What to Do When Someone Dies (20 page)

Chapter Twenty-six

I wasn’t sure which police station to go to, but I knew it would be bad either way, and it was. I went to see WPC Darby because I hoped she might be sympathetic to me, knowing me as a grieving widow. When she greeted me, I noticed the wary expression people adopt when they open their door to someone trying to give them a pamphlet about a fringe religion. But she sat me down and gave me some tea. I started to explain why I was there and her expression changed from wariness to puzzlement, then from puzzlement to what looked like alarm. She hushed me and almost rushed out of the room.

She returned five minutes later and asked if I could follow her. She led me through a door and into a room that was bare, except for a table and three orange plastic chairs. She sat me down and stood awkwardly by the door. I told her she didn’t need to stay but she said it was all right. It looked as if she had been told to stay with me and also not to say anything more. So I sat and she stood and we spent ten awful minutes avoiding each other’s eyes until the door opened and a detective came in. I recognized him as Detective Inspector Carter, the one I had talked to before. He didn’t even sit down.

‘WPC Darby tells me that you found the body of Mrs Frances Shaw.’

‘That’s right,’ I said.

‘And you called it in?’

‘Yes.’

‘Anonymously.’

‘Yes.’

‘Any particular reason for that?’

‘Kind of,’ I said.

He held up his hand to stop me. ‘It’s not our patch,’ he said. ‘I need to phone the Stockwell lads. You’ll have to wait here for a bit, if that’s all right.’

He was just being polite. I don’t think I had a choice. WPC Darby brought me a newspaper and another cup of tea, and I flicked through the pages without taking anything in. It was almost an hour before two more detectives, a man and a woman, came in and sat opposite me. WPC Darby left but DI Carter stood to one side, leaning against the wall. The man introduced himself as Detective Chief Inspector Stuart Ramsay and his colleague as Detective Inspector Bosworth. She opened her bag and took out a bulky machine, which she placed on the table between us. She loaded it with two cassette tapes and switched it on. She said the date and time and identified everybody present, then sat back.

‘The reason we’re being so formal,’ said Ramsay, ‘is that you have already made admissions that lay you open to being charged with a criminal offence. And that’s just to be getting on with. So, it’s important that, before you say anything else, we make clear that you’re entitled to legal representation. If you don’t have a lawyer, we can obtain one for you.’

‘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.