Remember Me This Way (8 page)

Same deal on the train, though my view through the connecting doors was less direct, heads and bodies in the way. I stayed on my feet, close to the doors, checking at each station. When she finally got out, a long twenty-five minutes later, I found myself in a depressing low-level station, miles out in the suburbs. Had it been the Midwest, tumbleweed would have been bowling along the platform, but we only had crisp packets and Aldi plastic bags. I wish I had written down its name. It’s a sign of its tedious anonymity that I can’t bring it to mind. Of course I could look it up, but at this stage I don’t care. Boxland? Moxton Eastfield? Gone.

Two boys in their early twenties and cheap suits, breathing beer fumes, alighted with me and I walked just behind them. She left the station, a flimsy construction made of cheap bricks and pretend pillars, and crossed the road towards a row of prefab houses. At the end – the boys still ahead of me, shirt tails dangling under their jackets – she took a left into an identical street. The boys went right, laughing, one of them leaping up to try and hit a street light. She glanced over her shoulder at that, her face lit by an orange glow, and I slunk back into the shadows and waited.

She kept walking for a bit, and I stayed behind my privet hedge. I wasn’t sure what to do. I’d seen enough, but curiosity, the thrill of the chase I suppose, still flickered in my limbs. She stopped halfway along, rummaged in her bag for her keys, and went into a house. I gave her time to take her coat off, clean her teeth, make a cup of tea, and then I slipped along the road on the other side to see where she lived.

Deal-breaker, I’m afraid. Even if Boxland or Moxton Eastfield had revealed untold delights – a Michelin-starred restaurant, say – I could never be happy with someone who had chosen a house like that. Ugly aluminium windows blocked by grubby net curtains, an elaborate front porch that wouldn’t have looked out of place at Versailles, an area for off-street parking that seemed to have been paved in shiny square bathroom tiles. Disappointing. But probably just as well. Not worth breaking in to check the interior. Sufficient danger signs – the job,
The Economist
, the clothes. If the property and its location had been tempting, I might have slipped up. I’m going to tinker with my profile. Probably best to find someone
without
a degree, narrow the field. I yearn for sweetness, I realise, not sassiness. I don’t need to be patronised. People with university degrees – medical or otherwise – think they know everything. Often they don’t have a clue.

I didn’t feel guilty following ‘Cathy’. If you agree to meet a stranger, what do you expect? It probably would have given her a thrill if she’d known I was out there.

I would never have imagined her living in a house like that. But of course the thing with people is, you never can tell.

Chapter Five

Lizzie

‘I’d take a dead body over vomit any day. I’m not being funny. Last night, I was called to an incident at the Taj Mahal – some clever clogs had bitten off his mate’s ear – and I was taking down statements when this young lad leaned forward and puked over my shoes. I was almost sick myself. You know that thing? That other-people’s-vomit gag reflex? My mum said I had it bad even as a child.’

PC Hannah Morrow, my Family Liaison Officer, is sitting at my kitchen table. There’s a cup of tea next to her, but she hasn’t had a chance to drink it yet. She hunches her shoulders and tightens her grip on her stomach to illustrate the horror of the experience.

Jane, stilettoed feet on the bars of my chair, says, ‘I think I’d be better with puke than a corpse.’

‘Honestly? I’d rather have neither.’

They’ve been here for at least an hour, talking away like this. I’m like a ghost. I’m hardly here.

It was past eight when I got back, already dark. Jane was waiting outside the house, pacing up and down to keep warm. Hannah arrived shortly after. I wanted her here because she might be an unofficial social worker (we have that in common), but as a policewoman she has resources. I figured she would help.

But now she is talking. This chatter – it’s been her way from the beginning, from that night she knocked on the door. She was only twenty-five then. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her. The inanities about what she had eaten that day, what her mum had said or thought, made me want to scream at first. I thought it was stupidity. Now, a year on, a year in which she has bought her own flat and lost five pounds and bobbed her hair, I understand what she’s doing. It’s a coping strategy. She is letting the mood in the room settle.

Her boss, DI Perivale, gave a talk on Internet safety at school last month and I told him how brilliant I thought Morrow was, how calm and constant even when other people were falling apart. He said something sniffy about how young officers are often better at ‘doing an agony’ than officers with more experience. ‘Doing an agony’: the phrase stayed with me.

