I Know What I Saw

40 Friday

‘I can’t believe that, Xander,’ Seb says, shaking his head. ‘I don’t think that you could have. I remember how you were about her – you loved her. There’s no way you could have harmed her. Could you?’

‘No. I mean, I don’t believe I could have, Seb. I did love her – I still do. But they think it. And they’re police.’

‘Police can get it wrong, Xander. You’d know if you had. And importantly, we would know.’ He looks at me and sighs. ‘You look exhausted. Let’s get some food inside you.’ He starts to rummage around the cupboards for ingredients.

We would know. We. I think of Nina and how she reacted to me. ‘I need to go and see Nina,’ I say. ‘Where is she living?’

He stops what he is doing and faces me over his granite worktop. ‘Nina? Really?’

‘I have to find out about the dollars. I need an explanation.’

‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, I don’t think you’re going to get much mileage out of her. She was pretty angry after you left. And she wasn’t having any suggestion that she took the money.’

‘But we both know she did – the earring you found.’

‘I know,’ he says, holding his palms out. ‘I’m with you. I just don’t know how much good it’ll do.’

The food comes but all I can see is the sky exchanging light for dusk. I fidget in my seat, on edge. I have to see her.

He finishes a mouthful of salad. ‘I could call her. Press her a bit more maybe? I’m just not sure about aggravating her and making her even more difficult about it.’

I don’t know why Seb can’t see how important this is to me. ‘I don’t care about aggravating her. This is my life.’

‘Okay, okay,’ he says, holding up his hands. ‘I’ll phone. Ask her if we can drop round.’

‘I’d rather just turn up. I don’t want her fobbing us off.’

Seb considers this before nodding, resigned. We drive. Seb’s hands are steady on the wheel and the smell of expensive new leather fills my nostrils. After ten minutes, we turn up a street that must be hers and slow down.

‘I’ll come in with you, Xander. I’m not happy about leaving you with her, especially going by her recent behaviour,’ he says.

‘I’ll be fine, Seb,’ I say, waiting for him to look at me.

He draws smoothly to a halt. ‘Can I wait for you here?’

‘No. Really. I’ll be fine.’

He takes a deep breath. ‘If you’re sure,’ he says. ‘Red door.’

I get out and walk to the well-kept front garden. Although it is small I know that in this part of London, Dulwich Village, the price of this cottage would be eye-watering. She is obviously still working in finance or something else lucrative. My heart skips a little as I rattle the knocker. I wait. The evening begins to gather darkness around my shoulders. I shiver in the cold until the door opens.

Nina appears in the doorway, hair glossy and sharp. She’s dressed as if she’s just back from work. Navy dress in a thick woollen fabric – bouclé, is it?

‘Nina.’

She sighs, taking me in. ‘What do you want, Xander?’

‘I need to talk you.’

‘If it’s about the money, I have nothing more to say to you,’ she says, and crosses her arms.

‘I didn’t kill her, Nina,’ I say softly.

‘Didn’t you? You might as well have.’

‘Nina, I don’t know what she told you, but I did not leave Grace. She left me, and it tore me apart.’

She shakes her head in supressed fury and turns to shut the door on me.

‘Wait. Okay. I know you won’t accept what I say. That’s fine. I get that. She’s your friend.’

‘Was.’ She’s glaring at me. Willing me to challenge her.

‘Was. I’d be surprised if you weren’t loyal to her. But I’m not here about that. I need to know what happened to the money.’

She pauses in the act of shutting the door.

‘I don’t care whether you believe this or not, but I don’t have the money,’ she says, a hand on the door.

My heart sinks at this. ‘Nina. If there were a way I could do this without asking you for anything at all, believe me, I would. But I can’t, Nina. I can’t do it without you. They’re charging me with murder, Nina. I didn’t do it. They think I killed her for the money.’

As I say it I feel my head swimming with the pressure of it all. I want to cry in frustration, make her somehow do the right thing.

She looks at me for a second and then closes the door. ‘Bye, Xander.’

I stare at the shut door. I’m finished. But just as I am about to walk away, the door opens again.

‘Look. If it matters, I know you didn’t kill her,’ she says. ‘You haven’t got the balls. Sorry – that didn’t come across as I meant it.’

I nod at her and smile a little. ‘Well, the police think I have.’

She considers this and I can tell she is weighing up how much she knows, which isn’t much, against what she doesn’t know, which is a lot. In the end she has no words to offer me.

‘You should look at the boyfriend,’ she says, and suddenly I am aware that my face has gone cold.

Boyfriend. That’s what the police said. They suspected the boyfriend. But that the boyfriend was me. Even now, the idea of her having a boyfriend who is not me hurts.

‘Who was the boyfriend?’ I say. I think of the other man in the house that I saw, strangling her. There was someone else after all.

‘You’ve forgotten?’ she says, eyebrows raised.

‘Did I know?’

‘Yes. It was the yoga guy. You must remember. Ariel.’

It comes washing over me. The smooth, easy manner. The oiliness of him. That smile. That wafting about in fake serenity. Our arguments. My jealousy.

‘She was seeing him?’ I say, incensed.

‘Oh,’ she says, quiet now. ‘You didn’t know.’

I feel hot tears beginning to pool in my eyes as I shake my head. She stands behind my watery screen, not moving.

‘She didn’t love him,’ she says. ‘It was a rebound.’

The words reverberate. I can’t believe it – after all the arguments we had about him. The baseless jealousy I was accused of. But she went to him. And then the pettiness of my reaction climbs in. She is dead. Grace. Gone – killed. And she could have been ended by him – that stabs at me most.

And then it seems to me that this can’t be true. The man who killed her had a suit on as if he had been at work. It couldn’t have been him. Ariel didn’t wear suits.

‘Ariel didn’t kill her,’ I say.

‘I didn’t mean he killed her. I meant I think he might have the money. He’s the only other person who might have known about it.’

The words settle on me and then begin to soak through. And the truth of it starts to wake me. I close my eyes and sink to my haunches on Nina’s step, eyes clenched, trying to think. There is something in the back of my memory about this. I try to reconstitute that evening. Those flickering flames against the wall. The song.

I stoke up the scent of burning logs in order to revive the memory. He said something, didn’t he, about money? I heard him calling across the room to her. Champagne? he said. Something about celebrating. Celebrating what? she said. And then it came out: the money.

She wished she hadn’t told him, in my memory. She wished she hadn’t mentioned it. It was the dollars. It must have been.

‘But how did he get it?’

‘I don’t know about that. I do know that he disappeared pretty quickly after she died. Didn’t even come to the funeral – cremation.’

‘And you didn’t mention it to anyone? Her parents I mean. About the money? About Ariel disappearing?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Sebastian wouldn’t hear any of it until after the service. And when I brought it up afterwards, he insisted that it was your money and that you’d left it with him, in his charge. Only you could take it. Wouldn’t even consider giving it up to anyone else. You know how bloody uptight he is about all that crap.’

‘So, what, Ariel could have broken in and taken it?’

She considers this for a second. ‘Who knows? We had a kind of wake for her. I looked out for him but didn’t see him. We were half-expecting you to turn up,’ she says then, and her face changes.

I hear the words and then the tears come. I am in mourning. For Grace. For our past. The loss of it all.