Nicci French - Until it's Over

Owen just looked at me. I thought I could detect the hint of a smile.

A door opened and shut downstairs and Davy called, ‘Hello!’ I shivered.

‘Is that it, then?’ I asked.

‘Is what it?’

‘With us – it’s finished, is it?’

‘It? I didn’t know it had ever actually begun,’ he said, in an indifferent voice.

‘No?’ I put my hands on either side of his beautiful, hurt face and kissed his angry mouth hard. ‘Then how can it be over?’

That night, I stood by the window and wondered what Owen was doing in his room, just a few feet away from me. But Pippa interrupted my reverie. As always, she didn’t knock or call, just pushed my door open and sat on the side of my bed. Her cheeks glowed. ‘Hey! Guess what?’

‘What?’

‘Mick used to be in the army.’

‘Did he? That makes a kind of sense, doesn’t it? It explains how he can cook meals for large numbers of people, anyway. Why’s he so secretive about it?’

‘He was in the first Gulf War and he left after. He doesn’t like talking about it.’

‘Clearly.’

‘After he left, he just travelled for years. I don’t think he has a clue what to do with the rest of his life.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘Oh.’ Pippa gave a little giggle and threw me a coy look.

‘No! You didn’t?’ I said, dismayed at the thought of all that was going on in the house.

‘I did.’

‘You had sex with him? Just now?’

‘I thought he looked sad and I was curious about him. I thought it might cheer him up.’

‘You make it sound like half a pint down the pub.’

‘It wasn’t the most intense experience of my entire life. Nice, though.’

‘Did you just knock on his door and ask him if he wanted to have sex?’

‘Not quite. I went to his room. God, Astrid, it’s completely bare. There’s nothing in there at all. It’s like he’s still in the army. Just a bed and a chest and that cupboard we hauled up from the junk room, nothing else. No personal touches. Anyway, I poked my head round and asked him if he wanted a cup of tea or a beer or something. And when he said no, I just kind of went in. And one thing led to another.’

‘God,’ I said. ‘Mick.’

‘Mick.’ Pippa grinned.

‘Will you do it again?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. It wasn’t like that. It was just fun.’

‘Won’t it be awkward between you?’

‘Why should it?’

I found it difficult to answer. ‘It would be awkward for me, I guess.’

‘I just thought you’d want to know.’

‘Yes,’ I said dubiously.

‘How about you?’

‘Me?’

‘Your love life.’

‘I don’t have a love life at present.’

‘No?’

‘No!’

‘Then you’re going to, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

‘Come on, Astrid. Owen. I saw the way you were looking this morning. And then not looking. I could have sworn you two had…’

I felt I was being cajoled into sharing confidences. But I wasn’t in the mood for bantering and giggling.

‘There isn’t any “you two”, and I wasn’t looking like anything. I was helping Mick make bacon butties.’

‘This is me you’re talking to, world champion at deciphering erotic glances in the morning. He’s gorgeous and he’s free. Why don’t you pounce? I would. Hey, can I borrow this shirt tomorrow?’

‘All right.’

‘Mick’s got a huge scar on his back. That was rather thrilling.’

Some days you draw the short straw. I got up just before seven, ignored Owen, dodged Miles, stepped round Davy, who was dismantling a crooked lintel and muttering something about ‘resident cowboys’, grabbed a piece of toast on my way out, switched on my radio – and immediately there was a message from Campbell telling me to pick up a package in Canonbury and take it to Camden Town. Twenty minutes later, as I was slogging along Hampstead Road on an empty stomach with car fumes in my face, the radio crackled again and he told me I might as well go straight from Camden Town up to Highgate to collect a package. Highgate is up a steep hill. It was a house I’d been to before and it was as high as it was possible to get in London.

Once, on the way up, I had passed a sign helpfully informing me that I was as high as the tip of St Paul ’s Cathedral. The woman who lived there was wealthy and chic and I thought she was one of those people who doesn’t see poverty or disease or tramps in doorways. She lived in a different world, one of entitlement, and she treated us messengers like servants, which is, I suppose, what we were. She never recognized me. I was just part of the crowd of people who smoothed her way. One of the stories I told the gang at the Horse and Jockey was how I had been summoned once to collect a Japanese takeaway at the bottom of the hill and take it up to the top. As I handed it over, puffing and sweating while she was immaculate in her linen and her jewellery, I had thought that this was the sort of thing that provoked revolutions.

‘Why me?’ I asked, into the radio.

‘Because you’re there.’

So I dropped off the package in Camden Town, grabbed a sweet crêpe and a coffee from the stand in the high street, and set off in the faint drizzle. There were seriously rich people in Hampstead and Highgate, tasteful shops, expensive restaurants, exclusive schools where girls in pork-pie hats and boys in blazers got dropped off by mothers in four-wheel drives, tall and gracious houses with walled gardens and alarms blinking over their front doors, golf courses. The house was set back from the road. A tulip tree was flowering in the front garden and a pruned wisteria over the decorative porch, two huge empty earthenware pots standing at either side of it. I had never gone inside and only ever glimpsed the hall, which was twice the size of my bedroom and smelled of polish, paint, leather and money.

I swung myself off my bike, leaned it carefully against one of the porch’s pillars, and rang the doorbell. I waited for thirty seconds or so, heard nothing, then rang again, for longer this time, and stepped back. Nobody came. A satisfying little bubble of anger formed in my chest. They make some poor sod cycle all the way up the hill at whim, then can’t be bothered to be there.

I pulled out my mobile, noting the time, nine forty-one, and called Campbell to check there wasn’t some kind of mistake, but the line was busy. I rapped the door knocker hard.

Again, nothing. I knelt down in front of the letterbox and prised it open. It was one of those that are angled in such a way that you can only make out a small strip of the interior. I peered through and saw the first few carpeted steps of the stairs. I twisted my head so my nose was pushed against the aperture and made out the glossy wooden floorboards of the hall. And something else besides. I squinted and squashed my face closer into the door. Something smooth, pale brown. It looked like skin, a segment of an arm. I half stood, bending at a painful angle to get a better look. A segment of forearm becoming a wrist, and then, no matter how I twisted my face, I could see no further.

I called through the letterbox. I could hear my voice bounce round the clean empty spaces of the house. ‘Can you hear me?’

The arm, if that was what it was, remained still. I scrambled to my feet and hammered at the door with both fists, then pressed the bell once more, its discreet chime repeating. I looked again through the letterbox. There was no movement.

There was only one thing to do. For the first time in my life I dialled 999. A voice answered. ‘Which service, please?’

I had to make myself think.

‘Ambulance, I guess. I think someone might be hurt or ill. Someone’s lying on the other side of the door. I can see the arm.’