I Know What I Saw

42 Friday

By the time that I get back to Seb’s, night has set in. I ring the doorbell and he opens it, looking harried.

‘Everything okay?’ he says, ushering me in.

‘Fine. Why?’ I say, following him.

‘You’ve been gone longer than I expected Nina would tolerate you,’ he says, walking into the living room. In the room I am conscious suddenly of my smell. He sits and when he beckons me into the matching cream chair, I hesitate.

‘Maybe I should go and have a bath,’ I say, and stutter in the doorway.

‘It’s okay, sit,’ he says, reading my discomfort. ‘I’ve got the good stuff open.’

There is a bottle of Macallan on a small ebony coffee table. That bottle. The one Dad liked. It’s there on the table, half-full. Two glasses keeping it steady.

‘So, what did she say?’ he says, and pours out two measures. His hand shakes a little as he offers me the glass.

‘What you said. She denied it.’

‘Knew she would,’ he says. ‘But you were there for a bit. Did she say anything interesting?’ The tone in his voice is one I haven’t heard before. He’s aiming for a nonchalance that he hasn’t quite managed.

‘Actually, I wasn’t there long. Didn’t even go in. But she did make me wonder about something.’

‘What’s that?’ He takes a sip, wincing a little.

‘Ariel. She thinks it might have been him who took the money.’

‘Ariel?’ he says, straightening in his chair. ‘The yoga guy? What makes her think that?’

‘Actually, I’m beginning to wonder if it was him, but it doesn’t really add up in my head.’

‘Why?’

‘That night. The night it happened. I was hiding behind the sofa when they came in. I couldn’t see much. But I’m sure I heard him say something about celebrating having the money.’

He leans back in his chair. ‘Well, she was seeing the guy. And she went away with him. Maybe that’s it. The simplest explanation. But how did he get it?’ he says.

‘I’m not exactly sure about that. Could he have broken in? After … after Grace?’

He considers this a while. ‘Maybe. It’s possible. We had so much going on around that time, if he had broken in while we were out, I can’t say I would necessarily have noticed. And back then you could just breathe on that window and it would have fallen open,’ he says, aiming his glass at the bay window.

‘But it doesn’t completely add up,’ I say.

‘Why not? He didn’t come to the funeral. I’d say that everything points to him. Especially after what you just told me about what you heard.’

‘I don’t know, Seb. As much as I loathed him, I can’t really see him breaking into your house in broad daylight to steal money. I didn’t like the guy, but I don’t see him as a cat burglar.’

He pauses for a second and takes another sip. ‘Maybe he did it at the wake,’ he says. ‘I remember seeing him there and now I think of it he was lurking around upstairs quite a bit.’

My heart skips. Nina said he hadn’t been at the wake. I want to believe this is just Seb’s way of supporting me. To help confirm what I already think. I take a sip of the whisky. The liquid stings the inside of my mouth. ‘But the man I saw,’ I say. ‘He had a suit on. Couldn’t have been Ariel.’

‘That’s what’s bothering you?’ he says. ‘You know he had a job?’

‘Well, he was a yoga instructor. I knew that,’ I say.

‘No. A proper job. He was an insurance guy or something,’ he says. ‘It’s true he was a yoga instructor but only ever part-time. I don’t think Grace would have gone out with someone who was just a yoga teacher.’

He had a job? I sit back in my seat and take some more whisky in. So he killed her. Then he took the money. The thoughts swill around my head, trying to get traction on something.

‘That’s where I was this evening.’

He looks at me in confusion. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I was trying to track him down. What happened to him? Did you ever see him again?’ I say, sipping some more. The whisky burns my chapped lips but the pain is welcome.

‘After Grace died? No. He just vanished. Although—’

‘What?’

‘He wasn’t really our friend. We didn’t know him, as such, beyond what Grace told us about him. Met him twice in total, I think.’

‘I have to find him,’ I say.

He turns to me with a raised eyebrow. ‘Good luck with that.’

