The Voices (28 page)

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘What does she want to see me for?’

‘I have no idea. You’ll have to ask her that yourself.’

They talked for a few more minutes and the psychiatrist elaborated on her earlier summary, fleshing out a few details, and when Simon put the phone down he could do nothing but stand in stunned silence, listening to the ticking of a clock. He stared into the orange, vertical plane of the wall and somehow seemed to get lost in its featureless infinity. After surfacing from his trance, he went in search of his wife and found her sitting in the kitchen, smoking and reading a copy of the
Radio Times.
She looked up and said, ‘Are you all right?’

‘No.’

‘Who was that on the phone? You haven’t lost a commission, have you?’

‘No.’ He inhaled deeply and said, ‘It was a psychiatrist.’

‘What?’

Simon sat down at the kitchen table. ‘I don’t believe what’s happened. I just don’t believe it.’

He began telling Amanda about the telephone call, but found it difficult to find the right words. His account was stumbling and disjointed, full of syntactical errors. As he spoke, Amanda’s hand floated off the table, as if suddenly weightless, and in due course it became attached to her
mouth. She looked like a mime artist reproducing the studied intensity of slow-motion film.

Tragedy on this scale was something that touched the lives of other people, not them. They shared a common, defensive delusion that their circle of acquaintances was immune from real harm. The abduction of Faye Norton had left them feeling raw and exposed; however, they had just about managed to come to terms with its shocking irregularity. Now, the news of Christopher’s death – or possible murder – and Laura’s descent into madness proved too much. They were both rendered inarticulate and had to resort to a more primitive method of communication – a useless dumb show of exasperated signals and lengthy sighs. A period of mute bewilderment ensued.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Simon repeated.

‘I know,’ said Amanda. ‘It just doesn’t seem possible.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘I know, I know.’

They discussed scenarios. Simon paced around the kitchen table, gesticulating like a fictional detective reconstructing the scene of a crime in his imagination. ‘Faye’s abduction must have put them under so much pressure. Laura must have cracked up, snapped. They were quarrelling, apparently, on the first-floor landing. Although,
really, they must have been fighting. The psychiatrist said it was a quarrel, but really it
must
have been a fight. Chris went over the banisters. That’s some drop. He died instantly. God, how awful . . . Chris and Laura – it’s unthinkable.’

‘How could she have overpowered Chris?’ Amanda asked.

‘Perhaps she took him by surprise, caught him unawares.’

‘But they were supposed to be fighting.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe he turned his back on her and . . .’ Simon stopped pacing. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ He sat down again and said, ‘When I go to see her, will you come with me?’

‘No!’ Amanda’s response was so forceful that Simon flinched. Observing his reaction, she apologized. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just . . . I don’t think I’m up to it.’

‘OK,’ said Simon.

‘You’re going then? You’ve already decided.’

‘I don’t have any choice.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘I don’t think so. Not now. Not now that Laura’s asked for me –
specifically.
It wouldn’t look very good, would it? If I didn’t go.’

‘What does she want?’

He shook his head. ‘God knows.’

They fell silent and bowed their heads, both withdrawing into private, inaccessible worlds of reflection. Suddenly, Amanda began to cry. ‘Poor Chris.’ Once again, Simon was discomfited by the rare spectacle of his wife’s tears. Amanda, anticipating a maladroit attempt to provide consolation, stood up, made an uncontrolled fending-off gesture and departed from the kitchen in a hurry. Simon felt obliged to follow even though he supposed that her gesture (like a starlet thrusting the palm of her hand at a flashing camera) implied that she wanted to be alone. He waited for what he judged to be a respectful interval before mounting the stairs and entering their bedroom. Amanda was prostrate on the eiderdown, her head buried in a pillow. Simon crept across the rug, sat down by her side and rested a solicitous hand on her convulsing shoulder.

