Down Cemetery Road (21 page)

The high-pitched sirens, keening over the rooftops . . .

Zoë fanned cigarettes out on the table. She’d smoked two and a half of them before Sarah reached the end.

They were silent for a while; Zoë finishing her smoke; Sarah drinking tap water, her throat raw from speaking, retching and passive vice. She had told Zoë little about the events since Joe’s death, but her own state said all that.

‘You’re saying you’ve been warned off,’ the woman said at last.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Joe gets killed, you get warned off.’ She seemed to consider this sexist as much as anything else. ‘This guy, what was his name, Downey?’

‘Michael Downey.’

‘Six-footer, late thirties, well-built, stringy dark beard and a ponytail tied with a red rubber band. Carries a blue canvas bag over his shoulder. Wears a denim jacket. Warm?’

‘He wasn’t carrying a bag,’ Sarah said numbly.

‘Well, he was yesterday.’

Sarah opened her mouth, shut it again. Waited for Zoë to explain.

‘I came by. You weren’t alone, you had a couple of visitors.’ Wigwam and Rufus, Sarah remembered. Wigwam doing a lot of creative enthusing about Sarah’s achievements, Sarah’s interior decorating skills, Sarah’s cookery; her attitude a warm amalgam of supportiveness and solicitude, with just the faintest hint of sympathy, as if Sarah had recently won only a small amount on the lottery, say, instead of having been arrested and so on. Rufus, true to form, had chosen an armchair and ceased to exist. It wasn’t so much that they were an odd couple; they were very nearly an impossible one. Faced with them yesterday, Sarah’s calm stupor had come close to shaking to bits.
What happened happened
, part of her wanted to scream.
Let’s stop pretending it didn’t
. But at least Wigwam cared. ‘In the afternoon?’

‘Friends, yes.’

‘He was watching the house.’

She could feel the balloon straining apart. ‘My house,’ she said flatly.

‘He’s not there now.’

She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. So if he’s not there now, where is he? Should she call the police? And tell them what?

‘You think he’s the one killed Joe,’ Zoë said.

She nodded, numb once more.

‘But you’ve no real reason to think so.’

‘Why else would he be watching? He gave the warning, he planted those drugs. Now he’s just keeping an eye to make sure . . .’

‘Make sure what? You don’t make a mad dash for freedom and justice? Round up the bad guys? Pardon me, Tucker, but you look like the only dashing you’re doing any time soon is to the bathroom.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘There’s just one thing you have to do.’

‘Oh, isn’t that
wonderful
. At last, somebody who can tell me what to do. Have you got a ticket with a number, or did you push in?’

Zoë Boehm said, ‘I’d forgotten, you bite. Sometime when you’re firing on all cylinders, we can exchange recipes. Meanwhile, what you do is, you do this. You call the police and tell them it was garbage, that statement about Joe selling drugs. It’s a simple thing. It’s called telling the truth.’

‘Are you crazy? That’s
exactly
what this hairy lunatic
doesn’t
want me doing.’

‘Hell, Tucker, what’s he going to do? He kills you, they’ll actually start looking for him. Which he’s gone to some trouble to avoid, up to now.’

‘That’s a big comfort.’

‘This might come as a shock, but right now I’m more worried about the damage you did Joe’s reputation than I am about anything that
might
happen to you. You know damn well he wasn’t dealing, and it’s only the fact that you look about two steps from a boneyard that stops me holding you over a phone and choking it out of you. So why don’t you have a shower, get dressed, remember where you left your principles, and do the decent thing? Who knows, it might get to be a habit.’

The force of which took her breath away. Another new emotion, shame, came tumbling after the others. ‘I never . . . Yes . . . I didn’t think.’

‘Doesn’t look like you were given half a chance,’ Zoë muttered. She picked up her bag, hooked it over her shoulder. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’

‘To check up,’ Sarah said numbly.

‘Oh, I’ll have done that long before then. But I’ll call you anyway.’ She cocked her head to one side. ‘Look, don’t feel too bad. It’s not that I blame you. Your position, I’d have done the same.’

Somehow, Sarah doubted it. One thing bothered her though. ‘If you loved him so much, why did you keep disappearing on him?’

‘Who said I loved him? That was over years ago.’

‘So why all this?’

‘Because when a woman’s partner gets killed, she has to do something about it. It doesn’t matter what she thought of him. She has to do something about it.’

