He had hit me, twice. What I wanted, what I was waiting to feel, was anger, the welcome fire of it, to burn away every other emotion, leaving no room for pity or for regret. I remembered his face twisted in a vicious snarl and his fists falling towards me, and then I remembered his face wiped clean by love for me.
Joni Mitchell came to an end. I stood up and went into the bedroom, retrieved his note to read again, although I knew what it said: ‘There are some things I would like to tell you that I should have told you before. Please let me see you. Please. Sorry. So very very sorry. H’. I stared at it, as if there was a secret code to be deciphered. The sun was low in the sky and its light rippled like water on the ceiling. The day was drifting into evening. The phone rang once more, and after it had stopped, the flat was full of ominous silence.
At last I stood up. I put on clothes – pale blue jeans torn at the knees, a T-shirt, a thin grey jacket. I left the house, feeling the warm evening air on my face, high summer in its breath.
After
Lightning cracked the sky ahead of me and I counted to eleven before the thunder rumbled. Eleven miles – did that mean eleven miles out or eleven miles up? As I left the canal basin and walked up Camden Road, fat drops were falling, bursting on the pavement like small bombs, and people were running for shelter. I didn’t bother trying to keep dry. I walked steadily up the road, feeling the rain splash on my head. Soon the separate drops seemed to have merged and the water was coming down like a sheet. I might as well have jumped into a river. Or a reservoir, I thought, and shivered violently, remembering again what I knew I would never forget. My shoes squelched and my hair dripped. My heart pounded with rage.
I didn’t have any battery left on my mobile, so I went back to the flat, peeled off my wet clothes, towelled myself dry, pulled on jeans and a shirt. Then I rang from the landline.
‘I need to see you. Yes, now. Are you at home? Alone? Good. Stay there. I’m coming round now.’
Sonia opened the door before I even had time to ring the bell. Her hair was pulled tightly back into a ponytail and there were dark shadows under her eyes, a stretched quality to her skin. She stepped aside and I entered. I didn’t usually meet Sonia at her flat; instead she came to mine or we saw each other in pubs and cafés and other people’s houses. And nowadays, of course, she seemed to spend most of her time at Amos’s. It wasn’t surprising – she rented a depressing basement flat a few minutes’ walk from mine, which felt damp and underground. It had always puzzled me that Sonia, who was so in control of her life, so practical and careful with money, thrifty even in the old-fashioned sense, shouldn’t by now have moved up the property ladder.
‘Something to drink?’
‘No.’
I sat at her kitchen table and folded my hands tightly together. Sonia sat opposite me.
‘Horrible weather. I couldn’t bring myself to go out in it. I’ve been getting ready for the new term. Just a few days left.’
For once I didn’t gabble. I didn’t even speak. Not yet.
‘I don’t know what to say, Bonnie. There’s nothing I can do to make it better. It was an accident. You know that. Nevertheless, I killed Hayden. And I misled you. I’m sorry. There’s nothing else for me to say except I’m very sorry. Sorry for what I did and sorry for your loss.’
I looked at her, waited. I felt the silence grow dense around us. When at last I spoke, it was slowly. I could almost taste each separate word. ‘Things have been going round and round in my head,’ I said. ‘I keep seeing his face, his dead, beautiful face. I remember how it felt to touch him. I guess it’s the same for you, the images that won’t fade. That’s not what I was thinking about this time, though. When I finally knew it wasn’t Neal, and he knew it wasn’t me – before we knew it was you, though – we all compared crime scenes. There was the one he found and disrupted, and then the disordered one that I found, disordered by him, as I later discovered.’
‘Your point being?’
‘My point being that the one you left was the one he found. But he found an ordered scene – nothing out of place, just Hayden dead on the floor. He messed it up so that it looked like a struggle or an accident, a robbery gone wrong or something. He probably didn’t know exactly what he was trying to do, he just wanted to make it look like something it wasn’t.’
‘Bonnie,’ said Sonia, softly, ‘dear Bonnie, you’ll go mad, turning it all over and over in your head. Let it go.’
‘No. Listen. Nothing was thrown around or broken at that stage. But you said it was. You did, Sonia. I can hear your words in my head. I’ve been going over and over them. You said you went to tell him to lay off me and it all turned ugly, and he lashed out and things got broken and you picked up the nearest object to hand. That’s what you
said.
