The Light of Day: A Novel (4 page)

7

The sun flashes off the road where the frost has turned to a black dew. I reach the corner of Beecham Close, as if a magnet has pulled me. I didn’t say I would, she didn’t say I should (and I won’t tell her I did). Though it’s hardly a detour. It’s even a short cut, avoiding the Village. Wimbledon Broadway to Putney Vale.

But now I’m almost there I have to pull up. I taste the dark taste again, like a gush of oil in the throat. I have to stop. It’s even hard to look.

Two years and everything is quiet. Frozen. The simple turn into a quiet street. A cul-de-sac with verges and chain-links and houses screened by autumn trees. It could almost be a private road. Private, keep out: not for you.

I stop by the kerb, some yards back from the corner, engine idling. Two years on, and how are these things managed? Is the date remembered? Ignored? Look—it’s a beautiful day.

In number fourteen they must be well settled in by now. Their name was Robinson, I know. I never met them of course. The estate agent’s job—the estate agent’s problem. A challenge, it’s true. But the place had been unoccupied for months by then.

Sell all the stuff, George, get rid of it. As if she might have said: Leave me nothing.

Thank God I was a private detective experienced in tricky situations.

They must have known—the Robinsons. But why should they care? What was it to them? A kitchen to die for. At a bargain price. And now they might even have sold on, for a small killing, the new owners never knowing. Until a little bird tells them. The Nash Case—ring any bells?

And what then? The sudden urge to move again?

It’s out of sight from here, back from the corner. And there’s this gold-and-rust camouflage of trees. A stillness, a crystal light.

I can’t do it. As if there’s a cordon, striped tape, stretched across. The kind of cordon I might have lifted, years ago, and stepped casually under. A police matter, but I was the police. And of course there was a cordon
then,
and a policeman stepping under it, in charge of proceedings. Marsh, DI Marsh. The Nash Case.

When he found out who I was I saw the shift in his face. An interview room, a statement. I was principal witness, after all, and principal snag in an open-and-shut case. How strange to be there, in an interview room, on the other side of the table. The other side of the law.

The sights and sounds of a nick. The whiff of the cells.

When he found out who I was, he might have leaned on me pretty hard. If it wasn’t for that little admission he let slip in return—the one thing for the other, it almost seemed. That he was retiring in four weeks, that this was his last real case. And they’d put him on it because it was a simple mopping-up. No complications—except me, so it seemed. He might have leaned on me pretty hard, and he did a bit. Grey shifting eyes. So that while he had me there on the spot, and sweating, on the other side of the table, it was as though he too was on the edge of some scary gap, and I was even the one holding out a hand and saying, Come on, you can do it, you can take the jump. Lean on me.

I could see in his face the question he never exactly asked—and that had become less simple anyway, just by meeting me.

What’s it like? What’s it like, not being a policeman?

The Nash Case. Who remembers it? Not every case that finds its way into police files makes the papers as well. It takes something. But even then, in a little while, it’s forgotten. Even right here, maybe, they’ve forgotten. Especially here.

I can’t do it. As if the car doesn’t want to make the turn, wants to forget as well. I rev the engine. A cold sick feeling of betrayal. As if Sarah’s still in that house, locked up in it—it’s her real prison—and I’m leaving her.

But how can I approach that house without bringing back how I approached it, twice, that night? The black taste suddenly filling my mouth as I drove away then, the first time. And I knew what it meant. Or why should I have
gone
back,
turned round and gone back?

I should have understood it sooner, tasted it sooner. I should have stopped him, overhauled him, right here maybe, at the entrance to his own street. Blocked his way. “Mr. Nash? Mr. Robert Nash? I’m a police officer . . .”

Or I should have overtaken him long before. Got there
first.
“Sarah—it’s not Bob, it’s me.”

I shouldn’t have just followed him to the corner, watched, then turned away.

He wouldn’t be where he is now. Nor would she.

8

Café Rio. A big stencilled mural on one wall: Sugar Loaf Mountain, parrots, palm trees, beach girls. It’s what you need in Wimbledon at the thin end of October. And they play samba music, smoochy and soft.

Our cars waited for us in the supermarket car park. We’d had to deal with our shopping first. I’d said, “I’m over there,” pointing to my car, near the far corner, “I’ll see you in a moment.” She might have just driven away.