‘I don’t get you.’

‘
The Maltese Falcon
,’ Zoë said. ‘Believe me, Joe’d have understood.’

IV

She left. Sarah sat once more, feeling sick, weak and hungry all at once. The hunger didn’t last. Most appetites seemed distant now, as if she could only focus on one point at a time, her current target being the retraction of her statement to the police – a necessary truth whose one saving grace was, it need not involve Simon Smith.

But though inevitable, it didn’t have to be immediate. She showered and dressed, and made herself eat a boiled egg; and while it was a strain not to be plucking at the curtains, checking for strangers in the street, she succeeded at this too. Then she sat with the newspaper cutting Joe had given her, retrieved from a jacket pocket. She had put Downey in his early forties when she’d first seen him, from the bridge. The more generous Zoë had him late thirties. And Zoë was right; he had been thirty-four at the time of his supposed death, making him thirty-eight now. The hair added years. But what did he want from her? He had been looking for Dinah too, but why did Joe have to die? A lot more questions hovered. None with obvious answers attached.

While she had the nerve, she made her call. Ruskin was unavailable. When would he be otherwise? About five, maybe six. She said she’d call back. Afterwards, she slipped into a waking doze. One of those almost-states, where the clock still ticks and traffic goes by, but inside everything comes to a halt. When the phone rang, she almost hit the ceiling.

‘You sound breathless.’

‘I’m okay.’

‘Did I wake you?’

She glanced at the clock; it had just gone five.
What am I, a baby?
But she bit it back. ‘I’m okay, Mark. Really.’

‘Fine. Good. Just calling to remind you, I’ll be late back. A meeting with one of my accounts. Could be ten, even later. Don’t wait up.’

‘Mark?’

‘Yes?’

Down the wires the silence pulsed. All of it carried from one place to another at the speed of electricity.

‘You sure you’re all right?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Okay. Call Wigwam or somebody. Have company.’

Always the assumption that Wigwam was at her beck. It irritated her that he was probably right.

It would be forever before they’d speak again. She hung up not knowing this; dialled the police while she was at it. Ruskin was in.

‘You want to
what
?’

‘It wasn’t true.’

‘What makes you think I give a –’ There was a strangled arrest; the crash of a receiver being dropped, or maybe slammed. Then: ‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you aware what a retraction will mean, Mrs Trafford? Have you taken legal advice on this?’

‘Why is it I need advice now when before you were quite happy to –’

‘Apart from the other implications. Wasting police time, that’s still an offence.’ They should lock up the whole bloody world, his tone implied. ‘Making false statements.’

‘It’s because I don’t want to –’

‘Not to mention the matter of the other charges that might still, might
still
, be levied against you. You’re into serious waters here, Mrs Trafford. You want to think very carefully before going any deeper.’

It had been on the news, she dimly recalled. The man who sold E to Lizbeth Betts.
Pusher cheats justice
. No wonder Ruskin was coming on like a shark.

‘Are you listening, Mrs Trafford? Can I make myself plainer?’

‘No, you listen to me. The statement I made, I made under duress.
Duress
. I’ll be at the station to make a fresh one tomorrow. Failing that, I’ll be calling a press conference. Your call, Inspector.’

Two could crash a phone.

For minutes afterwards she trembled on her feet; unable to move, unable to do anything. Except wonder, naturally, what precisely she had just done; and how,
precisely
, she would suffer the consequence.

She did not call Wigwam. Mark did that for her: she arrived a little after six thirty with a half-hearted attempt at just dropping in, which did not survive Sarah’s opening sally.

‘He said you sounded fraught. I think that was the word.’

‘He’s turning into my keeper!’

‘We’ve all been worried, Sarah,’ Wigwam said, without a hint of reproach.

It was the nearest she had come to making reference to Sarah’s troubles.

‘I have been,’ Sarah admitted now. ‘Fraught,’ she said.

‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Wigwam said. ‘And you can tell me all about it.’

But Sarah couldn’t. It was not that she didn’t want to; more that she wouldn’t know where to start. And felt, too, something of what it would be like to listen to a friend, however close, tell you they were at the centre of a giant conspiracy in which men with beards lurked, wishing them harm. You would have to love them very much not to feel enormous pity.

She countered a yawn. This terrible lethargy; it needed fighting. Needed shock.

