What I knew was bad enough, but what was worse was what I didn’t know. I felt like a very minor soldier in a big battle, right on the edge, who didn’t understand what the struggle was about, or who was winning, or what the tactics were, but just heard occasional explosions from a distance. I had no idea what they meant. Sudden lulls. I had no idea what
they
meant either.
I was almost sure that the police still had no idea of where Hayden had been killed. Did they suspect? Were they combing the flat for evidence? Even if they were, I couldn’t think of anything significant they would find. What about his body? Would it just take a hair off my head, a fibre from my sweater? But they knew we’d been together. If I just stonewalled and denied everything, whatever they put to me, surely I’d be safe. But now there were Neal and Sonia as well. We were as strong as the weakest link. The one comfort was that there was no doubt it was me.
I knew that the police had talked to the others. What had they said? Did it matter what they’d said? I had no sense of whether the police were working on a theory or whether they were just interviewing everyone who had had anything to do with Hayden and hoping for the best. I suspected they were a bit dubious about me, but did they actually think I’d killed Hayden? Did they think I was the woman in the car? That I was both? Or one and not the other? And what happened with these inquiries? Did they go on for ever or did they just gradually fade away? I remember hearing or reading, or probably seeing on some TV detective show, that if a murder wasn’t solved in the first twenty-four hours, it probably wouldn’t be solved at all. Was that true or just an urban legend? After all, I didn’t know very much and most of what I thought I did know generally turned out to be wrong whenever I checked it with anyone.
Above it all, or beneath, there was the person, or the people, who had killed Hayden and whose evidence we had covered up. What were they thinking? What had they thought when the body hadn’t been found? When it had turned up in a reservoir? Were they doing anything about it or just letting events take their course? Was it someone from his past, someone I’d never heard of? Or was it someone I knew? Was it all just staring me in the face? That question of who could possibly have killed Hayden was the least mysterious of all the questions I asked myself. The answer was, anybody who had known him because, with Hayden, that was about enough to give you a sufficient motive. That was the thing. I could have done it, given the right moment, the right argument, the right heavy object in my hand. What would God say to that? Perhaps the fact, if it was a fact, that I could have done it was as bad as if I actually had done it.
So I sat in my unfinished, indeed barely started, flat and asked myself questions because I didn’t want to speak them aloud. I couldn’t lose myself in music because music was now part of the problem. And I couldn’t lose myself in drink because I couldn’t trust what I might do or what I might say.
In the end, I couldn’t stand the voices scratching in my head. I had to speak to someone or I’d go mad and, of course, the only people I could possibly speak to were my accomplices, my co-conspirators: Sonia and Neal.
Sonia would be with Amos, and if there was anyone I wanted to avoid right now, it was Amos.
So it was that I found myself taking the bus to Stoke Newington and walking along the charming little streets to Neal’s house. It was such a beautiful day, the air soft and warm, the sky a deep blue with trails of cloud on the horizon. People looked happy in their light clothes, their faces open in the golden light.
It hadn’t occurred to me that he wouldn’t be there but when I rang the doorbell there was no reply. I peered in through the letterbox and saw nothing but the strip of floorboard leading to the stairs. And now what should I do with myself, with my knocking heart and the hot dread that snaked through me? I sat on the doorstep and put my head into my hands, closed my eyes because the sun throbbed in my skull.
‘Bonnie?’
I looked up, blinking. ‘Neal!’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘A couple of minutes, if that.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘I think so.’ I forced a smile. ‘I don’t know why I’m here. I didn’t want to be alone in my flat. How about you? Are you OK?’
‘Me? I – to tell the truth, I can’t seem to settle to anything. I’m jittery. That’s why I went out – because I couldn’t stay in. But then I couldn’t stay out either. I had to get back to the house, as if I needed to hide from everyone. God, I’d make a lousy criminal.’ His mouth widened into a desperate smile, like a hole in his usually handsome face. ‘But I am a criminal, aren’t I? I am! Me? Fuck. Who’d have thought it? I’m such a geeky, boring, law-abiding person. I never even break the speed limit, not even when I’m in a hurry.’
‘Shall we go inside?’
