The Other Half Lives

6

Simon was on the phone to Sam Kombothekra when he saw Aidan Seed’s car turn the corner from Demesne Avenue on to the Rawndesley Road. Seed was driving it, and he seemed to be alone. ‘Gotta go,’ Simon said curtly, tossing his mobile on to the passenger seat. He hadn’t been sure if Seed would make his trip on foot or in the dusty black Volvo estate that had been parked at a forty-five degree angle to the side of the workshop.

‘You’re not planning to wait, are you?’ Charlie had said. ‘He’s going nowhere. He lied to get rid of us.’

‘We’ll see,’ said Simon. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘You’ll see,’ she’d corrected him. ‘I’ve got to get back to my enthralling questionnaire. Give me a ring if something happens.’

Simon was pleased Seed had opted to drive wherever he was going. It was easier to follow a person in a car. Behind the wheel, encased in his own private space, Seed would be less likely to look at anything but the road ahead.

As he followed the Volvo along the Rawndesley Road, Simon thought about the lies he’d told Kombothekra, and felt something he didn’t often feel: proud of himself. His story had been a medley of all the things the sergeant wanted to hear: two hundred and seventy-six addresses divided into handy regional groups, a travel schedule, a brand new road atlas courtesy of the Snowman. Not a word of it true. Simon had thrown Proust’s tenner in the bin-perhaps his job along with it, but at the moment he didn’t care.

Seed drove at fifty miles an hour along the High Street, where the limit was thirty. It wasn’t long before Simon was having to do eighty on the dual carriageway to keep up with him. Why was he in such a hurry? Was his trip-news of which had evidently come as a surprise to Ruth Bussey-connected to Simon and Charlie having dropped in unexpectedly? Wherever he was going, it wasn’t Megson Crescent; that was in the opposite direction. Rawndesley, perhaps.

In the absence of Proust, and the need to defend his gut feelings, Simon was scornful of what the voice in his head was telling him. Where did it come from, this conviction that if he didn’t act quickly something terrible would happen? The sense that Seed, Bussey and Mary Trelease were teetering on the edge of something horrendous, something only he could stop? Arrogant wanker, Charlie would have called him.

At the Ruffers Well roundabout, Seed didn’t go straight over and on towards Rawndesley as Simon had expected him to. He took a right. Simon allowed a car to get in between them, then followed. Could Seed be heading for the A1? North or south? North, he guessed.

South, it turned out. So much for gut feelings. As he followed Seed past exit after exit, it started to seem more and more likely to him that Seed was on his way to London. ‘Shit,’ Simon muttered under his breath. He was a good driver in every other town, city, village-in every other part of the country-apart from the capital. London was different; other drivers played by strange rules, if any. Simon had been involved in two car crashes since he’d passed his test at the age of seventeen; both had been in central London. Both times he’d been in pursuit of a suspect and both times he’d pranged his car and lost them. Something about London made him lose his cool. Not today, he told himself. He wouldn’t lose Aidan Seed.

Less than an hour and a half later, he was seeing signs that said, ‘Highgate Wood’ and ‘West End’. It was five o’clock and starting to get dark. Great. Central London at rush hour. From a traffic point of view, it couldn’t have been worse. So resigned was Simon to his fate that he didn’t notice when Seed took a left turn ahead of him. He sped on past, then had to turn round. Seed had gone down a side street off Muswell Hill Road-something beginning with an ‘R’. Simon drove back past the entrance to Highgate Wood. Ruskington Road-that must have been it. He turned right. He’d got halfway down the road when he saw Seed walking towards him. He prepared to be seen-for the inevitable confrontation-but Seed didn’t notice him. He had his head down. Once he’d passed Simon’s car, Simon pulled in and watched Seed in his rear-view mirror. At the bottom of the street, Seed turned left.

Why had he chosen Ruskington Road? Simon wondered. Olivia, Charlie’s sister, used to live round here. She moved after her downstairs neighbour-and, by extension, the house they shared-appeared on a tacky daytime property programme. Simon could see Seed’s car parked a few metres ahead on the other side of the road, in front of number 23, a white-painted four-storey terrace that was divided into flats. Simon saw a light glowing behind the curtains in the basement window and another in the highest dormer window.

Did Seed know someone who lived in one of the flats? Or nearby?

Simon got out of his car, locked it and ran towards Muswell Hill Road. He was afraid he’d be too late, but when he turned the corner, he saw Seed’s broad-shouldered outline walking down the hill some distance ahead. Simon ran to catch him up. It didn’t take long, and Simon didn’t allow himself to get too close. As Seed passed each lamppost, the shoulder-patches of his black jacket shone under the artificial light. Simon patted his pockets. He’d forgotten his phone, left it on the passenger seat. Damn. Charlie would try and call him within the next half hour, he reckoned. He’d started to be able to anticipate when she was going to ring. He liked that: knowing what she was going to do.

Seed veered off the main road and down a footpath, also downhill. He wasn’t the only one. Most of the twenty-odd people between him and Simon went in that direction as well. It turned out to be a shortcut to Highgate tube station.

Seed went to stand at the back of the ticket queue. Simon ducked behind a van that was selling coffee, milkshakes and fruit juices. Once Seed had passed through the barrier, Simon flashed his badge at the fluorescent-jacketed woman standing behind the gate and said, ‘CID. Quickly.’ She let him through, eyes wide. Probably worried about bombs on the tube, Simon thought, but he didn’t have time to stop and reassure her.

There was only the Northern line, direction north or south. It had to be south, Simon thought, otherwise Seed would have driven all the way to his eventual destination. It was presumably as easy to park in High Barnet or Finchley as it was in the Highgate/Muswell Hill area. Simon couldn’t see Seed any more, so he had to hope he’d guessed right. Instead of going to stand on the southbound platform, he hung back, waiting for a train to come. When he heard one pulling in, he moved forward and walked briskly up the platform.

