Authors: Nicci French
Chapter Thirty-three
‘Fancy a drink?’ said Ross.
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘I’ll catch you later, then,’ he said.
Ross had arrived on the job a few days before. He was good-looking, with just the right confident carelessness about his hair and clothes. I couldn’t work out what he was doing with work like this. Probably just earning some cash before taking off. The day he arrived I tried to make conversation with him. He looked at me curiously and I babbled some nonsense. I felt myself go red and hated myself for it – hated him as well. For the days after that we worked in separate parts of the house and ignored each other. I was on the wiring, the plumbing, the plastering. He was painting and doing the finishing touches. He had lost interest in me.
The most important rule, said Petra Davies, author of
Success in Friendship
:
A User’s Manual
, is to care about other people. Petra Davies was wrong. She was as wrong as it is possible to be. The secret, as I was discovering, is
not
to care. I’d found this in the days at work after the murder. Everything seemed unimportant now, a charade, with nobody in on the joke except me. My head was buzzing with thoughts about Peggy dead and Peggy alive, about the police, about the guys in the house, and I worked without thought or interest. But I noticed from little murmurs and nods of approval that I was working faster and more effectively than before. I plastered one of the walls in what was going to be the master bedroom. I was so preoccupied with my thoughts that I hardly knew where I was or what I was doing. But when I finished, I stepped back and was startled by what I had done. It was a beautiful piece of work, smooth and level across the whole wall.
I wasn’t interested in Ross now. It seemed a thousand years ago that I’d cared what he thought of me. One time I helped him with a cornice that needed fixing, but apart from that we hardly exchanged a word. So when he asked me out for a drink, it seemed like a joke. He’d actually sought me out.
We weren’t able to do anything more than rinse our hands but that was all right, and it was even better when we arrived in the garden of the pub where Ross was meeting his girlfriend, Laura. She and her little friend, Melanie, worked in a gallery and the contrast between us, the neatly pressed and coiffured young women and the dusty, dirty men, seemed hugely comic. Laura, in particular, who sounded as if she had just arrived from a horse show, was loudly amused at the idea of having a boyfriend who was a grimy builder and stroked his hair in mock dismay. ‘I’m really surprised they let you two in here,’ she said. ‘Isn’t there some sign up forbidding builders and gypsies?’
‘I’ll get the drinks,’ I said.
I went inside and returned with a cool, damp bottle of wine and a clump of glasses. They talked about people and places I didn’t know. There was a pause and Laura looked me up and down appraisingly, like something in her stable. ‘So how did you meet this one?’ she said.
‘He’s the expert,’ said Ross. ‘He’s the man.’
I didn’t simper. I didn’t blush and say, oh, well, not really. I was looking closely at Laura, so closely that I could see the fur on her cheek, the strands of hair that had escaped and blown across her forehead.
‘Really?’ she said. ‘Have you got work set up after this job?’
‘Not yet,’ I said.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’ll bear you in mind.’
‘Careful,’ said Ross, and he and Laura laughed. He looked at his watch and then at her.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Ross and I have to… you know…’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you, then.’
As I started to get up, I looked at Laura’s friend for the first time. She had hardly spoken. She was clearly in her friend’s shadow. She had dark brown hair that she hadn’t done much with. That and her dark eyes made her skin seem pale. As I looked at her and she noticed me looking at her, the blood rushed to her cheeks. I wasn’t attracted to her in any way and suddenly I was intrigued by that. Nothing mattered, nothing was at stake.
‘Mel,’ I said.
‘It’s Melanie, really.’
‘Would you like to go and get something to eat?’ I said.
She murmured something, blushed and murmured something else, then said, ‘Sure, yes, all right.’ She stood up and I saw for the first time what she was wearing: a short-sleeved pale green top with a white frilly collar, a long white skirt and sandals, all very light, summery and girlish.
‘I’ve got to go home and shower and change,’ I said. ‘But you can come along and meet the people I live with.’