‘I keep thinking I’m going to tell someone. Like the Ancient Mariner. I’m going to stop someone in the street and tell them what I’ve done.’
‘Inside, Neal,’ I said.
‘Yes. Sorry. Here.’ And he fumbled with the key, muttering curses under his breath.
‘I’ll do it,’ I said, taking it from his thick fingers.
I made us a pot of coffee and then some toast and Marmite. We sat in the kitchen and Neal took a gulp of coffee, a giant bite of his toast, and then said – rather indistinctly through the crumbs, ‘Are we idiots?’
‘What?’
He took another bite; his cheeks bulged. ‘They’re going to discover, aren’t they?’
‘No. I don’t think that at all.’ I understood that although I had come here for a kind of comfort, or at least the companionship of a shared secret, I was going to have to prop Neal up.
‘I did it for you.’
‘I didn’t ask you to,’ I said helplessly.
‘I know. I know you didn’t. You didn’t ask me and I didn’t ask you – sometimes I feel almost euphoric with what we’ve done for each other.’
‘That’s not the way it was.’
‘And sometimes I just feel terrified.’
‘I know. Me too.’
‘Do they know anything?’
‘I don’t know what they know. I don’t think they know he died in the flat. They know about him and me. And I’ve told them about me and you.’
‘Not that there was anything to tell,’ he said. ‘Just one night.’
‘I said we were together. So, as long as we stick to that we’re all right.’
‘Yes. We were together. Yes.’
‘All evening and night.’
‘Yes.’
‘He was married.’
‘What?’
‘Hayden was married.’
‘He had a wife?’
‘A wife and a son.’
He pushed the last of his toast into his mouth. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Neal, I don’t have a fucking clue what anything means. All I know is that Hayden had a whole complicated, messy life and the police are going to be looking at all that as well. He had a wife he’d left behind, a son he hardly ever saw, he had friends he’d betrayed, people he worked with whom he let down. And you’re forgetting something.’
‘What? What am I forgetting?’
‘We didn’t do anything to him. I mean, I know we tampered with the evidence.’ He snorted wildly at that. ‘OK, you tampered with evidence and me and Sonia – well, I don’t know what you’d call it. But we didn’t kill or harm him at all. That’s a different kind of guilt. Someone out there killed him.’
‘And we cleared up for them.’
‘Yes.’
‘What must they be thinking?’
‘Well, what were you thinking when the body disappeared?’
‘I was thinking – well, I was thinking: Oh, fuck, oh, Christ, is this a dream, a nightmare, oh, my God, am I mad? I was – I was – I don’t know – It was just surreal and I swear to God I’ve never been through anything like that in my life, nothing even approaching it, when there was nobody I could talk to about it.’ He pulled at his hair.
‘Exactly. That’s probably what they’re thinking as well, whoever they are.’
‘Do you think it was anyone we know?’
‘Probably not. Maybe it was just a stranger. Maybe we’ll never know – nobody will ever know.’
‘And then what?’ He pushed away his mug and plate, laid his head on the table and started to cry. His shoulders shook and whimpers escaped from him.
I leaned across and put my hand on his back. ‘Don’t cry,’ I said. ‘Neal, don’t, please. It’s going to be all right. You didn’t kill him. You just tried to help me. You did it for good motives. We both did. We did it for each other and we’re going to get each other through this. Don’t cry.’
I looked at him lying across the table, his body shaking with wretchedness, and I wished it was me who was collapsed like that, and someone else was sitting with their hand on my back telling me it would be OK. For a moment I saw Hayden, his face open, crinkles round his smiling eyes, and he was saying, ‘But you’re a tough cookie, Bonnie.’ And I was. I wouldn’t cry and be comforted, not yet anyway, and not by Neal.
The phone rang and he jerked upright, his face tearstained.
‘You don’t need to answer,’ I said.
But he was already reaching out. ‘Yes?’ His face tightened. There were corrugated lines scoring his forehead. ‘Yes, that’s me. Yes. Um, I think that would be all right. OK, I’ll be there.’ He put the phone down.
‘The police?’ I said.
He nodded.
‘When?’
‘An hour.’
‘You know what you’re going to say?’
