Forget Me Not (6 page)

Our coffee cups are empty. The party of eight has departed and we are the only people left in the restaurant. The waiter lounges, bored and yawning, against the till. My throat is dry again and my head throbs, as if to remind me who I am. My daughter didn’t get to live to her fortieth birthday, and tonight, sitting at this table with Isaac, I’ve felt happy to be alive. I’m a monster. It’s time to leave but I don’t want to go home alone.

My living room faces onto the main road and so the windows are always shut. Even so, the drone of traffic is ever present and the air is stale. The fumes find a way to creep inside. An electric heater sits in the cavity where there was once a fireplace, and the two bars glow a fierce orange. I forgot to switch it off before I left for dinner.

On the mantelpiece, above the heater, there is a photograph of Ben and Vivien on their wedding day. Their kiss is captured in black and white. Vivien is sylph-like in satin, her dark hair pulled back, her face turned up to her husband’s. A bouquet of white roses tied with a satin ribbon dangles from her right hand.

Next to their wedding photograph is Lexi’s latest school portrait. She is unsmiling, a pale-skinned, ginger-haired child wearing a green blazer. There are several more photographs of my granddaughter scattered around the room, and in these a chubby baby becomes a sturdy toddler and then a pensive schoolgirl.

I walk down the passage, trailing my hand along the Artexed walls that threaten to close in on me as I anticipate the long loneliness of the night ahead.

I open the door to Vivien’s room. Here, the frosted window faces onto a narrow driveway, behind which is a row of red-brick garages. The light never reaches this room, no matter what the season or time of day. Vivien would complain about the smell, and the damp so persistent that when she put her hand flat against a certain spot on her bedroom wall her palm came away wet.

Her white-painted bedstead still takes pride of place in the centre of the room. The bed linen with lace edging is the same as it was when she slept here last. On the bedside table, her beloved pink-furred Alice band is draped over the small lamp.

I see myself, on a cold, dark school morning, shaking her awake and turning on the light. I set a cup of tea down on the bedside table, next to the Alice band. I think about all those mornings when I hurried her into her school uniform, and shunted her off to a childminder, hours before school even opened, so I could be at the hospital in time for handover. I don’t want to think about all the afternoons I wasn’t there to fetch her from school, how I would pick her up, exhausted, from the childminder’s at night.

In the darkness, I see the shape of my sleeping child. She lies on her side, one hand cupping her chin. Strands of black hair fall across her face.

At eleven o’clock the next morning, Intensive Care is quiet. There are only twelve babies with us on the unit, and at full capacity we can take up to eighteen. Radhika is looking after the set of newborn twins, while I’m caring for David, our twenty-eight weeker. David’s father is beside the incubator, his finger inside one of his son’s tiny fists. He has that shell-shocked look all the parents have when they first come in here. His wife is still on the labour ward downstairs, she hasn’t made it up yet.

‘Rose?’ Wendy hovers at the door. She beckons to me and her sombre expression tells me she is not the bearer of good news.

For the sake of Jonas’s father, I smile as I secure my notes in place next to the incubator. I walk across the ward with slow, calm steps.

‘There’s a DS Cole here to see you,’ Wendy says. She keeps her voice down.

I’m thrown for a moment as one of my worlds collides with the other.

‘I’ll take over here,’ Wendy says. ‘There’s no rush.’

‘Thank you.’

She pats my shoulder as I walk past her.

‘Also,’ she calls after me, ‘Mrs Murad’s left another message for you.’

DS Cole is waiting outside the front door of the unit, in the area where visitors hang their coats, pull blue plastic coverings over their shoes and disinfect their hands.

She wears a long herringbone coat over a tailored white shirt, and I notice how the tweed tapers a little at the waist, so that somehow the masculine fabric emphasizes her femininity. Her dark roots show – deliberately, I think – under her peroxided fringe.

‘I’m so sorry to bother you at work, Rose,’ she says. ‘I have a few more questions you might be able to help me with.’

‘Of course.’ I try not to look annoyed at the intrusion. She’s only doing her job.

