What to Do When Someone Dies

‘I’m not bothered,’ I said.

‘Does that mean you don’t want a lawyer?’

‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘No.’

‘And you need to understand that anything you say in this and later interviews can be used as evidence and introduced in court.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘So how can I help you?’

The two looked at each other as if they didn’t know quite what to make of me.

‘For a start,’ said Ramsay, ‘you can tell us what the hell you were playing at, leaving a crime scene, interfering with a police inquiry?’

‘It’s a complicated story,’ I said.

‘Then you’d better start telling it,’ said Ramsay.

I had promised myself I would leave nothing out, make no attempt to justify myself or explain things away. I’m not used to telling stories and I started from the murder and worked backwards, and in other directions as well, when necessary, or when I remembered something that seemed relevant. When I first said I’d been working for Frances under an assumed name DI Bosworth’s jaw dropped, like that of a character expressing surprise in a silent movie.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Ramsay. ‘I didn’t quite get that. What did you say?’

‘It’s probably easiest if I tell you everything and then you ask questions about what you don’t understand.’

Ramsay started to say something, then stopped and gestured to me to go on. As I meandered through the story, I felt as if I was talking about the misadventures of someone I didn’t really know – a distant cousin or a friend of a friend – whom I didn’t much care for and certainly didn’t understand. When I got on to the subject of Milena dying in the car accident with Greg and how I’d read her emails and how she had also had an affair with Frances’s husband, David, Ramsay’s head sank slowly into his hands. I then told him that Frances had confided in me that she, too, had had an affair.

‘I thought, or wondered, if the man she had had her affair with was Greg,’ I added.

‘What?’ He raised his head and stared at me; there was a glazed expression in his eyes.

‘You see, she said this man, I never got to know his name, had also had a fling with Milena, then turned to her. It doesn’t sound like the Greg I knew, but by that stage I was so confused I didn’t know what to think about anything.’

‘I know the feeling,’ he growled.

The one detail I deliberately withheld was my sexual relationship, such as it was, with Johnny. I don’t think it was out of any concern that it would make me look bad. It was far too late for that. I just felt it wasn’t an important detail and that at least I could spare Johnny the attention it might bring him.

Anyway, there was hardly a shortage of damaging revelations. When I talked about my attempts to find out about the relationship between Milena and Greg, DI Carter interrupted me. ‘She compiled charts,’ he said.

‘What?’ asked Ramsay, in a weak tone.

‘Like they do with school timetables on big pieces of cardboard. It established the whereabouts of her late husband and of the woman.’

‘Charts,’ said Ramsay, looking at me.

‘I had to know,’ I said. ‘I needed to prove to myself, and to the world maybe, that they really did know each other, or that they really didn’t.’

‘You’ve been told it’s hard to prove a negative,’ said Ramsay. ‘Kind of a police motto.’

‘People keep telling me,’ I said. ‘Not that it’s a police motto, that it’s hard.’

There was a pause. I leaned over the tape-machine to see if the little spools were turning.

‘Is that all?’ asked Ramsay.

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure if I told it in the right order. I may have left things out.’

‘It’s difficult to know where to start,’ said Ramsay. ‘For example, as someone who was working for Frances Shaw under an assumed name, you are an obvious suspect in her murder. If you had stayed on the scene, forensic examination might have exonerated you.’

‘It might not have,’ I said. ‘I pulled her out from where she was lying to see if she was still alive. I examined her. I wasn’t sure if there was something I ought to do to help.’

‘So you moved the body!’ said Ramsay. ‘And then you didn’t tell anybody. Our investigation to date has been based on a complete misunderstanding of the crime scene.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘That’s why I decided I had to get in touch with you.’

‘How kind,’ he said. ‘I still don’t understand. Why did you leave the scene?’

‘I was scared and confused. I thought the person who killed her might still be there. And maybe a part of me was wondering whether I was responsible for her death.’

‘How?’ asked Ramsay.

‘Perhaps I’d been stirring things up. I’m the one person who didn’t believe that Milena and Greg’s death was an accident.’

‘What on earth has that got to do with it?’ said Ramsay.

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’

‘Maybe we’re not clever enough to understand,’ said Ramsay. ‘Could you explain why it’s so obvious?’

‘My husband and Milena died in a car crash in circumstances that haven’t been explained.’

‘That’s not true,’ said DI Carter.

‘And then Milena’s work partner is murdered. There must be a connection.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Ramsay. ‘I started off saying you ought to talk to a lawyer, but you really need a psychiatrist.’

‘I’m seeing one, as a sort of grief counselling.’

‘I’m surprised he lets you walk the streets.’

‘She.’

‘I don’t fucking care.’

‘I haven’t told her the details of all of this.’

Ramsay threw his hands up in exasperation. ‘What’s the point of a psychiatrist if you’re not telling her the truth? And, furthermore, if you’re lying to your own doctor, why the hell should I believe you’re not lying to us now?’

‘It wouldn’t be much of a lie, would it?’ I said. ‘I don’t come out of it very well.’

‘I’m not so sure about that,’ said Ramsay. ‘Quite a few coppers would be happy enough to charge you immediately but you’d get off with an insanity plea – deranged widow runs amok.’

‘You forget,’ I said. ‘I don’t care.’

‘Your not caring is a big part of the problem.’

‘What I mean is that I don’t care what happens to me.’

Ramsay leaned forward and switched off the machine. ‘I can honestly tell you there’s a bit of me that would like to toss you into a cell right now for fucking us around the way you have. I can tell you that judges do not like people who get in the way of inquiries. If we charged you now, you’d be facing six months inside, a year if you pulled the wrong judge – and that’s just for not coming forward sooner. I don’t need to tell you there are more serious considerations at stake here. Murder, Ms Falkner. Murder.’

At that moment I thought suddenly that it would be an immense relief to be arrested and charged, convicted and sent to prison. It would halt my endless, hopeless, undirected need to do something. Clearly I had done the wrong thing. I had lied to so many people. Above all – below all – I had lied to Frances. I had betrayed her trust and now she was dead. If I had stayed at home and grieved, as everybody had told me to, and in the end gone back to my work, this probably wouldn’t have happened and maybe, just maybe, Frances would still be alive. I cared about the crimes I had committed. It was possible that my lies and cowardice had stopped Frances’s murder being solved quickly. Maybe I had destroyed an essential clue. But what seemed even more painful was that Frances had thought of me as her friend, as someone she could trust, and everything she had thought she knew about me was a lie.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I deserve to be punished. I’m not going to defend myself.’

‘You bet you fucking deserve it,’ said Ramsay. ‘And don’t pull that pathetic act with us because it won’t work. Maybe we will charge you, and not just for behaving like an idiot either. I’ll need to talk to some people about that. We’re going to think about it. In the meantime, you’re going to supply any physical evidence you have. The clothes you were wearing would be a help.’

‘I’ve probably washed them.’

‘Why was I expecting you to say that?’ said Ramsay.

‘Were you wearing a jacket or a coat?’ said DI Bosworth, speaking for the first time.

‘A jacket,’ I said. ‘I haven’t washed that.’

‘And shoes?’ she continued.

‘Yes, and I haven’t washed them.’

‘When you return home,’ said Ramsay, ‘an officer will accompany you in order to collect any items that may be relevant to the investigation.’

‘So I’m going home?’ I said.

‘Until we decide differently,’ said Ramsay. ‘But before that, you’re going to give us the mother of all statements.’

‘Isn’t that what I’ve done?’

Ramsay shook his head. ‘You’ve only just started,’ he said.

I sighed. ‘It’s a relief, really,’ I said, ‘that someone apart from me is doing the investigating.’

Ramsay looked at me, then at DI Carter, then back at me. ‘That was an investigation? For fuck’s sake.’

Chapter Twenty-seven

The first Christmas I had spent with Greg, we had escaped our families and gone walking in the Lake District. I knew I was in love with him – no, I knew I loved him – when he took a miniature Christmas pudding out of his backpack on the top of Great Gable and insisted we eat it. I can remember it vividly: the cool grey blustery day, the rock we perched on looking out over the empty landscape, the way the wind blew his hair into his eyes and turned his cheeks ruddy, the rich crumbs in my mouth, his warm hand in my cold one, a grateful sense of belonging – of being at home, even though we were up in the hills and far from anywhere. Despite all that had happened, the memory remained intact and robust.

The next Christmas we had spent with Fergus and Jemma, and Fergus and I had cooked a goose; Greg had insisted on making his version of champagne cocktails, singing loudly, filling their house with his tipsy cheerfulness. Last year, we had been in this house; we had planted the small Christmas tree at the end of the garden, planning to retrieve it. I used to dread Christmas; then, with Greg, I had learned to love it. Now I dreaded it again. In ten days’ time I would wake up on my own in this house, which seemed to be on its own downward slide (the faulty heating system, which meant that most of the radiators were lifeless and at best the water was tepid, the freezer kept icing up so that little lumps of ice lay across the kitchen floor, a window was cracked and I hadn’t got round to mending it, a cupboard door was coming drunkenly off its hinges). I’m usually good at mending things – of the two of us, I’d always been the efficient, practical one – but for weeks I’d been unable to summon the energy for domestic maintenance and all of my organizing skills had been used up on Frances and Party Animals.

But now I was going to put my life in order. I’d said that before, but this time I meant it. After weeks of claustrophobic murk and madness, I had to make a fresh start. I had to look ahead, not back – because what lay behind and all around me was so scary and inexplicable. So, I threw myself into clearing up the physical mess of my life. I started each day at six in the morning, when it was still pitch-black outside. I bled the radiators and felt them returning to life; I called in a heating engineer to replace the fan on the boiler; I mended the cupboard door and defrosted the freezer, hacking out months of ice; I measured the broken window and bought a new pane of glass, which I fitted with a glow of competence. I painted the walls of the kitchen white and my bedroom pale grey. I bought new bathmats.

I threw out every jar and tin that was past its sell-by date. I stocked the fridge with healthy food, and every day I made myself proper meals (for breakfast, yoghurt, toast and marmalade or porridge made with half water half milk; for lunch a bowl of pasta with olive oil and Parmesan or a salad; for supper, fish or chicken with one glass of wine). I went to the pool every morning, and swam fifty lengths. I bought myself a new pair of jeans and a grey cardigan.

I met Gwen and Daniel at the cinema. I went through my ledger and billed clients for outstanding payments. I made a list of the work I needed to do and wrote myself a timetable that I pinned on the noticeboard in the kitchen. I put a storage heater in my shed and spent at least eight hours of every day in there, trying to meet deadlines and make up for the broken promises of the past months. I replaced the legs on a Queen Anne sideboard, sanded and revarnished a rosewood table, put a new top on a scratched school desk that clearly had sentimental value to its owner. I even put a notice in the local paper advertising my services, and called at the nearby shops with business cards. I went late-night shopping and bought a beret and miniature dungarees for my soon-to-be godchild, and two beautiful scarves for Gwen and Mary’s Christmas presents. I rang my parents to tell them I would not be with them for the day itself, but would it be all right if I came on Boxing Day instead? I bought my mother a glass vase and my father a book on houseplants. I drew the line at sending Christmas cards, and the ones that arrived for me I put in a pile on the kitchen window-sill so that I didn’t have to read the dozens of sympathetic messages behind pictures of robins, virgins and comic turkeys.

