Summer Lies Bleeding (11 page)

In the weeks that followed she spent every waking moment reading about 7/7 in newspapers, online forums, television documentaries; gobbling up every bit of information she could lay her hands on in an attempt to find a pattern, a reason out of the chaos of that morning. She wrote down the numbers of the carriages of the stricken tube train, the time the bomb exploded, the date. She asked her father to send her a copy of his PhD thesis in which he had analysed the number and frequency of bombs that were dropped on Cologne on one night in 1942, the infamous 1000 bomber raid by the Allies on the city during the Second World War. He had identified a pattern within the frequency, an average number that seemed to defy the random scatter-like release of bombs during a raid. They appeared to fall in clusters, away from the targeted areas, as though making the decisions themselves where to fall. He took this pattern and formulated it into a law that could be applied
to other seemingly random events – avalanches, earthquakes, wars and uprisings.

His PhD had gathered dust in the library at the University of Cologne until a group of young physicists working in a Californian laboratory in the eighties published a thesis outlining the idea of Complexity Theory and Power Laws. Her father had been called upon to address illustrious scientific bodies around the world, taking his findings from the Cologne air raids and expanding on them, relating them to current research. Surely Kerstin could find a similar pattern behind the 2004 bombing and 7/7. But she was a statistician and a conservative one at that, she believed in order and predictability, numbers were the blanket she wrapped around herself, to shield her from the dangers all around her. She did not have her father's scientific mind or the boldness to strike out and question what she had been taught. Instead she began to use numbers in her day-to-day life to keep death at bay, as a way of outwitting it. She couldn't stop thinking of the intense heat, the dust, the fumes, the rats down in that tunnel; it was like ‘The Triumph of Death' made real and when she saw a print of the Bruegel painting in a little shop on the Charing Cross Road, she knew she had to have it, to hang on her wall as a constant reminder of the day death almost claimed her.

As the years passed, Matthew grew more and more intolerant of Kerstin's obsessive behaviour – which also included a complete refusal to use the tube, the bus or fly in an aeroplane,
citing the fact that the planes struck the twin towers in New York on her nineteenth birthday, how could all these cataclysmic events not be connected to her? – and in 2009, he had told her it was over and she had nodded her head. Inside she was screaming, begging him to stay but her compulsion for order was stronger than her need for Matthew. They had moved out of the Bloomsbury flat, and on a freezing February morning while her ex-lover boarded a plane taking him to a new life and a new job in the US, she had carried her few possessions up to the little, anonymous flat at the dark end of Old Church Street where she has stayed ever since, living a life as silent and spartan as a contemplative nun.

She turns on the gleaming, stainless steel oven and places a small potato into a glass dish. She knows she is trapped, a prisoner of London as well as her obsession. Refusing to use the tube or buses means she has a four-and-a-half mile round trip on foot each working day. She is constantly exhausted and it is beginning to show in her work. She is finding it more and more difficult to finish reports on time. Factoring in her daily rituals, work has become an inconvenient obstacle. Dominic Stratton has made his disappointment clear in recent weeks, which is why the Delta report is so important. She cannot afford to lose this job, and there are plenty around her desperate to take her place. Cal Simpson would eat off his own hand to do so. But she can do it, she will be able to get it delivered on time as long as everything remains just so, no ripped purses, no mess, no
disorder. She puts the potato in the oven and sets the timer for thirty minutes. Just enough time to get some cleaning done.

*

Seb sits by the window looking out onto the shadowy mass of trees that constitute Battersea Park at night. Though the room is in darkness, his face is illuminated by the streetlight outside and the soft white glow of the moon which hangs above the park like a great twinkling eye.

He can hear Cosima snoring gently in her little bed on the other side of the room. He hears the muffled sound of the television in the living room along the corridor and Yasmine making tea in the kitchen, but the clanking of cups and the BBC news, normally a comforting sound at this time of night, makes him anxious. The feeling that had gripped him as they walked through Soho and made their way home has returned.

