateur hider and they were professional finders. They knew the kind of places where idiots like me hid things, and if they didn’t know they’d find them anyway, because when they really wanted to find something, they ripped everything apart.
Not that it was a particularly brilliant hiding-place. What if someone who came to the flat suddenly did something that needed lots of sugar, like making lemonade or baking a cake, emptied the jar and found the key? It sounded stupid, but what would I actually say?
I got up, ran to the kitchen and plunged my hand into the jar. I suddenly thought: What if it isn’t there? But, of course, it was. I placed it on the table and sat and stared at it. It was like a talisman, representing my contact with Hayden, my guilt. It almost exuded energy, so that I hardly dared touch it. Instead I thought about it so intensely that I almost felt dizzy. What I needed to do was throw it, and the flat key I still had, away somewhere they would never be found. Why on earth hadn’t I done that in the first place? Why? I tried to interpret the motives of this other person, the earlier me, who had abandoned the car. There must have been a reason, even if I hadn’t articulated it to myself at the time.
I forced myself to think about this, even though it was in the past and all I really wanted was to shut it away. Yes, there had been a reason for keeping the key. If I had thrown it away, I would have lost my last chance of doing anything to the car. If I had remembered a mistake I had made, something I had left behind, there would have been nothing I could do about it. Now the car and its location wormed their way into my thoughts. Was leaving it there really such a great idea? If the police started to search for his car, wouldn’t an airport car park be one of the first places they’d look? It wasn’t as if they’d have to check all those thousands of vehicles one by one. They’d probably just have to type the registration number into a database. They’d be able to find the exact time the car had arrived there, which would give them the time of Hayden’s disappearance. They could start asking for alibis. Was it really likely that we hadn’t left some traces in the car? Even if we hadn’t, the photograph of us entering the car park would show a woman driving. There were too many weaknesses. I made myself think and think and, with a sickening lurch, realized where my thoughts were taking me. I was like a person with vertigo who was making herself walk to the edge of a very steep cliff and lean over as far as possible to stare down into the depths.
I washed and dressed, but it was too early to go out. I needed to wait until the shops opened, and I wanted to get to the airport when there were lots of people around. The key lay in front of me, burning a hole in the table, as I drank cup after cup of coffee and hunted through the phone book until I found what I needed. I tore a corner off a newspaper and wrote the address down.
It was eight thirty when I finally left the flat. First I went to a cash machine and withdrew £300. I was now £233 overdrawn: how would I pay my mortgage next week, or buy food? I walked up the high street until I reached a shop I vaguely remembered but had never been into before. It sold strange clothes at unbelievably cheap prices. I bought a garish pair of maroon slacks for five pounds, a horrible sweatshirt that bore the slogan Spalsboro Sports Club and a picture of an eagle for two pounds, and a pair of cotton gloves for two pounds fifty. I went back to the flat, put them on and faced myself in the mirror. I looked strange. I looked poor. But it didn’t matter. All I needed was the cash and the key.
I went out to Stansted on the train, surrounded by people with luggage, heading off on holiday. I stared out of the window at the canals, the vast construction projects, the scrubland that eventually gave way to a brief moment of countryside. I felt another sudden stab of horror. The car-park ticket. What had we done with it? I was almost sure we’d left it in the car. I thought of ringing Sonia, then decided not to. I’d probably have to tell her what I’d done, but I’d leave it till afterwards. Was it in the car? What would I do if it wasn’t? I’d just have to leave the car, go back to Plan A, and worry about it for the rest of my life.
When I got out of the terminal building, ready to catch the shuttle to the long-term car park, I realized I needed to know which zone to get to. There were twenty-six, one for each letter. I had parked there before and I’d always remember the letter by connecting it with something I knew, a name, a place, a pet. But I hadn’t done that this time. I hadn’t thought I’d be coming back. I ran through the alphabet in my mind. The letters all seemed neutral. A, B, C, D, E, F, G… That was it. G for God. All-knowing, all-powerful, non-existing. At least, that was what I hoped. I got on the bus.
When I reached the car I found the ticket in the glove compartment. Everything went easily. I had to go into the office to pay £80.20 but the girl behind the counter barely looked at me and there was no camera when I drove out of the barrier. They’re not bothered about you when you leave, just so long as you’ve paid.
When I got to London, I turned off into Walthamstow towards the address I’d written down. It was perfect. The SupaShine Twenty-Four-Seven Car Cleaning Service was located on what must previously have been a petrol station or a car showroom. As I pulled in, I saw a large group of overalled young men hard at work with hoses and sponges on a row of cars. I removed my gloves, because they made me look insane. I got out and an extremely fat man holding a clipboard came up to me. ‘You want standard wash and leather?’ he said.
‘What else do you do?’
He pointed up at the sign on the wall.
‘What’s the Interior Valet?’ I asked.
He sniffed. ‘Vacuum and shampoo all carpets, including boot carpet. Clean every surface, remove rubbish, clean the ashtrays.’
He peered at the car dubiously. It was absolutely filthy.
‘What about the exterior?’ he said.