Later, he found Amanda sitting in the lounge reading a volume of Stevie Smith poetry. She had washed the spoiled make-up from her face and tied her hair back with a ribbon. There was a hint of renewal in her scrubbed appearance and it made her look unusually childlike. Simon went to the music room, sat at the piano, and tried to complete the vocal line he had been working on just before the telephone had rung.
Occasionally, he heard Amanda sniffing, and the sound of a paper tissue being pulled from a cardboard box. He was unhappy with the music he was composing because it was too derivative, too reminiscent of Benjamin Britten. He rubbed an arc of quavers and crochets from the score and tried to think of something more original. A door opened and closed. The stairs creaked as Amanda ascended them. He glanced at his wristwatch and guessed that she was going to bed. Simon wasn’t tired and he persevered with his melody, repeatedly failing to find a satisfactory combination of notes. Frustration mounted, and he abandoned composition and drifted around the ground floor, eventually settling on the sofa in the lounge. Amanda had left the volume of Stevie Smith poetry on the coffee table. Without much thought, Simon picked up the book and flicked through its pages until he came to ‘Not Waving but Drowning’. He began reading but couldn’t get beyond the line about the poor chap who always loved ‘larking’ having died.

It was not merely the pertinence of the words that made Simon stop reading, but something less tangible, a marginal perception that made him uneasy without obvious cause. He became alert, his nostrils flared, and he raised the open book to his nose. Was he imagining it?
The pages smelt very faintly of Christopher’s aftershave. His first thoughts were panicky and irrational: he was reminded of phantom fragrances in ghost stories, communications from beyond the grave. And hadn’t Christopher become extremely interested in recording spirit messages? Simon lowered the book and gazed around the room, even straining to look behind the sofa. He studied Amanda’s collection of Indian deities: Shiva dancing in a ring of fire, four-armed Vishnu, and a miniature elephant god. Gradually, his initial panic subsided and he began to think more rationally. Connections were made, memories were cross-referenced, and he found himself considering alternative possibilities.

He remembered the marks on Amanda’s skin.
No,
he thought,
surely not.

His mind travelled back in time: a holiday in the south of France with Chris and Laura. He hadn’t known Amanda for very long and he had convinced himself that their relationship was going to work, that he had found a woman who would cure him of his public-school vices, the bad habits he had picked up as a boarder during his unhappy adolescence. Yet he had become uneasy towards the end of that holiday, mistrustful, suspicious. He had detected exquisitely subtle changes in the way Amanda
and Chris related to each other. By that stage, Simon had already made a significant emotional investment in Amanda and he couldn’t bring himself to challenge her. Besides, a simple denial on her part would have left him looking insecure and foolish. What evidence did he have? So, on their return to London he had dismissed his suspicions, chastised himself for being paranoid, and focused his energies on preserving Amanda’s romantic perception of him as a ‘serious artist’.

Simon raised the book to his nose again. The fragrance was faint but distinct.

‘No,’ he said aloud, ‘surely not.’

A few days later Simon drove to Holloway prison. He was ushered into a room where he was made to wait for some time before a uniformed officer arrived with Laura. He folded his arms around Laura’s frame and he was horrified to discover how thin she was: he could feel bones beneath her clothes. The officer, a plump woman with bad eczema, sat by the door watching them intently. It was obvious that Laura was heavily sedated. Her eyelids were droopy, her speech slurred, and her breath carried an unpleasant, metallic odour. Nevertheless, there was a curious urgency about her manner and she was
clearly resisting the effects of her medication in order to remain lucid.

‘Simon, I need to tell you what happened. It all sounds crazy but you must believe me. You knew about Christopher’s project, didn’t you? The new piece of music?’ Simon had been warned about her odd beliefs, but hearing Laura talk about spirit voices coming out of the baby monitor and Faye’s abduction by a supernatural entity was deeply upsetting. It filled him with unbearable sadness. Her eyes sustained a desperate, penetrating appeal for acceptance and vindication. Simon took her dry, papery hand and urged her to remain calm when she became agitated. ‘No, Laura, don’t – you’re upsetting yourself. It’s OK, I understand. I know what you’re saying.’ He rubbed his thumb along the ridge of her knuckles, trying to soothe her with slow oscillations.

‘I didn’t murder Chris,’ she said, lowering her voice as if taking Simon into her confidence. ‘We were arguing at the top of the stairs and he fell. It was an accident. The police say it couldn’t have been an accident, but it was, I swear it.’ She pressed on, forcing the words out, straining to overcome her chemical malaise. ‘I need your help, Simon. You will help, won’t you?’