And I did not look at the newspaper, so that I would not have to read any stories about Frances. I did not turn on the television for the same reason.

I did not respond to the message Johnny had left on my answering-machine, or reply to the long, angry letter he pushed through the door.

I did not investigate the missed calls on my mobile, though I suspected they might have been from David.

I did not go back to the counsellor, even though she had made it clear she thought it would be useful, not to say necessary.

I did not take up Gwen or Mary or Fergus or Joe on their offer to talk about what had happened, or describe in detail how the police had behaved towards me, particularly during the second interview I had had in Stockwell – their mixture of mounting incredulity and moral disgust. I was attempting to look ahead, move ahead, and the only way I knew how to do that was to blinker myself, choosing not to see what lay at all sides and behind me.

I did not let myself think of Frances, spread out under the desk with her sightless eyes staring up at me.

I did not insist to anyone who crossed my path that Greg had never known Milena. I understood at last that the past was gone and beyond my comprehension.

I did not cry.

I rolled up my two charts very tightly, bent them in the middle and stuffed them into the bin, along with carrot peelings and tea-bags. I gave the menu card with Milena’s scrawl on it to the police, who didn’t seem very interested even when I pointed out how the ‘J’ had been changed to a ‘G’.

Each night, I went to bed so exhausted by my frantic activity and by all my desperate evasions that I fell asleep as if I’d been hit on the head with a brick. If I dreamed, I didn’t remember of what. I wasn’t exactly ecstatic, but I was purposeful, like a soldier going into a battle or running away from one.

In the middle of one Thursday morning, just as I was about to go out to my shed, the phone rang. I decided to leave it, but after the ringing stopped, my mobile immediately started up. I looked at the caller’s ID before answering, in case it was someone I was trying to blank out of my consciousness.

‘Fergus?’

He was gabbling something. I couldn’t make out many words, but I got the sense. I was a godmother. Once I’d disconnected, I went and sat for a while in the kitchen. Outside, the sky had turned a dull white, as if it might snow. The house was quiet; the day ahead felt long and empty. I looked down at my hands, plaited together on the table, and told myself to stand up at once, go to my shed, get on with the work I’d planned for the day. My legs were heavy. It took an enormous effort to heave myself out of the chair.

The phone rang again. It was Detective Chief Inspector Stuart Ramsay – he said his whole name again, as if I might have forgotten him – and he wanted to know if I would come to the station.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What’s changed? What’s happened?’ There was a deep breath at the other end, but before he could answer I interrupted him. ‘No, it’s all right. I’ll come. When?’

‘Now? Do you want me to send a car to collect you?’

‘No. I’ll make my own way. I can be there in about half an hour. Is that all right?’

Ramsay had my statement in front of him and looked tired. He did not offer me tea, barely glanced up. At last he said, ‘Is there anything you didn’t tell us in your statement?’

I thought back to the long interviews, one in Kentish Town and the other in Stockwell. I had rambled, repeated myself, repeated the repetitions, gone round in circles and off at tangents, included irrelevant information. Had I left anything out?

‘I don’t think so,’ I said eventually.

‘Take your time.’

‘I don’t need time,’ I said. ‘I think I told you everything.’

He shuffled the papers, frowning. ‘Tell me, please, did you ever visit the site of your husband’s accident?’

‘I don’t think it was an accident.’

‘I’m asking you a question. It’s quite simple. Were you ever there?’

‘How did you know?’

He looked up sharply. ‘Was I meant not to know?’

‘Why are you asking me now?’

‘Answer the question.’

‘Yes, I went there.’

‘And you didn’t see fit to tell us?’

‘I didn’t think it was relevant.’

‘Is this yours?’

He took a transparent bag out of his drawer and held it up: my scarf.

‘Yes.’

‘It has blood on it. Whose blood would that be?’

‘Mine!’

‘Yours?’

‘Yes. I cut myself, that’s all. Look, I went because I wanted to see where Greg had died. It was purely personal.’

‘When?’

‘When did I go?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I don’t know exactly. It was a long time ago. No, I do know. It was the day before Greg’s funeral and that was on the twenty-fourth of October so it must have been the twenty-third.’

He wrote the date down and looked at it thoughtfully. ‘You’re quite sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘And were you alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you tell anyone you were going?’

‘No. It was something I had to do on my own.’

‘And afterwards did you tell anyone you’d been there?’

‘I don’t think so. No, I didn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Like I said, it was personal.’

‘But you have close friends – friends in whom you confide?’

‘Yes.’

‘And it must have been an emotional experience.’

‘It was cold and wet,’ I said, remembering slithering down the bank.

‘So isn’t it a bit odd that you didn’t tell anyone something like that?’

‘It’s not odd. The next day was the funeral, and I had lots of other things to think about.’

‘I see. So there’s no one to verify your story?’

‘It’s not a story, it’s the truth. And no, there’s no one to verify it, though I don’t see why it needs verifying. Why is it so important?’

But even as I said the words, I realized why he thought it was so important. My mouth opened, but no words came out. I stared at him and he looked back at me implacably.

‘It’s just funny you never mentioned it,’ he said.

Chapter Twenty-eight

‘Are you serious?’ said Gwen. ‘What are they playing at?’

I tried to hush her but she wouldn’t be hushed. I had arrived at what Fergus had called the baby-boasting party with a miniature pair of dungarees and a beret. When I’d bought them, they had seemed impossibly small, like doll’s clothes, but when I peered into the cot I realized they were much too big.

‘She’ll grow into them,’ I said. ‘Eventually.’

‘She’s called Ruby,’ said Jemma.

‘Oh, great,’ I said. ‘That’s a lovely name.’

‘Admittedly Ruby sounds like someone who should be dancing on a New Orleans riverboat,’ said Fergus.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Jemma, picking Ruby up and telling her she wasn’t going to let that horrible man say such horrible things about her. She was talking in a tone I’d never heard used by an adult. It was clearly something I’d have to get used to over the coming years. Jemma insisted that I hold Ruby. She told Ruby I was her godmother and that we ought to get to know each other straight away. Sensibly enough, Ruby was fast asleep as Jemma showed me her miniature fingernails and her equally miniature toenails. Then she woke up and Jemma retrieved her, coaxed her and contentedly fed her.

I went into the kitchen, where Gwen was making tea. Mary had brought a cake and was getting out plates and cups, keeping a watchful eye on Robin, who was fast asleep in his car seat in the corner. He used to look tiny, but now, compared to Ruby, he was big, on a different scale. I was still feeling a bit awkward with Gwen, having stolen her identity and everything, but I made an effort to tell her about things, the way I always used to. That was when she erupted in disbelief, and just as she did so, Joe came through and joined us. It was like the meeting of a secret society.

‘I’m just escaping from Babyland,’ he said. ‘Not that she isn’t beautiful. She’s very sweet, isn’t she?’

We all agreed that she was.

‘Obviously every parent is convinced that their own baby is the most beautiful in the world,’ said Joe. ‘I can remember saying something of the kind when Becky was born.’ He picked up a slice of cake before Mary could stop him. He took a bite as he continued talking, crumbs spilling from his mouth. ‘The difference is that when I said it I was right.’

‘Hmm,’ said Mary, and I could see she was about to launch into a Robin-is-best speech.

‘To return to what we were saying,’ interrupted Gwen, hastily, ‘Ellie has to do something to stop the police messing her about.’

‘What are they up to now?’ asked Joe, raising his eyebrows at me and grinning. I could tell he was trying to make me feel better about the mess I’d caused, turning it into a kind of joke that we could laugh at.

So, of course, Gwen had to explain to all and sundry about my latest encounter with the police. I was a bit ashamed to be the centre of attention again. They’d had to be sympathetic to me as a widow, listen to my rants about Greg and his innocence, then deal with my activities as some kind of fraudster. And always it had been me, me, me at the centre of things, with everyone else in a supporting role, their concerns pushed aside.

‘You should have asked us to come with you,’ said Mary. ‘I can’t bear to think you went on your own. It must have been grim.’

‘You’d done enough already, all of you. Besides, it was something I needed to do alone.’

‘What’s outrageous,’ said Joe, ‘is that visiting the scene of your husband’s death is something they should find suspicious. Of course you had to go. It would be stranger if you hadn’t.’

‘Do you think they were really suspicious?’ asked Gwen. ‘Of what, for God’s sake?’

‘I get the impression that they’re extremely irritated by me,’ I said, and then cast a glance at Gwen. ‘As you probably are. Or, at least, you should be.’

There was a joint, rustling murmur that of course they weren’t and how none of it mattered.

‘On the other hand,’ said Gwen, ‘have you thought that you may need some advice? I mean, legal advice.’

‘Legal advice?’ Fergus had come into the room with a plate of biscuits. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well,’ said Gwen, slowly and carefully, ‘if they were talking to Ellie about when she went to the scene, and asking if anybody was with her to corroborate what she was saying…’ She turned to me. ‘It feels awful even to say it but you’re the one, after all, who’s been claiming that Greg’s death was not what they assumed, was inexplicable. So it looks as if they might be thinking that…’But she stopped, unable to say it out loud.

‘That I had something to do with it,’ I finished for her. ‘Yes. That I was taking revenge on my husband and his presumed lover… So, are you going to ask if I’ve got an alibi?’

‘No, of course not,’ said Mary, in a shocked tone.

‘Of course it’ll never come to that,’ I said. ‘But I sort of do.’ I tried to recall the day in accurate detail. The terrible news had been such a blow that it was as if it had eliminated everything that went before. But I could remember. ‘I’d had a good day, funny as it may seem. I’d been working on a rather beautiful Georgian chair. It had taken longer than I’d expected so in the end I had to jump in a cab and take it down to the company who had hired me to do it for them. It was a solicitors’ office just off Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I remember the time because I was in a rush to get there before they closed. It must have been just a couple of minutes before six. When I handed it over, I had to sign a receipt for them, showing I’d delivered it. I wrote the date and the time on it. So I couldn’t have been in East London tampering with my husband’s car, if that’s what was required. There we are. Too much information.’

There was another awkward silence.

‘But why are they even looking at the scene of the crash?’ said Joe.

‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘It was an accident. We were at the inquest.’

‘God knows,’ I said. ‘I’ve caused so much trouble with my blundering around that the police don’t know what they think any more. It doesn’t bother me. I’m finished with it all. I’m going to do what I should have done a long time ago, which is get myself sorted out, be good, do some useful work.’

And so I did. Or, at least, I made a start. I helped carry the cake back into the midst of the baby celebrations. I picked up Ruby, who looked drunk after her feed, like a spaced-out old woman with blurry eyes and a milk blister on her lower lip, and held her in my arms, terrified I would drop her. I offered her my little finger to grip in her fist, and pressed my face to her neck; she smelled of sawdust and mustard. Then I handed her over for someone else to coo at and left.

