The Light of Day: A Novel (13 page)

32

I went to the Fulham flat. A dry run, just to check it out. To see what the parking and the sight-lines were like.

A first-floor flat, bay-windowed. Below: an arched porch, steps leading up over a basement.

As if she could have known it, a girl in Dubrovnik. The points on our map.

A small front garden. Dead roses. A laurel bush, a privet hedge. A front path and gate, a little bunker, draped with ivy, for dustbins, just inside. The house number on the gate: forty-one.

I was there again the next Monday, at four o’clock. November 20th. The earliest they would leave would be around five. But you have to be in position, ready. Detective work is fifty per cent waiting.

And the black Saab was already parked outside.

A dank raw afternoon. Almost dark even at four. A light already on, behind the curtains, on the first floor.

A concession, Sarah had said, and now, perhaps, in the gloom of a November afternoon, the concession was running out.

Well, let them have their last eked-out moments, let them use up their concession. Then leave each other for good. If that is how it was.

Or let them disappear, the pair of them together, into the night.

How can you tell—from a lit-up window? All the windows, saying nothing, lights on, lights off. All the houses that stare at each other across streets. Read my face, guess what I’ve got inside.

The street lamps changed colour, pink-eyed then amber.

At five-fifteen (I note these things exactly) the front door opened and Bob Nash appeared. He was manhandling two suitcases, one large, one small, moving with concentration. He looked like a man carrying out some dangerous task, as if the cases might be full of explosives. I remembered what Sarah had said: how he’d carried up the boxes while Kristina had sat in the kitchen, about to burst into tears.

He was wearing a suit, no tie. The flop of dark hair that, with his hands gripping the suitcases, he couldn’t smooth back. The cases looked new. He shut the door behind him and carried the cases to the car. I couldn’t tell, from where I watched, if there was already luggage (his own) inside the car. He re-locked the car, walked back to the front door. He seemed to pause and breathe hard for a moment, standing in the porch—but then he’d been lugging suitcases. He let himself in with a key.

Five minutes passed, maybe more.

You look around, take it in: take a last mental photograph. Home, and not home, something different from home.

The light went out upstairs. Then they both emerged below. He had a tie on now. She was dressed—as if to make an impression, as if she had some appointment, some role to perform—in a simple elegant dark suit, a pale round-necked top beneath.

It was the first sight of her I’d had, not counting that photograph. Different people you might have said. A transformation had taken place.

My first sight. There was only that brief moment when the light from the open door caught them, I could hardly see her face. I looked for some dizzying, devastating factor that might, in a instant, explain everything.

But didn’t I know, by then, there’s no telling how it strikes?

A scarf, deep red, hung loosely from her shoulders. Glossy black hair. Something foreign, yes, and intense. Italian, yes, your first guess.

They both had coats over their arms, for the few steps to the car. She had a bag, of the compact boxy sort you might carry on to a plane, another small bag hooked over her shoulder.

The door shut behind them. No meaningful pause.

A professional couple you might have said—in whatever sense—with matters to attend to, some schedule ahead. Married, or not married, or just professionally linked. Two people about to set off on some business trip—a trip that might have been entirely for legitimate purposes or entirely not, or something embracing both.

You can’t tell.

They descended the steps. She seemed the surer and quicker of the two. One of those man-woman partnerships where it’s the man who is the anchor maybe, but the woman who takes the physical lead.

He would have bought her the suit, I suppose. A “going-away” suit? She flicked the scarf round her chin like a mask. The scissory, clipping steps of a woman-about-town. A refugee.

He opened the car door for her, took her coat and bag to lay on the back seat. I lost sight of her after the quick inward swing of her legs. Good sleek legs. In four hours’ time he’d be dead and she wouldn’t know. He walked round to his driver’s door and before getting in, and with an odd quick wrench of his head, looked up, looked round, looked back.

33

Gone twelve. Enough. I get up from the bench. I’ve given it time enough. Time enough for respect, time enough to say I didn’t hurry it. Time for all those messages, if they were going to come, from the dead.

No, sweetheart, nothing. (I wouldn’t lie.) The dead don’t say anything. They don’t forgive.

There’s just one name on this bench: “John Winters 1911–1989.” But it’s made of good, weathered teak.

And my life got put back together again.

I walk back to the car. I shiver a little, now I’m on my feet. Sitting around—in November. John Winters. The day’s still brilliant, the sky an almost burning blue, but, even at just past noon, it has that urgent feeling that even still and brilliant days in November have. It’s waning already, it can’t last.

34

Marsh said, “To her? Something terrible’s happened to her?”

She was along the corridor. Nothing would ever be the same for her again.

He looked at me, reading my face.

“Something good had happened to her, hadn’t it? Her husband had come back. This girl had gone. Everything she wanted.”

“Yes.”

“So—why?”

“That’s not my business.”

“No?” He looked at me. “I could say it’s not mine either. When Mrs. Nash came to you—to hire you—did she seem like a woman intent on revenge?”

“No, not at all. She wanted her husband back.”

“You’re sure?”

“I see lots of women—clients—intent on revenge. You can tell.”

