Stop Me (16 page)

‘I’m not to speak to anyone.’

Leo had expected the house to be empty and had just resigned himself to the fact, when Mrs Mutatkar’s voice had vibrated from the gate intercom.

He pressed the talk button. ‘Mrs Mutatkar?’ There was no response and Leo watched the windows of the house through the black gates. Curtains were drawn in all of them and there were no lights or movement. ‘Mrs Mutatkar?’ He’d been stood outside for over ten minutes and had lost count of the times he’d pressed the buzzer. ‘Mrs Mutatkar, please speak to me.’ Minutes passed and still there was no reply. For a moment he wondered if he’d imagined the voice but he began to speculate if she’d been told not to talk to anybody by the police – or somebody else. Her voice had sounded even 
more anxious than the first time he’d visited and he wondered if whoever had taken the laptop had gained access to her with similar ease.

‘I’m not to speak to anyone.’
Not ‘I don’t want to speak with you’ or ‘This is now a police matter.’ Whatever the reason she was hiding, Leo guessed his first conversation with her had been his last.

Leo tried to remember the last time he’d visited Matty at his King’s Cross home.

He looked at his watch. It was just before 9 a.m. and he’d assumed he’d catch Matty before he went to work. There was no car in the driveway, however, and it looked as if he was going to be left on the doorstep for the second time that day. But then he heard the slam of a door within the house. He stood back a step as the oak-panelled front door opened so he could see Matty’s nettled reaction to his presence through the glass porch door.

Matty looked terrible. His tight brown curls were flattened at one side of his head and he was wearing an ill-fitting indigo dressing gown that Leo assumed was Carla’s. He hadn’t shaved for some days and as he opened the second door a large pile of mail hissed at its bottom edge.

‘This is an unexpected surprise. How come you didn’t respond to any of my messages?’ He was still doing that ‘say something positive first’ thing but he was clearly displeased at Leo’s timing. 

‘Sorry, Matty. If this is inconvenient…’

Matty raised his one eyebrow as if it was the understatement of the century and walked back into the house leaving the two front doors open. Leo followed him inside.

‘’Fraid you missed the twins.’

‘Carla running them to school?’

‘No, I mean you’ve missed them…permanently.’ Matty didn’t look back as he said it – just headed straight into the lounge where the big flat screen was chattering morning magazine-show gibberish. He seemed to have lost something amongst the twisted duvet that had been cast half-back from the couch and was looking around distractedly.

‘You sleeping down here?’ Leo immediately regretted his observation.

‘Just got used to it.’

Leo suddenly realised how much the house had changed. Many of the pictures and ornaments were now absent. ‘What happened?’

Matty found the remote control and turned off the TV. ‘Not enough, apparently.’ He dropped it onto the coffee table with a clatter and it fell off the edge. ‘Coffee?’

‘No, I’m fine. Are you OK?’ Now he felt as if he were Matty; saying all the things he was supposed to.

‘I will be. Just living on the dregs at the moment.’ 
He gestured around him at his props – pizza boxes, empty beer and wine bottles.

‘Ash told me what you said to Laura.’ He hadn’t thought about how he would confront Matty but suspected it was the reason he had decided to knock the door.

Matty looked blankly at Leo. It probably wasn’t easy spooling back over years of living different lies but then a trace of recognition registered, which quickly switched to bemusement. ‘Well, let’s not talk about me and my problems all day then.’

‘I just wanted you to know that I know.’

‘So, that’s why you’ve not been returning my calls.’ He picked up a cigarette box from the coffee table, shook it and then worked his way through a couple of others until he found a rattle.

‘Sorry if it’s made me a little anti-social,’ Leo said sarcastically then felt a pang of guilt. He’d been stonewalling Matty long before his lunch with Ashley.

‘When Carla and I got together, I suppose it was too much to expect you to share some of my happiness for a change.’ Matty sat back on the duvet and lit up.

Leo felt his neck tighten. ‘And that’s what you’ve always done for me eh, Matty?’

‘It was important to me you came.’ There wasn’t a trace of sadness. Matty was laying a guilt trip on him.

‘Yeah? Because I bet it looked good for a while. You and Carla and the twins. I could have come and seen 
how it all worked out so much better for you. Shame you couldn’t hold it together long enough.’

