What to Do When Someone Dies (9 page)

I couldn’t stop myself: I flinched in pain, as if Mary had slapped me across the face.

‘Oh, Ellie.’ Her face softened; I saw there were tears in her eyes, whether from the cold or emotion I couldn’t tell.

WPC Darby showed me into a small room. There were red and pink plastic flowers in a jug on the desk, and more flowers – yellow this time, a copy of Van Gogh’s
Sunflowers
– in a framed picture on the wall. I sat down and she sat opposite me, folding her hands on the desk. They were broad and strong, with bitten nails. No rings on her fingers. I looked at her face, weathered, shrewd and pleasantly plain under her severely cut hair, and was satisfied that she was the right person to tell. There was some meaningless chat and then I stopped.

‘It’s not the way it seemed,’ I said.

She leaned towards me slightly, her grey eyes on my face.

‘I don’t believe he was having an affair with Milena Livingstone.’

Her expression didn’t waver. She just went on looking at me and waiting for me to speak.

‘Actually I don’t think they even knew each other.’

She gave a nervous smile and when she spoke it was clearly and slowly, as if I was a small child. ‘They were in the same car.’

‘That’s why I’m here,’ I said. ‘It’s a mystery. I think you ought to look at it again.’

In the silence, I could hear the voices in the corridor outside. WPC Darby steepled her fingers and took a deep breath. I knew what she was going to say before she said it.

‘Ms Falkner, your husband died in a car crash.’

‘He wasn’t wearing his seatbelt – but Greg
always
wore it. You have to investigate further.’

‘The coroner was perfectly satisfied that it was a tragic accident and that no other vehicle was involved. I understand that the fact he was with another woman is unsettling and upsetting for you. As a matter of evidence, how they knew each other doesn’t matter.’

‘There’s no evidence at all, of any kind,’ I said. ‘Nothing to show that he knew her.’

Again, I anticipated what she was going to say. ‘If he was having an affair and keeping it secret, then perhaps that’s not surprising.’

‘I’m telling you, he didn’t know her.’

‘No. You’re telling me you don’t
believe
he knew her.’

‘It amounts to the same thing.’

‘With all due respect, it does not. What you believe and what is true are not necessarily the same thing.’

‘So you’re just going to let things lie?’

‘Yes. And I would advise you to do the same. You might consider seeing someone about –’

‘You think I need bereavement counselling? Professional help?’

‘I think you’ve had a terrible shock and are having difficulty in coming to terms with it.’

‘If anyone says “coming to terms” to me again, I think I’ll scream.’

Chapter Ten

I read through Greg’s emails so often that I almost knew them by heart. I thought they might give me a sense of his mood in the days and weeks leading up to his death. Was there a hint of anxiety? Anger? Apprehension? I couldn’t find anything and gradually they became familiar, like songs you’ve played so often you don’t hear them any more. Then I noticed something blindingly obvious, something that everybody in the developed world apart from me must already have known. Every email showed the exact time he had pressed the send button. Each email, whether from his home or his office computer, was a fairly accurate guide as to where Greg had been at a particular moment.

Within half an hour I was back from the stationer’s with two bulky carrier-bags. I tipped their contents on to the carpet. There was a large roll of poster-sized sheets of card, rulers, different-coloured pens and Magic Markers, highlighters, and sheets and sheets of little stickers – circles, squares and stars. It looked like the raw materials for a nursery-school art project.

I spread four of the cards in a row on the floor, using heavy books to hold the corners down. Then, using a ruler and a fine architect’s pen, I started to rule grids across them, each representing a week in the last month of Greg’s life. I traced seven columns, then drew horizontal lines cutting them into halves, then quarters, then eighths and so on, until I had chopped each column into a hundred and twenty rectangles, each representing ten minutes in a day starting at eight and finishing at midnight. I didn’t bother about the nights because we hadn’t spent a night apart in the last month.

Just from memory, I was able to cross out entire evenings I knew we had spent together. On the weekends there were whole days I eliminated with a bold stroke of black: the Saturday we had taken the train to Brighton, walked on the beach, eaten some awful fish and chips, bought a secondhand book of poetry and I’d fallen asleep on his shoulder on the journey back; the day we walked along the Regent’s Canal from Kentish Town all the way to the river. Those were two days when he hadn’t been having sex with Milena Livingstone.

