Down Cemetery Road (18 page)

This she brooded on through her tears: her tears were a mask so they’d leave her alone. Up to a point, that is. And up to a point, they worked. She was given a glass of cold water and tepid sympathy by an Asian policewoman who kept calling her Sally; kept asking, too, if it was coke she needed; if she was starting to get the shakes. Sarah cried some more to shut her up. And before these tears dried Mark arrived, together with a man she recognized, Simon Smith, who carried a black briefcase and spoke very loudly about lawsuits. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Mark, though, was livid.

‘Who the
fuck
is in charge here?’

The Asian woman gave Sarah a look of shared citizenship. As if they had this in common: loud male voices which knew they were right.

What she remembered afterwards were harsh details: the lighting, the shabby paintwork; a voice in the corridor complaining about a database being down. But of the human contact, of Mark’s intercession, almost nothing remained. At one point he hugged her, it was true, but it was the smell of trains and smoky rooms on his jacket that stayed with her. It was the irritation in his voice as he spoke of how worried he’d been, as if everything that had happened to her had been just another way of something happening to him.

Later, he’d say, ‘It’s all that Jewish detective’s fault, isn’t it?’

‘Why say that?’

‘Well, if it hadn’t been for him –’

‘Why say Jewish?’

‘Oh, Christ, don’t start playing PC games. I just meant he was Jewish, that’s all. He was, wasn’t he?’

He had been. That much was true.

But that was later, when they were home. Though in fact not much later, for Simon Smith’s talk of lawsuits, along with his lethally efficient briefcase, had them out on the pavement by nine. He could, he said, have got them a lift home in a cop car, but it didn’t always pay to be too pushy. He was of an age with Mark, but a savagely receding hairline gave him an authority Mark was still aiming at. He also had the smallest teeth Sarah had ever seen.

‘But you should have called me yesterday,’ he said. ‘We could have nipped this in the bud.’

‘I didn’t
know
about it yesterday,’ Mark said, exasperated. He ran a hand through his own thick hair. He often did this in Simon’s company. ‘I mean, nobody tells me
anything
.’

They both looked at Sarah. But she was transfixed by the passing traffic; the bright headlights slicing up the evening.

Simon hailed a taxi. The way he climbed into it left no doubt that getting into taxis was a way of life with him; something he had aspired to, earned, and enjoyed demonstrating in public. ‘Call me later,’ he said to Mark. It was about half-way between advice and instruction.

They walked the rest of the way in silence, though the electricity generated by what Mark wasn’t saying buzzed in Sarah’s ears. She felt disoriented, out of it; the time she had spent in the police station already receding to the status of a bad dream, but one she had yet to wake from. She wanted Joe, that was the worst of it. She wanted Joe to tell her what was happening; more importantly, to tell her it would stop. But Joe was dead, and when alive his advice had never been top-notch. Already she was mythologizing. Pretty soon, Joe would be everything her father had never been. He’d be the husband her mother had wished for her.

Her own real husband had been that once, though he was falling down on the job badly now. ‘I have my keys,’ he said redundantly as they walked up the garden path, as if affirming a disputed claim to home-ownership; he opened the door and allowed her in first, the kind of gesture he insisted on when pissed off. So she was waiting for the lecture; prolonged silence always led to the lecture. It was the last thing Sarah needed, and a list of the first things would have filled a book: a hug, a bath, an ear, some sympathy. But once inside Mark went straight to the phone: not the one in the living room, but the extension in what he claimed was his study, though had never been more than a den. It was where he read Q magazine and listened to Oasis on headphones. He had never really lost his youth; he just kept it in a small room off the landing.

In the kitchen, Sarah spent a short while picking things up and putting them down again. This was the room Ruskin had searched, and the effect now was of having endured an untidy guest. Small objects – a sugar bowl, a mug holding pencils – had been shifted from their accustomed positions, reminding Sarah of one of those magazine puzzles:
what is wrong with this picture?
But you had to have lived in it first. Upstairs, Mark hung up the phone, then dialled again. The phones, at his insistence, were the old-fashioned, alarm-bell kind. It had been a fad at the time; part of a trend that had done its best to suggest that adherence to tradition was a form of integrity.

