The Fall (28 page)

‘It’s just a blip.’ Charlotte was staring at her work-roughened hands, trying hard not to cry.

‘Listen, I can’t stay. Call Gail, will you? Even your dad’s been on to her.’

‘He has?’ Charlotte hadn’t contacted her father since their disastrous dinner. As far as she was concerned, he was just some other person who’d let her down.

‘And you need a lawyer. Jamie might know someone – he’s worried too. I went to see them last week.’

‘You did? Oh. I didn’t know.’ Jamie was Charlotte’s brother, not Sarah’s, but she hadn’t seen him in months.

‘Yeah, well, don’t take it the wrong way, but everyone’s very upset by what happened.’ Sarah was getting up and starting the laborious task of donning her cycle gear. ‘So you’ll call them? Everyone’s worried about you. I’m working flat-out and I still came round.’

Worried about you
. It sounded nice but it was just another way to say they thought you’d ruined your life, wasn’t it?

‘Guess you’re right,’ said Keisha, after Sarah had clumped down the stairs.

‘Hmm?’ Charlotte was still sitting there, a little shell-shocked.

‘We need to write it down. No one believes stuff if it’s not written down, do they?’

‘No.’ She dragged herself up. ‘Sarah’s right, sort of. I’m going to ring my parents.’

Gail was in full flow. ‘Oh darling, you know you’ve always been just a bit naïve. Dan did take care of you, but now I worry. Some of these people are just waiting to take advantage of a girl like you.’

A pause. ‘What do you mean, like me?’

‘Well, darling, you have that big flat, and I imagine his parents will see you right, even if your father won’t. And, well, you’ve never been so good at looking after yourself, have you? Remember at college, when you had all that mould in your kitchen, and I had to come down and clean it?’

‘For God’s sake, Mum, I was eighteen!’ This was rich coming from a woman who wouldn’t even drive on her own when her husband left her. They’d taken buses for a year until Phil came along, Charlotte and her mother and Jamie.

‘You know what I mean. Sarah says he won’t even see you at that place.’ She could hear her mum’s pursed lips. Bloody Sarah! She deserved to break another toe, if not all of them.

‘He’s ill, Mum. They think he might have epilepsy. It’s just not right, him being in there.’

Gail hesitated. ‘It just seems, darling, that if he doesn’t want you to go—’

‘What?’

‘Maybe you shouldn’t.’

‘And just leave him there?’

‘Oh, I know, it’s so hard! I thought he was wonderful too, dear, at the start anyway – although last time we saw you he was odd, wasn’t he, quite cold and jumpy. I actually said to Phil . . . Well, anyone can be wrong, sweetie. Look at me and your father.’

Charlotte gritted her teeth. OK, a lot of what Gail said was true, but he was still her dad.

‘And then this strange girl just moving in with you. Sarah already told me. What is she anyway, half-caste?’

‘MUM! You can’t say that!’

‘I don’t know anyone like that, do I? What should I say? Coloured?’

‘No, for God’s sake. She’s mixed-race. Why do you have to call her anything?’

‘Because, darling, it’s what she is.’ It was blindingly obvious to Gail, and Charlotte suddenly wondered, was she the same? Was part of her desperately aware that Keisha was different to her, and handling the fact as carefully as a porcelain vase? But you couldn’t help how you thought, surely. It was what you did and said that mattered. Wasn’t it?

Although Charlotte rang off from her mother dazed and confused, Gail’s final comment had struck home: ‘Call your father, why don’t you? It’s about time he did something for you.’ And she was right. It was.

Charlotte had never been good at working out time differences. She’d always asked Dan before, and now she got it wrong, phoning her father’s apartment at what was about four in the morning, Singapore-time.

‘
Wei
?’ A woman’s voice. Did she have the wrong number?

‘Hello? Is Jonathan there? Sorry, I don’t speak . . .’

The woman switched to English, with an accent. ‘Charlotte?’

‘Yes! Er – Stephanie?’

‘Yes.’ There was a long pause. ‘How are you? I’m sorry about your wedding.’

‘Thank you. It was bad, yes.’ Stephanie hadn’t been invited, since Gail had flat-out refused to go if ‘that Dutch woman’ came. ‘Actually, things aren’t great, Stephanie. Dan, he, well, he won’t see me. He won’t get a lawyer, and his trial date’s just come up.’

‘Ah. You want your father.’

‘Please. I’m sorry, is it early there? I never know.’