‘I don’t fucking believe you.’ Matty leant forward to flick his cigarette into the ashtray even though he didn’t need to.

‘I don’t have Laura any more and it looks like that’s exactly what you wanted.’

Matty looked up and his mortification was unnervingly genuine. ‘How could you say that?’

‘Try proposing marriage to her the day she was marrying me.’

Matty froze as if something had lodged itself in the cogs of his inner mechanism. Then his fingers flicked rapidly at the ashtray. ‘And that’s what you believe?’

‘Tell me otherwise then.’

‘It’s true…I wanted Laura. But then I always envied what you had…it’s my lot.’

‘Maybe if you hadn’t spent so much time trying to steal my life you would have developed one of your own. Besides, take a look at mine now.’ Leo said angrily.

‘Couldn’t even bring yourself to acknowledge my happiness – however fleeting you knew it would be.’

‘If you thought there was a time limit then it wasn’t really happiness, Matty.’

‘I never asked Laura to marry me. I said that one day she might change her mind and want to. Besides that was a joke I made the first day I met her. You, me, Laura and Ash – sibling foursome. You were out 
of earshot and, yes, that was deliberate. Ash was there though. Probably why she felt comfortable using it as part of her story after I rejected her the same evening.’

‘What? You and Ash…?’

‘No, never. I could see you only tolerated her. Why would I want her? I only want what you have, remember?’ Matty smiled crookedly. ‘Besides, she was preparing for a divorce and I didn’t want to be a retaliation against her ex’s affair. We ended up back at her place and she went ballistic when I wanted to leave. The only time I saw her after that was at the wedding. She blanked me the whole day. Seems we both wanted what our siblings had but only she was prepared to take me as second best. I couldn’t stick around to watch you and Laura though – before or after the wedding.’

Leo had underestimated the depth of Matty’s insecurity. He now saw exactly how much of an affront everything he’d done in his life had been to his younger brother. ‘So Laura and I get the blame for your unhappiness—’

‘More or less.’ He nodded emphatically and then dragged heavily on his cigarette. ‘You’ve never had to watch from the sidelines, Leo, there’s always been a natural evolution for you. I’ve always known that any contentment coming my way would be even more fleeting than yours but you could have so easily been part of it. You could have made things so much easier.’

‘For me or you?’ 

‘For both of us. The day Laura disappeared could have been the start of something new for us.’

Leo closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Restored the balance, you mean. Righted the injustice.’

‘But it wasn’t the way I thought it would be. You didn’t need me because you’ve never needed me.’

‘I didn’t need you rubbing my face in your made-
to-measure
family, Matty. Just add contrite husband and invite recently bereaved older brother round for family dinner. So sorry I couldn’t have made you feel better.’

‘Bereaved? You don’t know Laura’s dead.’

‘I do, Matty. Laura is dead and gone…’ He fought to keep his emotions in check. ‘She’s not coming back.’ Hearing himself say it out loud was excruciating enough but the fact that he was saying it to the person least likely to understand its significance, a man who wore life like a designer shirt, made the loneliness pierce him deeper than he’d ever allowed it.

But he’d been living a life of polishing and preserving and making ready for her return. Was it any different to the sort of pretence that he always accused Matty of? 

‘And you don’t think I would ever be capable of understanding how that feels?’ Blue smoke poured out of Matty’s nostrils.

‘Matty, I still don’t think that I’m fully capable of understanding it.’

‘And, of course, you’d have the monopoly on that. How could your younger brother ever begin to conceive of such things?’

‘No, Matty – I don’t think you could.’

‘You haven’t even asked me why Carla and Molly and Greg aren’t here.’

For a moment it occurred to Leo that something terrible had happened.

‘They’ve gone for good and I can’t even begin to understand why. I’ve done everything I thought I
was expected to do but Carla still doesn’t think it’s working. Her ex used to beat her up for Christ’s sake but apparently I’m still no substitute.’

‘I’m sorry, Matty.’ But it wasn’t anything he hadn’t expected to hear.

‘You’ve lost the love of your life, Leo, and you can’t for the life of you begin to comprehend it. Can you not credit me with knowing how you fucking feel?’

