The Poison Tree (35 page)

The vale of trees had never seemed more alive with swift darting presences and strange faces. Finally I knew the way as well as she did, but still I stumbled and clutched at branches and in the end she had to lead me by the hand along the paths that she and Rex had taught me. The trees disgorged us at the edge of Onslow Gardens. Her breath was uneven and I was struggling, too: I was unnaturally aware of the push and pull of my lungs.

There was only one house overlooking my parked car, and nobody at its windows. Biba fumbled in my bag and found the keys for me. Once we were inside, she clicked my safety belt and then hers into place. “Come
on
, Karen,” she said, with a click of impatience. I thought that I would be too distressed to drive, but once I had one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the gearshift I felt oddly grateful for the focus it gave me. I drove us to the only place we could go.

There was a clammy silence in the car as I drove through East Finchley and made our way onto the westbound North Circular. Somewhere near Neasden the road fanned out into four lanes and as we cruised downhill into the underpass, I astonished myself by making a noise I did not know a human being was capable of, a long howl that distorted the muscles of my throat. I stopped only when Biba grabbed the steering wheel to pull the car back within the road markings. The shock left me panting, and when I tried to swallow, it was with a rasp and a wince. The silence fell again in the aftermath of my scream. It was broken somewhere near Ealing.

“I can’t get through this without a cigarette,” said Biba. “There must be a convenience store or gas station somewhere. Stop when you see one, will you? Can you stop?” I pulled up on a double yellow line outside the gas station and told her to be quick. From her pockets she could gather only a scattering of dirty silver and copper. I nodded toward my handbag and she delved in and retrieved my wallet.

I watched her silhouette against the cashier’s window. The phrase “two men are dead” repeated itself like tribal drums in my head. Already I had a sense that this journey occupied a kind of non-time; that it was a last suspension between the events of my immediate past and a bleak and uncertain future.

Biba came back with two packs of twenty and a purple Bic lighter. I couldn’t find the words for the big questions so began with a smaller one. “Where did you learn to shoot a gun?” I asked. It hurt to talk.

“Fencing, archery, and firearms skills,” she said. She looked and sounded very young. “It was an optional module in the second year. We went to a shooting range.”

“Jesus
Christ
!” I banged the steering wheel with my fist. The horn gave a quick sharp blast. We turned onto my old street.

Biba looked as uncomfortable in this house as Rex had looked at ease. Now was not the time to enforce the household’s no-smoking rule as she sat on the oatmeal chenille sofa, the tar-black soles of her feet imperiling the pale pile.

“Have you got anything to drink?” she asked, but there was nothing alcoholic apart from a few frozen cubes of wine. There was juice, and we drank it from tumblers like children.

“Biba, what the hell have we done?” I heard myself say, and wondered why I was emphasizing my own complicity.

“Fucking . . . I panicked,” she said, as though explaining away a rash decision behind the wheel.

“He can’t seriously intend to take the blame for it,” I said. She considered the possibility with her head on one side.

“I think he does.”

“You’re not going to let him?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It might actually work.”

I didn’t know which of them I hated more at that second: her for what she’d done, or him for letting her get away with it. “You should be relieved,” she said. “This way, you get a clean slate.”

“I don’t want a fucking clean slate! I don’t want to not see you and Rex anymore!” She didn’t reply but used the lit end of the cigarette she was smoking to light another. I began to cry properly now, blinding tears and hoarse sobs. “I want to go back and get him.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Look, could you please stop crying?”

“It’s a bit late for that now! Two men are
dead
!”

Her eyes, when they met mine, registered only irritation. I knew then that no tears or words would penetrate, and something in me surrendered. “I’m going to bed,” I said, with the last of my voice. “Don’t come near me.”

