Claire Kendal - I Spy

I have the sense that Maxine is watching me, though she is slumped against the cream-coloured leather car seat and seeming to look at her own lap, where her hands are resting. Her nails, as usual, are long and perfectly manicured. The polish is what my grandmother calls dragon-lady red, and matches Maxine’s lipstick. I have never seen a chip in that polish.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Not far.’ She answers like a parent. Or at least how I think parents answer, because my own have been dead for too long for me to know this from experience, and I am not a parent myself, however much I try to tell myself that she counted and I am.

The car enters a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Bath. Because the houses here are built on top of old quarries, they get alarming cracks from subsidence, so walls split and ceilings buckle, hurling dark-grey plaster dust and chunks of building into the rooms.

Maxine’s driver turns onto a street that is filled with police cars and vans, all clustered near a modern, brick, perfectly square end-of-terrace house. The house is surrounded by police tape. ‘Come on,’ Maxine says, and I follow her out of the car.

I stand a couple metres away as Maxine speaks to a tall man with dark hair and dark-rimmed glasses, wearing a dark suit and standing outside of the cordon. He looks like the prince of death as he peers at me. I decide he is more likely to be MI5 than police as he nods at Maxine and says, ‘Tess’s up there. She’s expecting you.’

Maxine moves her head to signal that we need to go into the tent that encloses the house’s front door. The door has an awning with a strange coating of artificial grass. We are given forensic suits, so that our hair is obscured by white hoods, our mouths and noses covered by white masks, and our shoes enveloped in white footwear protectors. I want to hesitate, but I don’t let myself. Maxine marches into the house, and I march after her.

‘Don’t touch or move anything,’ she tells me, without turning round.

The carpet inside the entryway is mink-grey and I can see the tracks left by the vacuum, despite the ghost-shapes of old spills that no amount of shampoo will remove. The air is scented with pine and lemon, and window cleaner, plus the lingering hint of something that makes my stomach clench because it reminds me of Zac’s soap.

‘The burglar alarm wasn’t tripped,’ Maxine says. ‘She either de-activated it to let someone in, or didn’t activate it in the first place. Good chance she knew them.’

‘She. Who is she?’

Maxine is making a performance of looking around too attentively to notice that I have spoken.

The house seems the wrong way round, with the sitting room at the back, spanning the building’s entire width. There are no books on the shelves of the fake wood bookcases, and no dust either. There is a single half-drunk cup of strong black tea on the cheap glass coffee table. Not many people drink their tea with no milk. I’ve known two, and though Milly likes hers weak, and Zac strong, it came as a surprise that she and Zac should share anything other than their mutual hatred.

The kitchen is to the left side of the entry hall. It is also pristinely clean, though far from luxurious with peeling laminate cupboards, a half-size fridge like my own, and cork flooring.

At the bottom of the stairs is a handbag, stiff and upright, the obvious item in any game of odd one out. Tan leather, shiny gold hardware, and the Hermès logo in its cleanly embossed capital letters. Only once before have I come across a designer bag of this ilk.

Maxine answers one of the many questions I haven’t voiced. ‘It was a two-month holiday let, paid by credit card. They haven’t traced the holder of the card, but it didn’t belong to the woman who was occupying the house. She moved in a week ago – used a false name.’

We crunch our way up the stairs, along a roll of white paper. I can see on either side of it that the stairs have been sanded and painted.

At the top of the landing, straight in front of us, is an open bedroom door. A tall woman in another moon suit, glasses peeping out of her otherwise-covered face, emerges and squeezes onto the landing with us. ‘Hey, Maxine,’ the woman says.

‘Hey, Tess.’ It isn’t the forensic drama that brings home the fact that I am being allowed to see another version of Maxine, who is not slouching. It is Maxine’s use of the word ‘Hey’ and its attendant chumminess.

‘Needless to say,’ says Tess, ‘don’t touch anything.’

‘Sure thing,’ Maxine says, in more of the new Maxine language.

Tess does not ask who I am when she motions for us to follow her. There is a frizz of grey hair on her temple, which has escaped the head covering. There are smile lines around her eyes, and my guess is that in the part of her life that doesn’t involve space suits and corpses, this woman is restrainedly contented, with wry good humour.

Instead of moving forward when Tess beckons, though, I freeze. My head is telling me to go in, but my body does not seem to want to.

I’d thought the sweat had dried on me in Maxine’s car after my run, but I am wet again, beneath my breasts, down my spine. The mask over my mouth is stopping me from breathing. My scalp is itchy and hot beneath the hood.

Maxine puts a hand on my shoulder. The last time she did that I practically chopped it off. She says, ‘You don’t know the strength of a person until they’ve been tested.’

I nearly say, No shit, Sherlock, which is one of Milly’s favourite expressions. Milly loves the word shit. Instead, I manage a more restrained, ‘Thanks for your wisdom,’ and for the first time in forever, Maxine visibly blanches.

Zac left for London early this morning for a British Cardiovascular Society symposium. Tomorrow he will fly to the Ukraine for a fleeting visit, to do some teaching in a hospital in Kiev. Before he drove away, I leaned into the open car window for a final kiss goodbye, my hair unbrushed and circles under my eyes after a night of endlessly being sick.

I watched the car disappear out of sight, fantasising that I would get out my journal and write. Instead, I wandered through the house nibbling a special ginger biscuit that was supposed to help with nausea but was proving useless. I was ten weeks pregnant but the sickness wasn’t getting any better.

Zac hated clutter, but this place was decorated in a romantic style that seemed to invite it. The personal things were all mine – the cardigan thrown over the cabbage roses sofa, the pregnancy magazines covering the distressed coffee table, the pot of lip gloss and ponytail holder on the white-painted chimney piece, the novels on the chintz armchair. Zac was constantly putting them away, then scrubbing the artificially aged surfaces with disinfectant wipes. I was trying to be more orderly, because it was painful to see him so unnerved by what he would call mess and I would call the ordinary chaos of human life.