Lie With Me (26 page)

‘I didn’t do it – you know that. It was almost definitely Alice’s caretaker, Artan.’

‘My question,’ he continued as if I hadn’t spoken, ‘regards your whereabouts during the hours when the creature had its throat cut. To be precise, the trip you took to the Helladic Settlement at Okarta.’

I said, ‘I don’t see why this is a police matter.’

‘Enjoyable, was it?’

‘Yes.’

He leant back, tucking his shirt into his trousers. ‘It amazes me, Mr Morris, that you found so much to interest you at the Helladic Settlement, since the site is temporarily closed for renovation.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Alice said.

My eyes felt dry and my tongue swollen.

‘I did go,’ I said. ‘I did see the ruins. There was no one in the ticket office to pay; I thought that was a bit odd. But I got in and walked around OK.’

‘And you got the bus?’

I nodded.

‘How fortunate you were to find “a bus” going into the interior of the island. Unusual.’

‘My mother used to say I had the luck of the devil.’ I looked at him and he looked at me. His eyes were narrowed. ‘So if that’s it. I might go and have a shower.’

I stood up, without waiting for an answer, and began to walk casually across the terrace towards the bedroom door. As soon as I had my back to him, I felt a desire to run, a sort of explosive panic in my feet. I was ready for the sound of footsteps, for the winding thud of Gavras’s body, for the twist of my arm. But there was nothing. The squeak of my shoes. The cockerel in the distance. Cicadas.

I spent the rest of the afternoon playing the role of model boyfriend. I attended the barbecue, turning and basting the chargrilled meat, my eyes filled with smoke, my hands scalded by tiny splatters of oil, without complaint. I served up, and I cleared away. I charged people’s drinks. I found fresh ice. The sun broke through the clouds and reminded us we were on holiday. The builders hadn’t yet returned and the peace was like a gift. Pigeons coo’ed and swallows swooped, darts across the pool. There were jokes and laughter. Someone swam – small splashes, sharp intakes of breath, sighs of pleasure. Normally, I’d have slept after lunch, but today I kept myself alert to other people’s needs. Tina forgot her paints and I went back up to the house to collect them. Yvonne was hot in the sun and I moved her lounger to the shade. Frank and Archie needed a third to play a card game called ‘Cheat’ and I was the first to volunteer.

We played at the table under the gazebo, next to a plant with big trumpet-like white flowers and dark pink centres, yellow stamens. The petals were dropping on the ground, where they lay crinkled like tissues. I won the game – the best cheat there, it turned out – and afterwards the boys leapt into the pool. Alice was sitting on a chair next to Yvonne’s lounger and she smiled across at me. ‘Thanks,’ she mouthed, wrinkling her nose. One of the flowers had flopped on to the table. I picked it up and stroked it across my lips. It was soft and velvety, and smelt like almonds. It felt like promise, like sex, like hope.

I wasn’t worried about Gavras – not now he’d left. They were small lies I’d told; what mattered now was Alice. I’d tell her the truth later, as soon as we were alone. The sort of mistakes I’d made, the kind that were natural to me in the past, I wouldn’t make again. Not now I was with her. Small lies, small errors of judgement – they added up. It was better to be truthful, to be honest, to take care of other people. Take Florrie. Poor dead Florrie. I should have known she was vulnerable; I should have picked up on the danger of it. She had loved me – I could hear her voice whispering it in my ear; feel her lips on my neck, remember pushing my tongue into her mouth, my body against hers. But I had gone to London and left her. That letter, screwed up. Phone calls I didn’t return. I should have been kinder.

I gazed across again at Alice, hoping to catch her eye again, to convey how I felt. I was different now, I’d turned a corner, all because of her. But she was leaning back stiffly in her chair, her lids closed. Yvonne basically ignored or snapped at her. Nothing was ever right with Yvonne – the meat was burned, the wine too warm, Karl was telling a story she’d heard too many times before. She was sour and strangely resentful, and someone like me might find that suspicious, but Alice stayed by her side, stuck with her. That was the definition of goodness, of kindness. And I would learn from it. Maybe I’d confess about Florrie, explain my guilt. And what else? Artan and Daisy? Should I divulge what I saw? Or should I keep my promise? What was the right thing, the most honest thing? Oh God, it was a minefield. The selfish response to events was so much more straightforward than the morally correct.