Late October. The clocks about to go back. Now more things could happen in the dark.

I’ve got the job, I thought. I won’t pass it on to Rita.

And she’s got something too, I thought, and knows it: more than the simple job she’ll pay for. Not just a private eye, a private ear. I fetched coffees. This might not have happened, I might just have got her second-thoughts call.

Doctors and patients aren’t supposed to meet by chance, but they do, and there’s a loosening, an unwinding, a Latin-American beat.

“So you want to know the story?” she said.

I hadn’t said I did. I might have given the barest nod. But it helps if you’re going to talk and you need someone to talk to, if that someone’s a stranger, a neutral party, as close as you can get to talking to a wall.

And it helps if you aren’t sitting face to face but side by side at one of those narrow front-window counters, watching the rest of life pass by. The traffic in Worple Road, the homeward rush. That’s why all those places, rooms that are set up for the purpose—two chairs on either side of a desk— have got it all wrong. Doctors’ surgeries. Not to mention police interview rooms with the tape humming on the table—the worst places, usually, for getting anyone to blab.

You couldn’t stare them in the eye, that never worked. Get up, walk around, let them talk to your back. Better still: two stools at a bar, a couple of drinks and (if it only counted as evidence) you’d have them nailed in a jiffy.

I think Marsh thought (and he was right) that I was judging his technique.

Interview rooms. Grey walls, scuff marks. An ashtray nobody empties.

She sipped her cappuccino, looking straight ahead. That curve the cheek makes up to the hollow of the eye. I know when to pretend I’m not there.

“I’m a teacher,” she said. “I lecture at Roehampton. French and Spanish . . .”

For a moment I saw her standing in front of the class— to tell them everything she was about to tell me. Today’s lesson will be different, today’s lesson will be special. I pictured myself at a desk in the front row.

Ten minutes . . . twenty, more perhaps. I hardly risked a word. A teacher of languages.

“It’s all my own fault . . .” she said.

I go there now, of course. The place is still running, minus its newness. I sit, if I can, where we sat that time. And she’s the one now who’s made herself go invisible—so invisible you’d think she wasn’t there.

I could speak to the air. Our few free moments together. They’d barely add up to a couple of hours. And if I’d never said, “I cook too.”

I look at the palm trees on the wall, the beach girls. As if everywhere’s a prison and we need to peer out at a different world. In Rio de Janeiro, maybe, there’s a Café Wimbledon where they think of cool green lawns.

“It’s all my own fault . . .”

And what I didn’t know then, what she had no reason to say, was that at that very hour Bob and Kristina—Mr. Nash and Miss Lazic—would have been together at a flat in Fulham. So Mrs. Nash had no need to hurry home.

Afterwards we walked back to our cars. The homeward rush, though not in her case, or his. The supermarket still in full swing. We stood by her car, a silver Peugeot. Her husband had a black Saab. The car I’d have to follow.

She said, “All right. I’ll bring in the photos.”

So it was settled.

“Fine. Give me a call first.”

The tingle of conspiracy, undercover work—meeting in car parks. The excitement that, in spite of everything, begins to infect them. The thrill of the chase.

She unlocked her car. Then she said, as if she’d forgotten her manners—as if we’d met by accident at some gathering, some convention of language teachers, say (though what would I be doing there?): “I’ve just talked about me. I don’t know about you.”

Her face even looked a little guilty in the dark.

The car park was heaving. Trolleys careering, boots yawning, a scene of plunder.

“That’s okay,” I said. “You don’t need to know.”

9

I drive off quickly, forgetting the speed bumps. The car bucks. The flowers almost fall off the back seat.

All her fault? Yes, in the sense that if she’d never let that girl under their roof . . . If she’d never tried to be more than her teacher . . . She should have seen it coming: the wife’s fault for putting temptation under the husband’s nose.

But was that supposed to be her first consideration? And was he supposed to have put up his hand and forbidden the whole thing, on the grounds that—you never know—he might just be tempted?

And anyway it wasn’t like that. He wasn’t a “womanizer.” Only professionally. There wasn’t a history. Just the history of them being a happy couple with good careers, a grown-up son who’d flown the nest, and (her own sad words): “pretty well everything we could want . . .”

She poked her spoon in her cappuccino. The traffic slid by outside.

“And, anyway, when she first arrived, she looked—well, she looked like not much at all. You know what I mean? She looked like she didn’t care how she looked . . .”

