Home Before Dark (22 page)

Reaching out a bare arm, Jelly groped for the radio alarm
on the bedside table and opened one eye. Five more minutes.
She groaned, pulled the comforter over her head and lay
there listening to the traffic on Lexington under her windows
barrelling downtown at stop-go intervals. Last night had been
a total, total disaster.
What had she expected That a year in LA might by some
miracle have changed Frank Stavros? He’d started pawing
her in the back of the Jeep before they’d even gone half a
block; and then acted loud and obnoxious all evening,
reminding her why they broke up in the first place.
She’d never felt so relieved to get home and lock the door
of her apartment behind her. Checking her inbox last thing,
she’d discovered an e-mail from Ed saying it was important
she contact him – something had happened.
Obviously just a ploy. She’d ignored it and gone to bed.
The alarm went off and Z-100 FM brought Missy Elliott
bouncing into the room like sunlight. Across the hall her
neighbour’s door slammed. She could hear Lazlo muttering
to himself out there, jangling his keys.
You think I don’t know they’re watching?’ he was saying,
'I seen 'em on the corner, right across from the Cuban
Mission, looking up at my window’
Then, as he lumbered past her door and down the stairs,
putting on a high squeaky voice to reply, 'Why would anyone
want to spy on a pathetic tub of lard like you?’
'It’s a stakeout. You think I don’t know . . .’ Lost the rest.
She only ever heard the craziness. Whenever she bumped
into him on the stairs or in the street, Lazlo was always polite
and as sane-seeming as anyone. Jelly yawned and turned up
the music, then got out of bed and headed straight for the
bathroom.
Ten minutes later, showered and dressed, she was sitting
at her desk between the windows, one of the cats, Mistigris,
on her lap. Leaving her breakfast (half a toasted bagel and
a glass of OJ) untouched, she lit a Marlboro and brought up
the text of Ed’s e-mail on her computer. She knew she should
stick to her guns, but it couldn’t hurt to reinforce her position,
let him know she wasn’t changing her mind.
She typed her answer:

OUT
OF
THE
QUESTION
.

Hesitated, then hit send. Oh shit . . . she took a furious
drag of her cigarette. What are you doing there? Waiting for me?
She hadn’t expected him to reply – at least, not instantiy.

templedog: there’s something you need to know

He’d gotten back to her on Messenger, which only made it
worse. She debated for a second, staring at the screen as if
mesmerised by his words.

td: Jelly, I wouldn’t be contacting you if it wasn’t serious adorablejoker: hold on a sec… doorbell
She stubbed out the Marlboro she’d just lit and leaned back
in her chair, raking both hands through her hair; then, lacing
her fingers behind her neck, her bent arms sticking out like
wings, she rocked back and forth. What the hell was going
on here?

aj: back
td: are you at work
ay; on my way… running late
td: ok, I’ll get to the point. What’s happened is that a girl my daughter knew in
Florence has been found murdered on a train
aj: oh my God … my God
td: it looks like she was stalked by the same person who killed Sophie. It’s dreadful
news, I know. But the fact he’s killed again may make this monster easier to track
down. The police seem to think so. Jelly, listen, I don’t believe for a moment that
you’re in any kind of danger I wasn’t even sure whether to tell you.

He couldn’t possibly be making this up, could he?

aj: this is so shocking … i don’t really know what to say. i’m sorry, it must be
hard for you… i really have to go now
td: we may need to talk again
aj: i don’t know … i meant what I said about taking a break
td: look, I’m not trying to scare you, I just think because of the present situation
we ought to stay in touch.
aj: let me think about it, k?... I gotta run

It was so clear to her he just wanted an excuse to go on
talking that Jelly forgot for a moment the gravity of what
she’d just heard and smiled to herself.
Only later, on the LL train coming out into daylight on the elevated track at Prospect Park, did she remember that
the story had been on the Fox Report . . . two girls, wasn’t
it, though, murdered on a train in Europe?
What exactly had Ed meant by not in any danger? What
had made him think of the opposite of that? He wasn’t trying
to scare her?
Well, you could have fooled me, Mister.

