What to Do When Someone Dies (21 page)

Chapter Twenty-eight

‘Are you serious?’ said Gwen. ‘What are they playing at?’

I tried to hush her but she wouldn’t be hushed. I had arrived at what Fergus had called the baby-boasting party with a miniature pair of dungarees and a beret. When I’d bought them, they had seemed impossibly small, like doll’s clothes, but when I peered into the cot I realized they were much too big.

‘She’ll grow into them,’ I said. ‘Eventually.’

‘She’s called Ruby,’ said Jemma.

‘Oh, great,’ I said. ‘That’s a lovely name.’

‘Admittedly Ruby sounds like someone who should be dancing on a New Orleans riverboat,’ said Fergus.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Jemma, picking Ruby up and telling her she wasn’t going to let that horrible man say such horrible things about her. She was talking in a tone I’d never heard used by an adult. It was clearly something I’d have to get used to over the coming years. Jemma insisted that I hold Ruby. She told Ruby I was her godmother and that we ought to get to know each other straight away. Sensibly enough, Ruby was fast asleep as Jemma showed me her miniature fingernails and her equally miniature toenails. Then she woke up and Jemma retrieved her, coaxed her and contentedly fed her.

I went into the kitchen, where Gwen was making tea. Mary had brought a cake and was getting out plates and cups, keeping a watchful eye on Robin, who was fast asleep in his car seat in the corner. He used to look tiny, but now, compared to Ruby, he was big, on a different scale. I was still feeling a bit awkward with Gwen, having stolen her identity and everything, but I made an effort to tell her about things, the way I always used to. That was when she erupted in disbelief, and just as she did so, Joe came through and joined us. It was like the meeting of a secret society.

‘I’m just escaping from Babyland,’ he said. ‘Not that she isn’t beautiful. She’s very sweet, isn’t she?’

We all agreed that she was.

‘Obviously every parent is convinced that their own baby is the most beautiful in the world,’ said Joe. ‘I can remember saying something of the kind when Becky was born.’ He picked up a slice of cake before Mary could stop him. He took a bite as he continued talking, crumbs spilling from his mouth. ‘The difference is that when I said it I was right.’

‘Hmm,’ said Mary, and I could see she was about to launch into a Robin-is-best speech.

‘To return to what we were saying,’ interrupted Gwen, hastily, ‘Ellie has to do something to stop the police messing her about.’

‘What are they up to now?’ asked Joe, raising his eyebrows at me and grinning. I could tell he was trying to make me feel better about the mess I’d caused, turning it into a kind of joke that we could laugh at.

So, of course, Gwen had to explain to all and sundry about my latest encounter with the police. I was a bit ashamed to be the centre of attention again. They’d had to be sympathetic to me as a widow, listen to my rants about Greg and his innocence, then deal with my activities as some kind of fraudster. And always it had been me, me, me at the centre of things, with everyone else in a supporting role, their concerns pushed aside.

‘You should have asked us to come with you,’ said Mary. ‘I can’t bear to think you went on your own. It must have been grim.’

‘You’d done enough already, all of you. Besides, it was something I needed to do alone.’

‘What’s outrageous,’ said Joe, ‘is that visiting the scene of your husband’s death is something they should find suspicious. Of course you had to go. It would be stranger if you hadn’t.’

‘Do you think they were really suspicious?’ asked Gwen. ‘Of what, for God’s sake?’

‘I get the impression that they’re extremely irritated by me,’ I said, and then cast a glance at Gwen. ‘As you probably are. Or, at least, you should be.’

There was a joint, rustling murmur that of course they weren’t and how none of it mattered.

‘On the other hand,’ said Gwen, ‘have you thought that you may need some advice? I mean, legal advice.’

‘Legal advice?’ Fergus had come into the room with a plate of biscuits. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well,’ said Gwen, slowly and carefully, ‘if they were talking to Ellie about when she went to the scene, and asking if anybody was with her to corroborate what she was saying…’ She turned to me. ‘It feels awful even to say it but you’re the one, after all, who’s been claiming that Greg’s death was not what they assumed, was inexplicable. So it looks as if they might be thinking that…’But she stopped, unable to say it out loud.

‘That I had something to do with it,’ I finished for her. ‘Yes. That I was taking revenge on my husband and his presumed lover… So, are you going to ask if I’ve got an alibi?’

‘No, of course not,’ said Mary, in a shocked tone.

‘Of course it’ll never come to that,’ I said. ‘But I sort of do.’ I tried to recall the day in accurate detail. The terrible news had been such a blow that it was as if it had eliminated everything that went before. But I could remember. ‘I’d had a good day, funny as it may seem. I’d been working on a rather beautiful Georgian chair. It had taken longer than I’d expected so in the end I had to jump in a cab and take it down to the company who had hired me to do it for them. It was a solicitors’ office just off Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I remember the time because I was in a rush to get there before they closed. It must have been just a couple of minutes before six. When I handed it over, I had to sign a receipt for them, showing I’d delivered it. I wrote the date and the time on it. So I couldn’t have been in East London tampering with my husband’s car, if that’s what was required. There we are. Too much information.’

There was another awkward silence.

‘But why are they even looking at the scene of the crash?’ said Joe.

‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘It was an accident. We were at the inquest.’

‘God knows,’ I said. ‘I’ve caused so much trouble with my blundering around that the police don’t know what they think any more. It doesn’t bother me. I’m finished with it all. I’m going to do what I should have done a long time ago, which is get myself sorted out, be good, do some useful work.’

And so I did. Or, at least, I made a start. I helped carry the cake back into the midst of the baby celebrations. I picked up Ruby, who looked drunk after her feed, like a spaced-out old woman with blurry eyes and a milk blister on her lower lip, and held her in my arms, terrified I would drop her. I offered her my little finger to grip in her fist, and pressed my face to her neck; she smelled of sawdust and mustard. Then I handed her over for someone else to coo at and left.

The previous day, a man had dropped off six dining chairs at the house. They had been in his shed for years and he had forgotten about them. Could I do anything with them? Yes, I could. I could strip off the surfaces with wire wool and white spirit. I could replace broken slats and balance the legs so that they sat flush. I could arrange for the seats to be re-covered, and then I could smooth and polish the surfaces. I had given a quote that would have paid for a reasonable second-hand car and the man had seemed happy enough. I was happy too. The chairs would give me days of tricky, fiddly, messy, scrapy, lonely, lovely, satisfying work. It gave me a possibility of happiness. Well, maybe not happiness, but something to lose myself in, somewhere to escape, or so I thought.

If I had known who it was, I would never have answered. I had just come in from the shed to make myself a cup of tea and was caught off guard. I picked up the phone automatically, without thinking it might be someone I wanted to avoid, and when I heard his voice I was so shocked that I slopped scalding tea over my wrist, then dropped the mug, which shattered on the floor. I stared at the receiver, thinking I might simply put it back in its holster and shut myself up in the shed, where no one could get at me.

‘Hello.’ The voice was cool and uninflected; even now, he wasn’t going to show his emotions. I imagined him at the other end: his greying dark hair, his impeccable clothes and manicured hands, his languid air of slightly contemptuous amusement; above all, his watchfulness.

‘David,’ I said at last, trying to match my voice to his. ‘What do you want?’

‘Straight to the point.’ He gave a small laugh that held no mirth. ‘I want to see you.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m surprised you need to ask. There are certain things that need to be made clear.’

‘I’ve got nothing to say to you that I haven’t already told the police.’

‘I, on the other hand, have things to say to you. And I’d prefer not to do it over the phone.’

‘I don’t want to come to your house.’

‘I imagine not.’ At last I heard the current of anger in his voice. ‘Shall I come to yours?’

‘No, I don’t want that either.’

‘I have a cast-iron alibi, you know, Eleanor.’ He gave a light emphasis to my name, to remind me that I had been an impostor. ‘If you’re imagining that I might be a murderer, you needn’t trouble yourself.’

‘I wasn’t,’ I said, although of course I had thought about David murdering Frances, and had found it very easy to picture: he was a cold, clever, ruthless man, rather than a messy creature of conscience. However, the reason for keeping him out of my house was not fear but an instinctive, deeply felt revulsion at the idea of him setting his well-polished brogues in my own shabby, Greg-haunted world.

‘We could meet in my club, if you want. There are private rooms.’

‘No. Somewhere outside, public.’