He hadn't felt it when they arrived at Maggie's to pick Cosima up, but then it is hard to feel anything but sunny in Maggie's eccentric world. Cosima had greeted them at the door with a little dance that she had picked up from a TV programme, then as they walked home along Battersea Bridge Road, she had talked non-stop about what she had eaten for dinner, about the photo album Maggie had shown her of Yasmine's father when he was a young boy in Tangier – ‘he looked just like Mummy' – and the playdate she has tomorrow at Gracie Marshall's house in Wandsworth – ‘and she's got guinea pigs … can we get a guinea pig, Daddy?'

By the time they got home, they were all exhausted and Cosima had gone straight to her bedroom and flopped onto the bed while Yasmine wriggled her into a clean pair of pyjamas. Seb had spent ten minutes in his study, answering emails then he had come and sat by Cosima's bed to read her a bedtime story. This was normally the highlight of his day, sitting making up stories with funny voices and elaborate characters while his little girl shrieked with laughter. Tonight though, he wasn't in the right frame of mind to make up a story so he had reached over to the little bookshelf by the bed and taken out a thin volume that Cosima had borrowed from the library. Underneath the protective plastic sleeve there was a picture of a little boy and a dinosaur and Seb had squirmed at the crudeness of the illustration as he often does with children's books. As a child he had loved the dark, squiggly drawings of Arthur Rackham, they seemed to have so much more magic and bite than the generic, flabby drawings in modern children's books.

He had started to read but his voice must have been as uninspired as the story because Cosima was sound asleep by page two. Seb had closed the book and placed a kiss on his little girl's forehead but as he tucked her in and switched off her bedside lamp – a paper lantern showing the map of the world – he was struck by an indescribable sense of doom and horror, a force drawing him back into the room.

One day she will grow up and I won't be able to protect her
.

The words roll round his head as he sits in the chair, it's a comfortable chair and Cosima likes having it in her room because it is the chair Yasmine used to sit in to feed her when she was a baby.

He looks out onto the street; a young woman walks past carrying a pizza box and a bottle of wine. She looks tentative as she hurries along, casting furtive glances over her shoulder. It makes him think of that song by The Cure: the one where the woman is being followed down a dark street. As she disappears from view, he wills her to keep walking fast; to get home safely. An inky blue cloud moves across the moon and the park looks like a deep, black hole sucking all the light out of the street. Beyond the park flows the river; the dirty, brown serpent that has dragged so many souls into its depths. It's an uncompromising city, thinks Seb, a cruel, wretched place.

It had been a night very much like this one; warm and still, with a moon that was almost full. London had just won the bid to host the 2012 Olympics, not that he had cared back then. He had drunk himself silly in a bar and ended up sitting on a bench in Soho Square Gardens where he had amused himself with apparitions and voices. He was convinced that his dead girlfriend had come back, he could hear her voice, feel her breath on his face as he sat there alone on the bench, falling into a drunken stupor. Then he had woken up to see another girl standing above him: Zoe. The girl from the office where he was working at the time – a glamour model agency of all
things, dreamed up by Henry in his quest for world domination.

She had wanted to be a model; had arranged an appointment with Becky Woods, the chief model booker but Becky had forgotten and left Zoe sitting in the waiting room all day. And after such a crap day and the horrendous evening she went on to have – it all came out in court, how Zoe's landlady had set her up, tricked her into going to a party full of crack-heads and prostitutes and Zoe had fled with the landlady's ill-gotten cash – after all that, she still took it upon herself to see if Seb was okay when she saw him flat out on the bench. She thought he had collapsed so she pulled herself over the railings of the little garden square just to check, to make sure he was safe.

Seb shivers, though the room is not cold. He looks over at Cosima. Her chest rises and falls peacefully. Life, he whispers. This is all it comes down to: breathing in, breathing out, feeling safe …

He had not returned Zoe's concern. After unloading his tales of woe onto her as she sat beside him on a freezing bench for almost three hours he had left her standing alone in the street. What had she said again? ‘I'll be fine. I'll go and find a McDonalds to sit in.' He had been so impatient to get back to the office to finish his painting of Sophie that he had effectively sent her off to meet her murderer. What was he thinking letting her go off into the night like that? She had been due to catch a train back home to Middlesbrough the next morning. He should
have told her to get in a taxi to King's Cross where it would be light and full of people; he should have waited with her while they hailed one. She wasn't streetwise despite her bravado, she was like a lost child wandering away from her parent.

