Nicci French - Until it's Over

‘Astrid. It’s seventy-two Maitland Road. A friend of mind drove past and saw the for-sale sign.’

‘Oh,’ I said, and suddenly I felt cold and the garden turned from autumnal gold to grey. ‘I didn’t know he was selling it. He never said. But what did you arrange that for?’

‘I’m curious to see it because of everything it’s meant to you. And I want to see it with you. You always said you needed to go back one more time at least. But only if you want to.’

I paused for a moment.

‘All right,’ I said.

When we arrived the estate agent was already waiting on the pavement, a clipboard under his arm, a mobile phone at his ear. When we got out of the car, he held up his hand in acknowledgement of our presence but continued talking.

‘Well, you know what they say about verbal agreements,’ he said, and laughed. ‘Cheers, mate. Catch you later.’

He put his phone into his pocket and turned to us. He seemed momentarily confused by our appearance. Emlyn was dressed in a grey suit with a blue open-necked shirt. I was doing my best impersonation of a landscape gardener who had been interrupted while at work.

‘Sounds as if someone’s being gazumped,’ said Emlyn.

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said the agent. ‘But the market’s looking positive at the moment. Very positive.’ He held out his hand. ‘Mart Ponder,’ he said.

‘I’m Emlyn Kaplan,’ said Emlyn, ‘and this is Astrid Bell.’

‘You’ve been told that the property’s already under offer,’ said Ponder, ‘but the owner may be sympathetic to imaginative bids.’

‘Clearly,’ said Emlyn, giving me a sideways glance. ‘In the meantime…?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Ponder. ‘Let’s go inside.’

He took a familiar key with an unfamiliar tag from his folder and opened the front door. I suddenly felt a stab of alarm. ‘Is the owner around?’

‘He’s abroad and has been for quite some time,’ said Ponder. ‘The right cash offer and the buyer could move in tomorrow.’

I’d prepared myself to be shocked by the sight of bare boards and blank spaces on the walls but it wasn’t exactly like that. Miles had never come back and finished the job of moving out. He hadn’t been able to face the house again, so full of memories. There were still the familiar pictures on the wall. I could see a rug through the open door of Pippa’s old room. Still, it was obvious that the house had been abandoned for months. There was a smell like from a cave or a cellar, damp and still, as if the air and the light had been shut out.

‘You’ll see the house needs some decoration,’ said Ponder. He looked at the brackets on the wall just inside the door. ‘Clearly someone used to hang his bike here. And he wasn’t too careful about lifting it on or off.’

Emlyn raised an eyebrow and gave me an ironic smile. I didn’t smile back. I felt suddenly as if I were a ghost coming back to haunt a house where I had once been happy, or at least where I had been young. A ghost in a house that already had its ghosts.

‘Do you have a place of your own to sell?’ asked Ponder. Emlyn shook his head. ‘Well, good on you if you can afford this as your first buy.’

I felt he wasn’t sure whether to be very dubious or very impressed.

‘Let’s start here,’ he said, walking into Miles’s old room. ‘It’s a bit rough but this place sells itself. Large rooms, big windows – look at that view out on to the garden. Plenty of original features, if that’s what you like. I’ll be honest, upstairs you’ll find some pretty odd DIY that’s been done, but you could easily rip it out.’

I opened a cupboard door. A coat and a jacket and a couple of familiar shirts still hung inside. I breathed in: behind the staleness and decay, I thought I could detect Miles’s smell. Suddenly my eyes were full of tears. I blinked them away and turned back to the estate agent. ‘Could we look round alone? It’s easier to get a feel of a house like that.’

‘No problemo. It’s in need of a good clean, I’m afraid. Try to see beyond that to the outstanding potential. And give me a shout when you’re ready.’

When he was gone, I sat on the bed – the bed Leah had shared – and stared around me. Emlyn walked over to me and stroked my hair. ‘Was this a bad idea?’

‘Davy hasn’t said anything, as far as I know, but they think that this is probably where he killed Peggy. That’s the first woman. Well, the second, if you count his poor mother. He killed her here, stowed the body in the cupboard, then somehow dumped her out in the street.’

‘Creepy,’ said Emlyn.

‘Mmm. She was a nice woman, I think. Decent. Lonely. Careless about opening car doors.’ I stood up abruptly. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘Where to next?’

‘I’ll give you the guided tour.’

Pippa’s room, which used to be such a mess, was empty and bare, except for a tube of lipstick on the carpet near where her mirror used to stand. I pulled open her wardrobe, to the rattle of coat hangers, and found only a pair of red stilettos that she used to call her vamp shoes. I winced. For a moment, I could see her sitting cross-legged on her rug, surrounded by bright heaps of clothes and strewn with jewellery.

‘It feels like the Mary-Celeste’ said Emlyn.

‘We left in a hurry.’

I led him up the stairs. There were dustballs on the landing. The windows were smeared and one was newly cracked. A spider floated from the bulb in the bathroom. Our footsteps echoed tinnily.

‘This was my room,’ I said, pushing open the door and stepping inside. A rectangle of light lay on the carpet. ‘It was nice when I was here. Simple.’

‘You left some earrings,’ said Emlyn, picking them up from the window-sill and holding them out in the palm of his hand: tiny silver bicycle wheels.

‘Leave them,’ I said. ‘They belong here.’

‘You don’t have to do this, you know,’ he said, as we left the room.

‘But I want to. This way.

‘Owen’s,’ I said, standing at the threshold.

‘Your…?’

‘Yes.’

The photo of the woman swimming in a ripple of water still hung on the wall. I stood in front of it for a moment, in the fierce clutch of memory. How hungry and urgent we had been for each other once. How we’d clung to each other, for a while. Now he was a stranger again. One day I would barely be able to remember his face.

‘Do you ever hear from him now?’

I shook my head. ‘The thing is, I didn’t actually like him very much. Whatever happened between us, he was never really my friend. So when it was over, and it was quite quickly over – well, that was it.’

‘Out of here.’ He tugged me from the room.

On the top floor I led him briefly into Dario’s room, tripping over a grubby, ripped deck-chair that had somehow survived both the house sale and the skip, then into Mick’s boxy, deserted space.

‘Last but not least,’ I said, standing in front of the closed door, ‘that was where Davy was.’

‘Do you want to go in?’

‘No,’ I said. There was an icy darkness behind that door. If I opened it, it would spill over me. ‘No. I really don’t want to go in.’

He took my hand and his fingers felt strong and warm on mine, full of life.

We went downstairs, where Ponder was waiting.

‘Wait until you see this,’ he said. ‘Someone’s going to spend some money on a new kitchen, sort out the french windows and they’re going to have themselves something spectacular.’

‘What’s this?’ said Emlyn. He walked across the kitchen, took a piece of paper from the wall and handed it to me. As I looked at it I felt an ache in my chest, a prickling behind my eyes. It was the photograph, the only photograph of us all together, the Seven Dwarfs. It had seemed hilariously bad when Davy printed it out; we were falling all over the place, hysterical, slightly drunk. But happy, yes, we looked happy then, squeezed into the frame, out of focus and pushed close up against each other, arms flailing, mouths open in merriment or scowls. Now when I looked at the picture I tried to see behind Davy’s laughing eyes at what he knew and what we didn’t, what he still knew and we didn’t. How could he have done it, taken that group photograph, while the body of Peggy Farrell was lying upstairs? Was that his way of mocking us?