The previous day, a man had dropped off six dining chairs at the house. They had been in his shed for years and he had forgotten about them. Could I do anything with them? Yes, I could. I could strip off the surfaces with wire wool and white spirit. I could replace broken slats and balance the legs so that they sat flush. I could arrange for the seats to be re-covered, and then I could smooth and polish the surfaces. I had given a quote that would have paid for a reasonable second-hand car and the man had seemed happy enough. I was happy too. The chairs would give me days of tricky, fiddly, messy, scrapy, lonely, lovely, satisfying work. It gave me a possibility of happiness. Well, maybe not happiness, but something to lose myself in, somewhere to escape, or so I thought.

If I had known who it was, I would never have answered. I had just come in from the shed to make myself a cup of tea and was caught off guard. I picked up the phone automatically, without thinking it might be someone I wanted to avoid, and when I heard his voice I was so shocked that I slopped scalding tea over my wrist, then dropped the mug, which shattered on the floor. I stared at the receiver, thinking I might simply put it back in its holster and shut myself up in the shed, where no one could get at me.

‘Hello.’ The voice was cool and uninflected; even now, he wasn’t going to show his emotions. I imagined him at the other end: his greying dark hair, his impeccable clothes and manicured hands, his languid air of slightly contemptuous amusement; above all, his watchfulness.

‘David,’ I said at last, trying to match my voice to his. ‘What do you want?’

‘Straight to the point.’ He gave a small laugh that held no mirth. ‘I want to see you.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m surprised you need to ask. There are certain things that need to be made clear.’

‘I’ve got nothing to say to you that I haven’t already told the police.’

‘I, on the other hand, have things to say to you. And I’d prefer not to do it over the phone.’

‘I don’t want to come to your house.’

‘I imagine not.’ At last I heard the current of anger in his voice. ‘Shall I come to yours?’

‘No, I don’t want that either.’

‘I have a cast-iron alibi, you know, Eleanor.’ He gave a light emphasis to my name, to remind me that I had been an impostor. ‘If you’re imagining that I might be a murderer, you needn’t trouble yourself.’

‘I wasn’t,’ I said, although of course I had thought about David murdering Frances, and had found it very easy to picture: he was a cold, clever, ruthless man, rather than a messy creature of conscience. However, the reason for keeping him out of my house was not fear but an instinctive, deeply felt revulsion at the idea of him setting his well-polished brogues in my own shabby, Greg-haunted world.

‘We could meet in my club, if you want. There are private rooms.’

‘No. Somewhere outside, public.’

‘All right, Blackfriars Bridge. North side. In one hour.’

‘It’s raining,’ I said stupidly.

‘Indeed. I’ll bring my umbrella.’

I hung up and ran my wrist under cold water for several minutes until it went numb. I considered changing out of my work clothes but in the end I didn’t. After all, I no longer needed to pretend to be anyone other than myself. I searched in the cupboard under the stairs for an umbrella, but only found one with a broken spoke, which flopped uselessly when opened. I would just have to get wet.

I arrived wet and cold, smelling of glue and dressed in paint-spattered canvas trousers under a streaming waterproof. David was as dry as a bone under his large black umbrella.

I stopped a few feet from where he stood on the deserted pavement, and gave him a stiff nod. His beautiful camel-hair coat was familiar, as were the brown shoes that shone like new conkers. I couldn’t have pointed to any particular change in his appearance, yet I was struck by a difference in him. His skin seemed to be drawn tighter over his bones than the last time we’d met, giving him a pinched, sharp expression.

‘This won’t take long,’ he said.

I waited. He had asked to see me and I wasn’t going to be the first to speak.

‘My wife trusted you,’ he said. I didn’t respond. There didn’t seem to be anything I could say. ‘She liked you,’ he went on. ‘For once she showed bad judgement. Catastrophically bad judgement.’

‘I didn’t kill her.’

David gave a shrug. ‘That’s for the police to decide,’ he said indifferently.

‘Did she trust you as well?’

‘You mean, because I was unfaithful to her? I know, of course, what you told the police.’

‘I told the police what was true – that you had an affair with Milena.’

I had also, I thought, told them that Frances had had a lover. Did David know that? I stared at him, his unreadable face. Had he discovered that, and was that why Frances was dead?

‘You disapprove of me,’ David said. ‘Of course you do. After all – and let’s put the whole thing with Johnny to one side, just for the moment, shall we? – you think you’re living in a romantic novel where husband and wife marry and live happily ever after, where first love doesn’t fade, where your precious husband couldn’t possibly have deceived you because he loved you so much. What makes you think Frances didn’t know?’

‘Did she?’

That dismissive shrug again.

‘I’ve no idea. If she did, she would have had the good sense not to muddy the waters. She was sensible. We understood each other. We suited each other.’

‘You mean you turned a blind eye?’

‘That’s one way of putting it. Another is to say that we didn’t snoop, pry and poke around in each other’s worlds, thinking we had a right to know everything about each other. We treated each other like grown-ups. There are worse ways of being married.’

‘Are you saying she would have understood about you and Milena?’

‘You’ve no right even to ask that. You were an outsider who came blundering into our house, putting your nose into business that didn’t concern you.’

‘Did you love her?’

Real anger flared in his face and suddenly he stepped out of the circle of his umbrella so that large drops of water splashed on to his coat. ‘You want to know what I felt?’ he said, his face a few inches from mine. ‘You still want to find things out? Frances was a good woman and Milena was a bitch. A hard-core, monstrous bitch. Bitches always win. She played with people. She played with me, lured me, hooked me, pulled me in, and when she was done with me she threw me back into the water. She never loved me. She was only interested in me because she could use me to get back at Frances. Yes, yes. I know there was another man in Frances’s life. Milena told me when she dumped me that I had been her revenge on my wife, who’d stolen someone from her.’

As I watched him, he seemed to crumble. His mouth trembled, and for a moment I thought he was going to cry or hit me.

‘If you want to know who he was, I can’t tell you. I never asked. I didn’t want to know. I’m not like you. Some things are best kept hidden. We depend on that; we’d go mad if we knew everything. So if this had anything to do with your precious husband, I can’t tell you. Nobody can now. Everyone’s dead.’

He snapped his mouth shut and stepped back under his umbrella. We stared at each other.

‘I liked her a lot,’ I said at last. ‘I felt very guilty that I deceived her.’

‘Her, me, Johnny, everyone.’

I walked all the way home in the rain, barely noticing the Christmas lights, the festive shops billowing out warmth through their open doors, the brass band on Camden High Street playing carols and collecting for the blind. Cars and vans thundered past, spraying water from puddles all over me. David must have arranged to see me because he wanted to prod me, taunt me, play with me, scare me. Had it just been sadistic revenge or something else?

I sat in the living room and stared at the empty grate. Greg used to love making fires. He was very good at it, very methodical. He would never use fire-lighters, saying they were a cheat, but started instead with twisted pieces of paper, then kindling. I remembered how he would kneel and blow on the embers, coaxing them into flames. I hadn’t lit the fire since he died and I thought about doing so now, but it seemed too much effort.

Out of the blue a thought occurred to me that was both trivial and irritating. I tried to brush it away, because I was done with my botched attempts at amateur sleuthing, but it clung like a cobweb in my mind: why hadn’t Greg written down his appointment with Mrs Sutton, the old lady I had met on the day of his funeral? I was sure she had told me she’d arranged to see him on the day after his death, but it hadn’t been in his diary.

I told myself it didn’t matter, it was meaningless. I made myself a cup of tea and drank it slowly, sip by sip, then rang the office.

‘Can I speak to Joe?’ I asked.

‘I’m afraid Mr Foreman isn’t here.’

‘Tania, then?’

‘Putting you through.’

After a few seconds, Tania was on the line.

‘Tania? It’s me, Ellie.’

‘Ellie,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine. Listen, Tania, can you do me a favour?’

‘Of course!’

‘I need the number of one of Greg’s clients.’

‘Oh,’ she said doubtfully.

‘I met her at the funeral. A Mrs Sutton, I think – I don’t know her first name. She was very nice about Greg and there was something I wanted to ask her.’

‘All right.’ There was a pause and then her voice again: ‘It’s Marjorie Sutton and she lives in Hertfordshire. Have you got a pen handy?’

‘Hello?’ Her voice was crisp and clear.

‘Is that Marjorie Sutton?’

‘It is. Who am I speaking to?’

‘This is Ellie Falkner, Greg Manning’s widow.’

‘Of course. How can I help?’

‘I know this sounds peculiar, but I was tying up loose ends and there was something I wanted to ask you.’

‘Yes?’

‘You told me you were going to see Greg the day after he died.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You’re quite sure about that? Because there’s no record of an appointment in his diary.’

‘He’d only arranged it the day before. It must have been just before the accident. He was very insistent that he should come and see me.’

‘Do you know what it was about?’

‘I’m afraid not. Is there a problem?’

‘No problem,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much.’

I put the phone back in its holster and returned to my chair by the empty grate.

Chapter Twenty-nine

I saw a nature documentary once that showed a baby seal lying in a little hole in the Arctic ice sheet. Above, in the outside world, it was about fifty below but in the hole it was warm, at least by baby-seal standards. It must have felt safe as well. But it wasn’t. Miles away, a mother bear, desperate to feed its cub, had caught the scent of the subterranean baby seal and smashed her way through the snow and ice to get at it.

That was more or less how I felt when DCI Stuart Ramsay came to see me in my work shed. It felt wrong. The whole point of me being there was to pretend that people like him didn’t exist.

‘I was working,’ I said.

‘That’s fine,’ he replied. ‘Don’t mind me.’

‘All right.’ I continued with my sanding while he wandered around the room, picking up tools, occasionally glancing at me with a look of puzzlement, as if I was doing something unimaginably exotic.

‘What are you working on?’

‘It’s a storage chest Greg and I found in a skip months ago. I said I’d repair it and they could have it in the office. It’s really quite nice – look at the carvings on the top. I thought, after Greg died, I wouldn’t bother with it, but now I’ve decided I’m going to do it for them anyway. Joe will like it.’

Ramsay picked up a plastic squeezy bottle and sniffed at the nozzle. He pulled a face. ‘What’s this?’ he said.

‘It’s a laminate,’ I said. ‘It’s the sort of thing teenagers sniff and then go to hospital.’

He put the bottle down. ‘My gran used to hate old furniture,’ he said. ‘She said she hated the idea of sitting in a chair that a dead person had sat in.’

‘It’s a point of view,’ I said.

‘When people got married, they were supposed to buy themselves nice new furniture. That was the tradition then.’ He knelt over one of the chairs I had dismantled. ‘This is the sort of thing that would have been put on a bonfire in the old days.’

‘I guess you haven’t come to hire me,’ I said, ‘so why are you here?’

‘I’m on your side, Ms Falkner,’ he said. ‘You may not think so, but I am.’

‘I wasn’t thinking about it.’

‘It’s just that you make it difficult for someone to be on your side.’

‘You’re a policeman,’ I said. ‘You’re not meant to be on anybody’s side. You’re meant to investigate and find out the truth.’

