The Start of Everything (25 page)

“How cold are you, exactly? Is that your teeth?”

“I’m fine.” I am fine. I wish people would stop making me say that. I turn up the dial on the electric fire. I cough.
No
, I lecture myself.
Now is not the time to fall ill
. “You sound like my brother.”

“Richard? Bloody hell, Keene, what’s wrong with you?” Her indignant tone chills me further. It’s like we’re having two different conversations.

“What are you talking about?” I ask meekly.

She sighs, exasperated. “Richard brought you his car. He must have told you.”

“No, see, he left it for me. He left me the car. We haven’t spoken.”

She breathes a few times—in, out, in, out—without saying anything. Then, “Alice near miscarried on Tuesday. That’s why Richard had the car when it was supposed to be waiting for you. He’d driven to the hospital. She’s home on bed rest now.”

Alice is pregnant?
“How do you know that?” I ask. It’s like there’s some pregnant-women secret society.

“Shit, Morris, I knew something had to be wrong when Richard hadn’t come through with the car. I called and asked.”

No, no, no, no, no
. This is not the way things work. Chloe is work. Richard and Alice are family. Not just family, a certain kind of family. My old family, my childhood family. Gwen and Dora are my family-family. And anything that goes between those different groups is supposed to go through me. That’s how it works. “Why do you even have their phone number?”

She doesn’t have to answer. The hospital waiting rooms. They’d all mixed together there, worried for me. Nervous laughter, comforting hugs. It was my fault, too. I call her Chloe now, instead of by her last name. I’d got used to Gwen calling her that. It just came out. Now the clear boundaries in my life were rubbed away.

I think,
I don’t want you talking behind my back to my family
. Before I actually say it out loud, I hang up.

I have to phone Richard. Maybe he’ll accept my apology for hounding
him about the car, and maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll spew a whole lot of words that I pretty much deserve. I don’t know if I can manage saying anything right, but I could be a target for him. Sometimes a person has a right to be angry at life, and no one to pummel. I could give him that, at least.

But I don’t know Richard’s new number off by heart. His wedding and move weren’t so long ago, and, with the number in my mobile, it wasn’t necessary to memorise it. At least, it hadn’t seemed so.

I breathe out. Chloe will know it. Will she give it up to me without a lecture?

I reach for Mr. Casey’s phone one more time. I almost lift the receiver.

Instead, “Cheers, mate,” I say to Mr. Casey, standing up.

I kick each of my legs. The trousers are mostly dry.

If I want Chloe to stay out of my family affairs, that has to start with me.

No, not “Chloe.”
Frohmann
. It’s important to address her like the co-officer she is, and insist on the same in return. I have to get things back to the way they were when things worked.

“Do you know where Mr. Bennet is?” I ask Mr. Casey. If I expect Frohmann to go after George in Cambridge for me, it’s only fair I pursue her interests here.

“I saw him head to work an hour ago. He won’t finish until late. But he works nearby.”

I ask for an address. I don’t need Chloe to write it down. It’s “across the hall.”

I knock at the flat under renovation. No sound of power tools or hammering inside, but there’s a lot else a person can call work. I try the door, only to check if it’s locked, but it pops open an inch, as if the latch hadn’t been lined up with its catch exactly right.

“Mr. Bennet?” I call out. I don’t enter. I don’t have permission.

Behind me, Mr. Casey barks, “Inspector! Telephone call for you.”

It has to be Chloe. I try to close the door, but it doesn’t hit the frame right. If this is the kind of work he’d overseen or himself performed elsewhere in the building, it’s no wonder people were hearing one another through the floors.

I pull up roughly, to bring the hardware in line, but my grip slips. The door swings all the way inward, with a whoosh that ruffles the sawdust on the floor.

The room is all skeleton, no skin. Posts and beams are exposed; wiring runs up and down the walls like veins.

The man, however, is fully clothed: A thick buttoned shirt tucked into belted jeans. White socks and trainers, one of them untied and hanging off from the toes.

A jostle from the door is enough. The shoe drops.

“Inspector! Telephone!” Rory Casey near brays.

“I’m here,” I say, not turning.

He comes up behind me, then with a swear charges in. He gets up on a stool, pulling the body up to take the pressure off the neck. “For Christ’s sake, man!” he calls at me.

I get on a crate. I pull the rope off, up around the face, catching on the nose. The head falls back and its hair tickles my neck. A suck of breath.

Casey has the legs and I get my arms under the shoulders and around the chest, my left hand clutching my right wrist tight. We lower him to the dirty floor, where the head flops. Casey leans over his face to listen for another breath.

But it was Liliana who’d gasped, the Finleys’ au pair, on the stairs with the little boy. He stares at us through the bars of the bannister.

Casey tilts the head back. He pinches the nose and blows air into the grey-lipped mouth.

On the stairs, the au pair pulls on the little boy, and he elbows her. Daniel. His name is Daniel. He’s what, three? “I want to see,” he insists.

