‘That’s not very grateful of you,’ I said.
‘Later, maybe,’ he said distractedly. ‘I mean, you know that Astrid and I have a history. And Leah’s not exactly a diplomat.’
‘While you’re over there could you cut me a slice?’ I said, breaking his flow.
‘What?’
‘Cake.’
Miles looked confused. ‘Oh, all right.’ He picked up the knife and cut me a slice, then one for himself. ‘You’ve tempted me.’ He took a bite and pulled a face. ‘Bloody hell, that’s rich.’
‘Good, though,’ I said.
A few minutes later Miles left the kitchen and I heard the front door slam. I wiped the chocolate cake from the blade of the knife and put it back in the plastic bag. There was no sign of Dario or Mick. Miles’s room was a mess. Leah had been moving in while everybody else was moving out. There were piles of her clothing on the floor, makeup and little glass and plastic bottles on every surface. I pulled some drawers open in Miles’s desk. The bottom one contained old photographs and postcards, a tennis trophy from his schooldays, a couple of old electric plugs. In the end, I pushed the carrier-bag containing the knife between the two mattresses, which is where people hide things in films and where they always get found.
After I left Miles’s room I phoned Melanie at work. I told her I loved her, that I wanted to see her and that she should come straight over here after work. I wanted to see her and talk to her about things. She was so happy and excited that she was almost laughing and crying at the same time. I could hear sounds coming from Dario’s room but I didn’t want to talk to anybody at that moment so I went upstairs and lay on my bed. For a few hours I had felt completely focused. Now I felt the way I did when I came back from the dentist and the anaesthetic was wearing off. For hours there had been a numbness but now there was a prickly feeling in my head as the real world forced its way in.
By now Astrid would know. The police would know. If I’d done something really, really, obviously stupid, if I’d dropped something, left something of myself, it was too late to do anything and soon there’d be a knock on the door. Now the police were investigating three murders and it was going to be a huge deal. My head hurt. There was what had happened and there was what I had made it look like. I had to keep them separate. Now experts would be picking over every detail, every thread. I had only one advantage. They would be looking for something clever, something logical, or perhaps something insane that linked them. But I wasn’t clever and I wasn’t logical and I wasn’t insane. They were just linked by bad luck. Had I blunderingly created a trail that was impossible to follow? Except for Astrid. It always came back to her.
I felt so tired. I just wanted to go back in time to before I’d done all this. But I couldn’t go back in time, so I would need to draw a line under it, get away and start again. Start again. Again. In the meantime, I would have to live through the pantomime once more. How would it happen? Who would find out first? I imagined that Astrid would get her one phone call and would ring up the house. Mick or Dario would answer and they would spread it with that excitement, that sparkle in the eyes, that jolt of electricity people have when they’ve got really bad news to tell you. Suddenly I realized I had to get out of the house. I couldn’t be here when the first news arrived, when people were huddling around, snatching at fragments, speculating about what exactly might have happened.
I ran down the stairs, nodding at Dario on the way. He asked me if I could give him a hand. I shook my head. I told him somebody had rung me. I had urgent work to attend to.
‘This is going so badly,’ he said.
I said I’d catch him later. As I walked away from the house, I phoned Melanie at work again.
‘You’re stalking me,’ she said.
It was the first time she had ever teased me. Was I seeming needy? Putting myself in a position of weakness? ‘Is it a problem?’ I asked.
‘No, no, course not,’ she said.
I told her I’d pick her up from work. There was something I needed to talk to her about. She left her gallery at ten past five. I had more than four hours to kill and nothing to do. The day passed in a fuzzy rush. I wandered the streets looking at passers-by, men in stained trousers drinking lager and talking to themselves, people with headphones, busy shoppers. Everybody inching their way through a crowd of strangers. What did it matter if one or two or three of them disappeared? In a hundred years there’d still be a crowd here, winos talking to themselves, busy shoppers, but they’d be new. The old ones would be dead.
I took Melanie for a coffee. I dropped hints about us all having to leave the house and she blushed and smiled and said maybe we could think of looking for somewhere together, and I nodded and smiled and said we should think about it and maybe we should head home.
As I opened the door, Dario was standing in the hall, wild-eyed. He walked over to us and spoke quietly. ‘Davy,’ he said. ‘Mel.’
At that moment I needed Melanie the way people sometimes need a cigarette. It’s not that you particularly want a smoke. It just gives you something to do with your hands. When you do all the stuff like taking the cigarette out of the packet, putting it into your mouth and playing with lighters or matches, it stops you feeling self-conscious. When Melanie was there, draped around me, doing what I said, agreeing with me, I turned into a new creature: Davy-and-Mel. So sweet, so young and in love. People stopped paying attention. Best of all, she could do the reacting for both of us. I pretended to be numbed by the news, so shocked that I couldn’t even speak. And I watched Melanie as if she was an actress giving a performance. And what a performance. Her pretty pale face flushed, tears filled her eyes, she stammered and asked questions and said she couldn’t believe it and held my arm tight and tried to remember when she had last seen Leah and what Leah had said. I stayed close, my arm round her, silent. I could smell her smooth, newly washed hair.
Pippa heard us and came out of her room. She seemed the most composed of anyone. Suddenly I saw how ridiculous Melanie looked, her cheeks streaked with black, weeping for somebody she hardly knew and couldn’t have cared for.
‘What’s going to happen?’ I asked.
‘How should I know?’ she said. ‘Miles is downstairs. Go and see him.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better if you did?’
She smiled. ‘No,’ she said.
So the two young lovers went downstairs and found Miles sitting alone at the table staring into the air. We made tea and opened tins of biscuits and sat and held hands and murmured and nodded while Miles babbled and cried and talked aimlessly. There was too much talk. It was too confusing, too much to keep in mind. I was worried I would say the wrong thing but I couldn’t think of an excuse to get up and leave him there. And then Astrid came in. She was wearing strange rough clothes: tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt that clearly weren’t hers. She looked exhausted and rumpled, yet she had the glow about her of someone who had been close to the action.
‘Was it horrible?’ I asked, then realized how fatuous that sounded and Astrid instantly told me so. Miles got up and I could see that he felt more intimate with Astrid than he had with us. He had made do with us because there was nobody else to talk to. He might as well have been talking to himself. Now, with Astrid, he let his guard down and hugged her and talked in a new, raw tone. We watched them curiously.
‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said, then looked round at us awkwardly and said he’d talk to her outside.
They left the kitchen and Melanie turned to me. ‘What was that?’
‘I don’t know. Let’s go upstairs.’
As we walked up, I saw Miles and Astrid in a conspiratorial huddle on the stairs. I heard – thought I heard – Astrid saying, ‘I can’t take twenty thousand in cash, Miles!’ But they looked round, saw me and feel silent. Shutting me out. We eased past them.