A dozen men of varying ages, heights, weights, and races were paraded into the cell. Ms White asked each one in turn to step forward.
‘This one?’ she asked Clare.
‘I have told you,’ Clare said, impatience fraying her voice, ‘the intruders all wore hoods and head masks — ski masks, balaclavas without eye slits — a mesh where the eye slits would have been. Gloves, too, long-sleeved shirts, polo-neck jerseys. I could not see their skin. I do not know what they were. I do not even know with certainty that they were men.’
‘This one?’ Ms White asked, sounding unperturbed.
‘I have told you already,’ Clare whined, ever more exasperated. ‘Why do you refuse to listen?’
Ms White remained unruffled, patient as a good parent with a recalcitrant child. ‘This one?’
‘This is an absurd exercise. I cannot see the point,’ Clare cried out, hitting her fist against the chair and breaking her own skin. ‘You have brought people here who bear no resemblance to each other. It is not what I call a normal kind of line-up. And anyway, it is pointless to show me anyone. I saw nothing of them that would help. They all wore black, and it was night, so not even a description of their clothing could possibly help. The only thing I know is what they smelled like.’
‘What they smelled like, madam?’ Ms White turned from the detainees to Clare and switched off the light, leaving the prisoners in darkness. ‘You never spoke of smell. Do you think you know what they smelled like? That might be helpful.’
‘They smelled of disinfectant,’ said Clare. ‘Orange-scented disinfectant. Industrial cleaners.’
‘The intruders were industrial cleaners?’
‘No. For pity’s sake. They smelled of industrial cleaning solutions. Solvents. I don’t know. I would know the scent if I smelled it again. It was distinctive, distinctively unpleasant.’
‘But this is a major development, madam,’ said Ms White. ‘Why did you never tell us you could smell the intruders? Please come this way.’
Ms White led Clare out of the room, back into the corridor, around a corner and a further corner, and into a laboratory next door to the viewing gallery. A group of men in white coats, men as heterogeneous and generic as those presented in the line-up, so similar that they might have been the same people in different costumes, looked up, faces passive, as if old women were routinely delivered to their lab at bedtime. Ms White indicated Clare should sit on a stool near the door and, after a few minutes, a young man came over and presented her with a number of vials to smell.
‘This?’
‘No.’
‘This?’
‘No.’
‘This?’
‘Closer, yes.’
‘This?’
‘Yes, that’s it. But …’
‘Ah. Let me see,’ he said, thumbing through his rack of vials. ‘This one?’
‘Yes. Definitely. This is it.’
‘Lady Grove.’
‘Lady Grove?’
‘Lady Grove. The housewife’s friend. Have you not seen the ads?’ the man asked. He hummed a calypso jingle and shuffled a dance, hips swivelling, arms becoming branches. ‘Lady Grove,’ he sang, shaking his head, as if even the blind and deaf would know it.
‘I don’t watch television,’ Clare lied.
‘Not an industrial cleaner after all,’ said Ms White, clicking her tongue. ‘A domestic cleaner. But madam would not know that. Madam does not know about domestic cleaners. She still has a maid, whom she no doubt calls a maid.’
‘She only comes a few times a week,’ Clare protested. ‘Marie and I do most of the cleaning, it’s just the heavy things, the windows …’
But Ms White had already taken Clare by the arm, leading her back into the corridor, around a corner, a further corner, and into an empty waiting room. ‘I will be back just now, madam. Madam will please wait.’
‘I should like to go home. I have cooperated with you, Ms White. I think that I have been exceptionally cooperative given the circumstances, not to mention the time of the evening. May I remind you that I am not the criminal?’ Clare found herself wiping away tears. The wound on her hand left a streak of blood across her face.
‘Not the criminal? No. Of course not, madam. What a suggestion. What a silly thing to say. You had the misfortune to be a victim. And that is a very grave matter, although some might say that victimhood is a kind of delinquency. Some would say you should have been more careful, as you are being now, in your nice, safe house. No one should wish to be a victim. Please wait here. I will be back just now.’
It was decades since Clare had been left alone in a waiting room. The last time she had been waiting in a hospital for her parents to come, to see their eldest daughter and son-in-law, or what remained of them. It was to be expected, Clare supposed, that the police had come for her first in that case, so long ago. They had been polite enough initially, a man taking her elbow, much as Ms White did, leading her to an armchair in her own living room, in that house on Canigou Avenue, and sitting her down, kneeling himself, explaining in his crude English that her sister had been murdered, and that a positive identification by one of her family members was necessary as her husband’s family were away on the other side of the country and would not arrive until the next day. Official confirmation was needed. They had been murdered in their guest house.
Leaving her husband and son at home, Clare had gone with the police in a government car to the hospital. She had expected to be shocked, the sheet removed to reveal a quarter of a face, just enough remaining to be unmistakably her sister: the beauty mark below her lips, pursed even in death, as though her own assassination had triggered nothing but disapproval. The policemen with her had held their breath, as if they expected Clare to throw her body against her sister’s, slake her grief with blood, but she had only nodded curtly, saying in her cool voice, Yes, that is my sister, now let me see my brother-in-law.
After she had identified both bodies, the policemen took Clare to a waiting room with rows of orange plastic seats all facing towards the door, where she sat alone, monitoring her heart rate. The policemen had offered to leave a nurse with her, but she shook her head, keeping two fingers on her neck and her eyes on the red second hand of the clock on the wall, timing eighty beats per minute, ninety, slow breaths, seventy-five again, down to seventy. How long had she waited alone, facing the clock on the wall and the door beneath it? Only seconds were recognizable, each second counting beats and after perhaps fifteen thousand of those seconds her parents had appeared in the door like two grey monuments. Her father, she remembered, wore an opposition pin.
‘Are you trying to test them?’ she had hissed.
‘What?’
‘The pin.’
‘Pin? Oh. No, sweetie. It was on the coat. It was the first coat I grabbed. I didn’t think.’
‘Let me take it, Dad.’
‘No one will care. I’m an old man. I don’t mean anything now.’
After being interrogated all night by the police, Clare and her parents had left the hospital the following morning. The murder of press photographers caught the pin on her father’s lapel. When the photos were published in all the papers, the whole country believed that even in the hour of his daughter’s death Christopher Boyce had staged an act of defiance.
The funeral, another kind of waiting, had been unpleasant on several counts. Clare later heard that before their arrival a crowd had been gassed into submission, clubbed, and taken away in handcuffs, two later dying in custody. Worse still, she and her parents had to stand in the company of the Pretorius family, who had already refused them access to her sister’s papers and belongings. They sang hymns that were foreign to the Boyce family, whose own suggestions for the service were ignored, judged too secular, inadequately Christian. ‘We’re not having a circus here,’ her brother-in-law’s father informed them. While the minister lectured the mourners about the sins of man, Clare had fixed her eyes on a wild fig tree and the mountain in the distance, dust rising from its slopes in spiralling devils around the great pale domes of granite; mute tortoises rearing up from the earth. They had waited then, she and her parents, for the two caskets to be lowered into the ground, dropped on canvas streamers by the muscled hands of her brother-in-law’s family, men red from the sun, sweating under heavy pads of fat. After the others had left, Clare and her parents threw handfuls of dirt on the coffins before two men began to shovel. Later, she wondered why she had not grabbed a shovel herself, and added more than handfuls of dirt instead of just watching the young men, their shirts soaked with sweat, dust running down their faces. She wanted to be sure her sister was in the ground, was not going anywhere.