To Tell You the Truth, page 18
DS Bright was having to work to maintain her placid demeanor, but she wasn’t giving up.
“I’m just making you aware of the uncanny similarities between this description and the luminol evidence I showed you. And there’s something else. It’s a little bit sensitive, but I hope you understand I’m obliged to ask some difficult questions sometimes—”
As if she hadn’t just accused me of murder. I almost laughed. “What do you want to know?”
“I’ve noticed myself—and some of my colleagues have also remarked—that you haven’t seemed to be very upset by your husband’s disappearance and now death. Is there a reason for that?”
I stared at her. “I want a lawyer,” I said.
“You’re not under arrest, Mrs. Harper.”
“Yet,” I said.
I knew how it worked.
XVIII.
Charlie doesn’t call at the house for a few days. Outside, there are some journalists on the street, but not as many as before. You can’t hear the dogs any longer, nor the helicopters.
You have been watching the journalists from the landing window, stepping back when they turn cameras on you. One day, you weren’t quick enough. When your mum sees a photo of you in the paper the next day, staring out the window, the palm of your hand pale where it presses on the glass, your hair uncombed, she cries. “You look like a freak,” she says. “It’s all we need.” Her tears make damp, spreading blots across the newsprint.
One day, you’re in the kitchen with your dad. He is sitting still as a statue in the seat that has the best view down the front drive. Out of the blue, he slams his fist down on the tabletop so hard that your cereal bowl leaps and the spoon slides into the milk. You are frightened.
“What have you been saying to them, Lucy?” he says. “What have you been saying that makes them ask me whether anyone else apart from family saw Teddy the night before he disappeared?”
Your fingers grip the sides of your chair and you press your spine against the back of it.
“Do you know what that means? Why they’re asking?”
You shake your head.
“It means they think me, or your mum, did something to Teddy and we gave you that story about going into the woods, to get you to cover up for us.”
So many tears spill from his eyes at once that it’s as if someone is inside his head, gently pouring a steady stream of them down his cheeks. A bubble of snot forms, then pops.
Your mum turns from the sink. “Don’t,” she tells him. “Don’t blame her.” But she doesn’t look at you.
“We should have sat in on the interviews,” he says.
“Don’t tell me what I should have done,” Carol replies. The washing-up brush in her hand is dripping suds onto the floor. “When my son is missing, and that man is constantly in my house picking through our lives and staring at me as if I’m a bad mother. Don’t tell me what I should have done!”
Your dad’s shoulders shake. Nobody touches each other. You stay where you are, pinned to the back of your chair. After a while he looks up and at you. His eyes are as red as the devil’s, crisscrossed by veins.
“Have you been making up stories, Luce?” he asks. “Tell me, please. Tell me what you told them. Why don’t they believe you?”
“You know why,” your mum says. “You just said it yourself. It’s because she’s a fibber. Always has been, always will be.”
37.
They let me back in the house, handing over the keys in what felt to me like a parody of the day Dan and I had first turned up here together.
There were few physical signs of the police search but the sense that they’d been here, prying into my life, snooping through our stuff, touching things without leaving a trace, got right under my skin.
They’d taken some of the paperwork from Dan’s office, I’d had to sign for it, but not everything. I found a record of the solicitor who had handled the house purchase. I called and got through to her assistant, introduced myself and was braced for sympathy, but he behaved as if he hadn’t heard about Dan’s death yet.
“How are you enjoying that magnificent house?” he asked.
I ignored the question. “I need a recommendation for a criminal solicitor,” I added. “The best. Is there anyone at your firm who can help me?”
“Absolutely. I can put you through to someone.” He paused. “Actually, our top criminal solicitor at the firm is a neighbor of yours.”
“Who?” I asked, but I already knew.
“Ben Delaney.”
Kate’s husband. Of course. But I didn’t want him. Barry had called him incompetent, and much as I disliked Barry, he struck me as someone both rigorous and intelligent. Plus, Ben Delaney was far too close to home.
I wanted the best. After a bit of persuasion the solicitor coughed up the name of someone from another firm.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll be in touch to arrange to come and add my name to the house deed.”
“The deed?”
“Of the house. Dan said the paperwork was ready.”
He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry but I’m not aware of that arrangement.”
“Perhaps your boss knows about it.”
“I’m aware of everything that my boss is working on, believe me.”
I felt flustered. He must be mistaken. Dan had told me that everything was ready. Perhaps I’d used the wrong terminology. Dealing with people in offices was always a strain. They were so sure of themselves.
“I’ll call you back about this,” I said.
“Please do,” he said. “And if you could send my regards to your husband . . .”
“He’s dead,” I said, and hung up and cried.
Vi sent me a text: How are you bearing up? Is there anything we can do?
I’d left their house abruptly earlier that morning, after DS Bright had called, and Vi had watched me from her doorstep, waving to me when I turned around, but I had felt as if there were darts in my back as I walked away. I felt conflicted about her offer. I didn’t want to be anywhere near her, or Barry, but I needed help.
