Final Demand (16 page)

Whoever it was, the person must have gone. Natalie pushed back the bolt and stepped out.

Phillip stood there.

‘Go away,' she said.

‘I've got to see you—'

‘This is the ladies'.'

Lunging towards her, he gripped her shoulders. ‘You're driving me mad.'

‘Piss off, Phillip.' She tried to disentangle herself.

‘I love you, I can't bear it any more—'

‘You're bloody married.'

‘I told you, me and Melanie—'

‘I'm married too. Fuck off!'

He held her tight. She smelt the familiar scent of his skin.

‘It's been hell, I can't bear it—'

‘And stop leaving me bloody flowers.'

‘I've got to see you again.'

He held her so tightly she couldn't move. She felt his erection pressing against her stomach.

‘Somebody'll come in!' she hissed.

‘I love you.' He pushed her against the washbasin. ‘I love you, Natalie – I'm crazy for you.' His hand pulled up her skirt.

‘Fuck off!' she shouted, panicking.

‘You're driving me mad.' He started to pull down her knickers.

Natalie broke away. ‘You want to bloody rape me?'

There was a silence. Phillip started sobbing. ‘I'm sorry, darling . . . I'm sorry.' Tears ran down his cheeks.

She pulled down her skirt. Her heart was hammering. ‘It's over, Phillip. Remember, you cheated on me? Remember that? Go home to your family, you snivelling little prick.' She picked up her bag and swung it over her shoulder. ‘And if you try it on again I'll report you for sexual harassment.'

She walked out.

Blimey, she thought. That was a near thing.

A few moments later she was down in the lobby, smiling at the police officer as he opened her bag.

‘Sorry about this,' he said.

‘That's OK. You're only doing your job.'

He gave her back her bag and she skipped through the door, to freedom.

DAVID SLEPT HEAVILY
, those first weeks; he slept like the dead. It awed Sheila, that he could sink into oblivion, that the blackness could close him away from her as she lay beside him, waiting for dawn to lighten the curtains. Her pills were no use. They didn't send her to sleep; nor did they quell the panic.

For she was terrified. She lay there, very still, trying to control it. To hold her body together needed every ounce of energy she possessed; she had to concentrate on it. But the panic made her bowels churn and she would have to rise from bed, very slowly, and make her way to the bathroom. Like an elderly person, she gripped the doorknob for support. Once seated on the toilet, it seemed impossible to think of getting up again. If she moved, the chaos would open up. It would claim her, pulling her down into nothingness.

Besides, why move? What was the point of being in one place rather than another? This thought alarmed her; she needed to shake herself out of it. So she would heave herself to her feet in preparation for the long journey back to the bedroom. Outside Chloe's bedroom door she sometimes lost the will to move at all. When Chloe was small, Sheila would tiptoe in to check that she was still breathing. The miracle that she did.

Hours later Sheila would find herself sitting outside the bedroom door, chilled in her nightie. Dawn would arrive, eventually. Those early days in May, the dawns were beautiful. A detached part of her recognized this. There was one tree she could see, rising up behind the yard wall; it was misted with the tenderest green. Traffic was already building up, she heard the hum of it, but it seemed to be taking place a long way away, in another world entirely. It seemed extraordinary that they carried on driving, that people went on with their lives, getting
in and out of cars, fuming in traffic jams, as if nothing had happened. People worried about things, about whether the plumber would turn up, wasn't that strange? And stranger still that the days passed, one remorselessly following another. Did nobody realize?

She would climb back into bed carefully, like an invalid. She lay apart from David, for fear of touching him; she felt his skin would bruise. Her body gave off a sour smell. It was too much of an effort to wash. This alarmed her, but in a sluggish way. Besides, it hurt to move. Her bones ached; her guts felt corroded with acid. The sheer physical pain sometimes made it hard to breathe. David smelt too, of all the cigarettes he had smoked since Chloe's death, thousands of them, and the whisky he was drinking at night.

