Common sense kicks in.
I stop chasing her. I return to the water’s edge and put on my clothes, having to struggle with them as they stick to my wet skin.
Fuck it, fuck her, fuck it all.
I should probably phone the others. Howard, at least; I should tell him what’s happened. I’m guessing it’ll take a while for the woman to agree a price with a newspaper or website, and then the story will appear. That gives me a window of maybe a day. I should attempt some damage limitation, as least by explaining to Dan what I was doing outside his house, naked, swimming in the reservoir.
As soon as I work it out myself, I’ll let him know.
For now, London is what I need. It’s past ten when I get in, and the tiled hall with its clean mirrors placed along the white walls is just what I need. I take the stairs to my top-floor flat, and am relieved to find it’s still not a home to me. It’s just a space I rest in sometimes, where I don’t have to be recognisably anything. Not even a person, really.
I’ve lived here for a few months. One of the things I like best about it is that my cleaner keeps moving everything. I like the thought of her, shifting it all about, rearranging to her satisfaction while pretending it’s for mine. She works for an agency; I don’t even know her name. Whenever I get a glimpse of her, early in the morning, she puts a finger to her lips and tiptoes off to another room.
Perhaps that’s the kind of relationship Max liked, with his female bodyguards. They took care of him without once expecting a word from him. Maybe I should get a guard too. But no, I don’t want that kind of life any more. Having a bodyguard is a bit like proclaiming you’re worthy of one, and trouble invites trouble. I don’t want to be the focus of any more fantasy or jealousy.
I never should have swum in the water. Stupid, stupid.
I eventually find the instant coffee at the back of a cupboard, and make myself a cup, enjoying the way the smell awakens the flat.
There’s always something to apologise for. I’ve done something terrible, Gwen said, the day we left Max behind. The day he took all those pills. These sins, I can’t believe in them. And Alexander, Phineas, whatever he called himself – he made out like Max was some sort of monster. But these people are my friends. These are the people who found me at my lowest, and saved me. These crimes feel like a child’s crimes; I am finally a parent, with transgressions brought before me, and I must smile and mend the toy, and say All better now. Is that my role here?
But Max is dead and Taylor is dying, and there are so many pieces to glue together.
The sleek wall-mounted television, background company, reports a large anti-Suscutin rally at Westminster. In the aerial views the streets are packed, and then the camera cuts to the inevitable close-up of angry faces, and a car on fire. Not here in Kensington of course, but somewhere not far away people are raging, screaming, fighting to restore what they think of as the natural way of things. But they are a minority.
The camera cuts back to the main desk, and the serious presenter moves on to similar rallies being held across European capitals today, and protest gatherings across the US. She doesn’t mention Africa or Asia, and she doesn’t mention a possible link to Epidermal Sclerosis. It’s as if these things belong in different programmes, or not in the news at all.
How am I meant to know things if nobody will tell me the truth?
Flicking through the channels, I land upon Max’s face, young and handsome, playing a cop tracking down a serial killer who makes girls fall in love with him so he can slice off their skin and wear it. All of his expressions, his movements, are familiar to me, but in a different context. When he’s disgusted by the barbarity of a crime, I see it as that time he hated the amount of mayonnaise I put in his sandwich. When he expresses his love for his beautiful young wife, who will undoubtedly end up in danger, I see him on our ridiculous camping trip, in his own backyard of his Sussex Downs estate, telling me that it’s a great sunset and a wonderful world, and he could do with another beer.
Yeah, that was a great camping trip, even if we didn’t go further than a mile from his house and the tent leaked.
While he tracks down the killer I tap the name Petra Cross into my phone.
Two things:
She has her own Wikipedia page.
She’s dead.
I scroll down the page, and the reason why I know her name comes back to me. Every person at the Suscutin march, out there rioting on the streets tonight, would have told me in a heartbeat that she is their hero, their martyr. She attempted to burn down the biggest Suscutin laboratory in the UK three years ago, and didn’t escape the blaze she had started. Firefighters managed to save the building, but her body was found within; she’d climbed into a janitor’s cupboard when she was unable to escape, and died of smoke inhalation.
There are lots of memorial sites and mentions of her name, but I find only a few pictures of her online; in this day and age it’s quite an achievement to have been so camera-shy. There’s a photo of her with a military unit, in camouflage gear. They are arranged in two rows, and she is front left, kneeling, with dark smears on her face and twigs sticking up from her helmet. She looks very young.
There’s also a photo of her after she died, curled up in that small cupboard; someone took a picture of her, and slapped it up on websites and wherever, at a price. Her face is half-twisted away, and her limbs are folded up tight.
I wish there was a third photo of her, smiling naturally at the camera, or maybe caught unawares with a group of friends, looking the wrong way or pulling a funny face. Then she would become someone I might recognise if I passed her on the street.
There’s nothing to suggest a link to help me find Rose Allington, but there is one interesting aspect. Both Petra and Gwen are ex-military; could Rose be the same? Starguard: that’s the link. You’re a superstar and you want a cool bodyguard, then you employ an ex-military looker. Max always used Starguard.
Wherever I look, Max’s face pops up. Right now, he’s saving the day as his beautiful wife gets kidnapped by the serial killer. He finds her in time, punches the killer in the face, and seals the whole deal with a long, loving kiss. Wife, and skins, saved.
I’m not going to pass this puzzle back to the private investigators I hired before. I’m going to solve it myself. I want to understand it in ways that a report can’t tell me.
I start working through all the Google results for Petra Cross, methodically, while the serious news presenter returns and runs through the same lines about the rally all over again.
‘What happened?’ says Howard. ‘Your film not doing well enough at the box office, so you have to strip off for the publicity?’
‘Don’t be a dick,’ I tell him. ‘Have you spoken to Dan about it?’
‘He says you should have let yourself in and grabbed a towel. Apparently the spare key is still under that pot Sunetra made at night school.’
‘Seriously?’ I had forgotten all about that pot, and her experiment at integrating into the local community while learning a brand new life skill. It lasted about four weeks, as all her projects did, before she hit on poetry, and her one creation – a lopsided pot with a thick handle and a patchy green glaze – got consigned to the garden as a planter into which nobody planted anything. Not one of us was much of a gardener. ‘Tell him I’m sorry.’
‘You tell him.’
‘I’m busy. I’m doing something for a friend.’
‘Are you driving?’ he asks.
‘I’m on hands free, and keeping my eyes on the road, Howard.’
‘Come out to Cologne. You’ll love it. Nobody in Germany gives a crap about your skinny-dipping.’