Then I started on the emails. At work, Greg had written twenty or thirty a day, sometimes more. Based on each one, I wrote ‘O’ for office in the appropriate slot on the card. Some were in clusters. He had a habit of sending a flurry of messages as soon as he arrived at work, another just before one o’clock and another at around five, but others were dotted through the day. It didn’t take me much more than an hour to work my way through the emails, and when I was done, I stood back and surveyed the result. The chart was already satisfyingly shaded in, and there was still so much to do.

The next day I invited Gwen round. I said it was urgent but she was at work and didn’t reach me until almost six. When she arrived I hustled her through to the kitchen, boiled the kettle and made a pot of coffee.

‘Would you like a biscuit?’ I said. ‘Or a slice of ginger cake? I made both this afternoon. I’ve been busy.’

Gwen looked amused and a bit alarmed. ‘Some cake,’ she said. ‘A tiny slice.’

I poured the coffee and gave her the cake on a plate. I wasn’t hungry. I’d felt I needed to cook but not to eat.

‘So what’s up?’ said Gwen. ‘Did you summon me here to try the cake? It’s great, by the way.’

‘Good, have some more. No, it’s nothing to do with that. Drink your coffee and I’ll take you through.’

‘Take me through? What is this, a surprise party?’

‘Nothing like that,’ I said. ‘I’ve got something to show you. I think it’ll interest you.’

Gwen took a few quick gulps of her coffee and said she was ready. I steered her along the hall and into the living room.

‘There,’ I said. ‘What do you think of that?’

Gwen stared down at the four large pieces of card, now covered with marks and stickers, all different shapes and colours. ‘It looks lovely,’ she said. ‘What’s it meant to be?’

‘That’s Greg’s life in the month before he died,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’

I explained to Gwen how the charts represented days and sections of days. I told her about the timed emails and my own memories and how I’d even found receipts from the sandwich bars where Greg had bought his lunch. All the receipts, whether for food or petrol or stationery, gave not just a date but an exact time, to the minute, when the purchase was made. ‘So all these stickers, the yellow circles and the green squares, they show moments when I know exactly where Greg was. It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but –’

‘A couple of times a week Greg drove to visit a client. But I pretended to be Greg’s assistant, rang up and said that for tax reasons I needed an exact time for when the meeting had taken place. People were very helpful. I’ve marked all those in blue. Even then I was left with the gap between him leaving the office and arriving at the client. But I found a website. If I type in the postcode of the office and the postcode of his client, it gives an exact driving distance and even an estimated journey time. I’ve marked those in red. Obviously, driving in London traffic during the day, it’s not an exact science, but even so it fits pretty well. It took me a day and a half – and look.’

‘What?’

‘What do you see?’

‘Lots of colours,’ said Gwen. ‘Lots of stickers.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s what you
don’t
see. There’s barely a gap over four weeks when I don’t know where he was and what he was doing.’

‘Which means?’

‘Look at the chart, Gwen,’ I said. ‘It shows Greg working very hard, travelling, eating, buying stuff, going to the movies with me. But where’s the bit when he’s having an affair? Where’s the space for him even to meet the woman he died with?’

There was a long pause.

‘Ellie,’ she began, ‘for God’s sake –’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Stop. Listen for a moment. I talked to Mary about this – not about this,’ I gestured at the charts, ‘I mean my feelings about Greg. She wasn’t sympathetic. She was even angry with me, as if it was some insult to her that I wasn’t immediately accepting that my husband had been having an affair and had had a crash with the woman he really loved.’

‘No one’s saying that,’ said Gwen. She looked at my charts almost with an expression of pity. ‘I don’t really know what to make of this.’ She took my hand. ‘I’m not an expert but I’ve heard that there are stages of grief and at the beginning it’s anger and denial. It’s completely understandable that you feel anger. I think the point of mourning is to get through that and reach some kind of acceptance.’

I pulled my hand away. ‘I know all of that,’ I said. ‘I read a piece about it once in
Cosmo
. And you know what I was thinking when I was doing all this crazy stuff with coloured stickers and ringing people up under false pretences? What would make it easy would be to find just one deleted email, just one scrap of paper in a pocket, that would show Greg had been having an affair. Or even just one occasion when he wasn’t where he was meant to be, or a missing afternoon when nobody knew where he was. Forget denial. Then I could just get angry and be sad, and my life would continue. There’s no trick to proving somebody’s having an affair. You catch them at it, just once. But how do you prove somebody’s innocent? What do you suggest?’

