The paramedics had lifted Morris onto a stretcher and were inserting a drip.
“Are you going to look in his pockets?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I think he was going to attack me.”
Cameron glanced at Links, who nodded. Morris’s nice new trousers were now in halves. They had endless pockets, and Cameron started rummaging in them. I saw something glisten in his hands. He was holding up a wire.
“What’s this?” he said to Morris.
“I was doing some repairs,” he answered.
“What repairs were you doing that needed piano wire tied into a running noose?”
He didn’t reply. He stared at me instead and said in a whisper, “Darling. I’ll be back, darling.”
The paramedics picked up the stretcher and carried it out. Links shouted at one of the uniformed officers.
“Two of you go with him to the hospital. Caution him on the way. Keep him fully secure-no access.”
I watched him go. He looked at me steadily until they turned the corner, with his bright eye, his friendly murderer’s face. He was smiling at me through his mask of blood and blisters.
Then: “What about Fred?” I said.
Links gave a sigh. “We’ll interview him immediately. Or as soon as we can.”
“What about me? Can I go?”
“We’ll give you a lift home.”
“I’ll walk. Alone.”
Links stood firmly in front of me.
“Miss Blake, if you refuse to go in a police car and with police protection, I shall have you restrained.”
“I think,” I said, as coolly as I could manage, “I think I would feel safer on my own.”
“Very well,” he said heavily. I saw fear in his face: He was looking at public disgrace, a career in tatters.
“I was always safer on my own.”
TWENTY-THREE
What did I do next? What does one do when a life has been given back?
I spent the first day and night at my parents’ house, helping my father paint the garden shed and lying facedown on the faded chenille counterpane in my old bedroom, the smell of mothballs and dust in my nose, while my mother clattered anxiously round the kitchen, making milky cups of tea and baking ginger biscuits that I couldn’t eat. Every time she saw me she would gaze at me with her red-rimmed eyes and press my shoulder or put her hand cautiously on my hair. I had told them something of what had happened, but I had left everything out. Everything that mattered.
Then I went back home and I cleaned my flat. My first thought had been that I would move out immediately, pack up my bags and begin again-but what would be the point of that if I couldn’t begin again with me? I didn’t want to. So I threw open the French windows, and I put on an old pair of cotton dungarees that looked as if they had been given to me as a joke-certainly I couldn’t remember buying them. I turned on the radio so it was blaring cheerful, inane music through all the rooms. I went through every drawer. I filled bin bags with torn tights, old envelopes, scraps of hard soap, empty toilet rolls, leaking pens, moldy cheese. I put newspapers in a pile of recycling, bottles in a large box. I folded clothes or hung them in the wardrobe, filled a laundry basket with washing, put bills in piles, poured bleach down the sink and lavatory and anywhere else that looked like it needed it. I defrosted the fridge, scrubbed the kitchen floor. I cleaned the windows. I dusted, for Christ’s sake.
It took two days. For two days I just worked, morning till evening. It was like meditation. I could have thoughts without really thinking, let memories bob around without pursuing them, without tracking them down to their source. I didn’t feel euphoric, and I hardly even felt relieved, but bit by bit I felt I was crossing back over into my life. I picked up Morris’s business card from my desk and remembered his bright eyes watching me as he had been carried away, and put it with the other rubbish in the bin bag. I screwed up the paper covered with my jottings from the case files Cameron had filched for me and threw that away too, though not before copying down Louise’s address. I collected two small buttons from the floor. Cameron’s? I held them for a minute in the palm of my hand before depositing them into a shoe box, which from now on would be where I kept my sewing things.
I screened all my calls-and there were a lot of them, because the first tremors of the story had reached the media. There were even pictures of us-Zoe, Jenny, and me, though I didn’t know where they had managed to get hold of the one of me-in a line across the top of page three of the Participant, as if we had all of us died. Or all lived. Reporters rang, and friends suddenly wanted to get in touch, and Cameron rang several times with a hissing, secret urgency, and people I had met once or twice in my life rang, breathless with discovering that they knew someone who was suddenly and briefly a little bit famous. I didn’t pick up the phone.
Not until early on the morning of the fourth day after, a blowy beautiful day when the sun was streaming in through the open French windows and the first few autumn leaves were scattering themselves under the pear tree, where I had first put my arms round Cameron and kissed him. I was thinking about beginning on my garden next, hacking down the nettles, when the phone rang and the answering machine clicked on.
“Nadia,” said a voice that made me stop in the middle of pouring boiling water over a tea bag. “Nadia, it’s Grace. Grace Schilling.” Pause. “Nadia, if you’re listening to this, can you pick up the phone?” Then: “Please. This is urgent.”
I crossed over to the telephone.
“I’m here.”
“Thanks. Listen, can we meet? There’s something important I need to tell you.”
“Can’t you tell me over the phone?”
“No. I need to see you.”
“Really important?”
“I think so. Can I come to your flat in, say, forty-five minutes?”
I looked round at my gleaming home that smelled of bleach and polish.
“Not here. On the heath?”
“I’ll come over to your side. Ten o’clock, by the pavilion.”
“Fine.”
I was early, but she was already there. It was a warm morning, but she was huddled up in a long coat, as if it were winter. Her hair was pulled back austerely, which made her face look curiously flat, and older and more weary than I had remembered. We shook hands formally and started walking up the hill, where a solitary man was flying a huge red stunt kite, which flapped and jerked in the wind.
“How are you?” she asked, but I just shrugged. I didn’t want to be talking about my mental health with her.
“What is it?”
She stopped and took out a pack of cigarettes; struck a match into the cup of her hand and inhaled deeply. Then she looked at me steadily with her gray eyes.
“I’m sorry, Nadia.”
“Is that the important thing?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, well.” I kicked a stone out of our path and watched as it clattered away into the grass. Above us, the red kite swooped and danced. “And what did you want me to say back?”
She frowned but didn’t reply.
“Do you want me to forgive you or something?” I asked curiously. “I mean, it’s not me who’s dead.” She winced. “I can’t just hug you and say there, there.”
She made an impatient gesture with her hand, as if she were swatting a cloud of insects away from the space between us.
“I don’t want that. I’m saying sorry because I’m sorry.”
“Did they send you, then? Is this a group apology?”
She smiled and took a drag of her cigarette. “God, no. Everybody has been forbidden to have contact with witnesses.” Another dry smile. “Pending legal proceedings and internal inquiries. And TV documentaries.”