Authors: Nicci French
‘Mrs Farrell has her shopping in the car. She leaves you to be helped into the house. What is she going to do next?’
‘Go into her house, I suppose.’
‘Collect her shopping, take it inside. But from what we can tell, she never went back to her car to take out the shopping and never opened her front door. Her husband was away that night, and the lads from the estate didn’t arrive until four hours later.’
I thought for a moment. ‘On the other hand, they could have attacked her, concealed her body and come back later to rob her car. Under the cover of darkness.’
Mitchell’s hitherto grim face broke into a broad smile and he looked across at Prebble, who smiled back. ‘It’s a theory,’ he said. ‘It’s a crap theory. But it’s a theory.’
‘But you probably didn’t bring me in here to get my ideas about the case.’
‘We’re always grateful for input,’ said Mitchell. ‘But what really interests me is what you saw.’
‘The problem,’ I said, ‘and I feel really bad about this, is that I didn’t see anything.’
‘But you were there,’ said Mitchell. ‘You were there when it happened.’
There was a long silence.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I almost want to say, “Ask me anything but that.” I’ve got a very good memory. Ask me about my first day at primary school, every holiday I’ve ever been on. Next week I’ll remember the colour of the tie you’re wearing. But in that moment when I ran into Mrs Farrell’s car door, I didn’t take in anything at all. I didn’t even know it was her. I hit the door, I hit the ground, I heard someone apologize and I was dragged inside. My memory’s like a faded fax of a bad photocopy. You can use a magnifying-glass, but all you’ll see is a mess and a blur.’
I expected Mitchell to look depressed or cross. I thought he might send me home like a bad girl. But he smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Miss Bell,’ he said. ‘Compared with some witnesses, you’re like Mr Memory. I’m going to bring in another officer and you’re going to say everything you know, and she’ll write it down.’
‘It won’t take very long,’ I said.
He smiled again.
‘Oh, yes, it will.’
For me the police had always been vague, abstract figures. I saw them in their cars, blue lights flashing in the darkness, or walking along the street, and I felt slightly anxious, as if I might be doing something wrong without realizing it, and that when their eyes settled on my face they would see a furtive criminal. Night after night I saw them on Maitland Road and in Hackney, stopping black youths and searching them, standing in pairs with walkie-talkies crackling, shepherding the violently drunk or the stupefied stoned into the backs of their vans. Before Peggy’s murder I had never been into a police station, except the one occasion when I’d reported a stolen wallet, and then I’d only got as far as the front desk. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, and I was sheepishly surprised to discover they seemed quite normal, not brutal or racist or ignorant or fiendishly clever – just slightly bored and harassed men and women doing their job and thinking about what they would do once their shift was over.
Of the three of us, it was definitely Dario who was having difficulty in talking to them.
‘They’re not interested in you taking drugs,’ said Davy, before we were all interviewed that second time. ‘They’re interested in who killed Peggy. Right, Astrid?’
‘I know that,’ said Dario. ‘But I’ve got this feeling I’ll break out in a sweat and just announce it. I won’t be able to stop myself. I once heard about this guy going through Customs. Nobody was interested in him, and he suddenly started crying and confessed he’d got cocaine in the false bottom to a set of knives and forks he was carrying.’
‘Knives and forks?’ said Davy.
‘Yes, but that’s not the point. The point is, I’m going to confess to something. I can feel it. They’ll look at me and I’ll break.’
‘The point is,’ I said, ‘someone’s been murdered.’
‘I don’t know anything. I’ve told them everything I know.’
‘Tell them again. Then sign your name at the bottom and that’ll be that.’
Of course, it could never be that simple. Someone had been killed a few yards from where we lived, a few minutes after we had spoken to her. It almost felt as if she had been killed before our very eyes, but we hadn’t noticed. I knew her face, her name. Every time I passed the house, I looked down into the recess where the bins had stood, and where her body had been crammed, and imagined her there. After a couple of days, the space started to fill with flowers and messages, and after a week or so the flowers started to rot in the Cellophane wrapping, giving out a sweet stench that made me want to gag. I looked at people in the street, at the gangs of youths who hung around in the balmy evenings, and wondered if it had been any of them, or if they knew something they weren’t saying. I had always thought of Maitland Road as rough and down-at-heel, but it was my home and I felt safe there. What had once seemed normal now took on an air of menace. When I heard footsteps behind me in the dark, my heart beat faster; shadows seemed to move; faces were sinister. The road hissed with rumours: the husband had been arrested and charged; the husband had been released; the police knew which of the gang from the estate had done it but had insufficient evidence; there were drugs involved; it was a mugging gone wrong; it was an accident. She had been shot, stabbed, strangled, hit over the head with a stone, raped. I even heard that one of her hands had been cut off. Everyone knew better than everyone else. Everyone knew Peggy better than everyone else. People remembered conversations they had probably never had with her. People who had never said hello to her missed her. People who had never said hello to me now sought me out because – by slamming into her open car door and landing in a dazed, cursing heap on the road – I had become a star witness, someone to know.