’
‘And that’s what happened. He came on to me and I panicked and – well, that’s how it all went wrong.’
‘Yet everything was in place when Neal arrived a few minutes later. He arrived at an orderly scene – a scene where no struggle had taken place.’
‘Perhaps he got it wrong, perhaps I did. For God’s sake, Bonnie, I was in a state of shock. A man was dead. Maybe I didn’t remember everything clearly.’
‘That doesn’t sound like you, Sonia.’
‘I’m sorry if I didn’t behave with total calm and logic. I don’t think any of us did.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You left the flat in good order. You killed him, certainly you did, but not the way you described.’
‘I don’t know what you’re trying to say.’
‘That was the other funny thing,’ I said. ‘Once you realized I’d done it to protect Neal, and Neal had done it to protect me, you knew we’d protect you. Why didn’t you tell us? You’re a logical person, Sonia. It was the logical thing to do.’
‘I wasn’t thinking logically,’ Sonia said.
‘You always think logically,’ I said. ‘That set me wondering. I tried to work out whether there was any connection between you and Hayden apart from me and that crap about going to see him because he’d knocked me around.’
‘Bonnie, how can you say that?’
‘And I did. Do you remember that party we all went to after we’d played at that post-exam party?’
She didn’t reply.
‘Of course you do. You and Amos and me and Neal and Hayden went. There was a woman there who used to know you. She’s called Miriam Sylvester.’
‘Miriam Sylvester?’ Sonia said the name slowly, separating it out into its syllables. She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said.
‘Oh, come, Sonia. Surely you remember. You taught together, after all, in your last job.’
‘Oh, her. Yes, I do remember. It was hearing her name out of context that threw me.’
‘I went to see her today.’
She got up and started to fill the kettle, speaking with her back to me. ‘Why? Was she a friend of Hayden’s?’
‘Yes. We talked about him. She was upset. Well, women loved Hayden, didn’t they, for all his faults? Except you.’
‘I wasn’t so fond of him,’ said Sonia. ‘A bully who beat up his girlfriend.’
‘You didn’t know that, though, did you?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I don’t think you actually knew he hit me until after he’d died. I don’t think you realized we were together at all.’
‘Of course I knew. I told you. That’s why I went round there.’
‘You told me you went round there to warn him against ever being violent only after you discovered from me that he’d hit me. When it was a convenient excuse for you to grab onto. You didn’t know before. That wasn’t why you went round there, was it? Answer me. Tell me what I already know.’
‘Answer what? You’re not making sense.’ Her voice was icy.
‘I remembered meeting Miriam Sylvester at the party and I remembered that she didn’t seem to like you very much. So I took the train up to Sheffield to ask her about it. She’s got nothing against your teaching.’
Sonia put the kettle down without switching it on. She came and sat down. Her eyes looked very dark and her face very white.
‘You suddenly had to leave your school and come to London.’
‘I left,’ she said. ‘So?’
‘She told me about a boy called Robbie, who died, and the whole school raised money for a charity in his name.’
‘Get on with what you’re saying, then,’ she said, so calm. Her hands were quite steady.
‘You stole the charity money.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Money raised because a thirteen-year-old boy died and the school wanted to do something in his memory. They had sponsored silences and went on three-legged walks and washed cars. And you used it for a down-payment on rather a nice flat.’
‘Miriam Sylvester has given you a complete misrepresentation of what happened.’
‘No wonder you live in this grotty dump and have no money. You’re still paying off your debt, aren’t you?’
I had to hand it to her. She was still utterly composed.
‘Bonnie,’ she said. ‘Think about it. What she told you doesn’t make sense. There was a dispute about the use of some school funds. It turned ugly. Anyone who actually stole money like that would be arrested and sent to prison. You’re making a terrible mistake. You’ve been under such stress, I know that.’
‘Oh, save it, Sonia. You’ve lied to me enough. Miriam explained all this. They didn’t want to bring the police in and drag the school through a tribunal and get all the disastrous publicity. Miriam told me about the admission you signed, about paying the money back, about how you left. Are you still going to brazen it out?’
‘I think you should go.’