‘I think so.’
‘We’re an item. We were together.’
‘OK.’
‘The whole time.’
‘Yes.’
‘Everything else, everything that happened around Hayden, you just tell the truth. You can say you didn’t like him, you can say you know we’d had a fling and of course you felt a bit jealous, you can talk about the tensions in the band. You don’t need to conceal anything except what happened on that one evening. All right?’
‘I’m a terrible liar.’
Before
After Amos had left, I looked around the flat, seeing it as other people must when they came into it for the first time. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The reason I hadn’t gone away, apart from not having any money, was to decorate it and make it more habitable, but all I’d succeeded in doing was to make it look as if a deranged person lived there. I’d emptied half the cupboards into boxes, but then emptied the boxes back onto surfaces or simply onto available floor space in order to find things. I’d painted parts of walls but then given up. I’d started pulling away wallpaper and then got distracted. In the kitchen, I’d ripped up a few of the vile green lino tiles to reveal unlovely wooden boards beneath. The problem, I decided now, was that I hadn’t concentrated on one room at a time. I had been acting on the principle that if I created chaos everywhere I’d have to deal with it, but actually what I’d discovered was that if I created chaos everywhere I simply got used to it.
I went from room to room and realized there was a second problem: I had no real idea of what I wanted. I just knew what I didn’t want: this dinginess, this pokiness, these flat kitchen units, this grubby beige carpet, this plastic bathtub. The bedroom had patterned wallpaper that probably dated back to the sixties, a worn green carpet that hadn’t been properly fitted around the radiator and the general appearance of a room into which a motley collection of things picked up in a second-hand shop had been crammed – which was pretty much the truth. Nothing went with anything else. I would start here.
I managed to pull the wardrobe out of the room, although for ten minutes it got stuck in the doorway, wedged at an impossible angle, and I only wrenched it free by taking a chunk out of the plaster and leaving a nasty scar along the wall. I pulled the chest of drawers out as well, discovering lots of objects behind it – pens, an old phone charger I’d been fruitlessly looking for, a scratched CD of folk music. Now, in order to get from the bedroom to the rest of the flat, I had to practically clamber over the chest and squeeze past the wardrobe. This I did, to retrieve the scraper that was in the kitchen. I spent the next two hours scraping and tugging off the wallpaper. After about ten minutes, I began to wish I had simply painted over it several times until the pattern was obscured, but by then it was too late to stop. Also I wished I’d thought about the mess I was going to create. Scraps of paper lay everywhere; flecks scattered the room like dandruff. My bed, which I had failed to cover, was littered with shreds and scabs of it. Underneath the pattern there was another, less geometric and more flowery. How far should I go down in this archaeological project? When would a plain wall appear?
I was hot, sweaty, dirty, thirsty. My scalp itched and my eyes watered. I opened the window wide and sounds from the street filtered in. People talking, laughter that floated in the warm air, birdsong and traffic. I laid down the scraper, clambered over the chest of drawers and escaped.
After
She stood just outside the door and I stood just inside, and we stared at each other for a moment. I knew at once who she was, even though she was different from the photograph, older, of course, but also less vivid, thinner and more finely drawn. I saw she had eyes that were almost green and there were grey threads in the auburn hair she wore brushed behind her ears. She had on cream cotton trousers, a thin brown shirt and espadrilles, and looked cool and clean and in control. I wondered if she had thought about what to wear to meet me, whether she had stood in front of her wardrobe considering how she should present herself to her dead husband’s lover. Certainly I wished I’d known she was coming so that at least I wasn’t dressed only in an oversized man’s shirt that was, I realized, with a rush of horror, one that had belonged to Hayden. Maybe she had given it to him one Christmas. I did up the top button and said, ‘You’re Hannah Booth.’
‘That’s right. I was married to Hayden. And you’re Bonnie Graham.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve been told you knew my husband.’
‘Yes.’ I hesitated, then said, ‘Will you come in? It’s a mess. Everything’s everywhere.’
‘That’s all right,’ she said. She gave me a cautious smile. ‘I don’t care about that.’
I took her through to the kitchen and offered her tea. When she sat down and laid her thin hands on the table I saw that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.