Nicci French - What to do When Someone Dies

‘Do you need my name?’ I said. ‘Or his?’

‘The deceased’s,’ said Dr Kyriacou.

‘His name is Gregory Manning,’ I said.

Dr Kyriacou rummaged through some files piled in a metal tray on the counter until he found the one he wanted. He opened it and examined the papers inside. I tried to lean across and see but I couldn’t read anything.

‘Do you have any identification?’ he asked. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a regulation.’

I handed him my driving licence. He took it and wrote something on his form. He frowned. ‘Your husband’s body was badly burned,’ he said. ‘This will be distressing for you. But may I say that in my experience it’s better to see the body than not.’

I wanted to ask if that was really true, even after plane crashes, people hit by trains, but I couldn’t speak.

‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Gwen asked.

Suddenly I felt possessive of the experience. I shook my head. She sat down and Dr Kyriacou led me along the corridor and into a room that looked as if it were full of filing cabinets with drawers four deep, but with handles like old-fashioned fridges. He glanced at the clipboard he was carrying, then walked to one and turned to me. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked.

I nodded. He pulled open the door and there was a rush of cold air into the already cold room. He drew out a tray. There was a body lying on it, covered with a sheet. Without hesitating he lifted a corner of the sheet. I couldn’t stop myself gasping because now I knew, finally, decisively, that there was no mistake and that he was dead, my darling Greg, whom I’d last seen rushing out of the house, a half-eaten piece of toast between his teeth, so we hadn’t even kissed.

I made myself look closely. His face was blackened by the fire, some of his hair was burned away and his scalp scorched. The only real damage was above his right eyebrow where there were signs of a terrible collision. I reached out and touched some of his hair, then leaned forward and touched it with my lips. There was a strong smell of burning. ‘Goodbye,’ I whispered to him. ‘My love.’

‘Is this Gregory Manning?’ said Dr Kyriacou.

I nodded.

‘You need to say it aloud,’ he said.

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, and wrote on his clipboard.

Dr Kyriacou took me back to Gwen and then a thought occurred to me. ‘The other person in the crash. Is she here?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

I paused. I hardly dared ask the question. ‘Do you…’ I began. ‘Do you know her name?’

Dr Kyriacou rummaged through the files. ‘Her husband came,’ he said. ‘Yes, here we are.’ He looked at the front of the file. ‘Milena Livingstone.’

Gwen looked at me. ‘Who is she?’

‘I’ve never heard of her,’ I said.

My little house filled with people. Filled with forms, with tasks, with long lists of what I had to do. Friends made me cups of tea and pushed pieces of toast at me that I tried to eat. The phone rang and rang. Gwen and Mary must have set up a rota between them, because as soon as one left it seemed that the other arrived. My parents turned up with an overcooked ginger cake in a tin I remembered from childhood, and bath salts. Joe came with whisky. He sat on the sofa, shook his head slowly from side to side in disbelief and called me ‘darling’. Fergus arrived, his face ashen with shock; he called me ‘sweetheart’. Everyone tried to hug me. I didn’t want to be hugged. Or, at least, I didn’t want to be hugged by anyone except Greg. I woke at night out of dreams in which he was holding me in his warm embrace, keeping me safe, and lay with dry, sore eyes, staring at the darkness, feeling the space in the bed beside me.

I needn’t have worried about what I had to do for at every stage there were plenty of people to tell me. I had become part of a bureaucratic process and was channelled smoothly and efficiently towards the end point, the funeral. But before there could be a funeral, the death had to be registered, and for that, I discovered, there needed to be an inquest to establish the cause of death.

We used to talk about dying. Once, while drunk, we answered a questionnaire online that then provided you with your date of death (me at eighty-eight, Greg at eighty-five), because death seemed ludicrously far away, a joke and an impossibility. If we had ever thought about it seriously, we would have assumed that when it came we would be old, and one of us would be holding the other’s hand. But I hadn’t been holding his hand and someone else had been with him. Milena Livingstone. The name crackled in my head. Who was she? Why had he been with her?

‘Why do you think?’ asked my mother, grimly, and I ordered her out of the house, slamming the door so hard behind her that little bits of plaster flaked to the floor.

‘Why do you think?’ asked Gwen, and I laid my head on the table, on top of all the bits of paper, and said I didn’t know, I had no idea. But I knew Greg. He would never… I didn’t finish the sentence.

‘Tell me about her.’

‘Who?’ Joe looked at me with a grave, attentive expression.

‘Milena. Who was she?’

‘Ellie.’ His voice was kind. ‘I’ve already told you. I’ve no idea. I didn’t know about her.’

‘She wasn’t a client?’

Joe and Greg were partners in their own business. Accountants are supposed to be thin, grey men in suits and glasses, but that certainly wasn’t true of those two. Joe was flamboyant and charismatic. Women always gravitated towards him, drawn by his blue eyes, his wide smile, his air of utter attention. He was rather handsome himself, but Greg and I used to say that the real secret of his charm was that he made other people feel beautiful, special. He was older than us, in his late forties, so he seemed like an uncle or a much older brother. And Greg – well, Greg was Greg. He used to say that if I’d known what he did for a living, I’d never have gone out with him. But I couldn’t have known. We’d met at a party, a mutual friend of a friend’s, and if I’d had to guess, I would have said he was a TV director, a writer, even an actor or a professional activist. He looked raffish and stylishly unkempt; there was a slightly dreamy, unworldly air about him. I was the one who was methodical and practical, whereas he was enthusiastic, untidy, boyish. Certainly not what I thought of as an accountant.

‘No,’ said Joe. ‘I’ve looked through everything. Twice.’

‘There must be an explanation.’

‘Can’t you think of anything?’ This time his kind voice, pushing me gently to acknowledge the obvious, made me shudder.

‘I would have known.’ I glared at him. ‘You would have known.’

Joe put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Everyone has secrets, Ellie. Both of us know how wonderful and adorable Greg was but, after all -’

‘No,’ I repeated, cutting him off. ‘It’s not possible.’

‘Who was Milena?’ I asked Fergus.

‘I have no idea,’ he replied. ‘I swear he never mentioned anyone called Milena.’

‘Did he mention…’ I hesitated. ‘Did he ever say he was… you know?’

‘Having an affair?’ Fergus finished the sentence I couldn’t.

‘Yes.’

‘He adored you.’

‘That’s not the question.’

‘He never mentioned he was having an affair. Nor did I ever suspect that he might be. Not for a single second.’

‘And now?’

‘Now?’

‘Do you suspect he might have been?’

Fergus rubbed his face. ‘Honestly? I don’t know, Ellie. What can I say? You know I was in his office with him the day he died, working on the computers. He seemed completely normal. He talked about you. He never said anything that would make me suspect. Yet he died in a car with a strange woman whom no one seems to have heard of. What’s your explanation?’