A Room Swept White (8 page)

‘I’ll see you in an hour,’ says Rachel Hines. That’s when it hits me: this is real, and I’m scared.

Three quarters of an hour later I’m at home, trying to cram a drying rack draped with wet washing into my wardrobe. Normally it lives in the bathroom, but that’s a part of the flat that a guest might conceivably see, so I can’t leave my damp underwear on display there. I succeed eventually in stuffing the rack into the cupboard, but then I can’t close the doors.
Does it matter? I’m so jittery, I can’t think straight. Rachel Hines is unlikely to force her way into my bedroom.

A panicked voice in my head whispers
How do you know what she’s likely to do
?

I pull the drying rack out of the cupboard. Half the clothes fall to the floor. Even if she wouldn’t see it, knowing it was there would bother me. It’s crazy to put wet laundry in a wardrobe, and I’m not going to start acting like a crazy person before anything’s even happened.

I shudder.
Nothing is going to happen
, I tell myself.
Get a grip
.

I put the clothes back on the rack, stand it in the middle of my bedroom and close the door on it. Then I run to the kitchen, which I left in a state this morning: plates and magazines strewn everywhere, toast crusts, milk-bottle tops, orange peel. The fat black bin bag that I should have taken out days ago has leaked oily orange sauce onto the lino.

I look at my watch. Nearly eleven. She said an hour to an hour and a half. That means she could arrive in five minutes. I need at least fifteen to sort out the kitchen. I yank open the dishwasher. It’s packed with shiny clean cutlery and crockery. I swear loudly. Who said dishwashers make life easier? They’re the devious bastards of the household appliance world. When you want a clean cup or plate, you get a stinking cavern full of curry stalactites dripping baked-bean juice. When you want the damn thing empty and ready to receive, that’s the moment it picks to be full to bursting with an entire dinner service, gleaming and ponging of lemon.

I pile the clean stuff randomly into cupboards and drawers, chipping a couple of plates that were already chipped, as most of my stuff is. Then I load the dirty things without bothering
to rinse them as I normally would, and wipe the surfaces with a cloth that’s probably dirtier than the mess I’m using it to wipe up. I’m quite shallow when it comes to cleaning – tidy and bacteria-infested suits me fine, as long as it looks presentable to the untrained eye.

I take out the rubbish, mop up the oil on the floor and stand back to survey the kitchen. It looks better than it has for some time. The thought pops into my head before I can stop it:
maybe I ought to have murderers round more often
. In the lounge, to a soundtrack of loud bangs from my pogo-jumping upstairs neighbours – their getting-ready-for-bed noises – I pick up about twenty DVDs from the floor and shove them in a cloth shopping bag, which I stuff behind the door.

I don’t want Rachel Hines to know what DVDs I own, or anything else about me. I cast my eyes over the bookshelf that fills one whole alcove of my lounge, the one nearest the window. I don’t want her to know what books I read, but I haven’t got a bag big enough to house them all temporarily, or time to take them off the shelves. I toy with the idea of rigging up some kind of curtain to hide them, then decide I’m being paranoid. It doesn’t matter if she sees my books. It only matters if I make it matter.

I plump up the sofa cushions and the one on the chair, then look again at my watch. Five past eleven. I pull open the curtains I closed when I got in, and, looking up to street level, see a man and woman walking past. They’re laughing. Her heels clip the pavement as she hurries along, and I have to restrain myself from pushing up my rattly sash window and shouting, ‘Come back!’

I don’t want to be alone with Rachel Hines.

In the hall, I scoop up all the letters, bills and bank statements that have piled up on the table and put them in the one drawer in my kitchen that opens properly, underneath the cutlery divider. I’m about to slam it shut when the corner of a thick cream-coloured envelope catches my eye, and I remember that I ran out of the flat this morning without opening the post.

That card someone sent me at work, the one with the numbers on it – that arrived in a thick cream-coloured envelope with the same ribbed effect.

So? It needn’t mean anything. A coincidence, that’s all
.

This one’s also addressed to Fliss Benson. And the writing . . .

I rip it open. Inside, there’s a card with only three numbers on it this time, in tiny handwriting at the bottom: 2 1 4. Or is it supposed to be two hundred and fourteen? The first three numbers on the other card, the one Laurie threw in the bin, were 2, 1 and 4.

