Nicci French - Until it's Over

‘I’ve waited so long,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’

She sat up, stroked my hair and kissed me. ‘I think I owe you,’ she said.

‘Owe me?’ I was finding it difficult to speak.

She pulled my jacket off and very delicately undid the first button on my shirt. ‘You got Miles out of the way for me, didn’t you?’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘What does it matter?’

She smiled at me and kissed me again. I could taste her, wet and sweet. She undid the second button. ‘It matters to me,’ she said, kissing my lips, my face. She kissed my ear and whispered, ‘Tell me. I need to know. I want to know everything about you.’

‘It was easy,’ I said.

She undid the third button and pulled open my shirt. She put her lips against my neck. I moaned. I couldn’t stop myself.

‘So what did you do?’

She lay back on the sofa again. I bent over and kissed her lips. I kissed her hair, breathed it in. The clean soft smell was like a drug that made me feel dizzy and drunk with her. She gave a murmur.

‘It was the paperweight,’ I said.

‘Mm?’

I put my fingers on the fastening of her jeans, and this time she didn’t try to stop me. I undid the fastening, then drew down the zip. I saw her blue knickers, lacy at the top. I put my hand on them. I felt the hair through them, warm under my hand.

‘Tell me,’ she said.

‘The paperweight.’ I said the words to her between kisses. ‘You saw it in my room. I just put it in Miles’s room.’ I pushed my hand deeper under her knickers.

‘No,’ she said. ‘My top. Take it off first.’

I undid the first button. She lay back with her hands raised behind her head, open to me.

‘Peggy was just a mistake,’ I said, undoing the second button and the third. ‘But it was in his room, so the traces were there already.’

‘You?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Perfect, Davy,’ she said. ‘Perfect.’

And I didn’t know whether she meant me, stroking and kissing her beautiful body, or whether it was because now she finally understood it was me who knew everything and had done everything. I unfastened the last button and pulled the cardigan open and apart.

‘No, it was a mistake. Leah and Ingrid.’

My hands moved to the blue filigreed covering of her bra.

‘What’s this?’ I said, as I saw a black cord running along it and round under her back. I looked at her and her expression had changed suddenly, like a cloud covering the sun, and I knew what it was and I knew that bad things were going to happen. Everything was about to crumble. The darkness would cover everything, like an icy tide coming in. I reached for my jacket, for the spanner in the pocket. I could take her with me. One blow. She would raise her hand. It would shatter her wrist. The next blow would hit her face, immobilize her. Then I could smash those glorious features to jelly. But the jacket was out of reach; the bitch had kicked it away.

I raised myself from the sofa, pushing her back with one hand so that her head knocked against its wooden arm, and then I heard a clatter outside, heavy footsteps. The door opened hard, banging against the wall, and there was a rush of bodies. I let myself be shoved backwards against a wall. They pushed me hard, so that something fell from a shelf and smashed. The pain in the back of my head was like cold water, but a trickle of clear thought seeped into the jumble of my mind.

‘You’re under arrest,’ said a familiar voice. Kamsky. It was like a surprise party. You think you’re having a night alone and suddenly all your friends jump out. You think no one can hear you and all the time they’ve been listening, snooping, prying, spying.

‘No!’ I said. ‘Don’t. Listen – listen, this is a mistake. A stupid mistake, I was just playing along with Astrid. I was talking dirty to excite her. You’d understand that. It was a joke.’

Astrid was sitting on the sofa with her head in her hands. Kamsky looked at her with concern. ‘Are you all right?’

She stood up, then remembered the state she was in. She zipped up her jeans. A female officer stepped forward and removed the wire and microphone. She had to reach round Astrid’s body and disentangle it from her bra. All the time, Astrid looked at me, with an almost speculative expression, as if she was staring at me through the bars of a cage. Her lips curled back.

‘You…’ she began, and then she stopped.

‘You did well, Astrid,’ said Kamsky. ‘Really well, my dear.’

‘He touched me,’ she hissed. ‘I let him. I let him.’

Her hand came to her mouth. Her eyes met mine for a second, then she ran from the room. I heard the sound of vomiting, again and again. Then the sound of a door being locked and then of a shower. Not very flattering. The officers started to get busy. There was rummaging in my pockets. Grubby fingers poking and prodding me. Dirty eyes staring. A nasty fluttering in my head. A nerve was jumping just above my lip. I tried to bite it still, but I couldn’t stop it.

‘You fucking piece of filth,’ said a voice. A uniformed man brandished my spanner in front of my face. ‘What the hell’s this?’

‘I’m a…’ I couldn’t remember the word. What was happening? Pieces of my brain falling off like flaking plaster; words and thoughts cascading away. ‘A builder,’ I managed at last. ‘I keep tools in my pocket.’

‘Admit what you did,’ said Kamsky. ‘Save us all a lot of trouble. Get your friend out of prison.’

I needed to look puzzled. I tried to pull my expression the right way. My face was rubber and cardboard. My mouth felt numb, as if I’d had a stroke or something.

‘Get a guilty man out of prison?’ I said at last. I laughed, tried to laugh. Kamsky drew back slightly. ‘Why would I do that, mate?’

Kamsky’s expression was partly anger and partly a kind of wonderment. ‘You never give up, do you, your kind?’

My kind. What did that mean, ‘my kind’? He didn’t know anything at all about me and he never would. I didn’t have a kind. I was someone else, someone different, and they’d never understand.

‘All that stuff you said before,’ I said, ‘about what I say being used as evidence. I hope someone has noted down that I’ve kept trying to explain that you’ve made a mistake, that I’m completely innocent.’

‘It’s all on tape,’ said Kamsky.

‘I told you,’ I said. ‘I was playing along.’

‘We’ve got you admitting it. You don’t have an alibi. We’ve got the underwear you stole from Leah Peterson. That’s right. We’ve been talking to your girlfriend. It seems she wasn’t entirely convinced by your attempt at an alibi.’

‘Silly little bitch,’ I said. My tongue was thick. There was spit on my chin but I wiped it away. ‘I got that underwear at the sale at our house.’

Kamsky smiled.

‘Which is why Leah Peterson’s credit-card payment is dated the day before she died. We’ve got you, Davy. You might as well tell us what you did. Spare the families of the people you killed.’

I was falling. A steel band was being drawn tight round my skull and no relief from it would ever come.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No. No. You’ve got it all wrong. It wasn’t me.’

Because it wasn’t. Not really.

My mobile rang.

‘Hi, Emlyn,’ I said.

‘What are you doing?’

‘You know what I’m doing. I’m hacking some bushes down.’

‘I know. But I like to hear you say it. It helps me imagine it.’

‘Can’t you ring a chatline for that sort of thing?’

‘I’ve arranged for us to look at a house. The estate agent’s meeting us there in half an hour.’

‘A house? What for? We’ve already got a house.’