Nicci French - Secret Smile

'I'm sorry,' said David. 'I didn't think of it at the time.'

'Whose friend was he?'

'What?'

'You said he was an old friend of one of the guys. Which one?'

'Why do you want to know?'

'I just do.'

David thought for a moment.

'Jeff,' he said. 'Jeff Locke.'

'Do you have his phone number?'

David gave a half-smile.

'You want to get in touch?'

I looked at him. The half-smile vanished. He started to rummage in his pockets.

When I woke, I was drenched in sweat and my heart was thudding. I had been dreaming, but the dream was breaking up and sliding away. I tried to hold on to a corner of it. Something about drowning. Drowning, not in water but in a substance that was slimier. Thrashing around and looking up at the bank and there were people sitting there, talking to each other and smiling. Lots of faces: my mother's face; an old friend from school whose name I no longer remembered; and my own face too, suddenly there on the bank. I lay in bed, my skin prickling, and tried to draw more of the dream back into my conscious mind. Something about Troy. I saw his face in my mind now, chalky-white and his mouth calling something, except no sound came out.

I sat up in bed, drawing the duvet around my shoulders. It was just past four, but there was still orange light from the street lamps and blue light from the moon shining through the half-open curtains into my room. I waited for the panic to subside. It had just been a dream, I told myself. It didn't mean anything: random images flickering in the night. I was scared to go back to sleep again because then I'd see Troy shouting for help in my head.

I hauled myself out of bed, pulled on my dressing gown and padded into the bathroom. In the mirror, my forehead looked shiny with sweat and my hair was damp, though I was now shivery with clammy cold. I rubbed a towel over my face, then went into the kitchen and made myself a mug of hot chocolate, which I took back to bed with me, along with an A to Z of London. I opened it at the right page and squinted down at the tiny letters, the network of roads. When I'd found what I had been half-dreading I would see, I put it on my pillow and lay down. I closed my eyes. Soon, it would be light and the birds would be singing and the sounds of the morning would start.

I had to be in Bloomsbury by eight-thirty, so I got up at half past six, pulled on my shorts and singlet, and put a sweatshirt over the top. I had two glasses of water and then went out to my van. The traffic wasn't thick yet, so it only took me fifteen minutes to drive to Seldon Avenue in E8. It was a broad road, with apartment blocks and terraced houses on either side, not really like an avenue at all. I parked directly opposite number 19. I looked at the A to Z one more time, to make absolutely sure I had the route in my head, then took off my sweatshirt and got out. It was still quite cool and there was a slight mist softening the horizon. I jogged on the spot for a few minutes to warm up and loosen my limbs, then ran up and down the road twice, getting ready to start properly.

I looked at my watch. 7.04. A deep breath and I set off, quite fast: halfway down the road, right on to a parallel road, right again and then up through a small alleyway with scrubland on one side and houses the other. It led to a housing estate, and I dodged round the fire gates, into the parking space and out the other side. Along the small road with lock-ups and a railway bridge; left on to a cul-de-sac, through a narrow cutting that led on to a pedestrian bridge over the railway line. I knew exactly where I was now. I'd been here dozens of times. Hundreds of times. I sprinted along the street, turned right and stopped, panting for breath. Kirkcaldy Road. Laura's road. Laura's house. I gazed up at her window. The curtains were not drawn, but no lights were on. I looked at my watch. 7.11. Seven minutes.

I waited for a minute or so and then ran back, retracing my footsteps. This time it took just over six minutes. It would take around twenty minutes, maybe, if you followed the streets, which went the long way, along a railway embankment, across a bridge and round a series of builders' yards. But the direct pedestrian route, the alley, cutting through the flats, the one you couldn't see if you were driving around in a squad car, that was a quarter of the distance at the most. Not twenty-five minutes in any way at all.

I arrived at eight in the morning at the flat in Bloomsbury, letting myself in with the key I'd been given. I was going to sand the floorboards. It wasn't my favourite job: it's noisy and stirs up a storm of dust. I covered the shelves with sheets and put on my ear protectors and mask, and for three hours I moved steadily up and down the spacious living room, planing the dark grot of decades off the wood and seeing it turn honey-coloured and grainy again.

At last I was finished. Squatting on the floor, I ran a finger over the wood, which was full of new patterns and knots. Once it was varnished, it would look beautiful. I stood up, pulled off the ear protectors and mask, and shook myself, like a dog coming out of water. I opened the large windows to let in the spring air and the buzz of traffic. I swept up the sawdust and then vacuumed the floor, making sure the nozzle got into all the corners. I pulled all the sheets off the bookshelves and started to vacuum them too, running the nozzle up the cracks between each volume, sucking up the fine layer of dust that lay over their tops.

This man had strange books. The first shelf was full of general things – two thick atlases, several dictionaries and encyclopedias, a tall book about birds of prey, another one about remarkable trees. But as I lifted the nozzle up to the second I saw titles such as The Addictive Personality, Maternal Ambivalence, Psychotic States in Children, Forensic Perspectives on Erotic Obsession and a thick green tome called The Handbook of Clinical Psychopharmacology. I turned off the vacuum cleaner and pulled down a book with the title Erotomania and the Sexualization of Torture and opened it at random. 'In the structure of unmaking,' I read, 'there is a fundamental differentiation to be established between the intricacies of this conflation…' I rubbed my grimy face. What on earth did that mean? My brain felt thick with effort. I sat down on the floor and flicked forwards a few pages. Karl Marx was being quoted: 'There is only one antidote to mental suffering and that is physical pain.' Was that true?

I heard a movement behind me. I was surprised in different ways at the same time. I had assumed the owner was at work. Not only was he not at work, but also he was wearing striped flannel pyjamas of the sort that I hadn't seen since visiting my grandfather when I was a small child. How could anybody have slept through what I'd been doing in that flat? He looked as if he had just woken up after several months of hibernation. He had long dark curly hair and 'unkempt' was an inadequate word to describe its state. He rubbed his hand through it and made it worse.

'I was looking for a cigarette,' he said.

I reached down a packet from a bookshelf.

'And matches.'

I found a box on a loudspeaker. He lit the cigarette, took a couple of deep drags on it and looked around him.

'I hope you're not going to say that I've got the wrong flat,' I said.

'You're not Bill,' he said.

'No,' I said. 'He subcontracted the job.' I looked at my watch. 'Did I wake you? I didn't know you were here.'

He looked puzzled. He didn't seem entirely to know that he was here either.

'I had a late night,' he said. 'I've got to get to work at twelve.'

I looked at my watch again.

'I hope it's nearby,' I said. 'You've got thirty-five minutes.'