Nicci French - Secret Smile

'They could have caught a cab,' I said, a bit feebly.

'I thought your theory depended on nobody noticing,' said Rob. 'Your murderer calls a cab, it arrives at the party with nobody noticing. And what? Did he ask the cabbie to wait while he went inside and committed the murder?'

'He could have followed her back. Nobody noticed she was gone.'

'Oh, I forgot,' said Rob, and at that very moment I felt hands on my shoulders. I looked round and a face leaned into mine, kissing me on both cheeks, hugging me too close. It was Brendan.

'Oh, Miranda, Miranda, Miranda,' he murmured in my ear. 'What a terrible thing. It's so good of you to come. It means a lot to me. It would have meant a lot to Laura.' He looked over at Rob Pryor. 'Rob has been a good friend to me, ever since the business with Troy.' He looked back at me. 'I'm sorry, Mirrie. I'm so sorry. I seem to bring bad luck wherever I go.' I didn't reply. I couldn't. 'I needed to talk to you, Mirrie.' He smiled at me, looking me in the eyes. I always felt he was just a bit too close, his breath warm on my cheeks. 'You're the one who understands me. Better than anyone else. There's something strange. Has Rob told you?' He looked over at Rob, who shook his head. 'Almost at the moment when it – you know, the thing with Laura, I can't bear to say it – do you know what I was doing?'

'Of course I don't,' I said.

'You do,' he said. 'I was talking to you.'

Dearest Troy,

There's this memory that keeps coming back to me. When you were about nine you insisted on waking me up at four in the morning to listen to the dawn chorus. I staggered blearily out into the garden in my dressing gown even though it was freezing cold and the grass was soaking wet. I thought I'd just stay out there for a few minutes to humour you and then race back to my warm bed. But you were all dressed up in jeans and Wellington boots and a big jacket, and you had Dad's binoculars hanging round your neck. We stood at the end of the garden in the dawn and all of a sudden – as if a switch had been thrown – the birds started to sing. A great wall of sound all round us. I looked at your face and it was so incredibly joyful that I forgot to feel cold. You showed me the birds in the branches and then I could match the sounds with the open beaks and pulsing throats. We stayed out there for ages and then we went into the kitchen and I made us hot chocolate and scrambled eggs. You said, with your mouth full: 'I wish it could be like this all the time.'

Of course you can't read this, but I'm writing to you anyway because you're the only person I really want to talk to. I talk to you all the time. I'm terrified that one day I'll find that I've stopped talking to you, because that will mean you're dead.

'I don't really know why I'm here,' I said.

The woman opposite me didn't answer, just looked at me until I glanced away, down at my hands screwed together in my lap; at the low table between us where a box of tissues stood ready. Out of the window I could see daffodils in the sunshine. The yellow colour looked garish and excessive. I felt blank and dull and stiffly self-conscious. At least I wasn't lying on a couch.

'Where should I begin?'

At least she didn't say, 'Begin at the beginning.' Katherine Dowling must have been in her late forties or early fifties; her lined, handsome face was without make-up; she had steady brown eyes, strong cheekbones, a firm jaw. Her hair was flecked with grey and she wore quiet clothes – a skirt down past her knees, old and wrinkled suede boots, a baggy, soft-grey cardigan. She was focused on me, or trying to see into me, and I didn't know if I liked it. I shifted in my chair, unfolded my hands, scratched my cheek, gave a polite, irrelevant cough. I glanced at my watch – Troy 's watch – on my wrist. I had forty-three minutes left.

'Tell me what brought you here.'

'I've got no one else to talk to,' I said and noticed the unsteadiness in my voice. I welcomed it – I wanted grief to overwhelm me, to pour uncontrollably out of me, the way it did sometimes at night when I would wake in the small hours and feel my pillow was wet with weeping. 'The people I want to talk to are gone.'

'Gone?'

'Dead.' I felt my throat begin to ache and my sinuses thicken. 'My little brother and my best friend.' I made myself say their names aloud. ' Troy and Laura. He killed himself, or that's what everyone says, though I think, I think – well, never mind that… I found him, in my flat. He hanged himself. He was just a boy, really. He still hadn't stopped growing. If I close my eyes I can see his face. Except sometimes when I try to remember him, I can't. Laura died just a few weeks ago. She died in her bath. She was drunk and she knocked her head and drowned. Isn't that a stupid way to die? She was only my age. The last time I saw her we didn't speak. I keep thinking if I'd said something to her, if I'd done things differently, this wouldn't have happened. I know that probably sounds stupid to you, but it's what keeps coming back to me.'

Katherine Dowling leaned towards me very slightly in her chair. A lock of hair fell forwards and she pushed it behind her ear without taking her eyes off me.

'I can't believe that I'll never be with them again,' I said. I took the first tissue out of the box. 'Of course I know I won't, but I can't believe it. I can't,' I repeated hopelessly. 'It seems impossible.'

I took another tissue and wiped my eyes.

'Bereavement,' began Katherine Dowling, 'is something that everyone experiences in…'

'This is his watch,' I said, holding up my wrist. 'He left it by my bed and now I wear it and every time I look at it I think, this is the time he doesn't have any more. All those seconds and minutes and hours, ticking away. I always thought we'd grow old together. I thought I could help him. I should have helped him, my lovely little brother.'

I was weeping in earnest now and my voice was coming out in hiccups.

'Sorry,' I said. 'Sorry, but it seems so unfair.'

'Unfair on you?'

'No. No! I'm not dead, am I? I'm one of the lucky ones. Unfair on them, I mean.'

I talked and my words came out in a jumble of memories and feelings, everything mixed up together. Troy, Brendan, Laura, Kerry, my parents, Nick; a body dangling from a beam, phone calls in the night, words whispered into my ear like poison trickling into me, weddings called off, funerals, first his and then hers… Every so often I stopped and cried into the damp wodge of tissues I clutched in my hand. My cheeks stung; my nose was snotty and my eyes were sore.

'I'm like Typhoid Mary,' I said at one point. 'I'm like one of those Spanish soldiers bringing plagues to the American Indians, poisoning their world. I'm like

'What do you mean, Miranda?' Katherine Dowling's calm voice broke into my tirade.

'I'm the carrier,' I cried out, blotting my face. 'Don't you see? They were all right, more or less. I brought him into my world, and that's my problem and I had to deal with that. But it was their world as well and he's infected them, destroyed them, wrecked their lives. I'm all right. Look. Here I am, sitting with a therapist, working out ways to feel better about everything. You see, that's the problem.'

'Listen,' she said. 'Listen to me now, Miranda.'

'No,' I said. 'Wait. I've got to get this straight, for myself as much as anybody. It's like this: there are awful things in the world, right? I feel terrible about them. Your job as a therapist is to stop me feeling bad about it. But maybe what I should really do is deal with the awful things in the world.'

'No,' she said.

'There's something narcissistic about this, if that's the right word. I mean, if people came to you and were suffering from depression because of the poverty and suffering and injustice in the world and you had a pill to make them stop worrying about it, would you give it to them? Would you dole out this pill that would make people indifferent to what is wrong in the world rather than go out and make it better?'