I grab my coat, the one Vivien gave to me for my fiftieth birthday, the one I have barely taken off in recent weeks, and pull it over my scrubs. I change into a different pair of trainers. I suggest we go down to the ground floor to get a coffee and I lead the way to the lift, then through the warren of bridges and passages that connect the various buildings. We don’t make small talk.

The café is near the front exit and a continuous flow of people passes in and out of the glass doors. It’s draughty and we huddle inside our coats. DS Cole leans down and searches inside her satchel, a bag made of green canvas. She takes out a notebook, which she opens on a fresh page. Then she lays a ballpoint pen down along the centre fold. She leans forward, looking out at me from under her fringe.

‘I know you mentioned in our last interview that your relationship with your daughter wasn’t a very close one,’ she says, ‘but I wondered whether you knew that Vivien was taking antidepressants?’

‘I wasn’t aware of what, if any, medication she was taking.’

Yet again, I feel as though I’ve been judged and found wanting.

‘I wondered if you knew whether your daughter was unhappy about anything in particular?’

‘I don’t think depression is about being unhappy,’ I say. ‘Depression is an illness.’

‘But something might have triggered her illness.’

I don’t say anything at all; I wait for her to go on.

‘Mr Kaye has told us that Vivien started taking antidepressants around three months ago,’ she says. ‘Would you have any thoughts about why she began taking antidepressants at this particular time?’

‘I really don’t know. She didn’t share those kinds of things with me. Vivien was a very private person, so I doubt she would have wanted people to know she was unhappy.’

‘Not even her own mother?’

She has sharp eyes, DS Cole. And she’s no fool. I tell myself she doesn’t mean it as an accusation.

‘If I had to guess,’ I say, ‘I’d say that the depression might have been linked to her difficulty conceiving a second baby. She’d been having fertility treatment for several years. But as I say, that’s really just a guess. Vivien didn’t discuss the details of her treatment with me.’

A cleaner wearing bright purple gloves mops the floor around us. I watch him, hypnotized by the rhythm of the mop, moving smoothly, back and forth, over the damp floor, sweeping away the dirt and the debris.

‘In fact,’ I say, ‘my impression was always that it was Ben who really wanted a second child, and that Vivien was more anxious about letting him down than about not being able to fall pregnant.’

‘Did Vivien ever talk about her marriage?’ DS Cole says.

The conversation seems to have made an about-turn. I pause as I try to catch up with where this interview is headed.

‘For example,’ she goes on, ‘would Vivien have told you if she and Ben were having difficulties? Arguing?’

‘She didn’t talk about her marriage,’ I say. ‘I don’t think there was much to say, because I assumed it was all going well. Ben and Vivien were always close, a tight unit. And no, Vivien didn’t tell me about any arguments.’

The cleaner is now emptying see-through dustbin bags into a large black bin on wheels.

‘As I said, Vivien was a private person. She was generally very reserved, and I think people who didn’t know her well might sometimes have mistaken her reticence for rudeness. She could seem stand-offish. Is any of this relevant?’

I have no idea what DS Cole is looking for. My mouth is dry again and I take a sip from my bottle of water. DS Cole waits in silence, as if to encourage me to keep talking. But she doesn’t write anything down.

‘Ben and Vivien were devoted to each other,’ I say. ‘They’d been married for ten years and from what I could see, their marriage was a strong one. One of those that would have lasted.’

For the first time, DS Cole looks uncomfortable. She rubs the cropped hair at the back of her neck.

‘In this type of investigation,’ she says, ‘a certain amount of sensitive information tends to come to light, regardless of whether or not it’s relevant to our inquiry.’

‘I see.’ I tap my fingertips against the Formica table top and look across at the kiosk, where a bored teenager with dyed-black hair and eyebrow piercings is texting on her mobile phone.

DS Cole changes her position in the chair, pressing her hands down on the seat on either side of her. ‘A witness has come forward to say they saw Vivien and Ben having an argument,’ she says. ‘This would have been on the day before Vivien died, while she and Ben were visiting a jewellery shop. We also have information that Ben didn’t spend the night at home. He checked into a hotel overnight.’

