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

if they weren’t great works of art, even if they’d end up on a skip.’

‘Don’t pretend you’re like that,’ he said. ‘You know you’re better than that.’

‘Better? Better, Hayden? You’d rather die in the back of a car with nothing?’ I said. ‘With nobody to care for you?’

‘Why would there be nobody? Being free isn’t the same as being lonely.’

I knew Hayden took pleasure in me. Sometimes he even adored me, in his fashion. But I was the woman who was there at that moment. There had been others before and there would be others after. A thought occurred to me that I spoke out loud before I had time to stop myself: ‘What if you die in the back of a car and you’re not Hank Williams? Does that make a difference?’

He brought his hand up, the one that was still holding the metal sculpture, and touched my shoulder with it, almost playfully, but not quite. ‘Careful now,’ he said.

After

‘Right. We have to think. I can’t think. My brain isn’t working. It feels like bits have come loose in my head. Nuts and bolts.’

‘That would be the vodka,’ I said, holding up the bottle that was now only half full.

‘No. The vodka makes things clearer. Or slower or something.’

‘I feel a bit distanced from everything myself. Or insulated, maybe. It’s quite a relief, actually. As if I’m standing to one side of my life and looking at it as if it was happening to someone else. Which it isn’t, I know.’

‘We have to think, Bonnie.’

‘Yes. What about? I mean, what shall we think about first?’

‘I have a question.’

‘Another question?’

‘I’m not stupid, you know. I mean, I might be in love with you—don’t look at me like that, you know I am—and I might be a bit drunk and I might be in shock and I might have done something colossally foolish, but I’m still not stupid.’

‘I know you’re not.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘Tell you what?’

‘Who were you with?’

‘What?’

‘Come on, Bonnie. He was a big man. You didn’t get his body into the car and then into the reservoir alone.’

I closed my eyes and tried to sort through the jumble of my thoughts. Could I tell Neal about Sonia, or was that a further betrayal of the person who had helped me so unconditionally? ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘You mean, you don’t know whether to tell me?’

‘Right.’

‘Someone was with you when you found him?’

‘Not exactly, no.’

‘So you called someone to come and help you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you don’t want to tell me because—what?’

‘Because it doesn’t feel like my secret to tell. I promised to keep quiet.’

‘It might be a relief to them.’

‘I think this person simply wants to put it behind them,’ I said carefully. I was having trouble getting the pronouns right. Words would betray me, I thought, trip me up and expose me when I wasn’t paying attention to them.

‘Don’t you think that you and I and this person should get together and talk about what we know and what we should say?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I think.’

‘For instance, are we going to the police?’

‘The police?’

‘The police. For God’s sake, someone killed Hayden.’

‘Yes. I’m not forgetting that.’

‘But it wasn’t us.’

‘No.’

‘Now we know that, do you think we should go to the police?’

‘But look at what we’ve done.’

‘We have to think about it, at least.’

‘I am thinking,’ I said. ‘I’m thinking I’ll wake up and this will be a dream.’

‘We can’t even begin to make any decisions about it without this other person. Your third man. Or woman, of course.’

‘They did it for me,’ I said wretchedly. ‘Because I asked them to. How can we go to the police?’

‘How well did you cover your tracks?’

‘I don’t know. I wake up night after night in a cold sweat, remembering things I should have done.’

‘You say they’re suspicious of you already.’

‘I was having sex with him. I lied about that—and a whole lot of other things, of course, but they don’t know about that. Not yet, anyway. What shall we do?’

‘Do you want something to eat?’

‘I don’t know. Am I hungry?’ I put my hand against my belly. I couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten. Days had lost their normal structure, a wheel turning round and round and carrying me along with it, and had broken down into jagged, clockless episodes of fear, guilt, a dazed sense that all the time I’d thought I was running away from everything I was actually running towards it—helter-skelter into the arms of disaster.

‘How about a poached egg on a muffin? That’s one of my stand-bys.’

‘All right.’

I watched him while he cooked, proficient and domestic in a way that Hayden had never been, and I thought of how it could so easily have been different. I could have stayed with Neal and avoided my head-on collision with Hayden. Maybe he would still be dead, but it would be a story that had happened to somebody else, not to me, not to us. We ate in silence, knives and forks scraping against the china, and afterwards Neal made a pot of strong coffee. I drank two mugs, then said, ‘I’ll ring them.’

‘The third person?’

‘Yes.’

DAY WAS TURNING to night, and Neal’s garden was soft with fading light and the blurred chortle of wood-pigeons.

‘Sonia, I have something to tell you.’ I heard her give a gentle sigh, as if she had been expecting this moment. ‘Neal knows what we did.’

‘Neal!’

‘He doesn’t know you were involved, just that someone was.’

‘What have you gone and done, Bonnie?’ Her voice cracked.

‘It’s hard to explain on the phone. Everything’s changed. Nothing means what I thought it meant. I’d like to see you as soon as possible.’

‘Where are you?’

‘At his house.’

There was a long silence that I didn’t try to break. At last she said, ‘I’m coming over.’

‘He doesn’t have to know it was you.’

‘I’m coming over,’ she said. ‘Give me his address.’

When I went back, Neal looked up from his chair.

‘Before you say anything,’ he said, ‘there’s something I need to