In court he had tried to keep it together. He had been called as a witness, the last person to talk to her. It all sounded so dodgy, their evening together – a drunk man sitting with a young woman in a locked deserted square for three hours in the middle of the night. She was young and attractive, she had been wearing a skimpy dress, surely something must have happened? He told them how he had seen her as he was leaving the office that night; she had looked like a little girl playing dress ups in her high heels and short dress. He had told her that Becky had gone, told her to try again tomorrow but she had burst into tears and handed him a set of photographs. ‘Can you give these to Becky,' she had pleaded and because he had been in a rush to get to the pub, he had relented but he had put the photos in his bag as Becky's office was closed. He could feel the eyes of the jury bore into him, though he was not the defendant; somehow his cross examination made the whole evening sound seedy, as though he were in the same league as the sleazy landlady and the crack-head who had paid for Zoe to come to the party then murdered her. Despite his sharp Paul Smith suit and his confident public school-honed voice, he had felt vulnerable, a fraud.

As he had walked to the witness stand he had seen Zoe's
mother. She looked like a tiny bird, a lost, half-person, floating between worlds. Her face was grey and creased with deep lines, the result of day after day of incessant weeping. She held a set of rosary beads in her hands and when the details of her daughter's death were read out to the court along with the grisly post mortem photographs, she had wrapped the beads around her fingers so tightly it looked like they might snap.

The details of Zoe's murder were horrific. She had been stabbed fifteen times in the chest, puncturing her lung and sending her into cardiac arrest. After watching her slowly bleed to death, Martin Harris had taken her lifeless body and raped her before discarding her underneath a pile of bin bags at the back of Hanway Street.

When the Guilty verdict was returned, Seb had looked over at Zoe's mother. Her head was bowed and she seemed to be praying, her lips moving noiselessly as she stared at the floor. It was then that Seb caught the eye of the man sitting next to her, a thick-set, tough-looking man in his late twenties – Zoe's brother, Mark. His eyes were dry and he stared at Seb with such hatred, such menace that Seb had quickly looked away, but he could feel the cold, blue eyes upon him as he stood up and crossed the court room to the exit, as he opened the door and emerged into the stark, strip-lit corridor. When he finally got outside, into the noisy fug of Ludgate Hill, he had taken a deep breath and tried to rid himself of the horror of what he had just heard; the image in his head of Zoe bleeding to death
while that psycho brutalised her, and the look in her brother's eyes. In those few moments when he had fallen under Mark's gaze it felt like he had been ripped open and examined; it felt like all his faults, all his weaknesses had been exposed, like it was him and not Martin Harris who had murdered Zoe.

‘Are you okay?'

He jumps at the sound of Yasmine's voice in the dark, silent room. She is standing behind him. He turns and smiles at her comforting form. She is dressed for bed in a pair of his old stripy pyjamas and a grey ribbed vest. Her face looks tired and she suppresses a yawn as she stands there with her arms folded across her chest. He pulls her towards him and rests his head against her stomach. He wants to lose himself in the softness of her skin, burrow deep down into her warm body, breathe in all her strength, all her goodness.

‘I'm fine,' he says, lifting his head. ‘I was just thinking.'

Yasmine looks at him as though she doesn't fully believe him yet is too tired to dig deeper. She pulls the curtains and everything collapses into darkness. The room looks like a deserted theatre stage, the colourful, happy pink-and-purple decor dissolves leaving just a set of props: a bed, a chair, a table, a chest of drawers.

‘Come on,' says Yasmine. ‘We've got an early start tomorrow.'

Seb stands up and stretches. ‘I'll be right with you,' he says, yawning. ‘Just need to brush my teeth.'