“You should have asked for help,” he said.
“What would you have done?”
“Something,” he said. “For example, about being dead. Think of before you were born. You were dead for millions and billions of years. You don’t find that frightening, do you?”
“Yes, I do.”
Suddenly there was a presence at my elbow. It was Lynne.
“There’s a message from DCI Links. He’d like to see you straightaway.”
“What’s happened?”
Lynne gave a shrug.
“He just said he wants to see you.”
They were so nice to me at the police station. I was whisked straight through and taken into a grander office, set away from all the other desks in the open-plan setting. I was seated in the chair in front of the desk and brought tea and two biscuits on a little saucer and I was told that Links would be along in just a tick. I had managed no more than a couple of sips and a dip of the biscuit into the tea when Links and Cameron came into the room. They both looked serious and formal. Cameron sat on the sofa to one side and Links sat behind the desk. So it was his office.
“They got you tea?” he said.
I held up my cup. There wasn’t really much to be said.
“I wanted to tell you straightaway,” he said. “We’ve interviewed Morris Burnside and we’ve now eliminated him from the inquiry.”
The room seemed to shift around me, leaving me queasy and dazed.
“What?”
“I want to assure you that this is a positive step.”
“But how could you clear him so quickly?”
He had picked up a paper clip from his desk. First he had unwound it so that it was straight. Now he was trying to twist it back into its old shape. I had tried that before. It never works as well again. But as an activity it at least prevented him from having to look me in the face.
“I understand from Dr. Schilling that you have found out that there are two other murders-I mean two murders involved-in this inquiry. Document analysis has shown with complete certainty that the same person was involved in the murders of Zoe Haratounian and Jennifer Hintlesham and in sending you the threats that you have received. It’s not just the documents.” Links was now talking as if he were in severe pain. “We know that the murderer went to the trouble of placing an object belonging to Mrs. Hintlesham in the flat of Miss Haratounian as a means of er… muddying the waters.” He untwisted the clip again. “On the morning that Zoe Haratounian was murdered, Morris Burnside was in Birmingham at an information technology conference that lasted all that weekend. He was manning a stall, doing presentations. We made a couple of calls. There are numerous witnesses who can place him there for the entire Sunday, morning till evening.”
“Couldn’t he have got away?”
“No, he couldn’t.”
“How did he react to being questioned?”
“He was a bit shocked, of course. But he was perfectly polite and cooperative. Nice young man.”
“Was he angry?”
“Not at all. Anyway, we didn’t mention you had given us his name.”
I leaned forward and put my teacup on the desk.
“Is it all right if I leave that here?”
“Yes, of course.”
I had nothing left. Everything seemed to have drained out of me. I’d thought I was safe. Now I had to go back out into it again. I couldn’t face it. I was too tired.
“I thought it was all over,” I said numbly.
“You’ll be fine,” Links said, still not looking at me. “The protection will continue.”
I got up and looked around for the door, in a daze.
“You must see it as a positive step. We’ve eliminated one potential suspect. That’s progress.”
I looked around.
“What?” I said.
“One less person to bother about.”
“Only six billion to go,” I said. “Oh, I suppose we can eliminate women as well and children. That’s probably two billion. Minus one.”
Links stood up.
“Stadler will see you out,” he said.
It was a matter of half leading, half carrying me out. On the way he stopped in a quiet stretch of corridor.
“You all right?” he said.
I moaned something.
“I need to see you,” he said.
“What?”
“I’ve been thinking about you all the time. I want to help you, Nadia. I need you and I think that you need me. You need me.”
He touched my arm.
“Uh?” It took me some time to work out what he was doing. I moaned something again and shook him off me. “Don’t touch me,” I said. “Don’t ever touch me again.”
SEVENTEEN
Fear kicked in. I was legless with it; my insides felt molten with it. I crawled into bed and lay staring up at the ceiling, trying not to think, yet trying desperately to think. A few hours of hope and elation, and what now, then? What now, when I was back at the beginning where I’d begun just a few days, a week or so, ago? Except it didn’t seem like days, but months and years, a dreary and ghastly eternity of fear. I slept and woke and slept again, stale and itchy sleep, just under the first level, where dreams lurk and catch you like thick weeds waving under the surface of the water. It was dark and then it was dim and then at last light again, a steely sky outside the window. I lay and listened to a bird singing outside. I peered at my watch. Six-thirty. I pulled the covers over my head. What was I supposed to do with myself today?
The first thing I did was to ring Zach. His voice when he answered was thick with sleep.
“Zach, it’s me. Nadia. Sorry. But I had to. It wasn’t him after all. It wasn’t Morris. He couldn’t have been the one.”
“Shit,” he said.
“Right. What am I going to do now?” I found I was crying. Tears were dribbling into my mouth, itching against my nose, tracking their way down my neck.
“Are they sure?”
“Yeah, it’s not him.”
“Shit,” he said again. I could tell he was trying to think of something to add that wouldn’t sound so dismaying.
“I’m back at square one, Zach. He’ll get me. I can’t do this. I can’t go on like this. It’s no use.”
“Yes you can, Nadia. You can.”
“No.” I wiped the sleeve of my nightie over my teary, snotty face. My glands ached and my throat hurt. “No, I can’t.”
“Listen to me. You’re brave. I have faith in you.”
He kept saying that: I have faith in you; you’re brave. And I kept crying and snuffling and saying: I’m just me, and: No, I can’t. But somehow the repetitions made me feel a bit better; my protests thinned out. I even heard myself giggle when Zach swore I’d live to be a hundred. He made me promise to make myself some breakfast. He told me he’d ring me in an hour or so, that he would come round to see me later.
I obediently toasted some rather stale bread and ate it with a large cup of black coffee. I sat in the kitchen and stared out of the window. People walked past and I thought to myself: It could be him, with the baseball cap and the wide trousers, lips pursed in a whistle I couldn’t hear. Or him with headphones, towing the yappy dog. Or him, with the straggly beard and thinning hair, hunched inside his quilted anorak on a baking late-August day. Anyone. It could be anyone.
I tried not to think about Jenny after she had died. If I called to mind that photograph, panic almost closed my throat. Before I saw the files, the killer had been a lurking menace, something abstract and almost unreal. But there was nothing abstract about Zoe’s sweet face, or about Jenny’s grotesque corpse, and now there was a stirring, tentative part of me that was starting to feel personal hatred toward him: an intimate, purposeful feeling. I sat at the kitchen table and held on to that feeling, let it take clearer shape in my mind. He wasn’t a cloud, a shadow, something dreadful in the air I breathed. He was a man who had killed two young women and wanted to kill me. Him against me.