Because She Loves Me (29 page)

I felt queasy with nerves as I negotiated the maze-like corridors. Would she agree to see me? Would they let me? I had no idea, but I had to try.

I eventually found the Brunel Ward and, acting as confidently as I could, told reception I was here to see Kristi Tolka. The woman behind the counter said, ‘Bed thirteen’ and I inwardly thanked God for providing me with this stroke of luck. Dark spirit, be damned.

Bed thirteen had a plastic curtain drawn around it, and I could hear voices from within. I paused. The voices were speaking a language I didn’t recognise. Albanian, I assumed. I cleared my throat and said, ‘Excuse me.’

The curtain was jerked back and a young woman with black hair and suspicious eyes peered up at me. Now I wished I’d brought flowers.

‘Yes?’ she said in a thickly accented voice.

‘I . . . er . . . I came to see Kristi.’ I couldn’t see beyond the curtain to the bed.

‘Who are you?’ the woman asked.

‘My name’s Andrew Sumner. Kristi was my cleaner and I, er, heard about the terrible . . . thing that happened. I just wanted to check how she is.’

Then Kristi said something in her native language, addressing the other woman as Dita. Reluctantly, Dita gestured with her chin for me to step beyond the curtain.

I took a deep breath as Kristi came into view. She was sitting up in bed, a pillow propped behind her, a thin hospital quilt pulled up to her collarbone. The right side of her face was covered with a bandage, which wrapped around her skull and across her chin. Her lips were visible through a slit in the bandage. Only the upper left-hand side of her face, including her undamaged eye, was visible.

She fixed that eye upon me now and said, in a weak, restricted voice, ‘Hello?’

‘Hi Kristi,’ I said, in what I hoped was a friendly, light tone. ‘How are you?’

She looked at me, her eye blinking slowly. I cringed.

‘How do you think she is?’ Dita asked.

‘I’m sorry.’ I turned back to Kristi, who picked up a beaker and sucked up some juice through a straw. I noticed that there were no cards or flowers beside the bed and wondered how many people she knew in the UK. Would she go back to Albania after this? I found her future impossible to envisage. But I knew it would involve pain and suffering. ‘Have they caught the person who did it?’

Dita replied for her. ‘Fucking police are not even looking. Why do they care about some immigrant?’ She spat out the last word.

Kristi said something to her in Albanian and Dita said, ‘She is asking what you want.’

It had dawned on me that by coming here, I was making myself a suspect, particularly in the eyes of these two women. And what I needed to ask Kristi would seem strange to say the least.

I spoke to Dita, while continuing to look at my former cleaner. She had been so beautiful. It’s easy to say that beauty is only skin deep, but I imagined myself trotting out that cliché now. It would be like a barb in her heart. ‘I need to ask Kristi something. I want to show her a photo and ask if she recognises this person.’

I thought that, if Charlie had been behind the attack, she would have had to follow Kristi at some point so she knew her route home, which would tell her where to lie in wait. The report had said that the attacker was a man in a balaclava and black leather jacket. But wouldn’t it be easy for a woman dressed like that to be mistaken for a man? Especially if it happened quickly, in the dark, and the victim was half-blinded? I wanted to know if Kristi had seen Charlie.

‘I need to know if you ever saw this woman,’ I said. Dita translated.

I brought up my girlfriend’s photo on my phone and held it close to Kristi’s face. She reached up with an arm that was also wrapped in bandages and took the phone.

She scrunched her one visible eyebrow. ‘Your girlfriend,’ she said in English.

‘Yes. You saw her at my flat. But did you ever see her anywhere else? In the street.’ Again, Dita translated.

The wait for her response was agonising. She stared at the picture. I could hear her breathing, a wet, rasping sound that emerged from the slit in the bandages.

She spoke to Dita in Albanian, and I waited impatiently for the translation.

‘What did she say?’

Dita stared at me, her face pale and hostile. ‘She says that your girlfriend is crazy. That she offered her money to stop cleaning your flat.’

My blood ran cold. ‘When was this?’

The two women spoke and Dita shrugged with one shoulder. ‘She doesn’t know exactly. A day or two after she first met her? This girl, your girlfriend, was waiting outside the cleaning agency office when Kristi went to get wages. She asked Kristi to refuse to clean your flat, that she would give her £100 to stop.’

They spoke together for a moment.

‘Your girlfriend had translated her words into Albanian on the internet – she had words printed out.’

‘What did Kristi say?’

Another exchange.

‘She said nothing. She just laughed at her. Laughed in her face.’