He looked dubiously at my workbench, then leaned back on it, half sitting. ‘I’m not really here,’ he said. He consulted his watch. ‘I finished work half an hour ago. I’m on my way home.’

‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ I said. ‘Or a drink?’

‘My wife’s waiting at home for me,’ he said, ‘with a drink. Cold white wine, probably.’

‘Sounds nice,’ I said. ‘But if you’re not on duty…’

‘I just wanted to tip you off that things might get a bit messy.’

‘Why do you want to tip me off?’ I said. ‘And why should they get messy?’

‘Obviously it’s all rubbish. You – Well, it sounds stupid even to say the words, but I’m going to anyway. You obviously couldn’t have been involved with the death of your husband, could you?’

I’d been carrying on intermittently with my piece of sandpaper, but now I stopped and stood up. ‘Are you waiting for me to say no?’ I said.

‘You’ve been going around making yourself look suspicious but it still doesn’t work.’

‘It doesn’t work because it isn’t true,’ I said.

‘We don’t work on truth. We work on evidence. Even so. The death of your husband was recorded as an accident. You were the one who was going around screaming that it wasn’t. I’ve tried to think about it as a double bluff, or a triple bluff, but I can’t make it work. And then not only did you claim you didn’t know about your husband’s infidelity, you actually made a bloody… Well, you kept claiming it was all a mistake, that they weren’t even having an affair. Even when you found evidence that they were.’

‘But the evidence doesn’t work.’

‘Evidence is always messy.’

‘Not messy,’ I said. ‘Impossible.’

He was rocking himself back and forth on the bench. ‘You really didn’t know about the affair?’ he said. ‘I mean before your husband’s death.’

‘I don’t believe he was having an affair.’

‘Did you have an argument on the day of your husband’s death?’

‘No.’

Ramsay stood up and walked across the room to look out of the window. ‘Do you need planning permission for a shed like this?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Interesting,’ he said.

‘Is that relevant?’

‘I’ve been thinking of buying one,’ he said. ‘Somewhere to go that’s out of the house. To get back to what I was saying, you’ll notice I’m asking you these questions informally, not taking an official statement. If I had been, it might have seemed I was trying to catch you out.’

‘How?’

‘We’ve been talking to various people.’ He took a notebook from his pocket and flicked through several pages. ‘Including people in your husband’s office. Mr Kelly, for instance, who was in the office that day doing a software update. He said that early on the afternoon of the day your husband died, he heard one end of an argument on the phone between your husband and someone Mr Kelly assumed was you. Perhaps it wasn’t you.’

‘Fergus said that?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s right. It was me.’

‘You said you hadn’t had an argument.’

‘It wasn’t an important argument.’

‘What was it about?’

‘Something completely trivial.’ Ramsay didn’t reply. He was clearly wanting to hear more. ‘It was about him coming home late.’

‘You had an argument about that?’

‘All our arguments were about trivial things. Oh, for God’s sake, I’ve still got the text he sent me afterwards.’ I picked up my mobile phone and scrolled down to one of the messages I hadn’t been able to delete. I handed the phone to Ramsay. He extracted some reading glasses laboriously from his top pocket and put them on.

“‘Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry. Im a stupid fool.” That’s a lot of sorries. Do you mind if I take this?’

‘It’s my phone. I need it.’

‘It’ll be returned to you. Pay-as-you-go phones are available in the meantime.’

‘What do you want it for?’

Ramsay put the phone in his pocket. ‘A cynical person would say that your husband doesn’t say what he’s sorry about. He could be sorry that he’s been unfaithful.’

‘He wasn’t unfaithful.’

‘I’m sure you’re right.’

‘Your wine will be getting warm.’

‘I’m not cynical,’ he said. ‘I’m on your side. I know you’ve worked hard to incriminate yourself, but you haven’t done a good enough job. That crash, with your husband and Milena Livingstone. You couldn’t have done that on your own.’

‘Why do you say on my own?’

‘No reason. Besides, who would you do it with? I’ve talked to her husband as well. Her widower. We don’t really say “widower”, do we? I’ve always wondered why. He didn’t seem like someone to arrange a murder. He seemed more like the tolerant type. If you see what I mean.’

‘If you mean do I agree that he didn’t kill his wife, I do.’

‘And your husband.’

‘Well, of course.’

‘And then there’s Frances Shaw.’

‘I didn’t kill Frances!’

‘I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, trying to construct the sort of theory that a hostile person might. It might be seen as an unfortunate coincidence that you worked for the company run by your husband’s lover.’

‘It wasn’t a coincidence,’ I said. ‘And she wasn’t his lover. I was working there to prove that. Or to find the truth.’

‘I mean, how would you really do it?’

‘What?’

‘Kill two people and make it look like an accident.’

‘I thought you were talking about Frances Shaw.’

‘We’ll come to Frances Shaw. I was thinking about the car. How would you do something like that? Tamper with the brakes, the way they do in films?’

‘How do you tamper with brakes?’ I said. ‘Anyway, what would that do, driving in London? You don’t kill two people driving along at thirty or forty miles an hour. At least, not reliably.’

‘Sounds right,’ said Ramsay. ‘So what do you do?’

I broke the promise I had made and made myself think about the event once more as I had hundreds of times before.

‘They would have to be already dead. And you drive them to somewhere quiet…’

‘Like Porton Way,’ said Ramsay.

‘That would be a perfect choice,’ I said. ‘Where you can steer the car over the edge, set fire to it and then get away.’

‘Making sure you don’t leave any traces,’ said Ramsay. ‘Or drop anything.’

‘Do you think I’d have left my scarf behind if I’d committed the murder?’

‘You wouldn’t believe what people leave at murder scenes. False teeth. Wooden legs. I’m sure it’ll never come to this, Ms Falkner, but if you’re ever called upon to construct a defence, I wouldn’t stress the point that leaving evidence at the scene is an argument that you weren’t there.’

‘I was there. I went later.’

‘Obviously the case with Frances Shaw is very different. Traces of your presence were found everywhere at the scene, including on the body.’

‘I worked there,’ I said, ‘and I pulled the body clear. I wasn’t sure she was dead.’

‘That’s what the emergency services are for,’ said Ramsay. ‘They can revive people who might seem completely dead to civilians like you and me.’

‘She was dead.’

‘I believe this argument has been had before. My point was that there’s no doubt you were there, even though you fled the scene. But while there’s obvious motive for you to kill your husband and his lover, even though you couldn’t have done it, there’s no motive at all for you to kill Frances Shaw, is there?’

There was a pause because I didn’t know what to say. I wondered if he knew something and was waiting to catch me out once more. If there was damning evidence – more damning evidence – it was better coming from me. And now was the time to give it. There was a moment when I thought, Why not? I had this feeling that somehow everything was closing in on me, everything was turning out bad. Why not go along with it? What if I was blamed for it, convicted and imprisoned? How did that matter, really? But I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t think of the words with which to say it.

‘We got on well,’ I said. ‘She thought of me as a friend. I felt bad about deceiving her. I meant to tell her but…’

‘So you’re sticking to your story that you didn’t know about your husband’s affair and you had no problem with Frances Shaw…’

‘I didn’t say no problem.’

‘Nothing that would be a motive for violence, I mean.’

‘Of course not.’

‘Although you accuse her husband of having an affair with your husband’s lover.’

‘He did have an affair with her – and she wasn’t Greg’s lover. And his wife was also having an affair, don’t forget.’

‘Hmm.’ He scratched the side of his nose. ‘You can see why we’re so confused, can’t you? The problem is that it’s all these negatives, proving that someone didn’t know something, that they didn’t have a motive. I’m not clever enough for that. A knife with blood and fingerprints. Preferably caught on CCTV. That’s what I like.’

He looked around. ‘Do you ever make new furniture?’ he said.

‘I have, as a sort of hobby. It’s more expensive than old furniture.’

Ramsay seemed disappointed. ‘I can’t afford either on my salary. I’ll stick with Ikea.’ He paused and appeared to remember something. ‘You’re not playing any more of your games, are you?’

‘Like what?’

‘Pretending to be someone else.’

‘No.’

‘It wasn’t even funny the first time.’

‘I’ve got an alibi.’

‘Ah, yes. It seems we’re going to have to look into that.’

I told him about the delivery on the day of Greg’s death. I even went into the house, found the name of the solicitors’ office, then wrote out the address and the phone number for him. ‘You can check yourself.’

‘I will,’ he said.

Chapter Thirty

When Detective Chief Inspector Ramsay came to see me on the Monday morning it wasn’t anything at all like his previous visit. Even his ring at the door sounded different, more insistent and uncompromising. A younger colleague had come with him, awkward in his shiny new suit, as if Ramsay needed someone to protect him from any hint of flirtatiousness, of informality, of special treatment. There was no jovial suggestion of watching me work. He insisted on going through to the living room, where I felt out of place in my smelly, dusty work clothes. Worst of all was his expression, closed off, almost glassy-eyed, as if we hadn’t met before, as if he was only going by a first impression and it wasn’t good. When I offered them tea, he began speaking as if he hadn’t heard.

‘I thought you might be interested to know. We sent an officer round to Pike and Woodhead to check your alibi. Unfortunately they didn’t have the receipt.’

He stopped and looked at me, his expression still and unyielding, as if waiting for some justification.

‘I’m sorry about the waste of time,’ I said. ‘I remember signing for it but they must have thrown it away.’

‘No, they didn’t,’ said Ramsay. ‘But someone had collected it and taken it away before we got there.’

‘Who?’

‘You.’

For a moment, my vision went dark, dark with little golden speckles, like it does when you’ve looked at the sun by mistake. I had to sit down. I couldn’t speak. When I did, it took an immense effort. ‘Why do you say it was me?’

‘Are you serious?’ said Ramsay. He took out his notebook. ‘Our officer talked to an office manager at the firm. A Mr Hatch. He checked the file, found the piece of paper was missing, but there was a note saying it had been taken by a Ms Falkner. By you.’

For a vertiginous moment I let myself wonder whether it was possible that I really had gone over to the office, collected the docket and suppressed the memory of it. Perhaps this was what being mad was like. It might explain everything. Part of my mind had known about Greg’s infidelity, had been responsible for other terrible things and had hidden them behind a mental wall. Hadn’t I heard about that? About people who had suffered traumas and buried them so they wouldn’t have to confront the implications? People who had committed crimes, forgotten them and truly believed they were innocent? It would almost have been a relief to yield to that, but I didn’t.

‘Where is it?’ said Ramsay.

‘I don’t have it,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t me.’

‘Stop,’ said Ramsay. He held up his right hand, the tips of his first finger and thumb almost touching, as if he was holding an invisible match. ‘I’m this close – this close – to arresting you now. Ms Falkner, I don’t think you realize the trouble you’re in. Perverting the course of justice is not like crossing the road when the little red man is showing. Judges don’t like it. They see it as a kind of treason and they send people to prison for a surprisingly long time. Do you understand?’

‘It wasn’t me,’ I said.

‘Of course it was you.’

‘It doesn’t make sense in any possible way,’ I said. ‘If it was me, why would I tell you about the company, give you the address and then take away the evidence before you got there?’

