The River House (30 page)

“But, Ursula, you always hate it if I try to talk about it.”

She looks at me. She has a lucid gaze, green as leaves.

“We all have our ways of coping,” she says. “Your way is to talk about things. That’s not my way, Ginnie.”

I put my hand on her wrist. Her skin is cold. All my life I’ve wanted for her to see things as I do, but none of that matters
now. We stay like that for a moment; then she finishes her brandy and gets up. She gives herself a little shake, like someone
coming up out of the sea, shaking cold water from herself.

“Can we just look in the shed before you go? I’d rather have you with me. Is that OK?”

“Of course,” I tell her.

We go out into the back garden. The grass seems even longer at the back of the house, washing up to the patio like green water.
There’s a haze of drifting thistledown, and the stream is a sludgy, viscous purple under the straggling hedge. Inside the
shed there’s a sweet grass-and-sunlight scent of last year’s apples.

Ursula lifts out our mother’s old gramophone from the shelf at the back.

“This might be worth a bit,” she says. “Don’t you think? I bet people collect this kind of thing. Could you bring the records?”

They’re 78s, brittle and amazingly heavy, with crumbling cardboard covers in faded pinks and browns. I pick them up and follow
her.

She puts the gramophone down on the lawn and opens it up. The crushed grass has a sappy smell.

She looks up at me with a glint of excitement. I suddenly see something quite different in my sister — the part of her that
paints hibiscus flowers with petals like fire and glittery snakes creeping through. It enters my mind that I don’t really
know her at all, that when she’s not with me she may be entirely different: admiring in her a bright, brittle courage I didn’t
know was there.

“Shall we?” she asks me.

“Yes.”

She chooses a record from the pile. Louis Armstrong: “After You’ve Gone.” She slips it onto the turntable. She takes a new
needle from the little box in the side and puts it into the arm. She winds the handle and moves the silver arm down onto the
record. It prickles, fizzes, bursts into fabulous life, singing out through the April gardens.

Ursula smiles up at me.

“They’ll hear it for miles,” she says.

We stand there and listen right through. The reproduction is crackly yet lavish. It’s music to dance to, in a backless dress
red as flame, with a man who pulls you close, his hand resting lightly on the bare skin just below your shoulder blade: music
to make love to. When it comes to an end, the needle settling into the groove in the middle of the record, we stand very still
for a moment.

Ursula lets out a little sigh.

“That’s that, then,” she says. “All over.”

“Yes.”

She still doesn’t move for a moment. The silence of the garden seems more absolute now. You can taste it on your tongue, this
stillness, this absence.

She bends down to pack up the gramophone.

“OK,” she says briskly. “You’re happy for me to see what I can get for it?”

“Sure. It’s a lovely thing, but I don’t suppose we’d play it again.”

I pick up the records and follow her into the house.

She turns to face me.

“OK, then, Ginnie. Take care.”

We hug.

“You’re sure you’ll be OK? Paul will be there when you get home?”

She nods.

“I’ll be fine,” she says.

“Just let me know if there’s anything I can do,” I tell her.

I leave her sorting the mail into orderly heaps.

About five miles north of Southampton, quite suddenly, I know I have to stop. I pull off the road and weep, parked by the
run-down café, the overflowing rubbish bags, the bicycle that has been dumped there, the tangled bramble flowers: crying and
crying for my mother and all that is now past mending — for the photos I never sent her and the things that we never said
and whatever happens to love.

T
HE CALL COMES ON A
T
HURSDAY
, the day I used to see Will. Outside, the wind is blustering in my garden and ripping all the blossoms from the pear tree.

“Now — am I speaking to Ginnie?”

My pulse skitters off. I don’t recognize the number, but the voice reminds me of Will.

“Yes.”

“Ginnie, I’m so sorry to bother you. This is Roger. You remember? Roger Prior. We met in that bar in the autumn.”

“Yes, I remember.”

The wind sneaks in around the ill-fitting door of my kitchen; I feel its cold touch on my skin.

“So, Ginnie, how are you?” His voice is gentle with concern.

I tell him about my mother.