At the same time, another change was taking place closer to home. Suddenly we were just temporary tenants. A few days ago I’d been thinking of the seven of us as my strange rag-bag family. Now the others had reverted to a collection of individuals, and I found myself thinking: Will I still know you in a year’s time? Who would I stay in touch with? I felt sure about Pippa; perhaps I would even ask her to share my next flat. And pretty sure about Miles, too – even if he was the ex-lover who harboured nostalgic desires for me and the landlord who was evicting me, even if he was a well-paid economist who was dating a well-paid architect and who owned a desirable property on the borders of Stoke Newington, while I was just a despatch rider. Dario and Davy I was less certain about. I could imagine gradually drifting apart from them, getting together for quick drinks between more important appointments, the intervals between each meeting becoming longer, the common ground dwindling into a series of anecdotes about our shared past. Eventually, perhaps, they would become people I would bump into in a pub and kiss on the cheek and say hello to and promise to give them a call soon, very soon. It was hard to believe that I would keep in touch with Mick – I didn’t feel in touch with him while I was living in the same house. And as for Owen, I didn’t even know if I liked him, and I was pretty sure he didn’t like me. Or perhaps it was simply that he didn’t see me; he couldn’t even be bothered to look.
Chapter Six
The third time I felt as if I was interviewing Detective Inspector Mitchell. As he made me tell the story all over again, he shifted in his chair, fidgeted with a pen, rubbed his scalp, adjusted his tie, failed to meet my gaze.
‘There we are,’ I said, when I’d finished. ‘The same story. Told in the same words.’
‘No,’ he muttered. ‘It’s not the same.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘Did I get something wrong?’
He reached into a bag on the floor, removed a file and pushed it across the desk. He nodded at me, so I opened it. There was page after typewritten page. ‘What’s this?’
‘It’s the physical-traces report from the crime scene.’
‘It looks very detailed.’
‘If you read
page four
, you’ll see an account of the glass fragments found on Mrs Farrell’s coat.’
‘So?’
‘They’re from a supermarket-brand vodka bottle. The fragments were scattered round her body and underneath it. Hence they became attached to the material of her coat. One such bottle is duly referred to on the receipt found in Mrs Farrell’s car.’
‘Well, I’m glad that’s been cleared up,’ I said. ‘I was wondering where the bottle of vodka had got to.’
‘Shut up,’ said Mitchell.
‘What?’
He got up and paced the room. ‘I hate this fucking case,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Everything’s wrong,’ he said. ‘The yobs who stole the property aren’t the people who killed her. And now this.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t see…’
He sat down and jabbed a plump finger at me. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘You remember our scenario?’
‘
Your
scenario.’
‘Mrs Farrell knocks you over. She attends to you, leaving her car unlocked, her shopping inside. She is attacked, robbed, murdered, dumped. Then, some hours later, the gang from William Morris help themselves to the alcohol. As we now know, they drink the vodka on the spot and toss it down into the recess in front of number fifty-four, where it smashed.’
He paused and stared at me meaningfully.
‘Is this a problem?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s a problem. When they threw the bottle down, it should have landed on Mrs Farrell’s body.’
‘So it missed her.’
‘What?’ said Mitchell, sarcastically. ‘And the fragments lifted her body and positioned themselves under it?’
‘Maybe somebody else took the vodka. It could have been the same person who killed her.’
Mitchell tossed another file across the table. ‘Fingerprint report,’ he said. ‘It was them, all right. Her body fell, or was placed there, after the bottle had been smashed.’
‘If that’s true, the gang could have killed her after all.’
‘So she sat in her car for three hours?’
‘People do strange things. She might have been locked out.’
‘Oh, stop that,’ said Mitchell, wearily. ‘She had her keys. She wasn’t in her bloody car. So where was she for those hours? With her car unlocked and her shopping in it? And why did she come back?’
‘Is that what you’ve brought me in to ask?’
He leaned across the table. ‘I want you to be sure, absolutely sure, that you’ve told me everything you know.’
‘I have,’ I said.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Tell me again.’
I was on my way to my room and looked up to see Dario peering down through the banisters, beckoning me, his face a parody of conspiratorial secrecy. ‘What is it?’
‘Up here,’ he hissed.
