To Tell You the Truth, page 16
People worked around us, so many of them, making so many little adjustments that I didn’t know where to look, and couldn’t concentrate on mentally rehearsing what I had to say and I knew, suddenly, that I couldn’t do this. I would have to put a stop to it. I reached for my microphone, I wanted to rip it off, but someone said “Action” and Cathy’s whole demeanor changed for the camera and Eliza took over.
She recited our speech flawlessly, projecting pitch-perfect levels of spousal concern.
“What would you like to say to Dan, if he’s listening now?” Cathy Coates asked. She looked at me so intently, so warmly.
“Dan, if you’re listening, please come home or get in touch to let me know that you’re okay,” Eliza replied. “I’m worried about you. I miss you. I love you.”
She answered Cathy Coates’s other questions smoothly, and by the end Cathy had a tear in her eye. “Thank you for letting us share this difficult time,” she said as she removed her microphone. “I hope this does some good.”
The studio lights were switched off. Noah gave me two thumbs up.
Once it was over, gear was packed up and people disappeared as quickly as they’d appeared, and I was alone. Without anyone there to ground me, the house’s empty spaces seemed to gape around me.
“Thank you,” I said to Eliza.
“We dodged a bullet. You were in no state to do it yourself,” she said. “And I’m always here for you. You know that.”
I wanted so much to believe that unreservedly, the way I used to.
32.
For the rest of Sunday, I didn’t know what else to do. I turned on the television but avoided the news, just in case. I binged episodes of an interior design competition where the contestants tore each other’s work to shreds and took offense when it was their turn to be on the receiving end of it. How towering the self-confidence of the creator, the maker of worlds, I thought. I turned it off because it made me think about Dan.
I knew better than to go online, but I did it anyway. I was desperate for distraction. I avoided social media but couldn’t resist the Eliza fan page. It was heaving with comments. The armchair detectives had swarmed out of the woodwork.
Look to the books, one of them had written. The clues to what’s happened to him must be in there. Truth feeding off fiction?
Bit of a coincidence! another wrote. Crime writer’s husband goes missing!!
Is this a case of “write what you know” or “do what you write”?
I wonder if she’ll still be able to write when she’s in prison? Where imagination meets reality, MrElizaGrey had written. For most people, this might have been cryptic on first reading, but not to me, because “where imagination meets reality” was a phrase that Dan used over and over again when he was talking about writing. I stared at the words on the screen. I had dismissed my suspicions about a link between Dan and MrElizaGrey as a coincidence the first time I’d made the connection but now I wasn’t too sure. Was Dan posting online as MrElizaGrey? Was he trying to communicate with me, knowing I couldn’t keep away from this page?
This time, I felt the answer in my bones: MrElizaGrey was Dan.
“You going to answer that?” Eliza asked.
“Answer what?” But I heard it as I spoke, the banging on the door.
When I opened the door, the moon was visible behind them, a scrap of cloud in front of it, delicately silvered, unbelievably fragile. No. It was a reminder that perfection can be marred. Hell, no. It was moving swiftly. That’ll do.
When I opened the door, the moon was visible behind them, a scrap of cloud in front of it, delicately silvered, moving swiftly.
“Can we come in?” DS Bright asked. She wasn’t smiling and I felt afraid. It was too late for a routine call.
We sat around the kitchen island and I felt as if someone had poured water into the room, filling it to the brim, submerging us. Our movements slowed, our communications were garbled, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see bubbles rising from our mouths, but I still couldn’t escape hearing what they had come to tell me, though I heard it only in fragments.
A body found.
Forensic examination.
Suspected identity is that of.
Your husband.
We wanted to warn you.
We’re so very sorry.
We believe your husband may have been murdered.
“Where did you find him?”
“In the countryside, but not very far from the motorway junction at Easton-in-Gordano, so only a few miles from here. He’d been buried in a shallow grave by a hedgerow which borders a patch of woodland that’s out there. A dog walker came across him after her dog strayed.”
What a horrific image that was. A dog. Tongue and fur and the slowing of its beating tail as it got serious about what it was smelling. Its heart pounding, olfactory receptors screaming: “Death!” Did it lick Dan? The thought was unbearable.
“Can I see him?”
“We would appreciate it if you could identify him formally in person, but only if you’re willing. We can do it with a photograph if you prefer.”
“I want to see him,” I said. I didn’t think I would believe it was real, otherwise.
XVI.
Karen comes up to your bedroom.
“What are you reading?” she asks.
You show her the book cover.
“Hmm,” she says. Her drawn-on eyebrows rise. “Is it any good?”
You nod.
“What’s it about?”
“Nothing, really.”
You like Karen, but you don’t feel like talking. All they want you to do is talk, but you never seem to be able to say what they want to hear. People have been getting cross with you. She sits on the end of your bed. You pull your feet closer in.
