They made me go through what had happened once more, and then homed in on all the bits I’d left out for the sake of brevity, starting with the unexplained smell of cigarette smoke. Had I noticed that?
‘No, that was me,’ I clarified. ‘I smoked a cigarette – one and a half cigarettes – after I found him.’
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ PC Something admonished. ‘It’s a potential crime scene.’
‘Oh. Well, I kind of needed it. And Beck doesn’t like me smoking in the flat.’ I thought I saw the policemen exchange a sidelong glance, so I added, ‘Not in a weird, controlling sense. It’s just, you know, one of those issues you learn to compromise over. I mean, in general our domestic situation is a good one.’ I rested my hand on Beck’s leg and smiled at him for back-up. He was giving me a what-the-fuck look, which I suppose, in hindsight, may have been warranted. I’m not sure where the verbal diarrhoea had come from, but it was possibly connected to the general lack of space and air in the room. Needless to say, our flat had not been designed with four occupants in mind; it had not been well designed with a single occupant in mind. Beck and I were sitting on the two-seater, and the policemen had pulled chairs across from the dining table – such as it was. If you imagine each of us sitting at one corner of a washing machine, that was the approximate space we occupied. Is it any wonder that our dialogue felt more like an interrogation?
‘Can we go back to the very beginning?’ PC Somethingelse asked. ‘What exactly were you doing in his flat?’
‘Tomatoes,’ I said. ‘I wanted to borrow a tin of tomatoes.’ I felt I’d been quite clear on this point.
The policeman nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I understand why you went over in the first place. But then what? Why did you go into the flat? Did you have any reason to think something was wrong?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘So why enter? You said the door was closed.’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘He wasn’t expecting you.’
‘No.’
‘And you weren’t in the habit of dropping in unannounced?’
‘No.’ I decided not to mention that this was the first time I’d ever been in Simon’s flat, that I hardly knew the guy. This was quite hard to explain already. ‘I tried the door on an impulse,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t really expecting it to open. I presumed it would be locked.’
‘But it wasn’t, so you entered.’
‘Yes.’
‘Another impulse?’
‘Right. More or less. I mean, the TV was very loud, so I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me at the door.’
‘Quite a coincidence,’ PC Something pointed out. ‘That you happened to go over today.’
‘Yes, that occurred to me too.’
What else could I say?
I sipped my wine and waited to see if there was more.
‘Jesus, Abby! “Our domestic situation is a good one”?’
‘Did it sound insane?’
‘Yes – entirely!’
‘Oh.’
‘Are you drunk?’
‘No.’ After two glasses of wine, I was a little light-headed, but Beck didn’t need to know this. It wasn’t relevant. ‘It was just the way they kept looking at each other. You must’ve seen. It put me on edge.’
‘They were looking at each other because you’d just revealed you sat and had a cigarette – sorry, one and a half cigarettes – with a corpse. That’s not the most normal thing to do.’
I shrugged. What part of this evening had been normal?
‘I wonder what happened,’ I said later on, not for the first time. We were back on the two-seater, having emptied one bottle of wine and started on another.
‘God knows,’ Beck replied. ‘How old was he, anyway? Forty, forty-five?’
‘Yeah, about that. No age to be dead.’
This was a fairly ridiculous thing to say, but Beck didn’t seem to notice. He was stroking the nape of my neck with two fingers.
‘Presumably it couldn’t have been a natural death,’ I said. ‘I mean, it didn’t look like a crime scene, but still . . .’
‘Hmm.’
‘Healthy people don’t just drop dead in their early forties, do they? There must be more to it – suicide or something. Although . . . well, you do hear about these sudden, unexpected deaths sometimes: blood clots, haemorrhages, aneurysms – things like that.’
Beck’s fingers were now massaging my left shoulder below the bra strap, and seemed to be migrating south with each passing second. What was it about men’s brains? If there was a topic of conversation that could divert their attention away from sex, I had yet to discover it. I shifted my position and leaned back to reorientate his hand, a manoeuvre that was somehow misinterpreted.
‘You know, I’m not feeling in a particularly sexy mood right now,’ I told him.
‘Oh.’ The look on his face was confusion tinged with disappointment and a hint of resentment, as if I’d been making come-to-bed eyes for the past hour. ‘Because of Simon?’
‘Well, yes, that might be part of it,’ I lied.
‘I thought you were fine?’
I hesitated, for just a moment.
‘No, of course you’re not fine. You’re—’
‘I am fine,’ I reaffirmed. ‘That’s not the point.’
What was the point? I didn’t know. It wasn’t as if sex was such an outlandish suggestion. We’d both been drinking, after all, and it was a Wednesday. Not that we’d got to the stage where sex needed to be timetabled, or anything like that. But nor was it purely spontaneous any more. It was just that Wednesday tended to provide the most convenient mid-week option. I think we both agreed, tacitly, that we didn’t want to have all our sex at the weekend.
‘I’m a little lost here,’ Beck admitted. ‘Simon’s dead and that’s . . . put you off sex? It didn’t put you off his tomatoes.’
I didn’t say anything.
Beck looked at me very earnestly for a few seconds, then took my hand and said, ‘Look: if it makes you feel any better, we can have a two-minute silence before we start.’
I was smiling, despite myself – which I suppose was his intention. He was trying to help me deal with this on my own terms, however baffling those terms might have been.
‘Or after. Or during. Take your pick.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Well, of course we’d be silent during. We’re English.’
‘I’ll let you smoke a cigarette afterwards. In bed. Suppress all my weird, controlling instincts.’
I hate to admit it, but that was definitely the clincher.
Sex turned out to be surprisingly good, if a little strange. Not that the sex itself was strange – that was entirely regular: fifteen minutes of foreplay followed by five of missionary. It was more my reaction to the sex that was strange. At first, my head was all over the place. I was thinking about the outfit I’d picked out for tomorrow, for the Miranda Frost interview, checking the impression I made in my mental mirror. Cool, calm, incisive. Then I was thinking about Simon, about how his flesh had felt – tepid and spongy – under my forefinger. And it was at this point that something shifted. I started to feel curiously detached from reality. I was disembodied, floating somewhere above myself, as if watching some artily shot, though otherwise rather matter-of-fact, pornographic film.
When I returned, everything had changed, though I’ve little idea why. It might have been that I’d somehow managed to ingest the optimum amount of alcohol – enough to relax, but not enough to numb. It might have been that my libido was finally enjoying a renaissance, after so many months in free-fall. It might even have been thinking about Simon; there was something, I felt in that instant, quite pleasant about being alive and warm and motile. Whatever the case, I came very quickly, and after such a long period of so-so sex, it felt like an overdue release.