I shrugged and made my way up to the second floor where he and Mick had rooms. As always, Mick’s door was closed, but Dario’s was wide open. Probably he couldn’t even shut it any more: half-empty paint pots, hardened brushes, bottles of turpentine and a rusty saw blocked the entrance and spilled out into the corridor, along with the strange items he collected from skips and dumps all round East London. I stepped over a tennis racket with broken strings and made my way round a small trestle table, into the unspeakable squalor and sweet stench of the room. It was hard even to make out the bed, amid the stacks of old furniture he’d amassed: two desks, on top of each other, one without any legs; a wooden towel rack; a fraying wicker Moses basket filled to overflowing with pewter plates and mugs; a large blue trunk with brass handles; three ladder-backed chairs in various stages of disintegration; an armchair piled with clothes; a supermarket trolley on its side, one wheel missing; a little carved chest; two cardboard suitcases. Dario always said he was going to do them up and sell them.
‘What’s up?’ I asked.
‘Take a seat?’
‘Where?’
‘You could lie in the hammock,’ he said. ‘Or I’ve got some deckchairs I found the other day I could open up. They’re a bit cobwebby, though.’
‘I’ll stand. What’s up?’
‘I just wanted to know what they were after this time?’
As I gave a brief account of Mitchell, his anguish and confusion, Dario lit a joint and took a deep drag. The sweet smell filled the room. He flicked ash on to the floor and offered it to me, but I shook my head.
‘Does my head in,’ he said.
‘He has this feeling that we were there when it happened. I don’t exactly know how. Nor does he.’
‘It’s going to end badly,’ Dario said. ‘For me probably.’
‘You know,’ I said, ‘I’ve gone over and over it in my mind and I’ve tried and tried to remember.’
‘Yeah, you said.’
‘There’s just one thing, but when I came off my bike and you and Davy came over, I’ve got some memory that someone else was there. Or maybe I was concussed.’
‘That was some bang when you hit the road.’
I gave up. ‘I can’t think about this any more. It makes my brain hurt. I’m going to go and get myself a coffee.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ he said, and followed me down three flights of stairs into the kitchen. Mick was sitting at the table, shelling monkey nuts and then, with a look of great determination, throwing each one high into the air and trying to catch it in his mouth. I said hello to him but he didn’t stop, though a nut bounced off his nose. I went over to the back door and gazed out on to the long strip of garden. ‘Let’s go out somewhere, to a club or the movies or something,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel like hanging round here talking about dead people.
But then we heard the front door opening and closing, and footsteps coming down the stairs: Miles and Leah, both cool and elegant. Leah had a couple of bottles of chilled white wine for the household, which was nice of her, but she also had one of those metal tape measures that extend for metres, then kink in the middle, and a notebook. She poured herself some wine and opened the tape measure.
‘Right,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Let’s get to work.’
‘Plans?’ I asked.
‘We thought we could make this room really lovely,’ said Leah.
‘It
is
really lovely,’ said Dario, dolefully. ‘I’ve only just finished painting it.’
‘It’s too dark. We need to open it up, make the most of its size. It should be full of light, leading into the garden like it does,’ Leah continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘It should almost feel like being outside when you’re inside.’
‘Architects’ fucking bollocks,’ said Mick.
Leah stared at him and Mick stared back, then threw a nut at the window.
‘What did he just say?’ Leah asked Miles, who shrugged uncomfortably. ‘As I was saying,’ she continued, with a visible effort, turning away from Miles and talking to me, though I really wasn’t interested in hearing her ideal-home plans. ‘Then if we make that first bit of garden a patio area with benches and chairs and pots, it’ll be like a continuation of the room.’
‘You mean where the vegetable patch is?’ I said.
‘That’s right.’
There was a pause, like when you’re waiting for a firework to go off.
‘I tell you what,’ I said, getting up from my chair and putting a hand on Dario’s bony shoulder, ‘I think we shouldn’t go to a film. I think we should go and have a picnic in the park. Right now. It’s such a gorgeous evening.’
Dario, Mick and I ransacked the fridge for bits to eat. Pippa arrived with a tall man in a dark suit and a slim black briefcase, and sent him to buy more food from the corner shop. Then, as we were leaving, Davy turned up with a lovely young woman in tow. She had shoulder-length brown hair, and large brown eyes, fair skin and pink cheeks; he introduced her as Mel and she blushed, smiled and shook our hands in turn.
‘Come for a picnic,’ I said.
‘We were going out to eat,’ began Mel, hesitantly.
‘Great idea,’ said Davy. He grinned at Mel. ‘It’s an initiation rite, but I’ll protect you. Let me have a shower first.’
After the world’s shortest shower, Davy collected his frisbee and Dario took a large rug from Miles’s room. I put plastic cups into a bag with Leah’s wine. The park was just a few minutes’ walk from the house, less if you climbed over the fence. It was not a very beautiful park – no ponds and walkways and landscaped views of London, no deer grazing inside well-tended enclosures – but it was beautiful this evening, green and tranquil in the dusk. There was no wind, and everything was very still, as if waiting. We made our way across the grass, strewn with plastic bags, cigarette ends, crumpled cans, to the chestnut tree, where we spread the rug and laid out our random assortment of food. As I was pouring wine into the plastic beakers I saw Owen walking towards us and raised a cup to him. He had his camera with him, and he stopped a few feet away from us and started taking photos.