Gwen shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘You have to do something like this,’ I said. ‘Something obsessive and excessive. You have to fill in all the gaps, then the gaps between the gaps so there’s just no space for this relationship. You know I went to see the police?’

‘Ellie, you didn’t!’

‘I told this woman officer I was convinced my husband wasn’t having an affair. She didn’t seem to believe me. I don’t think she thought it even mattered whether he was or not. The case was closed. This wasn’t something she wanted to hear about. But if I showed those charts to the police, do you think it would make a difference?’

Gwen frowned at the charts for a long time. ‘Honestly?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘This is amazing,’ she said. ‘Scary but amazing. I don’t think the police would pay much attention to it, but if they did, they might say, “Perhaps he was seeing the woman while he was doing other things. Perhaps she met him while he was buying his sandwich, perhaps she went with him in the car to his meetings. Or you might be right. Maybe they didn’t meet in that month. She could have been away and they were meeting up again on the day they crashed.”’

I took a deep breath. My first impulse was to be angry with Gwen, to shout at her and show her the door, but I stopped myself. She might have humoured me. Instead she had said what she really thought.

‘And if they said anything,’ Gwen continued, ‘it would be that you’re ignoring the only piece of evidence that really matters, which is that Greg and the woman died together. What in the end can you really say to that?’

I thought for a moment. ‘That it’s difficult to be innocent,’ I said. ‘And to prove you’re innocent is impossible.’

Chapter Eleven

I knew before I rang the bell and knocked with the heavy brass ring that no one was there: there were no lights on in any of the windows, no car parked in the driveway; the house had an unoccupied look. But I stood, stamping my feet in the cold, waiting to make sure. I opened the letterbox and saw only the polished floor. I peered through the downstairs window and saw the tidy, empty living room, the swept hearth, the gleaming top of a grand piano with photographs on top in silver frames. It was too arranged and perfect, like a stage set rather than a home. I wondered what Hugo Livingstone was feeling now. Was he lonely, angry, sad? Did he think about Greg as I thought about Milena, with hatred, jealousy and puzzlement? Did he think about me? Did he know something I didn’t?

That morning, when I had sat over my unsatisfactory breakfast of slightly stale bread and the last scrapings of marmalade, I had decided I needed to look at the picture from the other side. I had examined Greg’s life and found nothing, but what about Milena’s? Although to say that I had ‘decided’ is inaccurate, because what had actually happened was that I had drifted round the house, at a loss as to what to do with myself, picking things up and putting them down, opening the fridge and closing it, shuffling out through the garden, which was neglected and piled with soggy leaves, unlocking the shed door and gazing at the furniture waiting for my attention. Then I’d put on my coat, wrapped a scarf round my neck and walked to the Underground station, without even saying to myself that I was going back to the Livingstones’ house and certainly without knowing what I hoped to find there. Silvio, smiling sarcastically, a signed and dated love letter from Greg to Milena, with a photo of the besotted couple together? His father, assuring me that his wife had never had an affair with Greg and he could prove it with – with what? Nothing could prove that.

There I was, on a damp, grey November morning, staring at the blank windows of the large house and wondering miserably what to do next. Because I couldn’t return to my own small, cold house and deal with the things that were piling up: bills, letters, phone messages, laundry, dead leaves, broken chairs, dust, dirt and drabness. I found myself consulting my map and walking the half-mile or so from the Livingstone house to the address of Party Animals, the business Milena and her partner had run together.

I’d looked at the company website, read about parties at the Tower of London and the zoo, fancy-dress balls, colour-coordinated golden weddings, Burns Night celebrations, with haggis created especially for people who didn’t like haggis, and dinners for your most valued clients with six elegant courses. I thought about the parties Greg and I had had – you invite people round at the last moment to squash into the front room, ask them to bring wine, then cook chilli con carne and garlic bread, put on some music and see what happens.