“I’m so sorry,” he says. “This is terrible timing then. You’ll have to forgive me.” I’m very aware of his careful courtesy.
I remember Will once telling me that you have to be a bit of an actor to be a good detective. “Ginnie, what I wanted — I’d
really like to have a chat with you about this case of ours. Maria Faulkner. I think Karen may have mentioned I’m involved?”

I swallow hard.

“I thought that was all over,” I tell him. “I went to the identification parade.”

“I know you did,” he says. “Well, thank you so much. You’ve already been extremely helpful, Ginnie. I just wanted to have
a talk with you — just quite informally — about where we go from here.”

He waits for me. I don’t say anything.

“We could meet anywhere,” he says. “Any place that you’d be comfortable.”

“I wouldn’t be happy with you coming here,” I tell him.

“No. I understand. What I wondered — there’s a café in the main road, quite near where you live. Called Markham’s—it’s got
little trees outside. Would that suit you?”

I know the place; I’ve passed it sometimes. It looks expensive, with white cloths on the tables and trim bay trees in metal
tubs flanking the door. It enters my mind that he has chosen our meeting place with care: that he wants me to be at ease there.
The thought chills me.

“I could do later this morning, Ginnie. Perhaps eleven thirty?”

I have no reason to refuse.

It’s stylish, as I expected. There are stripped, untreated floorboards, and bunches of lavender on the tables, and black-and-white
photos of lovers on bridges in Paris, and over the sound system, classical guitar.

He’s sitting at a corner table: I guess that he’s chosen it so we won’t be overheard.

He reaches out and takes my hand. He’s just as I remember: the clever, self-deprecating smile, the scent of vanilla, the handshake
that seems to last a little too long.

“Ginnie. I’m so grateful to you.”

We sit.

“I hope this is OK,” he says. He hands me the menu. “A coffee? Something to eat?”

I know I am being seduced.

“Just a cappuccino.”

He says he’ll have the same.

The waitress has a long red skirt with bits of ribbon hanging from it, and those flat, clumpy boots you have to be really
beautiful to wear. He’s charming to her.

“I’m sorry about your mother,” he says to me.

“Well, she’d been ill, so it wasn’t a surprise.”

“It’s still a shock, though, isn’t it?” he says. “My father died last year, and I was pretty cut up about it. It’s that time
of life for us, isn’t it? Our kids growing up, our parents getting frail. And we’re the ones caught in the middle. Keeping
it all going.”

He’s resting his arm along the back of his chair. Everything about him says he’s so relaxed and casual, that this is just
a friendly conversation without consequence. But his eyes never leave my face, eyes of an elusive color, between gray and
green, like the leaves of olive trees. They narrow as he watches me.

The waitress brings the coffee. It’s strong, with bittersweet flecks of chocolate on top. I drink gratefully.

“You’ve got daughters, haven’t you?” he says. “Karen said how gorgeous they were — when she saw their photographs, when she
met you.”

I nod. “Amber’s sixteen and Molly’s just starting her degree.”

He smiles, showing his perfect teeth.

“You must be very proud.” He tips sugar into his coffee. “My eldest lad just started college too,” he says. “It’s quite a
wrench, isn’t it? You think you’ll be glad not to have that ghastly music playing, and then you miss them horribly.”

“Yes,” I say.

He sips his coffee. A little silence falls.

“So, Ginnie. About Maria Faulkner.”

He’s like me, in a way: He’s someone who watches people, I can see that. When I put my coffee down so carefully, trying to
keep it steady, yet it still slops into the saucer, because my hands are shaking: I know he sees.

“To get straight to the point, Ginnie, your evidence is important to us. I want to ask if you’d be willing to go a little
further for us.”

He waits for my response, those cool gray eyes on me.

“It’s difficult,” I say.

“I know it’s difficult, Ginnie. But you come across to me as someone who would want to do the right thing. Someone who’s very
responsible. I think that’s why you rang the Incident Room — because you wanted to do the right thing. Even when it’s difficult.”

“Why does it matter? Why is it so important — what I saw?”

He’s leaning forward, his hands clasped loosely in front of him on the table: immaculate, a surgeon’s hands.

“OK,” he says. “I’m going to take you into my confidence. Let me tell you how this all fits together — let me tell you the
story, Ginnie.”