On the tube I told her about the people in the house, exaggerating things about them, so that I made her laugh. I told her that things were a bit delicate because we were all about to be thrown out. I told her about the murder and the involvement of the police and saw her eyes widen.
‘Did you know her?’ she said.
‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Murder victims are like famous people. People like to know them. Or to know someone who knows them.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean that.’
Petra Davies would have told me to reassure Melanie, to say, ‘Of course, you didn’t.’ I said nothing; I just looked at her. Suddenly I wondered if I’d made a mistake. Did I really want to spend an entire evening with this woman, then another and another until after about four we could have awkward, unsatisfactory sex?
As I opened the door at Maitland Road, I met the whole group in the hallway, with carrier-bags and bottles. They all looked at Melanie. I felt for a moment like someone bringing his first girlfriend back to meet the parents. ‘This is Mel,’ I said.
There was a rush of greetings that almost overwhelmed her.
‘Come for a picnic,’ said Astrid.
Melanie looked alarmed. ‘We were going out to eat,’ she said.
That did it. ‘Great idea,’ I said. ‘It’s an initiation rite, but I’ll protect you. Let me have a shower first.’
We were a strange group, marching over to the park. It made me think of excursions from school, walking in a crocodile, shepherded along the street. They were all there, except Owen. And Pippa was with a guy in a suit, who seemed even more ill at ease than Melanie.
As we settled down on the grass, Owen arrived, hovering around with his camera, taking pictures. I poured a plastic cup of wine for Melanie and one for myself.
‘I haven’t been to a picnic for years,’ she murmured. She moved close, her shoulder against me.
‘Ants,’ I said, ‘and nowhere to sit properly. You can’t hold your food and drink at the same time.’
‘I like it,’ she said.
I filled her plate for her. I dipped a slice of carrot into a tub of hummus and fed it to her. I caught Astrid’s eye on me. I could see what she was thinking. Oh, how sweet, little Davy’s found a girlfriend. Still, at least I was showing them I wasn’t some weird loner. I was stroking Melanie’s hair when I sensed someone beside me. Astrid. I looked at Melanie. ‘Will you excuse us?’ I said.
‘Oh, all right,’ she said, and edged away to sit on her own, pretending to sip at her wine.
Astrid moved close to me and spoke in what was little more than a whisper. I thought of Melanie looking at us. She probably thought we were ex-lovers. Astrid was in a bit of a state because she’d been questioned again by the police. At first I thought she might have suspicions but I discovered she had a dim memory that someone else had been on the step when she had her accident. I forced myself to think clearly. Would it be better to tell her straight away or allow him to be a mysterious suspect dimly in the background? I was angry with myself for not thinking about this in advance. I decided to be transparently evasive on Dario’s behalf. It would muddy things up a bit but I wasn’t sure it was the best plan.
‘Maybe there was someone,’ I said. ‘But if there was, Dario’s the one you should ask.’
Astrid wasn’t fooled for a second. Or, rather, she was. So Dario’s customer would be forced into the light. The only disaster would be if he had seen Peggy follow me, but I was almost certain he’d scarpered before then. Astrid had clearly been brooding on matters because now she turned her attention to Pippa, claiming that Jeff should come forward and tell all. It was funny to see Pippa squirming, like a beetle with a needle pushed through it.
‘It’s not really a good idea,’ she said.
It wasn’t part of my strategy, but I couldn’t resist it. ‘Married, by any chance?’ I said. She gave me an angry look but I returned it blandly.
‘It would be awkward,’ she said.
The evening turned golden, the shadows lengthened. I watched Astrid and Owen and it seemed to grow colder, and then Miles arrived and started to moan about the events he had set in motion, and it felt colder still. The magic had gone and people stirred and gathered together the stained, sticky remnants of the picnic. As we walked back, I thought about what was to come and whether there was anything I needed to worry about.
‘I probably ought to go home,’ said a voice beside me.
I looked down. I had almost forgotten about Melanie. I shook my head. ‘There’s something I want to show you,’ I said.