Tonight she was off duty, but she still came. ‘Are you kidding?’ she said. ‘I was bored out of my skull. Nothing on but
Antiques Roadshow
. It was either you or a phone call to my nan.’

‘Was the ear salvageable?’ Jane has leaned across to rest her hand on my knee. She is wearing a 1950s prom dress and fishnet tights. I expect she’s supposed to be somewhere else. She gives my knee a squeeze to show I’m not forgotten.

‘The waiter wrapped it in a packet of Birds Eye peas. It never occurred to me you’d find Birds Eye peas in an Indian. Matar paneer I suppose. Anyway, off to A & E and Bob’s your uncle.’ Hannah unwraps her arms and takes a long gulp of her tea. She slaps the mug back on the table. ‘Surprising amount of blood actually. Not as much as the head injury inflicted by a frozen turkey I was called out to witness on Christmas Eve. But more than you’d imagine. Real blood, I should add. Not red paint.’

She gives me a conspiratorial smile and my gaze reverts to my lap. I am suddenly overwhelmed by tiredness, and it’s as if the compressed afternoon has suddenly expanded beyond reason, so that it could be days, rather than mere hours, since I told Jane, to her audible alarm, that I was coming straight back, placating her by promising to pull over and call her every thirty minutes; days, rather than just an hour, since I first sat shaking in this kitchen while Hannah, who had the police in Cornwall check over the studio, attempted to calm me with their verdict. Paint, not blood, on the walls. Possibly a break-in, although in the absence of anything that could be reported as stolen . . .

I look down wearily. I’m still wearing my mother’s skirt. It’s filthy, covered in grass stains and muddy paw marks. I try to think when I got them. Was it from laying the flowers at the tree, or from charging down the hill earlier today? I unpick a shred of bramble tangled in the jersey at my shoulder. Under it is Zach’s shirt. The one with the stain. I should try again to get it out. I’m wearing wellies, too. Did I drive back in them? How did I change gears? Or brake? It’s the sort of thing Hannah might pick me up on. I don’t want her to get cross. Not now.

Jane says, ‘I wish you had let me come and get you.’

I shake my head.

She leans over and, with a small, contrite smile, rubs the side of my face with two of her fingers. It must be red lipstick from her earlier kiss. I take a deep breath and look around the kitchen. My breakfast things from yesterday are still in the sink. Crumbs litter the worktop. I haven’t been looking after any of this – this room, this house – since Zach died. The woodwork is grubby and peeling. Brown splatters next to the bin show where a teabag has hit the wall. I’ll have to clear up.

‘You both think I’m mad.’

‘No,’ Hannah says. She is watching me carefully.

‘But I do think Zach’s still alive.’ I try to talk calmly. Howard is at my feet, idly scratching. The MacBook is on the table. ‘Why would his laptop be at Gulls? And other things were missing. His Hunter boots. I found them at Sand Martin. They were in the rack.’

‘Sand Martin?’ Hannah says.

‘I don’t know how they got there. The last time we were in Cornwall together, they were at Gulls, so it means something. I’ll work it out. But that’s not the important thing. Other stuff too. Things had gone. Clothes, a bag, a torch, money that was kept tucked away for emergencies, a picture, I think. I can’t be sure about that.’

‘And you searched the house properly?’ Hannah asks. Leaning back in her chair, she rests her knees on the edge of the table. ‘It’s a long time since you were down there.’

‘The police thought the studio had been broken into,’ Jane adds. ‘Gulls has been empty for a year—’

‘No, but wait. There were flowers already at the tree, lilies. Someone else had left them there. This SUV, a silver one; I kept seeing it everywhere.’ I shake my head, try and clear it. ‘Maybe that’s irrelevant.’

I’m not doing this right. I have to go carefully or they’ll get it wrong. They won’t understand.

To give myself time, I get up, take my boot out of Howard’s mouth, and open the door. The garden is thick with shadows and windy. I watch Howard disappear into the complicated gloom of the bushes. When I find my chair again, I sit up straighter than before. A muscle in my leg starts shaking. ‘I wrote him a letter,’ I say. ‘And when I got there, it was opened. He’d read it.’

‘What letter?’ Jane says.

‘What did you write?’ Hannah asks.

‘We’d been going through a tricky patch, you know, with me not getting pregnant, and Zach . . . I had been finding Zach a bit . . . possessive. I wrote things perhaps I shouldn’t have. I said I wanted to separate.’