36

I knew something was wrong the moment I saw Peter Jowett,
our gardener and handyman, standing out in the middle of
Little Meadows Lane. Just before we turned in the gates of
Greenside, he stepped forward and flagged the car down.
'Hold on,’ I said into the phone, and told the driver to pull
over.
'Andrea, I hate to do this to you.’ I was on the line to
Morelli in Florence. 'It looks like we’ve got a problem here.
Let me call you back.’
He gave an exasperated sigh. 'Signor Lister, I’ve been trying
to have this conversation with you for two days now.’
'I’m sorry but I can’t talk now’ It was Saturday morning
and I’d left word for him that I could be reached on my
mobile between ten and twelve, when I knew I’d be driving
down to the country alone.
'I only have a few more questions. You were saying about
your god-daughter . . .’
'I told you, she really has nothing to do with this business.’
'Maybe not, signore, but she had a bearing on your movements
in Paris. A music student, I believe. She plays the
piano? '
'Yes … I thought we’d covered the subject.’
Morelli had obviously spoken to Lucas Norbet at the
Conservatoire and assumed, as any Italian male would, that
I was having an affair. I felt like telling him to stop wasting
his time and mine – as usual – on an irrelevance.
'What is your god-daughter’s name, Signor Lister?’
'Andrea, I really have to go now’ I cut him off.
I was still thinking about what he’d said and the potential
fallout if he pursued this line of enquiry as I lowered the
window and Peter Jowett blurted out that Jura had been run
over and killed by a vehicle that didn’t stop.
I stared at him, not really taking it in.
The details followed, more or less coherentiy. The accident,
I gathered, had happened around ten that morning. Peter’s
son, Andrew, who works for us as a part-time stable lad,
found her lying in the ditch. Nobody saw or heard anything – no screech of brakes, no sound of an impact. The old black
Lab had gone missing earlier. It was raining hard, Peter told
me. I caught the smell of wet fur that still hung about his
hands and waterproof jacket.
All I said was, 'How did she get out on the road?’

'Why didn’t anyone think of calling my mobile?’
Laura, barely audible, mumbled something about not
wanting to break the news to me over the phone; she knew
I was coming home for the weekend and it seemed better to
wait. George just stood.
The boy has always been closer to his mother. Although
physically we look a lot alike – tall, loose-limbed, angular,
eyes grey-blue, hair dark – I’m not sure how much else we
have in common. We find it hard to communicate.
I couldn’t get anything more out of them. They were numb,
but I was not invited to share their misery. I felt like an
outsider. It made me realise that they regarded my presence
there as almost irrelevant.
Later that afternoon, I took my son with me to help dig
Jura’s grave. We chose a spot on the Downs behind the house
where Sophie had liked to walk her dog when she was at
home. She’d doted on the animal. George drove the body up
there in a small trailer attached to his new quad bike, while
I walked behind carrying the pick and spade. The hole had
to be dug deep enough to deter foxes.
Jura was wrapped in a tarpaulin, but I wanted to see her
before we put her in the ground. I told George to look away.
Her injuries were not as gruesome as I’d feared. A flap of
skin had been torn from the bow of her chest, leaving a
crimson rosette mat stood out against her damp black coat;
a dewclaw had been ripped off and her muzzle had been
lacerated, a small section cut away exposing her gums and a
blood-speckled eye-tooth – it looked as if she was smiling.
There was no other damage that I could find. The fatal
injuries, I assumed, were internal.
When I removed her collar, I noticed Jura’s name-tag was
missing, but didn’t attach any significance to its disappearance;
she could have lost it at any time. I folded the corners of the
tarp back over her like a parcel.
Digging the grave took us the best part of half an hour;
we were both sweating and grimy by the time the job was
done. We piled some rocks on top of the low mound of earth
to mark the place and talked about a headstone and what it
might say. I suggested a cairn with a simple inscription. 'It
would be nice if it could be in memory of both of them,
don’t you think?’
George’s reaction was unexpectedly vehement.
'No . . . she’d hate that,’ he burst out. 'It’s so totally unSophie.
She hated any kind of sentimental . . . just because
it was her bloody dog . . . sometimes I think it’s like . . . you
never really knew her … at all.’
He soon became incoherent, and then with a hoarse moan
his scrawny frame convulsed and he broke down. He hung
his head and just stood there, heaving with sobs. Heartbreaking
to witness, but I’m not sure it wasn’t healthy for
George to vent his feelings. He never talked about what
happened, about his sister’s death.
At least, not to me. I walked over to where he was standing
and awkwardly tried to put an arm around his shoulders. I
couldn’t see his face, but his hard scarecrow body immediately
stiffened, as if programmed to resist and repel any attempt
at affection. He wouldn’t let himself be hugged. I was the
same with my own father. We weren’t demonstrative either.
'It’s all right, George,’ I said. If you want to talk about her,
if there’s anything at all you want to ask me . . . I’m always
here.’
He turned away. I thought I heard him say under his breath,
'No, you’re not.’ But I could have been mistaken.

