Nicci French - What to do When Someone Dies

‘You mean you turned a blind eye?’

‘That’s one way of putting it. Another is to say that we didn’t snoop, pry and poke around in each other’s worlds, thinking we had a right to know everything about each other. We treated each other like grown-ups. There are worse ways of being married.’

‘Are you saying she would have understood about you and Milena?’

‘You’ve no right even to ask that. You were an outsider who came blundering into our house, putting your nose into business that didn’t concern you.’

‘Did you love her?’

Real anger flared in his face and suddenly he stepped out of the circle of his umbrella so that large drops of water splashed on to his coat. ‘You want to know what I felt?’ he said, his face a few inches from mine. ‘You still want to find things out? Frances was a good woman and Milena was a bitch. A hard-core, monstrous bitch. Bitches always win. She played with people. She played with me, lured me, hooked me, pulled me in, and when she was done with me she threw me back into the water. She never loved me. She was only interested in me because she could use me to get back at Frances. Yes, yes. I know there was another man in Frances’s life. Milena told me when she dumped me that I had been her revenge on my wife, who’d stolen someone from her.’

As I watched him, he seemed to crumble. His mouth trembled, and for a moment I thought he was going to cry or hit me.

‘If you want to know who he was, I can’t tell you. I never asked. I didn’t want to know. I’m not like you. Some things are best kept hidden. We depend on that; we’d go mad if we knew everything. So if this had anything to do with your precious husband, I can’t tell you. Nobody can now. Everyone’s dead.’

He snapped his mouth shut and stepped back under his umbrella. We stared at each other.

‘I liked her a lot,’ I said at last. ‘I felt very guilty that I deceived her.’

‘Her, me, Johnny, everyone.’

I walked all the way home in the rain, barely noticing the Christmas lights, the festive shops billowing out warmth through their open doors, the brass band on Camden High Street playing carols and collecting for the blind. Cars and vans thundered past, spraying water from puddles all over me. David must have arranged to see me because he wanted to prod me, taunt me, play with me, scare me. Had it just been sadistic revenge or something else?

I sat in the living room and stared at the empty grate. Greg used to love making fires. He was very good at it, very methodical. He would never use fire-lighters, saying they were a cheat, but started instead with twisted pieces of paper, then kindling. I remembered how he would kneel and blow on the embers, coaxing them into flames. I hadn’t lit the fire since he died and I thought about doing so now, but it seemed too much effort.

Out of the blue a thought occurred to me that was both trivial and irritating. I tried to brush it away, because I was done with my botched attempts at amateur sleuthing, but it clung like a cobweb in my mind: why hadn’t Greg written down his appointment with Mrs Sutton, the old lady I had met on the day of his funeral? I was sure she had told me she’d arranged to see him on the day after his death, but it hadn’t been in his diary.

I told myself it didn’t matter, it was meaningless. I made myself a cup of tea and drank it slowly, sip by sip, then rang the office.

‘Can I speak to Joe?’ I asked.

‘I’m afraid Mr Foreman isn’t here.’

‘Tania, then?’

‘Putting you through.’

After a few seconds, Tania was on the line.

‘Tania? It’s me, Ellie.’

‘Ellie,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine. Listen, Tania, can you do me a favour?’

‘Of course!’

‘I need the number of one of Greg’s clients.’

‘Oh,’ she said doubtfully.

‘I met her at the funeral. A Mrs Sutton, I think – I don’t know her first name. She was very nice about Greg and there was something I wanted to ask her.’

‘All right.’ There was a pause and then her voice again: ‘It’s Marjorie Sutton and she lives in Hertfordshire. Have you got a pen handy?’

‘Hello?’ Her voice was crisp and clear.

‘Is that Marjorie Sutton?’

‘It is. Who am I speaking to?’

‘This is Ellie Falkner, Greg Manning’s widow.’

‘Of course. How can I help?’

‘I know this sounds peculiar, but I was tying up loose ends and there was something I wanted to ask you.’

‘Yes?’

‘You told me you were going to see Greg the day after he died.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You’re quite sure about that? Because there’s no record of an appointment in his diary.’

‘He’d only arranged it the day before. It must have been just before the accident. He was very insistent that he should come and see me.’

‘Do you know what it was about?’

‘I’m afraid not. Is there a problem?’

‘No problem,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much.’

I put the phone back in its holster and returned to my chair by the empty grate.

I saw a nature documentary once that showed a baby seal lying in a little hole in the Arctic ice sheet. Above, in the outside world, it was about fifty below but in the hole it was warm, at least by baby-seal standards. It must have felt safe as well. But it wasn’t. Miles away, a mother bear, desperate to feed its cub, had caught the scent of the subterranean baby seal and smashed her way through the snow and ice to get at it.

That was more or less how I felt when DCI Stuart Ramsay came to see me in my work shed. It felt wrong. The whole point of me being there was to pretend that people like him didn’t exist.

‘I was working,’ I said.

‘That’s fine,’ he replied. ‘Don’t mind me.’

‘All right.’ I continued with my sanding while he wandered around the room, picking up tools, occasionally glancing at me with a look of puzzlement, as if I was doing something unimaginably exotic.

‘What are you working on?’

‘It’s a storage chest Greg and I found in a skip months ago. I said I’d repair it and they could have it in the office. It’s really quite nice – look at the carvings on the top. I thought, after Greg died, I wouldn’t bother with it, but now I’ve decided I’m going to do it for them anyway. Joe will like it.’

Ramsay picked up a plastic squeezy bottle and sniffed at the nozzle. He pulled a face. ‘What’s this?’ he said.

‘It’s a laminate,’ I said. ‘It’s the sort of thing teenagers sniff and then go to hospital.’

He put the bottle down. ‘My gran used to hate old furniture,’ he said. ‘She said she hated the idea of sitting in a chair that a dead person had sat in.’

‘It’s a point of view,’ I said.

‘When people got married, they were supposed to buy themselves nice new furniture. That was the tradition then.’ He knelt over one of the chairs I had dismantled. ‘This is the sort of thing that would have been put on a bonfire in the old days.’

‘I guess you haven’t come to hire me,’ I said, ‘so why are you here?’

‘I’m on your side, Ms Falkner,’ he said. ‘You may not think so, but I am.’

‘I wasn’t thinking about it.’

‘It’s just that you make it difficult for someone to be on your side.’

‘You’re a policeman,’ I said. ‘You’re not meant to be on anybody’s side. You’re meant to investigate and find out the truth.’

He looked dubiously at my workbench, then leaned back on it, half sitting. ‘I’m not really here,’ he said. He consulted his watch. ‘I finished work half an hour ago. I’m on my way home.’

‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ I said. ‘Or a drink?’