‘How do we look?’ I called.
He lowered the camera. ‘How should I know? I’m interested in that tree and its shadow.’
‘Flattering,’ I said.
He frowned at me, not smiling, then put away his camera, sat on the grass and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Pippa’s friend, whose name I never found out, used his briefcase as a small table on which to assemble messy sandwiches. We threw the frisbee to each other until the light became too murky to continue. Then we lounged on the grass and talked and didn’t talk. Pippa and her latest sat with their legs tangled: I saw Davy and Mel shyly holding hands when they thought no one was looking. Dario lay flat on his back with a joint clamped between his lips, snorting smoke through his nostrils. He was giving a garbled account of my meeting with DI Mitchell to Mick and anyone else who would listen. Mick wasn’t paying much attention but he seemed more at ease than usual. He was wearing a black singlet and I noticed for the first time that he had a tattoo on his shoulder: two intersecting spirals that moved and expanded when he flexed his muscles.
I slid over the grass towards Davy, and he and Mel moved apart.
‘Sorry to butt in,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to ask you something. You know the police hauled me in again?’
‘I heard,’ said Davy. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I think they’re desperate,’ I said. ‘You know when you’ve lost something and you start looking in the places you’ve already looked? I think that’s what they’re doing. I just wanted to ask you something that’s been getting on my nerves. You know when you and Dario ran out to help me in the street?’
Davy grinned. ‘I’m not likely to forget it, am I?’
‘I know I asked you before, but I still have this nagging impression that there was someone with you. Someone who said goodbye to Dario, or Dario said goodbye to him. Or her. Dario said there wasn’t and I don’t mean to doubt his word, but this is a murder we’re talking about and if there’s anything we can do to help…’
‘Of course,’ said Davy. I thought he looked slightly uncomfortable, but perhaps I was imagining things. ‘Maybe there was someone – but if there was, Dario’s the one you should ask.’
‘I have asked him. You’re telling me there was, aren’t you?’
‘I’m not telling you anything. It was sunny. I was tired. I was sitting on the steps, with my eyes closed, probably, letting everything drift over me, you know how it is.’
‘Your eyes were closed?’
‘I dunno. Maybe, is all I’m saying. They were open for your accident, though. It makes you realize how unreliable memory is, doesn’t it? If you ask someone in advance to remember everything that happens, that’s what they do. But if you ask them afterwards – well, ninety per cent has gone over their head. My head, I mean.’
‘OK,’ I said, not satisfied.
‘What are you two conspiring about?’ said Pippa. ‘Are you planning to tell Miles we’re sitting tenants and we’re never leaving?’
‘The police hauled Astrid in,’ said Davy. ‘Gave her the third degree yet again.’
‘I should call you in as my lawyer,’ I said.
‘Any time, darling,’ she said.
‘Charge my client,’ I said. ‘Or let her walk.’ Then a thought occurred to me. I looked round. Her partner of the evening was far enough away, pouring himself another glass of wine. I spoke to her in a quieter voice: ‘Pippa, do you remember that guy who stayed over the night I had my accident?’
‘Just about.’ She gave a coy giggle, which irritated me.
‘You might want to mention him to the police. They really want to talk to anyone who was in the area. He may have seen something when he arrived.’
Pippa’s expression turned frosty. ‘We didn’t see anything.’
‘Even so,’ I said. ‘It might be worth mentioning.’
‘It’s not really a good idea,’ she said.
‘Married, by any chance?’ said Davy.
Pippa shot him a fierce glance. ‘It would be awkward,’ she said.
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘you didn’t see anything.’
‘Exactly.’
I sighed. I’d done my duty as a responsible citizen, and I didn’t want to think about Peggy any more, not this evening, anyway. I went back to where I’d been sitting and lowered myself on to the grass. I lay on my back next to Owen and gazed dreamily up into the sky, which was fading from turquoise to silver grey. The trees’ branches were massed darkly above me, and through them I could make out the faint outline of the half-moon. I closed my eyes.
Then Dario lobbed the frisbee towards me, spilling my wine, and the spell was broken. I sat up, cursed Dario and poured myself some more. In the thick evening light, I looked across the park. From where we were, I could see the roof of our house. Leah and Miles were there, planning how it would look once we were out of the way. They’d change bedrooms into studies and extra bathrooms, knock down walls, throw old beds and sagging sofas into a skip, paint over all the marks and stains that had accumulated through the years, until nothing would be left to show that we had lived there. Time to move on, I thought, but I’d never felt less like moving on than that evening in the park.