Final Demand (29 page)

Or maybe he lives alone and is sitting in front of the TV, knocking ash into a takeaway pizza box. He's never any trouble, his landlady remarks. Keeps himself to himself. Maybe he has a birthmark down the side of his face, a big beetroot stain, but nobody has lived to report it.

Because – who knows? – maybe he has done this thing more than once. Nobody will ever find out, not in this case. He will take his secret to the grave.

It is not a murderer who sits in the dock. It is Natalie. Dressed in black, she looks small and defiant. Her eyes
challenge the jury, who listen with varying degrees of attention to the prosecution witness. It is an afternoon in October, the second day of the trial. Their eyes are drawn to her. It is hard to connect this young woman with crime, she looks so thin and defenceless. Her blonde hair is neatly brushed. The evidence against her seems overwhelming but many people in the jury are secretly on her side. After all, she hasn't murdered anybody. Her crime is a bloodless one, just figures on pieces of paper. Bloody clever, in fact. Maybe, if they had thought of it themselves . . . just maybe . . .

Nobody came to any harm and they too resent these big corporations, fat-cat payouts, the staggering greed of it, the contempt for ordinary folk. They too have been driven mad by mornings wasted trying to reach a human being and only getting ‘Greensleeves'. They too have shivered on a station platform, waiting two hours for a train that never arrives, while the Railtrack chief gets a million-pound bonus. Just thinking about it makes them enraged. She looks so small in this room which is heavy with the weight of the law.

The public gallery is only half-full. After all, this isn't a murder case, it's nothing sensational. Amongst the people sits David, ramrod-straight. He's dressed smartly in a suit, white shirt and tie, as if it is he himself who has been accused, and is trying to impress the judge with his respectability. His eyes are fixed on Natalie.

Voices drone on – Phillip Tomlinson is in the witness stand, he's saying, ‘She phoned me at my home and told me to write her a reference under an assumed name . . .'

David's eyes, however, don't move from Natalie's face.

Colin sits behind him, in the public gallery. He too is looking at Natalie. She glances up; she looks at him, briefly, and then turns her head away. Beside Colin sits Stacey – dumpy, plain Stacey from NuLine. Her hand slips into his.

‘Terrible, isn't it?' she whispers.

Derek is history now. Stacey has been a supportive friend to Colin during the past months. On many occasions she has fed
him cake at her flat and listened to his woes; they have gone rock-climbing together. She loves rock-climbing, she says. In a few weeks his divorce will be finalized.

‘You all right, Stumpy?' she whispers, gazing at him through her glasses. He nods.

I never liked Natalie, she thinks. Always thought she was better than us. Prettier, brighter, slimmer legs. And now – see – there is some justice in the world.

When she's at work she doodles dreamily on her jotter. Stacey Taylor . . . MRS S. TAYLOR . . .

She settles back. This is better than going to the cinema. She gives Colin's hand another squeeze.

The minutes tick by. The courtroom is stuffy; some members of the jury struggle against drowsiness. David, however, stays wide awake. His eyes don't leave Natalie's face; there is a fierce concentration to him. He hasn't seen her for eight months; his last image of her is lying on a bed in Finsbury Park. Around him, people shift on the seats. They might leave, soon, for a cup of tea.

Another witness is called: some NT book-keeper who starts itemizing the allegendly stolen cheques. Somebody coughs, a rattly, smoker's cough; it is Natalie's mother. Her purple hair is startling amongst the drab browns. A fly buzzes around David's face.

And then Natalie looks at him. Across the room, through the darkness of the tinted glass, her eyes meet his.

‘. . . cheque for the sum of a hundred and twenty-three pounds, fifty-nine pence, dated the eleventh of February . . .'

The voice drones on. The fly buzzes around his ear.

‘. . . cheque for the sum of a hundred and forty-four pounds, fifty pence, dated the twentieth of February . . .'

Some of the jury members, following her gaze, turn and look at David. The minutes tick past. Through his own face, reflected in the glass, David looks at her. He knows, now, that he is capable of murder. He thought he had died, that night in April, but there was still life in him. Enough, anyway, to be
finally extinguished in Finsbury Park.
Nothing will get my daughter back but . . . justice will be done
 . . . Evil, however, has finally triumphed, and the next time, if he can get his hands on Natalie, it will be he himself who stands in the dock. What will be his plea? That the world is senseless?

Natalie looks at Colin. She is not listening to what is being said. She turns away; more minutes pass.

What is going through her mind? Why does she choose this moment? Later, David will ask himself this question over and over. He will never meet her again; he will never learn the answer.

