The First Cut (23 page)

It struck her that she didn’t recognize many people in this drawer and the most common subject apart from Greg himself seemed to be Liz. Greg didn’t carry friends through life. In all the time she’d known him she had never met a friend from school or an old university pal. Most of his work contacts were now in the States and she’d never met them. Greg wasn’t a keeper: he shed friends and created new ones without any sense of loss or pain.

Did this tiny sample from the complexity and length of a person’s life hold any picture of Francesca? Nothing was written on the back of any of the photos; Greg didn’t collate or organize, he wasn’t the type to alphabetize or label.

There were almost no photos of herself, apart from their official wedding ones. She knew why: those were on the computer, sealed up in a hard drive rather than in a drawer like this. She’d drawn a blank.

She started a hunt through Greg’s desk, inspecting filming paperwork, his tax minefield. Finding a white A4 envelope she opened it and the funeral service for Grace fell out. She froze, that hideous day jumping to clarity in her mind. She was always holding someone’s hand at that service, and other hands continually patted her on the back or gripped her shoulder, as if everyone at that funeral needed the touch of another to survive it. The only time she had stood alone, physically unsupported by someone else, was when she had followed Greg’s funeral address with her own. She still to this day did not know how she had done it.

Or how Greg had done it. He had seemed calm, in control, adjusting his shirt sleeves under his black jacket.

The envelope was full and she pulled out the contents: correspondence from lawyers, the copy of a writ served on a national newspaper for insinuations that could prejudice a future trial, condolence letters.

The dam holding the tears back was beginning to crumble. What was she doing, rifling through Greg’s stuff, digging through his history, feeling grubbier and nastier the deeper she went? Finally the dam burst and she sat in the study amid all the old and yellowed paper and she wept. She wept for Grace, for the people who had loved her, and in a good dose of maudlin self-pity she wept for herself and what had happened to her over the past few days at Adam’s hands. She began to pile the paperwork back onto the desk and that was when she found it: a funeral card inside another envelope that had been thrown in amongst everything else. Another life lived, another life ended. Francesca Connor, Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, Ca, 3 September 1999. And there was Greg, giving another eulogy. Nicky had to sit down on a chair because the strength in her legs drained away. Grace
and
Francesca. The room seemed to still, even the dust particles rising on the summer air seemed to pause on their lazy way.

The man who lost two blondes.

How had Francesca died? She looked at her dates on the pale yellow card. She had been twenty-five years old. Grace had been married to Greg so he got all the official correspondence, but Francesca had been Greg’s girlfriend so, according to the law, she was still the property of her parents and Nicky found nothing more than the funeral card. What was it Liz had said? Something about jumping. She did an internet search on Francesca’s name but came up with nothing. She phoned the library at the newspaper and insisted they look in their files, claiming it was research for a story, but that also turned up a blank. She was an American citizen; finding the truth wouldn’t be easy.

She made a cup of tea and tried to put her thoughts into some sort of coherent order. She listened to the home phone’s answering service and found a message that shocked her more than she thought possible. Greg was coming home, he said; he’d be back in London on Saturday. Something uneasy moved deep inside her. He must have spoken to Liz. She had the sensation of being in a pincer movement, closed in by Greg on one side and Liz on the other. What was so important that he’d abandon a film shoot and come home?

She pulled out of her pocket the photo of herself that came from Struan’s car, and stared at it again. It didn’t reveal anything at the moment, but she began to wonder if it would.

T
he lift door hadn’t even shut behind Nicky when Maria saw her and was up from the desk and over in a flash. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘What, not even a hello?’

‘The managing editor was here, asking where you were.’ Maria spoke theatrically
sotto voce
, looking round the desks like she was an East German spy at Checkpoint Charlie.

‘I sprained my ankle.’

Maria sighed and tapped the side of her head. ‘You left me a message that you were ill. At least keep to the right cover story.’

Nicky stood and drank in the image of Maria, stressing before 9.30 a.m. She reached out and gave her a spontaneous hug. ‘You have no idea how happy I am to see you and to be back.’

‘It’s too early for sarcasm,’ Maria snapped. ‘Now put your back into that limp, Nics. Wince a bit more. Oh, and your phone’s finally arrived. It’s on your desk. That bloke with the pimples in Accounts brought it up. Isn’t that nice?’

