Nicci French - The Memory Game

‘Talk about it if you like.’

‘I remember your pain, Paul. I remember watching your humiliation by Natalie and wondering what to do about it and…’

‘What are you going on about?’ said Paul sharply, and Bella clicked off the tape recorder and laid down her pen. ‘What do you think you’re doing, Jane?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t play the innocent with me like that. You know, what I mean. You’re deliberately destroying the memory, aren’t you? Well, aren’t you?’

‘No,’ I replied. I pushed away my plate, sipped some more wine and lit a cigarette. I felt a bit more in control now, not so seduced by the gentle golden light of my imagined past. ‘Are you going to ignore your crush on Natalie and her cruelty towards you? It was complicated, wasn’t it? There was you and Natalie, and then Natalie and Luke, and me and Theo, and then me and Claud, and there were the twins who were so odd really, playing silly jokes, and there was Alan fucking girls while Martha cooked our meals and put plasters on our knees, and there was Mum being unhappy, and who knows what Dad felt about the whole thing?

‘And then I remember’ – I couldn’t stop now, words were spilling out of me – ‘I remember that when I was sixteen and you were eighteen, Natalie disappeared. You see this as the end of our innocence. It may be good television. Do you really believe it?’

At some point, Paul had switched on the recorder again. I could see that he was torn between personal confusion and professional interest. I was delivering the goods, all right. Then I said something terrible. The words were out of my mouth, and lying between us like a sword, before I’d even thought them:

‘When did you last see Natalie, Paul?’

To my surprise, Paul didn’t react with hostility. He looked at me for a few seconds, considering me, and then rolled a pellet of bread between his fingers, before leaning towards the recorder and speaking directly into it:

‘I can’t remember. It was a long time ago.’

We had coffee and Bella and I smoked another cigarette: Paul sat between two bluish clouds of smoke and asked me other questions, but the real interview was over. Soon I put on my leather jacket, kissed Paul on the cheek, nodded at Bella and left. London was grey and shabby in the wet wind, and bits of paper lay over the pavements. A woman and her child asked me for money and I gave them five pounds and she asked me for ten. Wretched world.

‘There’s a little bit of Alan that’s enjoying all of this.’

I was cooking supper for Kim, who’d arrived from her surgery looking exhausted and clutching two bottles of wine and some squishy packets of cheese. The potatoes were mashed, a green salad was prepared, there were fresh flowers on the table: I had someone to cook for. Kim had taken off her shoes and was padding round the kitchen in a dazed fashion, lifting up pan lids, peering into my fridge. I’d been to the supermarket on my way home from work and the fridge was satisfyingly full: tomatoes that looked suspiciously off-red, fennel bulbs, some lettuce with a funny name, a slab of Parmesan, tubs of yoghurt, fresh pasta, a packet of smoked salmon. I had resolved to be good. No more of those dinners that only had to be lit and inhaled. Most mornings, I went swimming on my way into work; most evenings, I prepared myself a proper meal.

‘How do you mean?’

She pulled a cork and poured us a glass of wine each. I took a gulp, then threw some chopped onions into a pan and started to pull the snotty slime out of a squid with my finger.

‘Well, I suppose he’s devastated. But did you see that interview in the Guardian? Honestly! And Paul just rang me and told me that he’s just been photographed for one of the women’s mags. They’re doing a big feature on famous people whose children have died.’

‘There are no problems,’ said Kim sardonically, ‘only opportunities.’

‘That’s what you tell your patients, is it? Then the biggest opportunity of all is this thing at the ICA tomorrow evening, part of their “Angry Old Men” season; Alan Martello in conversation with Lizzie Judd. You know, the academic who made her name with that book called Sitting Uncomfortably, that attack on C. S. Lewis and Roald Dahl and other children’s writers that got into the newspapers. She’s a carnivore.’

‘Are you going along?’

‘Of course. It’s like a bullfight, isn’t it? People say you should see at least one in your life. I don’t know whether Alan will be in his chivalrous gentleman mode or his shocking truth-teller mode, but both will be disastrous.’

‘Don’t worry, Jane, people will have a good time. It’ll be like a modern version of bear baiting, just the sort of thing Alan enjoys.’

‘It won’t be much fun for the daughter-in-law of the bear.’

Kim had met a man, I learnt over squid. His name was Andreas. He was six years younger than her and a musician. He was small and handsome and sentimental, and their first date had lasted for an entire weekend, broken off only when Kim had been called out of bed to make home visits. I’d always envied Kim’s sex life; the variety, the excitement, the sheer numbers. One of her more interesting qualities as a friend was her willingness to talk about what she actually did in bed with these men. I had always had so little with which to reciprocate. I ventured a feeble question about whether it might turn out to be serious and she waved me away as she always did.

‘Do you miss Claud?’ she asked over cheese.

What could I say? I knew that Kim wouldn’t hold my confusion against me.

‘I miss a bit of my life, but, then again, I wanted to be free of that old intimacy. Maybe I’m a bit scared by what I’ve done but I’m excited as well somehow.’ I paused to gather my thoughts. ‘I feel that something huge is going on in my life, but that I’m in the wrong place at the moment. I almost wish I could tag along with the police, be involved. I feel like I’ve got to do something to find out how Natalie died. I need to know what happened.’

‘But it must have been that old boyfriend, mustn’t it?’

‘You mean Luke?’

‘Yes, and the police have got him.’

‘They’re talking to him.’

‘There you are then. Luke got her pregnant, they had some row, he killed her, maybe by mistake. And buried her.’

‘In Alan’s and Martha’s garden. Right by the house.’

‘People don’t do logical things when they’ve killed somebody. Did I ever tell you about the patient of mine who killed his wife? He dismembered the body and sent the bits off to branches of Barclays Bank all over the world.’

‘That sounds quite clever.’

‘Except that he put his address on the customs declaration.’

‘Why?’

‘His psychiatrist said that he wanted to be caught.’

‘Is that story true?’

‘Of course it is. Anyway, I don’t see that the improbability lets Luke off the hook any more than anybody else. Somebody must have buried her there.’

‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘It makes everyone less likely.’

They always say that if you started public hangings again, they would attract hordes. The ICA was packed out. The audience was mostly young. Television cameras were being set up near the stage, and a large man wearing round wire-framed glasses like Bertolt Brecht’s was wandering around the stage with a clipboard. I squeezed along the row towards the two empty seats in the middle. Theo still hadn’t arrived. The man sitting in the seat next to mine was almost invisible in a large tweed overcoat. I stepped on his foot and tripped over a plastic bag on the floor.

‘Sorry,’ I said irritably, and he nodded briefly, before going back to his ceiling-gazing.