‘Because it didn’t say what you said it said.’

I stopped for a moment, confused. ‘But getting rid of the evidence doesn’t help. It just makes it worse. Why would I do that? And give my name while I was at it?’

Ramsay gave a snort that was almost a laugh but then his expression turned serious and when he spoke it was quietly and deliberately. ‘If a jury was informed of everything else you’ve been up to, I don’t think they’d have difficulty swallowing one extra piece of insanity.’

There was more before the two of them left and none of it was very pleasant. Ramsay said that in the near future I would be interviewed under caution, which meant there was the possibility of an imminent criminal charge, and that I ought to have a lawyer present. He also muttered about having a psychological evaluation and that it might be my best hope. As they were about to leave he regarded me with a mixture of bafflement and pity. ‘I felt sorry for you,’ he said, ‘but you don’t make it easy. I don’t understand what you’re up to. But we’re on your case. Don’t piss us around.’

As soon as they were gone, as soon as the car had pulled away, I changed into more businesslike clothes. Half an hour later I was at the office of Pike and Woodhead, whose entrance was in a small road, almost an alley, just off Lincoln’s Inn Fields. A middle-aged woman was sitting at a desk just inside the door. I asked her if a Mr Hatch was in.

‘Darren? Yes, he’s around somewhere.’

I asked if I could see him and a few minutes later he appeared, not, as I had expected, in a pin-striped suit but in jeans and a Fred Perry T-shirt. I hadn’t met him when I had delivered the chair. I had left it at Reception, signed a piece of paper, taken a copy and left.

‘You deal with deliveries?’ I said.

‘You got one?’

‘Not today. My name’s Eleanor Falkner. I delivered a chair here a few weeks ago.’

His face became suspicious. ‘A policeman was here about that this morning.’

‘I wanted to check up on it.’

‘What for?’

‘When I delivered the chair, I signed a receipt. They said I collected it from you. But I didn’t.’

He walked over to a filing cabinet against the wall and pulled open the top drawer. He took out a file and flicked through it. ‘We have a slip for everything that’s collected or delivered. Here we are. It’s just a note saying, “Docket retrieved for Ms Falkner”.’

‘When?’

‘That would be yesterday.’

‘I don’t understand. Who wrote it?’

He examined it more closely. ‘Looks like my writing.’

‘So was it me who collected the docket?’

‘That’s what it says here.’

‘But can’t you remember the woman who collected it?’

‘What I mainly do is sort out deliveries. Twenty, thirty, forty a day. That’s why I need the pieces of paper.’

‘But why did you let someone take a piece of paper away just like that?’

‘Because it wasn’t important. The receipts for documents go upstairs and we keep those. This is just office stuff, you know, pens, photocopying fluid. Every couple of months we chuck it out.’

‘So anyone could have walked in off the street, asked for the docket and you would have given it to them?’

He looked back down at the file. ‘It says Ms Falkner here.’

‘Yes, but…’ I stopped. I’d realized the futility of pushing it any further.

Eight hours later, or thereabouts, I was drunk. In the afternoon I had phoned Gwen and Mary, left messages and assumed they were busy, out of town or understandably sick of hearing from me. Of hearing about me. Of even knowing I existed. But later in the afternoon, Gwen rang and said that the two of them were taking me out. I had that infallible sixth sense when you know that people have been talking about you and making arrangements for you without your knowledge. I told her it was very kind of her but it was a Monday night and they had lives to lead. Gwen said that was nonsense. I had to put a dress on and they would pick me up at eight.

They took me to a new Spanish bar in Camden Town where we ate tapas with little glasses of dry sherry, then had more tapas and more sherry, and then we got into a discussion about what our favourite drink was. Someone said a dry martini and Mary said it should be served with a twist of lemon peel and Gwen said it should be with an olive. So we had one with the lemon followed by one with the olive. I was given the casting vote as to which was the winner, so I chose the lemon peel and we had to have another of those to celebrate.

It was at that point, as I was taking a delicate sip of my third dry martini, that Gwen asked how I was. Even in my alcoholic stupor, I realized that this was what the whole evening had been leading up to. My messages on their mobiles must have sounded terrifyingly abject and they had clearly decided something needed to be done.

‘I’m all right,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Mary. ‘This is us.’

I thought for a moment and I – or perhaps it was the gin on my behalf – saw things with a new clarity.

‘I am, really,’ I said. ‘In a way. There was something wrong with me, but now it’s different. It’s the things around me. I know you’re getting tired of Widow Falkner and her endless tales of woe, so I’ll give you the short version.’

Well, fairly short. I told them the events of the previous days in as compressed a way as I could manage. At the end of it, Mary and Gwen exchanged an alarmed, confused glance. I drained my glass. ‘I mean, what would be the point of giving the police an alibi that I knew wasn’t true, then removing the evidence before they could check it? I mean, what’s the point of that? How would you explain it?’

There was a pause.

‘There must have been a mix-up of some kind,’ said Gwen.

I was now having to concentrate very hard to speak, let alone think. ‘I keep trying to think of logical explanations,’ I said, ‘but all I come up with are illogical ones. For example, I thought that maybe one of you went down there to check whether the alibi was right, found it wasn’t and took it away to protect me. But you wouldn’t do that, would you?’

‘Of course not,’ said Mary.

‘We should have had margaritas,’ said Gwen. ‘Martinis are too dangerous.’

‘You can’t have margaritas here,’ I said. ‘Margaritas are Mexican. They’d be offended.’

‘But martinis are even foreigner,’ said Mary. ‘More foreign.’

We came out of the bar as it was closing and the cold air seemed to clear my head immediately. I hugged my friends and thanked them.

‘You don’t think the police will arrest you, do you?’ Gwen said. ‘They can’t. Not really.’

I pulled my coat tightly around me to protect me from the wind whistling up Camden High Street. Suddenly things came into focus.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure if it all fits together. If suddenly I was found dead and it looked as if I’d killed myself, it would be good enough. A grief-stricken widow, a guilty murderer who felt the net closing over her and couldn’t take the pressure any more. They would be able to close the files on three cases at the same time. If the pieces didn’t quite fit, if it didn’t make complete sense, well, life’s messy, isn’t it? But it would be good enough for the police.’

‘Ellie,’ said Gwen, horrified, ‘you mustn’t say that.’

I saw a taxi and raised my arm to hail it. ‘But if anything happens to me,’ I said, ‘you’ll remember I said it, won’t you?’

I went to bed exhausted, but my nerves were jangling, my mind racing and I knew that sleep was impossible. I tried every trick I could think of to make my brain forget about trying to go to sleep so that it could just go to sleep. I relaxed, I concentrated, I mimicked a supposedly sleep-like regular breathing, eyes closed. I opened them, stared into the darkness and said to myself, That’s what blind people see. I tried to think of something boring, I tried to think of something interesting. I began to wonder how I had ever managed to fall asleep in the past. How can you manage an action that isn’t an action, but instead just a letting-go? I became obsessed with the idea that you can never observe yourself going to sleep, in the same way – I supposed – that you can never experience yourself dying. So I began to think that there must be an earlier falling-asleep you do before you fall asleep, like the pre-med before an operation, so that you don’t observe yourself falling asleep. But you’re not conscious of that either, so that must be preceded by another, and another, so that actually it’s impossible ever to fall asleep.

As a deranged way of trying to tire myself out and force myself into unconsciousness, I went for a journey in my head, as if thinking about something was as tiring as doing it. I walked out of the house, turned left, then left again and went down to the canal, past Camden Lock through Primrose Hill, then out into Regent’s Park, along Euston Road and back through Somers Town, Camden Town and towards home. It was like a feverish dream, except that I was awake and in control of it.

At first I tried to imagine it as a simple walk through the city but then I had the impression I was being chased, but I couldn’t see who was behind me, couldn’t tell whether I was being pursued by one person or many, or even whether it was a person or a thing. I just had the feeling that people were out there and that they were hostile to me. Suddenly, overwhelmingly, I knew that on my imaginary trek I wasn’t being hunted. I was looking for something, following something and I realized it was you. I wasn’t just looking for you but I started talking to you and I wondered whether it made any sense for me to talk to you, whether you existed outside my mind and the minds of people who knew you. Was some remnant of you somewhere in some darker dark than the dark in which I was lying? If I didn’t believe you were out there somewhere – and I didn’t, not really – it didn’t make sense for me here, in the dark, to talk to you, and you were ‘him’ again, Greg, a thing, something past and gone.

Suddenly the temptation to yield not only to sleep but to death felt irresistible, leaving the harsh noises and bright lights, the jabs, pains and torments of life for the absence, for the nothingness, to join you, to be with you, or at least to share nothingness with you. For a time, as I lay there, listening to sounds from outside, watching the beams of headlights crossing the ceiling, I felt that anyone who killed me would be doing me a favour.

I lay in bed, peacefully, stolidly awake, for what must have been hours, waiting for the curtain edges to grow light, and then I realized that the shortest day of the year had only just passed and that daylight was still far away. I fumbled for my watch on the bedside table, knocking a lamp over. It was just after five. I got out of the bed, pulled on jeans, a shirt, a sweater, a thicker sweater on top of that, walking boots, then a bulky jacket of the kind you might wear on a trawler and a woolly hat. I left the house and started to walk, not as I had in my waking dream but northwards.

Remember in the summer when we walked out on Hampstead Heath late at night? It was so warm that we had been in T-shirts and it was never entirely dark. From the top of Kite Hill we watched the glow in the sky over in the far east of London, and the office blocks of the City and Canary Wharf glowed wastefully even after midnight. We saw shadows and silhouettes around us, but we didn’t feel threatened by them. They were out walking like us, or even, some of them, sleeping under the stars, by choice or necessity.

As I walked up Kentish Town Road I saw a few other pedestrians, stragglers from last night or early birds heading for work. There were taxis and delivery vans and cars, because the traffic never stops, barely even slackens. But once I turned on to the Heath, I felt as safe as we had felt in the summer. It was too dark and cold even for criminals or mad people, except mad people like me who were just looking for one of the few places in London where you could escape. I walked up the hill so that I could look over the lights of London, distant and abstract and glittering, as if I was flying above it. I went further up the hill and to the right, and walked deeper into the Heath on paths lit only by the moon, finding my way by memory on routes I had taken dozens of times before. The early-morning air felt fierce and good on my cheeks.

Finally I found myself surrounded by the dim skeleton shapes of oak trees. I stopped and listened. There wasn’t even the hum of traffic that you hear everywhere else in the city. I was in the centre of London and yet I was in an ancient forest as old as England. I looked up at the branches. Were they standing out more clearly as the sky turned from black to grey? Was the dawn coming? Sometimes on these winter mornings you couldn’t tell.

I started to talk to you, not because I thought you were somehow present, not in the wind that was shifting the branches, but because it was a place we had been together and that had somehow become a part of us. I told you the story of my life since you had gone away. I told you about my strange behaviour, my madness, my distrust of you and then my belief in you. How it had been so hard, such an effort, how I had wanted to give up.