We didn’t speak again until we arrived back at the house. As the rest of them headed downstairs for coffee and a smoke, I took Melanie’s hand and led her upstairs and into my room. I took her towards my bed, then placed my hands on her shoulders, positioning her just so, and looking into her large eyes. The collar of her shirt was tied with a white silk ribbon in a bow. If I could unfasten it easily, that would be proof that God wanted me to fuck her. She started to say something but I shook my head. I took one end of the ribbon and pulled. It came undone like a badly tied shoelace. I took the bottom of her shirt and lifted it over her head. She had to raise her arms to help me. I unclipped her bra and let it fall. I pulled her skirt and knickers down in a single movement. She had to lift her sandalled feet to step out of them. I sat her on the bed and pulled off her sandals.
At first, when I pushed myself inside her, I imagined that I was fucking Pippa and I pushed harder and harder, and heard Melanie cry out under me. Then I thought of Astrid. I imagined her face on Melanie’s body.
And then at the very moment I came, from the very first moment I started to come, I regretted everything: meeting Melanie, spending the evening with her, bringing her back here, having her in my bed. I felt her hands on my shoulders, her heels on the back of my thighs. She held me close inside her.
‘Davy,’ she said, after a long time. ‘I’ve never ever done anything like this.’ And then I heard a snuffling sound and saw that she was crying.
After she went to sleep I got up and went to the bathroom. I pulled up the blind and stared into the garden. Something was moving and it took me some time to make out what it was. What they were. What they were doing. I knew it. I don’t know how, but I fucking knew it. Astrid and Owen, like animals, not caring who saw them. The tick in my eye, getting stronger. I tasting something sour in the back of my throat, as if I was about to be sick.
Chapter Thirty-four
I saw Owen’s photographs before Astrid. I let myself in one day when Dario was asleep and everyone else was out. I wasn’t working myself now. It took too much time and the money wasn’t good enough. I made up some of the difference from people’s carelessness. Pippa was the best. She left notes lying around in her room and never noticed if they disappeared. Since Peggy’s death, I’d collected forty pounds from her. And twenty from Miles, when he left his wallet at home one day by mistake. A few coins from Astrid, so far. Mick and Owen were trickier, and Dario never seemed to have any money on him. One time, though, I lifted some weed from his room and sold it back to him. I said someone had given it to me at work and I didn’t want it, but I thought he might. He insisted on giving me something for it, and I could tell he felt a bit guilty that he was ripping me off.
For me the crunch had come when we were finishing the work on the house, which the landlord was doing up before selling. While we were adding the last touches – painting the walls, laying down the last skirting-boards – this couple had come to look at it. They weren’t that old, in their early thirties perhaps, but it was obvious they were stinking rich. They had an air of smug wealth about them. Their hair gleamed as if every strand had been buffed. Their skin glowed. There was a kind of carelessness about them, as if they were so far above normal people that they didn’t even need to show it. We were invisible to them, workers with rough hands and plaster in our hair, who, for all they knew, didn’t even understand English. And if we did understand, what did it matter? What did
we
matter? In loud, drawly voices, they said that if they bought the place, they’d start again. Their words: start again. Some of the decoration wasn’t to their taste. They’d obviously have to rip out the kitchen units and get an architect in to have a look at the layout of the ground floor. The bathrooms were cheap and nasty. I stood and listened to them and felt a fluttering in my chest, as if a moth was trapped in there. A band tightened round my head. Ticking in both eyes.
I laid down my paintbrush, walked into the garden, where I could escape what they were saying, and made a promise to myself. I was going to get some proper money together and I was going to leave. Leave London, leave the UK, go to a new life where people would treat me with respect and I would be the one calling the tunes. I saw the beaches of Brazil, the beautiful women gazing up at me adoringly. For a few moments, I even saw Astrid beside me, hanging off my arm, laughing at what I was saying, pressing her slim, strong body against mine.
