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

‘I don’t know, but it feels relevant to me. As if all this time everyone’s been looking at the wrong picture.’

‘There isn’t a picture at all any more,’ I said. ‘Sonia and I saw to that.’

Before

Once again Guy didn’t turn up, and Joakim, when I asked him where he was, mumbled something, avoiding my eyes. Amos wasn’t exactly bad. He’d practised, I could see that. He didn’t make all that many mistakes. He didn’t come in at the wrong moment all that often. But he was playing music as if he were filling out a form, slowly, laboriously. Neal was all thumbs. He really was playing badly. He was obviously angry with Hayden and wanted to make some sort of point, but whatever the point was, it was doing nothing for his music. What made it worse was that Hayden didn’t respond. He didn’t make sarcastic comments. He didn’t point out wrong notes or suggest improvements. He had clearly given up on them and that was the greatest insult. He seemed bored, as if his mind was elsewhere. The only time he was engaged was when he and Joakim retreated into the corner and worked together on a piece that had nothing to do with what the rest of us were doing. I left them to it.

After

Sonia left and I was going to leave but Neal poured me another glass of his vodka. We didn’t discuss it any more. I wasn’t capable of it. I just needed to go away, preferably to an uninhabited island somewhere, and think about it, get it straight in my head, draw diagrams, make connections, and then I would be able to sort out what I had really done, and when I had that clear, I might start to have ideas about what I should do next. What was the rational thing to do. What was the right thing, if that had a meaning any more after the pile-up of wrong things. As I was drinking this last glass, I saw Neal hovering in a solicitous way and wondered if he thought that this was going to bring us together somehow.

Slowly and laboriously, as if my tongue had doubled in size and didn’t properly fit into my mouth, I tried to explain the situation. ‘I think I’m a bit drunk,’ I said. ‘And I’m in a state of shock. I’m not sure if the shock has made the being drunk worse or better. What I’m going to do is lie on the sofa for a bit and if you could just turn the light off, that would be great, and go away. When I’ve gathered myself together, I’ll get off the sofa and walk home.’

He did switch off the light and leave the room, then came back with a blanket, which he laid across me, and left again. I lay in the dark and thought in a maudlin fashion about how I’d got involved with Hayden and not Neal when Neal was clearly a better and more suitable and more decent person in every imaginable way. I almost started crying and then I wondered if I was ever going to sleep, and then I woke with a start and looked at my watch and saw that it was almost six thirty.

I felt terrible, much worse than before. My head ached, my mouth was dry, my brain felt like it had been left out in the rain and had rusted, and my clothes had that irritable, scratchy feel they get when you’ve slept in them. I couldn’t face Neal. I just wanted to escape. I let myself out and walked home. The freshness of the early-morning sunlight and the sight of people heading for work made me feel even more stale and grubby. When I got home, I had a shower, then crawled into bed and pulled the duvet over my head. I didn’t have a plan. It was more like a reptilian instinct deep in some primitive area of my brain to sleep for a whole day and then a whole night.

I was having a dream where I was trying to catch a train and I was unable to pack, and when I’d packed I couldn’t buy a ticket and I couldn’t get to the right platform, and then there was a whistle of the train coming or about to leave, but I couldn’t find it and I couldn’t find my luggage and, anyway, somewhere along the way I’d lost my ticket and the whistle changed from being a whistle to something I vaguely recognized and then realized was the doorbell. Still half in my dream I hoped someone else could answer the door. My mother, maybe, or Amos. But then I pulled the duvet off my face and remembered that my mother was two hundred miles away and Amos didn’t live with me any more. The light hurt. I got up and opened the door and two uniformed officers were standing there.

‘Does it have to be now?’ I said.

I KNEW JOY Wallis well by now but there was another detective with her at the police station I hadn’t seen before. She introduced him as Detective Chief Inspector James Brook.

‘Call me Jim,’ he said, as he took his jacket off and draped it over the back of a chair. He was about forty and his hair was cut very short, almost shaved, so it was like grey stubble. He looked at me with a smile. He was on my side, the smile said. We were in this together. It was about helping each other. He made me feel instantly insecure. Joy Wallis sat down further away. It seemed that Brook was in charge today. I imagined that he was one of those detectives who were meant to be good at getting people’s trust and persuading them to talk. He reminded me of the guys at college you hear are particularly successful with women. In a way it was