‘Dropping off, are we?’

I must have closed my eyes for an instant, and Andrew was leering down at me.

‘No. Thinking.’

‘Planning your next book?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Nice work if you can get it.’ He slapped me on the shoulder before heading for the steps. ‘Got some calls to make,’ he said loudly.

‘But it’s Saturday,’ Tina said. ‘I thought now you were partner . . .’

‘No rest for the wicked.’

Of course I ruined it by drinking too much. I don’t know what happened. I think the lamb at lunch was too salty and I downed one too many beers or glasses of wine to compensate. Perhaps that was the problem – I was mixing. Or perhaps it was the stress of the day, the shopping trip, and the efforts to impress. I was aware of dusk falling, and the lights flicking from the house, the steps up to the terrace rickety and uneven, the shrubs closing in on me as I climbed. I was aware of Andrew enjoying every minute. ‘Oopsadaisy,’ he said as I stumbled. I tried to make a joke. ‘Oops your own Daisy,’ I tried to say, but I don’t think it came out right.

A hand under my am, plates clattering, conversation louder and then quiet. The dark bedroom. The cool of the pillow against my face. My head was full of Florrie, and of Jasmine, of dead girls and missing girls, of certainty and uncertainty. My head began to pound and I felt a dread that was like sediment blocking the flow of my blood.

When Alice came in, I pulled her down. ‘Lie with me.’

Her body moved close, swellings and dips.

‘I’m sorry, Alice,’ I murmured.

‘You just called me Florrie.’

‘What did I do? What did I do wrong?’

I was half drugged, but I remember her mouth on mine.

Chapter Eighteen

The workers had been creeping closer. The following morning they started in the copse just beyond the swimming pool. The jack-hammer destroying what was left of the wall woke everyone up. ‘Ignore it,’ Alice said in my ear. Her breath was damp and hot. A wrench of the sheet as she turned away. ‘It’s the only thing to do. Keep on as usual.’

The sun was out, the sky a clear new blue, the world dried out, soil-cracking hot. Yesterday had been dull and then patchy. But this was the kind of heat that we’d come for – the kind of heat we deserved. Alice got up and went down to the pool, hoping to shame the builders into stopping, and I followed her. Artan was cleaning out the filter. I remember his cap stuffed in the back pocket of his jeans, the back of his head, the scraping noise. Andrew and Tina came down the steps, and Tina asked after my head. ‘I’ve got some aspirin up at the house,’ she said. ‘You should drink lots of water.’

Andrew sneered. ‘Bit late for that.’

Daisy arrived soon after, and peeled off her sundress, her slim body olive-brown. Artan watched her as she arranged herself on a towel. I remember that. And I remember thinking she knew he was watching and feeling mildly turned on by that, and also guilty, as if there was something I still had to do. Was Phoebe already with us? Details at this point matter. Yes. I remember stepping past her to reach an empty sunbed. I remember noticing the bleach of her hair against her dark roots, and the deliberate attempt she made, seeing me, to cover herself with a towel.

I don’t remember the exact moment the construction stopped. It had been off and on all morning. I don’t remember a shout, the alarm first being raised. If I had heard it, I would have assumed a problem with the machinery. Possibly distant shouting filtered through into my consciousness. I was still fuzzy from the booze. I expect when the noise stopped, I sank with relief into the silence.

On the sunbed, the world was still – that’s the impression I have, thinking back. Alice, lying on her front – her head turned to one side, a rigidity in her neck, the hand that held a book trailing on the ground. The laced pattern of the pool reflected on the underside of an umbrella. Gnats in the grass. Olive leaves silver in the sun. A hornet low and dangerous across the pool, a gurgle from the water filter.

But then the voices changed and grew louder – an urgency in them, an alarm. Shouts like bullets. The sound of a car bumping up the field. The roar of a motorbike. Footsteps running. Boots on cracked vegetation, getting closer. I remember sitting up and seeing, through slowly clearing eyes, Gavras. Right there. In the scrub just below the pool, in the dappled shade of the low trees. Muscles bulging below his shirt sleeves. Too dark to see his face, but an arrow in his head – no, a twig caught in his hair, at an angle. Gavras took a few steps forward, out of the shadow, up the slope. There was something ghastly about his expression. Did he mouth something to Alice? I’m still not sure.

