“Come in,” said Kit.
“You don’t want to see my search warrant, sir?”
“Have you got one?”
A sour smile.
“Whatever,” said Kit. “Come in anyway.”
Without waiting to see if the officer would follow, Kit made his way towards the stairs and heard the front door click behind him. As the two of them passed the door to Sophie’s flat, her door opened slightly and then shut again.
“She didn’t like me.”
“It’s late,” said Kit. “You worried her.”
“Really, sir? Well, people who don’t like the police worry me.”
By the time they reached the top landing the officer was stopping for the occasional rest and gasping for breath. Kit found that oddly reassuring. “In here,” he said, undoing the door. “Let me get some candles…I’m waiting for the electric to come back on.”
Only a candle was already burning and Neku stood in the kitchen doorway.
“I heard noises,” she said.
A flame lit her fingers, until Kit looked again and the match went out, leaving Neku outlined in flame and a thin sodium haze that filtered between the slats of a wooden blind. It didn’t help that Neku was dressed in her black jersey and very little else.
“Go back to bed,” said Kit.
The girl gave him a look, but disappeared as ordered.
“How old is she?” asked the officer.
Kit shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never asked.”
Silence followed this answer. And when Kit finished finding a saucer for the candle, it was to find the huge man staring at him.
“What?” said Kit.
“You send her to your bed and you don’t know how old she is? People like you need to be more careful.” All pretence of politeness was gone, along with the sirs the officer had been dropping into his sentences like redundant punctuation.
“She’s not going to my bed,” said Kit.
He watched the officer leave the kitchen and count off the exits leading from the tiny hall; front door, half-open bedroom door, and one other, from behind which came the flush of a lavatory. As the officer watched, that door opened and Neku stalked out, stared straight through both of them, and left the flat. A second later, an unseen door crashed shut, rather louder than was necessary.
“Roof garden,” said Kit. “She’s got a mattress.”
The huge officer ran his fingers through thinning hair and wiped his hands on his trousers. The sheer smallness of Mary’s flat seemed to be giving him problems. “Mattress?” he said, before deciding not to take it further.
Digging into his pocket, the man produced a leather wallet and flipped it open. A badge inside introduced him as Sergeant Samson. That was all Kit had time to see before the Sergeant flipped it shut and stuffed the wallet back into his jacket.
“I’ve got some questions,” he said. “I’d be grateful if you’d answer them honestly…”
“If I can,” Kit said.
“You were a friend of Mary O’Mally?” The Sergeant obviously had no doubts that Kate’s daughter was dead.
Kit nodded, embarrassed to feel almost sick with relief. It seemed the questions were about Mary, rather than him.
“When did you last see her?”
“About three days after the funeral of a friend…”
“And how long ago was this?”
PART II
CHAPTER 35 — Flashback
The love affair of Kit’s life began to unravel two weeks after Kit and Mary first made love and three weeks before Josh crashed his bike. It began unravelling in Mary’s bedroom at Seven Chimneys with an argument about cars.
“Gently,” she said. Mary wasn’t happy to be squatting naked on top of Kit and kept glancing at her stomach. The first two fucks of that day had been great, but this was one too many and it was Kit’s fault for being greedy.
“Here,” he said, folding a sheet around her shoulders. “Better?”
Mary nodded.
It was complicated, because Mary was going out with Josh. Well, technically…except Josh was in Paris for a fortnight with his parents. So he and Mary would need to talk when Josh got back.
“You love me?”
They’d been through this. The first time two weeks earlier, beside the potato field, as the sun edged its way between two hills and stained the spire of St. Peter’s with the first rays of dawn. Kit had been impressed that Mary waited until after he took off her clothes. “Of course I do,” said Kit, which had been his answer then.
“Say it,” Mary demanded.
So Kit did.
“Mean it,” she said.
“I’ll love you forever,” said Kit, and inside that second it was true.
When he was done, Mary wiped between her legs and folded the soiled tissue inside a clean one, then stuffed three foil wrappers into the crumpled cardboard of a condom packet and folded a tissue around this. She left Kit to collect up the used rubbers and add these to her fist-sized ball of rubbish.
“Take it with you,” said Mary.
Kit looked at her.
“We have a cesspit,” she explained. “Dad makes enough fuss about the pipes getting clogged with toilet paper. He’d freak if he discovered we’d blocked them with these.”
“Okay,” said Kit. It felt odd to be in Mary’s bedroom, but not as odd as actually being at her house. Patrick Robbe-Duras and Kate O’Mally keep themselves to themselves. Jumped up, said half the village; the other half wondered which of the two had most to hide.
A high wall ringed the garden and electric gates guarded the entrance with its white pillars and two stone eagles. A turning circle in front of the huge yellow-bricked house was scuffed with tire marks from half a dozen cars and Kit’s own motorbike. Legoland, Josh’s father called it, but obviously not to Mary’s face.
A black BMW 5 Series, a red XK Jaguar, a metallic blue Mini Cooper S convertible, and a new Land Rover were among the vehicles parked outside. They were all still there, visible from Mary’s bedroom window.
“How many cars have you got?”
“One,” said Mary, pulling a sheet over her breasts. “The Mini. The others belong to Mum or Dad…Why?”
“Just wondered.”
“Mum started out dirt poor,” Mary said. “You need to remember that.”
He’d made her cross, Kit realised. Mary’s relationship with her mother was as complicated as his own with his father was simple. Kit hated the man, Kit’s father hated him, both of them knew exactly where they stood. “It doesn’t matter,” said Kit. “I was only wondering.”
“Yeah, right…”
At the gate Kit had to lean over to punch numbers into a keypad that hid itself beneath a stucco-coloured plastic cover. He entered Mary’s birthday from memory, and had just kicked his Kawasaki into gear when Kate O’Mally pulled up on the far side of the gate in a dark Mercedes. Armani sunglasses examined Kit, flicked to his bike, and returned to his face.
The woman was busy lowering her window when Kit blipped his throttle, let slip the clutch, and roared out onto Morton Road, only just missing her wing mirror as he went past.
Josh died in an accident on the B342. The evening was warm, the light was still good, and the road was dry. His Suzuki went out of control on a bend in the road and crashed into a two-hundred-year-old oak tree near the edge of Woodham Common. He died instantly, at least that was what the police told his parents.
A piece in the Advertiser talked about the danger young men on bikes posed to themselves. A kinder piece, under a smiling photograph, highlighted Josh’s achievements, the grades he got at A level, and the fact he’d been offered a place by Trinity, his father’s college at Oxford.
A picture showed a Josh who was younger by three or four years, in the days before he grew his hair, discovered amphetamines, and took to wearing shades. Josh was dressed in a blue blazer, with a white shirt open at the neck. Maybe that was how his family remembered him.
The funeral was delayed by an autopsy, to the outrage of Josh’s father. All the autopsy proved was that Josh had not been drinking. At first it seemed the funeral would be private, then someone must have talked to Colonel Treece, because it was agreed the service would be immediate family, but Josh’s friends could attend the burial and come back to the house afterwards. Mary O’Mally was the only exception. She got to go to the whole thing.