The Other Half Lives

13

When I wake, my head is clear. I know where I am straight away. All the details of this room are familiar, though I saw them for the first time only last night: blue and white checked bedspread and pillowcases, beige loop carpet, the loop so coarse it makes me think of a bathmat. Small, square pine cabinets on either side of the bed, a pine dressing table with a three-sectioned mirror at one end of the room, a wooden blanket chest at the other. Yellow curtains with red and gold tasselled tie-backs. I can hear banging coming from downstairs that sounds like crockery, and a radio.

I’m in Garstead Cottage, in the grounds of Villiers school-the cottage Martha Wyers’ parents rent, and allow Mary to use. We’ll be safe there-that’s what she said. I have fallen out of my life and into hers.

I pull back the bedclothes. I’m wearing the pyjamas Mary threw at me last night, too tired by that point even to speak: they’re pink, with ‘Minxxx’ printed across the top. The soft moans of animals from outside draw me over to the window. I open the curtains and look at the view in daylight: fields full of cows, a wall separating the farmland from the school’s land, the square-towered stone bulk of the main school building at the top of the steeply rising path. It’s the building Mary painted, the picture I saw in her house.

Garstead Cottage nestles in a dip beside the path, a few metres beyond Villiers’ main gates. It’s down a level from the land around it and has an air of being hidden. Last night, Mary told me I didn’t need to bother closing the curtains. ‘No one ever looks in,’ she said. ‘Not girls and not teachers. It’s like being in the middle of nowhere.’

The door opens and she walks in. ‘Late breakfast,’ she says. ‘Actually, it can double as late lunch.’ She’s wearing a grey T-shirt with blue paisley pyjama bottoms and carrying a large blue cloth-bound hardback book. Horizontally, in both hands. Balanced on top is a teapot trailing a green label on a piece of string, a cup, and a sandwich overhanging the edges of a saucer that’s too small for it. ‘I’m hoping it’s not every day someone brings you peppermint tea and a Marmite sandwich on a tray. Well, a book,’ she corrects herself. In the pocket of her pyjama bottoms I can see the outline of her cigarette packet.

Something has changed. I’m not scared of her any more.

Pieces of last night start to come back to me: Mary’s insistence that she couldn’t tell me; she had to show me. She didn’t want to talk while she drove, so we listened to the radio for a while. Then she put a CD on; the ‘Survivor’ song started to play. ‘Martha was playing this when she hanged herself,’ Mary said matter-of-factly. ‘Odd choice, don’t you think? If you’re going to commit suicide, why play a song that’s all about coping without somebody, growing wiser and smarter and stronger?’

‘Maybe…’ That was as much as I could say. I didn’t feel comfortable speculating.

‘Irony, do you think? I don’t think so. Arrogance: that’s what I think it was.’

I asked her what she meant, but she frowned and shook her head. ‘Not tonight,’ she said. ‘Not if you want me to get us there intact.’ Then she took her mobile phone out of the glove compartment, saying she had to ring Villiers. She asked for someone called Claire. I listened as she ordered her to contact the local police, to meet us and them at Garstead Cottage in two hours’ time.

‘Why the police?’ I asked.

‘It’s my routine,’ said Mary, turning up the volume on the stereo so that I couldn’t say anything else.

As we pulled in through the school’s large sculpted iron gates, the police car was ahead of us. Claire Draisey, who turned out to be Villiers’ Director of Boarding, was waiting for us next to the side door of Garstead Cottage, taking shelter from the drizzle in a partially covered wooden outbuilding that was attached to the house. In it were two old bicycles, a watering can and a large cardboard cut-out of a cow in profile, a cow wearing a yellow earring. I didn’t register the oddness of this until later; at the time, it seemed one of the less odd aspects of the situation.

Claire Draisey’s manner was brisk, impatient. ‘This has to be the last time, Mary,’ she said. She was wearing a red dressing-gown and slippers, and looked exhausted. I’d warned Mary that everyone at the school might be asleep, but she’d dismissed my concern. ‘They get woken up all the time,’ she said. ‘It’s a boarding school-goes with the territory. The staff who are soft enough to need to rest don’t live on site. In exchange for their beauty sleep, they’re frowned upon and overlooked for promotion. ’

Strangest of all was what Claire Draisey didn’t say: she didn’t ask Mary what or who she was worried about, why she wanted the police to check the house. The policeman who was there didn’t ask either. He and Draisey had a familiar manner around one another, as though they’d done this many times before. He checked that all the doors and windows were secure. He and Mary went into the cottage together and checked for intruders. Mary asked him if he’d wait outside in his car until it was light, but Claire Draisey said, ‘Don’t be silly, Mary. Of course he can’t.’

‘This time there’s been an actual threat,’ Mary told her. ‘It’s not only myself I’m worried about.’ She indicated me. It made me feel flustered. So does the breakfast and tea on a tray. I don’t want to like Mary, not after what she did to me at Saul’s gallery. If she can attack me and still be a good person, what does that say about me?

What does it say about Stephen Elton and Gemma Crowther?

‘I can say their names,’ I tell her as she puts the sandwich into my hands. ‘The people who lived at Cherub Cottage. I’ve called them Him and Her for years. I couldn’t write their names when I wrote you the letter. But now that you know the story, I can say them. He was called Stephen Elton. She was called Gemma Crowther.’

‘Was?’

‘Is.’

Mary nods. ‘I know.’

‘What?’ The air around me thins out. I feel dizzy, as if I’ve been deprived of oxygen.

‘There’s a lot I need to tell you.’

‘You can’t know their names. It’s not possible.’

‘You’d better sit down,’ she says, bending to pick something up. The sandwich. I didn’t realise I’d dropped it. I stay on my feet.

‘After that day at Saul Hansard’s gallery, when you tried to force me to sell you my painting, I was scared. You were too keen. I didn’t trust you. I thought you-’ She breaks off, tuts at her inability to say what needs to be said. ‘I convinced myself that you meant me harm. I… I had to know who you were, who’d put you up to it. As far as I could see, it could only be one person.’

‘Aidan?’ I guess.

‘Aidan.’

‘But…’

‘It won’t make any sense to you, not yet. Not until I show you what he did to me.’ Mary sits down on the bed, pulls her cigarettes and lighter out of her pocket. ‘I told Saul I wanted to write to you and apologise. He wouldn’t give me your address, but he told me your name, said I could write to you care of the gallery. I was sorry, or rather, I was prepared to be, if it turned out…’

‘What?’ I say.

‘I had to know why you wanted that picture so much. It was unnatural, the way you latched on to it, as if you had to have it. Have you heard of First Call?’

‘No.’

Mary lights a cigarette, inhales. ‘They’re a firm of private investigators in Rawndesley. Someone I used to know works there. I paid him to find out about you. Your background, everything-as much as there was to know about you, I wanted to know it.’

‘The man with the red bobble hat and the dog.’

‘You saw him?’

‘He kept walking past my house. Looking in at the windows.’

‘You were suspicious of him even with the hat and the dog?’ She almost smiles. ‘I’ll have to tell him he’s wrong. He thinks they make him look innocuous. He’s a bit of a clown, but he got the job done, gave me the information I wanted. From him, I found out about your religious background, your award-winning garden design business.’ She pauses, as if reluctant to state the obvious. ‘And what happened to you in April 2000. Gemma Crowther and Stephen Elton, the court case.’

My skin feels as if tiny bugs are crawling over every inch of it. A stranger watching me, reporting back to Mary…

‘I’ve hired him before, successfully. I knew he could dredge up anything of interest. First Call mainly work for insurance and credit card companies, on fraud cases, but they’ve got one or two people who specialise in what they call “matters that require complete discretion”. He’s one of them.’

She shrugs. ‘What can I say? I’m sorry. He followed you for a few weeks-weeks during which, by all accounts, you hardly left the house. When he told me that, I felt terrible. It was never my intention to drive you out of your job and turn you into a recluse. There was no way I could have known what had happened to you in Lincoln.’ Mary bites her lip. ‘I’m sure my impassioned self-justification speech is the last thing you want to hear. Anyway… I had him keep an eye on you long enough to satisfy me that you had no connection, past or present, to Aidan Seed, and then I called him off.’