“Yes. I think you should.”

In spite of everything, I feel a surge of curiosity.

“We’ve had our suspicions all along. About Sean Faulkner — the man you picked out from the lineup.”

He waits for me to respond. I ask him why.

“Sean Faulkner has a history of violence toward women, and a total failure to take any responsibility for it,” he says. “You
know how these men are. The scum who beat up their wives. The pathetic excuses they make.” A flicker of anger moves across
his face. I glimpse the toughness in him, which he’s seeking to conceal. “You’ll get a man who says, I was drunk, I couldn’t
help myself. Well, how many guys did he beat up on the way back from the pub then? But you know about that, don’t you? You
know about violent men.”

This shakes me. I’ve attributed such intuitive powers to him, such powers to read me, that I think for a moment that he is
talking about my father.

“Through the work you do, Ginnie,” he says, as though responding to my confusion.

“Yes,” I say.

“Sean Faulkner had recently been abusive to a neighbor who—according to Sean, at least—had flirted with Maria. And there were
inconsistencies in the story he told. Like, when we went to his house, after he reported Maria’s disappearance, he told us
he hadn’t washed any clothes, but the washing machine had recently been used. But we’d nothing concrete, nothing to link him
with the place where Maria’s body was found.”

He leaves a small, significant pause. I feel the thud of my heart.

“Where did he kill her?” I say.

“We think he strangled her at home during a row, then put her body in the garbage bag and drove her to the river.”

“Why there? Why that part of the river?”

“It’s where they used to live,” he says. “When people dump bodies it’s always somewhere they know—where they’ve once lived,
or where they were brought up or something. They need to understand the lay of the land. … We think he changed into his trunks
and sneakers and walked out into the river and sank her body. Probably more or less where she was found—there’s an eddy near
the bank there, we don’t think the tide moved her much. I guess he didn’t realize the body would come to the surface. The
river’s a great place to hide a body—but only for a while.”

“And when I saw him?” I say.

“You saw him the morning after he reported her missing. Our theory is that he went back to check that her body was still hidden,
that he hadn’t left any traces. Maybe he worried he’d left some evidence—clothing or footprints, perhaps. That’s why he went
back in daylight. He claims he was at work then, but he doesn’t have an alibi, not for the time you saw him.”

His eyes rest on me, his enigmatic gaze.

“Yours is our only sighting that links him to the place where he dumped her body. And it was just the morning after Maria
disappeared.”

The palms of my hands are wet.

“She was twenty-three, Ginnie,” he says quietly. He doesn’t say, Just four years older than Molly; but the thought hangs there,
in the air between us. “Twenty-three and one week. Here, let me show you.”

He takes a photograph out of his wallet and places it in front of me: His hands are gentle, as though this image is a fragile,
precious thing. It’s a color photo, rather blurred and amateurish, three women in a bar, their drinks on the table before
them, the flash reflecting redly in their eyes.

He points to one of them.

“This is Maria,” he tells me.

She has Italian coloring—coppery skin, and crinkly Mediterranean hair, and dark eyes fringed with heavy, curly lashes. She’s
all dressed up for her evening out, in a strappy top and embroidered jeans, the kind of clothes that Molly or Amber would
wear. She has glitter at her wrists and throat, and lipstick of a sweet, ripe red. She’s vivid and gleaming, her face all
bright with laughter, with an air of surprise about her, as though she looked up suddenly when someone called her name.

I stare at the image of her—her face on the edge of laughter and the soft, dark mass of her hair. Tears well in me. I try
to hide this, but I know he sees.

“This was at her birthday party, the week before she was killed,” he says. “She’d been flirting with a neighbor. We think
she was killed for flirting.”

He leans toward me, intent.

“Ginnie, I want to ask you to be a witness for us. I’m asking you to help us nail this man.”

I sit there a long time, not looking at him, staring down into my coffee. There are pictures in my mind, precise as something
seen, as though these are things that have already happened. The pain in Greg’s face, all his confusion and bitterness; Molly—puzzled,
reproachful; Amber in a wild mood, scratching her arms or cramming her mouth with pills.