Of course I did not sleep. It was an alien concept, like eating, or happiness. The pillow still smelled of Rex and I half suffocated myself in an attempt to breathe in the traces of him that lingered in the cotton. Where would he be sleeping tonight? Not in his room or mine, that much was for certain. Would they even let him sleep? If he went through with his plan to confess to the murders his sister had committed, would the police still question him, or would they leave him alone, glad that he had made their job so easy? I could not silence the cynical voice in my head suggesting that, on one level, Rex would be relishing this once-in-a-lifetime chance to martyr himself for his sister. As the sun began to rise, tears gave way to the aftershock shudders that follow extensive, exhaustive crying and, sometime between six and seven, I fell into a light, fretful sleep.

I had not locked us into the house deliberately, but had double-locked the front door through force of habit. If I had not, she would have gone without waking me. I was shaken out of sporadic sleep by the sound of her rattling the back door handle. I called her name from the landing. Like me, Biba still wore the clothes we had fled in the night before, but she had taken a shower and washed her hair before dressing again. From my perspective on the stairs, her eyes in that little face looked bigger than ever.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“To my dad’s,” she said.

“To your
dad’s
? Do you think he’ll take you in after what’s happened?” I had not meant for my words to crush her but they did.

“Home, then.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No, Karen. Rex was right. This is our mess. You don’t need to get involved,” she said.

“Don’t get involved? I was there. I
saw
it. You’ll need me as a witness, or an alibi or something.” I could not believe that I was using these words in the context of my own life. “You need me.” I wasn’t sure if I was still talking about the same thing.

“Look, it’s all over, Karen. We’ve lost the house. We’ve lost each other already. What else is there? Me and Rex will keep you out of this.”

“But my stuff is all over your house!”

“I’ll say it’s all mine.”

“My fingerprints are on everything.”

“So are lots of people’s. We’ll say it was the party.” She was growing impatient. I heard myself beg her to incriminate me just so that I wouldn’t lose my friends, and recognized this as madness. They had both decided they did not want me. Something inside me buckled under the weight of my own sudden resignation.

“I really should go,” she said, when I made no move to let her out.

“You don’t even know where you are. Let me drive you to your train at least.”

I dropped her off outside Brentford station. She checked her hair in the mirror, tucking a strand behind her ear and smoothing down her fringe, using her forefinger to wipe an imagined smudge from below her eye.

“Can you lend me five pounds to get me home, please?” The new formality of her good manners marked an unhappy shift in our relationship. I fished in my purse for the note. Finding only a crisp new twenty, I handed her that.

“What are you going to say when you get there?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

“When will I see you again?” I asked. Her face was set and she shook her head decisively, but there was a catch in her voice when she said, “I’m sorry.” She did not lean in for the expected kiss good-bye but shut the door gently in my face. I adjusted the rearview mirror so that I could watch her enter the station. The street was busy and I could not linger. Alone, I returned to the place I would have to force myself to think of once more as home.

The first newspaper to run the story was Monday’s edition of the
Evening Standard
. I forced myself to walk three streets to the corner shop and bought the early afternoon edition. My old home, my real home, loosely wrapped in tape, was pictured on the front page underneath the frowning headline MILLIONAIRES’ ROW MURDERS—2 SHOT. I folded the paper inward so that only the sports section was visible to others, sure that anyone who saw me reading the story would be able to deduce my associative guilt.

I locked the front door behind me and dropped to my knees in the front hall, spreading the paper out in front of me. Pages three and four of the paper portrayed a grainy photograph of Guy and a crisp portrait of Tom Wheeler. I still don’t know how journalists get photographs so quickly. They must literally sprint to the victims’ families’ homes and ask for access to the family album almost before they offer their condolences. The words took up less than half the space occupied by the photographs and gave little away, although the journalist did reveal Guy’s age.

“Nineteen,” I whispered into my lap. “He was only nineteen.” The text stated only that a twenty-four-year-old man was helping police with their inquiries. The euphemism comforted me. It allowed me to imagine Rex fetching cups of tea for friendly detectives, rather than shivering in a cell. There was no mention of a twenty-one-year-old woman being held or questioned.