“Charlie and I were wondering,” she says, “if Eliza knows what happened to Teddy. Do you think she does?”
This is not right. It’s not up to other people to say things about Eliza. She is your special friend. No one else can even see her.
“She doesn’t,” you say.
“Does she talk to you a lot?”
You shake your head. You know by now that admitting that Eliza talks to you constantly makes other people think you’re wrong in the head.
“How often, would you say?”
You shrug. “Only sometimes.”
“Does she ever tell you to do things that you don’t want to do?”
You bite your lips. The feeling of your teeth mashing into the shiny soft flesh is a good distraction.
“Lucy?” Karen says. The longer Teddy is missing, the more impatient everybody is getting.
“No,” you reply.
“Your mum told me that sometimes Eliza does naughty things. She said Eliza broke some of Teddy’s new toys when he was a baby. Do you remember that?”
“Eliza isn’t naughty now.”
“No?”
You shake your head.
“Not at all?”
You have learned that there are only two things that get you out of these talks. Either the adults get cross and walk away, or you get sad about Teddy.
It’s easy to cry when you think about him and how much he loved you.
“Oh, Lucy,” Karen says. She reaches over to hug you. You stiffen, but you don’t push her away. Last time you did that, she stared at you as if you had just told her something shocking.
“I miss Teddy,” you say, and you cry the way you have heard your mother crying, a wail that scrapes out everybody’s insides.
33.
Monday morning. Almost a week since Dan disappeared. I had been to a morgue before for research purposes, but this was different. This visit, I wasn’t part of the professional gang, I was on the other side, being handled.
It was horrible.
I let Eliza take the lead.
They escorted me into the building via the relatives’ route, and took me to an airless room, barely expanded from the size of a corridor, where an exuberant silk poinsettia set the wrong tone. Leaflets fanned across every flat surface.
“Are you ready?” DS Bright said, her hand poised on the door handle to the next room.
“Yes.” Though it was hard for me to walk steadily.
Dan’s body was on a table, beneath a sheet. I wondered if it was possible that he was alive, beneath there, if they could have made a mistake.
“There’s some bruising on his face,” they said, “and a cut.”
I heard Eliza say, “Okay.”
They pulled the sheet back from his face. The movement was executed with skilled, careful fingers. They made a crisp fold in the fabric and laid it smoothly across his shoulders. Such calibration of touch. So different from Dan himself: the clumsiness of him, the mess he made when cooking, his innate laziness, his urge to cut corners, to leave a job incomplete, his sloppy affection for me, his exuberant confidence in his writing. He was a puppy dog at times, and who doesn’t love one of those?
I leaned over, my face parallel to his, breathing the same air, except that only I was breathing, and I saw that this was him, and yet not him, because he was gone. Within myself, I felt the strongest sensation of crumbling because, however I felt about him, I didn’t think I knew how to exist without him.
I traced the outline of the bruise on his temple. He felt so cold. He looked so pale. My tears wetted his forehead. The texture of his skin had lost all its vitality. I blotted my tears from the dip of his eye socket with the cuff of my coat.
The cut on his forehead was grotesque, the edges of the skin not reaching one another, the wound disappearing under his hairline. His hair had been cleaned and combed.
What was more unsettling, though, was the way his head lay. It was almost straight, but not quite, and I thought it was slightly more sunken onto the trolley on his left side, which was at odds with the care that had been taken over his presentation in every other respect. It dawned on me, sickeningly, that the reason for it might be that the back of his skull was partially caved in.
Eliza muttered, “I think you’re right.”
The chemical smell hit me then, faint enough but leaching unrelentingly from Dan’s body, rising, choking up my airways. I retched. Looked at him again, to be sure. He was an effigy of himself. Collapsed somehow. It felt wrong that he wasn’t wearing his glasses, because he couldn’t see a thing without them. I wondered where they were and whether his missing watch had left a pale imprint on his left wrist.
I didn’t know how to say goodbye to him. I didn’t want to. It was also too public. Eyes were on me. DS Bright observed silently. And many more people would be watching when this news got out. The thought was terrifying.
But I knew I had to do this right or I would be judged. I said, “Goodbye, darling,” and lowered my mouth to Dan’s forehead. This time, the contact made me shudder.
Eliza spoke. “How did he die?” She wasn’t asking me. She wanted DS Bright to confirm whether we had guessed correctly.
“We’ll let you know as soon as we get the postmortem results,” DS Bright said.
“Can we hold a funeral?” I found my voice again.
“We’ll let you know when.”
For hours afterward, even once I was home, I couldn’t stop touching my lips. I rinsed out my mouth repeatedly and when I looked in the bathroom mirror, I saw darkness nestled beneath my eyes and I mouthed the word “widow” and paused to see how it fit.
I felt completely and utterly alone in the world. I had no family left.
Only Eliza.