‘All right, Blackfriars Bridge. North side. In one hour.’

‘It’s raining,’ I said stupidly.

‘Indeed. I’ll bring my umbrella.’

I hung up and ran my wrist under cold water for several minutes until it went numb. I considered changing out of my work clothes but in the end I didn’t. After all, I no longer needed to pretend to be anyone other than myself. I searched in the cupboard under the stairs for an umbrella, but only found one with a broken spoke, which flopped uselessly when opened. I would just have to get wet.

I arrived wet and cold, smelling of glue and dressed in paint-spattered canvas trousers under a streaming waterproof. David was as dry as a bone under his large black umbrella.

I stopped a few feet from where he stood on the deserted pavement, and gave him a stiff nod. His beautiful camel-hair coat was familiar, as were the brown shoes that shone like new conkers. I couldn’t have pointed to any particular change in his appearance, yet I was struck by a difference in him. His skin seemed to be drawn tighter over his bones than the last time we’d met, giving him a pinched, sharp expression.

‘This won’t take long,’ he said.

I waited. He had asked to see me and I wasn’t going to be the first to speak.

‘My wife trusted you,’ he said. I didn’t respond. There didn’t seem to be anything I could say. ‘She liked you,’ he went on. ‘For once she showed bad judgement. Catastrophically bad judgement.’

‘I didn’t kill her.’

David gave a shrug. ‘That’s for the police to decide,’ he said indifferently.

‘Did she trust you as well?’

‘You mean, because I was unfaithful to her? I know, of course, what you told the police.’

‘I told the police what was true – that you had an affair with Milena.’

I had also, I thought, told them that Frances had had a lover. Did David know that? I stared at him, his unreadable face. Had he discovered that, and was that why Frances was dead?

‘You disapprove of me,’ David said. ‘Of course you do. After all – and let’s put the whole thing with Johnny to one side, just for the moment, shall we? – you think you’re living in a romantic novel where husband and wife marry and live happily ever after, where first love doesn’t fade, where your precious husband couldn’t possibly have deceived you because he loved you so much. What makes you think Frances didn’t know?’

‘Did she?’

That dismissive shrug again.

‘I’ve no idea. If she did, she would have had the good sense not to muddy the waters. She was sensible. We understood each other. We suited each other.’

‘You mean you turned a blind eye?’

‘That’s one way of putting it. Another is to say that we didn’t snoop, pry and poke around in each other’s worlds, thinking we had a right to know everything about each other. We treated each other like grown-ups. There are worse ways of being married.’

‘Are you saying she would have understood about you and Milena?’

‘You’ve no right even to ask that. You were an outsider who came blundering into our house, putting your nose into business that didn’t concern you.’

‘Did you love her?’

Real anger flared in his face and suddenly he stepped out of the circle of his umbrella so that large drops of water splashed on to his coat. ‘You want to know what I felt?’ he said, his face a few inches from mine. ‘You still want to find things out? Frances was a good woman and Milena was a bitch. A hard-core, monstrous bitch. Bitches always win. She played with people. She played with me, lured me, hooked me, pulled me in, and when she was done with me she threw me back into the water. She never loved me. She was only interested in me because she could use me to get back at Frances. Yes, yes. I know there was another man in Frances’s life. Milena told me when she dumped me that I had been her revenge on my wife, who’d stolen someone from her.’

As I watched him, he seemed to crumble. His mouth trembled, and for a moment I thought he was going to cry or hit me.

‘If you want to know who he was, I can’t tell you. I never asked. I didn’t want to know. I’m not like you. Some things are best kept hidden. We depend on that; we’d go mad if we knew everything. So if this had anything to do with your precious husband, I can’t tell you. Nobody can now. Everyone’s dead.’

He snapped his mouth shut and stepped back under his umbrella. We stared at each other.

‘I liked her a lot,’ I said at last. ‘I felt very guilty that I deceived her.’

‘Her, me, Johnny, everyone.’

I walked all the way home in the rain, barely noticing the Christmas lights, the festive shops billowing out warmth through their open doors, the brass band on Camden High Street playing carols and collecting for the blind. Cars and vans thundered past, spraying water from puddles all over me. David must have arranged to see me because he wanted to prod me, taunt me, play with me, scare me. Had it just been sadistic revenge or something else?