‘What do you mean?’ I say.

‘What are you going to trace him with? You don’t even know his name, do you?’

‘Ariel. It can’t be that common a name. And now we know he was in insurance.’

‘Xander. I don’t think Ariel was his real name. I think it was like a yoga name. When I met him, he called himself something else, though I can’t remember now what it was. It was something less frilly, like Harry or James.’

This stops me mid-breath. I haven’t even considered that Ariel might not be Ariel. My body starts up a mild panic. ‘What the hell am I supposed to do now?’ I say.

I close my eyes and there is silence. All I can hear now is the pulse of my blood in my ears beating out a percussive drum. I stay this way, perched on an abyss until I hear Seb moving across the room. My ears wade through the sounds coming from the other end of the room and I look up. Seb is shuffling through records. I close my eyes again. How am I going to find a person without a name?

I hear the wisp of a record leaving its sleeve. A low static hum, velvety and rich. It is the sound of a cinema before the screen lights up. The sound of anticipation. A soft amplified thud. A hiss and then in glorious technicolour, sound comes rushing in waves across the room.

Opening my eyes, I see that Seb’s back again in his chair. He catches my gaze and swills his glass sadly. Rory comes now tapping at the windows of my head. He wants to come inside. I can fight him back for now, but not for much longer. I clamp my eyes and a giddiness takes me over so that I feel as if I am trapped in an eddy of swirls.

Time slips from grey into deep black. The hiss of a stylus on a loop shakes me from the images flickering in my eyelids. I open them with a start. The night has fled. It is early morning. Seb is curled up on the sofa. I roll as quietly as I can on to the floor and then tiptoe out of the room.

In the bathroom I scrub myself with soap and a trickle of water, crouched in the bathtub. When I come back down, Seb is still sleeping, so I creep quietly out of the front door. The world in here is cloying but when I get outside the pavement has a light dust of frost that crunches as I cross it. Cool air in my lungs shakes the sleep from my body as I walk.

Rory, who has been holding on by the fingernails, has flown away. There is a difference in the two worlds, his and mine. A difference in substance, physics. He doesn’t have the physical strength to hang on to me when I am moving. Even slowly. But he can fill my mind when I am inside and boxed in.

Grace now comes directly in view – just a shimmer. I stop and try to look at her but she is too insubstantial. But I see her smile, her eyes hollow. You, she points at me. It’s you she seems to want to tell me. I smile back at her. I nod.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘Me.’ And she becomes air again.

I walk, aiming for the Horniman grounds once more. That’s why she has appeared. She is calling me there so that we can talk this out. Me and her. She is calling me so that we can untangle it together, the thing that has been tugging at my brain.

Seb lied to me. I’m less sure about his motivation than I was last night, mixed as it was with his warmth and whisky. Was he just trying to confirm my suspicions? I don’t think so any longer.

I walk through the main entrance since it is daytime. There are no walkers or visitors at this hour, though. Only a few pigeons, grubbing for food, and me. I make my way to a sheltered spot I sometimes sleep in. My feet are fleet. The air carries me.

Ariel didn’t break in, did he? Grace says this but not with her mouth. It is all with a look.

He didn’t.

Seb lied.

There is the hollow formed from dead branches and twigs, still unmolested. I made this a few weeks ago as a shelter, before all of this. Before Squire, when the world was clearer. There is slime and rotting mulch now under its awning, but I am alone here.

I shut my eyes and catch Grace’s hand as she holds it out to me. She leads me somewhere deep inside a memory. The flames kick out at the wall. They glow and dance and crackle to the sound of a hissing turntable. I glance out from behind the edge of the sofa. He is standing over her, his legs steepled on either side. Can I see his face?

There are thoughts that are running through my head which feel as if they are chasing me or leading me somewhere. But they are there, with me.

I can’t go back there to Seb yet.

I have the QC to see on Monday. It’s Saturday now. Until then I can wait here.

Untangling. Collecting. Connecting.

If all the while, unravelling.