The Burning (12 page)
He looked back towards the street, and when he spoke, he sounded remote. ‘Mine, I suppose. She agreed with me.’
She had had her pride, I guessed. But she had made it easy for him. And from what Louise had said, she hadn’t been able to forget him.
‘You said you wanted different things. What did she want?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s too late for relationship counselling.’
‘That’s not why I’m asking.’ I leaned forward, a supplicant rather than an interrogator. ‘I need to build up a picture of what she was like. I need you to tell me about her because that’s the only way I can understand her.’
He didn’t speak for a moment, considering it. ‘I don’t know if I can help you.’
‘You knew her better than most people. You were together for a long time.’
‘Just over two years. Not that long.’
I didn’t answer, letting the silence stretch out so he felt compelled to fill it.
‘You aren’t giving up, are you? You’re tougher than you look.’ He walked over and sat down in the other chair, looking at me with amusement in his eyes. I realised that the half-smile on his face was intended to be charming and couldn’t bring myself to respond in kind. Maddick was the sort of man who liked to feel he was irresistible to women, and I fell into the right age-bracket and gender. The flirting was practised and automatic, and wasted on me. I liked funny and passionate, not arrogant and egotistical, no matter how attractive the packaging.
‘She wanted what everyone wants. The happy ending. Marriage, kids, they all lived happily ever after.’ He looked down for a second, suddenly serious. ‘She didn’t get any of it in the end. Poor bitch.’
‘It’s what everyone wants … but not what you wanted.’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe one day. But not now. And not with her.’
‘Why not?’
‘Bex just wasn’t the sort of person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. She was for a good time, not a long time, if you know what I mean.’ He raised his eyebrows, inviting a laugh which didn’t come. ‘She was fun, but she gave you back what you wanted to see. I never had a single argument with her. Not one. That’s not normal. I used to try, sometimes. I’d push and push, and all she ever did was cry and apologise to me for something she hadn’t even done.’
‘That sounds like a great relationship,’ I observed, forgetting for a moment my role as the impartial representative of the Metropolitan Police.
He looked irritated. ‘You’re missing the point. She was simple. Straightforward. She wanted to be liked – loved, actually. She gave affection unquestioningly and unstintingly, like a dog. I couldn’t respect her because she didn’t respect herself.’
And you manipulated her so you could feel big about yourself
. I was not warming to Gil Maddick. ‘How did she fracture her cheek?’
‘Oh God, that. She fell over.’ He thought for a second. ‘It was about a year ago. She was pissed after her Christmas party. She was going up the stairs here and tripped – smashed her face into the floor because she didn’t put out her hands in time. She was miserable for a few days. Beautiful black eye, too.’
‘Did you see it happen?’
‘Heard it. I was upstairs, in bed.’
How convenient
. I changed tack. ‘Did you know about her eating disorder?’
He stared at me. ‘No. She didn’t have one. Didn’t need one. She was a gannet – couldn’t eat enough, never put on a pound.’
‘Because she threw up most of what she ate. She was bulimic.’ He shook his head. I moved on. ‘Did you know about her drug addiction?’
‘Drugs?’ He started to laugh. ‘What the fuck are you talking about? Sorry to swear, but this is ridiculous.
What
drugs?’
‘Cocaine.’
‘She wouldn’t even drink coffee when we were together. She said it made her too jittery.’
‘Maybe she didn’t want you to know about it.’
‘Maybe not.’ He was still staring at me. ‘What else are you going to tell me about her?’
‘Do you know where she worked?’
‘Ventnor Chase. It’s a PR agency.’
‘She hasn’t worked there since August. You really weren’t in touch with her, were you?’
‘We were supposed to go for a drink last month. I cancelled. Couldn’t face it in the end.’ He was staring into the distance. ‘You think you know someone.’
‘Apparently she wasn’t as simple and straightforward as all that.’ I flicked back in my notebook. ‘Can you give me a contact number for Tilly Shaw?’
He took out his mobile phone and scrolled through the address book, handing me the phone so I could write down her number. ‘I never meant to lose touch with Bex. We ended things amicably – I thought we would stay closer than we did. She was all right.’
