‘That’s right,’ said Dario, half to himself. ‘Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s fine.’
‘Dario,’ I said, ‘have you been smoking?’
I hardly needed to ask. His pupils were like black pinpricks.
‘Just to settle myself,’ he said.
He disappeared down the stairs. Melanie’s face nuzzled into my neck.
‘Shall we go down?’ she said, with a smile.
I looked at her. ‘Neaten yourself up a bit first,’ I said.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘Sorry. I was going to.’
When we walked into the kitchen, arms round each other in our swinging lovers’ pose, it looked as if a party was getting going. At the centre of things, seated at the table, was the detective. He was wearing a suit with the tie loosened and the top button of his shirt undone. His greying hair was brushed back over his head. His face was narrow, with quick, smiling eyes that darted round the room observing everyone, taking everything in. I disliked him immediately. Distrusted him. Be careful, I told myself. Mustn’t put a step wrong. Melanie and I sat at the table and grabbed a glass each of the wine Pippa was pouring. Melanie immediately started talking in a flirtatious, blushing way to him. I asked him if he was here to take statements. He looked at me properly for the first time, sizing me up. ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Have you got something you want to say?’
Fuck, I thought. Fuck, fuck. I’d been trying to blend into the crowd and now I’d drawn attention to myself. ‘Not exactly,’ I stammered.
‘But some people have,’ said Leah.
I had to stop myself grinning. The attention had shifted to other people’s secrets and it was all my doing. Leah was like an evil little toy I had wound up and set going and now she was trundling around stirring things up and generally muddying the water. It culminated wonderfully with her dropping a bag of Dario’s weed on the table in front of Detective Chief Inspector Paul Kamsky. The evening went downhill from there.
The only good news was that Kamsky left without arresting Dario, or even cautioning him. But from then on it was meltdown.
Over the next day and the next I was a spectator as the house started to pull itself apart. I could hardly go anywhere without seeing people whispering together, making plans about people who used to be friends or lovers. Sometimes it was just cold stares across the kitchen. The best was when one of Pippa’s ex-lovers came and shouted on the doorstep, then threw a brick through the window at Leah. One by one, the secrets that had been suppressed so that these people could put up with each other were exposed for everyone to see.
Mostly I found it funny to watch what they were doing to each other but sometimes it got too much to bear and I felt as if it was happening inside my head, as if Dario had drawn a line across my brain, as if Leah’s manipulations and Pippa’s negotiations with Miles and whatever Astrid was up to with Owen and Mick and all of them, as if they were just voices jabbering away at each other. I felt like I should get drunk to shut them up and give me some peace, except I knew I had to think clearly. A single mistake, one word said in the wrong place, and I’d be done for.
Instead I left the house and walked away through street after street until I got to a park where I looked at couples arm in arm and mothers pushing buggies and a small boy failing to fly a kite. I felt like trying to help him because it irritated me, the way he was jerking the strings at the wrong moment, but then I remembered bad things happened to people who went up to small children in parks. I wondered how the two murder investigations were going. I tried to remember what Kamsky had said, or what people said he had said, and then I tried to make myself stop thinking about it. Because it was like dealing with women. The way to get away with it was not to care. Thinking too much was the way to get caught. But thinking was how I’d get myself out of this. Get to Brazil where the sun shone. That was the really stupid thing. I’d done a murder for money and got no money from it. No money, just this anxiety and the tightness in my head.
When I arrived back at the house, I felt worse than I had before. My brain was buzzing with the thoughts I was trying to suppress. I ran up the stairs and walked into my room. Melanie was there. She gave a little jump. She gave me an uncertain smile. I looked around. The room seemed different.
‘You startled me,’ she said.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Dario let me in,’ she said.
‘But what are you doing here?’
‘Look,’ she said, handing me some tickets. ‘They’re tickets for the Chelsea Flower Show. Someone at work gave them to me. We could go.’
I stared at them blankly. ‘Why would I want to go to a flower show?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I thought…’
I looked again at the room. ‘What have you done?’
She started to stammer. ‘I brought some things round. Wind chimes. Some flowers. I did a bit of tidying, got some things out.’
I walked over to her and put my right hand round her neck, quite gently. I pushed her backwards slowly. Then, when she was close to the wall, I gave her a shove, so that she banged her head. Not so that any damage was done but quite hard. Her eyes became wet with tears. I did it again.
‘Davy,’ she said, barely able to speak.
‘Don’t,’ I said.
I let her go and she started to cough.
‘Get out,’ I said.
‘No, Davy, please.’
Now I spoke more quietly, touching her cheek as I did so in very gentle slaps, little more than a whisper against her flesh. ‘You don’t touch my stuff.’ Slap. ‘You don’t come in without asking me.’ Slap. ‘Understand?’ Slap.
She nodded.
‘Now get out. I’ll call you.’
Almost in a dream she left and I heard her footsteps on the stairs. I lay down on the bed but jumped up almost immediately when there was a sharp knock on the door. I opened it. Astrid was standing there. She was wearing three-quarter-length brown jeans and a red top. She looked concerned. ‘I saw Mel on the stairs,’ she said. ‘Is anything wrong?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Come in.’
She stepped inside and prowled round the room, looking as if she was scarcely conscious of where she was.
‘Are you all right?’ I said.
‘I’ve just been seeing a mad psychiatrist,’ she said.
I tried to look sympathetic. ‘Is there a problem?’
‘The police sent me. He’s supposed to be an expert at profiling murderers.’
I felt a shiver. I tried to think of how an averagely interested person would respond. ‘How did he…’ I began. ‘I mean what does he think?’
‘A scarred leather worker,’ she said. ‘If you meet one, let me know.’
I almost laughed with relief, then looked at my left hand. I was still holding the stupid tickets. Astrid was the only person I knew who was interested in gardens. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ I said. ‘I thought it might cheer you up.’
I made up a story about having been given the tickets at work. She seemed about as unexcited by it as I had been when Melanie gave them to me, but she was quite polite. She asked if she needed to wear a hat, as if she were looking for an excuse to get out of it. Then she gave an obviously forced smile and leaned forward and gave me a kiss on the cheek, the sort you might give an old aunt, and said thank you. I knew she wouldn’t go. She’d find an excuse. It was probably for the best. What if she met Melanie and mentioned it to her? I wondered if it would have been different if I’d been disdainful of Astrid. Would that have made her want me? The trouble is, it doesn’t work like that. You have to really not care about them to make them like you. If I had pretended not to like Astrid, she would have been exactly as she was now: treating me as part of the scenery. She would be nice enough to me but she wouldn’t notice if I wasn’t there.
As she walked round the room, she touched things and commented on them. She flicked at the wind chimes, she picked up a silk scarf Melanie had left and ran it through her fingers. She stopped in front of the mantelpiece and only at that moment did I notice that, in tidying my room, Melanie had found the glass paperweight I had taken from Ingrid de Soto ’s house. She had taken it from the drawer and put it in full view. All I needed was for Astrid to move on and I could put it back out of sight. But she stopped in front of it, as if lost in thought. I was about to say her name, to distract her, but before I could speak she picked it up and rotated it in her hand, holding it up to the light, as if fixing it for ever in her memory. The colours shimmered.