Ian McEwan - Nutshell

This may be the wrong answer, but there’s not time to work it out. The questions have acquired new weight. Trudy’s heart is beating faster. I wouldn’t trust her to speak. But she does, in a constricted voice.

‘Birthday present from me. He loved that hat.’

The chief inspector is already moving on to something different, but she turns back. ‘It’s all we can see of him on the CCTV. Sent it off for a DNA match.’

‘We haven’t offered you any tea or coffee,’ Trudy says in her altered voice.

The chief inspector must have refused both for herself and the still-silent sergeant with a shake of the head. ‘That’s most of it these days,’ she says in a tone of nostalgia. ‘Science and computer screens. Now, where was — ah yes. There was tension. But I see in the notes there was a row.’

Claude will be making the same racing calculations as me. His own hair will be found in the hat. The correct answer was yes, he borrowed it a while ago.

‘Yes,’ Trudy says. ‘One of many.’

‘Would you mind telling me the—’

‘He wanted me to move out. I said I’d go in my own time.’

‘When he drove off what was his state of mind?’

‘Not good. He was a mess. Confused. He didn’t really want me to go. He wanted me back. Tried to make me jealous, pretending that Elodie was his lover. She put us right. There was no affair.’

Too much detail. She’s trying to regain control. But talking too fast. She needs to take a breath.

Clare Allison is silent while we wait to know the next direction she’ll take. But she stays with this and puts the matter as delicately as she can. ‘That’s not my information.’

A moment of numbness, as if sound itself has been murdered. The space around me shrinks as Trudy seems to deflate. Her spine slumps like an old woman’s. I’m just a little proud of myself. I always had my suspicions. How eagerly they believed Elodie. Now they know: nurse’s flowers will certainly not last. But I should be cautious too. The chief inspector might have her own reason to lie. She’s clicking her ballpoint pen, ready to move on.

My mother says in a small voice, ‘Well, I suppose I was the more deceived.’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Cairncross. But my sources are good. Let’s just say that this is a complicated young woman.’

I could explore the theory that it’s no bad thing for Trudy to be the injured party, to have corroboration for the story of her faithless husband. But I’m stunned; we’re both stunned. My father, that uncertain principle, spins yet further away from me just as the chief inspector comes at my mother with another question. She answers in the same small voice, with the added tremor of a punished little girl.

‘Any violence?’

‘No.’

‘Threats?’

‘No.’

‘None from you.’

‘No.’

‘What about his depression? What can you tell me?’

It’s kindly said and must be a trap. But Trudy doesn’t pause. Too distraught to coin new lies, too persuaded of her truth, she falls back on all she said before, in the same unlikely language. Constant mental pain … lashed out at those he loved … wrenched the poems from his soul. A vivid image comes to me of a parade of exhausted soldiers with ruined plumage. A sepia memory of a podcast, the Napoleonic Wars in many episodes. Back when my mother and I were at ease. Oh, that Boney had stayed within his borders, I remember thinking, and gone on writing good laws for France.

Claude joins in. ‘His own worst enemy.’

The altered acoustic tells me that the chief inspector has turned to look directly at him. ‘Any other enemies, apart from himself?’

The tone is unassuming. At best, the form of the question’s light-hearted, at worst, fertile with sinister intent.

‘I wouldn’t know. We were never close.’

‘Tell me,’ she says, her voice now warmer. ‘About your childhood together. That is, if you want to.’

He does. ‘I was younger by three years. He was good at everything. Sports, studying, girls. He thought I was an insignificant scab. When I grew up I did the only thing he couldn’t. Make money.’

‘Property.’

‘That sort of thing.’

The chief inspector turns back to Trudy. ‘Is this house for sale?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘I’d heard it was.’

Trudy doesn’t respond. Her first good move in several minutes.

I’m wondering if the chief inspector is in uniform. She must be. Her peaked hat will be by her elbow on the table, like a giant beak. I see her as free of mammalian sympathies, narrow-faced, thin-lipped, tight-buttoned. Surely, her head nods pigeon-like when she walks. The sergeant thinks she’s a stickler. Bound for promotion out of his league. She’ll fly. Either she’s decided for John Cairncross’s suicide or she has reason to believe that a late third-term gravid is good cover for a crime. Everything the chief inspector says, the least remark, is open to interpretation. The only power we have is to project. She may, like Claude, be clever or stupid or both at once. We just don’t know. Our ignorance is her perfect hand. My guess is that she suspects little, knows nothing. That her superiors are watching. That she must be delicate because this conversation is irregular and could compromise due process. That she’ll choose what’s appropriate over what’s true. That her career is her egg and she’ll sit on it, warm it, and wait.

But I’ve been wrong before.

WHAT NEXT? CLARE Allison wishes to look around. A bad idea. But to withdraw permission now, when, for all we know, things are going badly, will make them worse. The sergeant goes first up the wooden stairs, followed by Claude, the chief inspector, then my mother and me. On the ground floor the chief inspector says that if we wouldn’t mind, she’d like to go to the top and ‘work down’. Trudy doesn’t care to climb more stairs. The others continue up while we go into the sitting room to sit and think.

I dispatch my light-footed thoughts ahead of them, first to the library. Plaster dust, a smell of death, but relative order. The floor above, bedroom and bathroom, chaos of an intimate kind, the bed itself a tangle of lust and broken sleep, the floor strewn or piled with Trudy’s discarded clothes, the bathroom likewise with lidless pots, unguents, and dirty underwear. I wonder what disorder tells suspicious eyes. It can’t be morally neutral. A contempt for things, for order, cleanliness, must lie on a spectrum with scorn for laws, values, for life itself. What is a criminal but a disordered spirit? However, excessive order in a bedroom might be suspicious too. The chief inspector, bright-eyed as a robin, will take it in at a glance and come away. But below the level of conscious thought, disgust might bend her judgement.

There are rooms above the second floor but I’ve never been so far. I bring my thoughts to ground and, like a dutiful child, attend to my mother’s state. Her heart rate has settled. She seems almost calm. Perhaps fatalistic. Her engorged bladder presses against my head. But she can’t be troubled to move. She’s making her calculations, thinking perhaps of their plan. But she should ask herself where her interests lie. Disassociate from Claude. Land him in it somehow. No point in both doing time. Then she and I could languish here. She won’t want to give me away when she’s alone in a big house. In which case I promise to forgive her. Or deal with her later.

But there’s no time for schemes. I hear them coming back down. They pass by the open sitting-room door on their way to the front entrance. The chief inspector surely can’t leave without a respectful goodbye to the bereaved wife. In fact Claude has opened the front door and is showing Allison where his brother was parked, how the car failed to start at first, how, despite the row, they had waved when the engine turned and the car reversed into the road. A lesson in truth-telling.