The Other Side of the Door, Nicci French [new reading .TXT] 📗

a bag of buttons, last year’s wall calendar, a Christmas-tree stand plus a box of defective Christmas lights. All the debris of life: phone chargers, adaptors, pens, socks, cotton reels, assorted bits of makeup. When they were locked away from me, they had seemed intensely desirable and the thought of them being in Amos’s possession had filled me with rage and a self-righteous grievance; now, in the back of the car, they returned to being useless, unwanted, superfluous. I stopped at a skip and threw in several bags, barely checking what was inside them. Then, at the florist in Camden, I bought a large bunch of flowers to go with the vase I’d fought for, and drove home.

After

It was DI Wallis and DI Wade again, but this time it wasn’t at my flat but at the police station, and it wasn’t an informal chat but a formal interview, with a tape recorder playing. They didn’t smile at me, and they didn’t reassure me, and I found that my hands were shaking so much that I had to put them on my lap to hide them. My voice seemed to echo in that small, bare room, which was so brightly lit that I felt every twitch on my face would be noticed by them, that every lie would be amplified. I told myself to say as little as possible, to repeat what I’d said before—but I could no longer remember what I’d said. My story, such as it was, seemed to have been lost in the whirling panic of my mind—or, at least, tiny fragments remained, floating around in a blizzard of thoughts and fears. I was an actress with a scattering of randomly remembered lines and a whole play stretching out before me, a concert musician without music, a child back at school again, facing the nightmare of exams and only a few unassimilated facts bobbing around in the stew of ignorance.

I had spent the morning reading newspapers in the café down the road. I had ordered a pot of coffee, which I had drunk too quickly, burning my lips and increasing the jittery sensation in my limbs, and an almond croissant I scarcely touched because I felt so queasy that I thought even a few sugary flakes might make me throw up. All the papers had stories about Hayden Booth, the gifted musician with a promising future, whose body had been found in a reservoir. Headlines screamed of mystery, tragedy, relatives’ sorrow. What relatives? Did he have a mother, a father, brothers and sisters he had never mentioned, maybe little nephews and nieces he’d let clamber over him as Lola had clambered over him? In almost all, there was a photograph of him taken several years ago: he was standing on a stage and holding his guitar, his face half in shadow and his eyes hooded. He looked like someone famous, like someone beautiful. The fact of him took my breath away and I folded my arms around myself and waited until the thudding of my heart subsided and I could see the newsprint clearly again.

I didn’t want to read about him but I couldn’t stop myself. I scanned every line, waiting for my name to leap out at me, or for some damning fact to hit me, but there was nothing I didn’t know, except his age, which was thirty-eight, and the name of his ex-manager, Paul Boland. The stories had been hastily put together the day before, and the police, who were sitting opposite me now, were way ahead of them. They knew, for instance, that I hadn’t told them the whole truth.

When I had first sat down, my bare legs hot and sticky against the plastic chair, I had been offered a solicitor. It was my legal right. ‘If you don’t have one, we can arrange one for you.’ DI Wade waited for my reply.

‘I don’t know. I don’t think . . .’

If they were offering me a solicitor, did that mean I was—what was the phrase that was always used?—under suspicion? My first instinct was to say yes. I imagined someone—a silver-haired man in a grey suit, carrying a slim leather briefcase, or a slender, well-groomed woman with high cheekbones and a fine, ironic intelligence—sitting beside me and steering me through the dangerous waters ahead, making everything steady and safe. But, then, what would I tell the solicitor? I realized I would have to lie to them as well, have to attempt to remember the exact story I had already told, and the thought of adding another layer of deception to the tottering edifice made me feel giddy with panic.

‘No,’ I managed. ‘I don’t need a solicitor.’ I attempted a breezy self-confidence. ‘Why would I?’

‘Why indeed?’ said DI Wade. ‘So . . .’

So we began—and began, of course, with the fact that I had known Hayden Booth rather better than I had previously let on.

‘You told us . . .’ said DI Wade, flicking through his notebook. ‘. . . yes, you said that he didn’t have a girlfriend.’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘That is, yes, I told you that.’

‘Would you like to amend that statement?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you still want to tell us that he didn’t have a girlfriend?’

A deep heat flooded my body. I could feel it passing through me in waves. My face burned. ‘He didn’t. I mean, that’s not the word for it.’ They both waited. Joy Wallis bounced her pencil lightly on the surface of the table, tap tap tap. ‘It wasn’t like that with Hayden.’ Silence opened in front of me and I thought for a moment that I would hurl myself into it, blabber everything, get this over with. I swallowed hard and looked up. ‘He wasn’t the kind of man who had a steady girlfriend.’

‘So you said last time.’

‘Well, then.’

‘You misled us.’

‘I didn’t understand.’

‘Understand what?’

‘I don’t know.’ I tried again. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to mislead you. It’s true that I wasn’t Hayden’s girlfriend.’

‘How so?’ mused DI Wade.

‘We weren’t in a committed relationship,’ I said. ‘I had