There was a sudden breath of wind that shifted the branches above me and I wondered what you would have said if you had been there, whether you would have teased me or got cross or said something encouraging, or just put your arms around me and said nothing. Then I told you about the strange things that had happened, the disappearing evidence. I know what you would have said about that. You always wanted to know how things worked. When you didn’t know, you found out. Even once when we had been to the Hampstead fair, you had got into conversation with a sinister tattooed man who ran one of the merry-go-rounds and he had shown you the gears and the machinery underneath. And as I told you all that I realized I had to know, even if I died at the moment I knew. It didn’t matter, as long as I knew, as long as I could tell you.

I looked up at the branches. Yes, they really were standing out more sharply against the greying sky.

Chapter Thirty-one

I sat on the sofa in Fergus’s living room. Jemma had left the house for the first time since Ruby’s birth to go a few hundred yards down the road for a cup of coffee with a friend, but leaving enough instructions for a week’s absence, and I had come round with croissants and freshly squeezed orange juice for Fergus. There were Babygros over the radiators, congratulation cards and flowers on every surface, and a buggy in the corner. Ruby’s Moses basket lay at my feet, with its downy snuggle of crocheted blankets, but I held Ruby on my lap, her soft head on the crook of my arm, her little bag of body slumped against me. Her eyes were closed and her lips puffed slightly with each sleeping breath she took. I needed to look at her puckered old-woman’s face, smell her musky breath, feel how her hand gripped my middle finger firmly, as if she knew she could trust me.

We had talked about broken nights, miniature nails, eye colour, stork marks, the shape of her nose, the shell of her ear and upturn of her nose.

‘Who does she look like?’ asked Fergus.

‘Not you,’ I said, staring at her features. ‘But she’s got Jemma’s nose and mouth.’

‘Everyone says that.’

‘Maybe your chin,’ I said doubtfully, because he seemed to want me to spot a resemblance.

‘No. She’s got Jemma’s father’s chin,’ he said.

I smiled at him: dear Fergus, Greg’s best friend, father of my goddaughter. ‘This was what I needed,’ I said.

‘Are you all right, Ellie? You seem – I don’t know – very thoughtful. A bit subdued.’

‘I don’t mean to. I’m fine, Fergus. Weary. I didn’t sleep very well. Actually, I came round to tell you that I think I’m going away for a while. I’ve been a bit mad, haven’t I? I feel more peaceful now.’

‘Do you?’

‘I think so. The stages of grief.’

‘If there’s anything I can do…’

‘You already have.’

‘What a ghastly time this has been for you.’

I smiled at him and looked down at the baby in my arms. ‘There’s been one light in all the darkness. A new life among the deaths.’

It would soon be dark again. So much darkness and so little light. I went to Gwen’s house and she let me in. Daniel was there, too, wearing Gwen’s stripy apron and covered in flour. ‘He’s decided to make pasta,’ said Gwen, proudly.

He led the way into the kitchen. There was flour on the floor, the work surfaces and the table. Bowls sticky with dough were piled in the sink and clothes-hangers draped with long strips of gunk hung from the backs of chairs. Two large pans of water were boiling on the hob, filling the room with steam.

‘Do you want to eat it with us?’ Gwen asked.

‘I don’t think so. I’m sure it’ll be delicious.’

‘Have a cup of tea at least.’

‘One cup and then I must go.’

‘Busy?’

‘Busy in my head.’

Daniel picked up one sagging strip of pasta dough and dropped it into the boiling water.

‘Are you using your car at the moment, Gwen?’

‘Not that I know of. I never use it if I can help it. It stands there from one week to the next. I’m thinking of selling it.’

‘If she does need it, she can use mine instead,’ said Daniel, hurling another strip into the pan and jumping back as water splashed over the rim. ‘This isn’t looking quite the way I imagined it would. They’re disintegrating.’

‘Can I borrow it? I’m insured to drive any car. I was thinking of going away.’

‘Where to?’

‘I don’t know. Just for a few days.’

‘But it’s Christmas.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Don’t go away on your own. Come and stay here, Ellie.’ Gwen seemed close to tears.

‘That’s really lovely of you but I need to go right away. Not for long. I’m sure you understand.’

‘As long as you know that there’s always…’

‘I do know. I’ve always known.’

‘Of course you can take the car. Take it now.’

‘Really?’

‘No problem.’

‘I’ll be very careful of it.’

I drove Gwen’s car home and parked it outside the gate, then let myself into the house. It was so empty, so silent, so cheerless. I wandered from room to room, picking up objects and putting them down again, running my finger along shelves to collect dust. Perhaps I would move. After I came back from wherever I was going, I would put the house on the market.

I came to a halt in the chilly living room where I closed the curtains. I decided I’d light a fire to brighten it up. The basket already contained pieces of kindling and some tightly screwed up pieces of paper. We’d got into the habit of doing it with used envelopes, letters we didn’t need, scraps of paper. Greg used to talk about identity theft and that it was better than buying a shredder.

I collected a bag of coal from my work shed, then set to work, although I’d rarely lit a fire before – that had always been Greg’s task. I made meals, he made fires. I laid several of the homemade fire-lighters in the grate, then arranged kindling in a wigwam over the top before striking a match and holding the flame against one of the twists of paper. It caught quickly on the dry kindling and I immediately felt the comforting warmth on my face. I sat cross-legged in front of the fire and began to toss the little screwed-up pieces into the flames and watched as they were consumed. Some I unrolled and read. Articles in six-month-old newspapers seem more interesting when you’re about to throw them on the fire. Mostly there were useless old envelopes and letters offering to lend us money or telling us we’d won some in a competition. It struck me that these were the last traces of Greg’s ordinary daily life that were left in the house, the rubbish that surrounds all of us. I was about to toss another into the flames when something caught my eye.

It was just a fragment of handwriting scrawled on the edge of the paper but it looked familiar and I couldn’t think why. I untwisted the paper and smoothed it out.

It had the office letterhead – Foreman and Manning Accountants – but above that, in her flamboyant calligraphy, was written: ‘I’ll ring you about this – Milena Livingstone.’ And underneath the letterhead, in a different ink, a name was written over and over again. Marjorie Sutton, Marjorie Sutton, Marjorie Sutton… About twenty signatures running down the page.

I sat on the floor and held the paper in both hands, staring at it. What did it mean? The message was in Milena’s handwriting. There was no doubt about that. After my days in the office, I knew it as well as my own. And it was on a piece of paper from Greg’s office with Milena’s name on it. It was the thing I had been looking for all this time, the connection. And I was more confused than ever. Why was Marjorie Sutton’s name written on it over and over again? And what was it doing here?

I tried to remember. I thought so hard it hurt. I looked at one of the newspapers. It was from the day that Greg had died. Yes, that was it. These were the scraps from the tidying I had done that day, just before the knock on the door, before my life changed. The connection between Greg and Milena had been in my hands on the day he had died, before I knew, perhaps while he was still alive. Before I had heard of Marjorie Sutton, before I had heard of Milena, or had known her handwriting. I looked down at the crumpled sheet of paper. Suddenly it seemed fragile, as if it might crumble away and the connection would be lost for ever.

I found her number and dialled it. She seemed confused to hear from me again. She said she had told me everything she remembered.

‘Did you know a woman called Milena Livingstone?’

‘No,’ she said firmly.

‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘You might have forgotten.’

‘It’s a funny, foreign sort of name,’ she said. ‘I would have remembered it.’

I described the piece of paper I’d found. ‘Were they your signatures?’

‘I don’t see the importance of this,’ she said, with a touch of impatience. I felt as if I was talking to a small child whose attention was wavering.

‘I think it’s very important,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take the paper to the police. They may want to ask you about it.’

‘I certainly didn’t sign any piece of paper in that way.’

‘What exactly do Greg’s company… I mean Foreman and Manning, what do they do for you?’

‘I’m not sure that’s your concern,’ she said.

‘I suppose they do your accounts.’

‘Since my husband died…’ she began.

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘It was twelve years ago, thirteen almost. They handle the money side of things for me, the things my husband used to look after. I couldn’t do it myself.’

‘But there’s something about that piece of paper,’ I said. ‘It must have been connected with why Greg wanted to see you.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.

‘But have you had any trouble with the firm? Have they behaved strangely in some way? Were you having problems with them? Had you complained?’

‘No, I hadn’t. Really, Ms Falkner, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘But there must be something,’ I said, in desperation. ‘I’ve found this piece of paper, Greg wanted to see you urgently, just at the time he died. You must try to think.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I can’t help you any more.’

‘But don’t you see –’ I realized the line was dead. I couldn’t believe it. She’d actually hung up on me.

Almost in a dream, I walked through to the kitchen. I laid the paper on the table. I boiled the kettle, made coffee and stared at it as if it was a mathematical problem that would yield an answer if I thought about it hard enough. Those signatures. I was sure I’d seen something like it before, but I couldn’t think where. It was like a fragment of a story and I tried to piece it together. I’ll ring you about this. Milena Livingstone. You? Greg? Milena calls Greg? Greg calls Marjorie Sutton? Had he seen something in the note that I couldn’t? Had Milena told him something?

I looked at the coffee mug. It was empty. I refilled it. It didn’t matter now. I would take it to Ramsay. Finally it was the connection I’d been looking for. The professionals could deal with it. I found an old envelope and slipped the piece of paper inside. I put the envelope into my shoulder bag. As I was pulling on my jacket, the doorbell rang. It was Joe. I must have looked almost comically puzzled. He smiled.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I was worried about you,’ he said.

‘Everybody’s worried about me. I’m fine.’

‘One of our clients phoned the office. She’s in a state. She said a woman had been ringing her and asking her strange questions.’

‘Marjorie Sutton. But you don’t need to concern yourself about me,’ I said, pulling the door shut behind me and walking towards Gwen’s car. ‘I was on my way out.’

‘The way that woman was talking, I thought you might be having some sort of breakdown. You can’t go disturbing old ladies like that.’

‘There are things I need to know.’

‘What things?’

I unlocked the car door. ‘I can’t talk,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to go. One of my regular visits to the police.’

‘Do you want me to come with you?’

‘No, I don’t,’ I said, and then stopped myself. ‘No, thank you.’

‘Could you at least drop me at a station? I let my cab go.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘So long as you behave yourself.’

As I drove off, I half expected to feel Joe’s hand on my knee.

‘What are you seeing them about?’

I told him about the piece of paper and where I’d found it.

‘Isn’t that just a scrap of paper?’ he said.

‘It’s a scrap of paper from Greg’s work with Milena Livingstone’s handwriting on it.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But it feels like the thing I’ve been looking for.’

We drove for a couple of minutes in silence and then I thought, He’ll suggest going somewhere else. We continued in silence for several minutes.

‘I could drop you over there.’

‘It’s probably nothing, but why not come back to the office? We could look through Mrs Sutton’s file and see if your piece of paper refers to anything.’

‘All right.’

‘It’s not too far out of your way,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘At least you’d know,’ he said.

‘That’s all I want.’

I felt, almost for the first time, in the midst of all the fog and all the darkness, that I was seeing with clarity. The office was no good to him. If he suggested something else, I’d know. We stopped at some traffic-lights.