Each word creates a new catch in my throat. I cough and then I try to laugh. I rub at an old mug ring on the table, and when I am doing that, Jane puts her hand on mine and holds it. Her nail polish is pale grey, like a nun’s habit.

‘Have you got the letter with you?’ Hannah asks lightly.

‘No. I burned it.’ I don’t look at her. ‘The one thing I was grateful for was that he hadn’t read it before he died. But he had, you see. He must have reached Gulls earlier than he said. He must have been there. You see? He reached the bungalow – that’s how his laptop got there – and he read the letter. He was so angry, he broke up the studio.’ I turn to Jane. ‘It was in pieces, Jane. And OK, not blood – but paint on the walls. Like someone had gone wild in there. But then he must have pulled himself together. He lied to me on the phone. He left me a private message on a painting.’

‘On a painting?’

‘A “private” message?’ Hannah adds. ‘You mean in code?’

‘In charcoal. He’d drawn himself setting off on a new life without me. He knew I’d see it. He knew I’d understand what it meant. And then he locked up the house . . . And then he . . .’

There is an expression on Jane’s face, like it’s being tugged. Her eyes are full and her cheeks have flushed. I look across at Hannah and her lips look funny, twisted. Jane’s taken her hand away from mine and is holding it across her mouth. Her eyes are full of alarm. Neither of them says anything.

‘So you see,’ I say again.

Hannah nods very slightly. ‘He read the letter and was devastated. He drank too much to drown his sorrows. And then he set off towards London. It explains the direction of travel. He hadn’t doubled back. He was driving home to confront you, a bit angry, a bit too fast. Maybe . . .’

Jane takes her hand away. ‘Oh, poor Zach. He—’

‘NO,’ I shriek. ‘I know what you are about to say. He didn’t kill himself. It wasn’t suicide. He wasn’t in the car. It wasn’t
him
.’

Jane pushes her chair back and crouches next to where I am sitting. She puts her arms around me. I’ve started crying properly now.

‘No body,’ I say. ‘There wasn’t a body.’

‘But there was,’ Jane says. ‘Sweetie, there was.’

‘No. No.’

Hannah stands up too. I’m aware of her moving around the kitchen. She opens the back door. She must have let Howard in, because he noses around at my feet, rests his face on my knee. His beard is wet and grainy. I hear the kettle being filled. Eventually, Hannah sits back at the table, and puts the teapot down.

‘We didn’t need to do a DNA test, did we? Listen, Lizzie. That’s because we were sure, weren’t we? His mobile phone was in the car. There was CCTV footage of him getting petrol earlier in the afternoon. You told us he was in the car that night. We only authorise a test when there is doubt. And there was no room for doubt.’

I think about her coming to the door. The questions she said she had to ask, standing there with her neat ponytail, her clean uniform. Who did the car belong to? Did I know who was driving? Was I sure? I know now she was seeking proof, confirmation. But her words died in the air. I put my hands out to stop them from coming. She held out a CCTV picture of Zach taken at a service station. ‘Is this him?’ I crumpled it up, tried to push her out of the door.

I blow my nose. Jane dips her head to check I am all right. She pushes her chair a bit closer to mine.

The funeral was at Putney Vale crematorium. The car crawled along the grid of roads between the graves. It poured with rain. We were late – the next lot were already there, milling in black outside the chapel. Flowers heaped. Half-empty pews. Peggy and Rob, a few artists from the studio where Zach worked. The smell of sandalwood, the swish of a polyester curtain. The coffin seemed so lightly borne. His pitiful remains were so easily shouldered. It was a willow casket, but it might have been a child in there.

‘Who was in the car, Lizzie? If it wasn’t Zach, who was it?’ Jane is talking very quietly.

‘Teeth and bones,’ I say brutally. ‘Not even bones. Fragments.’

‘Somebody,’ Hannah says, ‘was in that car, Lizzie.’

‘I think he faked the accident. I don’t know how. It was thick fog. A fireball. He was clever, so much cleverer than me. He would work it out.’

Jane moves away from me very slightly. ‘Are you saying he killed someone?’

‘No. Of course not.’ My mind is racing now. ‘He might have lent the car to someone and when they had that terrible crash, he grasped the opportunity. He was like that. He was always taking risks. He had this thing about being different, about breaking the mould. There are precedents, aren’t there? Those people who used the Twin Towers as an opportunity to start new lives?’