Leo could have told Matty that Carla really wasn’t the love of his life; that once he’d spent the requisite amount of time replicating a broken heart she would eventually be replaced but, at that moment in time, he knew that Matty genuinely believed it. Despite this though, Leo didn’t doubt Matty’s incomprehension of why life seemed to move convincingly around him but never flow through him. Perhaps he was yet to meet the human being that would change him but perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing if he didn’t.

Matty crossed his legs on the duvet – it was his way of withdrawing from Leo and he’d done it since they were kids. ‘Let’s just suffer apart then.’

It was a vintage Matty performance and Leo would have laughed affectionately for it because it was a momentary flashback to their childhood: sitting together on the sofa at home while Leo tried to make the best of their father staggering in drunk – knowing that he would get the brunt of any random rage while Matty cried and kicked up a fuss even though not a
hair on his head would be touched. ‘We’ve both got our fair share to work through and when we’re done, we’ll get together over a beer and compare wounds.’ It was the most facile and crass thing for Leo to say but Matty seemed to brighten at the notion that he could be part of a mourning that Leo knew hadn’t even begun.

‘Just don’t be afraid to pick up the telephone.’ Matty’s mood had apparently already shifted and he stood up quickly from the sofa as Leo turned to leave.

Leo nodded a couple of times as he headed back into the hallway.

Matty tried to smooth over the awkwardness. ‘Good to clear the air…get things straight.’

Leo nodded again and opened the front door, a raw wind in his face as he headed for his original destination.

As he climbed the stairs into darkness for the second time, the same middle-aged lady with a towel around her head appeared from the room at the top of the stairs and cast her eyes over him twice as if she recognised him.

‘Excuse me,’ he found himself saying.

As he got closer his voice seemed to have startled her and her hand missed the knob of the bathroom door.

‘I just wondered if Dr Mutatkar has had any visitors recently?’

‘Number 4? Never saw him to speak to. You from the bailiffs?’

‘No, I’m just looking in for him and wondered if anyone has called by recently…’

Her eyes narrowed in suspicion.

Leo wanted to know if the police had found out about the room but as he avoided her gaze he looked across the darkened landing to room 4. ‘You know, messages, mail.’

‘Don’t think he’s ever had his mail delivered here.’

He turned back to her and pulled out the room key and held it up. ‘Thanks, anyway.’ It seemed to relax her features a little so he jangled it along the landing until he was standing in front of the door and heard her shut herself in the bathroom.

The door cracked open again and it didn’t look as if anything in the room had been touched since his last visit. He wasn’t back to search for something that he wouldn’t find though. He was here for the same reason as Mutatkar. He didn’t want to be at home, he didn’t want to be at work and he didn’t want to be with Matty or Ash. Had Ash concocted the whole wedding day proposal story to make sure Matty and his rejection of her wouldn’t be in the way of her plans for Leo? He no longer cared.

He closed the door behind him, collapsed on the bed and lay staring at the yellow curtains in the window. The world outside it seemed vast and grey, cold and
silent and its void seemed to press in against the windowpanes. Not even Bookwalter’s fantasies could comfort him now.

Mutatkar was dead and gone and he thought it unlikely that the police investigation would throw up any evidence of why the doctor would know anything about Laura’s whereabouts. His wife clearly had no inkling of what happened in the hours her husband had spent here or what he’d been involved in outside his work and family existence. Perhaps there was nothing more sinister than what he’d found here, perhaps the doctor had stumbled onto something that necessitated him being silenced.

Exhaustion suddenly travelled upwards from his legs and his eyes snapped firmly shut as it reached his brain. He didn’t open them for another four hours. When he did somebody else was in the room.

He knew there was somebody there before he opened his eyes and guessed who it was from the sound of their breathing. His eyes focused on the silhouette in the
window
and wondered how long she’d been watching him.

‘Mrs Mutatkar?’

‘I wanted to lead him here.’ She wore a dark overcoat and still had her handbag slung over her shoulder. She can’t have been there long.

‘Who?’

‘The man who threatened Sabri and me.’

Leo sat up and felt light headed. ‘Who is he?’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t. Perhaps what he wants is here though. I just want him to leave us alone.’ Silence hung between them and it appeared she was waiting for Leo to speak.

‘I think your husband has a lot of answers that he took with him. I found his laptop here but there was nothing on it. Then it was taken from my home. I assume that whoever that was is going to remain as ignorant as us.’

‘You’ve found nothing?’ Leo discerned the desperation strangling her voice.

‘Whatever it was your husband did he was careful not to leave any traces.’ Leo thought about the crack pipe in the drawer but deemed it an unnecessary detail. ‘And maybe that’s a good thing as far as you and your daughter are concerned. Perhaps once he’s satisfied you know nothing he’ll leave you alone.’

‘Have you any idea what a nonsense that makes of the last twenty-nine years?’

‘Yes. I think I do.’ Leo lay back on the bed. ‘Go back to your daughter. There’s nothing for either of us here.’

Mrs Mutatkar looked around the room. ‘I can’t even imagine Parag sitting in this room. And what was I doing all the time he was here?’

‘Believing who he was. Don’t torture yourself about it.’

‘Easy to say.’

Leo nodded.

‘If you do ever find out what happened to your wife…I don’t want you to tell me.’ Mrs Mutatkar left as quietly as she’d arrived.

Leo ached all over, almost as if his body had been
pinned to the bed by a huge weight that had suddenly been removed. He didn’t care if someone had followed Mrs Mutatkar to Bell Terrace, didn’t care if they were dangerous. He needed to sleep properly but as his eyelids closed again, the constant traffic at the end of the terrace and its reverberation kept puncturing the membrane of his unconsciousness.

He picked up Mutatkar’s MP3 player from the bedside table, pushed the phones inside his ears and wondered what sort of music the good doctor enjoyed when he took his sabbaticals from reality.

He pressed play but there was nothing but hiss. Then a voice said:

‘This is Doctor Parag Mutatkar. Date, December 29th 2007.’

Leo was suddenly wide awake.

It was like listening to his answerphone message. Something creaked on the recording and Leo looked across at the armchair in the window. ‘This is a recorded insurance against future events.’ Clearly comfortable in the chair Mutatkar continued in a lower tone. ‘I will also leave a copy of this recording in a secure deposit box, details of which I have written into my will and which will only be opened upon my death. This is your recording, just so we’re both crystal clear as to what will be divulged should my safety or the safety of my family be threatened.’ He swallowed and Leo wondered who was being addressed and guessed
that his smudgy delivery was probably due to the pipe in the drawer. ‘I will also burn this commentary to several other discs for safe keeping.’ Mutatkar breathed in heavily through his mouth and it sounded like he was stealing himself for what he was about to say. His voice dropped almost to a whisper. ‘On the 18th December 2007, I received a telephone call at my home asking for assistance in a very sensitive matter.’

Leo stood in darkness at the front door and as the porch light came on and illuminated him his heart continued to crawl, pounding up the back of his throat. He felt curdled by what he knew, paralysed by Mutatkar’s dictaphone account and the complexion it had thrown on all the times he had knocked at the same door for comfort.

The door was unlocked and opened and Maggie Allan-Carlin peered out, clasping a quilted dressing gown around her emaciated form. She looked even more sunken than when he had recently visited and still sported the bandage on her left hand.

‘Leo, what are you doing here?’ she grated.

He saw the usual apprehension in her expression but now he knew why she wore it so prominently, why it was eating her away.

‘I
know
, Maggie.’ The words weren’t big enough, not when he wanted to bellow and spit them at her. The
words were even and impotent and he saw only a vague glimmer of panic in her eyes.

‘
Know
? What do you know?’ There were footsteps behind her. ‘It’s Leo.’ She turned to address her husband and turned back with a placid expression that was ready to invite him in. It froze though because Leo’s palm was flat on the door and shoving it inward. The door caught on her toe and she yelped as he entered the hall. The door banged loudly against the wall.

‘Leo, what the hell…’ Joe mustered some mortification as he knotted a chocolate silk dressing gown around his pyjamas. His eyes shifted from Maggie gripping her foot and the expression fell away as soon as he saw Leo in the light of the hallway. ‘What are you doing here? I thought we agreed there was nothing else for us to discuss.’ But there was no potency in his reaction and its delay spoke volumes.

‘Where is she?’