Please could you give me a lift into the city? I replied.
We followed the same routine as before, with me under the rug in her back seat. Before I pulled it over me, I asked, “Did Barry mind me staying last night?” I probably shouldn’t have asked, but sometimes you want to press a bruise, and I thought if I pressed this one, she might confess to knowing about my past.
“Oh, don’t mind Barry,” she said. “He can be a bit curmudgeonly, but his heart’s in the right place.”
She draped the blanket over my head. “All set,” she said. “A bit lumpy but it’ll have to do.”
The car rolled slowly down the lane. Every pothole jarred.
“Oh, my,” I heard Vi say as we approached the end. “There are so many more of them.” I heard her window roll down. Journalists began shouting questions at her. “Out of the way!” she snapped. “Piss off!” There was a loud thump on the side of the car. I flinched.
“She’s in there! In the back!” a man shouted, and more voices joined his. I heard my name like an echo, amplified by the hot claustrophobia I felt beneath the blanket.
“Lucy, Lucy, can you tell us about Dan? What can you tell us, Lucy?” I covered my ears. Vi put her foot down and the car surged away.
“Bloody hell,” she said after a few seconds.
I sat up cautiously. “I’m really sorry.”
When we paused in the queue to pay the bridge toll, I climbed into the front seat of the car but Vi and I didn’t speak much. I drank in the sights of the city streets as if they were nectar and I was parched.
Vi dropped me outside the solicitor’s office. I put my hood up and ran from the car into the building. My new solicitor was waiting for me. Her name was Tamsin.
She was very corporate. In her business suit and heels she was intimidating to me, though her appearance gave me confidence in her abilities. Any woman who can wear a supersheer stocking with aplomb at her age must be doing something right. And her hair! A master class in that triumvirate of professional women’s grooming: color and cut and spray.
But what was hard was the realization that I had just added another member to my handling team, and that she was likely to be an alpha member. What other choice did I have though?
I liked the way that even after I’d explained my situation, she maintained her bullish expression. She tapped the end of her pen on her desk and said, “Now, is that everything? It’s important you tell me everything.” I was emboldened by her and her confidence.
“There is one more thing,” I said. My voice was barely louder than a whisper.
“Go on,” Tamsin said.
I told her about Teddy. I felt Eliza becoming unbearably tense as I spoke, but I didn’t tell Tamsin everything. Of course not. I only told her as much as anyone else knew, apart from Eliza and me.
Tamsin seemed to deflate a little as she listened, but not entirely. “That complicates matters,” she said once I’d finished. “It’s probably not something that’s admissible if we ever find ourselves at trial, but it guarantees the police and the media are going to be all over you like a rash once they know. Thank you for being forthright about it.”
There was something about the way she said it that made me wonder if I should tell her more. If perhaps I’d misjudged her, and this was the moment to unburden myself completely and confide in her, because holding that secret about the bunker for so long had been so, so hard and the urge to tell was suddenly very strong. And if someone else knew, would Eliza have so much power over me? Was Tamsin a safe person to tell?
Eliza kicked off, warning me not to say more, telling me to protect myself. She appeared suddenly beside me in an empty chair and leaned so close I flinched. Her jaw was clenched. I was afraid of her. I recoiled.
“You do not tell,” she said. “You. Do. Not. Tell.”
I had to squeeze my eyes shut and shake my head to get rid of her.
“Hello?” Tamsin said.
“What?”
“You kind of zoned out a little there. Are you all right?”
“Yes. Yes, I am. Sorry. It’s all a bit overwhelming.”
“I’m sure it is.” Her words were kind enough, but there were new traces of concern in her expression. Eliza had lowered the temperature yet again. She had erected another barrier between me and the world.
“Do you mind if I ask?” Tamsin said. The pen was tapping on her desk again. “Do you have any medical conditions, either physical or related to mental health, that I should know about? I’m not being nosy. It’s pertinent to your case.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
She made a note. When she looked up at me, her eyes bored into mine, and I looked away.
“Let’s keep in close touch,” she said. “And by the way, I love your novels. That Eliza character, she’s terrific. A real ballbreaker, isn’t she? I wouldn’t like to be working on the opposite side of her in real life.”
I tried to smile, but my mouth felt as if it was full of gummy ashes.
XIX.
There aren’t any journalists out front of your house anymore and neither Charlie nor Karen has visited for ages, although they phone most days and your dad gets on the other line and you have to be as quiet as a mouse.
Your mum spends time in Teddy’s bedroom every day, arranging and rearranging the toys on his bed, to make him smile when he gets home. “We can tell him they’ve been having a tea party,” she says one afternoon. The toys are sitting in a circle.
“Like the people at the bonfire,” you say.
Her head whips around.
“What did you say?”
“The bonfire people made a circle.”
“Did you tell Charlie or Karen?”
You nod your head.
“Do you remember their faces? Anybody’s face?”