Thirty-three

I walked home from the bus stop, picturing myself surrounded by a bruise-coloured halo, invisible hooks and cords turning me into a living marionette, and when I went inside I was shivering and sniffing from the damp, clinging cold. Harold’s and Kristi’s words echoed in my head.

I could picture Charlie’s reaction when Kristi laughed at her. The anger that would have bubbled up. Anger that could lead to her attacking the woman who had rejected her offer. Would Charlie really go that far? All I knew was that Charlie had felt threatened enough by Kristi to try to stop her cleaning my flat. My cleaner, who was attractive, yes, but whom I had never shown any sexual interest in. If Charlie had done what Kristi said – and I couldn’t see any reason why Kristi would have lied about it – then some of the other things I suspected Charlie of seemed more in character, like setting up Victor to stop me working in his office and becoming ‘exposed’ to all those attractive women.

As if that wasn’t enough, when I got home I found an email from Sasha in my inbox.

Hey A

How’s it going? Just wanted to let you know all is quiet here at the moment. No more threatening texts or weird things going bump in the night (I have to joke about it because otherwise I’d spend every day hiding in bed, unable to go out!).

I’m sure I saw Charlie yesterday afternoon in Farringdon. She was going into the chemist’s. I tried to catch her eye, not wanting to be unfriendly, but she blanked me. Hope all is good with you two. I’d like to meet up with her again, try to make amends for last time. I don’t want there to be any crap between us, anything that makes it harder for me to see you.

Anyway, hope all good with you. Call me.

S xx

I called her immediately.

‘I just got your email,’ I said.

She mimicked my voice. ‘
Hi Sasha, how are you? I’m fine, thanks. How about you?
’

‘Sorry. It’s just . . . are you sure you saw Charlie yesterday afternoon?’ I was light-headed, the walls of the flat closing in on me.

She hesitated. ‘I’m pretty sure it was her, yeah. Like I said, she blanked me. Though I don’t—’

‘What time was it?’

‘Um. I finished work early, got back into Herne Hill about four, so it would have been just after that.’

‘It can’t have been her. She’s in Newcastle on a training course.’

‘Oh.’ There was a long pause. ‘Well, I didn’t see her face. Not properly. She was ducking into the doorway.’

‘But you said you tried to catch her eye.’

Again, she took ages to respond. ‘Yeah. I meant I was waiting for her to turn her head. Maybe it was someone who looks like her, wears similar clothes.’

‘That must be it. Sorry.’

I hung up before Sasha could say any more. Had Charlie lied about going to Newcastle? She had given me the name of the hotel she was supposedly staying at so I looked up the number and called it. A young woman with a light Geordie accent answered.

‘Hello. I need to speak to one of your guests. Charlotte Summers.’

‘Do you have her room number, sir?’

I told her I didn’t.

‘Hold on.’

The line beeped for a while, then started ringing. If they were trying to put me through, at least that meant she was indeed at the hotel. I looked at my watch. It was five-thirty. Surely her training would have finished for the day. But then I was talking to the receptionist again. ‘Sorry, sir, there’s no answer. Can I take a message?’

‘No, it’s fine. Can you tell me when she checked in?’

An intake of breath. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not able to do that. But I can take a message.’

‘It’s all right. I’ll try her mobile.’

I stared at my phone. Sasha must have got it wrong. Of course she had. Normally, I would have known that straight away, but with everything that was going on . . . I sent Charlie a text, asking her to call me when she got a minute. After that, I looked in the fridge and took out a bottle of wine. I needed to get drunk.

When Charlie called me, a couple of hours later, I had almost finished the wine. I didn’t ask her whether she’d been in Herne Hill yesterday afternoon, unable to think of a way of asking it without revealing all my suspicions. She told me about an amusing incident on the course, said that she missed me, told me they were going out in Newcastle but she didn’t really want to go.

‘What are you doing tonight?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. Staying in, watching TV.’

‘You should go out. Why don’t you go and see Sasha?’

‘Really?’

A soft sigh. ‘Yes, really. I know there’s nothing going on between you, and she’s your best friend. Apart from me, I mean.’ She laughed. ‘I need to make an effort to be friends with her.’

I felt like my brain was being ripped in two. ‘She said something very similar earlier.’

‘You saw her today?’

‘No, she emailed me.’

‘Oh, right. Well, that’s good. You don’t want the women in your life to be at war, do you?’

I couldn’t tell Charlie that I didn’t want to go out because I had no energy, that I was worried sick, that all I wanted to do was hide in my flat. So I said, ‘No, I think I’m going to stay in. There’s a film on that I want to watch.’