She adjusted the calendar, which was hanging out of true. The rest of the month was a chequerboard of appointments and deadlines: visits to the dentist, bills to be paid; black scrawls noted weeks in advance, when there had still been a chance that they might be important. For Joe, there’d be no more of this. For Joe, the weeks and months ahead would remain blank; the calendars unbought. This was what death was. It was the point at which calendars were wiped clean, and all the pre-Raph ladies and Warhol etchings decorating them blurred into nonsense.

On the stairs, the thump of Mark’s feet. He entered the kitchen guns blazing. ‘You realize this couldn’t have happened at a worse time for me?’

‘I didn’t have a great day either. Thanks.’

‘Oh, that’s right. Turn it into my fault. What got into you, Sarah? Coke in the bathroom? For Christ’s sake!’

She did not need this argument now. On the other hand, it was all that was on offer. ‘I didn’t put it there.’

‘Are you saying I did?’

‘No, of course not!’

‘So what happened, the police planted it? Is this one of those seventies things? The pigs framed me, man. It was a bum deal. That it?’

‘You’re being ridiculous.’

‘
I’m
being ridiculous? Well, thank God for that. I knew one of us was off the wall. Sarah, when I went out this morning, you were a housewife. I come home, you’re public enemy number one. What the fuck is going on?’

‘I don’t
know
.’

‘Well, who does, then? Yesterday, you find this man dead in his office. You told me you’d never met him before, that you wanted to hire him to find this girl you’d never mentioned either. Am I on the right track so far?’

‘I didn’t tell you because I knew you wouldn’t understand. And I was right.’

‘Today it turns out he’s running a Colombian franchise in North Oxford, and half my income’s in his bank account. Not to mention his product under my bathroom sink. Which part haven’t I understood yet, Sarah?’

‘None of this is true. This isn’t what’s happening.’

‘What
planet
are you on, woman? Of course it’s fucking happening! It’s half-past nine, I haven’t eaten, I’ve just dragged you out of a police cell. How real do you want it to get?’

‘I. Don’t. Take. Drugs. Joe. Doesn’t. Sell them.’

‘Not any more he doesn’t. And whose word do we take for your being clean? Have you forgotten what –’

‘
Of course I haven’t!
’

There was a ring at the doorbell and Sarah burst into tears; events so perfectly synchronized, they might have been a Pavlovian illustration. Mark looked at her for a long while. He started to say something, changed his mind, then went to get the door.

The sugar bowl was still out of place; the time still out of joint.

When next she was aware of company, it took the form of a man she had never met. He was gently guiding her to sit, as if this were his kitchen and Sarah some waif wandered through the back door; he was speaking, but the words rushed past in a warm, musical flow. This was a trick everybody used when speaking to a strange dog or a grizzling baby, and a sudden flash of anger riled her entire body. But it left as quickly, leaving only tremendous tiredness, and the relief of having somebody not barking at her. So Sarah cried herself out; it did not make her feel noticeably better, but at least released tears that had been building since she found Joe’s body.

The man – Sarah already suspected he was a doctor – made her a cup of tea.

She could never remember what he looked like. Small and shiny was the best she could manage in retrospect, and even that was a mental quirk: he could have been a hairy giant, and still seemed small and shiny afterwards. The same general size and shape as a little blue tablet. But at the time, what mattered was his voice. Though when she could make it out, what he actually said was: ‘Why don’t you drink that, and tell me all about it?’

So she drank the tea and told him all about it, or as much as she could recall. About her day being ripped from her, replaced with a nightmare of custody and harsh questioning; about a drab room with overhead lighting, and nothing to mark the passage of the hours but the constant ringing of phones. And when she ran out of words, a new need sprang to the top of her list: it was to wallow in silence; to have everything about her wind down and come to a halt. Instead, there was the drumming of fresh rain on the kitchen window, and the raggy breathing of this small shiny man as he waited to be sure she was finished. Even the sound of her tears, drying on her cheeks.

‘You’ll be all right,’ he said at last. ‘Here. Take this.’

He handed Sarah a small blue tablet, then poured her a glass of water, which he placed in front of her, removing her teacup first like a fussy monitor.

