The fresh spring air does make me feel better and inconsequential thoughts make me a little braver. When I reach the end of St. James’s Park, I wonder whether I should continue my walk across Hyde Park. Surely it’s about time that I found the courage to confront my demons and finally lay to rest my ghosts.
Heart pumping faster, I go in through the Queen Elizabeth gates. But like its neighbor, Hyde Park too is a riot of color and noise and smells. I can’t find any demons at all in all this greenery, no whispering ghost amidst the ball games.
I walk through the rose garden and then past the bandstand, which looks like a pop-up from a children’s storybook, with its pastel pink surround and sugar-white top held up by licorice sticks. Then I remember the bomb exploding into a crowd, the nails packed around it, the carnage, and I feel someone watching me.
I feel his breath behind me, cold in the warm air. I walk quickly, not turning round. He tracks me, his breath coming faster, lifting the hairs on the nape of my neck. My muscles tense to a spasm. In the distance I can see the Lido with people. I run toward it, adrenaline and fear making my legs shake.
I reach the Lido and sit down, legs still jittery and my chest hurting every time I take a breath. I watch children splashing in the paddling pool and two middle-aged executives paddling with their suit trousers rolled up. Only now do I dare turn around. I think I see a shadow, among the trees. I wait until the shadow is no more than the dappled shade of branches.
I skirt round the copse of trees, making sure I keep close to people and noise. I reach the other side and see a stretch of bright-green new grass with polka-dot crocuses. A girl walks barefoot across it, her shoes in her hand, enjoying sun-warmed grass, and I think of you. I watch her till she’s at the end of the polka-dot grass and only then see the toilets building, a hard dark wound amidst the soft bright colors of spring.
I hurry after the girl and reach the toilets building. She’s at the far side now, with a boy’s arm around her. Laughing together, they’re leaving the park. I leave too, my legs still a little wobbly, my breathing still labored. I try to make myself feel ridiculous. There is nothing to be scared of, Beatrice; it’s what comes of having an overly active imagination—your mind can play all sorts of tricks. Reassurances pilfered from a childhood world of certainty: there’s no monster in the wardrobe. But you and I know he’s real.
17
Tuesday
At the CPS I squeeze into a lift. Bodies are unwillingly pressed against one another, sweat smelling of burned rubber. Surrounded by people, in the bright light of morning, I know that I will not say anything about the man in the park. Because Mr. Wright would just tell me, correctly, that he’s in prison, refused bail, and that after the trial he’ll be sentenced to life imprisonment, without parole. Rationally, I should know that he can never hurt me again. As the lift reaches the third floor I tell myself sternly that he is not here and never will be, that he is an absence, not a presence, and I must not allow him to become one, even in my imaginings.
So this morning is one of new resolutions. I will not be intimidated by a specter of imagined evil. I will not allow him any power over my mind as he once had over my body. Instead, I will be reassured by Mr. Wright and Mrs. Crush Secretary and all the other people who surround me in this building. I know that my blackouts are still happening, and more frequently, and that my body is getting weaker, but I will not give way to irrational terror nor to my physical frailty. Instead of imagining the frightening and the ugly, I will try to find the beautiful in everyday things, as you did. But most of all, I will think about what you went through—and know, again, that in comparison I have no right to indulge myself in a phantom menace and self-pity. I decide that today it will be me who is the coffee maker. It is nonsense to think that my arms are trembling. Look, I’ve managed to make two cups of coffee—and carry them into Mr. Wright’s office—no problem.
Mr. Wright, a little surprised, thanks me for the coffee. He puts a new cassette into the recorder and we resume.
“We’d got to your talking to Tess’s friends about Simon Greenly and Emilio Codi?” he asks.
“Yes. Then I went back to our flat. Tess had an ancient answering machine that she’d got in a garage sale, I think. But she thought it was fine.”
I’m skirting round the issue, but must get to the point.
“When I came in, I saw a light flashing, indicating the tape was full.”
Still my coat, I played the message, which was just something from a gas company, unimportant. I’d already listened to all the other messages, other people’s one-way conversations with you.
I took off my coat and was about to rewind the tape when I saw it had an A side and a B side. I’d never listened to the B side, so I turned it over. Each message was preceded by a time and date in an electronic voice.
The last message on the B side was on Tuesday, January twenty-first, at 8:20 p.m. Just a few hours after you’d had Xavier.
The sound of a lullaby filled the room. Sweetly vicious.
I try to sound brisk, and a little too loud, wanting my words to drown out the vocal memory in my head.
“It was a professional recording, and I thought whoever had played it must have put the telephone receiver against a CD player.”
Mr. Wright nods; he has already heard the recording, though unlike me, he probably doesn’t know it by heart.
“I knew from Amias that she felt threatened by the calls,” I continue. “That she was afraid of whoever was doing this, so I knew he must have done it many times, but only one was recorded.”
No wonder your phone was unplugged when I arrived at your flat. You couldn’t bear to listen to any more.
“You phoned the police straightaway?” asks Mr. Wright.
“Yes. I left a message on DS Finborough’s voice mail. I told him about Simon’s fake project and that I’d also discovered a reason why Emilio would have waited till after the baby was born to kill Tess. I said I thought there might be something wrong with the CF trial because the women were paid and Tess’s medical notes had gone missing, although I thought it unlikely there was a link. I said I thought the lullabies were the key to it. That if they could find out who had played her the lullabies, they’d find her killer. It wasn’t the most moderate or calm of messages. But I’d just listened to the lullaby. I didn’t feel moderate or calm.”
After I’d left my message for DS Finborough, I went to St. Anne’s. My anger and upset were visceral, needing physical release. I went to the psychiatric department where Dr. Nichols was having an outpatient clinic. I found his name written on a card pinned to a door and pushed past a patient who was about to go in. Behind me, I heard the receptionist remonstrating but took no notice.
Dr. Nichols looked at me, startled.
“There was a lullaby on her answering machine,” I said. Then I started singing the lullaby, “Sleep, baby, sleep / Your father tends the sheep / Your mother shakes the dreamland tree / And from it fall sweet dreams for thee / Sleep, baby, sleep.”