Tulser Road was a quiet residential street just down from Vauxhall Bridge. It didn’t look like the kind of place for offices and, indeed, number eleven was clearly just a house, like the other houses on either side: large and semi-detached, with a side alley leading to its garden, a basement floor and bay windows. There was only one bell, and no sign saying that this was where exciting and original happenings, tailor-made to suit every individual customer, were organized. But there were lights on in the downstairs window; someone was there, at least. I raised my hand to ring the bell and saw my wedding ring. I looked at it for a moment, almost dispassionately, as if it had suddenly appeared. In fact I hadn’t taken it off since – with a great deal of effort – Greg had pushed it over my knuckle in the register office. I had thought it would be difficult to get off but I’d lost weight and it made no resistance. It was an object now, not part of me. I put it into my purse and rang the bell.

The woman who answered the door was slightly older than I had expected; she was tall and slender, with long legs and unexpectedly full breasts. Her highlighted blonde hair was cut short in a chic style with soft wisps framing her triangular face. Her pale skin was just beginning to line, and she wore thick, rectangular specs. She had on beautifully tailored black trousers and a pale blue linen shirt, tiny studs in her ears and a thin silver chain round her neck. If she was wearing makeup, it was the invisible kind. There was a classy look to her, a restrained and intelligent attractiveness that I liked immediately.

‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Can I help you?’ Her voice was low and husky; her manner was polite, but a little impatient. From somewhere in the house there was a loud bang, the sound of something dropped. I saw her wince and bite her lip.

‘Is this where Party Animals is run from?’

‘That’s right. Are you planning an event?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve come about Milena Livingstone.’

I saw her eyes widen and then she made a visible effort to control herself. She reminded me of me. I recognized the weary sense that the story would have to be told yet again.

‘Are you a friend of hers?’ Without giving me time to answer, she said, ‘Didn’t you know?’

There was a fraction of a moment when I could have said, yes, I knew, because the man she died with was my husband. But something stopped me. ‘Know what?’ I said.

‘Come in for a second. Sorry, my name’s Frances Shaw.’

She held out a hand and I shook it. Her grip was warm, strong; I saw that her nails were painted the palest pink. I stepped over the threshold and she shut the door behind us, then led me along a corridor.

‘Better come downstairs into the office, if you can call it that. I’m in total chaos, I’m afraid.’ She led me into the basement, a large room with a long table in the centre; on its surface were several roughly stacked heaps of paper and files. There was a sofa covered with brochures and a desk pushed up against the wall, also piled high with folders.

A phone was ringing and a young woman, with dramatically dark eye-shadow and very high-heeled boots, came out of the adjoining room. ‘Shall I get that?’ she asked.

‘No, let the machine answer it,’ said Frances. ‘I tell you what, though, Beth, perhaps you could make us a cup of coffee. If you want coffee, that is,’ she added, turning to me.

‘Coffee would be lovely.’ I was a bit dazed.

‘Have a seat.’ Frances scooped up the brochures from the sofa, looked at them helplessly, then laid them on the floor. ‘When did you last see Milena?’

‘I don’t want to give you the wrong impression…’ I said.

The phone rang again and then her mobile, which was lying on the table. ‘Damn. Sorry. I’ll be with you in a second.’ She flipped it open and turned away from me. I heard her murmuring something. Upstairs, cupboard doors banged and Beth’s heels clicked across the floor. I sat on the sofa, taking off my jacket. The warm, cluttered room was like a nest.

Frances snapped shut her mobile and sat beside me. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t heard. I’m so sorry to have to tell you that Milena died.’

That was my last chance to say who I was, but I didn’t. I wasn’t even sure why. Perhaps it was a relief to be the onlooker for a while, rather than the victim.

‘Oh!’ I said, and rubbed my face because I wasn’t sure what my expression should be.

‘This must be a shock.’

‘I wasn’t exactly close to her,’ I said, which was true.

‘She died recently in a car crash.’

‘How terrible,’ I muttered. I felt like an actor, saying lines that made little sense to me.

‘It was awful. She was with a man.’ There was a pause. ‘Someone nobody knew even existed.’

‘So young,’ I said. The possibility of putting Frances straight receded, and then – as she told me Milena’s husband and her step-children were coping as well as could be expected and I expressed sympathy – it vanished altogether.

‘Hence the chaos,’ said Frances, gesturing at the room.

‘It must be hard for you,’ I said. ‘Were you close?’