If you have everything, why go and risk it all? The good life. That house up there, through the trees, in burglar-alarm country. Why go asking for trouble? All her own bloody fault.

But for pity’s sake. Or charity’s. Since wasn’t that the point? If you have everything, then shouldn’t you be able to afford that? And to look out from your window at the world now and then? Why do people spend money on flowers?

“Do you follow the news . . . ?”

It wasn’t really a question, and I didn’t say anything. I sipped my coffee. I follow people, I follow scents, it’s how I make my living. And where would I be if the well-off didn’t go chasing trouble now and then, with their cheque books to wave in its face?

The black cashmere—to shop in. How much did a gynaecologist make?

And she’d thought the vermouth was wrong.

A teacher, she said. French and Spanish. A little freelance translation. A little English as well.

I sipped my coffee. I didn’t say: Teachers—smart-arses, they always used to piss me off. But there must be something about them . . . I married one once.

She looked straight ahead at the window but I could see her reflection in the glass.

A teacher. A “lecturer.” Twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays (so it was where she’d just been), she took an English class, open to all-comers but aimed especially at foreign students. Brush up your English. And into that class had walked, one Tuesday afternoon, Kristina Lazic from Dubrovnik in Croatia.

I looked it up, I wasn’t sure. You could say my field was domestic affairs.

Croatia then—Yugoslavia before (and in my out-of-date atlas). The “former Yugoslavia”: a familiar phrase.

“They won, you see. The Croats beat the Serbs.”

What did this have to do with a flat in Fulham?

And Dubrovnik, Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia, had once been, I knew this, in the holiday brochures. Hot old walls, blue sea. A tourist destination. The “Dalmatian Coast.” And that’s how it had been before she left—before Kristina had left—five years ago.

She’d won a studentship and come to London only months before the serious trouble began. It must have involved calculations, hard thinking. Conscience searching. Eighteen years old: her big break. And then the world she’d left behind her had been smashed apart.

But not just that—worse than that.

“It’s hard to imagine . . . You might as well know . . .”

First her brother, then both her parents had been killed. She’d got the news in two terrible, barely separated stages. The brother had become a soldier—but not for long. The parents had been unluckier still. They’d left for where they thought they’d be safer. A mistake. The wrong place, the wrong time. They weren’t the only ones to be rounded up.

“Can you imagine . . . ?”

I cleared my throat, the way you do during a lecture. The samba music swayed on.

It put paid to her studies, of course. What was the point now? Though she was granted an extension to her studentship—and counselling—and, slowly, she’d begun to pick up the pieces, to make up for lost time. But even when she’d walked that Tuesday into Sarah’s class she’d looked “only half there—like some convalescent.”

So Sarah had taken her under her wing.

This would have been late in ’93. Then the summer had drawn near when her studentship—and visa—would expire, when her only option would be to register as an asylum seeker.

“You know what that means?”

I nodded. My work takes me around. It means the bottom of the heap.

So there was Kristina Lazic, about to become an official refugee, and there were Sarah and Bob Nash, just the two of them in a smart house in Wimbledon, and even a room in it recently knocked together with another to make a “guest suite,” after the son had left to go and work in the States.

“He’s in Seattle. Computers. He makes a mint. He doesn’t know about any of this. I mean, about Bob and her. I hope he never will.”

She turned for a moment and looked me straight in the eye.

My eyes might have flicked away.

Charity: okay if you’ve got the money, if you’ve got the room. Okay for some. A luxury item. And was it such a fine piece of charity anyway, if what you got out of it was unpaid help around the home and the bonus of feeling good? Look, we have everything—including our very own orphaned Croatian maid. Look at the good life we lead.

But for pity’s sake. Have a heart. Can’t a good deed be a good deed? And who can say when the urge to commit one won’t suddenly steal over you? You never know. Someone walks into your life and you want to care for them specially, you want to protect them. You know you’ll put yourself out for them, never mind all the other cases, the thousands of other cases. This is your case.

And that poor girl. Have a heart.

Kristina. A name like fragile glass.

Girl? She was almost twenty-two—a woman, even if she’d lost a chunk of her life. Poor? She’d landed on her feet. A damaged soul, a convalescent, a stunted flower. But, put down in new soil—I hadn’t seen the photos yet—she’d bloomed.