‘I couldn’t give a shit one way or another, now,’ said Pippa. ‘Probably better if they had, quite frankly.’
‘Was that why you split up?’ Chris asked. ‘Duncan never said.’
Pippa sighed. ‘That’s probably the reason, but I wouldn’t want to put all the blame on Duncan. At first, I thought he was great. He’s cute, and he seemed to think I was the most wonderful person he’d ever met. He had that adoring puppy-dog look.’ She scowled. ‘I really fell for it. Then we got married, things changed, and it turned out Lenka was the most wonderful woman he’d ever met.’
‘Difficult,’ said Chris.
‘Yeah. But I said it wasn’t all his fault. Has Duncan told you about Tony?’
Chris shook his head.
‘He’s a guy at work. I’d been seeing him. Duncan found out about it. He was quite good about it, really. Things just fell apart from there.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes. The whole marriage was a right cock-up. Thank God there weren’t any kids.’
‘Is it Tony you’re going to see now?’
Pippa reddened. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That ended pretty quickly. It turns out I’m not the world expert on relationships, either.’
Chris had to summon up his courage to ask the next question. ‘Do you think Duncan could have killed Lenka?’
‘Um, no. No, I don’t.’ But Chris noticed the hesitation in her voice.
‘Isn’t that what you seemed to think when I mentioned Lenka had been murdered?’
‘Yeah.’ Pippa looked down into her glass. ‘I’m sorry about that. It was just that I assumed you wanted to see me because Duncan had got himself into some kind of trouble, and when you said she’d been killed, my first thought was that was it. But even in his weirdest moments, Duncan wouldn’t do something like that.’
‘A neighbour said that Duncan had been hanging around Lenka’s flat.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me.’
‘It also seems that Lenka had been avoiding him.’
‘Neither does that. I never got any impression that Lenka felt the same way about Duncan that he did about her. She obviously had more sense.’
‘So, if she rejected him, wouldn’t Duncan have been upset?’
‘Yes. He’d have been devastated.’ Pippa downed her wine. ‘Look. He drove me crazy, but for a while I loved the stupid bugger. He’s not a killer. I know that.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’ve got to go. Thanks for the drink. Oh, and I am sorry about Lenka. I know she was a good friend of yours, too.’
With that, Pippa disappeared, leaving Chris even more confused.
As Chris opened the door to his flat, he heard the phone ringing. He picked it up. It was his mother.
‘Chris. How are you? Are you all right?’
How the hell did she know there was something wrong? Chris had avoided talking to her about Lenka. It was something he wanted to sort out by himself; the last thing he wanted to deal with then was his mother’s panicking.
‘Chris? Are you there? I’ve been ever so worried.’
‘Why, Mum?’
‘Because you haven’t telephoned me for two weeks, that’s why.’
‘But I don’t have to call you every week, do I?’
‘You don’t have to, no, dear. But you always do.’
Chris closed his eyes. There was no escaping his family. It was the same with all the Poles in Halifax. Even when you were an adult, you couldn’t escape your parents. He knew a close family was supposed to be a good thing, but sometimes, no, most of the time, he just wanted to grow up and get away from it.
‘There is something wrong, isn’t there?’ said his mother, worried now, rather than nagging.
‘Yes, Mum, there is.’ Chris took a deep breath. ‘Lenka has been killed.’
‘Oh, no!’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘What was it? A car crash?’
‘No.’ Chris explained what had happened in some detail. To his surprise, he could hear his mother sobbing on the phone. She was a strong woman, his mother. She scarcely ever wept. It caught Chris unawares.
‘Mum, don’t cry.’
‘She was a lovely girl,’ said his mother. ‘She did so much for you.’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘I got the most wonderful letter from her after you and she started your business together. I wrote to her thanking her for helping you out—’
‘You did what?’
‘I wrote her a letter.’ Chris’s heart sank. Not for the first time he was mortified by his mother. ‘And she wrote me one back. She said you were her first choice for a partner. She said you were extremely good at your job, but that wasn’t the important thing. She said you were totally trustworthy, and she knew she could always rely on you if things went wrong. I kept the letter. I’ll show it to you if you like.’
‘That was nice of her,’ said Chris.
‘Oh, she meant it, dear. I know she meant it.’
Chris felt his eyes pricking. He knew she meant it, too.
‘How are you coping without her?’ his mother asked.
‘Struggling, to be honest.’
‘Ah, well. Never mind. I’m sure you’ll sort it out. I know you won’t let Lenka down now.’
‘No, Mum, I won’t.’
‘Can you come up and visit us next weekend? Anna will be here with Vic and the boys. And your granddad would love to see you.’
Anna was his sister. He supposed that it would be nice to see her, but they had drifted apart since her marriage to Vic at the age of twenty. And he wasn’t at all convinced about his grandfather. As a boy, Chris had idolized the crotchety old war hero, but as they had both grown older, they seemed to inhabit different worlds. His grandfather was suspicious of international banking, feeling it was a suitable profession for a Jew or a German rather than a good Polish Catholic, and Chris found the old man’s increasingly extreme political opinions hard to take. He could get by without seeing his grandfather.
‘Sorry, Mum, I can’t. As you can imagine, there’s a lot to sort out down here. And I’ve got to be in America on Monday.’
‘You’re always off somewhere or other, aren’t you? All right, dear. Have a good trip. And I am so sorry about Lenka.’
Chris said goodbye, and put down the phone. He slumped back in his chair and thought about his mother. He cringed as he imagined her writing to Lenka about him. But Lenka hadn’t cringed. She had understood a mother’s concern for her son, and her pride in him. Chris smiled to himself. Despite their very different styles, Lenka and his mother would probably have got on very well. It was a shame they had never had the chance to meet.
A twinge of guilt nagged at him. It wasn’t the usual guilt he felt about his efforts to distance himself from his family, about disappointing his mother and grandfather. For the first time he had an inkling that his desire to keep away from them was not a sign of maturity, but rather the opposite. His mother was a good woman, who truly loved him, and would do anything for him. If he really was an independent adult, there should be nothing in that to threaten him. Once he had truly established his own identity away from his family then there would be no shame or danger in seeing them. Lenka was a strong, independent person who had immediately seen the goodness in his mother. He was ashamed that he hadn’t the strength to do that too.
Lenka.
He glanced across the room at his computer, and wondered whether the mysterious Marcus had anything more to say about her. He switched on the machine and checked his e-mail, as he had done at frequent intervals throughout the weekend.
There was something. Between Hot Russian Babes Download and How to make $2,000 per week from home was a message entitled simply Lenka. It was from Marcus.
Chris opened it.