‘She obviously thought a lot of you.’ I stood up, looking down at him. ‘She made you the beneficiary of her life-insurance policy. Luckily for you, the policy runs until the end of the year. You’re in line for quite a pay-out, Mr Maddick.’
‘I–I had no idea.’
‘Before you can claim it, you’ll have to prove you weren’t involved in her murder. Good luck with that.’ I walked towards the door. ‘I’ll see myself out.’
I left him sitting in his over-designed chrome and leather chair, staring into space. As I walked down the street, I tried to analyse why I had disliked him so much. Something about him was unsettling. Something made me edgy. I thought he was a smug, manipulative creep, for all his good looks. But being a creep wasn’t an arrestable offence.
On the bright side, it was a life sentence.
L
OUISE
It seemed to me as if I didn’t sleep at all on Friday night, but I must have drifted off at some point because I woke up stiff and cold in the morning with the duvet sagging on the floor and what felt like grit behind my eyelids. It was still early, still dark outside and quiet, with the hush that only fell at weekends, when all my early-rising, over-achieving neighbours gave in to exhaustion. No one was stirring yet. I looked out of my bedroom window at the bare, frosty gardens on either side of my own, and across to the backs of the houses in the next street. There were no lights on in any of the rooms and no signs of life, just blank windows that stared blindly back at me.
I couldn’t go back to sleep; I couldn’t switch off. I felt more alive than usual, more aware of my physical self and its surroundings. I was exceedingly conscious of the dense pile of the carpet under my feet, the soft felted flannel of my ancient pyjamas on my skin, the chill from the air leaking into my bedroom through the old sash window. My hair curled against my neck, feeling like a soft fingertip stroking the skin, and I shook it away with a quick movement and a shiver. The shiver, I told myself, was because the house was freezing and I shuffled downstairs in a thick towelling dressing gown to make a cup of tea, taking it back to bed. I left the bedside lamp off and sat upright against the pillows watching for the dawn, the mug clasped in both hands, sipping the steaming liquid and planning. I made a list for myself of tasks for the day, the week, the remainder of the month. Nothing was to do with work; everything was to do with me, with how I was and what I could be. Rebecca had coaxed me for so long to change myself. The irony wasn’t lost on me that now, when her voice had fallen silent for ever, I was finally starting to do what she’d suggested.
By the time I left the house some two hours later, I had been through every room, collecting and bagging up clothes, shoes and bed linen that needed to be thrown away. It was all destined for the dump, not good enough even for a charity shop. I threw out a few of the more unflattering items in my wardrobe, things I had meant to get rid of for a long time – sagging suits I had had since I was a trainee, old jeans with tar on the cuffs, a pair of trainers that had seen better days. I hesitated over a jumper with a hole in the sleeve that I had found when I was a student, thrown over the back of a chair in the Law Bodleian. It had had the exciting strangeness that someone else’s clothes always seemed to possess for me, as if by wearing it I borrowed something from a different personality, tried on a different life. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it now, and in fact I found myself putting it on before I left the house.
I was glad of it; the morning air was cold as I walked quickly to the Underground station along silent streets. I liked travelling on a Saturday, especially early. The trains were empty and on time, the other passengers more relaxed and considerate than during the week. You had space to think. But then, I had been doing too much thinking lately. I sat and looked at my reflection in the window of the train, distorted and doubled by the thick glass. Both versions of me looked pale, washed out in the fluorescent lights of the carriage, and from lack of sleep. It was a relief when the train stopped at Earls Court and a man sat opposite me, blocking my view. When I changed trains at Victoria, I didn’t bother to sit down, just stood holding on to a pole, staring at the floor. I counted under my breath, clearing my mind of anything but the numbers: how long it took the train to go between stations, how long it stopped, how many people got off, how many got on. Numbers were straightforward. They quietened my mind.