I woke up late the next day with another hangover, having polished off nearly two bottles of red wine.
This needs to stop
, I thought, running myself a hot bath, planning to sweat out the alcohol.

Charlie would be back the next day and, sitting in the bath, I made my mind up. I was going to ask Charlie about everything. I would tell her I knew about her offering Kristi money and visiting Karen. I would also tell her I knew she lived with her ex-boyfriend. It was the only way forward. I would be able to gauge her reaction to the news that Karen had died of a drug overdose, see what she had to say about Kristi and Fraser. I would look into her eyes as we spoke and, I felt confident, I would know.

I didn’t know, however, what I would do with this knowledge.

I got out of the bath and walked, dripping and naked, into the bedroom. The heating was cranked up and the flat was tropical, the windows steamed up. I was sick of winter, was reaching the point I got to every year where I started to crave sunshine, my body starved of vitamin D. It had been a long winter and now even the brightness Charlie had brought into my life was diminished, black clouds over the sun. I wanted to get that brightness back.

The phone rang. It was Tilly.

She went straight into the conversation without niceties, in the same way I had with Sasha the day before.

‘Did Rachel stay at yours on Friday night?’

‘Yes . . .’

‘And what did she say she was going to do afterwards?’

‘Why? What’s happened? You sound like you’re about to have a panic attack.’

‘No, I’m fine. I’ll explain in a second. Just tell me, please.’

‘She said she was going to ride up to Cardiff to stay with her sister. She left here Saturday morning. What’s going on?’

I sat on my bed wrapped in just a towel, the last droplets of water on my body evaporating. I could hear the couple downstairs arguing. I wondered vaguely what colour my aura was at the moment. Red, probably.
Cabernet sauvignon
.

Tilly’s voice tightened, like she was on the verge of tears. ‘She never got there. Her sister waited for her all afternoon. Rachel’s not answering her phone, either. I’ve tried to ring it a hundred times but it goes straight to voicemail, like it’s turned off.’

‘Oh Jesus.’

‘I’m so worried, Andrew. We’ve been on to the police but there haven’t been any reports of motorbike accidents.’

‘Maybe – I mean, I don’t like to say it, but what if she went off the road somewhere remote and the bike’s . . . concealed somewhere.’

‘In a ditch, you mean.’

Neither of us spoke.

‘How did she seem Friday night?’

I realised straight away what Tilly was asking. ‘You mean did she seem suicidal? No, she didn’t at all. She was scared, shaken by what had happened with Henry. But she struck me as someone who very much wanted to survive.’

‘That’s what I told the police. Listen, they’ve got your name and address. They might come round to talk to you.’

‘OK.’ The couple downstairs had stopped arguing and were now having sex. ‘What about Henry?’

‘I don’t know. The police asked me a
lot
of questions about him. I told them what he’d done.’

‘You think he caught up with her, intercepted her?’

‘Oh God, I hope not. But that’s the most probable explanation, isn’t it?’ Her voice caught. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without her. I couldn’t cope.’

All I could do was reassure her, say words I didn’t believe. Tell her everything would be all right. But inside I was thinking,
She’s dead. Another one.
And I heard Harold’s voice again, talking about the dark spirit. Rachel had stayed with me – and now she was dead.

It was my fault.

Monday morning. Charlie was due back later. There was no news about Rachel, except that the police had arrested Henry, were questioning him. I kept the news channel on, waiting for a story about how the body of a female motorcyclist had been found. But there was nothing.

I needed to change the bed. The sheets smelled and a ridiculous part of me was worried that Charlie would be able to smell Rachel on them. I stripped the sheets and opened the wardrobe to get out a clean set.

A few of Charlie’s clothes had slipped off their hangers onto the wardrobe floor, including a coat and the suit I’d had dry cleaned. I picked them up and took down some coat hangers. As I held the coat, something struck me. If I was looking for evidence, surely here was somewhere else to look.

I felt terrible delving in her pockets, but reassured myself that the ends justified it. Besides, I had already looked through one of her bags, and I didn’t really expect to find anything, anyway.

The coat contained nothing but a few balled-up tissues, an old Oyster card and a pair of gloves. Next I checked the trousers of the suit. Empty.

Finally, I tried the pockets of the suit jacket. There was just one pocket, on the inside, and I could feel, immediately, that there was something inside. A small brown envelope, sealed. I took it out and held it in my hands. Had the envelope been there when I’d had it dry cleaned? I hadn’t checked, had just taken it out of the wardrobe and put it in a bag.