The final edition of the newspaper two hours later ran the same story but this time the picture of Wheeler was a family portrait, a formal studio shot showing him with Jenny and their four children. Jenny Wheeler, widow. Hers must have been the screams we heard as we ran through the woods. I looked at that page for as long as it took to glean the printed facts—there was no new information—and then stuffed the whole paper into the kitchen wastebasket. I remained aware of its presence for the rest of the evening and that portrait of the Wheelers, though glimpsed only once, impressed itself onto my retina so vividly that I can still see it today with almost no effort if I close my eyes.

At half past six I turned on the London news, so nervous that I left a sweaty palm print on the remote control. There was a one-minute item, a young male reporter standing in Queenswood Lane summarizing the report in the
Standard
and promising more developments on this case as they arose. The case did not make the national bulletins, which were still dominated by Diana’s death and its aftermath. Without that distraction perhaps the murders would have received greater publicity. As it was, our story was buried like the layers of flowers being crushed under the weight of their own cellophane outside Kensington Palace. I went out again only to buy a bottle of wine to help me sleep; my hand hovered over a dusty Shiraz, but it was the color of the stain on Tom Wheeler’s shirt and instead I chose a Chardonnay. It was sharp and bitter, but it was all gone before dark, and sleep was as elusive as it had been the night before. I wondered if Rex had had any rest yet.

The press had obviously been as diligent and industrious as I had been frustrated and idle. On Tuesday morning, every newspaper carried the story. The
Daily Mail
, the paper my parents took, had devoted three pages to it. They, along with the other tabloids, had gone with the headline HIGHGATE HOUSE OF HORRORS. Rex had been named and pictured: the photograph had been taken the night I met him. I recognized the frayed shirt collar. He was freshly shaven and looked terribly young and vulnerable. A slim female arm wrapped around his neck and in the edge of the frame a flare of peroxide blond hair was just visible. Rachael had wasted no time. In the twenty-four hours between the story breaking and now, the journalists had discovered everything, from the fact that Guy was a small-time drug dealer to Tom Wheeler’s employer and even his salary. They knew that Biba had filmed a sex scene in a forthcoming drama, although they did not say where she was. They had made the connection from Rex to Roger Capel and thence to Jules Millar. A boxed-off column headlined TRAGIC BEAUTY gave a sensationalized précis of the life and death of Sheila Capel. All that was missing was me. I closed the
Mail
and smoothed the front page. Diana looked up at me from underneath heavy black lashes as the telephone started to ring.

It was neither the dreaded call from the police nor the longed-for one from Biba but the expected one from my parents. My parents, usually so careful on the telephone, spoke at once, their words tumbling over each other like leaping salmon.

“It’s the same Rex, isn’t it?” said my mother, at the same time as my dad said, “Karen, are you all right? What’s happened?”

The first words I had spoken to another human being for three days were the first lie I told in connection with the case.

“I don’t know any more about it than you do.”

“But you must know something . . .” said my father.

“It says here it was drugs,” said my mother. “You wouldn’t have any part in that, would you?” When I said no, I was being truthful. I knew that I had taken my last illegal drug.

“I’ve had a bad feeling since we met him,” said Mum, contradicting her words of only two weeks before.

“We’re coming down to get you,” said Dad. “We haven’t been able to get hold of you at all since you took up with him. I want to know where you are.”

I pressed my head against the window, my throat swollen with the effort not to tell them everything and surrender myself to their care.

“I’ll drive myself home,” I said. “Tomorrow. But I’ve got to go into college first.” My one-size-fits-all excuse worked on them even now. The guilt twisted my empty stomach into a tight little knot. To ease it, I made my lie come true.

I took a shower and changed my clothes for the first time since leaving Highgate, watching as the water ran gray. I turned my bedside radio on while I dressed. Elton John was still singing good-bye to England’s rose, and my hand hovered above the off switch, but I decided to hear him out and wait for the next news bulletin. At nine o’clock, the newsreader announced in even tones that Rex Capel had been charged with the murders of Guy Grainger and Tom Wheeler and that he had been remanded in custody. The police, she said, were not looking for anyone else in connection with their inquiries. I waited all morning for Biba to call and tell me what had happened and what she had said, but the phone remained silent.