He spotted Seed in a huddle of people by one of the sets of doors. He knew the risk he was taking: Seed could turn round and see him at any moment, but so what? There was no law against going to London. Seed didn’t have to tell Simon what he was doing there and vice versa.

Each time the train stopped, Simon leaned out to see who got off. Seed didn’t alight at Archway, Tufnell Park or Kentish Town, as far as Simon could tell, though the mass of moving bodies was such that he couldn’t be sure. Camden Town: no. Mornington Crescent: no. Leicester Square, Simon guessed. People who came into London for the evening usually headed to the West End. What did Proust think, that Simon was some kind of bumpkin who started to hyperventilate if he went any further than the ‘Welcome to Spilling’ sign outside the Queen’s Hall? Fucking wanker.

Simon had to move fast when he stuck his head out at Euston and saw Seed walking along the platform, following the ‘Way Out’ signs. He jumped off the train and went after him. Euston, he thought. What was at Euston? He swore at himself, impatient with guessing and being wrong.

He followed Seed up the escalator to Euston station proper. The place was heaving. In the middle of the concourse, an un-moving crowd of hundreds stood and stared up at the boards overhead. Around this still mass, another several hundred bodies swirled-those who already knew where to find their trains, those dashing in and out of shops. Simon kept his eyes fixed on the shiny shoulder patches of Seed’s jacket and made sure to stay out of his line of sight.

Seed went into WHSmith and bought something. From his vantage point, Simon saw that it was a newspaper, but not which one. Where next? Across the station concourse. Seed walked fast, like a man who knew exactly where he was going. He wasn’t ambling, drifting in and out of shops aimlessly like some of the people Simon could see. He had a purpose. He’s done this before. But done what? Simon wasn’t sure.

He watched as Seed went into the station’s food court and approached one of the counters. After a brief exchange with a woman wearing a red uniform and a red cap, Seed went to the till to pay-for nothing, apparently-then sat down at a small table that was unoccupied, his back towards Simon. He opened his newspaper. Simon moved closer and saw that it was the Independent. About five minutes later, the woman in the red uniform brought a plate of food to Seed’s table.

Simon wished he’d remembered to pick up his phone. He could have phoned Charlie. And said what? That Aidan Seed had come to Euston station for his tea? She’d have pissed herself laughing.

Seed had to be going on somewhere. No one came all the way from Spilling to London to have their dinner in a train station food court. Yeah, Charlie would say, just like no one confesses to murdering women who aren’t dead.

Simon was freezing, having left his coat in the car, and getting hungrier by the second. He groaned when Seed got up to buy more food. Two doughnuts and a coffee. Greedy bastard. Seed sat down again. He seemed in no hurry at all.

Finally, at twenty-five past six, he stood and stretched. He left the food court without picking up his newspaper and made for the station exit. Simon followed him out on to the Euston Road, to a crossing. He hung back, but there was no need. There were so many people pushing along the pavement in both directions that Seed would have had a job spotting him even if he’d been looking.

Simon crossed the road and kept his eye on the shiny black shoulder patches ahead. A woman coming in the opposite direction banged his arm with hers. Simon mumbled, ‘Sorry,’ but the woman said nothing, though their collision had been her fault. He couldn’t believe how rude some people were. Aware that his mind had drifted, he pushed the thought away.

The black jacket was gone. How could Seed have disappeared so quickly? The pavement was busy but not that busy. It wasn’t possible that Simon had lost him in the split second he’d spent thinking about that sodding woman.

Two people walking ahead, a man and a woman, turned right and went round the side of a wide building with large windows symmetrically spaced across its faμade. Simon looked because it was the only other option. If Seed wasn’t ahead, behind or across the road…

There he was, going in through a side door at the top of a concrete ramp. He stopped when he saw the man and woman approach, said hello to them, but it wasn’t the sort of greeting that would pass between friends, Simon thought. They knew each other, but not well.

Once they’d gone inside, Simon approached the door and saw that it had been wedged open. He peered into a wide, empty foyer containing a reception desk with a cash till at one end. Beyond the foyer was a corridor leading to another door. Closed. There was a poster on it that Simon couldn’t read, and a table to the left, covered with leaflets, books and pastel-coloured pamphlets.

Three elderly men with long, straggly hair and matted beards passed him on their way in, leaving in their wake a smell of stale sweat infused with alcohol. Homeless, Simon guessed. Once they’d gone into the room, he moved. The poster on the door at the far end of the corridor was headed ‘Quaker Quest’. Immediately, Simon thought of his two miserable experiences of Laser Quest in the early 1990s-birthday parties he’d been unable to avoid, friends from university who strove to be wacky. He pictured the three ageing tramps he’d just seen running around a darkened room, brandishing glowing swords.

‘A spiritual path for our time,’ the poster said. ‘Monday evenings, Friends House, Euston, 6.30 p.m. All welcome.’ At the bottom there was a website address: www.quakerquest.org. Simon picked up a leaflet from the table, a mini-version of the poster, but with more text. ‘Are you looking for a spiritual path that is simple, radical, contemporary? The Quaker experience could speak to you. We offer a series of six informal open evenings, exploring such issues as equality, peace, God, spiritual practice and faith in action. We will share our individual and common insights through presentations, discussions, questions and an experience of Quaker worship.’

Simon skimmed the titles of the books: A Light That Is Shining, The Amazing Fact of Quaker Worship, God Is Silence. He glanced at the closed door. It sounded as if there were twenty, perhaps thirty people chatting inside. Every so often, Simon caught a whiff of egg. Were there sandwiches? Was that why the three homeless men were there-free food?

Simon picked up a pamphlet called Advices and Queries: the Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain. The booklet contained paragraphs of spiritual wisdom, numbered one to forty-two. Beneath the forty-second, there was a quote from someone called George Fox, dated 1656, about being a good example to others and walking cheerfully with God. Simon flicked through the pages, reading some of the shorter passages. Number eleven made him angry: ‘Be honest with yourself. What unpalatable truths might you be evading? When you recognise your shortcomings, do not let that discourage you. In worship together we can find the assurance of God’s love and the strength to go on with renewed courage.’

