Patrick Flanery - Absolution

It was hours before Ms White returned, by which time Clare had fallen asleep in the chair. The other woman cleared her throat and Clare righted herself, found her mouth had been open, a line of drool on her shirt. She squinted up at Ms White, at the clock behind her.

‘I apologize, madam. I got delayed. I did not expect you still to be here,’ Ms White said. ‘Why have you not gone home already?’

‘Where did you think I would go in the middle of the night without a lift from you?’

‘I’m sure you could have found your way home. You are good at finding your way, aren’t you? Anyway, you were free to go all this time. Really, I can’t understand why you came with me in the first place if you weren’t prepared to cooperate,’ Ms White huffed.

Clare looked at the woman’s eyes. There was no glitter of irony or sarcasm, only blankness. Who is this stupid woman who abducts me at bedtime and leaves me alone in a waiting room for hours? Surely this is not how the police now operate, surely not.

‘Why didn’t you say so before you left me here?’ Clare tried to control her voice but a screech of rage slipped out.

‘There is no reason to be angry, madam. I will have you driven home by one of my officers just now.’ She turned her back on Clare and, as she walked away, paused, head half-turned. ‘We also discovered something about Lady Grove, the domestic cleaner you say you smelled on your invaders. It is sold in nearly three thousand separate retail outlets across the country. Not unique at all. Any of us could smell of Lady Grove.’

‘I see.’

‘Yes. So you would call us all suspects, I guess, madam.’

‘I can call no one a suspect, for I have no other evidence to provide. There was blood on the floor, was there not? You could conduct DNA tests. There was a car registration number.’

‘There was no match for the number. It does not exist, that registration. Perhaps your assistant made a mistake,’ Ms White said, and sniffed.

‘It is nearly three in the morning. Why are we having this conversation in the middle of the night?’

‘Because you did not order a taxi when you might have, madam.’

‘Stop calling me madam. Call me by my name if you must call me anything. I am in no mood for this. Test the blood that was on my floor. Find DNA matches. Or don’t. But leave me alone now. I don’t want to see you again, Ms White, or hear from you, unless you have firm evidence linking a suspect to the blood that was shed all over the floor of my old house. Is that clear?’

‘Perfectly, madam. You are interested only in blood.’

*

Days or weeks passed in which Clare stopped thinking about the house invasion and carried on settling into her new home, learning its peculiar rhythms and idiosyncrasies, the way a closet door would catch or the shower in the master bathroom would drip if the washing machine was on. She had to admit that all the elaborate security features made her feel more protected, while they also made her think constantly about her security in a way that she had never done in the old house on Canigou Avenue. If security came at the cost of paranoia, she supposed it was something that had to be borne.

Then, on yet another evening, when Marie was working late, finishing a batch of correspondence while Clare watched the news, the intercom buzzed.

‘We have good news, madam,’ Ms White said through the intercom. ‘We have caught the miscreants.’

‘Why must you always come unannounced, and always at such inconvenient hours?’ Clare shouted into the microphone, cross with her voice for once again betraying her irritation.

‘The law does not rest. And now we know who is responsible, madam.’

Marie showed Ms White into the living room. Clare did not offer her a seat.

‘Three men and a woman. One of them is known to you,’ Ms White said, consulting a file.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Jacobus Pieterse, the man who was your gardener at the house on Canigou Avenue, he is the killer.’

‘But there was no killing, and—’

‘Yet his DNA matched the blood found in your house. We had almost forgotten that bit of evidence. Why did you not tell us you had a criminal in your employ?’

Clare was astonished by the suggestion. Jacobus was the gentlest, least violent man she had ever known. He had refused to use poisons of any kind in the garden for fear of killing the birds. ‘Jacobus is no criminal. He is certainly no killer. I refuse to believe he had anything to do with it. It’s nothing to do with him. You have the wrong person. He’s been in and out of that house a million times. There are perfectly innocent reasons why his DNA should be present. I remember a time he cut his hand in the garden on a pair of secateurs and I brought him inside to bandage it. No doubt he bled on the carpet.’

‘But he has a gang this one. Him and his wife,’ said Ms White, tapping a binder with the long nail that extended from her index finger like a pointer — a pointer or weapon, Clare thought.

‘Gang? The man is nearly my age.’

‘Yes, but he and his wife are major players as we say. You would have saved us so much time had you told us in the first place he had been your handyman, instead of waiting for us to question your former neighbours.’ Ms White sniffed, wagging her finger at Clare.

‘My gardener. Not my handyman. I never needed a handyman, only a gardener. This is quite impossible. Jacobus and his wife are devout Christians. They would never be involved in any kind of criminal activity. What claim do you make against him?’

‘He invaded your house, madam.’

‘But you said he was already a criminal.’

‘Yes, he invaded your house with his gang. That makes him a criminal, but he was already a criminal. You can tell the type. Or,’ and Ms White laughed at herself, ‘I can tell the type, but clearly you cannot, otherwise you would not have hired the man in the first place.’

‘Jacobus was in my employ for more years than I can remember. He would have had nothing to do with this matter. He had opportunity for years, decades, to break into the house, and I never once had a problem. Nothing ever went missing, nothing was stolen, no blood shed in defence or malice.’

‘Biding his time, madam, waiting for the right moment to strike, a viper,’ Ms White said, sniffing again. ‘He waited until after your husband left you, didn’t he? You are lucky you came away with your life.’

‘And what about my stolen property? Do you mean to say that Jacobus is in possession of my father’s wig?’

‘Oh no, madam. He has disposed of the property already. A very clever thief. No doubt he sold it for a high price on the black market.’

Clare felt the room spin and slant. The woman made her feel nauseated and unsure of everything she knew to be true. ‘This is madness. The wig is all but worthless to anyone but me. You are very mistaken. This is all a mistake. I want it to stop.’

‘But you have put it in motion, madam. It is a serious crime. We go until it is finished,’ said Ms White, opening and closing the binder with a final tap of her fingernail.

I have been experiencing recurring dreams of such vividness I would be certain they were reality if not for the fact of your presence in them, Laura, and even that makes me wonder if you have not reappeared, or I have slipped unwittingly into a space where the impossible is routine. Each time, Marie wakes me out of a deep sleep in which I have been dreaming another dream — these other, prior dreams are the only things that change, and they are almost always banal: cows in a field, me on the farm as a child, or in a boat off Port Alfred, memories conjured up out of darkness. In the recurring part of the dream it is always half-past six when Marie wakes me, and she says, You have to get ready, you have to be at the studio . I am making an audio recording of my new book, doing my own reading. This is what makes the dreams so real, because this week, in my waking life, I am in the process of recording the new book, Absolution , a volume of fictionalized memoirs (although it is nothing like the memoir the publishers truly wanted, hence the official biography). In the dream, I thank Marie, go to have a shower, dry off, all very deliberately. I choose black slacks and a black shirt, tie my hair back with a black satin bow and rub moisturizer into my face — always the same actions in every dream, in the same order. Marie has made me a light breakfast — no lemon, no dairy, nothing to constrain or confuse the vocal cords. Hot tea, a soft roll with honey. In the car, Marie tells me this is the last day of recording, and after that we can get back to the usual routine, the humdrum that keeps us happy. I remind her of my biographer’s presence, remind her he may continue to visit daily for months to come, except when I tell him, as in this week (and as in the real week happening now), that other things keep me busy and we will recommence after a break of ten days. (I know it is cruel the way I play with him, both in dreams and in reality. He knows nothing about the actual contents of this forthcoming book. It is embargoed.)