So Sheila lay there, for what else could she do? She lay there, willing herself to stay sane. Ah, but the effort of it! Sometimes it didn't seem worth the bother. She would just surrender herself up and free-fall, into the pit. Meanwhile she willed David to stay asleep a little longer, in sweet oblivion. She dreaded the moment he woke, for when he opened his eyes, just for a moment, he was a normal, groggy person facing a normal day. Then, a moment later, he remembered.

And then the letters of condolence would thud through the door, still several each day, some from strangers. Mr Hassan opposite opened up his shop as if all that mattered was setting out his goods and putting them away again, that was the point of it all. He had slipped a note through their door. She supposed a lot of people knew; after all, it had been all over the papers. For several days reporters had pestered them, that had been hellish, but David had told them to fuck off.

Certainly their customers knew, the regular ones anyway. David had insisted on reopening the pub after three days. ‘We'll lose business otherwise,' he said. ‘You don't have to come down; Lennox and I will manage.' David was a man of routine. She knew he clung to it, now more than ever, that he too was fighting the chaos in his own private way. He showered
in the morning, he ate two slices of toast, as he always did, and stood outside for a few minutes until eleven sharp when he opened up. Archie, however, had stopped coming.

Amongst the customers there had been a certain amount of shuffling, some muttered words of sympathy and avoidance of her eye. There were fewer of them these days; a lot of familiar faces had melted away. The past week, the takings were down twenty per cent. It was hardly surprising, for who wants to have a drink in a house of death?
Hey, let's go out tonight and get bladdered! How about the Queen's Head – know the one? Daughter murdered and dumped in Whitworth Street.

Sheila helped him behind the bar. David needed her because that week Lennox was due to leave. ‘May God be with you in your time of trouble,' Lennox said, for it transpired that he was a born-again Christian, a fact that she and David, in their former life, would have found hilarious. ‘Take one day at a time, and keep our saviour Jesus in your heart.'

Being busy, she thought, might help. The trouble was, it was all she could do to put one foot in front of the other. She felt ill all the time, on the verge of vomiting. Stupid with grief, she mixed up the orders. David was patient with her. So were the customers. How many of them knew? She hardly had the energy to wonder, but some of them addressed her kindly, repeating their orders as if speaking to the retarded. She stopped the lunches; cooking them was out of the question. Besides, the sight of food made her nauseous.

And she would suddenly find herself standing still, incapable of movement. In Europa Food and Wine, where she had gone to buy some lemons, she came to a standstill in front of the cooking utensils. She looked at a cherry de-pipper. Somebody had bothered to invent that, wasn't it odd? Chloe was dead and somebody had thought about taking stones out of cherries. Then she thought: Chloe's birthday is on June the twenty-seventh. She would be twenty-two.

It was hard, being exposed to the world like this, flinching when somebody shouted, feeling as if she had been flayed.
Crossing the road frightened her – how huge and unkind were the lorries, thundering past! When a driver shouted at a car, ‘Stupid cunt!' she jumped as if she had been shot. And every day she had to face the customers, their mouths opening and closing and noise coming out.

The funeral was long over. It had felt like the most terrible day of their lives, her and David's, but she hadn't known what lay ahead. For in those early days her family rallied around, her mother and her sisters, her uncle and nephews, the whole clan of Sampsons. They were a demonstrative lot; they wept with her and held her in their arms. Her mother, whose tests had turned out to be negative – at seventy-five, she was given a further lease of life – her mother went into Chloe's bedroom and tidied it up. She emerged with scraped-out yoghurt pots, their teaspoons smeary. When Sheila came into the kitchen her mother was throwing a half-finished packet of Jaffa cakes into the bin. She jumped, as if caught in a criminal act. And then, seeing Sheila's face, she made her a mug of hot chocolate, as she had when her daughter was small. Later Sheila heard the washing-machine rumbling with Chloe's clothes.

But her family was no longer around, they couldn't be there for ever. They too had lives. At some point Sheila had to face the long haul alone.

And she was alone. David sometimes put his arm around her shoulder. ‘Are you taking your pills?' he asked. At the funeral he had cried briefly – loud, racking sobs that had alarmed her. But since then he had closed himself off. His fierce, stony grief was terrible to her.

Sometimes, late at night, he went out in the car. She heard the engine coughing into life, out beyond the yard, and then the whine as he reversed. An hour, two hours, he was gone.

‘Where have you been?' she asked when he was undressing.

‘Out.'

And then he climbed into bed and slept like the dead. Sometimes she resented this, and sometimes she was glad for him. Sometimes, during the long watches of the night, she
slipped her hand into his. He would squeeze it briefly – was he really awake, and faking it? And then his hand lay there, inert, and finally she gave up and slipped hers out.

The next day, if she went out in the car, it stank of cigarettes.

‘We'll get him, Mr Milner,' said the detective. ‘It's only a matter of time.'

‘A matter of time?' snapped David.

‘We have thirty officers working on the case.
Crimewatch
created a huge response, we're following up a number of leads. You'd be amazed what crops up . . . memories jogged, things people have seen but thought nothing of at the time . . .' He laid two biros side by side. ‘I know nothing I can say will help you, believe me, I do understand that—'

‘Do you?'

‘David . . .' Sheila laid a hand on his arm. She felt stagey, doing this. They weren't themselves. She would wake up and find it had all been a dream.

‘We shall track this animal down and bring him to justice.' The man seemed to have learned some sort of script too. He was a new one; maybe he was an inspector, she didn't know. He had introduced himself but she hadn't caught the name. The whole scene had the glazed unreality of a TV series. But then everything seemed like that.

‘What exactly are you doing?' David demanded. ‘Six weeks this monster has been free.' Monster? He, too, sounded stilted.

‘How about coming along to the Incident Room?' asked the man. ‘Meet some of the people involved?'

‘No!' said Sheila. They would all look up;
the victim's parents.
They might – God forbid – have photos pinned to the wall. She had seen those on TV, photos of the victim. At the time she had felt a pleasurable frisson. Wasn't that almost the strangest thing of all? She felt sick. She wanted to be taken home and tenderly laid in bed.

David was firing questions at the man. Who had they interviewed? What about the forensic report? He sounded
impressively knowledgeable, another person entirely, but he was badgering the man. All his anger seemed to be channelled in the police's direction. In fact, he had always been suspicious of them – drug busts in the past, that sort of thing. Sheila was a more trusting soul and used to tell him what a difficult job they had; it had been one of their regular arguments.

Suddenly, painfully, she missed their squabbles. How normally married such things now seemed! Chloe's death had bulldozed through the landscape of their relationship, scoring it open like a raw wound and squashing the plants – whatever they were, she could hardly remember now what the terrain had looked like.

David's aggression embarrassed her. She had wanted to come with him, however. The police were their allies. The world was so hostile; it pursued so heedlessly its own ends. Here in the police station Sheila felt briefly at home. Chloe might be simply a case to the police, but she was at the forefront of their minds. The same questions preoccupied them. Where exactly had she been killed? (Sheila couldn't even put a word to the other thing that had happened to Chloe before she was killed, not yet.) Somewhere on her route home, for the police had found out, by questioning people at the nightclub, that she had failed to get a minicab and decided to walk. But she had been discovered near the railway station, way off her route, left on a patch of waste ground (nor could Sheila say
body
or
dumped).
They suspected she had been killed somewhere else. They were agonizing, these speculations, but at least she was companioned in the horror of them.

‘Of course it makes our task more challenging, that this was a motiveless attack – no links, as far as we know, to any other murders or serious sexual assaults . . .'

Nobody had watered the detective's spider plant. It sat alone on the windowsill, its roots bulging out of the plastic pot. But still it had struggled to produce offspring, the survival instinct was that strong. It had put out runners, with babies attached to them. They dangled down from the ledge.

‘. . . but we'll get a break. Sooner or later he'll make a mistake, let something slip. Somebody, prompted by something else entirely, will make a connection. It's happened more times than I care to mention . . .'