I left that day, after collecting what was owed to me, and I didn’t go back, and I didn’t answer the messages that were left on my mobile. I didn’t tell the Maitland Road lot, of course, which meant that each morning I would leave the house at the usual time, and each afternoon return as if from a hard day at work. Now I had time to make plans and time to investigate the people I was living with.
Which was how I knew that Pippa had fucked poor old Mick, one more scalp to add to her collection. And then – much better, much more interesting, something to make my spine tingle – I came into the kitchen and saw Pippa saying something to Owen. She laughed and put her hand on his arm, and he went red and stepped back and I knew, I just knew, that they had done it as well. Pippa and Owen. Could no one else tell? I looked at them when they were all together and it was obvious that they were like blind people. Even Astrid.
One rainy day I was in Owen’s room again, examining his photographs, which I’d been thinking about ever since I’d had that glimpse of them. All of them were black-and-white. Some were blurred and arty and pretentious, water and burned trees and posters half ripped off walls. The women were different. I could hardly move and my breath rasped in my throat. Owen, I thought, you bastard. You’re not so different from me, after all. You think you’re making art but really you’re making pornography. Just because there’s no colour doesn’t mean that blood isn’t blood, flesh isn’t flesh. It made me laugh. He’d got some woman to take her clothes off by telling her it was art. Then I came across the woman with the mutilated face. I picked it up and held it in front of the window to see it more clearly. He was good, I had to admit it. He really was good. I felt envious of him. I touched each slash with my fingers. Now I know you, I thought. I know you, but you don’t know me.
I heard the downstairs door open and the sound of voices: Astrid and Owen. I put the picture back, stepped quickly out of the room and went upstairs to my own, where I lay on my bed. I could hear them talking in low voices in the hallway, then their footsteps mounting the stairs together. I folded my arms round my body and screwed my eyes shut. Rain rattled against the window in waves with the wind but it felt as if it was inside my brain. The pair of them were going into Owen’s room, where they would be together, surrounded by those images. I saw the naked bodies of Owen’s women, and then I saw Astrid and Owen naked too and it felt like something swelling in my head. I crept down one flight of stairs and listened outside their door. Astrid was saying something. What? I put my ear against the door.
‘Your women don’t have faces.’
So he was showing her the pictures. I couldn’t hear what they were saying next; just murmurs, his voice, then hers. And then there was silence. Fucking silence. Except the roaring in my head.
Sometimes things come together, as if they were meant. You don’t make plans, but you make yourself ready and available and plans come to you, falling into your lap like a gift.
The next day, I just happened to find myself near the Horse and Jockey at around the time I knew Astrid usually finished work, so I went in, scanning the room for a glimpse of her. She wasn’t there and I turned to go.
‘Davy. Over here, mate!’
It was one of her biker friends. I couldn’t remember his name, though I’d met him there several times and he always treated me as if we’d been friends for years.
I walked over to the group.
‘Looking for Astrid?’ he said.
‘I was just passing.’
‘Yeah?’ He grinned knowingly. ‘She’s not here. Have a drink, though.’
‘Why so generous all of a sudden?’ asked one of the other bikers, who had a shaved head and a ring through his nose.
‘I got a tip today from Queen Ingrid. Can you imagine?’
‘Queen Ingrid?’ asked Buzzcut.
‘You know. That bloody de Soto woman up in the fortified palace in Highgate.’
‘The tan’s real – she has lots of holidays.’
‘And you got a tip? What was it? Additional services?’
There were smirks all around, even from a couple of the girls.
‘No such luck. She needed a bit of furniture moving. So what’ll you have, Davy?’
‘Half of lager,’ I said. ‘Don’t they have servants for that sort of thing?’
‘Didn’t seem to be anybody around.’
I sat in the warm fug, sipping slowly, smiling when they smiled and laughing when they laughed, keeping half an eye out for Astrid, my mind ticking away.
