Fearful Symmetry (16 page)

CHAPTER
20

A
NDREW
’
S
GP
TURNED
out not to believe in miracle cures.

‘But look, I’m practically mobile. And pain-free, well, almost. It’s two days since the acupuncture. I’ve had acupuncture for it.’

‘Yes, I know, you said,’ the doctor replied.

‘But I’ve got to get back to work. You just have to declare me physically fit. Please. I promise I’ll be careful.’

‘Physically fit? Sorry, no can do. Could you chase a suspect? Make a difficult arrest?’

‘Well, no, but I hardly ever have to.’ Andrew knew the argument was lost.

‘Give it until next week. There’s been substantial tissue damage and it needs time. Be as active as you can without being silly. All right?’

Actually he was getting on quite fast at home, even managing to keep up the momentum, such as it was, in the Bevan enquiry. But they were so desperate for a lead now that they were chasing up and interviewing people with the most tenuous of connections to the dead woman. One of the last things he had done before his back went was to interview the deputy editor of a national newspaper who had a weekend flat in Camden Crescent. Yes, he had admitted, he brought his aged cat with him from London for the weekend although the lease forbade it. ‘He’s an old cat. He can’t be left in London all on his own.’ How had he felt, Andrew asked, when Miss Bevan had written to the Residents’ Association about it? The silver-haired man had turned on him a look of such friendly intelligence that he had hardly needed to go on to say that he wished he did have the time to get worked up about a petty complaint from a provincial harridan whom he had never, to his knowledge, actually met. ‘But next time I bring Andreas, I’ll be sure to take his collar off before I let him out. Thanks for the tip-off,’ he said, winking. As he left he had given Andrew a pitying look, which conveyed that he understood that Andrew was scraping the bottom of the barrel in the hope of progress.

Part of him was in no hurry to get back to work and confront the Giraldi case, about which he was being kept informed. He had already extricated himself from the front line of the investigation on the grounds that he was too close to those involved, but it was still painful to know that Jim might find himself up on a manslaughter charge. The enquiry was only just starting and it would be some months down the line, if he knew anything about the speed of progress within the CPS, but it was bad enough. Adele’s death was in one sense a tragic accident, but if a case could be made that Jim as an employer had failed to maintain a safe workplace then that case would have to be answered.

It was Friday now; by this afternoon it would be forty-eight hours since he had seen Sara. Yesterday she had not answered his call. He had wanted to tell her himself about Adele, but more than that he had simply wanted, since he could not see her, to hear her voice.

P
LAYING CELLO
to Herve’s percussion had begun to feel to Sara like a habitual row between two people who, having abandoned long ago any thought of winning the argument, carry on squabbling all the same. Only occasionally did she catch glimpses of the Herve she had first found attractive and it was only those slight smiles or the sight of his face in repose that kept her faith. Where the music itself was concerned she was braver about expressing her opinions. This seemed to be having no effect whatsoever on how the work was shaping up, she was beginning to realise, as she persevered to manifest meaning out of the new sketches and notions that Herve continued to deliver.

After bunking off on Wednesday she had intended to work especially hard on Thursday, partly to convince herself that her enthusiasm had been renewed after her little break, but mainly to dislodge thoughts of Andrew. It had not helped that she had had to confess to losing two sheets of music, but Herve had been surprisingly sanguine about it and had simply written the notes out for her again and handed the sheets to her at the end of their rehearsal. For the rest of the day back at Medlar Cottage she sulked over the music, defying it to say something to her. She switched off her answering machine, let the phone ring and went to bed early and depressed.

By Friday morning she woke up acknowledging two things: failure—nothing in Herve’s music could renew enthusiasm that had never been there in the first place, and a craven need for Andrew—the sound of his voice, the sight and the feel of him. She got through the morning’s rehearsal by focusing on the coming afternoon when the first of her agonies, Herve and his music, would be over for another week. For the Andrew problem she had no solution and felt the bleakness of the coming weekend, the forlornest time of all for women in love with married men. At one o’clock she drew her bow for the last time over the bottom string with the depressing creaking noise that Herve wanted. It would have been the moment, working with any other partner, to suggest a friendly bite of lunch together somewhere, but from Herve she had no desire for anything but escape. Leaving him brooding over the prospect of solitary tinned soup, she walked down Lansdown into town. At the crossroads where Lansdown and Broad Street met the Paragon and George Street, her miserable self-absorption was suddenly obliterated by the street vendor’s board carrying the
Bath Chronicle
headline.