It was my father who gave the dog to Sophie as a present
for her ninth birthday. I’ll never forget her reaction – she was
just young enough to show unaffected delight. I can still see
her eyes widen, still hear her laughing for joy, when he
conjured the fat little puppy from his bulging coat pocket.
Everything connects, if you think about it.
My father was a stonemason, a 'gentleman’ builder
(although he disliked the term), who ran the family business
from a small yard around the farmhouse where I grew up
nearTisbury. A meticulous craftsman, specialising in the care
and preservation of old buildings, Charlie Lister never
approved of what I do for a living – property speculation,
by his lights, was not a real job. He wasn’t impressed by my
material success or by my marriage to a Calloway (which
raised more eyebrows among my family than hers), but he
was hugely proud of his granddaughter. He died, mercifully,
a year before Sophie. His last words to me in hospital, where
they could do nothing to slow and little to cushion the final
gallop of pancreatic cancer, were about her. He’d always
believed in her talent and her future as an artist. He told me
he saw Sophie as the one who would keep the flame of Lister
artisanship burning.
The reality, just two years on, is that as a family our sense
of who we are and where we’re going has become fractured,
and diminished.
In an oblique way I’m sure it was what George felt, what
provoked his outburst. For all of us, Jura’s death meant that
a living connection with Sophie had been severed. I think he
felt he was the only one left.
We cry, they say, when we feel unprotected.

I went for a walk later that afternoon, taking a route I know
well that leads up onto Cranborne Chase and across the
Wiltshire-Dorset border. It’s wonderful striding country, a
terrain of gentle swelling hills and steep-sided hollows that
gradually flatten out towards the coast. On Win Green Hill
you can usually see across four counties and I always get that
exhilarating feeling of being on top of the world. Not today.
The rain had stopped, but it was still muggy and overcast.
Oblivious to landscape or weather, I tramped along head
down, listening to Elgar’s Variations on my iPod, avoiding
reflection. I just wanted to wear myself out.
Sometime after six I got back to Greenside, having made
a detour by the lane where the accident happened. I felt I
owed it to Sophie to visit the actual spot and recreate in my
mind’s eye how Jura met her end. I also needed to satisfy
myself that it really was an accident. Her wounds hadn’t
looked right somehow.
Crouching down, I examined the surface of the road. Any
blood, hair or animal tissue, I realised, would have been
washed away by the rain. But I thought I might find a glass
splinter broken off a front-light assembly, or perhaps a flake
of paint from a wing of the hit-and-run car. There was
nothing, no sign of the missing name-tag, no evidence of any
land that there had been an incident. It was only when I
explored the ditch that I noticed a shred of what looked like
black bin-liner caught on a hawthorn stump. I retrieved it
and, opening it out, saw that there was blood in the folds of
the plastic.
In an instant, I went from vague suspicion to unshakable
conviction that the dog was killed elsewhere, brought back
here and dumped.
Whoever did this, did it “deliberately.

