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

was the word Hayden had used, admiringly, as if it aroused him, in the past. I had grown up in a household in which my father tyrannized my mother and I had made a pledge to myself that it would never happen to me. Sometimes being strong meant being cool; being independent meant holding myself back from involvement. Amos used to complain that there was always something withholding about me, and perhaps he was right; perhaps that was why in the end we had gone our separate ways. I didn’t know; it didn’t matter any more because that was over and Amos loved Sonia, and our relationship faded even as I thought about it. I could barely remember what we had been like together, and now when I saw Amos I felt faintly surprised that once we had felt passionate desire for each other. How was that possible?

But Hayden had outmanoeuvred me. Where I was independent, he was detached; where I was anxious about intimacy, he was phobic. I wanted to be free, but he wanted to be freer—and for him freedom meant losing all anchors and rudders and being carried off by whatever wind took him. An ill wind had blown him into my life and an ill wind was blowing him out of it. And I saw, lying on my sofa and listening to Joni Mitchell singing about love and disillusion, that with him I had taken on the unfamiliar role of the more committed and more loving one, the one who got hurt, the one who was left.

He had hit me, twice. What I wanted, what I was waiting to feel, was anger, the welcome fire of it, to burn away every other emotion, leaving no room for pity or for regret. I remembered his face twisted in a vicious snarl and his fists falling towards me, and then I remembered his face wiped clean by love for me.

Joni Mitchell came to an end. I stood up and went into the bedroom, retrieved his note to read again, although I knew what it said: ‘There are some things I would like to tell you that I should have told you before. Please let me see you. Please. Sorry. So very very sorry. H’. I stared at it, as if there was a secret code to be deciphered. The sun was low in the sky and its light rippled like water on the ceiling. The day was drifting into evening. The phone rang once more, and after it had stopped, the flat was full of ominous silence.

At last I stood up. I put on clothes—pale blue jeans torn at the knees, a T-shirt, a thin grey jacket. I left the house, feeling the warm evening air on my face, high summer in its breath.

After

Lightning cracked the sky ahead of me and I counted to eleven before the thunder rumbled. Eleven miles—did that mean eleven miles out or eleven miles up? As I left the canal basin and walked up Camden Road, fat drops were falling, bursting on the pavement like small bombs, and people were running for shelter. I didn’t bother trying to keep dry. I walked steadily up the road, feeling the rain splash on my head. Soon the separate drops seemed to have merged and the water was coming down like a sheet. I might as well have jumped into a river. Or a reservoir, I thought, and shivered violently, remembering again what I knew I would never forget. My shoes squelched and my hair dripped. My heart pounded with rage.

I didn’t have any battery left on my mobile, so I went back to the flat, peeled off my wet clothes, towelled myself dry, pulled on jeans and a shirt. Then I rang from the landline.

‘I need to see you. Yes, now. Are you at home? Alone? Good. Stay there. I’m coming round now.’

SONIA OPENED THE door before I even had time to ring the bell. Her hair was pulled tightly back into a ponytail and there were dark shadows under her eyes, a stretched quality to her skin. She stepped aside and I entered. I didn’t usually meet Sonia at her flat; instead she came to mine or we saw each other in pubs and cafés and other people’s houses. And nowadays, of course, she seemed to spend most of her time at Amos’s. It wasn’t surprising—she rented a depressing basement flat a few minutes’ walk from mine, which felt damp and underground. It had always puzzled me that Sonia, who was so in control of her life, so practical and careful with money, thrifty even in the old-fashioned sense, shouldn’t by now have moved up the property ladder.

‘Something to drink?’

‘No.’

I sat at her kitchen table and folded my hands tightly together. Sonia sat opposite me.

‘Horrible weather. I couldn’t bring myself to go out in it. I’ve been getting ready for the new term. Just a few days left.’

For once I didn’t gabble. I didn’t even speak. Not yet.

‘I don’t know what to say, Bonnie. There’s nothing I can do to make it better. It was an accident. You know that. Nevertheless, I killed Hayden. And I misled you. I’m sorry. There’s nothing else for me to say except I’m very sorry. Sorry for what I did and sorry for your loss.’

I looked at her, waited. I felt the silence grow dense around us. When at last I spoke, it was slowly. I could almost taste each separate word. ‘Things have been going round and round in my head,’ I said. ‘I keep seeing his face, his dead, beautiful face. I remember how it felt to touch him. I guess it’s the same for you, the images that won’t fade. That’s not what I was thinking about this time, though. When I finally knew it wasn’t Neal, and he knew it wasn’t me—before we knew it was you, though—we all compared crime scenes. There was the one he found and disrupted, and then the