‘Yes. But we get up early.’ Stephanie set the phone down and spoke a different language – Dutch? Did her father know Dutch? She tried to picture him in this flat she’d never seen, with this woman only dimly remembered from when she was ten. Charlotte had spent the whole of their dinner at the Hard Rock Café leaning in to catch her perfume smell, deciding that when she was grown up she’d also walk round in a cloud of lovely scent.

‘Hello?’ Her father always sounded gruff on the phone. ‘It’s the middle of the night.’

‘I’m sorry, Dad. I messed up the time difference.’

‘Never mind, we’re up now. Are you all right?’

She hesitated. ‘Not really, no. Can you help me?’ She remembered how she’d called him
Daddy
when he came to her house that day, and felt she might cry again. ‘I need to find a lawyer for Dan. He won’t get one himself – and I can’t afford to pay for it.’

‘All right, let’s not get upset.’

‘S-sorry.’ Her father hated crying. ‘Do you know anyone, any lawyers?’

‘It would have to be a good criminal barrister, preferably with appeal experience. You’ve left it rather late, I’m afraid.’

‘I’d have to trust them too. I mean, the way the evidence looks . . . they’d have to believe me.’

She heard her father hold the phone away and speak the other language again. She waited. ‘All right. Stephanie knows someone here. Australian girl, qualified in the UK, she says. Not a full QC yet, on the young side, but in your financial situation, well . . . And I suppose we can discuss some help with fees, too.’ He said it grudgingly. ‘Although I should warn you I can’t cover it all.’

‘But how would I meet her?’

‘You’d come out here, of course.’

Had her father ever asked her to visit before? ‘Really? But I can’t . . .’

‘I’ll help out with the fare. You can get away? Your mother said you weren’t working any more.’

‘I am, actually, but I can get off. When?’

‘You’d need to instruct as soon as you can. It’s quite late already.’

‘Oh, OK.’ They made more small talk – something her father was truly awful at – and she hung up and went back into the kitchen, feeling dazed.

Keisha was back on the sofa with
Friends
on, her feet up on the table again, an open bottle of Coke leaking rings onto the cream carpet beside her. Charlotte thought about what her mother had said:
People are just waiting to take advantage, darling
. On the table was another sheet of printer paper. It looked as if Keisha had started on her statement, this most vital document, and given up after a few lines.

‘Listen, Keisha, I think I might have to sell the flat, when I get back.’ She was surprised to hear herself say it. But how else would she help Dan, without making sacrifices?

Keisha didn’t seem to take it in. ‘Oh yeah? Back from where?’

‘I’m going to Singapore,’ Charlotte said, marvelling to herself that it was true.

Keisha didn’t look up. ‘What’s that, a takeaway?’

Did she say them on purpose, these things? Was she really going to let this girl stay here in her house, with all her things, while she was gone? And what about the man? But no, it was nothing. Her imagination. Charlotte looked down at the scrawled-on piece of paper again. ‘It’s a country. I’m going away for a while.’

Charlotte had decided to make an effort for her meeting with DC Hegarty the next day. Maybe because she was tired of looking at her own face, worn and sullen, tired of pulling on and off the same frayed pair of jeans. It was sort of nice to get dressed up again.

Keisha watched Charlotte drying her hair into loose curls. ‘You fancy him or something?’

Charlotte shot her a look. ‘He might be able to help.’ But suddenly she was embarrassed by the black slingbacks she’d paid so much for, and the mist of perfume drying on her neck. What was she doing? ‘It’s rude not to dress up for dinner,’ she said snootily, and saw Keisha raise a cynical eyebrow. Sighing, Charlotte tousled her hair one last time and ran down the stairs to meet him at Kentish Town. No cabs now; she laced on her trainers and carried her heels wrapped up in a Tesco’s bag. It was starting to rain so she held her bag over her head. When she got to the bus stop near the restaurant she leaned awkwardly on the slanted bench and pulled on the heels – the first time she’d worn them since That Night. The night when everything went wrong.

He was waiting in the place he’d chosen, checking his watch and looking nervous. It was a small and cheap Malaysian restaurant with fairy lights on the wall, and it was BYO so she wondered if he’d picked it because it wouldn’t cost much and he would try to pay.

He was anxious. ‘It looks a bit, you know, I know, but the food’s good, I promise.’

She flipped open her menu. ‘It’s fine. I like it.’

‘I’m sure you’re used to something fancier.’

‘Honestly, I like it.’ Suddenly she wasn’t at all bothered what she ate. She looked up at him. He met her eyes and looked quickly away.

