I can’t leave her alone in this condition.
Oh, fuck it.
I follow her.
We pad into the house. It stinks of urine and mould, but at least it’s empty. And so is Angelique, her arms slightly outset at her sides, her fingers gently waving, as though she is swimming through the fetid closeness of the old house.
I don’t like this. ‘Angelique,’ I say. ‘Why can’t you wait until we get back to Flicks?’
It’s a rhetorical question, and as I say it I can hear the defeat in my voice. She can’t wait because she can’t wait.
I try another tack, as I see her plump down on the filthy floor. ‘I am not sitting in here all night.’
Also doomed, I realize, as she flaps a hand at me. ‘Just a taste. It’s cold out there. Just to get me home.’
I sigh. ‘Just a taste.’
I watch her get her kit out – a Hello Kitty pencil case. She has about six disposable lighters in it, only one of which works at any given time. Once she has fixed herself up, she offers some to me, without enthusiasm.
‘No. Absolutely not.’
Instead, I light one of her cigarettes and sit there fuming silently while her eyes roll back in her head and she makes a little coughing noise. Then she coughs again, more loudly. She slumps sideways on to her side like a wax doll in the process of melting, and I sigh, hard, realizing that I’ll never get her back to Flicks while she’s like this.
It takes me a little while – until I finish my cigarette – to notice that she’s not breathing any more.
The ambulance seems to take for ever to come. I phoned it from the telephone box two streets away, and gave what I considered very clear directions to the derelict house, but they still stumble about for another ten minutes before I hear one shouting from within that he’s found her.
I stand on the corner, with the rest of the street flotsam, watching. My grip on Angelique’s little Hello Kitty bag is so tight my fingers hurt.
When I understood she was dead, there was a strange moment when I stopped swearing at her and commanding her to breathe. My conscious emotion was a kind of irritated fury, but to my surprise, I then burst into a hot white flood of fat breathless tears, squirting out with the force of bullets. I am, for some time, unable to master myself, even though in the back of my head I can hear a voice like hers screaming, ‘GET UP, GET OUT, THE PLOD WILL COME YOU STUPID COW!’ and I know it’s right, I know it’s true, but I cannot move.
The telephone box stinks of urine and is dotted with cards for prostitutes. I rub my wet red eyes with a scrap of tissue I find in her bag. The tissue is spotted with tiny drops of her blood.
I put the tissue back in the bag, and in the bottom I can see the last remaining detritus of her life. A new packet of three condoms, one missing. A half pack of mint Polos. A little bottle of Ysatis. A small roll of banknotes, perhaps as much as a hundred pounds. This astonishes me. I don’t think I’ve ever held this much money at one time before now.
There are also a few cards in the bottom of the purse – entries into clubs, vouchers for free food at charities. But there is also one – laminated – and I turn it over under the streetlights as the wail of the ambulance dies down, examining it under the hectic red and blue lights.
It’s a college ID card for West Hyrett School, which I’ve never heard of but is apparently in Essex and ‘Encouraging Excellence’. There’s a passport photo on it of someone it takes me a second to identify – a studious brunette with thick glasses and bright pink lipstick. It’s Angelique, of course, in her previous life, her hair a lacklustre centre parting, but her big eyes and good skin glowing through. I don’t recognize the name beneath the picture. She smiles, that crooked, secretive smile. I can feel the tears – powerful but mysterious – fighting their way back.
But I remember where I am. I drop the card back into the pencil case, drop it all in her handbag and holster it over my shoulder. The ambulance men have not come out of the house, but the police have arrived. It’s time for me to go. Tilting my head down and away, I head back towards the bright lights of London Bridge and a place to spend the night.
She didn’t look like a Margot.
‘You took her name.’ Katie’s hands are laced together over her bandages as she relaxes back on the bed.
‘Yes. I stole it. I stole her life.’
‘Stole it?’ Katie considers this. ‘You sound like, I dunno, you feel guilty.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Not guilty. She didn’t need it any more. I did. But still.’ I sigh. ‘It wasn’t mine.’
Katie is silent. She is thinking it; what Martin is thinking, what I am thinking.
I leave her with a kiss.
When I get home, I have barely hung my coat up before the doorbell rings behind me.
It’s Susannah, or more properly Detective Constable Watson, who came to my house after the letters were verified.
‘Hiya, Margot.’ She grins at me. I’d seen a lot of both her and Eamonn (her boss) during the trial and we’d all become quite friendly, but that was a couple of months ago.
‘Hello,’ I respond, surprised. ‘Come in. I’ll put the kettle on.’
She shakes her head. ‘Thanks, but no, I can’t this time. I’m really just passing by, but there was something I had to drop off to you and I thought, no time like the present.’
She holds out a small brown packet that she has taken out of her handbag.
I regard it with curiosity and a touch of reluctance.
‘Take it,’ she says kindly. ‘It’s nothing bad. We need to return this to you.’
When she’s gone and I have shut the door, I open the packet with shaking fingers.
Inside there is a paper bag, secured with a sticker marked ‘EVIDENCE’, some numbers and my name. I rip the seal, shaking the contents of the bag out into my palm.
The little tarnished silver cross and chain glint back at me.
I know the story of this necklace now. It came out in Christopher Meeks’s confession. I stir the dull links with one finger, thinking.
After a moment I lift it up and fasten it around my neck.
Tomorrow I’ll take it into the jewellers and get it cleaned.
But for now, it’s fine.
‘So, am I coming to yours tonight?’ he asks.
I am silent, thinking, my mobile pressed to my ear.
‘Margot?’
‘You know what, Martin, can I come to yours instead?’
‘What? Yes, of course. Is something the matter?’
I play with the cross with my free hand, gently turning the cool silver in my fingers, feeling the chain brush my neck. ‘No. But there’s something I need to do, and I might be back quite late.’
‘Is it what you were talking about last week?’ he asks.
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you want me to come?’
I think for a moment. That’s so, so tempting.
‘No,’ I say finally. ‘Thanks. But I need to do it alone.’
‘If you’re sure.’
I bite my lip. ‘Yeah. I am.’
It is late when I reach my destination – nearly seven o’clock – and the sun has set. I have second thoughts about the whole endeavour, but somehow I manage to find the little road and bang the ornate knocker.
When Flora Bellamy answers and sees me, her face sets like iron.
I hold up my hands, palms outward.
‘It’s all right. I understand if you don’t want to speak to me, and if you like, I’ll go.’
There is silence as she waits for me to state my business, but I can see the thin skin on her knuckles whitening around the door.
I realize that there is no other way to do this.
‘My name is Bethan Avery,’ I say. ‘And I knew your daughter.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS