He got up, crossed the room to where the phone was, and lifted the receiver. His expression changed subtly as he listened. “Yes,” he said, and “yes” again. “May I ask why?” She couldn’t remember ever having seen him dismayed before. “I would like to phone my lawyer first,” and then, “Half an hour, right.”
“What is it, Jims?”
“They want me at the police station. Here won’t do. They’re coming to fetch me.”
“My God, Jims, but why?”
Instead of answering he lifted the receiver and dialed the home number of his solicitor.
Eugenie came in, trailing Matilda behind her. “You owe me five pounds, Mummy. You’d better write it down or you’ll forget.”
Chapter 22
ALONE AT HOME, Fiona hadn’t set foot in her garden or conservatory since the news reached her of Jeff’s death. Nor had she been back to work. She had barely been out. When Violent Crimes and Miss Demeanor weren’t there, and their visits grew shorter and shorter until they no longer happened, she sat in her living room, not reading, not watching television or listening to the radio, but just sitting. Her hands were usually folded in her lap, her knees close together. It was days now since she’d cried. She’d phoned no one and when the phone rang she left it to ring.
Michelle, who had been with her every day up until Thursday, hadn’t been back since. She’d have liked to see her, for her next-door neighbor was the only company she wanted. But Michelle, she supposed, had grown tired of comforting a grief-stricken woman and had doubtless run out of things to say.
Fiona marveled at the intensity of her own sorrow. She was as wretched as any widow after a twenty-year marriage. Her heart was broken. In the past she had laughed at the absurdity of this phrase and others like it: heartbreak, heartbroken. “You will break my heart,” her mother had said to her over some minor offense she’d committed while at university. What nonsense. So she’d thought then but now she understood. Her own heart was broken, shattered to bits, and she told herself that since Jeff died she hadn’t been able to feel it beating. When she placed her hand under her left breast there was no fluttering movement, nothing but a dull ache. Sometimes, sitting alone, she worried over this and took her own pulse, not knowing whether to be relieved or not at its gentle regular throb.
Every day the newspapers had a fresh story in them about Jeff. His marriage, his idle life. Fiona swore not to look at these articles but she couldn’t help herself. They’d said everything they could about the murder and now they were on to Jeff’s womanizing activities, his failure ever to have worked for his living, the base advantage he took of women who kept him and were then abandoned. Reading about this brought her an intense physical pain, which fetched little sobs and moans from her. One woman he’d moved in with five years ago had parted with her savings amounting to two thousand pounds, had later lost her job, and was now living on the benefit. Fiona, still believing herself the great love of Jeff’s life, the one to change him, felt she ought to compensate this woman for her losses.
All this added to her grief. Next week she would have to go back to work. She had grounds no longer for staying away. It wasn’t a close relative she had lost, not a husband or partner in a long, steady relationship, not even really a fiancé. That word had become a dirty one to Fiona, who would never again read it on the page or hear it spoken without recalling how Jeff had not given her a ring and had lied to her about their wedding date. That knowledge did nothing to reduce the strength of her love, but it tinged that love, loss, sorrow, with bitterness.
At work they would all, of course, say they were sorry about her boyfriend, what a shock, what a ghastly thing to happen, and that would be it. Until the police caught the person who’d done it, when their sympathy would be revived and her boss would tell her to take the day off. She’d be a curiosity, to be pointed out as the woman whose boyfriend had been murdered. Forever, probably. Fiona imagined herself at fifty, still single, of course, still alone, the middle-aged solitary whom people got to know, wherever she might live, as the cinema victim’s girlfriend.
She forgot to eat. Having shared an almost nightly bottle of wine with Jeff, she could no longer bear the pain of tasting it. A woman who lost weight easily and quickly, she felt her hip bones protruding, her elbows sharp. At this rate-and she managed a wry joke with herself-Matthew would want her on his program. If only Matthew would come to her! If only Michelle would come! The phone had stopped ringing. Something hindered her from lifting the receiver and making a call herself; she couldn’t physically perform the actions. As for going to them, she had a vision of herself stepping out of her front door, ringing their bell, and, when the door opened, being stared at as if they’d never seen her before, as if she were some stray caller wanting to promote a product or give away a tract.
At night she took sleeping pills, Temazepam. They sent her to sleep but it was an uneasy sleep and full of dreams. Always of Jeff. In one he came back from some foreign trip he’d been on. She’d thought he was dead and felt boundless joy at their reunion, as he promised he’d never go away again. Waking to reality was one of the worst experiences of her life.
The newspapers continued to be delivered and thrown into the recycling bin. She’d need to take it out to the street one day before it got too heavy to lift, but she’d have to leave the house on Monday anyway, somehow get herself to the tube and the City and London Wall. Taking the papers from the doormat on Saturday morning, though hating them, though determined as ever not to look, she caught sight in the front-page photograph of a woman she recognized. It was, surely it was, Jeff’s ex-wife.
Only she wasn’t his ex-wife. They’d never been divorced. Fiona felt a shaft of intense pain run through her body as if she too had been stabbed with a long, sharp knife. She was indifferent as to whether Zillah Melcombe-Smith had knowingly committed bigamy or not. Jeff had lied again and this lie was infinitely worse than telling her he’d booked a wedding date when he hadn’t. He couldn’t book a date, as he was married already.
Fiona dropped the paper. She lay facedown on the hall floor in an agony of grief and, strangely, shame.
“I shall sue these trashy rags for libel,” Jims said when, for five minutes, Violent Crimes left him alone with his solicitor. He had completely forgotten deriding Zillah for making much the same threat.
“Have you got a million pounds to spare?” Damien Pritchard was a little older than his client, but not unlike him to look at, being also tall, dark, classic-featured, and gay. “A million you wouldn’t mind dropping down a drain or giving to a beggar?”
“Of course I haven’t. I wouldn’t need to. I’ll win.”
“Oh, please. Do me a favor. Let me tell you something. A solicitor came to live next door to my parents when I was a kid. I’ve always remembered my father saying to my mother, he’s a lawyer, don’t touch his ears. Actually, I think it had a lot to do with making me want to be one. Well, the same goes for newspaper editors. Don’t touch their ears.” Damien shook his head in exasperation. “And now, can’t you really come up with a better alibi than what you expect the Plod to swallow? Oh, God, here they are, coming back.”
Jims could, of course, improve on his alibi. He could have told the truth. But that seemed almost the worst thing he could do and its results the worst that could happen to him. Once more he sat down at that bare table with Damien next to him and Violent Crimes and Miss Demeanor facing them. They all sat in the kind of chairs Jims wouldn’t even have had in his garden shed. At least they were still calling him by his surname and honorific, though he wondered how long that would last.