Things I remember next: a violent clatter as Andrew’s sunbed jack-knifed. Alice running towards Gavras, and then away again back towards me, stumbling, stubbing her toe, her face stretched. Tina, throwing her dress on back to front and saying, ‘What is it?’ and Phoebe and Daisy wrapping themselves in towels and standing by the barbecue, and Andrew bent double, the tips of his shoulders pink with sunburn, scrabbling on the ground under the collapsed lounger for his phone. I remember seeing Artan talking quickly, in a language I didn’t recognise, to one of the labourers, and Gavras shouting into his phone in Greek.

But most of all, I remember Alice’s voice, over and over again: ‘They’ve found her. They’ve found her.’

I was extraordinarily calm. I felt like a bystander, a witness. Gavras put the phone back in his pocket and pushed his palms out at us, gesturing for us to go up to the house. I righted Andrew’s sunbed and picked up his phone. I rescued a towel that was dipping into the pool. And I put my arm around Alice’s shoulders and forced her up the path after the others. She was limping. Her toe was bleeding. She left smears of blood on each step. I made her sit on a chair while I washed it. I took her foot in my hand and inspected the loose flap of skin on one side of the toe and once I had stemmed the flow, I wrapped it tightly in some toilet paper. The blood soon began to seep through.

Louis, huge and ungainly in a pair of pyjama bottoms, came out of his bedroom. ‘What’s happening?’

Alice said: ‘It’s something to do with Jasmine.’

Tina shook her head. ‘We don’t know that.’

I looked up from Alice’s small, bleeding foot. ‘We don’t know anything,’ I said.

No one came for hours. We huddled on the terrace, like actors in an Agatha Christie novel, waiting to be told what to do. Andrew, changed into beige chinos and a pale pink Fred Perry, went down to the pool to find out ‘what the hell was going on’ and was sent back. Gavras had asked permission to use the house for access and he had given it. ‘That’s all right, Alice, isn’t it?’ She nodded. Tina brought out some cold lamb chops, left over from the day before, and some tomatoes. Nobody ate. I cracked open a beer and then, watched by the others, wished I hadn’t.

Archie and Frank walked down to the end of the drive and said the lane was blocked with police cars. They had stretched tape across the gate. ‘It can’t be another dog,’ Frank said. ‘They didn’t bother with tape for Paul’s dog.’

‘The dog Paul murdered,’ Phoebe added.

‘It wasn’t my dog,’ I said. ‘It had nothing to do with me.’

‘We should ring Yvonne,’ Alice kept saying. Her foot was still up on a chair, the blood-stained paper unravelling. She didn’t notice. I reaffixed it whenever I could get near her. ‘Just in case. She’d want to know.’

‘We shouldn’t.’ Andrew shook his head, and then nodded a few times, watching to check she understood.

‘It’s the way he nodded at me,’ Alice said. ‘I can’t get it out of my head.’

She buried her face in her arms and rested them, crossed, on the table. Every few seconds her body convulsed in a silent shudder.

‘They might not have found anything. It might just be that one of the workers has been injured,’ Tina said. ‘Broken his leg or something. An industrial accident. They’d send for the police if it was serious. If machinery was involved. If it was the company’s fault.’

‘It’s Jasmine,’ Alice said, lifting her head. ‘I know it is.’

Shadows shortened and then began to lengthen. The three boys had gone into the house and were playing on the Xbox. Tina was clearing up in the kitchen. Phoebe and Daisy had retired to my fag seat and were watching something on an iPad. Alice and Andrew were sitting, side by side, staring at the sea. I was pretending to read my book.

A middle-aged man in a blue suit came round the side of the house, holding a briefcase, walked straight past, and descended the path down to the pool. Two younger women in white overalls followed a few minutes later, carrying heavy bags full of equipment. One of them nodded, but neither of them spoke. A few minutes later, the older man in the blue suit returned and stood on the edge of the terrace with his back to us, making a phone call. His suit jacket was cheap and too tight – the central seam was beginning to pull away.

Alice lifted her head. ‘I wish we could speak Greek,’ she said.

‘How does he know we don’t speak Greek?’ Andrew said. ‘How does he know we don’t understand every word?’

‘It’s just so
rude
. Treating us like we don’t
count
.’

I was looking at her while she spoke so I saw it on her face: the precise moment they came up the path. I saw her eyes darken, the hollows in her cheeks sink, the colour in her lips drain away.