‘What is it?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘I don’t like to take pills,’ she said softly.

The lights cartwheeling in her head. Stan Laurel removing his face.

‘It’ll relax you, that’s all. It’s ninety-eight per cent herbal.’ He carried the teacup to the sink and rinsed it under the tap.

Ninety-eight per cent, leaving two. The precise figure, the transparent honesty of it, left the very small part of her untouched by the day’s tensions howling in scorn and hurling daggers at his back. Was she supposed to break down and cry again? Thank him for his
maths
? While her right hand curled and its nails bit her palm, her left took the pill and steered it to her mouth. She swallowed it without the water, her mouth still awash with her tears.

He left her then, and went to talk to Mark. She sat waiting for the pill to take effect; to feel its little blue wonder spread through her body. This didn’t seem to happen. But some degree of calm arrived, she thought from the sound of the rain, and little by little she felt the panic leave, and her stress level out to a straight, flat line. The front door opened, then shut. She was alone once more with her husband.

Who ushered her upstairs with a minimum of conversation. ‘You’re to have a bath,’ he said, as if he’d been the recipient of complicated medical advice. ‘Then get some rest.’

She wondered how much the doctor charged for his instructions. A million zillion pounds, her lazy brain decided. A million zillion trillion pounds.

Later, in bed, she found the energy to ask who the small shiny man had been.

‘Someone Simon knows,’ Mark said shortly. ‘He’ll be back in the morning. Simon, I mean.’

‘Why?’

‘For God’s sake, let’s just try and get some sleep.’

It came, in the end, easily enough, and was deep and entirely without dreams. She woke to a hand shaking her shoulder; the hand was Mark’s, and his other held a cup of coffee. ‘Take this now,’ he said, putting the cup on the bedside table, and placing beside it a small red capsule; identical in all other respects to the previous evening’s blue.

‘What’s it?’ she said, or tried to say. Her voice lost in the thick canyon of her throat.

‘Never mind what it is. You’re supposed to take it now.’

I’m not ill, she wanted to tell him.

‘You’ve been under a lot of stress. Look, I know it’s hard, darling. I wish I could stay with you, but it’s all so bloody hairy at work . . . I’ll call later. Simon’s coming at eleven. I’ve reset the alarm. Just take this before I go.’ He bent and kissed her.

It was only for the kindness in his voice that she took the pill.

She slept again, but woke before the alarm. She did feel better. The situation remained, but seemed a lot less urgent somehow; certainly yesterday’s anxiety had been siphoned off in the night. Nor had appetite replaced it; the muesli she’d been looking forward to was gravel in a bowl. She couldn’t remember her last meal. But it wouldn’t hurt to skip a few.

The kitchen was a mess; bits and pieces all topsy turvy. It didn’t seem to matter, though. She had another bath.

Simon turned up, indeed, at eleven. It took immense effort to get him in, sit him down, ask about coffee, do the kettle, and she had to force herself to focus while he made a phone call in response to his beeper. This was important, what was happening now. Something about drugs in her bathroom. Simon’s call was short, sharp, effective; when he hung up, the receiver made a noise like a cash register. This wasn’t a social occasion. She had to get a grip.

‘What happens now?’ Her voice sounded tinny in her ears, like a mono recording.

‘Your case is referred to the CPS. They decide whether or not to bring a prosecution.’

‘And will they?’

He sighed. ‘Does the name Lizbeth mean anything to you? Lizbeth Moss? A thirteen-year-old –’

Who had died last weekend after taking Ecstasy. Yes.

‘They’re not going to wag their fingers at you and leave it at that, Sarah. This Silvermann character, he was what, forty-something? Pushing pills to schoolkids? If he wasn’t dead, they’d crucify him.’

‘He didn’t do that,’ she whispered.

‘And there you go. You told the police you didn’t know him, and you know what? They don’t believe you. Now you’re defending him. What’s the story, Sarah?’

She didn’t reply.

‘They’ve got a waiter from the restaurant opposite Silver-mann’s says he saw you going in exactly when you say you did. But when they showed your photo to a couple of blokes working on the pavements down the road, they say they didn’t see you. They were on their tea break.’