“Did she tell you who it was?”
He shook his head. And I suddenly wondered if his tears were genuine or like the proverbial crocodile’s, ruthless and without remorse.
“Why do you think she chose you, Simon? Why not one of her other friends?” I asked.
He had dried his tears now, closing up. “We were very close.”
Maybe he saw my skepticism, because his tone became angrily wounded. “It’s easier for you—you’re her sister, you have a right to mourn her. People expect you to be in pieces. But I can’t even say she was my girlfriend.”
“She didn’t phone you, did she?” I asked.
He was silent.
“She would never have exploited your feelings for her.”
He tried to light his joint, but his fingers were trembling and he couldn’t get his lighter to work.
“What really happened?”
“I’d called her loads of times, but that ancient answering machine was always switched on, or the line was engaged. But this time she answered it. She said she needed to get out of the flat. I suggested the park and she agreed. I didn’t know that the Serpentine Gallery was shut. I’d hoped we could go there. When we met up in the park, she asked me if she could stay at my flat. Said she needed to be with someone twenty-four/seven.” He paused, angry. “She said I’m the only person at the college who doesn’t have a part-time job.”
“‘Twenty-four/seven’?”
“Round the clock. I can’t remember her exact expression. Jesus, does it matter?” It did matter because it authenticated what he was telling me. “She was frightened and she asked for my help, because I was convenient for her.”
“So why did you leave her?”
He seemed jolted by the question. “What?”
“You said she wanted to stay with you, so why didn’t you let her?”
He finally managed to light the joint and took a drag. “Okay, I told her what I felt for her. How much I loved her. Everything.”
“You came on to her?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“And she rejected you?”
“Straight out. No wrapping the bullet. She said this time she didn’t think she could offer ‘with credibility’ to be friends.”
His monstrous ego had sucked any pity for you, for your grief, into turning himself into the victim. But my anger was bigger than his ego.
“She turned to you and you tried to exploit her need for protection.”
“She wanted to exploit me—it was that way round.”
“So she still wanted to stay with you?”
He didn’t answer, but I could guess the next bit. “But with no strings attached?”
Still he was silent.
“But you wouldn’t allow that, would you?” I asked.
“And be emasculated?”
For a moment I think I just stared at him, too astonished by his gross selfishness to respond. He thought I didn’t understand.
“The only reason she wanted to be with me was because she was terrified witless. How do you think that made me feel?”
“Terrified witless?”
“I exaggerated, I meant—”
“You said ‘frightened’ before, now it’s ‘terrified witless’?”
“Okay. She said she thought a man had followed her into the park.”
I forced my voice into neutral. “Did she tell you who the man was?”
“No. I searched for him. Even went scrapping around in the bushes, getting covered in snow and frozen dog turds. No one.”
“You have to go to the police. Talk to an officer called DS Finborough. He’s at the Notting Hill police station—I’ll give you the number.”
“There’s no point. She committed suicide. It was on the local news.”
“But you were there. You know more than the TV, don’t you?” I was talking as I would to a child, trying to coax, trying to hide my desperation. “She told you about the man following her. You know she was frightened.”
“He was probably just a paranoid delusion. They said postpartum psychosis makes women go completely crazy.”
“Who said that?”
“Must have been the TV.”
He heard how lame that sounded. He met my eye, casually unconcerned. “Okay. Dad found out for me. I hardly ever ask anything of him, so when I do…”
He trailed off, as if he couldn’t be bothered to complete the sentence. He took a step closer toward me and I smelled his aftershave, pungent in the overly warm flat. It brought into sharp, sensory focus the first sight I’d had of him, sitting in the snow outside your flat, holding a bouquet, smelling of the same aftershave despite the cold air. I hadn’t taken it in then, but why the flowers and the aftershave when you’d only offered him the consolation prize of friendship? And now, when I knew you’d turned him down outright?
“You had a bouquet when I found you waiting for her. You smelled of aftershave.”
“So?”
“You thought you’d try it again, didn’t you? Maybe she’d be desperate enough by then to accept your conditions.”
He shrugged, not finding fault with himself. Spoiled since the time he was born; spoiling him so that he’d turned into this man rather than the person he might once have had the potential to become.
I turned away from him, to see his enormous collage of babies’ faces making up a picture of a prison.
I flinched from it and went to the door.
As I opened it, I felt tears on my face before realizing I was crying.
“How could you have just left her there?”
“It wasn’t my fault she killed herself.”
“Is anything ever your fault?”
I am back with Mr. Wright, the smell of Simon and his flat still pungent in my memory. I am grateful for the open window, the faint scent of newly mown grass reaching us from the park.
“Did you tell the police what Simon had told you?” Mr. Wright asks.
“Yes, a junior of DS Finborough’s. He was polite but I knew it would do no good. The man following her was her murderer, but he could also have been a product of her supposed paranoia. The facts that pointed to murder also backed up the diagnosis of psychosis.”
Mr. Wright looks at his watch, five-fifteen. “Shall we call it a day?”
I nod. Somewhere at the back of my nose and throat linger the remembered particles of dope and aftershave, and I am grateful that I can go outside and breathe the fresh air firsthand.
I walk across St. James’s Park, then get a bus to the Coyote. I know you’re curious about how I’ve come to be working there. Initially I went to question the people you worked with, hoping someone could give me a clue about your death. But no one could help—they hadn’t seen you since the Sunday before you’d had Xavier and they didn’t know much about your life outside the Coyote. Meanwhile, my boss in the States had, “with great reluctance, Beatrice,” let me go, and I had no idea when I’d get another job. I knew my share of the mortgage for the New York apartment would soon eat up all my savings. I needed to earn something to live on, so I went back to ask Bettina for a job.
I was wearing my only clean outfit, which was a MaxMara pants suit, and Bettina thought I was joking to start with but then realized I was genuine.
“Okay. I could do with an extra pair of hands, two shifts at weekends and three during the week. You can start this evening. Six pounds per hour plus free dinner cooked by me if you’re doing a shift longer than three hours.”
I must have looked a little startled that she had offered me such immediate work.
“The truth is,” said Bettina, “I just really fancy you.” She giggled at my horror-struck face. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist.” Her laughter at my shockability reminded me of you; there was no cruelty in it.