‘There’s a short-cut ahead,’ he said. ‘I’ll direct you.’

‘All right.’

‘Turn left along there.’

I started the car, and as it moved forward, it jerked and stalled.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I haven’t done that since I was seventeen.’

‘I could drive for you,’ he said.

‘I’m fine.’

I drove as if hypnotized, as if someone else was doing the driving and I was just getting a ride and looking around in curiosity. I saw people walking on the pavement and it seemed to me that they were different from me, as if I was a visitor from another world, shortly to depart. I glanced at Joe, who was also glancing around. He rubbed his face. He looked tired. In fact, he looked worn out. Why hadn’t I seen that before? I had been so busy looking in the wrong direction. I wasn’t afraid. I felt a sense of peace. I wanted to know and after that nothing mattered.

‘You just turn left ahead. The second on the left.’

It’s funny. Wherever you are in London, however busy it is, you’re just a minute or two from somewhere desolate and abandoned. One day it’ll all be turned into bijou apartments, but not yet. A left and a right and we were among some abandoned office buildings. I saw a sign, almost eradicated by graffiti, for a carpet factory. There was another warehouse building at the end. And there were no cars in sight, and no pedestrians.

‘Bloody hell,’ Joe said. ‘It’s a cul-de-sac. I got it wrong. You’ll need to turn round. You’d better pull in here.’

‘Some short-cut,’ I said, as I stopped the car.

This was it. This was where it had all been heading. All roads meet here. All stories end here. Now I felt Joe’s hand on the nape of my neck, soft, caressing. ‘This reminds me of Porton Way,’ I said.

‘What’s that?’

‘You know. Where Greg was killed.’

‘I don’t.’

And now I remembered where I’d seen those signatures.

‘I used to play a game when I was little,’ I said. ‘My friend and me, writing each other’s names, copying each other’s signature. You could do a lot with Marjorie Sutton’s signature. I guess she’s not someone who checks her accounts very thoroughly. It was you, wasn’t it?’

Joe looked at me stonily. I could feel his hand, hardly more than his fingertips, brushing the back of my neck.

‘The thing about Milena,’ I said, ‘is she had a nose for weakness, for something she could use. She saw it, picked it up, and when you dropped her for Frances, she used it. No wonder you wanted to clear out my house for me. You needed to find it. You must have been frantic. And when Frances guessed – as she must have done, or why would you have killed her? – was it easier the third time?’

Joe stared at me, but didn’t speak.

‘I just wanted to know,’ I said.

‘So now you do,’ he said quietly.

‘So this is what it’s going to be?’ I said. ‘Poor Ellie. Couldn’t take it. Couldn’t live without her husband. There’s just one thing.’

‘What’s that?’ said Joe.

‘I don’t care,’ I said, and I pushed the accelerator to the floor so that the rubber on the tyres screamed and the car leaped forward. No stalling this time. I heard a shout but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I was in a dream anyway, in the car with this man whom Greg had trusted and loved until he hadn’t trusted him any more. Forty miles an hour. Then fifty. Then sixty. We were running out of road.

I heard a scream and I didn’t know whether it was Joe’s scream of terror or something inside my head or the tyres against the rough road, and I had a moment to remember that this was Gwen’s car I was destroying, and then it wasn’t fast and loud and violent, but slow, silent, peaceful. And it was no longer winter, a day pinched by darkness and ice; it was warm. A summer afternoon, fresh, soft and clean, the kind that’s like a blessing, full of blossom and birdsong. There he was at last – oh, I had waited so long – walking towards me over the grass and such a smile on his face, his dear, familiar face. The smile he gave only to me. How I’ve missed you, I said, I wanted to say. How badly I’ve missed you. And I wanted to say, Have I done well? Do I make you proud? And I love you, how I love you. I will never stop loving you.

He held me in his arms at last, wrapped me in his solid warmth. And at last I could close my eyes and rest because I had reached the end and come home.

Chapter Thirty-two

It didn’t feel good to be dead, not the way it should have done. There were bits of me that hurt and bits of me that felt sticky and bits that were bent in different directions and there was something over my face and there was an insistent electric noise that went on and on and wouldn’t stop. Everything was dim and far away and becoming dimmer. I felt something from outside and there were presences close to me and hands on me, voices. I was being roughly handled. Didn’t they know I was fragile? That I was broken inside? I tried to protest that I wanted to be left alone so I could sleep, but something was forced into my mouth and I couldn’t speak. I felt cold air on my skin and then I was inside once more and I felt jostling. Something was shouted in my ear that I couldn’t recognize, and then I did recognize it. It was my name. How did they know? And then I sank without fear or regret into darkness. Not sleep but a state of non-being with no dreams, no thoughts.

I didn’t wake up from that nothingness. I gradually found myself in an existence of feverish semi-sleep in which I sometimes saw faces around me, flickering and unsteady, like candle flames. Some were familiar: Mary, Fergus, Gwen. I tried to say sorry about her car but my mouth was full and the words wouldn’t come. Once my eyes opened to see a policeman looming over me. It took an effort to put a name to the face. Ramsay. At first I wasn’t sure if he was real. I mumbled things to him and when he had gone I couldn’t remember what I had said.

The sign of my gradual return to life, to reality, was that I started to hurt in almost every part of my body. In that period when I could still barely tell night from day, sleep from wakefulness, a doctor came and sat by my bed and talked to me slowly and patiently. He talked about fractures and rib damage and a punctured spleen and operations and about gradual recovery and patience and determination. When he had finished he paused as if he was waiting for me to ask some question. It took an enormous effort.

‘Joe,’ I said.

‘What?’ said the doctor.

‘In the car,’ I said.

His expression changed to one of professional sadness. He started talking about how they had tried to revive him and how, unfortunately, they hadn’t succeeded and how they had been waiting until I was strong enough to bear the shock.

One morning I felt for the first time that I was really waking up and that I wasn’t stuck somewhere on the brink of unconsciousness. Over by the window a man was standing, looking out. I could only see his silhouette against the brightness of the sky. When he turned and I saw that it was Silvio, I was so surprised it made me feel dizzy and tired.

‘It’s an amazing view.’

‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

He walked over to the bed. ‘I brought you flowers but they didn’t let me bring them in. They think they’re some kind of risk. I don’t know whether it’s because they spread disease or the nurses don’t want them around. Or maybe they just want to take them home themselves.’

‘Thanks for the thought.’

‘I gave them away and then I went round the corner and bought some blueberries and strawberries. I don’t know if you like that sort of thing.’

‘I do.’

‘I’ll put them on something.’ He lifted the cover off a plate on the table by my bed. ‘What’s this?’

‘I think it’s my lunch.’

‘Grey sludge.’

‘There’s some fish under it.’

I felt the weight of him on the bed as he sat on the edge and offered me the blueberries. I took a couple, put them into my mouth and chewed, feeling them burst against my tongue. ‘Lovely,’ I said.

‘Healthy,’ said Silvio. ‘Someone told me that if you have a handful of them every day, you’ll never get cancer. Or anything else.’

‘Can you give me some water?’ I said. ‘There’s a jug over there.’

He poured it into a plastic cup. I took a couple of sips. It was warm and tasted stale. I drank it all anyway and handed the cup back to Silvio.

‘Do you know everything?’ said Silvio.

‘I don’t know anything.’

‘But you know about the guy in the car with you?’

‘He died.’

‘The police said you were lucky to survive. It was in the papers. I saw a photo of the car. I don’t know how you walked out of that one.’

‘I didn’t walk out of it. How did you find out where I was?’

‘I just did what you’ve been doing,’ said Silvio. ‘Detective work.’

‘I didn’t do any detective work,’ I said. ‘Mainly I found out things by mistake.’

‘You’re like one of those women scientists.’

‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘I’ve been studying history of science at school. There are these women scientists, they do all the research and the important experiments and at the end the guys come in and make the final discovery and get all the credit.’

‘What discovery?’

‘You’ve been going around stirring everything up, causing trouble.’

‘You could say that. What about you?’

‘Me?’

‘Are you all right?’

He looked embarrassed; he flushed and turned to stare at the view again. ‘Yeah. I guess.’

‘I’m sorry about everything.’

‘Thanks,’ he muttered.

‘Have a blueberry.’

He popped several into his mouth. One split on his lip, leaving a dark stain. He looked about ten, angry, ashamed and full of confusion. Milena had certainly left her mark on the world she’d left behind.

Detective Chief Inspector Ramsay came to see me one more time. ‘You were lucky to survive that crash,’ he said.

‘So I’ve heard.’

‘You were wearing a seatbelt,’ he said, ‘but Mr Foreman wasn’t. I suppose there’s a moral there.’

‘I’m glad there’s one somewhere. So, is the inquiry over?’

‘More or less.’

I forced myself to think. My mind felt so slow. ‘He must have had help,’ I said. ‘Who collected the docket from the firm of solicitors? The woman who said she was me. It was Tania, wasn’t it?’

‘We’ve interviewed Miss Lucas.’

‘Did she confess?’

‘Confess?’ said Ramsay. ‘She admitted carrying out certain tasks on his behalf.’

‘Criminal tasks.’

‘She claims she had no suspicion of anything criminal.’

‘She was pretending to be me.’

‘She said that must have been a misunderstanding.’

‘Bollocks,’ I said. ‘They were sleeping together, you know.’

Ramsay coughed. ‘I’ve no evidence of that,’ he said, ‘not that it would be relevant. Except possibly to show she was in thrall to him.’

‘In thrall?’ I said. ‘You mean she’s a weak woman? So she’s not to be charged with being an accomplice to murder, interfering with the course of justice?’

‘We’ve got a file but we’re not sure there’s a reasonable chance of a conviction.’

‘What about the company?’

‘It’s currently in administration, pending investigation of certain irregularities.’

‘You mean Joe was stealing from his clients. That he was up to his neck in it.’

‘That has been suggested,’ said Ramsay.

‘And presumably Tania knew nothing about that either.’

Ramsay shrugged instead of replying. That was his reply.

‘I suppose at least you accept that Joe killed Frances.’

‘Yes, we do. We’re assuming that Mrs Shaw knew, or at least suspected, what he had done and was going to expose him.’

‘That makes sense,’ I said, remembering Frances’s agitation, the sense of guilt, how close she had come to confessing to me. If she had, she wouldn’t have been dead now. ‘She was clearly troubled.’

For a minute Ramsay stared at me gloomily, then turned to the window. A dishevelled pigeon was sitting on the other side of the glass, its beady eyes glaring in.

‘What about the deaths of Milena and Greg?’ I asked. ‘Do you also accept Joe killed them?’

‘We’ve reopened the file.’

‘You don’t sound very grateful to me.’

‘Your role in the investigation has been mixed,’ said Ramsay, ‘but at an appropriate time…’

‘Is that what you meant when you said the inquiry wasn’t completely over?’

‘Did I?’

‘More or less, you said.’

He paused, seeming shifty, ill-at-ease.

‘When this accident happened, or shortly before,’ he said, ‘you had developed suspicions of Mr Foreman’s role in the case.’