‘I’
M AFRAID
it is true. I tried to ring you yesterday. How did you hear?’

‘I saw it on a billboard. I had to find out from the bloody
paper,
Andrew! You should’ve told me.’

Andrew was taking Sara’s distraught call from his small music room, where the desk opposite the piano had been cleared temporarily of its usual covering of cello music to make way for police files.

‘You should’ve answered your phone. I did try. Look, Sara, I’d like to tell you more. And I’ve got to see you. You go back home now and I’ll come straight over.’

S
ARA OPENED
the door to Andrew and was immediately enveloped in his arms.

‘Accident. Horrible, I know, but what else could it be?’ he said.

Sara shook her head. She couldn’t see what, but the arbitrary pointlessness of it was just unacceptable. She led him to the kitchen and began to put an unwanted lunch together, attempting to disguise the odd combination of grief and half-crazed lust under a veneer of domestic competence. She remembered a time, months ago, when she and Andrew had sat here and watched each other’s mouths pulling and nibbling on the translucent shells and soft pink flesh of langoustines, and she wanted to scream. Instead, she took several deep breaths and tried to concentrate on slicing the bread straight, wishing that Andrew would stop looking at her as if he were thinking about the langoustines, too.

‘Leaking gas, followed by a match,’ he was saying. ‘After the blast, a fire started. Looks like she was lighting a cigarette. Do you really want to hear all this?’

Her eyes were filling with tears. She didn’t want to hear it. Nor would her mind accept the hideous coincidence, as the
Bath Chronicle
had reported it, of Jim’s being away on the very day of a fatal gas leak. Usually he got Adele started on her work in the workshop himself before going to the shop. Ordinarily he would have been there and it would never have happened. She shook her head again.

‘Sorry. It’s messy, horrible,’ Andrew said. He guided her to a stool at the kitchen table and sat down opposite.

‘Poor, poor Adele. All because of a cigarette. I wonder she didn’t smell the gas.’

‘I gather it might not have made any difference. I’m getting the picture that autism might involve difficulty in processing sensory information. Even if the autistic person is aware of something like a smell, they may not process it as information that implies something else: danger from a naked flame, in this case. The significance of the smell wouldn’t be understood, so it wouldn’t affect Adele’s behaviour. She went through the same routine every morning at the workshop, according to Jim. Shut the door, checked the work on the table, then washed the coffee mug, put the coffee in, lit the ciggie, filled the kettle, switched it on, when it boiled made the coffee. Only yesterday, we know what happened when she lit the match. I don’t know whether it’s hard to understand, or horribly easy.’

‘What about the gas leak? How could the workshop suddenly become so dangerous? She was working there the day before, wasn’t she?’

‘That’s the truly awful part. There was no leak, nothing faulty. It was some old gas cooker Jim’s got down there. You know how Adele fiddles with switches and dials? Jim said she’d never shown the slightest interest in the cooker, so he’d never thought of it as a danger. She’d obviously turned one of the dials on the afternoon before, the very afternoon Jim wasn’t there. Gas leaked into the room all night.’

‘Obviously?’

‘Nobody else was in the workshop that day, only Adele. Jim was in his shop until five and he went straight on from there to Salisbury for an auction the next day. And what’s even unluckier is that if Adele had left more than one dial switched on, there wouldn’t have been an explosion.’

Seeing Sara’s mystified face, he went on, ‘The cooker was taken away for examination. It wasn’t faulty, so that’s in Jim’s favour at least. They discovered that just one tap had been left open. The dials were so damaged it was impossible to tell from the front. Gas only explodes when it’s mixed in a proportion with air of between five and nine percent. Less than that and there isn’t enough gas, any more and there isn’t enough oxygen for combustion. The gas burners were standard, that’s to say they emitted gas at a rate of 11.6 cubic feet of gas per hour.’