37

Laura had prepared an elaborate dinner that we ate in the
kitchen, as we always did when it was just us. It had been
her way of dealing with things after Sophie died – keeping
busy, observing small family rituals, putting a brave face on
it. I knew how upset she really was about Jura. Nobody had
much appetite. Even after my long walk, I felt only a gnawing
ache in my stomach that I tried to deaden with alcohol.
Sitting in grim silence, we were all relieved when the ordeal
came to an end and the three of us could go our separate
ways.
We didn’t discuss the incident. I got the feeling that Laura
wanted to believe I was somehow to blame for the dog’s death
just as I’m sure that deep down she held me responsible
for Sophie’s. She never came out with it and said, 'This is
all your fault.’ But her eyes whenever they caught mine had
that accusing look.
I decided not to tell her about the evidence I’d found in
the ditch that indicated Jura was killed intentionally. It would
have only caused more anguish. I didn’t want to alarm Laura
either, in case I was wrong and it had been a random, isolated
incident – unconnected with the uneasy feeling I’d had last
night of being followed home from Notting Hill Gate, an
experience that in the end I’d put down to paranoid feelings
or too much to drink.
The irony was that this miserable crisis had come at a time
when the ice between Laura and me had begun to melt a
little. That sounds misleadingly hopeful. We were carrying too much baggage for anything more than a short truce. But
finding her at Campden Hill Place when I believed her to be
in the country, once I got past the idea that Laura was
checking up on me (I even wondered if she was having me
tailed), had been somehow a comfort.
It’s odd how a person you think you know as well as it’s
possible to know anyone can become such a mystery again.
When we talked now it was more like a conversation between
strangers than husband and wife. We stayed up late watching
an old Robert Altman movie on TV, Short Cuts, which we
first saw together in New York. The parallels in some scenes
with our own slowly dissolving marriage were hard to miss,
but neither of us made any comment.
In bed later, strangers there too, Laura’s enthusiasm caught
me by surprise; she seemed recklessly uninhibited, almost
wanton. It wasn’t like her and it didn’t feel right: as if someone
else had taken her place while the real Laura was on leave
of absence. In return, I made love to my wife with the ardour
of a man guilty of unfaithfulness. In the midst of all that
sweaty ill-founded threshing, I had the sensation again of
observing us, the Listers, from a distance.
But last night seemed an age ago now.
I took a tumbler of whisky upstairs to the library, watched
the news, then went online and dealt with some e-mails. There
was one from Campbell Armour with a six-page attachment
titled 'Synesthesia’. I wrote back letting him know what had
happened to Jura, describing her injuries and suggesting that
the dog had been deliberately killed, then run over to make
it look like an accident.
Since I last spoke to Campbell, I’d given careful thought
to his theory that I was being targeted by somebody. I was
pretty sure he would see the cruel, senseless execution of
Sophie’s old Labrador as part of their campaign. But I’d failed
to come up with a single name.
The room felt airless. I got up from the desk, walked across
to the bay windows that overlook the garden and opened one
of the sashes. It was too dark out to see anything. I lit a
Gauloise and stood contemplating my reflection in the panes
of distorting antique glass. I decided to take a look at the
synaesthesia material Campbell had sent me later. It was just
an excuse really for leaving my computer on standby on the
off-chance that Jelly might sign in.
I thought about her all the time. Couldn’t stop myself.
Although we’d agreed to take a step back, give each
other some space for a while, as she put it, I’d insisted on
keeping open the link between us for her security. But the
desire to talk to her and 'hear’ her voice was more powerful
than ever. As I turned to stub out my cigarette, the ash
falling on the polished wooden floor before I could find
an ashtray, I suddenly felt an overwhelming need to get
in touch.
I sat back down at the computer and, just as I was about
to click on her name, a dark blue message tab on the toolbar
started flashing. It seemed such an extraordinary fluke – or
yet another example of Jelly’s powers of
ESP
– that I laughed
aloud. It was the kind of gleeful sound nobody makes unless
they are alone.
She must have sensed that I wanted to see her, and come
online: I could only assume because she wanted to see me
too. Then, on the point of answering her, I noticed the name
that had lit up was not in fact Jelly’s. I stared at the screen
in disbelief, reluctant to accept my mistake until I looked
more closely and realised that what I saw didn’t make any
sense. It had to be a mistake.
The letters 'ST’ on the blue flashing icon stood for
Stormypetrel – Sophie’s screen-name. The air went out of
me in a short reedy gasp.
I knew what was running through my head to be impossible,
but I could hear my heart beating faster as I checked my
contacts list. It showed a yellow smiley face beside the screenname
I’d never been able to bring myself to delete. It indicated
that my daughter was online.
I just sat there, afraid to answer, afraid that if I didn’t, the
ghost in the machine would vanish. It was clearly an error, or
else someone 'out there’ was playing a trick on me, and yet. . .
I picked up the phone and tried Campbell’s number in
Tampa, but only got his voice-mail. The little girl’s voice on
the recording.
Then the blue flashing light went off. I hesitated for another
moment before bringing up the saved messages.