There’s no signature, no indication of who sent it. I turn the envelope upside down and shake it. Nothing. What do the numbers mean? Is it some kind of threat? Am I supposed to be scared? Whoever the sender is, he or she knows where I work, where I live . . .

I tell myself I’m being ridiculous, and force the tension out of my body, letting my shoulders drop. I concentrate on breathing slowly and steadily for a few seconds. Of course it’s not a threat. If someone wants to threaten you, they use words you understand:
do x or I’ll kill you
. Threats are threats and numbers are numbers – there’s no overlap.

I tear both the card and the envelope into small pieces and take them outside to the bin, resolving to waste no more time
on what must be some idiot’s idea of a joke. Back inside, I pour myself a large glass of white wine and walk up and down, looking at my watch every three seconds until I can’t bear it any longer. I pick up the phone and ring Tamsin’s home number. Joe answers on the second ring. ‘She’s puking her guts up,’ he tells me.

‘Can I speak to her?’

‘Well . . .’ He sounds doubtful. ‘You can listen to her spraying the toilet bowl with gin if you want.’

‘I’m
fine
!’ Tamsin shouts in the background. I hear a scuffle; more specifically, I hear Joe losing. ‘Ignore Joseph. He likes to make heavy weather of things,’ says Tamsin, with the crisp enunciation of someone determined to sound sober. ‘Well? How did it go? What did she say?’

‘She’s not here yet.’

‘Oh. Sorry, I’ve slightly lost time . . .
track
of time,’ she corrects herself. ‘I thought it was really late.’

‘It is – too late to turn up on the doorstep of a complete stranger. Maybe she’s seen sense and decided not to come.’

‘Have you – gonna say this carefully, right? –
checked
your phone for texts?’ It sounds like ‘shrek-ed your phone for sex’, but I know what she means.

‘Yeah. Nothing.’

‘Then she’s coming.’

My watch says twenty past eleven. ‘Even from Twickenham, she should be here by now.’

‘Twickenham? That’s virtually in Dorset. She could be hours. What’s she doing in Twickenham?’

‘Doesn’t she live there?’

‘No. Last I heard she was in a rented flat in Notting Hill, five minutes from her ex-husband and the former family home.’

All I know about Rachel Hines is that she was convicted, and later unconvicted, of killing her two children.
Good one, Fliss. Nothing like going into a situation well prepared
.

‘Why did I agree to this?’ I wail. ‘It’s your fault – you were nodding at me like a maniac as if yes was the only possible answer.’ Even as I’m saying it, I know it’s not true. I said yes because I’d just heard that the film might be about to fall apart. Once that’s happened and Laurie’s at Hammerhead, he’ll have no leverage with Maya or Raffi. They’ll be able to make me redundant: punish me for daring to think I was Creative Director material, even though I never did, and save themselves a hundred and forty grand a year. I agreed to see Rachel Hines in the absurd hope that somehow it might lead to my becoming indispensable at Binary Star, which is pretty embarrassing, even when I’m the only person I’m admitting it to.

Does that mean I want to make Laurie’s film? No. No, no, no.

‘I won’t let her in,’ I say, certain this is the best idea I’ve ever had.

‘There’s nothing to be scared of,’ says Tamsin unhelpfully.

‘Easy for you to say. When was the last time you were visited by a murderer in the middle of the night?’ I’m not sure Rachel Hines killed her babies – how can I be? – but it makes me feel better to pretend that I am.

‘She isn’t a murderer any more,’ says Tamsin. Automatically, I think of the woman I overheard on the tube:
I can believe Helen Yardley was innocent all along
. ‘Even before she appealed and won, Justice Geilow made a point of saying she didn’t think Ray Hines would ever pose a threat to anyone in the future. She as good as said in her sentencing remarks that,
though murder carries a mandatory life sentence, she didn’t feel it was appropriate, and implied that cases of this sort shouldn’t be a matter for the criminal courts at all. It caused an uproar in legal circles. God, I feel sober. It’s your fault.’

‘Justice who?’

Tamsin sighs. ‘Don’t you ever read anything apart from
heat
? If you’re making the film, you’re going to need to familiarise yourself with—’

‘I’m not making the film. I’m bolting my door and going to bed. First thing tomorrow morning I’m handing in my resignation.’

‘Fine, do that. You’ll never know what Ray Hines wanted to talk to you about.’

Good
.