‘So the volume of the room has to be—I suppose you know that?’

‘Of course. It’s—wait, I’ve got it written down.’ Andrew pulled from an inside pocket a much scribbled-on piece of paper and unfolded it onto the table.

‘Twelve by fifteen by seven. Feet, that is. That makes a total volume of 1,260 cubic feet, so there had to be between 63 and 113 cubic feet of gas. Given that, she could only have left the burner half on, emitting, say, about 5.75 cubic feet of gas per hour. It would take between about eleven and twenty hours to produce the quantity that would explode. So the dial could have been left on as early as half past one on the Wednesday afternoon. Or any time after that, before she left at four o’clock.’

‘You mean if it had been full on, the room would have been too full of gas to explode?’

Andrew nodded. ‘I’ve checked all the arithmetic myself.’

Sara put down the sandwich from which she had taken one bite. ‘That’s the day I went to Helene to find my music. To think, while we were chatting away, a few doors away Adele was fiddling with the cooker and gas was starting to fill the room. And we didn’t know. Oh, no! Do you think—do you think if I hadn’t been there, Helene would have popped along to see her? Or would Adele have come back for lunch? If I hadn’t been there, do you think—’

‘No,’ Andrew said firmly. He took her hand and brought it down from her face, gently stroking the wrist. ‘Adele always did a full day uninterrupted. She took her lunch with her. She liked it, it was simpler and gave her less locking up and getting herself back and forth. And it freed up Helene’s day too, of course. Wednesday was a perfectly normal day.’

Sara accepted this silently. About Adele there seemed to be no more to say, since there was no redeeming shred of consolation in the awful facts that either could offer the other. In the silence of the kitchen Sara cleared their plates away. Andrew watched her. The quiet of the house and the long afternoon stretched out, offering them their forbidden, longed-for possibilities. Sara wondered whether she should turn from the sink and say something but she couldn’t bear to. And what, anyway? Anything would sound banal. Andrew was behind her now, his hands round her waist. She turned to face him, saw that his face was serious, intent, in a hurry. They were both breathing too fast for speech and in any case, everything had been said. Everything was clear and beautifully simple. Wasn’t it?

‘Wait. Wait,’ Sara said, pulling away. ‘She couldn’t have left a gas burner on. She couldn’t.’

‘What do you mean?’ Andrew’s hands dropped to his sides.

‘The clocks and dials. Remember the clock in Helene’s drawing room? Have you ever noticed it’s always at six o’clock? Because Adele fiddles with it, because she likes the hands symmetrical. Don’t you see? Adele just
wouldn’t
turn on a single gas dial.’

Andrew did not disguise his exasperation. ‘Christ, Sara,’ he said through his teeth. ‘Stop this! This was an
accident
—’

‘And you said it was awful luck Jim wasn’t there.’ Sara’s voice rose wildly. ‘So someone else could have been there. Someone else could have done it!’

Andrew grabbed her by the shoulders and stopped her mouth abruptly by kissing her. ‘Shut up. Shut up and listen,’ he murmured eventually, both arms still wrapped tightly round her. She began to cry softly. ‘Listen. Pointless, unpredictable things happen. They happen. I see quite a lot of them. I know you can’t bear that. I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to find reasons for me, because you want me to clean up every case with some elegant resolution, so you can think I’m brilliant and that life won’t sometimes be hideous. Even if you have to invent ludicrous theories to do it. Isn’t that what you’re doing?’

‘No, I don’t think so. Oh, I don’t know. Maybe. Perhaps I am.’

‘But you must stop, d’you hear? This thing does have to be accepted. And look, I know acceptance is hard, especially for you, especially since Matteo. But you’ll drive yourself mad if you don’t, because these things can happen. Oh, Sara, I do love you.’

With a burst of elation Sara kissed him, drawing her breath in sharply but not loudly enough to drown out the sudden imperious knocking and plaintive ‘Sara? Sara? Hello, your door is open, you are where, Sara?’ from the hall.

Five seconds. Five lousy seconds were all they had in which to spring apart and fix smiles of welcome on nonchalant faces before Herve appeared in the doorway of the kitchen with a small suitcase in his hand.