I suddenly felt under threat. ‘How do you mean?’

‘What I’m trying to say, Ms Falkner,’ said Ramsay, in a deliberate tone, as if he was speaking to a child, ‘is that I’m working under the assumption that you had suspicions of Mr Foreman and then he realized you had these suspicions and that there was some sort of struggle while you were driving. Perhaps he tried to seize the wheel. And you crashed. Accidentally.’

I thought for a moment. ‘I don’t remember,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember anything about the accident. It’s a blank. Is that all right?’

‘Yes,’ said DI Ramsay. ‘That’ll do.’

Chapter Thirty-three

I walked to Fergus’s house with the box in both hands. It was early, a soft dawn breaking over the rooftops. Even here, in the streets of London, birds were singing all around me. At that time of the morning the volume seemed to have been turned up. I could see the blackbird on the branch of a tree, its throat pulsing.

Fergus was waiting. He opened the door before I knocked and stepped out to join me, kissing me on both cheeks and giving me a small smile.

‘Ready?’ I asked.

‘Ready.’

We didn’t talk. After twenty minutes or so we left the road and entered the Heath, making our way along the empty paths to the wilderness. We could no longer see the city glittering in the pale sunlight, or hear the noise of cars. I remembered that other dawn when I had walked there: then it had been winter, and I had come alone to talk to Greg. Standing under the boughs of an oak tree, I turned to Fergus.

‘It began like this,’ I said. ‘The alarm went and he woke and reached over to my side of the bed to turn it off, then he kissed me on the mouth and he said, “Good morning, gorgeous, did you have nice dreams?” and I muttered something thickly in reply but he couldn’t make out the words. He got out of bed and pulled on his dressing-gown, leaving me still tangled up with sleep. He went downstairs and made us both a cup of tea, and he brought mine upstairs in my stripy mug – which was what he always did, every morning. He watched me struggle up to sitting, half laughing at me. Then he had a quick shower. He sang in the shower, loudly, humming where he couldn’t remember the words. It was “ The Long and Winding Road”.

‘Mornings were always a bit of a rush and that morning was no different. He put on his clothes, brushed his teeth, didn’t bother shaving, then went downstairs, where I joined him, still not dressed. He didn’t have time for a proper breakfast. He bustled around, making coffee, reading out snippets from the headlines, finding a folder he needed. Then the post arrived. We heard it clatter on to the floor and he went to get it. He opened it standing up, tossing junkmail on to the table. He opened the envelope containing Marjorie Sutton’s signatures or, rather, Joe’s practice versions of them. He read Milena Livingstone’s scrawled message. He didn’t understand what he was looking at but he was puzzled. He tossed the sheet of paper on to the table, along with the rest of the discarded post, because he was late and in a hurry. The last time I saw him, he had a piece of slightly burnt toast in his mouth and he was running out of the door, keys in one hand, briefcase in the other.

‘He drove to work and got there by about nine. He made himself and Tania a pot of coffee, then went through his post and his emails, which he answered. Joe wasn’t there – he’d left a message with Tania that he was going to see a client. Then you arrived, to help with the new software that was being installed. Greg sat on his desk, swinging his legs, and talked to you about the IVF treatment I was going to have. He said he was sure it would turn out all right in the end. He was always the optimist, wasn’t he? Then he had a meeting with one of his clients, Angela Crewe, who wanted to set up a trust fund for her grandchild. After that, he made five phone calls, then another pot of coffee and ate two shortbread biscuits, which were his favourite. He kept them in the biscuit tin with the sunflowers on the lid.

‘He went out to lunch with you at the little Italian place round the corner from the office, and he ate spaghetti with clams, which he didn’t finish, and drank a glass of tap water, because he had just decided that bottled water was immoral. He probably told you that.’

‘Yes, he did,’ said Fergus.

‘You also talked about running, compared times. You went back to work and he went into his office and shut the door. The phone rang and it was Milena. She asked if he had received the page of signatures in the post and he replied that he had. She said she was sure that an intelligent man like him must have grasped its implications and Greg responded sharply that he didn’t deal in suspicions and implications and put down the phone.’

‘Is this all true?’ asked Fergus.

It was starting to rain and the drops felt cold and good on my face.

‘Most of it,’ I said. ‘Some of it’s the sort of thing that must have happened. The rest of it is what I tell myself in the middle of the night.

‘After he had put the phone down on Milena he sat for a while, pondering. Then he went into Joe’s office to ask him about it, but Joe still wasn’t there and he wasn’t answering his mobile. So instead he called up Marjorie Sutton’s files and went through them carefully. After he’d done that he rang her and made an appointment to see her the following day. He said it was urgent.

‘He was going to go home after that. He’d promised me that we’d have a proper evening together. I was going to make risotto and he was going to buy a good bottle of red wine. We would make love and then have a meal together. But as he was preparing to leave the phone rang and it was Joe, saying something odd had just happened concerning Marjorie Sutton and they needed to talk. Greg was relieved to get the call: in spite of himself, he’d been worried about those signatures. He told Joe he’d been trying to reach him about the same subject, but perhaps they could do it the next day. He had a date with his wife. Joe insisted. He said it wouldn’t take long, could Greg pick him up at King’s Cross?

‘Greg rang me. He said, “Ellie, I know I said I’d be home early, but I’m going to be a bit delayed. I’m really sorry.”

‘And I said, “Fuck, Greg, you promised.”

‘And he replied, “I know, I know, but something’s come up.”

‘And I said, “Something always comes up.”

“‘I’ll explain later,” he said. “I can’t talk now, Ell.”

‘And I should have asked him if everything was all right, and I should have told him to take care, and that it didn’t matter if he was late, and I should have said I loved him very, very much. Or no, no, that’s not it, that’s not it at all. I should have told him to come home at once, to cancel whatever arrangement he had made. I should have shouted and insisted and said I was upset and I needed him. I could have done. I nearly did. A whole other story unwinds from that, the story that never happens and which I’ll never get to tell, which is about a long life and happiness. Instead, I said goodbye rather coldly and slammed the phone down, and that was the last time I heard his voice, except on my answering-machine. And sometimes I wake at night and think he’s talking to me. He’s saying, “Good morning, gorgeous, did you have nice dreams?”

‘You heard the argument, anyway, or at least his end, because you came into his office halfway through. He put down the phone and turned to you, saying I was a bit pissed off with him, and you told him you were sure it would blow over.

‘When he was alone again, he sat back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. I don’t know that, but I can see him doing it. I see exactly the way his head was tipped, the small muscle clenching and unclenching in his jaw. He closed his eyes and thought of me feeling downcast about not getting pregnant, and suddenly his irritation seeped away and he simply felt tender. So he sent me a text. “Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry. Im a stupid fool.”

‘He stood up. He put on his jacket. He put his head round Tania’s door and said he’d see her tomorrow. He waved at you as he went. He ran down the stairs two at a time, the way he always did. He got into the car and drove to King’s Cross. Five minutes, and he’d drive home and barely be late.

‘He pulled up and Joe opened the passenger door and climbed in, carrying a bag. He said there was something he needed to show Greg. Of course Greg knew he could trust Joe. He loved Joe, after all, looked up to him and often turned to him for advice. In many ways, Joe was the father figure Greg had never really had. So Greg innocently followed Joe’s instructions and they drove east, towards Stratford, towards Porton Way. He would never have suspected anything was wrong. Why should he? How could he have done? In the boot of the car, Milena Livingstone lay bundled up and dead.

‘Greg drove Joe to the disused wasteland. It was dark and cold and there was no one around. He kept asking Joe what this was all about, but he wasn’t anxious, just a bit puzzled and slightly amused by the hush-hush air of it all. Joe, being Joe, would have come up with something plausible as they drove along, lots of details. It didn’t matter. It would never be checked. Just so long as it kept Greg from becoming suspicious.

‘Greg stopped the car when Joe told him to. He looked out of the window, to where Joe pointed. He didn’t see… what was it? A spanner? Maybe one of the tools from the boot of the car? It’s the sort of thing that’s called a blunt object. It caught him just above his eyebrow, once and then again. He didn’t know that Joe was his murderer – oh, Fergus, I hope he didn’t know, and that the last few seconds of his life were not utter confusion and terror. No. He didn’t. I know he didn’t. Joe’s aim was good and death came quickly.

‘Joe drove to the spot where he had hidden Milena. He lifted her body into the passenger seat. He undid Greg’s seatbelt. He pulled off the handbrake, and because the car was facing downhill, it didn’t take much effort to push it a few feet until it picked up speed, careered off the bend and over the drop. He watched it hurtle to the bottom. Then Joe – who was crying by now, fat tears running down his face because he was always a great sentimentalist, Joe was, and he did love Greg, in his own fashion – Joe clambered down the hillside, slipping and sliding as he went, and he set fire to the car and then he stood back while the flames consumed his partner, his beloved partner and friend. He was probably still crying. No, he wasn’t. He didn’t have time to cry. He had to get away before the fire attracted attention. The plan worked perfectly. He left two corpses, total strangers lying together like lovers.

‘The question is, did he walk away? That sounds a bit awkward to me. It would have been better to drive.’

‘What in?’ said Fergus. ‘He’d set fire to the car.’

‘Someone must have picked him up.’

‘Who?’

‘Tania, of course. But she says she doesn’t know anything about it. And, anyway, she was in thrall to him. That’s what the police think. Apparently that makes it all right.’

I hadn’t been looking at Fergus while I spoke, but now I turned to him. A single tear was running down his cheek. I reached up and, with the tip of my finger, wiped it away.

I prised the lid off the box and we crouched under the oak tree and, very slowly, I tipped the box until Greg’s ashes flowed over the rim and on to the green grass. We didn’t move, but Fergus held out his hand and I gripped it.

You were my best friend, you were my dear heart, my love. A small breeze stirred the pile. Soon it would be scattered by the wind and rain. It wouldn’t take long.

Fergus wanted to walk me home but I told him that today I preferred to be alone. Sometimes being alone is not so lonely as being with other people and, anyway, my heart was full of memories of happiness.

I walked back slowly through the beautiful blue morning, the sun on the nape of my neck, the air soft and warm. People flowed past me on their own journeys. When I unlocked my front door and stepped into the little hall, I almost called out that I was home. I went into the kitchen and stood in the silence that lay all around me. While I was waiting for the kettle to boil, I stepped into the sun-filled garden. I tipped my head back, closed my eyes and saw your face, the smile that was meant only for me. When I opened my eyes again, I noticed that a young blackbird was lying dead on the grass just a few feet away, beneath the old rosebush. I went into the house and collected an empty shoebox. Then I lifted the bird, with its damp body and yellow beak, into it and closed the lid.

I didn’t want to throw it into the bin for the dustmen to collect, so I dug a hole in the soil and put in the miniature coffin, then scraped the earth over it until you wouldn’t have known anything was there. But I knew, and although it was only a bird, I sank to my knees, put my head in my hands and cried bitterly, because it had sung so beautifully through the winter months and now it was gone. Then I stood up, wiped the earth from my hands, went back inside, and still you were not there.