‘One of her objections to the film was sharing it with the other two women,’ says Tamsin. ‘Now that Helen’s dead and Sarah’s pulled out, Ray could be the main focus. Her case. It’s the most interesting of the three by far, though I once said that to Laurie and he almost had me hung, drawn and quartered for treason. Helen was always his favourite.’

Helen’s case, or Helen the woman
? I manage to stop myself from asking. I can’t be jealous of a murder victim who lost all three of her children and spent nearly a decade in jail. Even if it turns out Laurie’s spent years crying into his pillow on her account, jealousy is not an acceptable option, not if I want to be able to live with myself.

I hear a car pulling up outside. My hand tightens around the phone. ‘I think she’s here. I’ve got to go.’ I hover uselessly by my front door, trying to contain myself until I hear the bell. When I can’t stand it any longer, I open the door.

There’s a black car outside my house, with its lights on and
its engine running. I climb the five steps that lead from my basement flat up to the pavement, and see that it’s a Jaguar. From her telephone voice, Rachel Hines sounded like the sort of person who might own one. I wonder how this fits in with her being a drug addict. Maybe she isn’t one any more, or maybe she’s a heaps-of-cocaine-off-platinum-edged-mirrors junkie, not your bog-standard shooting-up-in-a-dirty-squat smackhead.
God, if I was any more prejudiced . . .

I plaster a non-threatening smile on my face and walk towards the car. It can’t be her; she’d have got out by now. Suddenly, the engine and lights cut out and I see her clearly in the street-lamp’s glow. Even knowing as little as I do about her case, she’s totally familiar to me. Hers is a household face, like Helen Yardley’s – one that’s been on the news and in the papers so often that most people in Britain would recognise her. No wonder she didn’t want to meet me in the pub.

I can’t believe she wants to meet me at all
.

Her face is slightly too long and her features too blunt, otherwise she’d be stunning. As it is, she’s the sort of plain that has missed attractive by a hair’s breadth. Her thick wavy hair makes me look again at her face, thinking she must be attractive; it’s the sort of hair you’d expect to frame the face of a beauty: well cut, lustrous, golden blonde. She looks like somebody important; it’s in her eyes and the way she holds herself. Nothing like Helen Yardley, whose absolute ordinariness and accessible friendly-neighbour smile made it easy for most people to believe in her innocence, once her convictions were quashed.

Rachel Hines opens her car door, but still doesn’t get out. Tentatively, I approach the Jaguar. She slams the door shut. The engine starts up, and the headlights come back on,
blinding me. ‘What . . .?’ I start to say, but she’s pulling away. As she draws level with me, she slows down, turns to face me. I see her look past me at the house and turn, in case there’s someone behind me, though I know there isn’t.
It’ll be just the two of us, won’t it
?

By the time I’ve turned back, she’s halfway down the road, speeding up as she drives away.

What did I do wrong? My mobile phone starts to ring in my pocket. ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ I say, assuming it’s Tamsin calling for an update. ‘She was here about ten seconds ago, and she’s just driven off without saying anything, without even getting out of the car.’

‘It’s me. Ray. I’m sorry about . . . what just happened.’

‘Forget it,’ I say, grudgingly. Why is it so unacceptable, if you’re a decent human being, to say, ‘Actually, it’s not okay, even though you’ve apologised. I don’t forgive you’? Why do I care what’s socially acceptable, given who I’m dealing with? ‘Can I go to bed now?’

‘You’ll have to come to me,’ she says.

‘
What
?’

‘Not now. I’ve inconvenienced you enough for one day. Tell me a time and date that suit you.’

‘No time, no date,’ I say. ‘Look, you caught me off-guard in the pub tonight. If you want to talk to someone at Binary Star, ring Maya Jacques and—’

‘I didn’t kill my daughter. Or my son.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I can tell you the name of the person who did, if you want: Wendy Whitehead. Though it wasn’t—’

‘I don’t want you to tell me anything,’ I say, my heart pounding. ‘I want you to leave me alone.’ I press the ‘end
call’ button hard. It’s several seconds before I dare to breathe again.

Back in my flat, I lock and bolt the door, turn off my mobile phone and unplug the landline. Five minutes later I’m rigid and wide awake in bed, the name Wendy Whitehead going round and round in my brain.

From
Nothing But Love
by Helen Yardley with Gaynor Mundy