Nicci French - Until it's Over

‘I think he’s in his room. Packing, or clearing stuff out or something. We’re all being interviewed soon. But everyone’s locked away in their own private space, as if that’s the only place they’re safe.’

‘Except you.’

‘I’ve got Mel.’

‘Lucky you,’ I said. ‘What are your plans? Are you moving out?’

Davy and Mel exchanged a glance.

‘We’re working on it,’ said Davy. ‘What about you?’

‘I think I’d better make some calls,’ I said. ‘I thought it would end badly. But even so…’

I left them to their arrangements and went to find Pippa. As I passed Miles’s room I stopped and listened. I heard things being moved around. For a moment I thought I would go in and try to comfort him. He was my friend and once he’d been more. But as Owen had asked me, who did I trust? Not Miles, not any more. Not Miles or Mick or Dario or Owen, though if Owen knocked on my door I would let him in; I would pull the covers over us and in the darkness I would hold him against me. I carried on to Pippa’s door and, at the sound of her voice, pushed it open and stepped inside.

If her room had been a mess before, now it was in a new phase of chaos. Any clothes that had been in drawers or cupboards had been pulled out and lay in colourful heaps. Any books that had been in piles or on shelves were scattered. Folders were splayed open and papers lay across the floor like leaves in autumn. It took me a moment to find Pippa in the wreckage. She was sitting cross-legged by the side of the mirror, rummaging through a capacious makeup case, tossing stubs of lipstick and cakes of eye-shadow into a bin bag.

‘Hi,’ I said, lowering myself to the floor beside her.

‘Rough time?’

‘Pretty rough.’

‘Do you want to tell me?’

‘No, I don’t think so. There’s nothing left to tell. Everything I say I’ve already said a hundred times before. It all feels like a lie now. Does this additional layer of chaos mean you’re packing?’

‘Yup. I’m going to Ned’s tomorrow evening.’

I didn’t ask who Ned was. Instead I picked up a fringed shawl and held it against my cheek, closing my eyes for a second.

‘I’ve ordered a skip,’ continued Pippa. ‘We can dump the stuff we don’t want into it.’

‘Is there anything left after your yard sale?’

Pippa and I looked at each other and didn’t smile. The memory wasn’t so funny now.

‘You’d be surprised,’ she said.

‘The police might object,’ I said. ‘Disposing of evidence.’

She pulled a face.

‘Maybe they can take everything away,’ she said, ‘on condition they don’t bring it back.’

‘I’ve got the money,’ I said.

‘Where?’

‘Here.’ I tapped my pocket.

‘Christ! You’re just carrying it around with you?’

‘I didn’t know where else to put it. The police are about to descend on us and go through everything. I thought it would look odd if they found twenty thousand quid in my knicker drawer.’

‘Is there anything that doesn’t look odd?’

‘I want to divide it up. Can you work out who gets what?’

‘All right,’ said Pippa, vaguely. She picked up a pair of tights and started to ravel it up in her hands, then stretch it out again to check for ladders.

‘Soon?’

‘Fine.’

I remembered this house when we’d first moved in, every room clean, empty and full of possibility, the floorboards echoing when we trod on them, the light streaming in through the uncurtained windows. Gradually it had filled up – with objects, with people, with noise and with history – until it had become overloaded, like a boat buckling and tipping under the weight of too many passengers. But now we set about stripping it down again, and returning it to its original state. Rooms were being emptied, occupants were departing. Pictures were lifted down from walls, leaving patches behind them that Dario had never got round to painting. Hairballs and dust floated in the corners. The skip filled with the rubbish that had been too worthless even to put out for the yard sale, and I went and looked over its yellow rim at odd socks, cracked plates, torn sheets, a broken chair, a twisted bicycle wheel, yellowing newspapers: everything chipped, ripped, wrecked and unloved lay in the bottom. It was like a tide, I thought, that had swept in over the years, carrying us with it, and now was inexorably sweeping out again. Soon all that would be left in the house was the debris, the flotsam and jetsam of the life we’d led there.

As we were preparing to go, so the police arrived. Some were in plain clothes and would be conducting interviews with the occupants of seventy-two Maitland Road – DCI McBride and Paul Kamsky were there, and I thought I saw PC Jim Prebble, like a potato-faced hallucination from earlier days, but I didn’t recognize anyone else. Others came in uniform, carrying bags and cameras, not looking us in the eye; they would be picking their way through each room and even, it became apparent, through the skip and the bin bags into which we’d so hurriedly been pouring our unwanted objects. If it felt like an invasion, that was because it was an invasion. They poured over our threshold like a conquering army, with their IDs, their titles, their notebooks, their evidence kits and their suspicions. I saw the house through their eyes and it was full of dark and ugly secrets; I saw us through their eyes and we were a motley tribe, nervous, defensive and scared. It had become impossible to behave naturally or innocently, or to feel that way.

I watched Dario as he led a male and female officer up the stairs towards his room; he was ashen and red-eyed. Mick scowled at them so that his forehead corrugated and a vein pulsed in his temple. He wasn’t angry, I knew, he was full of terror and uncertainty, and probably all the nightmares from his past were crowding around him again. Only Pippa seemed quite cool, almost interested. She was used to things like this. She moved in the world of law and knew its language.

I went slowly down the stairs and stood in the hall, outside Pippa’s and Miles’s rooms. As I did so, a policeman came up the stairs from the kitchen and knocked heavily on Miles’s door. After a few seconds, Miles opened it. He was dressed in an oddly formal way, in a dark suit with a white linen shirt I had given him a long time ago. His face looked thinner than it had just a few hours ago, and older as well. He stood back and the police officer entered the room. Miles stared at me for a moment, his eyes glittering. Then he smiled faintly and turned away.

‘Astrid?’

I looked round. ‘Well, if it isn’t Detective Chief Inspector Kamsky. You don’t need to interview me again, do you?’

We walked out into the back garden together. I took him to my vegetable patch and pointed. ‘Broad beans, runner beans, potatoes,’ I said. ‘Those ones there are asparagus, but it takes two years to grow, so I doubt if any of us will be eating it. I’m moving out, you know.’

‘You’ll need to inform us of your -’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said. ‘I won’t run away. I’m going to stay with my friend Saul, not far from here.’

Kamsky didn’t reply. He seemed preoccupied with things he couldn’t say.

‘When will this be over?’ I asked.

‘All I can say is what I tell the team, and that is…’

But I never did find out what he told the team, for at that moment a police officer came walking across the grass towards us and Kamsky stepped away from me. The officer said something, and I saw Kamsky’s face become expressionless. A feeling of absolute foreboding descended on me.

‘Don’t let anyone else in,’ I heard him say, as the officer turned away. Then he looked back at me. ‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ he said, with a curious little bow, as if he was deserting me on a polished dance-floor.