‘You had contempt for someone like Hayden. He wasn’t a saint, but he would never have done something like that.’
‘You really did have a crush on him, didn’t you?’
I could feel my rage and my grief rise, almost blocking my throat, so that it was hard to speak, and when I did my voice sounded unfamiliar – low and hoarse in my ears. ‘What if I did? What if I had a crush on him? What if I loved him, wanted him, couldn’t keep away from him? What if I feel I’ll go mad with missing him? It’s not about that, it’s not about my feelings and it’s not about whether Hayden was a good man or not, whether he behaved badly. No – it’s about a life that’s been stolen. A life, Sonia. A whole life taken away.’
I stopped. The air throbbed around me. ‘Are you going to tell me what happened?’ I asked more quietly. ‘What Hayden said to you?’
‘Nothing happened.’
‘OK. I’ll tell you, then, as much as I know. It’s obvious enough now. Miriam told Hayden about you, and he must have told you. I’m sure it wasn’t blackmail. Hayden couldn’t be bothered with something like that. But he’d mention it just to take you down a peg or two. Hayden didn’t care for hypocrites.’
‘That’s enough!’ At last her voice had a crack in it.
‘That was bad enough for you, but you knew it would get worse. He wouldn’t be able to resist talking about it. He would probably have told me, wouldn’t he, for a start? And then no more deputy-headship, no more moral high ground, no Amos, no way out of this nasty little flat. So what did you do? Maybe you went round to tell him it wasn’t true and that he mustn’t tell anyone.’
‘This is all a fantasy.’
‘If you did, he would have laughed. Stuck-up Sonia, trying to cover her tracks. He’d have found it funny. Or perhaps you knew all along you were going to kill him. That’s what I think. The more I think about it, the more certain I am that you knew in advance you were going to kill him. He was a threat to you and your precious plans. You came to that rehearsal knowing, didn’t you? You were efficient and nice; you cleared up my flat for me; you sang “Leaving On Your Mind” more beautifully than you’d ever sung it before; you did everything impeccably. And all the time you knew what you were going to do. Then you left before anyone else and you went to his flat and you picked up the vase and cracked him over the head with it. Not manslaughter. Murder. Cold-blooded murder. You’re a killer.’
Sonia’s face was deathly pale, except for red spots on her cheekbones. ‘If I were you, I’d stop right now.’
‘Or what?’
‘Or I’ll go to the police and tell them I was your accomplice in taking away Hayden’s body.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said, ‘absolutely fine by me. I don’t care. It would be a relief to my conscience, actually – you know, that strange little voice in the head that torments you when you’ve done wrong. You tell them what I did and I’ll tell them what you did.’
‘They wouldn’t believe you. It’s all conjecture.’
‘Try it and see.’
‘Even if you’re right, Neal and you and I destroyed the evidence.’
I sat back and folded my arms against my chest. I felt hard and desolate. ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘But there’s still Miriam Sylvester and the document you signed.’
‘So what’s the point of all this?’
‘You leave the school at once. You leave the teaching profession and never return. And you leave Amos.’
There was a deep silence.
‘That’s a lot of leavings,’ she said at last.
I almost smiled. It was like watching a great, indomitable, unshakeable performer. ‘You still don’t get it, do you? Have you ever heard of contrition or guilt? You killed someone. You planned it in advance and then you went and did it. The fact that I happened to know him and care about him isn’t the point now. You didn’t kill him to protect me or out of self-defence or by accident. You planned it and you did it because you didn’t want your nasty, ugly little secret to be discovered. You put that above a life. So, no, that’s not a lot of leavings, Sonia.’
‘Is there anything else you have to say?’ She was white-faced and her mouth was thin and fierce, but she remained in control of herself. What would make her crumble?
‘Yes. Yes, there is. First of all, if it ever looks like the police are about to charge anyone else, I’ll tell them everything, without a blink of hesitation. And, second, I’ll be watching you, don’t think that I won’t. If you don’t stick to my conditions, I’ll know. I won’t let it go.’
‘Right. Now, you can make your own way out, I think.’
‘You have to say you agree to my conditions before I leave.’
I saw her jaw clench and unclench and her nostrils flare slightly. Then she said, in a stony voice, ‘All right. I agree.’