In the days that follow, Colin, too, will ask himself a similar question. Nobody will ever know; only Natalie, in her heart.

For at that moment something snaps. Something that she has resisted, all these months of stubborn self-justification. These moments cannot be forced by others, like an injection to trigger the birth of a child. She has arrived alone, after a long journey that has brought her to this place, and to David's face. Looking at him, she finally understands.

Or maybe she just realizes that the case against her is overwhelming.

Natalie stands up and turns to the judge. The witness falters, and stops speaking.

She holds up her hand – a quaint gesture, as if she is stopping traffic. The room is silent.

She addresses the judge in a loud, clear voice. ‘Excuse me,' she says, ‘but I want to change my plea.'

The judge starts to speak; Natalie's counsel jumps up.

But Natalie carries on talking. ‘I want to change it to guilty.'

Read on for the first chapter of Deborah Moggach's brilliant new novel
Something to Hide

I'll tell you how the last one ended. I was watching the news and eating supper off a tray. There was an item about a methane explosion, somewhere in Lincolnshire. A barn full of cows had blown up, killing several animals and injuring a stockman. It's the farting, apparently.

I missed someone with me to laugh at this. To laugh, and shake our heads about factory farming. To share the bottle of wine I was steadily emptying. I wondered if Alan would ever move in. This was hard to imagine. What did he feel about factory farming? I hadn't a clue.

And then, there he was. On the TV screen. A reporter was standing outside the Eurostar terminal, something about an incident in the tunnel. Passengers were milling around behind him. Amongst them was Alan.

He was with a woman. Just a glimpse and he was gone.

I'm off to see me bruv down in Somerset. Look after yourself, love, see you Tuesday.

Just a glimpse but I checked later, on iPlayer. I reran the news and stopped it at that moment. Alan turning towards the woman and mouthing something at her. She was young, needless to say, much younger than me, and wearing a red padded jacket. Chavvy, his sort. Her stilled face, eyebrows raised. Then they were gone, swallowed up in the crowd.

See you Tuesday and I'll get that plastering done by the end of the week.

Don't fuck the help. For when it ends, and it will, you'll find yourself staring at a half-plastered wall with wires dangling like entrails and a heap of rubble in the corner. And he nicked my power drill.

Before him, and the others, I was married. I have two grown-up children but they live in Melbourne and Seattle, as far away as they could go. Of course there's scar tissue but I miss them with a physical pain of which they are hopefully unaware. Neediness is even more unattractive in the old than in the young. Their father has long since remarried. He has a corporate Japanese wife who thinks I'm a flake. Neurotic, needy, borderline alcoholic. I can see it in the swing of her shiny black hair. For obvious reasons, I keep my disastrous love-life to myself.

I'm thinking of buying a dog. It would gaze at me moistly, its eyes filled with unconditional love. This is what lonely women long for, as they turn sixty. I would die with my arms around a cocker spaniel, there are worse ways to go.

Three months have passed and Alan is a distant humiliation. I need to find another builder to finish off the work in the basement, then I can re-let it, but I'm seized with paralysis and can't bring myself to go down the stairs. I lived in it when I was young, you see, and just arrived in London. Years later I bought the house, and tenants downstairs have come and gone, but now the flat has been stripped bare those early years are suddenly vivid. I can remember it like yesterday, the tights drying in front of the gas fire, the sex and smoking, the laughter. To descend now into that chilly tomb, with its dust and debris – I don't have the energy.

Now I sound like a depressive but I'm not. I'm just a woman longing for love. I'm tired of being put in the back seat of the car when I go out with a couple. I'm tired of internet dates with balding men who talk about golf –
golf
. I'm tired of coming home to silent rooms, everything as I left it, the
Marie Celeste
of the solitary female. Was Alan the last man I shall ever lie with, naked in my arms?

This is how I am, at this moment. Darkness has fallen. In the windows of the flats opposite, faces are illuminated by their laptops. I have the feeling that we are all fixed here, at this point in time, as motionless as the Bonnard lady in the print on my wall. Something must jolt me out of this stupor, it's too pathetic for words. In front of me is a bowl of Bombay mix; I've worked my way through it. Nothing's left but the peanuts, my least favourite.

I want to stand in the street and howl at the moon.

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Epub ISBN: 9781446496770
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Copyright © Deborah Moggach 2001

Deborah Moggach has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published in Great Britain in 2001 by William Heinemann

Published by Vintage 2002

www.vintage-books.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library