Three hours later Nicky was editing the early career of a lord who founded an ethnographic museum in Cairo. It really was good to be back. She craved work to stop her mind going crazy thinking over the madness of the past week. Last night had been sleepless as she tossed and turned, trying to process the revelations about Greg’s previous girlfriend, and Adam’s actions and her reaction to them.

Maria clunked the phone receiver back into the cradle and groaned. ‘It’s a freelancer chasing a late payment. It’s all bloody Accounts’ fault. I don’t write the cheques, but they phone me when their money hasn’t arrived.’

‘And you get shouted at.’

‘Oh, quite the contrary. She’s always so polite, so apologetic that she’s bothering me, which makes me feel even worse. We both know that underneath she’s seething with resentment that her pay has stayed the same for the last ten years. She should be giving an earful to Bill Gates, or online news sites, or Twitter or something, though I’d like her to find a phone number for them any time soon.’

‘Any more rumours while I was away?’

Maria waved her hand dismissively. ‘Oh the usual threat of further “reduced head count”. We’re not even complete bodies any more.’

‘We’re the past, aren’t we?’ Nicky said, looking with regret round the office.

Maria waved her finger in a note of caution. ‘Careful. The past can be more trouble than you might think.’ She leaned forward, a glint of defiance in her eyes. ‘And it fights dirtier. This old dinosaur would love to be too much trouble to sack.’

Nicky was thinking about past secrets, was thinking that she needed to talk to Maria and unburden herself, when she saw Bruton, the news editor, leaning on the back of an office chair and pushing it like a Zimmer with wheels across a large area of carpet where a phalanx of sub-editors used to sit before their work was outsourced to Shipton-on-Stour. Bruton was back from a fag break. She got up and joined him.

‘Feeling better, Nicky?’ he asked half-heartedly, his voice like a stone grinding flour.

‘Yes, I sprained my ankle, but it’s much better now, thank you.’ He nodded. ‘I need a favour.’

‘Mm?’

She followed him and the office-chair Zimmer back to his desk, which was dominated by a large ornamental glass ashtray brimming with paperclips and bits of gnawed pen and chewing-gum wrappers. It looked almost insulted at being used as a receptacle for desk junk. ‘I really need your help.’

Bruton looked up at her, she was much taller than him, or maybe he was just so stooped that it seemed that way. ‘That’s a first.’

‘Indeed.’ She smiled. Bruton didn’t suffer fools so it was better simply to ask. ‘You used to work the crime beat, I hear,’ she said, pulling up an office chair and sitting across the desk from him.

‘Crime beat! You make it sound like I was here back in the 1930s!’

‘You weren’t?’ He began coughing in reply. ‘I need to find out where someone lives.’

‘Is this for work?’

‘No.’

Bruton shook his head. ‘You know I can’t do that, Nicky. There are processes, security procedures—’

‘Get a contact of yours to do it.’

He paused to sit down in his chair, twisting slowly this way and that. ‘Why do you need it?’

‘So I can kill them, of course.’ She paused for a beat. ‘But I didn’t say that.’

Bruton smiled and tapped the edge of the ashtray with his finger, as if knocking ash off a phantom fag. ‘I really can’t do it, Nicky.’

‘Of course. But you’ll do it anyway.’

Bruton opened a new chewing-gum pack and put one of the rectangles into his mouth. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Because you and I are very similar.’ Bruton guffawed loudly. ‘I’m an addict.’ Bruton looked surprised. ‘I’m addicted to passion, intrigue, pointless high and lows, fleeting romances, none of which are good for me.’ She paused. ‘And I know you know all about addiction, Bruton.’

It was cheesy and lame but she hoped he’d go for it, and deep down she wondered if there was a grain of truth about what she was saying. Why else would she have gone on such a mad and reckless test of her marriage if she wasn’t some of those things? She had been, at least, very severely punished for it.

Bruton grunted and coughed. He held up his right hand so she could see the yellow stain between his fingers no soap or pumice stone could remove. ‘I’ve smoked forty a day since I was probably sixteen years old. I once worked out that I must have smoked at least half a million cigarettes in my lifetime. I’ve spent about three years of my life smoking.’ He paused and shook his head slowly. ‘And by God, I’ve enjoyed every single minute.’

Nicky picked up the glass ashtray and tipped the cluttery contents into the waste bin next to the desk. She buffed the glass with the edge of her shirt and put it back, pride of place on his desk.

Bruton shifted slowly in his chair. ‘You know, that ashtray was given to me by a famous footballer back in the days when I covered sport. We must have put fifteen cigarettes in it during that one interview alone.’

Nicky stood up, reached across the desk and patted Bruton on the shoulder. ‘If we can’t beat it, at least we can enjoy it,’ and she handed him the bit of paper with the name on it.

Two hours later he passed her desk on the way to the lift, an unlit fag dangling from his lips, and wiped down a Post-it with an address in Hackney on it. ‘This is ten years of purgatory for me,’ Bruton said.

‘I’ll buy you some duty-free when I next go through,’ she said. For the first time all day, her biceps didn’t ache.

The flat was in a red-brick mansion block with iron railings leading up a small flight of stairs to a communal door. The door was once fitted with small coloured squares of glass but the panes near the lock were a variety of cheap clear-glass replacements after numerous break-ins. There were eight doorbells on a panel on the left, with various surnames taped next to some of the bells. Nicky rang but there was no answer so she waited across the street in an entrance to some public gardens. She heard the slap-slap of flip-flops on a variety of young women, then a couple of young men in Hawaiian shorts strode by, followed by a hobbling wino. Windows screeched open, doors banged. There was activity aplenty in this street, a contrast to the quiet opulence where she lived with Greg. She had never even seen her neighbours on one side. She once saw a Daimler slide out of their car parking space, and that was the sum total of her interaction with her neighbours. She was trying to decide if this was a problem when a moped drew up and a girl in hot pants and ballet flats flicked down the stand and got off. Nicky peeled her back off the wall, her senses tingling.

The girl took off her helmet and ruffled her hair back down. Caught unawares Bea looked like an extra from
Roman Holiday
. She picked her hot pants out of the crack of her bum, then did a little youthful jump up the steps and unlocked the door. A moment later Nicky crossed the street and rang a variety of doorbells until she found someone to let her in.

Bea’s flat was on the first floor. Thrash metal blared out from behind it. She had to knock loudly three times before Bea heard her and opened the door. Nicky jammed her foot in the entrance before Bea had a chance to slam it back in her face. Bea’s mouth was a mean line, her eyes narrowing dangerously.

‘Get your foot out of my door.’ She had to shout over the music.

‘Let me in.’

‘Piss off.’

‘You’re lucky you’re not in jail,’ Nicky shouted. ‘I could have had you arrested for that stunt you pulled at the river. You’re going to talk to me, however long it takes.’ Bea tried to stare her out, but after a long moment she gave a sarcastic little laugh and opened the door. Nicky followed her into a living room and watched as Bea sank into a low sofa covered by a throw, under a dirty window. She tucked her legs underneath her like a fawn and started fiddling with an earring.

‘Turn the music off.’

‘What?’

‘Turn the music off.’ Nicky said it louder this time.

Bea waved dismissively at the iPod on a shelf unit made of reclaimed wood planks and brick struts and after Nicky turned it off they were plunged into a silence so profound it was as if Nicky had been thrown into a swimming pool. ‘Did you take photos of me, of Adam and me?’

‘Why the fuck would I do that?’ She spoke quickly and spat out the words. ‘Why would I want your ugly face near me?’

‘Did you get someone else to take a picture?’

Bea stretched her legs and flipped her shoes off onto the wooden floor. They landed next to a half-drained cup of coffee. ‘Worried your husband might find out?’

‘Just answer the question.’

Bea paused, but not for long. ‘I didn’t take your bloody picture.’

Nicky sat down on an armchair covered in a matching throw to the one on the sofa. It seemed more conversational to sit and she wanted to get Bea on side. She was facing a fireplace where the grate and the mantelpiece were gone, and the square hole was filled with magazines and books. A blue neon sign that said ‘hurt me’ hung above the hole, a black wire trailing away behind the bookshelf. ‘How long did you go out with him?’