When I slept, I saw Teddy on the metal table, not Dan. I woke a lot that night and every time I did, I found my cheeks and pillow were wet with tears and I was confused as to which of them I’d said goodbye to forever. In one fevered hour of dreaming, I saw myself there, lying on the table in the morgue beside both of them.
34.
DS Bright arrived early on Tuesday. I was in my dressing gown when I let her in, and got hurriedly dressed while she waited in the kitchen.
She wanted to know more about Dan and Sasha. Her focus on me had dialed up a notch and I thought I also saw pity in her expression, which I hated.
“What did you see happen between Dan and your neighbor?”
“Little things. They got in each other’s space in a way you only do when you’re intimate with someone. He got sort of excitable around her, blushing . . . that sort of thing. He seemed smitten by her.”
“Did you see them touching?”
“No.”
“Did you witness anything that was proof of this alleged affair?”
“A wife knows.”
“So, that’s a no?”
“Yes. It’s a no. But I know what I saw. Did you ask her about it?”
“We’re still conducting inquiries.”
“So, is that a no?”
DS Bright smiled thinly. “We’d like to offer you the support of a family liaison officer. I have someone in mind who is very good at working with victims’ families.”
“Refuse it,” Eliza said. “They spy on you.” As if I didn’t know what an FLO did.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Thank you, but there’s no need.” DS Bright looked disappointed. I wasn’t surprised. “It would be easy for my neighbor to have an affair, by the way. Her husband works in London part of the week.”
It felt good to say it, like opening a wound to fresh air. Or turning the crosshairs of a gun onto someone else.
“Lucy?” DS Bright was looking at me in a way that reminded me of another day, another interview a long time ago. Eyes on me. I got the feeling she’d been saying my name for a while.
“Yes?” I said.
“We’d like permission to search the house.”
“You have it,” I said. I wanted to refuse, but it would look bad, and besides, I knew they’d just get a warrant if I didn’t agree.
“It will include some forensic testing.”
“Of course,” I said.
But in the chair beside DS Bright, Eliza appeared. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. She had turned absolutely white.
I blinked and she was gone. I looked back at DS Bright. She was studying me closely again.
“Have you found the structural engineer yet?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
“Do you think he could have followed Dan and done something to him? He was here right before Dan left.” My mind began to race. “Perhaps he wasn’t who he said he was? Or who Dan said he was?”
“We’ll find him,” DS Bright said. “If he exists.”
XVII.
Charlie comes to the house with Karen. You watch them arrive from the window on the upstairs landing. You stand back so they can’t see you.
They talk to your parents for a while, after which your dad calls up and says they want to talk to you. You drag your feet on the way downstairs.
“Your mum says you had some bruises on your thighs the day after Teddy went missing,” Charlie says. “Can you tell me where you got those?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Are they still there?” he says.
You shake your head.
“Do you mind showing Karen where they were?”
“Don’t,” Eliza warns you. “They’ll know you carried Teddy.”
You shake your head again.
“What was that?” Charlie asks.
“What?”
“It was like you were listening to something.”
You don’t respond.
“Was it Eliza?”
“It wasn’t anybody.”
“Is that true, Lucy, or is Eliza telling you not to help us?”
“It’s true.”
“Where did you get those bruises that were on the front of your thighs? Did Teddy hit you?”
“No.”
“Did he fight you when you were out in the woods? Were you trying to make him do something he didn’t want to do? Was there an accident?”
A vein is bulging on the side of Charlie’s forehead.
“Because you can also get bruises like that from carrying a little one. Their feet bang into your legs. Is that what happened? You told us you didn’t carry your brother, that he came everywhere with you willingly. So, you’re telling me one set of stories but I’m seeing evidence of another.”
“Don’t tell him you carried Teddy,” Eliza says.
“I didn’t carry him. I don’t know how I got the bruises. Maybe it was when I climbed a tree to see the bonfire.”
“You climbed a tree? You didn’t mention that before.”
Charlie looks very tired, almost as tired as my parents.
“I climbed a big tree,” I say, and when I consider it, I think maybe I did climb a tree because it would have been an amazing way to see the bonfire and I can imagine what it looks like from high up, so I describe it to Charlie and he writes it all down in his notebook, just like everything else I tell him, and I like seeing him do that because it means that Charlie thinks I’m helping.
35.
“Luminol” was a word I’d loved, its syllables so rounded they practically constituted a mouthful. If it were a food, I’d say it would be a dark chocolate mousse. It used to give me pleasure to use the word in my books. My feelings about it changed when I learned they would be using luminol in my own home, to look for traces of blood there that might be invisible to the naked eye.
Cars arrived in my drive, each one disgorging people who would process a potential crime scene. I recognized them from my novels.
DS Bright was anxious to get rid of me. “You can stay here but you might find it very disruptive. Do you have friends or family you can stay with? Can we drive you somewhere?”