‘Of course I will. I’ll do everything I can.’

‘Thank you.’

The sound of heavy machinery could be heard outside. Simon had noticed that the prison grounds resembled a building site. Apparently, Holloway was in the process of being completely rebuilt.

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘I want you to arrange for the sale of the house and its contents. I’m never going to go back there – ever. My solicitor has the keys.’

‘Sure. I can do that.’

‘And there’s something else . . .’ She glanced at the plump officer. Boredom had made the woman’s expression slack and vacant but Laura still lowered her voice. ‘I want you to go up into the attic. There’s a large blue hatbox up there. Inside it you’ll find a hat, but underneath the hat is a can . . . you know, a film can. I want you to remove the reel and destroy it.’

‘OK,’ said Simon.

‘Please don’t try to view the reel.’

‘I won’t.’

‘And don’t hang around in the house – don’t stay there any longer than is absolutely necessary.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Thank you.’ Her eyes began to moisten. ‘There’s going to be a trial, Simon.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘They think we killed Faye.’

Inspector Barnes was sitting opposite Laura’s GP. They had been drinking tea and the gentlemanly atmosphere was vaguely reminiscent of a club room. Even so, the policeman was aware that the gilt leather inlay of the large desk that stretched between him and the doctor represented a kind of social no-man’s-land, an unbridgeable divide that discouraged overfamiliarity. The doctor dragged his half-moon spectacles down the slope of his nose in order to bring Laura Norton’s medical notes into sharper focus.

‘Yes, the last time she came here for an appointment her behaviour was quite hysterical. She was rude and stormed out of the surgery.’

‘Did you ever consider referring her to a specialist?’

‘It crossed my mind, but you see, Inspector, the NHS has limited resources, and as a GP one is expected to take this into consideration. If every GP in the country referred all of the anxious young mothers on his patient register to departments of psychological medicine, the system would soon break down. Hospitals simply wouldn’t be able to cope with the numbers.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Inspector Barnes agreed.

The doctor pushed a plate of biscuits towards his guest. ‘Thank you,’ said the inspector, taking a sugared shortbread finger.

‘Nowadays,’ said the doctor, ‘it’s standard practice for GPs to treat mild anxiety and depression with drugs. There’s usually no need to trouble the local hospital.’

The inspector bit into the shortbread and caught the crumbs with his free hand. Then, with great care, he tipped the crumbs into his saucer. ‘The psychiatrist says that all this nonsense about ghosts is the way Mrs Norton’s brain deals with guilt.’

‘Indeed. My Freud is rather rusty but one must suppose that Mrs Norton’s belief in the supernatural allows her to shift the blame for her abominable crimes onto another party, albeit an entirely imaginary party. As a consequence, the delusion alleviates a weight of guilt that would otherwise be intolerable.’

The inspector was momentarily awed by the fearsome complexity of the human mind. He swallowed his shortbread and said, ‘Extraordinary.’

‘Yes, it all begins to make sense when you think about it.’ The doctor seemed to be talking to himself rather than addressing Inspector Barnes. ‘The fact that she used to come here so often, expressing worries about the health of
her child . . . that too must have been significant, psychologically.’

The inspector shifted position to attract the doctor’s attention. ‘I always thought there was something wrong with their story.’

‘Oh?’ The doctor raised his teacup.

‘It just didn’t add up. Baby-snatchers don’t make life difficult for themselves. They’re opportunists. You wouldn’t get a baby-snatcher choosing to take a child from a first-floor bedroom in the middle of the night.’

‘Quite.’ The doctor coughed and appeared somewhat abashed. He put his teacup down and said, ‘Forgive me, Inspector, but I’m curious about something. What did the Nortons do with the child’s body?’

Barnes shrugged. ‘We don’t know. We just don’t know.’

Henry Baylis arrived early at Le Gavroche. He ordered a bottle of wine, lit a cigar, unfolded his newspaper, and read some disturbing reports about the Notting Hill Carnival. Petty criminal activity had led to clashes between black youths and the constabulary; missiles had been thrown and a police van turned over and set alight. A pitched battle had ensued and by the time it was
over more than a hundred officers had been taken to hospital.