When you recognise your shortcomings, do not let that discourage you? Not a word about addressing those shortcomings, trying to stamp them out or replace them with more noble character traits. For the first time in his adult life, Simon felt nostalgic for the Catholicism of his youth.

He stood motionless in the corridor and listened as the clash of voices subsided and a woman started to speak. The predictable welcome, the timetable for the evening-Simon could hear most of it clearly enough. He frowned when he heard her mention Frank Zappa, assumed he’d misheard. No, there was the name again: she was asking if everyone had heard of Frank Zappa. Bizarre. No one said they hadn’t, as far as Simon could make out, but the woman told them who he was nonetheless. ‘Mr Zappa is reported to have once said, “If you want God, go direct”,’ she told her audience. A few people laughed.

A man’s voice took over, saying, ‘We Friends agree with Mr Zappa. God doesn’t need the help of a man in a silk suit asking you for money. Quakerism is an experience-based faith-we only trust what we’ve experienced ourselves. Quakers have an unmediated relationship with God-in other words, we go direct. There’s no holy book, no churches or clergymen, no official creed, and we don’t always use the same words. We define our experience of this immense “something other” in different ways. “The Divine” is one, “God” is another, “the light”…’

‘You can go in, you know.’ Simon turned, found a security guard standing behind him, an elderly man with a concave chest. ‘People turn up late all the time.’

‘I’m all right out here.’

‘Suit yourself. They won’t bite.’ The man started to walk away.

‘Is there anything else going on here tonight?’ Simon called after him. ‘In the building, I mean.’

‘No. Just Quaker Quest.’

Simon thanked him. No doubt, then: Aidan Seed was inside that room-a man who’d looked Simon in the eye and sworn he believed only in the material world, facts and science.

Checking the security guard wasn’t watching him, Simon turned the door handle, opened the door a fraction. Now there was a gap between it and the frame that was wide enough to see through. He saw chairs in semi-circular rows, people’s backs-some straight, some hunched. There was Seed, in the middle of the front row. Simon couldn’t see his face.

Beyond the chairs, the top half of the woman who had mentioned Frank Zappa was visible. She was talking now about something called ‘giving ministry’. She was young, younger than Simon, with a pretty, doll-like face, which surprised him. He frowned. Had he been expecting everyone at Quaker Quest to be pig-ugly? Her hair was dark brown and glossy, centre-parted and tied back from her face. Like Olive Oyl from the Popeye cartoons, only more attractive. She wore a blue sweatshirt and a rectangular blue plastic badge on a string round her neck, with a large white ‘Q’ on it.

The other speaker, the man, wore the same uniform. He was bald, overweight and sweaty. When the woman stopped talking, he took over, defining what worship meant to him. ‘It’s in every sense the spring, the ground,’ he said. ‘It’s what sends me out into the world.’ Having delivered his lines, he stood back, smiling.

‘When all the still centres of all the people present meet in the middle, we call that a “gathered meeting”,’ said Olive Oyl. ‘When a meeting gathers, that’s our opportunity to get to know one another in the things that are eternal. Actually…’ She paused and giggled, as if she’d just remembered a rude joke. Simon imagined the sort of comments Colin Sellers would be making if he were here. I’d like to meet you in the middle, darling. Etcetera.

‘To go back to the subject of ministry for a second, I had a funny experience that I’ll share with you, even though it’s a bit embarrassing,’ said the woman. ‘Sometimes, in the silence and the stillness, you start to get what seem like little messages. Some are for you to share with the meeting, others are for you alone. Over time, you learn to distinguish one kind from the other. Sometimes you get a message that seems to be teasing you.’

The tittering that followed this remark had a knowingness about it; evidently there were people in the room who knew all about receiving teasing messages from-what had the sweaty bloke called it? The Immense Something Other. Wankers, thought Simon before he could help it. He resolved to be more accepting and tolerant, the minute he’d got the hell away from Friends House.

‘One day when I went to meeting, I was feeling a bit hot and bothered. I’d had a silly row with my boyfriend that morning,’ Olive Oyl continued. ‘I’d caught him rinsing some cutlery and putting it back in the drawer, still wet. When he told me there was no point drying it, that it would dry on its own in the drawer, I went ballistic. Anyway, at meeting later that morning, I started to hear this voice in my head. It kept saying, “Cutlery is not eternal.” ’ She laughed, and her audience laughed with her. ‘I knew that message wasn’t to be shared-it was a private joke, just for me. And I was so grateful for that. It’s no accident that gratefulness and “great fullness” sound the same.’

The radiant expression on her face made Simon want to gag, as did her contrived avoidance of the word ‘gratitude’. He’d have liked to tell her what he thought she was greatly full of. Applause broke out. Simon had seen and heard enough. He was about to stand back when he saw Aidan Seed turn in his chair. He wasn’t clapping with the rest of them. He was the only person Simon could see who wasn’t.

Seed looked sickened. Even from a distance, in profile, through a crack between a door and its frame, his disgust was unmistakeable. ‘You’re not one of them,’ Simon muttered under his breath. ‘You’re never going to be one of them. So what are you doing here?’ He wasn’t expecting an answer, neither from Seed, who couldn’t hear him, nor from a supreme being eager to communicate with him confidentially, so he wasn’t surprised when he didn’t get one.

He went outside, hailed the first free cab he saw and told the driver to take him back to Muswell Hill. To Ruskington Road.

Charlie watched as the door to Seed Art Services opened with a slow creak. A few seconds later, Ruth Bussey burst out of the dark interior as if someone had shoved her from behind. She was wearing flip-flops on her feet. No socks or tights tonight either, Charlie noticed, and still limping. Charlie wondered again why anyone who hadn’t sprained their ankle would pretend they had.

She hurried over, wanting to catch Ruth before she got to her car, not caring if it was obvious that she was coming from the trees by the river, where she had no reason to be unless she’d been spying on the workshop. ‘Ruth!’

Ruth turned with a cry, then fell back against her Passat, pressing her hand against her chest.

‘I’ve been knocking and knocking,’ Charlie told her. ‘Since five thirty. But you know that, don’t you? You were in there all the time. Sitting in the pitch black with the door locked.’

‘I was thinking,’ said Ruth. Her voice lost itself in the biting wind that blew strands of hair in her face. ‘Trying to decide what to do.’

‘And did you?’

‘Yes.’ From her puffy eyelids and the chapped skin between her nose and upper lip, it was clear that crying had played a significant part in the decision-making process. ‘I wasn’t completely honest with you before, and it got me nowhere. I thought you’d laugh me out of the police station if I told you the full story.’

‘Where’s Aidan?’ Charlie asked curtly. What did the silly cow expect-a card saying, ‘Congratulations, you’ve stopped lying’?

‘I don’t know. I don’t know when he’ll be back. I don’t know much, but I’m willing to tell you what I do know, if you’ll help me. You’ve got to.’ Ruth grabbed Charlie’s arm. ‘He said he was going to kill her.’

‘What?’ A remark like that couldn’t be ignored, even if it came from the least trustworthy person on the planet, which Ruth Bussey might very well be, Charlie thought. ‘Who said he was going to kill who?’

‘Aidan. Mary. He called her “that bitch”. He’s not in Manchester-I rang Jeanette at the City Art Gallery. He wasn’t there last weekend…’

‘Slow down. You’re not making sense.’

Ruth shivered convulsively in her crumpled white shirt. Charlie had her coat in the boot of her Audi. ‘Leave your car,’ she said. ‘I’ll drive you home and we can talk there.’ She would get inside that bloody lodge house one way or another. She’d been irritated all day by the thought of Malcolm Goat-man Fenton trying to keep her out.

‘A man’s been following me,’ said Ruth, as they walked down Demesne Avenue to Charlie’s car. ‘No, that’s wrong. Not following-he doesn’t stalk me when I go out or anything, but he walks past my house. With a black Labrador.’ Having started to talk, she seemed unable to stop-the words flowed out, devoid of tone, as if all she wanted was to get it over with. ‘I first noticed him last June. He was there every day for a while. Then he disappeared, for months. I thought he’d stopped but… he came back on Sunday, yesterday. I can show you-I’ve got him on tape. I saw him this morning too. Aidan says he’s just walking his dog in the park. He gets impatient when I mention it, calls me paranoid, but he’s never seen him, the way he looks at the house.’

Charlie had stopped. In order not to miss anything, she’d had to hang back. Ruth was barely moving and had stopped shivering. She no longer seemed aware of the cold. ‘Has he ever threatened you? Approached you, or the house?’

‘No.’

‘Isn’t it normal for people walking in the park to look at your house? It’s an unusual building. I’ve looked at it in the past and wondered who lived there.’

‘You sound like Aidan. He says everyone who walks in or out through the gates looks at the lodge on their way past. He’s right-nearly all of them do. But this man looks in a different way.’

Aidan Seed, the voice of reason, thought Charlie. Apart from the small matter of his belief that he murdered a living woman.

‘He wears a red woolly hat, the man, with a bobble on the top. Even in summer. That’s not normal.’

‘I’m not sure normal exists,’ said Charlie. Certainly not in your vicinity, she might have added.

Ruth stared into the distance, eyes wide. ‘He wears it because it looks stupid, comical. No one who wears a hat like that could be dangerous-that’s what he wants me to think.’

‘Ruth, how cold is it today? And you’re wearing flip-flops, no socks or tights, nothing. There you go: proof that a person can be inappropriately dressed and not stalking anyone!’ Charlie wasn’t angry, as she must have sounded, but a certain amount of force was necessary to stamp out irrationality. Was Ruth insane? Was Aidan Seed? If only the answer in both cases was ‘yes’, that would explain everything.

Apart from Mary Trelease’s behaviour. ‘Not me,’ she’d said, when Charlie had told her about Aidan’s claim that he’d killed her. Naturally, Charlie had asked her if she was implying Aidan had murdered someone else. Mary had denied it-‘I simply meant that I’m patently not dead’-but Charlie hadn’t felt good about it at all. The look on Mary’s face…

This man looks in a different way.

Charlie would have been lying if she’d told Ruth that a look in isolation could never be sufficient grounds for suspicion, though she doubted the man with the red bobble hat was anything to worry about.

‘I never wear socks,’ said Ruth. ‘My parents used to make me wear them every day, and a vest. They were obsessed with stopping heat escaping from their bodies. Our house was like a furnace, heating and gas fires on all year round.’ Her teeth started to chatter.

Charlie had to press the key-fob four times before her car’s lights flashed twice: unlocked. The battery was losing its power. She’d been meaning to buy a spare and put it in the glove compartment, but hadn’t got round to it. She opened the boot and handed Ruth her coat. ‘Maybe your man’s parents wouldn’t let him wear woolly hats, even in hailstorms,’ she said. Ruth didn’t smile.

Once they were in the car and driving, Charlie said, ‘Are you going to tell me why you had that piece about me from the paper in your coat pocket?’

‘You went through my pockets. I thought you would.’ Ruth seemed to shrink in her seat. ‘I’m sorry about… what happened to you. It must have been awful for you. You looked devastated in the photograph.’

‘We’re not going to talk about me,’ said Charlie firmly.

‘That’s why I waited for you on Friday. I was in such a state, I couldn’t have spoken to anyone else. After what you’d been through, I thought you’d be understanding.’

‘Sorry if I disappointed you.’ Charlie thought about the sequence of events: the article was printed in 2006, as were several hundred others, in every newspaper in the country, each gleefully raking over the minute details of the incident that, at the time, to Charlie, had felt like the end of her life. Aidan Seed told Ruth he’d killed Mary Trelease in December 2007. Did Ruth expect Charlie to believe she’d cut the piece out of the Rawndesley and Spilling Telegraph more than a year before she had any cause to go to the police, and kept it just in case, at some point in the future, she had need of a sensitive police officer? Charlie couldn’t ask, not without letting Ruth see how upset she was. She felt an urgent need to turn the conversation away from herself, even if that meant not knowing. She said gruffly, ‘I’m understanding about things I understand. Sorry to be the bearer of “challenging feedback”, as we say in the police service these days, but your and Aidan’s behaviour so far has made zero sense. It might even be into minus figures, on the Richter scale of unintelligibility.’

Ruth twisted her hands in her lap. She said nothing. They drove through the town centre. Elaborate Easter egg displays crowded shop windows along the High Street.

‘Has the story changed?’ Charlie asked. ‘What did you mean before-Aidan said he was going to kill Mary Trelease? I thought his angle was that he’d killed her already?’

‘It wasn’t a threat,’ said Ruth. ‘He asked if I thought it was possible to see the future. When I told him I was sure it wasn’t, he said it was the only explanation-everyone’s telling him Mary’s still alive, but his memory of killing her’s so vivid. If it’s not a memory, it must be a…’

‘A premonition?’ said Charlie wearily. ‘You’re not going to like this suggestion, but could Aidan be talking all this spooky crap to scare you? To drive you away? Premonitions, murders that never happened…’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’m not sure he could fake the fear I saw. He was scared of what he might do. He told me to go to Mary’s house and persuade her to run away, somewhere he wouldn’t find her.’ Charlie felt Ruth’s eyes on her. Waiting, hoping, for an explanation Charlie was unable to provide. Unless Ruth, not Aidan, was the one faking the fear. ‘At least it means he can’t be there with her.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I used to think you were right. Every time Aidan stayed away overnight, I wondered if he was with her, if the two of them were plotting to drive me mad, or something. I knew where she lived. I could have gone round, but I never did. I was too scared of finding Aidan there. He wouldn’t tell me to go to her house, would he, if that’s where he was going?’

Charlie closed her eyes, then opened them, remembering she was driving. How hard would it be to get some uniforms camped outside 15 Megson Crescent? Even if she succeeded, that level of protection would need to be justified on an hour-by-hour basis. Charlie reckoned she’d be granted a day, maximum. She wasn’t sure it was worth the hassle. What if Aidan Seed chose the next day to make good his promise, prediction, whatever?

Beside her, Ruth was crying. ‘I’m still scared,’ she said. ‘Scared something’s going to happen but I don’t know what. It’s nothing concrete-it’s not that I’m scared Aidan really has killed someone, or that he will, or that he’ll go to prison. I could live with those things.’

‘You’re telling me what you’re not scared of,’ Charlie pointed out. ‘What would be helpful is if I knew what you are scared of.’

Ruth picked at the skin around her fingernails. ‘Something so bad I’m not capable of imagining it. Not death. There are plenty of worse things.’

Charlie thought ‘plenty’ was an overstatement.

‘All I know is, there’s a danger and it’s… it’s closing in.’

‘Listen to me, Ruth. Don’t go to Mary’s. Is there anywhere you could go that’s…?’

‘Aidan told me something else, when he was talking about having visions of things that hadn’t happened yet. The picture Mary gave me, the one he said he gave to a charity shop-it’s called Abberton. That’s its title. Aidan said it was the first in a series. There were going to be nine, he said, but Mary hadn’t done them yet. He told me the names of the others: Blandford, Darville, Elstow, Goundry, Heathcote, Margerison, Rodwell, Winduss. He said it to prove to me that he was seeing the future. ’

Charlie had no idea how to respond to this. Hearing Ruth say the names like that-an alphabetical list-had made her feel uneasy. Eight titles of paintings yet to be painted? What could it mean? It complicated things, took them beyond the level of a simple threat: Tell her I’m going to kill her.

‘The man you’re engaged to,’ said Ruth. ‘Do you love him unconditionally? Would you forgive him no matter what he did?’

Charlie felt hounded. Why was everybody so keen to interrogate her about Simon today? First Mary, now Ruth.

‘I love Aidan so much, you’ve got no idea. If that love died, I’d have nothing. But that doesn’t mean it’s unconditional.’ Ruth turned to Charlie, breathing hard in her face. ‘When he told me he’d killed Mary, I… I didn’t react well.’

‘Who would?’ said Charlie. Unconditional? Yes. Forgive him? Not a chance, not for any misdemeanour, however small. ‘Loving someone doesn’t have to mean letting them off the hook,’ she said, pleased with her compromise position.

‘Yes, it does,’ Ruth said vehemently. ‘It does, and I don’t think I can do it. I’m scared of the truth, but without it I’ll only torment myself imagining the worst. What if I find out something so terrible it kills my love for Aidan? If that happens, I’ll know for sure that I’m not worth anything, that there’s not enough love in me to forgive or heal anyone. It’ll all be over-everything.’

Charlie almost smiled. If she hung around with this woman for much longer, she might start to think of herself as an irrepressible optimist by comparison.

Ruth closed her eyes, rubbed the back of her neck. ‘You asked me,’ she said in a voice that was barely audible. ‘That’s it. That’s what I’m frightened of.’

Blantyre Lodge’s lounge wasn’t small, but it looked it, overloaded as it was. While Ruth made tea in the kitchen, Charlie started to make an inventory. She wondered how big Ruth’s house in Lincoln had been, if it had housed all this comfortably: books, lamps, mirrors, candles, gardening magazines, six small Persian rugs, more exotic-looking plants than you’d expect to find in a botanical garden’s greenhouse. There was also an ironing board, stepladders, a clothes-drying rack. A small sofa had three throws draped over it and eight embroidered cushions piled on its seat. One was gold and had an image of two green shoes sewn on to it, with a cloth representation of a pink ankle protruding from each one. How peculiar, thought Charlie-the effort that must have gone into the embroidery, and the end result looked as if someone’s legs had been chopped off at the ankles.

Stuffed between a second sofa and the window was an old-fashioned dark wood desk with a computer on it, and, incongruously, a picnic bench of the sort one normally found in pub gardens, half unpainted wood and half dark green. For good measure, a bulky winged armchair had been crammed into the room as well. One whole wall was covered with wooden shelves that acted as a sort of display cabinet for pottery, carved stone figures, several different Russian doll sets, strange wooden blobs, heads of deer and lions and eagles made out of thin wire, some silver and some gold, an assortment of colourful plastic shapes, all of which were almost recognisable-as square, circle, triangle-but became more abstract at one end, as if they’d lost the will to be proper shapes and preferred not really being anything. There wasn’t a centimetre of space to spare, should Ruth Bussey decide she urgently needed to buy another metal model of a rabbit’s head. It was as if someone who had previously owned an eight-bedroom pile had downsized radically, without culling any of their possessions.

There were at least thirty paintings on the walls. Most of them were small, but one or two were huge, and ought, Charlie thought, to have been hanging over a marble fireplace in a ball-room. The largest picture was striking in its unpleasantness as well as its size. It had a rectangular gold-effect frame with four smaller rectangles protruding from it-one in each corner-and depicted a woman with long, dark hair wearing a white dress and a serene expression on her face. At the centre of the dress, there was a hole from which a distorted, grimacing face stared out, open-mouthed.

Charlie shuddered, turning her attention to a less disturbing picture of a large bull with a square body standing in front of a pink stone bell tower. Ruth came in carrying two cups of tea. Charlie would have preferred a double vodka. ‘That’s a ribbon-and-reed frame,’ said Ruth, seeing Charlie looking at the bull. ‘See the pattern on it? Aidan told me it’s based on the Roman symbol for government: reeds bound together by a ribbon. Individually weak but together strong. He said it was like him and me.’

‘Did Aidan buy you all these pictures?’ Charlie asked.

‘No. I bought them myself. Aidan framed them, though. Re-framed them, in some cases. He thinks most paintings aren’t framed as they should be.’ Ruth perched on the edge of one of the sofas.

Charlie didn’t want to sit. Ruth’s intensity was making her edgy, as was the thought that at some point she must ask again about the article. She sensed Ruth would tell her if pushed, and she dreaded the answer. The more she worried at it in her mind, the less likely it seemed that there was an entirely innocent, harmless reason why Ruth had had that article in her coat pocket. ‘Tell me about losing your job at the Spilling Gallery.’

‘Didn’t Mary tell you?’

‘Not really. She implied it was her fault.’

Ruth shook her head. ‘It was mine,’ she said unhappily. ‘If I’d…’ She stopped. ‘Do you ever wish you’d done almost everything differently?’

To someone else, Charlie might have said yes without missing a beat, but Ruth already had too much information about her. ‘Tell me the story,’ she said brusquely. ‘If you want my help, you’d better tell me everything you kept to yourself on Friday.’

Ruth lowered her eyes. For a second, Charlie thought she was going to refuse. Then she said, ‘Mary came in one day. To the gallery. I didn’t know her name at the time, and I didn’t find out that day. I didn’t find out until much later.’

‘Okay.’ It was a start.

‘She had a painting with her, one of her own, which she wanted Saul, my boss, to frame. It had ‘Abberton’ written on the back of it in capital letters. There was a… a sort of person in it, the shape of a person with no face. It was impossible to tell the sex. It was just an outline: a head, two arms…’

‘I’m familiar with the human anatomy,’ said Charlie. Obviously no penis protruding from the canvas, then, she thought.

‘I asked who Abberton was, and Mary refused to tell me. She… she got angry. I wanted to buy the picture and she didn’t want to sell it, and when I asked…’ Ruth put her mug down and covered her mouth with her hands. After a few seconds she said, ‘Sorry. When I asked if I could maybe buy another of her pictures, a different one, she said no.’

‘When was this?’ asked Charlie.

‘June last year. She attacked me, physically. I stormed out of the gallery and never went back. Then I changed jobs and-’

‘Hang on. You’ve seen Mary since, right? You’ve been to her house. Have you asked her again who Abberton is?’ What was the connection between the name Abberton and the eight other names Aidan had given Ruth? Nine people known to Aidan and Mary?

‘No.’ Ruth was trembling.

‘Why not? You’re on better terms now, presumably. She told me she was trying to persuade you to model for her.’

‘It’s none of my business. If you call a painting after a person and then depict them only as an outline, what does that mean?’ Charlie had the impression Ruth had asked herself this question many times. ‘Surely it has to mean there’s something painful or problematic associated with them in your mind, something you’d rather not remember.’

‘I didn’t see any outlines of people when I was looking at her pictures this morning,’ Charlie told her. ‘I saw people with faces and features.’

‘You mean up on the wall? The ones of the family?’

‘Mary’s family?’

‘No,’ said Ruth. ‘A family who used to live on her estate, I think.’

Charlie wondered why Mary had chosen to paint them so many times. She’d mentioned a compulsion to paint people she cared about. Like offering yourself an emotional breakdown.

‘They’re brilliant, aren’t they?’ said Ruth. ‘Did you see the one of the boy writing in pen on the wall?’

‘No. Where was that one?’

Ruth frowned as if she was trying to remember. ‘In one of the downstairs rooms.’

Charlie had only seen the kitchen and the hall before going upstairs. ‘What was he writing? On the wall?’

‘ “Joy Division”. I don’t know what it means.’

‘ “Love Will Tear Us Apart”,’ said Charlie automatically.

‘What?’ Ruth sounded startled. ‘Why did you say that?’

‘It’s the title of Joy Division’s most famous song. Don’t ask me to sing it to you.’

Ruth said nothing. There was a trapped look on her face.

‘Joy Division are a band,’ Charlie told her, trying not to sound scornful. ‘You haven’t heard of them?’

‘I didn’t listen to pop music as a teenager. My school friends all watched Top of the Pops, but it was banned in our house, effectively.’

‘What do you mean “effectively”?’

Ruth sighed. ‘My parents never actually told me I couldn’t do anything. Their particular brand of mind-control was far too subtle for that. Somehow I just knew I had to pretend not to want to do the things they’d disapprove of.’ She looked up at Charlie. ‘Were your parents strict?’

‘I thought so at the time. They tried to stop me from pursuing my hobbies: smoking fags, getting hammered, taking boys I hardly knew up to my bedroom.’

Charlie didn’t want to talk about her teenage years, but there was an avid look in Ruth’s eyes. ‘Fights aplenty. My sister was the good one-didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t screw around. Never challenged the regime, thereby making it look fair, and shafting me in the process. Her greatest triumph was to defy medical science and single-handedly defeat ovarian cancer. I can’t even give up smoking.’

Ruth was nodding. Keep your fucking mouth shut, Charlie ordered herself. She felt an urgent need to take back some of the poison she’d released. ‘It’s horrible having to admit your parents were probably right,’ she said. ‘Without Mum and Dad’s interventions, I’d have been mainlining cheap cider and hosting orgies every night of the week, especially school nights.’

‘There were no rows in my house,’ said Ruth. ‘There was only ever one opinion. I never heard my mother and father disagree about anything.’

‘Well…’ Charlie cast about for something to say, feeling uncomfortable, wondering how they’d ended up here. She and Ruth weren’t friends, swapping confidences. What would Ruth expect in exchange for her unhappy childhood stories? No, that was the wrong way to look at it. What might Ruth offer in return, if Charlie showed herself willing to act as a sounding board? There were still a lot of questions she wanted to ask; it would help if Ruth was favourably disposed. ‘Whenever I catch a bit of those Supernanny-style programmes, that’s what they seem to advise,’ she said. ‘Parents need to back each other up, not undermine one another.’

‘That’s so wrong,’ Ruth said vehemently. ‘If a child never sees its parents disagree, how’s it supposed to learn that it’s okay to have your own mind? I grew up thinking that if I ever said, “I disagree with you”, the sky would fall down. My parents only ever read the Bible or biographies-ideally of Christian martyrs-so I had to pretend I did too. I hid my real books where they’d never find them. I used to be sick with envy when I heard my friends scream at their parents that they hated them, when I heard their mums and dads scream back, “As long as you’re under my roof, you’ll live by my rules.” At least my friends could be honest about what they wanted to do.’

Christians, thought Charlie: pure evil. The Romans had the right idea throwing them to the lions. What a pity she’d omitted that line from her engagement party speech. She’d barely skimmed the surface of controversial; Simon had massively overreacted.

‘I lied to you on Friday because I needed to,’ said Ruth. She picked up her tea and took a sip. ‘I don’t disapprove of lying. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it if there’s an unreasonable constraint in your life stopping you being the person you want to be.’

‘How’s your relationship with your parents now?’ Charlie asked.

‘I don’t see them, not any more. We haven’t spoken since I left Lincoln. After years of being too scared to do it, I finally broke their heart. No,’ she corrected herself, ‘that’s not what I did. I put myself out of harm’s way, that’s all. It’s up to them if they choose to allow their heart to break.’

Charlie noted the singular, used twice in rapid succession: heart, not hearts.

Ruth said, ‘Some people choose never to see themselves in the mirrors you hold up for them. That’s their choice. I assume it’s what my parents have chosen. I’ve got a PO box address-it was in the letter I sent them when I moved to Spilling. They’ve never used it.’

‘They live in Lincoln?’ Charlie asked. No wonder Ruth had got the hell out.

‘Nearby. Gainsborough.’

‘You gave up a lot when you moved. I Googled Green Haven Gardens this afternoon. Sounds like you had a thriving business. ’

Ruth’s body jerked, as if she’d been shot. Charlie wasn’t surprised. She knew all about feeling invaded, finding out that someone was more interested in you than they ought to be. Interested enough to carry your story in their coat pocket. She pushed the thought away. ‘Organic and chemical-free before it was fashionable,’ she said. ‘And you won three BALI awards.’

‘I won the main BALI award three years running,’ Ruth corrected her, her eyes full of suspicion.

‘I was only skim-reading,’ said Charlie. ‘I had two seconds between meetings. I might have missed some of the finer points.’

‘Why are you interested in Green Haven? That part of my life’s over.’

‘Why did you give it up?’

‘I didn’t want to do it any more.’

Charlie nodded. It was an answer and, at the same time, no answer. She hoped Ruth wasn’t regretting how much of herself she’d already given away.

‘Let me show you the tape,’ said Ruth, standing up. Charlie didn’t know what she meant at first. Then she remembered: the man in the red bobble hat. She rolled her eyes behind Ruth’s back, lacking the heart to point out that her watching footage of a man walking past a house and looking at it would achieve nothing. She followed Ruth out into the hall and saw what she’d missed on the way in. Above the front door with its unusual leaf-patterned glass panel was a shelf with a TV on it, a video player, and a row of cassettes numbered one to thirty-one. One for every day of the month?

While Ruth reached up to put a tape in the machine, Charlie surveyed the hall. Apart from the door to the lounge, there were three others: kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, presumably. Only one was ajar, and through it Charlie caught a glimpse of shiny maroon fabric and a pink cushion. That had to be the bedroom. Checking first that Ruth was still busy with the machine and the remote control, Charlie pushed the door gently to open it further.

Yes, this was Ruth’s bedroom, Ruth and Aidan’s, though the only evidence of a man’s presence was a bulky watch with a leather strap lying on the floor. The rest was over-the-top feminine: ornate perfume bottles lined up on the window-sill, a pink voile scarf draped across the bed, silk curtains, also pink, white lacy underwear strewn everywhere, a pink heart-shaped hot-water bottle. Even the paperbacks with creased spines in lopsided piles looked girly, with titles like Hungry Women and Public Smiles, Private Tears.