Early the next morning I bought an
A–Z
at the newsagent up the road, took the Underground to Highgate and walked the rest of the way, map in hand, like a tourist. The walk was all uphill. At the end, I felt I’d arrived at a place that looked down on the rest of us, scrabbling around in the heat of the city.
Century Road was just off the main street, and I needn’t have worried about picking out the de Soto house: set back from the road, behind an iron fence, a burglar alarm blinking above its porched door, its tall windows glinting in the morning sun. Two cars were parked in the forecourt, a Jaguar and a Range Rover. His and hers. I looked around, suddenly feeling self-conscious. It seemed stupidly suspicious to be standing on a residential street staring at an expensive house. I walked along the road and through a square until I got to a shopping street. I returned to Century Road with a newspaper and a cup of coffee. I sat on the kerb, sipped coffee and pretended to read the paper. Now I looked like a dozen boring, explainable, forgettable people.
At twenty to eight a man in a suit came out of the house, got into the car, drove out and away, down the hill. I sipped at my now empty cup and actually began to read the paper. A bomb blast in a Baghdad market. A train crash in Egypt. At twenty-five past eight the postman walked through the gate and up the drive. He pressed a button and spoke into a small grille. After a few seconds the door opened and he stepped forward. He had a package in his hand, but whoever had answered was lost in the shadows. He turned round and I saw a glimpse of a woman disappearing inside, back into that world where she felt so safe. The door closed.
It was obvious that I couldn’t break into a house like that. There were probably alarms of a kind I knew nothing about. I needed to be invited in and I needed to be sure that she was alone, with no builders, butlers or gardeners. That was the challenge. I thought for a moment, then felt excitement ripple through me. I stood up and carefully crammed the newspaper and the coffee cup into a bin. People noticed litterers.
Now that I had decided, I was burning to act but I had a whole day and night to get through. It took about an hour to reach the gallery where Melanie and Laura worked. I pushed the door open and entered the hushed, cool interior. There were no customers, but Laura and Melanie were there. Melanie was wearing a flowery cotton dress that Astrid wouldn’t have been seen dead in. She had pink lips and looked like a child about to go off to a birthday party.
‘Davy.’ She blushed and put up a hand to check her hair. ‘I wasn’t expecting you!’
‘Why would you be?’ I asked rudely. ‘Hi, Laura.’
‘Hello, Davy.’ She looked at me appraisingly and I felt my anger mount.
‘These are a bit expensive, aren’t they?’ I said, flicking my hand dismissively at a canvas.
‘Well, not if you –’
‘Is there somewhere we can talk privately?’
‘You can go to the stock room,’ said Laura. ‘It’s not as if we’re rushed off our feet.’
Melanie led me into the back. Through the frosted-glass door I could see Laura’s shape moving around the gallery and I could hear her as well, the clack her shoes made on the wooden floor.
‘Are you all right, Davy?’ asked Melanie.
‘Why not?’
‘I didn’t think I’d hear from you again.’
‘Well, here I am.’
‘I was worried.’ As she spoke, she took a step forward and lifted her face. Her expression was anxious and hopeful. I knew she wanted me to kiss her, a chaste and tender kiss to reassure her of my affection.
I didn’t kiss her, but there under the naked bulb, among the box files, pressed against the computer that beeped and whirred, I pulled up her flowery dress and pulled down her demure white knickers, pulled them over her sensible shoes and put them into my jacket pocket. I pushed my hand between her legs. She tried to stop me. Her eyes were wild and she struggled silently, looking over my shoulder at the door. Then she stopped struggling and I unzipped my flies and pushed myself inside her. When I’d finished – it didn’t take long – she put her arms round my neck and pressed her face into my chest and told me it was all right and she understood and she loved me and she was so happy I’d tracked her down. She kissed me on the mouth, called me ‘darling’, and led me back into the shop by the hand, looking mussed and proud.
I’d tried nice. I’d tried considerate. And it hadn’t worked. But when you were cruel, when you were indifferent, they liked you for it. If you treated them really badly, they fell in love with you. It was their own fault.