‘When you work together the way we did, you have to be close.’ She grimaced. ‘For better or worse. She wasn’t exactly…’

Frances stopped herself. I wondered what she’d been going to say. What wasn’t Milena? I wanted to ask what she had been like, but I was supposed to know that. So instead I nodded and said, ‘Yes,’ in an I-know-just-what-you-mean kind of way.

The door was flung open and Beth tottered in, carrying a tray on which there were a cafetière, two mugs, a milk jug, a bowl of sugar lumps and a plate of biscuits. As she approached she stepped on a file and stumbled. She tried to keep control but disaster was inevitable, as in the seconds after a building has been dynamited from beneath. There was a moment of quiet and then it got noisy and messy. The cafetière banged on to the wooden boards and exploded, sending arcs of coffee everywhere; the jug shattered and a river of milk ran across the floor towards Frances; the mugs broke on impact and shards skidded across the room; sugar lumps bounced up at surprising angles.

‘Fuck,’ said Beth, from the floor. ‘Oh, fuck and fuck.’

‘Are you hurt?’ said Frances. She didn’t seem particularly surprised, just very, very tired.

‘Sorry,’ said Beth, scrambling to her feet with an expression of almost comical surprise. ‘It’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it?’

‘Let me help,’ I said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Frances.

I took Beth’s arm.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Show me where your cleaning stuff is.’

‘Would you? That’s really kind. There’s a mop in the tall cupboard in the kitchen, paper towels in a dispenser, and a dustpan and brush under the sink.’

We went upstairs into the long kitchen that smelt of coffee and fresh-baked bread. When we returned, Frances was on the phone, protesting about something. When she’d hung up, she took off her glasses to rub her eyes.

‘Trouble at work?’ I laid wads of kitchen towel over the puddles of milk and coffee and started to pick up pieces of glass and china and drop them into a bag. Beth hovered round me, avoiding broken china.

‘What I need,’ said Frances, ‘is the world to stop for about a week while I get the backlog sorted out and my life in some kind of order. Milena – may she rest in peace – wasn’t the most organized of women. I keep discovering things she’s done or promised that there’s no record of. At least,’ she glanced round the room, ‘no record that I can lay my hands on.’ She watched me as I picked up the sugar lumps one by one, swept up the biscuit crumbs, picked up the mass of sodden kitchen roll and dumped it in a bin-bag. ‘You shouldn’t be doing this.’

‘I quite like clearing up mess,’ I said. ‘With your work, though, you should chunk it up. You can’t clear it all at once. Maybe you should get extra help in, for the time being at least.’

‘I can’t do any more,’ said Beth, grumpily.

‘I wouldn’t expect you to,’ said Frances.

I gathered some loose sheets of paper from the floor. ‘What do you want me to do with these?’

‘Nothing. You’ve done more than enough as it is. I’ll sort them out later.’

‘I can put them into piles for you, if you want. I’m quite good at organizing stuff.’

‘I couldn’t possibly ask you to do that.’

‘You’re not asking. I’m offering. I’m not doing anything right now. I’m…’ I hesitated… ‘between jobs.’

‘You’d do that?’ For a moment she looked as though she was about to burst into tears or hug me.

‘Just to sort this lot out. After all, it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t offered me coffee.’

Beth pottered around to not very much effect while Frances and I sorted the papers: venues, catering companies that Party Animals used, parties being planned, quotations. There was nothing that gave me any hint of the personal life of Milena Livingstone, although there were papers with her dashingly scrawled signature, and Frances referred to the dozens of sympathy letters she’d received and hadn’t yet replied to.

Beth made coffee in a jug and brought it in mug by mug, with an air of triumph. I felt strangely, absurdly relaxed, even though I was there under false pretences. It was a relief to be helping someone instead of being the one in need. Maybe it also felt good to have a holiday from being me, the grieving widow and ‘betrayed wife’, pitied friend with a great big bee in her bonnet. When the time came for me to go, Frances, seeming slightly embarrassed but also a bit desperate, asked if there was any chance I could pop back. I replied, trying to sound casual, that I’d be glad to help out and suggested the next day.

‘Yes, great,’ said Frances. ‘Oh, Lord, that’s amazing. You’re my saviour. I was on the point of – Hang on, I don’t even know your name.’

And I answered, without a beat, ‘Gwen. Gwen Abbott.’