Ruth was busy rewinding a tape. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘The remote’s bust. I have to keep my finger pressed down on it to make it work. It takes ages.’

‘No problem,’ said Charlie. She leaned into the bedroom to get a look at what was behind the door, and nearly cried out in shock, lurching back out into the hall. She’d seen it only for a split second, but it was enough. What the fuck…? Her mind reeled. It was absurd, the sort of thing you might have an anxiety dream about-too extreme and too ludicrous to happen in real life. But this was real; Charlie knew what she’d seen.

Nearly a whole wall in Ruth’s bedroom was covered with newspaper cuttings about her, Charlie.

She pulled the door to, her heart juddering, the full range of headlines pulsing in her brain, phrases that had haunted her for two years, that she struggled every day not to think about: colourfully worded assaults on her character, selected by hacks for their shock value or alliterative appeal.

Headlines that Ruth had collected and stuck up on the wall beside her bed. Why? More recent articles too, Charlie could swear-though she had no intention of looking again to check-about her return to work, the forum she’d set up to tackle business crime in the area. No, she hadn’t imagined it. As well as the many photographs of her crying at the press conference in 2006, there had been one or two of her in uniform, after her transfer out of CID, wearing her polished I’m-so-proud-of-what-I’ve-done-for-the-community smile. She felt sick.

‘Here we go,’ said Ruth.

Charlie knew she didn’t have long to compose herself if concealment was her preferred option, and all her instincts were screaming at her to conceal, withdraw, hide herself away. To demand an on-the-spot explanation from Ruth would constitute exposure on a level that, in her state of shock, she couldn’t even contemplate. No, she must avoid a confrontation at all costs, or something disastrous would happen: she’d end up attacking Ruth physically, or become hysterical. Later. Deal with it later.

She blinked furiously to banish the tears that had sprung up out of nowhere, and tried to focus on the white bookshelves on the opposite wall that sagged slightly in the middle and made the hallway half as wide as it would otherwise have been. Ruth was evidently a collector of self-help books as well as the self-appointed archivist of Charlie’s disgrace. In a better mood, Charlie would have found these titles amusing: What if Everything Goes Right?, The Power of Now, What You Think of Me Is None of My Business.

She didn’t know what she thought. All she knew was that her insides had liquefied, she felt as if she might throw up and she wanted desperately to leave this house.

‘I asked my landlord to install CCTV when I first noticed the man hanging around,’ said Ruth. ‘He thought I was making a fuss about nothing, but in the end he agreed. Some rowdy lads had colonised the park at night, and I managed to persuade Malcolm that we could kill two birds with one stone. By the time the cameras were in, the man had stopped walking past. I didn’t get him on tape until yesterday.’

Charlie wondered if Ruth had videotapes of her from two years ago, old news reports, the press conference she’d given, the extended interview she’d agreed to at the insistence of the press office, when public opinion was still violently against her three months after the scandal had broken.

Later. Not now. There were other things to think about, like fighting back: finding out everything she could about Ruth Bussey and using it to devastate her sad, inadequate little life. At the moment, Charlie told herself, the advantage was hers; Ruth didn’t know she knew.

She watched the grainy image on the screen change, saw a man in a woolly hat approach the park gates with a black dog. ‘Has Aidan seen this?’ she asked. If by some remote chance Bobble Hat was spying on Ruth, did Aidan know about it? Did he know who the man was? Spying on someone who spied on others, who broke into their private pain and…

‘No,’ said Ruth. ‘Only Malcolm’s seen it, apart from me, and now you. Aidan and I haven’t spoken properly for months.’ She looked bereft. ‘I thought if Malcolm knew what the man looked like, he could look out for him. He’s often here when I’m not-bit of a guardian angel, really. He keeps an eye on things for me. There, look, you can see the man’s face.’

Malcolm. He must have seen the display wall in the bedroom. No wonder he’d reacted oddly when Charlie had turned up in person. Clearly Ruth’s made herself known to you… She didn’t tell me she was going to make contact. Did Malcolm Fenton know why Ruth was obsessed with Charlie? Did Aidan Seed? He had to, surely, if he shared Ruth’s bed. What possible reason could there be? How many other people had seen the wall? Had the men from Winchelsea Combi Boilers seen it? Had they also recognised Charlie this morning?

Her eyes were fixed on the screen, but she wasn’t really looking. Ruth’s voice cut through her thoughts and she realised she’d missed most of the show. ‘Look, you can see his face clearly now. See the way he’s looking at the window?’

No. It couldn’t be.

It was. Bobble hat or no bobble hat, it was him. With a black Labrador, for Christ’s sake? Now Charlie knew two things Ruth didn’t know she knew.

‘He’s probably just a nosey bastard,’ she said. If Ruth noticed that her tone or manner had changed, she showed no sign of it. Charlie couldn’t remember the last time she’d trusted anyone less than she trusted this strange woman who was staring at her wide-eyed, apparently waiting for help of some sort. ‘Why did you seek Mary out?’ she asked abruptly.

‘Pardon?’ Ruth paused the tape.

‘You said she attacked you. You left the gallery and never went back. Sounds pretty upsetting. Yet subsequently you went to her house. Why?’ I’m going to stick my fingers into every hole in your story, bitch, and I’m going to pull and pull until the whole thing snaps and I get to watch you fall apart.

‘For the painting,’ said Ruth. ‘For Aidan. Aidan wanted it. But that was later, much later.’

‘All right, so what happened next? After the incident with Mary in the gallery last June, and you leaving your job? That was six months before Aidan told you he’d killed her, right?’

‘I can’t tell you everything you want to know.’ Charlie heard panic in Ruth’s voice. ‘I can tell you everything I know, everything that happened, but not why, or what it means.’

‘I’ll settle for anything that isn’t a lie.’

‘No more lies,’ Ruth promised. ‘What happened next was that Aidan and I went to an art fair in London.’