She has asked this before. Your mother thinks one of the bonfire people took Teddy away with them and that you must remember seeing something. She’s looking at you with such intensity that you quail. She wants you to describe a face, but the trouble is, you can’t remember any of the individuals. Should you make one up, to give her hope? Or just describe the compound face that appears in your mind whenever you think of the features of those fire-burnished, shadowy people? She looks desperate enough to break if you don’t chuck her a bone.
“A lady had a crown made from flowers.”
“What kind of flowers?” She takes your hand, pulls you gently toward her so you’re both perched on the edge of Teddy’s bed. Her other hand strokes the duvet cover as if it is alive and needs comforting itself.
“Like a daisy chain,” you say.
“What was her face like? Do you remember her face?”
Golden skin, flickering light, eyes like deep pools, hair in curls.
“She was pretty,” you say.
“What color was her hair?”
You’re not sure. It was impossible to tell in the firelight. “Probably brown,” you say.
“Dark . . . light?”
“Light.” It could have been. When you looked at photos of the summer solstice at the library, you saw a woman with light brown hair. Maybe she was in the woods, too.
The questions go on.
You answer as best you can.
You feel yourself growing closer to your mum.
She confides in you.
She says the police have only been able to find some of the revelers to question. They are not mainstream people, she says. Not local. They’re pagans. Each word she speaks seems designed to snip the thread connecting them to the life you know, to make it clear that they are not people like us, and yet you feel you did know them that night. You shared something with them that ran deep.
She doesn’t let go of your hand until she goes to phone the police to share with them the new details you’ve supplied. And you know that it’ll probably only be a few hours before Charlie and Karen come back here to question you again.
38.
I didn’t want to go home after the meeting with Tamsin. I couldn’t face it.
Afraid of being recognized on the street, I wrapped my scarf high around my neck, pulled up my hood, and found myself walking to my old neighborhood.
At the building we used to live in, our former landlady, Patricia, was sitting in her usual chair by the front window, smoking a cigarette, gazing vacantly at the street life, puzzle books stacked on the table beside her. She came abruptly to life when she saw me, as if a puppeteer had just jerked her strings.
She opened the front door wide. “Have you come to pick up those boxes?”
“I’ve come to see you.”
I meant it. I wanted to be somewhere that felt like home, with someone whom I associated with safe, familiar things: cups of tea and cozy chats.
She said nothing about Dan. I saw no newspapers in her flat. I knew she didn’t go on the internet and her television was mostly set to the channels that showed reruns of shows she loved. Perhaps she didn’t know.
She made me tea and I told her about the new neighbors, how rich Sasha and James must be, how posh Barry and Vi were, and what a beautiful family Kate and Ben had. We watched her shows after that, and all the time, I thought: I’ve got to tell her about Dan. But she seemed so happy to see me, and I felt so grateful to cocoon myself with her for this little while, that I couldn’t bear to say the words.
As credits rolled at hyperspeed down the screen, she said, “I miss you and Dan. It’s not the same here with the new tenants. They’re never home. I used to like to think of you up there, typing all day, dreaming up a whole other universe right here in my flat, while I was just below. It was a lovely feeling. Special. Do you want a tea cake, darling? I know you’re partial.”
It was getting dark outside. The lights in the bakery windows opposite had just gone out. I felt my tension melting, just a little. I wanted nothing more than a tea cake.
She toasted one for me. The edges were burned, but I didn’t mind. As she sat back down beside me on the couch, she sounded as if the air had been punched out of her. She took my hand between hers and I felt the prickle of tears.
“Darling,” she said, “I’m sure you don’t want to talk about it or you would have said something, but I saw about Dan in the news. I know it wasn’t all roses up there between you two because I could hear more than you think, but I am very sorry he’s gone. He wasn’t all bad, was he? They’re usually not all bad. There’s got to be some reason you love them, right?”
What had she overheard? She began to pat the top of my hand. When she didn’t stop, the movement took on a sort of insistent quality.
“The police phoned me,” she added. The patting stopped. “They’re coming to talk to me in the morning.”
“Oh?” I said, casually, but my heart thumped. What would she tell them?
“Yeah. They’re coming in the morning, probably going to ask a whole lot of questions about you and your Dan. What I knew about you two, what I could hear, that sort of thing, which got me thinking—” She left her sentence hanging. My discomfort cranked up a gear.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Well, it’s silly really, but do you know what I’ve always dreamed about? Having a book dedicated just to me. I think that would be really nice.”
It took me a stunned moment to understand that she was blackmailing me. On the television a game-show host showed a mouthful of teeth. I found my voice as the screen filled with a shot of the audience applauding.
“It would be my pleasure to dedicate a book to you. It might be too late to get it into the next Eliza book, the one that’s coming out later this year, but the book after that will be yours.” I felt as if I might choke on my words. This was a small price to pay for her discretion, but I had trusted her when I shouldn’t have and now I didn’t know if I had anyone left on my side apart from Eliza.
