His heart exploding, Grace was on his feet, barging past a Japanese man taking a photograph, running, weaving through a group unloading their backpacks, locking on to her with his eyes, gaining on her.
59
Dressed in just a crumpled white T-shirt, Cleo sat in her favourite place, on a rug on the floor, leaning back against the sofa. The Sunday papers were spread all around her and she was cradling a half-drunk mug of coffee that was steadily getting more tepid. Up above her, Fish was busily exploring her rectangular tank, as ever. Swimming slowly for a few moments, as if stalking some invisible prey, then suddenly darting at something, maybe a speck of food, or an imaginary enemy, or lover.
Despite the room being in the shade, and having all the windows open, the heat was unpleasantly sticky. Sky News was on television, but the sound was down low and she wasn’t really watching, it was just background. On the screen, a pall of black smoke was rising, people were sobbing, jerky images from a handheld camera showed a hysterical woman, dead bodies, stark buildings, the twisted, burning ball of metal that had been a car, a man covered in blood being carried off on a stretcher. Just another Sunday in Iraq.
Meanwhile, her own Sunday was ebbing away. It was half past twelve, a glorious day, and all she had done was get up and lie here, downstairs, in this shaded room, leafing through section after section of the papers until her eyes were too numb to read any more. And her brain was almost too numb to think. The place looked a tip, she needed to give it a good clean, but she had no enthusiasm, no energy. She stared down at her mobile phone, expecting to see a reply to the text she had sent Roy. Bloody man, she thought. But it was really herself she was cursing.
Then she picked up the phone and dialled her closest girlfriend, Millie.
A child answered. A long, drawn-out, faltering five-year-old voice saying, ‘Hello, this is Jessica, who is speaking please?’
‘Is your mummy there?’ Cleo asked her goddaughter.
‘Mummy’s quite busy at the moment,’ Jessica replied importantly.
‘Could you tell her it’s your Auntie Kilo?’ Kilo was what Millie had called her for as far back as she could remember. It had started because Millie was dyslexic.
‘Well, the thing is, you see, Auntie Kilo, she is in the kitchen because we have quite a lot of people coming to lunch today.’
Then a few moments later she heard Millie’s voice. ‘Hey, you! What’s up?’
Cleo told her about what had happened with Grace.
The thing she had always liked about Millie was that, however painful the truth might be to hear, Millie never minced words. ‘You’re a bloody idiot, K. What do you expect him to do? What would you do in that situation?’
‘He lied to me.’
‘All men lie. That’s how they operate. If you want a long-term relationship with a man, you’ve got to understand it’s going to be with a liar. It’s in their nature – it’s genetic, it’s a bloody Darwinian acquired characteristic for survival, OK? They tell you what they want you to hear.’
‘Great.’
‘Yep, well, it’s true. Women lie too, in different ways. I’ve lied about most of the orgasms Robert ever thinks I’ve had.’
‘Doesn’t seem much of a basis to build a relationship on, lies.’
‘I’m not saying it’s all lies – I’m saying if you are looking for perfection, K, you’re going to end up alone. The only guys who aren’t ever going to lie to you are the ones lying in the fridges in your mortuary.’
‘Shit!’ Cleo said suddenly.
‘What?’
‘It’s OK. You just reminded me of something I have to do.’
‘Listen, I have an invasion coming any minute – Robert’s got a bunch of clients coming to lunch! Can I call you back this evening?’
‘No probs.’
When she hung up she looked at her watch and realized she had been so wrapped up in her thoughts about Roy that she had completely forgotten to go to the mortuary. She and Darren had left the woman’s body they’d brought off the beach last night on a trolley, because all the fridges were full – one bank of them was out of commission, in the middle of being replaced. A local undertaker was due to collect two of the bodies at midday, and she was meant to let him in, and at the same time put the woman in one of the vacated fridges.
She hauled herself to her feet. There was a message on her answering machine from her sister, Charlie, who had phoned about ten o’clock. She knew exactly what it would be about. She would have to listen to Charlie’s blow-by-blow account of being dumped by her boyfriend. Maybe she could persuade her to meet somewhere in the sun, in a park or down on the seafront, for a late lunch after the mortuary? She dialled the number and, to her relief, Charlie agreed readily, suggesting a place she knew under the Arches.
Thirty minutes later, after crawling along in heavy traffic headed for the beaches, she drove in through the mortuary gates, relieved to see that the covered side entrance, where bodies were delivered and removed out of sight of the public, was empty – the undertaker had not yet arrived.
The car’s roof was down and her spirits were up, a fraction, thinking about something Roy Grace had said to her a few weeks ago, as she had driven him out to a country pub in this car. You know, on a warm evening, with the roof down like this and you beside me, it’s pretty hard to think there is much wrong with the world!
She parked the blue MG in its usual place, opposite the front door of the grey, pebbledash-rendered mortuary building, and then opened her bag to take out her phone and warn her sister she was going to be late. But her phone wasn’t in it.
‘Bugger!’ she said out loud.
How the hell could she have forgotten it? She never, ever, ever left home without it. Her Nokia was attached to her via an invisible umbilical cord.
Roy Grace, what the hell are you doing to my head?
She closed the roof of the car, even though she was only intending to be a few minutes, and locked it. Then, standing beneath the exterior CCTV camera, she inserted her key into the lock of the mortuary’s staff entrance and turned it.
One of the vehicles in that solid stream of traffic trickling along the Lewes Road gyratory system, on the far side of the mortuary’s wrought-iron gates, was a black Toyota Prius. Unlike most of the rest of the traffic, instead of continuing on down to the seafront, it made a left turn into the next street along from the mortuary, then cruised slowly up the steep hill, which was lined on both sides with small terraced houses, looking for a parking space. The Time Billionaire smiled. There was a space right ahead of him, just the right size. Waiting for him.
Then he sucked his hand again. The pain was getting worse; it was muzzing his head. It didn’t look good either. It had swollen more during the night.
‘Stupid little bitch!’ he shouted, in a sudden fit of rage.
Even though Cleo had been working in mortuaries for eight years, she was still not immune to the smells. The stench that hit her today, as she opened the door, almost physically knocked her backward. Like all mortuary staff, she had long ago trained herself to breathe through her mouth, but the reek of decaying meat – sour, caustic, fetid – hung heavy and cloying, as if weighed down by extra atoms, cloaking her like an invisible fog, swirling around her, seeping in through every pore in her skin.
Just as quickly as she possibly could, holding her breath and forgetting about the call she was going to make, she hurried past her office and entered the small changing room. She pulled a fresh pair of green pyjamas off a hook, dug her feet into her white wellington boots, tore a fresh pair of latex gloves from a pack and wriggled her clammy hands into them. Then she put on a face mask; not that it was going to do much to reduce the smell, but it would help a little.