I lunge to close the door. The latch refuses to catch, so I lean back on it, to hold it shut. Through it I hear something like a quick shriek and a tussle and the boy crying. Pounding footsteps on the stairs.

She’ll call 999
, I assure myself. We need the pathologist, and the forensics team. And Chloe. We’ll need her here.

Casey pumps on the chest. I swear I hear a rib crack, just crunch under the pressure. “Please stop,” I say to Casey. But he’s wild-eyed. He keeps on; he keeps pushing. And the body jolts and wiggles, rubberlike, every time.

CHAPTER 22

GEORGE HART-FRASER
TEN YEARS AGO

I
had to wear my school uniform. Nothing else I had was suitable. The other applicants I saw wore personal clothes that had been pressed and well matched. Mine didn’t need pressing. I was sheathed in a cheap, unwrinkleable acrylic.

Stephen had interviewed wearing borrowed cashmere and good shoes. He’d driven with a group of friends. His was the sort of school full of Oxbridge applicants. I took the bus.

Stephen Hart-Fraser was my brother. He was charming, and took tests well. He followed instructions with seeming alacrity, then mocked the teachers later with his friends. He was a bully. He was popular. He had a gift for gleaning from any question what the asker wanted the answer to be.

That’s why we attended different schools. He was plucked out and granted a “scholarship for fatherless boys” to the school on the hill. The day-boys, such as he, wore practical, plain clothes: a jacket with crest and orange-striped tie over white shirt and dark trousers. The boarders
still wore the old Elizabethan pattern of uniform, and he was merciless towards those blue-belted coats that looked like dresses, the white collars, the canary-yellow knee socks.

Stephen did very well there. He’ll never know if he came first or third in the exams. The school names the top three, and identifies only which of them was in second place. First and third are left to forever wonder, and no one is able to claim to be the best.

I remained in the state school, struggling with handwriting and peers, the two things the teachers seemed to most concern themselves with. The only subject that inspired me was maths. It was a revelation. I wasn’t dependent on lessons or books for the answers. Everything that had ever been learned from numbers had come from the numbers themselves, and could be discovered and proved anew. No special knowledge or trust or interpretation was required. It was a safe place.

A girl from my school got in the year before me to read history at Oxford. It wasn’t unheard of to reach.

I thought the interviews would be like tests, but they were conversations. Conversations about maths, to be precise, but not questions and answers. I wasn’t expected to bark solutions. The teachers mused with me. Tobias Oliver was one of those teachers. We talked about Bristol; he had gone to Stephen’s school and had happy memories.

I stilled inside when he said the name of it. Tobias—I called him Dr. Oliver, then, of course—didn’t notice the change. He carried on the conversation, but my gears had stopped turning. When he asked the next question, I had no context. I opened my mouth but said nothing. He repeated the question.

I shook my head. What if I did make it? Stephen would be here, too. Not at this college—he had applied to Trinity—but in the lectures. We would sit the same exams. He would get a first and mock anyone I called a friend and fuck women I wouldn’t even be able to talk to. He belonged here.

“George, why do you want to come here?”

I didn’t anymore. Wouldn’t I be better off somewhere Stephen wasn’t? It wasn’t enough to leave home if the worst part of home came with me. I shook my head again.

He tried a different tack: “Why maths?”

Because it’s perfect. Because it’s certain. Because I can work it out for myself and not be dependent on others’ subjective judgements. Because it’s vast. It’s a road that doesn’t peter out
. “It makes me happy,” I said.

Dr. Oliver leaned forward. “I feel the same way.” He smiled at me. “Shall we have some fun?”

We played. Numbers are the perfect toys. He let me overrun my appointment time. Eventually he flicked a glance at his watch. I stopped; I apologised.

“Thank you, George. I hope we may continue our conversation,” he said.

Did he mean that he would recommend me? Are they allowed to say that?

“Yes, sir,” I said. I wanted it again. Stephen was irrelevant. Stephen was outside of this room. So long as I could be inside this room, and rooms like it, and carry on the rest of my life as this last half hour had been, Stephen could do what he liked. It didn’t matter that Stephen would do better. So long as I could do
this
.

I didn’t have money for a café; I bought a sandwich to eat on the bus. The person in the seat next to me played his music so loud that it leaked through his headphones. I curled my posture away from him. As we neared Bristol, my stomach tensed. Traffic crowded around us. I felt squeezed by it. Squeezed, and shrunken. By the time I was home, I was small again.

Stephen was pooled. That means his college of choice had declined to admit him, but his application had been opened to the other colleges, who could consider him to fill leftover spaces. None did.

It was wondered in our family what would have happened if he hadn’t been so ambitious in aiming for Trinity. Trinity was Isaac Newton’s college, and remained the top for maths. Perhaps if he had applied to … “Newnham,” I teased him. Newnham is all-girl. He poured his breakfast glass of milk on my head. I wiped my school clothes as best I could; I didn’t have another set clean. I stank of sourness the rest of the day.