‘I saw him on Sunday. And Monday,’ I tell her.

Her expression hardens. ‘When a cop turned up on Friday asking about Aidan, I panicked. I’d thought things were stable; clearly they weren’t. I needed to know what had changed. And then Charlie Zailer came round on Monday morning to tell me you were Aidan’s girlfriend. About fifteen minutes after she left my house, I got a call from First Call telling me the same thing.’

‘I didn’t know Aidan last June,’ I say, aware I’m not the one in need of a defence. ‘I met him later, in August. I needed a job, and Saul told me Aidan needed an assistant.’

‘How perfectly ironic,’ says Mary. ‘It was my fault you met him. One more thing to feel bad about.’

I want to tell her that meeting Aidan’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, but I can’t say it and mean it, not without knowing what he’s done. Not unconditionally.

‘Did you know Aidan used to work for Saul, before he set up on his own?’ Mary asks.

I shake my head.

‘That’s another reason I thought he had to be pulling your strings-the Saul connection. It seemed too much of a coincidence. ’ Anguish flares in her eyes. ‘I thought you wanted the painting so that you could give it to him.’

I look away. I’m not brave enough to tell her that was exactly what happened, only later. Not in June last year, but after Christmas, when I went to Megson Crescent for that very reason: to get Abberton because Aidan wanted it. Needed it.

Mary sucks hard on her cigarette. ‘When I told Saul I’d been thrown by how pushy you were, he said you were always like that about pictures you fell in love with. That’s how you met him, right? He told me the story: you wanted a painting that was in his window and told him you’d pay any price for it, however high. I realised then that you weren’t trying to work me-you really did fall in love with Abberton.’

‘Yesterday, at your house, I found another canvas. It was unfinished, but it looked a bit like Abberton. There was a different name on the back: Blandford.’

‘What about it?’ Mary flicks ash on the carpet, rubs it in with her bare foot.

‘Is it… are the two pictures part of a series?’

‘Why do you want to know? Yes, part of a series,’ she says quickly. ‘Why?’

‘A series of how many?’

She lifts her chin: a defensive stance, designed to keep me at a distance. ‘I don’t know yet. I’ll see how far I get before I run out of steam.’

I’ve got no choice, not if I want to find out the truth. ‘Nine,’ I say. ‘Abberton, Blandford, Darville, Elstow, Goundry, Heathcote, Margerison, Rodwell, Winduss.’

Mary cries out, as if I’ve stuck a needle in her heart. Her body folds in on itself.

‘What is it, Mary? Why do those names frighten you?’

‘He told you, didn’t he?’

‘Told me what? Who are they?’

Her eyes glaze over. ‘I don’t know who they were,’ she whispers. ‘They never told us. Isn’t that funny?’

‘Were?’ The word falls through my brain in slow motion. ‘They’re dead?’

She makes an effort to pull herself together. ‘Gemma Crowther’s dead,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘Did you know she was out of prison?’

I didn’t want to know. I asked not to be told. I wrote that in my letter…

‘Ruth?’

‘No. No.’

In some parts of the world, they stone you to death for fucking another woman’s man.

Dead. Did Mary say that Gemma Crowther was dead?

‘I didn’t want to tell you like this.’ Her words come out jerkily. ‘When you came round yesterday, you were in such a state-I couldn’t tell you then. You were ranting about Aidan hiding in my house. You wouldn’t have listened. I’d spent most of the day with a detective from London. He’d just left when you arrived. Gemma Crowther was murdered, she was shot. Twice-in the head and in the heart.’

Gemma Crowther, murdered. Yes; it makes sense. People who behave as she did might well end up getting murdered. In the head and in the heart.

I’m trying to get a grip on what I’ve heard when Mary says, ‘If you still think it’s the truth you want, ask me who killed her.’