I started at Oxford Circus and worked my way along the street. I was looking for a dress, but not just any dress. It had to be dark, as plain as I could find, but not drab. The Haworths, they had told me, were thinking of having a memorial service for Rebecca. They’d been told they might have to wait some time before her body would be released but they needed the consolation of some kind of ceremony to mark her passing. I would be invited, they said. The service was a bad idea and it was too soon, the grief too raw for public display. I would have to be there, nonetheless, to support the Haworths. It was what they would expect and I couldn’t let them down. And I might as well look as good as I could; it was a way of remembering Rebecca. I hadn’t lost sight of the fact that Rebecca’s friends would be there too – the ones who remembered me as a quiet mouse happy in her shadow, if they remembered me at all. I wasn’t that person any more. I wanted them to look at me, not past me. I wanted them to see me for what I was.
I found it in Selfridges, a midnight-blue dress in fine wool with bracelet-length sleeves. It had a straight skirt, a tiny waist and a low round neckline. The saleswoman was delighted, all the more since I took her suggestion of a new coat to go with it and bought a blindingly expensive one that fitted like it had been made for me and flared into a soft bell-like skirt. I bought shoes to go with it, and a wide grey cashmere scarf. I handed over my credit card without the least hint of guilt. It was all
right
– right for the occasion, right for me.
I found myself struggling to manage all of my bags as the street became busier towards lunchtime. I was suddenly exhausted, thirsty and conscious of the fact that I hadn’t had any breakfast. It was unthinkable to attempt another tube journey with all of my shopping. A black cab rolled towards me with its orange light on and without thinking I put out my hand to hail it. The driver pulled in to the kerb a couple of yards ahead of me and I hurried over, only to fall back, catching my breath as another woman got there first. Long blonde hair piled up messily, slim legs in black tights and high-heeled ankle boots, an elegance of movement that was totally unstudied, narrow hands, a red coat, a sweet curve of cheek as she laughed, a neat, flat ear decorated with a small diamond hoop earring – it was Rebecca who got to the door before me, Rebecca who leaned in to talk to the driver, Rebecca who stepped into the back of the cab and sat back, waiting to be taken where she had asked to go. It was her – and then it wasn’t. A stranger looked out of the cab window at me, a woman much plainer than my friend, with a gap between her front teeth and over-plucked eyebrows. The shape of her face was wrong, the hair was too brassy, the coat cheap and gaudy with gold buttons. The resemblance was fleeting and once I had seen her properly, I couldn’t see Rebecca in her at all, but as the taxi drove away I still stared after it. I suppose she must have thought I was angry that she had stolen my cab, but I didn’t care about that, not really. There would be another one soon, and indeed there was, and this time I got into it before anyone else could get there first. I sat in the back and watched the shoppers jostling on the pavement, looking without meaning to for fair hair, for a quick turn of a head, a flash of a smile.
Looking for something that was gone for ever.
I came home to my small, cold house and ate, standing up by the fridge: an overripe pear that dripped juice down my wrists, a curl of salty ham, a fig yoghurt. It was an unorthodox lunch but I was too hungry to cook and too impatient to go out for food. My muscles ached from the physical effort of shopping and I found myself laughing at how weak I was, how tired, after a morning of self-indulgence. I hung up the new clothes, taking off the labels that told the story of how much I had spent. Then I ran a bath and soaked in it for a ridiculously long time, adding more hot water when it threatened to cool down, drifting, holding up my hands and looking at them as if I’d never seen them before.
When I finally gave in and got out of the bath, I put on a plain black jumper and skinny grey jeans, tying my hair back out of the way. In the kitchen, I marshalled my supplies of cleaning products, preparing to clean the entire house. I would start with the bathroom, I decided, and headed into the hall with an armful of cleaners and bleach. Housework was therapeutic, and restful, and totally necessary, I thought, pulling a tangled cobweb off the stairs with a shudder. I passed the phone in the hall and, as an afterthought, backtracked to check for messages, frowning to hear that there was one, picking up a pen to write down anything important. There was a tiny pause before it started. The voice that spoke into my ear was low, heavily ironic, instantly recognisable, and I dropped the things I had been carrying so I could hold on to the receiver with both hands. My heart was thumping. I didn’t know he had my home number. I didn’t know he knew where to find me. I had heard a lot about Gil from Rebecca. I knew he was demanding, manipulative, possessive. I also knew he was exciting, charismatic, unforgettable. I had mentioned his name to the police because if they wanted to know about Rebecca they had to know about Gil.