Emily Barr - The Sleeper

‘Thanks for seeing me. Thanks loads. It’s really kind of you. I’m so sorry for everything you’re going through.’

My words were trite, but I had no idea what else to say.

‘You had to climb over that gate, didn’t you? I saw from the window. We have to keep it padlocked. You understand?’

‘Oh God, yes. Of course. I left my bike on their side.’

‘It should be safe there.’ She did an almost-laugh under her breath. ‘I don’t think there’s much danger of one of them cycling off. I don’t think it’s really their style.’

‘Thanks for seeing me.’

She sighed, blowing her breath out through pursed lips.

‘In a perverse way I want to know more about that woman. From someone who knows her, not the rubbish the papers print. Sam Finch and I have never set eyes on each other, but it turns out we’ve been linked for all this time without having a clue. I can see why he wanted to make contact. When all these bastards have gone home, maybe we can actually meet.’

I followed her down a dark hallway, with the kind of worn-smooth tiles on the floor that denoted an old and cared-for house, and into a kitchen with French windows that led out into a grassy back garden. There was washing on the line outside, but it looked as though it had been there some time: it was stiff with frost.

One family photograph hung on a wall. I tried to look at it unobtrusively. It had been taken at some kind of party: Diana was wearing a turquoise dress that was a tiny bit too bright for her skin tone, and Guy was squinting into the camera, his pale pink tie loosened, his top button undone. He was a good-looking man. I could see where Lara’s temptation had sprung from, though I was still amazed that she had been capable of so massive and prolonged a deception.

There seemed to be nobody else in the house. That was strange. I had expected it to be filled with friends and family, rallying round.

‘Are you all alone?’ I asked, as she filled an old-fashioned kettle with water and put it on the gas burner.

‘I’ve tried to be, these last couple of days, but everyone wants to come and be comforting. The kids are upstairs with friends. That seems to be working for them better than anything else. My brother came and took my mum off for a bit. She lives with us, you know. We have a Family Liaison Officer from the police, and she’s been utterly wonderful, a total rock in a way I would never have been able to imagine before any of this. But she only comes over once a day now. The rest of the well-wishers come and go. Sometimes I just can’t bear it. Sitting there drinking tea with people who are so desperately sorry for me, and knowing that, while they try to say the right thing, they have no idea. To have your life ripped apart. Your husband dead. And then to discover all the rest of it and not even be able to be properly angry with him. I’m fucking furious with him, in fact, the bastard, and by getting himself murdered he’s outmanoeuvred me so we can never have a conversation about it, and I don’t even get to …’ She bit her lip and took some deep breaths. ‘Anyway. Let’s have some tea, shall we? I’d rather be on the hard stuff, but I’m trying to resist because I know where it will lead. Tell me about her. Lara Finch. Did she kill my husband?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m absolutely sure she didn’t.’ I had slipped easily into the exaggerated version of our friendship. If Lara did somehow show up, innocent, I was going to have some serious backtracking to do when it came to the strength and duration of our bond. Real friends of hers, and colleagues and acquaintances had popped up in the papers, baffled by her dramatic story, insisting that illicit sex was out of character for her, let alone murder. ‘I was with Sam last Saturday, because I went over to see her and she wasn’t there. But all we knew then was that she hadn’t turned up from the train. I had no idea that she and Guy were … I’m so sorry. She never spoke about him at all, not to me. I mean, I’d never even heard his name.’

Diana turned her back and started fiddling with a teapot.

‘Poor bastard,’ she said. ‘Sam Finch, I mean. He must be in pieces. Being arrested so dramatically on top of everything else. I knew. I didn’t know – Guy obviously didn’t tell me or anything like that. Why would he? But it wasn’t exactly a first offence, and I can read him like a book. One minute he was mentioning this woman on the train all the time, and then suddenly he never spoke of her again. That was his pattern.’

‘His pattern?’

She turned and looked me in the eye. Every line on her face spoke of a woman holding herself together by willpower.

‘I’ve been married to Guy for over twenty years. Was married, I should say. We’re forty-seven years old, both of us, and we know each other inside out. His affair with Lara Finch was, depressingly, absolutely in character for him, though everything that’s been in the papers about them living together in London during the week and effectively having double lives makes him even more of a fucking bastard than I’d suspected.

‘They’re saying she killed him because he wouldn’t leave me. That doesn’t make sense to me, because to judge by everything the papers have unearthed, he probably was building up to leaving. I can hear the words he’d have said. “Di. There’s something I need to talk to you about.” He’d have hated every moment of the conversation. Sometimes I felt he was leading up to it. I’d see the look on his face and everything in me would contract with dread. And then he wouldn’t say it. But who knows? Maybe he was refusing to leave. Maybe she wanted him to. It sounds that way, you know.

‘That woman from the train, Ellen, who the kids and I met once by the way and who knew exactly what was going on, so that’s nice. She seems very convinced that Lara was going to leave her poor husband and that Guy was offering to do the same. Happy ever after. Maybe he was losing his nerve. I don’t know anything any more. It would only take a moment of madness. People do psychotic things.’

The kettle started screeching. I watched Diana turn the gas off and spoon tea leaves into the teapot.

‘I use proper tea leaves too,’ I told her. ‘Hardly anyone else does. It’s much nicer.’

She smiled at this, and her entire face changed for a fraction of a second.

‘Isn’t it? My mother insists on it, and because I was brought up that way, I do too. It’s a different drink from tea-bag tea.’

‘Like the difference between proper and instant coffee.’

‘Yes! Very few people understand that. Everyone’s snobby or apologetic about instant coffee, but tea bags are entirely socially acceptable. I’m glad you appreciate that.’

I watched as reality descended back on her like smog, crumpling and crinkling her face.

‘I really don’t think she did it,’ I told her. ‘Lara. I mean, who am I to say, obviously, but I cannot believe it of her for a single moment. I think something else went on.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, yes. I don’t know. Someone else. Maybe she witnessed it. Maybe she’s dead too.’

‘They’d have found her by now.’

‘In a lake or something? Or maybe the killer forced her off the train with him? She could have been taken somewhere. I’m sure there’s more to it than the things we know.’

Diana said nothing. She poured milk, then tea, into two matching mugs. They were proper farmhouse mugs: cream, with roses on the sides. A cat walked silently into the room and rubbed itself against my legs. Diana slumped down next to me on the sofa.

‘Oh Christ. I have no idea. I’m not set on the idea that it was exactly the way it looks – how would I know? I’m just trying to get my head round reality. You know? You kind of have your life story in your head – you get married and have kids and come to live in Cornwall, and you think it goes “Guy wasn’t the greatest of husbands and I was a bit of a doormat, but we got on all right, and the kids left home and my mother wasn’t around for ever, and we got old together with some ups and downs but in a mainly happy and companionable way.” That was how my future was going to be until last week. Now I keep having to remind myself that it goes “And when I was forty-seven my husband was murdered and I …” I have no idea how it goes after that. At first you just don’t believe it, and wake up every morning expecting him to be there, or to come back on the train. And then you remember. And then, slowly, you realise that this is actually how it’s going to be from now on. The grim, banal reality.’