‘Drink? I got wine, beer . . . Whatever you like.’

They didn’t talk about the case, as it turned out. A tea-light was placed on their small table, panpipe music in the background. They were almost the only people there in the quiet of the rainy night. The food when it came was sweet and hot on her tongue. Charlotte ate as if starved, sweet potato and coconut and fluffy roti bread. It was spicy, but damned if she’d let him see, she sipped her drink discreetly. He’d brought red and white wine as well as beer. ‘I didn’t know what you’d want.’

Afterwards she could never remember what they talked about for so long, just the soft roll of his Cumbrian accent, smudged round the edges with London, and how his wiry forearms sat on the table, shirtsleeves pushed up, the chink of his metal watch against his beer bottle. Looking up and looking away, each time with a lurching certainty in the pit of her stomach that she hadn’t just come about Dan. She almost didn’t even want, in the drowse of the beer and candlelight, to bring it up. What kind of person was she? She tried to focus. ‘Listen, my dad just asked me to go to Singapore, to meet this lawyer he knows.’

‘That’s good. Will he see them?’ Neither of them seemed to want to say Dan’s name.

‘Who knows?’ She laughed thinly. ‘I have to try. I think I’m going to have to sell the flat to pay for it.’

‘Well, getting away for a bit, that’ll do you good.’ He sounded like her mother.

‘Sure. You said you were off to Australia soon?’

‘In a few days.’

‘Well, I was thinking . . . do you come back by Singapore?’

His voice was casual. ‘Haven’t decided yet. There, or Hong Kong.’

‘Well, if you do – maybe I’ll be there too.’ God, he was making it hard. ‘I could show you about.’

‘I don’t know if it’d be that easy.’ He looked wary.

‘Why not, if we’re both there?’

‘Well, if we are. I dunno.’ He laughed. ‘You rich girls. Let’s meet up halfway round the world, just like, all right, let’s meet up for coffee.’

‘I can’t see why not.’

He thought about it. ‘Suppose I can’t either, now you put me on the spot.’

‘OK then.’ They applied themselves to the food for a while.

‘Why did you go into the police?’ she asked, chewing.

He tore off a piece of bread and offered it to her. He said, ‘I worked in an office first, for a year. When I left school. We don’t go to uni in my family. Waste of money, my dad said.’

‘My dad would’ve killed me if I
hadn’t
gone.’

‘I’ll bet. So this office, it was selling toilet seats. Bathroom fittings, you know. “Hello, Bathroom World.” That was me. Solitaire, soggy sandwiches, crap coffee – mind you, I still get that now. But I thought, Sod this, I can’t spend the rest of my life smelling Alan in Accounts and his pickled onions.’

‘My office was like that,’ she said, thinking how young he seemed, compared to Dan. ‘Everyone was sort of really shiny and never ate anything, never mind pickled onions, but it’s still other people all day long, clearing their throats and going on Facebook – you know.’

He nudged the chicken closer to her, cooling in its thick coconut and coriander. ‘Have a bit more there.’

‘I’m stuffed, thanks.’

‘You don’t miss it then – your work?’

She thought about it. ‘Maybe just having to look nice every day, having somewhere to get up for.’

‘You look lovely now,’ he said, and blushed violently. ‘I’ll get the bill.’ She took out her little designer purse, and he said, ‘Please, don’t.’

‘But—’

‘No. Please, Charlotte. I invited you.’

Touched by his pride, she let him pay. ‘Thanks. It was nice, wasn’t it? I ate tons.’

‘You need it,’ he said. When the bill was paid he crunched one of the hard white mints left on the saucer. ‘So. You didn’t want to see me to get my thrilling life story.’

She was almost sorry he’d brought it up. ‘The thing is, I think I’ve found out a few new things.’ She could see his face change. ‘I know it must be annoying, but you see, this is his life – Dan’s.’ It felt so bad to say Dan’s name between them, at the table they’d sat at for two hours gone.

‘Tell me,’ Hegarty sighed.

‘Well.’ Charlotte didn’t know how to begin. ‘After you came last time, and Keisha was sort of . . . you know. Well, she found out a few more things.’ And she told him about the gang rumours and the club owing money and the blue-eyed man at the shelter, how she thought maybe she’d been followed. ‘I don’t know for sure, but I thought . . . I sort of thought I’d seen him that night. At the club. I didn’t tell Keisha. She’ll never make her statement if she thinks he’s back. God, that sounds awful, doesn’t it?’