Wigwam sensed Sarah backing away, but did not press her. Instead, she returned to Mark. ‘He called me from his office,’ she said, investing the location with an awesome significance: she really was impressed, the love. The nearest Wigwam had been to working in an office was dusting somebody else’s desk. ‘You could hear all sorts in the background.’

‘They were probably playing cricket,’ Sarah said.

‘It was his
office
.’

‘They do that,’ Sarah said. ‘Bins as wickets. Paper for balls. You hit the fax machine, it’s six and out.’

‘He sounded ever so busy.’

‘Maybe it was his turn to bowl.’ She was tired of this already. ‘Wigwam. He spends all day sitting in front of a green screen, making phone calls about money to other people in other banks. All of them sitting in front of the same green screen. Every day, you make more human contact than he does in a month.’

‘Oh, I
like
my jobs. But they’re not important.’

‘Neither’s his. It doesn’t add or subtract a single sou to the sum of human happiness.’

‘Would you rather he’d been a teacher?’ Wigwam asked, a little wistfully. Wigwam had wanted to be a teacher.

‘I’d rather he was happy,’ Sarah said. And filled in all the blanks in her head: if he’d finished his doctorate, got the right fellowship, got stuck into his book . . .

Not married me, she thought with sudden clarity. To remind him of his promise.

And there was a thump on the doormat, as something dropped through the letterbox.

‘Bit late for the postman,’ Wigwam said. ‘Do you want to me to get it?’

‘It’ll be one of the free newspapers,’ Sarah said. Though it wasn’t, in fact, it was a letter; addressed to her in a hand she didn’t recognize, and amended by several others, since the original writer had transposed the house number.
Try 217
had been added, along with
Try 271
. Postmarked two weeks earlier. Looking at it, holding it in her hand, Sarah felt her heart unaccountably sinking; as if she too had spent the last two weeks misaddressed, and was now back where she ought to be, which was not a good place at all.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ she lied absently.

‘Aren’t you going to open it?’

‘Later. It’ll keep.’ But her mind was focused on it now, and for all Wigwam kept rattling on, Sarah heard barely a word.

‘Because of her Tai Chi lessons,’ Wigwam finished.

‘. . . I’m sorry, Wigwam. I was drifting.’

‘Caro’s looking after the babies,’ she began again. Wigwam always called her children babies. ‘But she has to leave at eight fifteen because of –’

‘Yes. I got that bit.’

‘So I’ll have to be back by then. But I’ll send Rufus round to keep you company.’

‘That’s okay.’

Wigwam’s face twisted into an awkward expression. ‘We – ell . . .’ she said.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Mark made me promise,’ she confessed, ‘I’d not leave you on your own.’

So what does he think I’ll get up to?
her inner voice snarled.
Mainline baking powder?
And then thought: No, what he’s worried about is, I’ll not take my pill, I’ll start to be a nuisance, I’ll get into trouble.

I’m already in trouble.

She thought the letter meant trouble: that’s why she couldn’t keep her mind off it. So to calm Wigwam down, she agreed that Rufus could come round if he must, though she had work of her own to get on with – letters to write – and would absent herself while he settled in front of the telly. A scenario which made her want to gag, actually, but better by far than actually watching it with him, or talking to him; or anything, in fact, involving being in his presence. Not that she could express any of this to Wigwam. So instead she kept herself nodding and smiling, feeling long-slack muscles in her cheeks stretch to aching-point, while Wigwam ran through the local gossip one more time. All Sarah wanted was for Wigwam to go, so she could open the damn letter, and find the worst. Her best friend, whom she felt she hadn’t talked to for months, and all she wanted was for her to go.

Which she did, eventually.

‘You’re sure you’ll be all right?’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘I’m sure Mark won’t be
too
late.’

‘Wigwam. I’ll be fine.’

She closed the door gently but put the chain on, too, once Wigwam’s steps had echoed out of hearing.

In the sitting room she sat for a while with the letter in her lap. It was from Joe. She knew that already: didn’t know the handwriting, but knew it was from Joe. Too like him to get her address wrong. With anyone else, that would have been a nuisance; from the private detective, it was a kind of quiet joke. Joe once got arrested looking for somebody’s dog: hadn’t Zoë told her that? Couldn’t detect his way out of a paper bag; but she helped him out of the envelope, anyway; unfolded the first sheet and read it through twice: