Nicci French - The Memory Game

Alex had put a tin of biscuits on the table. I dunked a shortbread into my coffee and ate it ravenously. When I had finished, he picked up the cups and took them to the sink. The conversation was over.

‘Thanks Alex,’ I said as I got on my bike.

As I reached Camden Lock, I knew there was something I had to tell him, so I cycled back and knocked on the door. He opened it almost at once, with the smallest flicker of surprise.

‘I’ll go forward,’ I said.

He didn’t move, just gazed at me steadily. Then he nodded.

‘So be it,’ he said.

It sounded alarmingly biblical. I cycled away without another word.

I had been ready for half an hour when the car horn sounded outside the house. It was snowing, beautiful snow that wafted down in large flakes, settled like feathers on trees and houses and parked cars. In the half-light, London looked pure and serene, and I sat by the window smoking and thinking. Rusting vans, dustbins, empty milk bottles had become clean white shapes. All sounds were softened. Even the security screens on the house across the road were a sparkling grid. Tonight it would be muddy slush. Tonight, Martha would be lying beside her only daughter. I was glad she was dead.

I put on the coat I had bought before going to kiss Caspar in Highgate Cemetery. I pulled on a brown felt hat and brown leather gloves, and went out to meet Claud. He had insisted on driving all the way down to fetch me. In this weather. He said he wanted to make sure I came.

We were silent at first. I smoked and watched London turn to countryside. He fiddled with tapes and drove at a steady seventy up the MI. The windscreen wipers methodically pushed snow into compacted lines of grime.

‘Well?’ I said, finally.

‘Well, what?’

‘You know.’

Claud frowned.

‘Alan has been ensconced up in his study the whole time I’ve been at the Stead. And when he’s not there, the door is firmly locked.’

‘Jesus,’ I said.

‘Don’t worry, Jane, together we can sort out something.’

I just grunted in assent, watched Birmingham with its sprawled blocks of flats pass by. Tried not to think about cigarettes. I hadn’t thought what I was going to say to Alan. I hadn’t even prepared myself for the sight of him. I fumbled in my bag and found a comb which I dragged through my hair before rearranging the felt hat. Claud glanced sideways at me.

‘Nervous?’

It occurred to me that Claud was the only member of the Martello family with whom I could now sit like this.

‘You’ve been good over all this,’ I said.

He stared ahead.

‘I hope so,’ he replied.

Under the thin spread of snow, Natalie’s grave still looked neat and new. There were spring flowers – snowdrops, aconites – pushed into the holes of a stone vase. I wondered if anyone would come to tend it now. Beside it was an ugly clay hole, agape. The last bitter snow fell into it like spittle.

A small crowd of mourners in dark clothes stood and watched as Martha’s four sons carried her coffin towards us. They looked sombrely handsome under their burden, generic grieving sons carrying the remains of their beloved mother. A man in front of me took off his hat, and I recognised him suddenly as Jim Weston, an improbability in a long dark coat. I’d last seen him at the side of another grave. Sort of grave. I took off my hat, too. Snow drizzled onto my hair. I placed myself right at the edge of the crowd of mourners to avoid any chance of encountering Alan. Later, he’d want to give me a long hard hug and mutter intimately into my ear about his loss. All that could wait. I felt a nudge beside me and turned. It was Helen Auster.

‘I just wanted to show my face,’ she said with a little smile.

I gave her a quick hug while the familiar words were being intoned once more.

I heard Alan before I saw him. As Martha’s coffin was lowered into the waiting pit, a howl ripped the air. All heads moved forward. Suddenly, through a gap, the scene became clear. Alan was leant over the coffin, roaring into it or at it. His greasy grey hair was whipped back in the wind; in spite of the chill, he was wearing no coat, and his black suit was grubby and unbuttoned. Tears cascaded down his blotchy face unchecked and he lifted up his cane and shook it in the air like an unrehearsed King Lear.

‘Martha!’ he yelled. ‘Martha!’

The four sons closed in on him; they stood tall and straight around their fat, wild father, who was addled with grief and drink. Alan put his hands over his face; tears streamed through them as he groaned and wept. The rest of us remained silent. This was a one-man show.

‘Forgive me,’ he yelled. ‘I’m sorry.’

Claud put his arm around Alan, who leant against him and mumbled and wept. A woman next to me whom I’d never seen before started crying quietly into her demure hanky. Erica, standing back from the scene with Paul and Dad beside her, blew her nose noisily and gave a single hiccuping wail. For my part, I felt clear-headed and as cold as the day. I had already said my last goodbye to Martha. Now I was about to defy her last request to me. Look after Alan.

Cold pebbles of soil splattered onto the coffin. Martha and Natalie lay side by side, and Alan wept noisily on.

Helen put her arm through mine and we peeled away from the group, stepping off the path and among the gravestones.

‘You don’t look well,’ she said.

‘I haven’t been well. I think I’m better now, though. How are you doing?’

She smiled.

‘I wanted to tell you. We’ve found a use for one of our lists. We’re going to make an announcement on Monday. We’re asking every male person who was present in the environs of the Stead on the twenty-seventh of July, the day after the party, the day when Natalie was last seen, to give a blood sample for DNA fingerprinting.’

‘To find the father?’

‘Maybe.’

‘And the murderer?’

‘It wouldn’t be proof in itself.’

‘Still, it sounds a positive step.’

‘We think so.’

We walked along for a few more moments in silence. The graveyard was empty now except for us. I forced myself to speak:

‘But how are you, Helen?’

‘Me?’

She was obviously thrown.

‘You know, of course?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

Helen stopped and sat on the edge of a plinth bearing a stone urn half covered with a stone cloth. She looked up at me, almost a supplicant.

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘Helen, I’m not looking for some sort of justification from you. My only concern is how you are.’

‘Me? I’m totally confused. My life has been turned upside-down.’ She took a tissue from her pocket, clumsily unfolding it in the cold, and blew her nose. ‘I’m behaving unprofessionally. I’m breaking my marriage up. I promise you I’ve never done anything like this before and I feel I’ll have to tell Barry – that’s my husband – about this soon. And it sounds awful, but I feel happy and excited as well. Of course, I needn’t tell you. You of all people know what Theo is like.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m suddenly thinking about things differently, seeing new possibilities. I feel a bit drunk with it all.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I keep planning different things. What will probably happen is that we’ll wait until this inquiry is over and then I’ll tell my husband and move out and then we’ll move in together.’

‘Is that what Theo has said?’

‘Yes.’ She glanced up at me again. ‘You don’t look as if you approve.’

‘It’s not a matter of approval.’ I sat down, very uncomfortably, on the edge of the plinth, next to Helen. ‘Look, I don’t want to give advice and you may be completely right in what you say will happen. I just think you ought to be wary of the Martello family. They’re fascinating and seductive and they draw people in and I think they can be deceptive.’