Sometimes as soon as they step through the door.

“Still, it’s an explanation. It could persuade a jury. Why—at
that
point? Because she was going to do it all along. She waits till he gets back, till he thinks he’s in the clear—”

“She’d cooked him a meal. His favourite meal. She’d laid the table. You saw—”

“Exactly. Revenge. A ritual element. People do weirder things. Did it ever cross your mind she might be off her trolley?”

He didn’t believe what he was saying—I could tell. Cock-and-bull. He was testing me in some way.

“A jury won’t come into it,” I said.

“Maybe not. It depends. You knew it was his favourite meal—she told you that?”

He looked at me.

“You
saw
her,” I said. “She didn’t
look
like she’d planned it. She didn’t look like she’d meant to do it.”

(She’d looked—as much as anyone can look who’s saying, over and over, “I did it, I did it”—like she didn’t know what she’d done.)

He looked at me and let a silence pass.

Not like
she’d
planned it, he might have said.

Your last case. What do you do? Go to town, follow the wildest goose-chase, break all the rules?

And if it could have been made to fit the facts I might have said at that point: Okay, all right, I planned it. I conspired with Mrs. Nash to kill Mr. Nash. I put her up to it. I followed him, reported in—so she’d know. Then followed him all the way back, just to be sure . . .

A false statement (my real one was on the table waiting for me to sign): I really did it, it was me.

Cock-and-bull. But people do the weirdest things. They walk into police stations (every nick has stories) and confess to crimes they never did.

He fingered his tie. He might have been thinking: and if she’s mad, he could be too.

But they can’t arrest you for what’s only in your head.

“Yes, I saw her,” he said.

Interview rooms. Two DIs. How strange to be on the other side of the law.

And wasn’t it why we’d both of us joined—back then, back in those simple, certain days—to be on the right side of the law?

(Yes, he’d say, later—when we met up to play golf.)

A good thing to do, the right thing to do. A kind of insurance: get on the right side from the start. A sound choice anyway for us good-on-our-feet types who were never much cop at school. (Problems at home as well.)

Schoolboy misfits (Marsh too, I’d guess). Not much good on paper, but good enough underneath. Good enough to serve the law.

And now look at Marsh—coming up to retirement: he looks like a teacher, a weary teacher (a touch of strict flint). And look at me, back in a police station. All because of a teacher. Because even teachers now and then go and land in trouble with the law.

Those simple days, before the police became the pigs, the fuzz, the filth.

I think he read my thoughts.

“Can I see her? Please can I see her?”

That question—that word “please”—like a confession.

He looked hard at me. The face of a tired teacher—the sort who, if you’re lucky, will let you off. But even tired teachers can catch you out. Even friendly-looking policemen can whip out the book.

It was the only way I’d see her—from then on: by permission.

“I can’t do that,” he said.

More than his job was worth, his job that would soon be done. A wife waiting for
him
to come home, for good.

“That’s not possible, you know the ropes.”

And Bob Nash was lying on a bed of stainless steel. I knew the ropes.

His last case. I might have tipped him over the edge.

It was me—I’ll come clean. Have me, take me instead.

What else is love for?

35

I start the car. Another funeral party, a large one, is dispersing, whole gaggles of mourners returning to their cars, and I get caught up in the queue of their departure, feeling vaguely in the wrong. No, I’m not with you. Just here to look at a grave. I’m here with someone else.

A little arrowed sign says “Exit.” There must be some system of traffic flow, even here—designed to stop a party leaving from obstructing a party arriving, from upsetting its slow but steady progress behind the hearse. So that on a busy day like today each party arriving can at least have its moment, can at least have the brief illusion that it’s the only one that counts, the only one with serious business here today.

Like my clients coming through my door.

You’re the only one who counts, the only one who counts for me.

How do we decide?

“Exit.” It’s a strange word, when you think about it, in a cemetery. It ought to be the word you see, the final word, as you come in. Everything here turned inside-out.

And where Sarah is it’s not a word that has much use: exit. No helpful arrows pointing. Everything there is just inside.

Before Sarah became my teacher I never used to think much about words—hold them up to the light.

“You can do it, George. Write it all down.”

More than just letters. A correspondence course, homework. Something more than just begging letters dropped into the dark. Please let me see you . . .

Special lessons, private coaching.

“Something for me each time.”

Not much good on paper, till now. Her eyes, her agent in the world. You have to have a motive. It’s the same with crime. You never know what you’ve got inside.

The day she said, about my latest effort (I’d wait for the verdict, like when Helen tasted my cooking): “I think you can do this, George, I think you’ve got something. You don’t need me any more.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said.

But I walked out that day—out of prison—my feet floating on air.

Look, remember, write it down. I carry a notebook, like every good cop. It’s like being on a special full-time case, the one and only case, the only case that counts.

The line of cars I’ve joined creeps along between cypresses and evergreens, then between the rows of gold-leafed trees, then comes to an unexplained halt. Gravestones glinting on either side. Here and there bright clumps of flowers.

