‘Excuse me,’ I say. I am instinctively self-conscious but her smile reassures me as she takes me in. I am in Seb’s clothes and I am neat enough to slot into her reference so that she knows me by archetype.
‘Yes?’ she says to me, her pale eyes are those of a husky. She is older than I had thought, perhaps seventy rather than fifty.
‘I’m sorry to trouble you …’ I say. The words are forming before I have even evaluated them. I don’t know how the sentence is going to end.
‘Yes?’ I notice that she tenses her glossy cream handbag closer in to herself. I have made her anxious now.
‘I’m here to meet a friend of mine from 42B, only I can’t seem to get an answer at the door.’
‘Oh, you mean Mr Ebadi?’ she says, her voice glass.
‘Erm, yes,’ I say. ‘That’s the chap. You wouldn’t happen to know where he is?’
She looks at me blankly.
‘At his girlfriend’s perhaps?’ I offer.
‘Oh,’ she says then, frowning. ‘I wasn’t aware he had a girlfriend.’
‘Ah,’ I say, my heart dropping but my mind racing forwards.
‘And you say you’ve tried his bell?’ she says, cocking her head.
I nod in assent.
‘Well, you see it can be a bit what I would call sticky. There is a trick to it. If one sort of wiggles the button. Come on, I will show it to you. We used to own that flat too, you see.’
At this I panic. I cannot have her ring the bell but at the same time I can’t think of a way to stop her.
‘There must be a loose connection,’ she says as she bustles over to 42B. My heart beats as I scramble about trying to think of a way out of this. It feels like a ludicrously small thing to panic over but I can’t have her ring that bell. Her hand quivers over the button and just as she is about to press it, I take her wrist.
She turns to me in alarm.
‘Sorry!’ I say, my voice softening in a way that I hope reassures her. ‘I just. You see the thing is I don’t really know the chap. The truth is, I’m an FI,’ I say, scraping at memories from my banking days.
‘An FI?’
‘Oh. Financial Investigator. I’m just conducting some routine due diligence. It’s a tax thing. Look do you mind, Mrs—?’
‘Wilbert,’ she says clearly.
‘Mrs Wilbert. Would you mind if I were to ask you a couple of questions?’
‘Oh,’ she says, frowning. ‘Only’ – she inclines her head conspiratorially – ‘the police were here just yesterday.’
I feign surprise. ‘Really? What about?’
‘I’m not sure,’ she says, walking back towards the pavement. ‘I only caught a glimpse of them as they were leaving. None of those flashing lights or what have you. I didn’t think anything of it.’
I walk in step with her as she goes back in the direction I came from.
‘Mrs Wilbert, is Mr Ebadi in the habit of entertaining late-night guests?’ I say, twisting my language around her upper-class settings.
‘Oh,’ she says, stopping. ‘Let me see. I don’t sleep so well these days. You know they always told me that I’d go deaf with age but it hasn’t happened yet, unfortunately. And these walls let in all the sound, you see, from down below. Yes, I think it was Tuesday night. I heard a lot of banging about. And definitely voices.’
My heart skips at this. ‘Did you hear a woman’s voice?’
She stops mid-step and looks in the air as if searching in it for something.
‘I couldn’t say, my dear, to be perfectly honest. There’s always noise coming from there. If it’s not a party it’s the television set.’
‘What about the next day? Did you see him then, Ebadi?’
‘No, I don’t think so. I’ve tried to get the environmental people on to it but they don’t seem to be interested enough to do anything about it.’
‘Okay,’ I say, disappointed a little. She doesn’t catch my eye but is still groping around in the air for something more.
‘Wait. Now you say it, I think I did notice something in the morning. It was very early, mind you, around six or so. I heard some voices outside, and a van. That was what woke me, you see. So I looked out of the window, but it was just some men moving some belongings out of the flat. People have no consideration for others. Fancy. Six in the morning!’
I can’t pull my eyes off her as I digest what I have just heard. He came back. With help.
He must have had her body moved. That’s why the police didn’t find anything.
‘Did you see him?’ I say.
‘I don’t think I did. Just the removal men. I don’t believe that he’s the kind to get his hands dirty. Young men don’t these days, I find. Now my husband, he used happily to—’
Before she can finish the sentence, I have thanked her and run off down the road with this news expanding in my head.
16
Saturday
By the time I reach south-east London, it is around midday. Even though the world is immense and for all intents and purposes boundless, we find ourselves locked into an orbit of just a few miles. Familiarity draws us in, a home for our troubles. I need it, the familiarity, to concentrate without being distracted by my environment. That’s why I’m here, in Dulwich Park, with the beginning of a headache but a clear mind, to think.
It was always Grace, this place. A memory crashes around me, or a dream. There’s a bench and I’m digging with my hands. The earth gives way and then nothing more.
We could have made it work. I still believe that.
I remember reading to her under the tree there and then reuniting with her after we split up. In a way we grew together in this place, the trees and us, sapling to oak. Once, I took her blindfolded across the park in the middle of summer. Her birthday was in December but she hated the winter. That year we had decided to celebrate it in August when the sun was shining so she could have a birthday photograph in the sun. I had hidden a picnic of sandwiches and champagne by some trees earlier in the morning and then surprised her by having Seb and Nina turn up.
‘Oh, my God. Xander!’
‘Happy not birthday, Mabe.’
I remember another time, a few weeks after the incident with Ariel. I had tried to convince myself and her that I wasn’t jealous, or more accurately that I no longer was, and that I understood my jealousy was a violation of her trust. I walked her casually through the park – a small box burning a hole in my pocket. There was no reason to be nervous, not really – it was just a peace offering but it had the quality of a proposal. Perhaps it was, in a way. We ambled hand in hand towards the boating pond but skirted the edge. There had been a time when Grace pulled me towards boats but eventually she gave up when I’d resisted enough times. I hadn’t wanted to dilute the day that we’d taken the boat at midnight. To get on one of these pond boats seemed like a violation of that memory. We passed the parked green pedalos and were a few paces on when I turned her back.
‘C’mon then, Mabe,’ I said. ‘Just this once.’
She raised her eyebrows in surprise and then lit up. After picking her way artfully on to the boat, she sat grinning on the bench seat, while I paid. The sun was shining hard so that by the time I had manoeuvred us out of the mooring, I was already flushed through with heat. I rested a little then as the boat glided under its own momentum. I produced the box. Heart beating.
‘It’s a conch,’ I said as she lifted out the tiny gold shell suspended on a gold chain. ‘Fibonacci and all that,’ I said, trying to sound careless about it.