Then as I round the boundary of the police station again, I come to a sobering conclusion. However improbable it seems, someone redecorated the house in the space of one day. It was unlikely, more than that, it was improbable. But not impossible. With enough money what could a team of say ten men do in twenty-four hours?
Unlikely.
But not, I have to conclude again, impossible. I am sure I saw this once on television. A woman leaves her house for a day and returns to find it transformed. A TV crew, an unlimited budget and a team of workers changed the garden, the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedrooms. In a day.
It was unlikely. But not impossible.
Ebadi is a dangerous man. He could arrange a disposal quickly and discreetly with the money he seems to have. A man with these connections, who could call on men in a van to remove a body, could surely make decorative changes to a house. Even make them discreetly, quietly. Although Mrs Wilbert the neighbour heard noises in the night.
I begin to race through the changes in the house. The mirror could be put up quickly enough. And the floor. A tiled Victorian floor couldn’t be pulled up and retiled that quickly. But a new floor could be tiled on top. Without any mess. The grout might not dry hard in a day, but unless you touched it, you’d never know. Each day that passed would put it more and more firmly in place. By now it would be setting hard.
The darkness begins to establish itself and I sense something behind me. My body freezes as a shrouded figure comes hurtling towards me. I tense and then relax as he passes. A jogger. I breathe again. I think about settling somewhere nearby for the night and then I think of Seb in his house. Is he wondering whether I’ll be coming back tonight? Should I return there to spend another night in the warmth, or should I stay out and allow my mind the space it needs to stop aching? I can’t afford to have my bones and skin become used to comfort after everything I have done to season them against the ravage of weather.
The smell. Wouldn’t the place smell of work? Damp tile adhesive? But then what do police do when they make what they think is a routine call? Would they feel like they could make comments about strange smells to Arab millionaires in their Mayfair homes because a tramp made a complaint? Or would they have noticed it at all? Would the house have been carefully doused in oud and frankincense to mask the smell?
A chill wind stings my ears as I am thinking this and before I know it, I have decided to make for Seb’s house. The beating in my head has dissipated. The thinking is done for the day and I know what I need to do: sleep. A good night’s sleep now can help me more than an unbridled mind. Insufficient sleep interferes with the neurons’ ability to encode information and translate sensory stimuli into conscious thought. Without sleep the brain’s cells can’t communicate with each other. If don’t get more sleep, the memory lapses will continue to worsen, I am sure.
I take my bearings and head south, tight-roping through the Green Zones.
Although I know what has to be done, I also know there’s a limited window in which I can do it. There will be no help from Conway or Blake. I can’t see either of them helping me to expose Ebadi. They already feel as if I am dissembling. Lying. They have charged me with this: Perverting the Course of Justice – criminal lying. I have to do this by myself.
18
Saturday
‘Eaten?’ Seb says without looking up. He is in a soft, pale blue crew-neck. Just the sight of him on the sofa gives me comfort.
I shake my head. The time, blinking at me from the stereo equipment, says 21:10. As soon as the hour registers in my brain, my stomach begins churning. ‘No, I’m okay.’
He looks at me with a half-smile and taps at his mobile.
‘The local Chinese. They’re usually pretty quick,’ he says. ‘Am I remembering this properly? You like Chinese food? Or you did, back then, I mean.’
In that phrase, I am transported. Chinese food every Friday night – me and Grace. That had become our ritual, a way of creating a line of tradition to give our relationship the appearance of longevity.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Well remembered. Mabel’s idea,’ I say to Seb, who is scrolling through his phone.
‘Mabel?’ he says, looking up before remembering again. ‘Grace. That’s right. You called her Mabel.’
The fire snaps in the grate and a pocket of steam hisses from a shifting log.
‘What was that all about anyway? Mabel?’
It was months after having met her that she told me that Grace wasn’t really her name. Not her real name, but her middle name.
‘Hate my first name. Why would they give me Grace as a middle name and such an awful first name?’ she’d said.
I can’t now remember what I said in reply. The details about where we were or what we were doing elude me. In my created memory of it, we were walking somewhere beautiful, kicking autumn leaves into a slip of wind. I would have told her it wasn’t such a bad name, but now that I’m made to think about it, I can’t pull it out of my memory. It’s there on the threshold, waiting to be carried over, but I can’t quite grasp her name. How stupid of me. Is this the sleep or the kick in the head?
I called her Mabel, which wasn’t her name. It was supposed to be sweet, but she complained that it made her sound like an old dame.
Seb is perched at the edge of his seat, looking at me. Waiting. Interested.
‘Ma belle,’ I say. ‘It was supposed to be ma belle but then it just became Mabel.’
‘Ha,’ he says, then laughing softly, ‘That’s right! I remember now. She hated it.’
‘She did,’ I say.
There was something else to it too, but I can’t remember now what that was. Some clever thing about it. Maybe, some Maupassant, knowing how I am, something literary like that.
Though Seb was the literary one. Somehow, he seemed to have read everything, heard every piece of music, seen every play.
‘Do you remember that friend you had? Sri Lankan guy?’ I say, snatching it out of the past.
‘Thamba? Was he called Thamba?’
‘That’s him. And do you remember how he thought he knew everything?’ I say, smiling at the thought of it.
‘Oh, yes! The record shop. I picked up some Beethoven. And that’s when he said it.’
I lean against the chair and shut my eyes to savour the sweetness of it before releasing it.
‘It’s not even Beethoven who’s playing on it.’
We sink into silence. I sink into Grace.
‘Grace liked him though.’
‘Grace liked everyone,’ he says, smiling. ‘Xand, I’m sorry about, you know,’ he says slowly, feeling his way. ‘What happened, I mean. I should have been there.’
I wave his apology away with a smile. ‘I know, Seb. But I didn’t need you to be there. I was okay. People go through break-ups, separations.’
‘But you went through more than most people. With the – bereavement.’
I stop him with my palm out. Not Rory, I can’t talk about him. All those wheels have turned and ground what they needed to grind.
‘I can’t pretend none of it happened. But time moves in one direction, Seb. I can’t think about this now. It doesn’t serve anything.’
He nods sadly.
‘You know we went looking for you a couple of weeks after the funeral. A bunch of us. You’d been spotted up near the Horniman.’
This news takes me by surprise.
‘Why?’ I say.
‘Because you went missing, Xander. We were worried,’ he says and even now, what must be thirty years on, his brow softens in concern.
‘I didn’t go missing,’ I say. ‘I just decided I needed a break.’