I think of the girl in the florist’s. The way she moved in and out of light. Somebody’s daughter. They bloom (Helen seemed to grow thorns). And what are Sarah and me? Late flowerers, like chrysanthemums. Flowers in November— arriving from God knows where. Hothouse flowers. Jail-house flowers.

The sun through the windscreen, as if I’m a plant under a frame.

“Putney Vale.” It sounds like some lost paradise. And it’s true, there can’t be much trouble-making here. No need for police-work. Minor traffic snags. No breaches of the peace. One safe little patch of the world. So why are we all lining up to leave?

We move off slowly again towards the gates, where everything will change speed. The gravestones seem to watch us, as if they’re standing, still and silent, out of respect for us. Everything inside-out. Honouring the living as they leave, watching us depart like some doomed patrol.

Except Bob—if he’s watching. He’s not honouring me.

There he goes, the bastard, sneaking out with the others. Trying to look like one of them, the fraud, trying to look as if he’s full of grief.

That last strange quick lift of his head before he got in the car.

There he goes, the creep, with his flowers delivered and his conscience clean.

36

The word that got used was “corrupt.”

A strangely physical word. A black taste welling in your throat, a thickness on your tongue, as if you have a disease. As if they’ve rooted out some foul stuff inside you and it’s you, it’s yours now, you’re stuck with it for good.

I was found to be corrupt, to be party to police corruption. At another time, maybe, there would have been internal disciplining, reprimands, suspension. Shaming enough. But because the air was busy in those days with the word “corrupt,” because there was pressure from above and lack of public confidence and examples had to be seen to be made, I got the axe while Dyson walked.

Justice: another word.

And I’d have got nothing but commendation if (as I nearly did) I’d locked him away for a good long stretch.

Look what I
haven’t
done, I said. I haven’t used police powers to further my own ends, to line my own pocket. I haven’t turned a blind eye. I haven’t, for the sake of the tally, stitched up an innocent man.

No dice. Look at it this way, they said—or I could read it in their eyes—you’re being sacrificed for the good of the Force, a bigger thing than you, for the sake of its reputation, for the sake of keeping its grubby face clean.

And, by the way, you’re getting off lightly, you assaulted a witness . . .

Corrupt. A word with no half measures: you’ve got the disease. Pooled in with the worst. Like a criminal gets called a criminal, along with all the others, even if he only dipped his hand, once, in the till.

Not just a cop who’d overstepped the mark. I’d sinned.

The gravestones twinkle in the sun. And this place, when you think about it, must be riddled with corruption . . . Not such a sweet little community after all.

Always, of course, the taint—that everyday, workaday taint. A dirty job sometimes. Things you have to clean up. A filthy job sometimes—and the police were sometimes just the Filth. And sometimes you’d bring it home with you (when they finally let you go home), like a smell in your clothes, in your hair. Home to your wife and daughter.

After a while it doesn’t wash away. You don’t even have the decent dutiful smell of a uniform. It gets in your plain clothes, the clothes that let you mingle and blend with the enemy. Then you go home.

So it had really been brewing all along, with Rachel? She’d had enough, and this was just the final crunch? Or put it another way: she’d grown sick of my smell. And I thought I’d managed it, mostly, that work-home thing, that difficult trick, that crossing a border every time you opened the front door.

At least in
that
direction. Going back to the nick, as often as not, with a bruising from Helen.

But at least with Rachel. Okay, so sometimes I was a pain, a big pain. Bruisings all round.

But now she had the chance to make it all my fault. The taint
was
me. Not Mr. Right but Mr. Wrong. And not my wife, my judge.

My queue of cars reaches the gates, files out, rounds the roundabout, still like some stately procession, then turns, gathering speed, onto the A3 slip road. Then, one by one, we launch ourselves back into the world.

I think Rachel never really gave up her god, that’s what I think. I mean, the big stern daddy part of him.

I never had a god like she did, I wasn’t brought up (thank God) like her. Though my dad would go to church often enough—to snap the happy couples.

I used to think of how it must have been for Rachel when she was small. God looking down on her, and her looking up, being obedient and scared. Then one day, when she was bigger, her deciding: no, there’s no one up there at all. Just me.

I wasn’t brought up like Rachel. But you pick things up about God. You pick up his scent, like the smell of church. And I remember some passage being read out somewhere, that there’s no sinner so bad, so worthless, that God will ever let them slip through the net of his love.

Rachel never quite gave him up, that’s what I think.

And whether he’s up there or not, and whether he’s got a net, I don’t know. But I think it’s how it ought to be just among us. There ought to be at least one other person who won’t let us slip through their net. No matter what we do, no matter what we’ve done. It’s not a question of right or wrong. It’s not a question of justice.

There ought even to be someone for Dyson, even Dyson. I don’t know who it is. I know it’s not me.

I turn onto the slip road and put my foot down. I’m on my way now, I’m on my way. I whizz out onto the A3.

No matter what we do, no matter how bad. If we’re found to be corrupt. Even if we do the worst thing ever, even if we do what we never thought it was in us to do, and kill another person. Even if that other person was once the person for whom we were holding out a net.