That didn’t matter so much but I didn’t want him to remember me and he had probably never in his entire life been asked to clean the inside of a car and not the outside. ‘And the exterior as well,’ I said. ‘Of course.’
He walked over and looked more closely at Hayden’s shoddy old Rover with its rusting sills and balding tyres. ‘It’s usually company cars that have the Executive,’ he said.
‘I borrowed it,’ I said. ‘I promised to have it washed before I gave it back.’
‘That’ll be ninety pounds,’ he said, with a shrug.
‘A bargain,’ I said, and counted the money out.
‘It’ll take about half an hour,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a waiting room.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said.
For the next half-hour I stood in the warm morning sunshine in a part of London I had never visited and watched the men doing what Sonia and I should have done, which was to scour every surface, vacuum-clean and remove a surprising amount of clutter, some of which may have been things that we – more probably I – had dropped by mistake. Better still I heard the men talking to each other in a language, or languages, I didn’t understand. I knew this type of place. They employed recent immigrants, low wages, no questions asked, high turnover. Nobody would remember me. Nobody would even still be here should any questions be asked. Nobody would remember the woman from the non-existent Spalsboro Sports Club.
I put my gloves back on and drove away, but only went a few hundred yards before turning left onto a busy road full of down-at-heel Internet cafés, shops selling cheap umbrellas, greengrocers with tubs containing fruit I couldn’t name, a seedy taxidermist’s, a barber, a shop selling canaries, budgerigars and hamsters in cages that were stacked up in the window, and another offering hardware. It was a poor and crowded area – perfect for my purposes. I pulled up behind a white van delivering fizzy drinks, checked that I had left nothing on the seats to incriminate me, turned off the engine but left the key in the ignition, got out and strolled away, trying to look nonchalant. Now someone just had to steal it. Surely that wouldn’t take long.
I had planned to go straight home, but I suddenly found I was so tired and so dizzy with a sensation that might have been hunger or might have been fear that I could barely put one foot in front of the other. I stumbled down the street until I came to a café with two tables by the window and a counter full of doughnuts and pastries. I ordered a cup of tea and a blueberry muffin and sat at a table. The tea was tepid and stewed and I had to drink it in hasty sips; the muffin had seen better days. It was like sawdust in my mouth, but nevertheless I could feel its sweetness giving me energy.
Outside the window life was going on. Women pulling toddlers passed by, teenagers in a gaggle, solitary men – some walking slowly and others with a quick and purposeful stride. There were a lot of cars, barely moving on the traffic-clogged road. Motorbikes and lorries too. And – I blinked but there could be no mistaking it – a tow-truck with a rusty old Rover on it. Hayden’s Rover. The Rover I had left with the key in the ignition to be stolen. How had that happened? It had taken them less than half an hour to tow away the car I’d left to be stolen. Had I parked it on a red line? Surely not. Now, instead of Hayden’s car getting its number plate ripped off and being driven around London by a thief, it had been taken away by the traffic police. Had I ruined anything? And then I thought: Maybe not. Maybe I had found a good way of getting rid of the car. Or was it a disaster? I didn’t know and there was nothing I could do about it. It was too late.
An hour later, I was back at home. I took my crazy clothes off and put real ones on, then walked around Camden, depositing the slacks, the sweatshirt and the two gloves in four different litter-bins. Then, with great unwillingness, I rang Sonia and told her I needed to meet her and, yes, it was urgent and, no, there was nothing to worry about and, yes, it should just be me and her, so she told me about a pub along the road from where she lived. I met her there and bought two glasses of wine, and we went outside on the pavement into the sunshine and I told her everything I had done. When I had finished, Sonia was silent.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘You idiot,’ she said loudly.
‘Sonia,’ I hissed. A couple were sitting at one of the picnic tables out on the pavement and the man looked at us.
‘You stupid, stupid idiot,’ she repeated, but this time in a furious whisper. ‘What the hell were you playing at?’
‘I thought it was too risky to leave it in the car park,’ I said. ‘We might have left some trace. We should have washed it first, washed away any clues. We were bound to have left something. Fibres, I don’t know. And they would have found it soon, just standing there.’
‘How do you know?’ said Sonia. The effort to keep her voice down seemed painful. ‘How can you possibly know?’
‘They must have some way of checking after a couple of weeks,’ I said. ‘Otherwise people would go and dump cars in airport car parks all the time.’
‘What if you’d had a breakdown?’ said Sonia. ‘Or an accident? Or been caught by a speed camera? Or been stopped by police?’
‘It seems mad…’
‘So you’ve just handed Hayden’s car to the police? That was your plan?’
‘It wasn’t what I had in mind but it’s not really the police,’ I said. ‘I’ve had cars towed away a couple of times. They take them to the pound.’
‘Yes?’ said Sonia angrily. ‘And then?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that. I suppose it’ll just stand there,’ I said. ‘And I suppose they’ll send out a letter and then another, but as he had no permanent address, who knows how long it will taken them to trace it back? And even if the police do discover it, so what? What’s suspicious? And now it’s not tied to the time of Hayden’s disappearance.’