‘I don’t know what to say. I’m … I’m shocked.’

‘You didn’t know?’ DS Cole says.

‘No. Are you sure about all of this?’

She nods.

‘I’m not surprised to hear they argued, but I find it hard to believe that Ben would walk out on Vivien and Lexi. That would be completely unlike him.’

My daughter spent her last night on earth alone
.

‘But if your daughter was a private person, then there are things she may not have shared with you?’

‘Yes. But then I know Ben, and I’ve seen the way he is with his wife and daughter. He was devoted to them. They were his life. Ben puts his family before everything.’

I can’t tell whether DS Cole is convinced by what I’ve said. But it is the whole truth.

‘Are you aware of anything that was a source of conflict between them? Something so serious that Ben
would
walk out?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry. I really have no idea.’

I think of Isaac. He probably knows more than I do about the state of their marriage. DS Cole is staring at me, as though she’s hoping I might remember something.

‘Did Vivien by any chance tell you about plans for an important dinner at her home on the night before she died?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Look, DS Cole, please, can you tell me what this is all about? Quite frankly, you appear to know more than I do about the state of my daughter’s marriage.’

She takes pity on me, and answers my question, at least in part. ‘We understand,’ she says, ‘that there was supposed to be a catered dinner for thirty people at your daughter’s home the night before she died. The dinner was related to a significant business transaction, a merger between Ben’s company and another investment firm. But Ben cancelled at short notice, telling his clients that he had to leave the country on business. He has subsequently told us that he and Vivien had argued and she’d then refused to host the dinner. That was the real reason for the cancellation. He says that after they argued, he left your daughter at the jeweller’s, had a few drinks at a pub and checked into a hotel near his office. He stayed there overnight. To cool down.’

‘So Ben told you about the argument himself?’

‘Yes. But only after a colleague came forward to tell us about the cancelled dinner plans and the fact that Ben had said he was out of the country when he wasn’t.’

‘I see. Did Ben say why they’d argued?’

‘Apparently there was a disagreement over a piece of jewellery – an expensive piece your daughter wanted. Ben said he’s been having a tougher time than usual with his cash flow, because he’s invested most of his capital into his investment firm. Does that sound like something your daughter would do – push him to buy her something expensive?’

‘I imagine my daughter could have played her part in this argument,’ I say, ‘in winding Ben up. Ben is much more easy-going than Vivien ever was.’

‘Can you explain what you mean?’

‘Vivien could be controlling. She liked everything to be just so – the way she looked, what she wore, what she ate. It could get …’ I pause as I search for the right word. ‘Well, it could get exhausting. Frustrating. She grew up in a council flat, with a mother who worked twelve-hour shifts and who was permanently anxious about money. That kind of life leaves its mark.’

‘The thing is,’ DS Cole says, ‘the owner of the jewellery shop doesn’t remember it the way Ben does. He remembers Ben encouraging Vivien to pick out any piece she wanted, as though money was no object.’

‘Memory is a strange thing,’ I say.

DS Cole picks up her pen. I think she might be going to write something down, at last, but all she does is draw a series of short black lines as she runs her pen back and forth in the corner of the page.

‘May I ask why this argument between Vivien and Ben is of any significance?’

‘It may not be,’ she says, ‘but your daughter’s death is still unexplained. And it seems the earrings that Ben and Vivien eventually settled on buying are missing from the house.’

‘I see.’

‘So your daughter didn’t contact you at all on that Thursday, perhaps later on in the evening, after the argument?’

I shake my head. ‘No, she didn’t.’

DS Cole closes her notebook, the pen still inside, making a bulge down the middle, and shoves it back into her large bag.

‘Thank you for taking the time to talk to me,’ she says. ‘I apologize again for disturbing you at work.’

We stand and shake hands. I’m aware of how cold and dry my skin must feel. There is a strange tension between us.

I watch her walk away, waiting until she’s disappeared through the wide glass doors of the main entrance.

I see Vivien, as a newborn. Her skull is so perfectly formed, her fontanelle still soft and vulnerable. Her eyes are closed, her lashes long and black, her mouth a rosebud—