The Start of Everything (27 page)

“No. Her things were still there, but I didn’t see her again.”

“How did you leave?” I assume she caught a lift with Mr. Bennet on his way to the recycling centre.

She chuckles. “With Mr. Finley! On his way to pick up the kids. His wife would murder him if she knew.” She smiles placidly. “He felt sad for me,” she adds. “Not sad enough to stand up to her, but he took me to my friend’s house.”

“Friend have a name?”

She gives it; I write it down.

“How do you think Grace left?” I ask.

“I assume the writer.…”

“What colour nail varnish did Grace have on last time you saw her?” That’s one of the descriptors we’ve been holding back.

Her eyes narrow. “Why are you asking?” The ash end of her cigarette spreads long. When at last it drops off, Katja shakes herself and answers. “The girl in the …? No. Grace wasn’t blond.” She shakes her own fair hair. “Grace had dark hair. The newspapers say the girl in the fens was blond.” Her hand shakes. She sucks on her cigarette.

“Did you notice the colour of her nails?” I persist.

There’s a 5p coin on the ground. She touches it with her toe. I think she says “silver,” but my phone is ringing. “We painted each other’s nails silver,” she says, forcefully. That’s the right—or wrong, if you wanted to be hopeful—answer. There were traces of silver colour left.

I hold up one finger and look at the number on my mobile. It’s not a number I know, but the area code is Peterborough.
Shit
. Terrible timing, but a call from the vicinity of Deeping House isn’t something I can ignore. I say I’ll be a minute. Katja hunches over her cigarette and stares at the pavement.

It’s Keene. His voice is strained, but it’s him.

“Keene? What are you doing? Where’s your phone?”

“I’ve got something,” he says. It’s that gloat he gets when he’s made a break. He wants me to ask for it.

“Bad timing, Keene. I’m in the thick of it. Just tell me.”

He’d found Grace’s suitcase, and a further connection with George Hart-Fraser: an engraved watch from a Bristol school. “And her hairbrush,” he crows. “Guess the colour and length of the hairs. Go on—guess!”

He’s giddy. And … shaky?

“Keene, what’s going on?”

“I went in the water. I’m cold. But it was worth it. Don’t fuss; I’ve got a heater blasting me now. Thirty-five centimetre, dark brown hairs. Sound familiar?”

“No, should it?” I look back at Katja. She’s rocking. I want to get him off the phone but then it grabs hold of me. “The hammer?”

He nearly cheers. “The hammer and shirt! From Trumpington Road!”

“Grace Rhys’s hairbrush hairs match the hairs stuck to the hammer? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“And George lives there, on Brookside. George Hart-Fraser.”

I shake my head. “That doesn’t make sense. Why dump something incriminating near himself? And why dump it separately at all? Why not with the body?” Again:
Don’t get sucked in
. “Look, I’ve got to go.”

“Where are you?”

I slide a look at Katja. She’s hunched over and looks ready to go through the whole box. Fine; she’ll hold a minute. I give in to Keene. “Cambridge,” I say.

“Perfect. Just do me this favour,” he asks. “Check George out. Nothing about the body or hammer or Mathilde Oliver. Just say a concerned citizen turned in the watch. See how he reacts. I have to stay here for forensics. Listen, can you call them?”

“Keene, what happened to your phone?”

“I dropped it.” Is that a laugh? “Going after the watch.” Yes, he’s laughing.

“Are you daft?” All his numbers, lost. And now I can’t reach him when I need to. “I think I’m supposed to be flattered that you had my number memorised.” Something rattles. “How cold are you, exactly? Is that your teeth?”

He says he’s fine. He tries to sidetrack into a discussion about Richard and Alice. I give him the minimum and ring off. Katja is quivering. “Is Grace dead?” she asks. “Is Grace that body in the fens?”

“Nothing is sure at this time. We’re investigating a number of leads.”

She coughs into the crook of her elbow, then sucks on the cigarette again. “I was so angry. I looked for her. I wanted to tell her off. We’d thought he liked
me
. Before Christmas he left me a note. We made a date. But when I showed up, he looked confused. I understood that he wanted Grace. I never told her that. I told her I didn’t like him.”

“Wait … who?”

“Stephen Casey.” She looks at me like I’m stupid. “He mixed up our names. Can you believe that? I expect that from Mrs. Finley—she called me Marta sometimes—who’s Marta, right? But a man should do better if he wants a yes. At least get the name right. I guess Grace didn’t care about that. It was like we were trapped at that house. Mrs. Bitch hated me to use the car. He was the only man there. What else were we supposed to do?”

“What about Ian Bennet?”

Her mouth makes an oval of surprise. Then she laughs. “The landlord?”

“On the snowy day, when Grace went with Stephen, were you jealous? Is that why you had sex with Ian Bennet?”

“That’s stupid. Because it’s gross! Why would you think that? I was on the phone with my mother.”

“Phone calls don’t take that long.” Sex doesn’t always take long, either.

“It was about my sister’s wedding. We talked for an hour. More than an hour! I told Mrs. Finley, but she didn’t believe me. I told her my mother would send the records. She didn’t care.”

“Really? You could produce those records?”

“My mother could.” Her eyebrows pinch together. “Why? It isn’t a crime. If you want to know what Mr. Bennet was doing that day, ask him. Ask his daughter.”

“His family were in London.”

“Not Dru.”

“No, that’s not true. They had an appointment in London.”

“Yes, with an astrologer. We
all
knew about it. Mrs. Bennet thought it was a good gift.” She raises her sharply plucked eyebrows. “On their way out that morning, they had an argument. It was ugly.”

“What about?”

“Nothing! Dru and her mother fight. It’s how they communicate. Mrs. Bennet said if she was going to be that way, she could stay home. Dru apologised, but it wasn’t good enough. So she stomped her feet”—Katja acts this out—“and Mrs. Bennet and the other one—the sick one—they left. I can’t believe you’d believe such made-up shit. I’m done.” She rubs her cigarette into the ground. She stomps up the steps.

I call Rory Casey’s number back. Keene’s not there.

Dru was home. Dru was in the flat with Mr. Bennet on the snowy day. The Finleys could have overheard him having sex while she was in another room; parents do that all the time. But everyone was accounted for. If it wasn’t Katja …

I flip through my notes. Dru is being dropped at her boarding school today.

I push the heavy glass door in. Katja is rubbing a cloth over a table. She says, without looking up, “If I’d been with Stephen, I would have told Mrs. Finley so. I don’t think I need to hide anything. I didn’t do anything wrong. If I’d been with Mr. Bennet, I would tell you that, too. What do I care? But I wasn’t.”

I ask her where Dru goes to school.

She looks up, startled by the apparent non sequitur. “The Leys,” she says.

In Cambridge. Here.

CHAPTER 24

GEORGE HART-FRASER

I
went home to Bristol for Christmas. It was always Stephen’s and my job to cook the dinner. Mother had to have a turkey. She liked us to cook recipes from television programmes, so we spread mincemeat onto puff pastry and rolled it like a Swiss roll and sliced it into ovals. We made a vile curried stuffing. Ridiculous.

Stephen had not started university. He’d moved out to live with a new girlfriend, whose parents paid the rent on her own house. Mother didn’t like her. She said the girl was a tart. I said that’s why Stephen liked her.

I braced for a hard shove or cruel riposte. But he laughed. It was real laughter, great
hah-hah-hah
laughter, with a fully open mouth. He put a hand on my shoulder and shook me back and forth the way friends do.

“Where’d you get her?” I asked. He said the pub. It was a lucky pick-up, then, because what are the odds the girl you meet out having a drink also has the means to take you in? She even dressed him in
good clothes. He wore an apron to protect his crisp cotton shirt and wool trousers.

“She’s asked me to join her family for Christmas lunch tomorrow,” Stephen announced.

Mother’s lips pressed together. “That was kind. I presume you refused. Bring her here if you must.”

Mother had cleaned, which meant she’d hoovered. But that did nothing for the dust that coated every small item—every ceramic animal and small brass bell that she’d collected and filled shelves with. The glass bottles of after-meal liqueurs were thickly furred. They had last been touched exactly a year ago.

“I already agreed, but she’ll come by here in the morning first. She has a present for you.”

Another bell? A family of porcelain geese? I’d got her a Cambridge teapot.

Mother put on the television. That was how she sulked. It was a game show. Three symbols were on the screen: a Gemini, a triple-lined equals sign, and a Chinese symbol. “Identicality,” I said. You were meant to say what the items had in common.

“We’ve got a right scholar in this family,” Stephen joked.

I wasn’t sure where this was going. I knew he’d be jealous. I’d hoped, though, that perhaps we’d be peers now.

“If you want to try again, I can help you,” I offered. He didn’t have the A-level grades to get in. When he didn’t get an offer, he stopped trying. But he could resit the exams if that was important to him.

“It’s not for me. I’d only done it as a lark with my mates. It takes a special mind to enjoy that shit.” He used “special” the way schools do, to politely label the developmentally disabled. Mother turned up the volume on the television. “If anyone needs a hand, it’s you,” Stephen said. “Have you even got any friends?”

Dr. Oliver had taken me in, in a way. He had me round for an occasional meal with his strange daughter at his cramped house. He showed me his work with galaxy clusters. The uses I wanted to put my maths to were becoming fixed.

“That’s what I thought. Look, I didn’t get you a prezzie.” That was usual. “So let me do this for you: Friday night. Give it a go. See what it’s like to be normal. Have a beer, throw some darts. Pub quiz.”

“You want to take me out with your friends?”

“Oh,
that
would work. You’d hunch over your drink refusing to talk, and everyone would ignore you. It’s not enough to drag you out. You need a whole new way of looking at the world.”

The timer buzzed for the potatoes. Stephen dropped the topic. We chopped and basted and sliced and served, and ate with the telly playing a Dickens adaptation.

Three days later, Stephen kept his word. He brought me tan trousers and a blue buttoned shirt. He put me in his straight, knee-length grey wool coat, and his school scarf: long stripes of orange and dark blue.

Why did I believe him? He’d only ever been cruel. But I believed, I think, that Cambridge had earned me something. That Cambridge had changed me, that I’d become deserving of different treatment. I expected new respect, so I saw it, even from him.

He unclasped his watch. It had been a prize for high achievement at his school. He always wore it, except to shower. He put it on my wrist.

“Now smile,” he said. We looked in the mirror. We were just alike, split from the same egg. But my posture was different. “Pull your shoulders back,” he said. “Stand like you mean it. Look, spread your feet.”

I tried it.

“Don’t duck your head. That’s an apology.”

It was uncanny. That wasn’t a mirror. I was looking at my brother.

“That’s it. I told them I’d be along to the Duck and Feathers at nine. Go on.”

“Do you want my coat?” I said.

He laughed. “Don’t be daft.” He sneered at my short jacket that gripped at the hips with elastic.

I shrugged.
Let him be cold
.

“You don’t get it. This is your turn. Go out, have a good time. They’ll treat you like you belong. It’s the only way you’ll learn to act like it.”

Warnings screamed in my head. “They won’t be happy to see me.”

“They’ll be happy to see
me
,” he said.

I got it.

“Merry Christmas,” he said. He shoved me out the door.