My hands moved to the blue filigreed covering of her bra.
‘What’s this?’ I said, as I saw a black cord running along it and round under her back. I looked at her and her expression had changed suddenly, like a cloud covering the sun, and I knew what it was and I knew that bad things were going to happen. Everything was about to crumble. The darkness would cover everything, like an icy tide coming in. I reached for my jacket, for the spanner in the pocket. I could take her with me. One blow. She would raise her hand. It would shatter her wrist. The next blow would hit her face, immobilize her. Then I could smash those glorious features to jelly. But the jacket was out of reach; the bitch had kicked it away.
I raised myself from the sofa, pushing her back with one hand so that her head knocked against its wooden arm, and then I heard a clatter outside, heavy footsteps. The door opened hard, banging against the wall, and there was a rush of bodies. I let myself be shoved backwards against a wall. They pushed me hard, so that something fell from a shelf and smashed. The pain in the back of my head was like cold water, but a trickle of clear thought seeped into the jumble of my mind.
‘You’re under arrest,’ said a familiar voice. Kamsky. It was like a surprise party. You think you’re having a night alone and suddenly all your friends jump out. You think no one can hear you and all the time they’ve been listening, snooping, prying, spying.
‘No!’ I said. ‘Don’t. Listen – listen, this is a mistake. A stupid mistake, I was just playing along with Astrid. I was talking dirty to excite her. You’d understand that. It was a joke.’
Astrid was sitting on the sofa with her head in her hands. Kamsky looked at her with concern. ‘Are you all right?’
She stood up, then remembered the state she was in. She zipped up her jeans. A female officer stepped forward and removed the wire and microphone. She had to reach round Astrid’s body and disentangle it from her bra. All the time, Astrid looked at me, with an almost speculative expression, as if she was staring at me through the bars of a cage. Her lips curled back.
‘You…’ she began, and then she stopped.
‘You did well, Astrid,’ said Kamsky. ‘Really well, my dear.’
‘He touched me,’ she hissed. ‘I let him. I let him.’
Her hand came to her mouth. Her eyes met mine for a second, then she ran from the room. I heard the sound of vomiting, again and again. Then the sound of a door being locked and then of a shower. Not very flattering. The officers started to get busy. There was rummaging in my pockets. Grubby fingers poking and prodding me. Dirty eyes staring. A nasty fluttering in my head. A nerve was jumping just above my lip. I tried to bite it still, but I couldn’t stop it.
‘You fucking piece of filth,’ said a voice. A uniformed man brandished my spanner in front of my face. ‘What the hell’s this?’
‘I’m a…’ I couldn’t remember the word. What was happening? Pieces of my brain falling off like flaking plaster; words and thoughts cascading away. ‘A builder,’ I managed at last. ‘I keep tools in my pocket.’
‘Admit what you did,’ said Kamsky. ‘Save us all a lot of trouble. Get your friend out of prison.’
I needed to look puzzled. I tried to pull my expression the right way. My face was rubber and cardboard. My mouth felt numb, as if I’d had a stroke or something.
‘Get a guilty man out of prison?’ I said at last. I laughed, tried to laugh. Kamsky drew back slightly. ‘Why would I do that, mate?’
Kamsky’s expression was partly anger and partly a kind of wonderment. ‘You never give up, do you, your kind?’
My kind. What did that mean, ‘my kind’? He didn’t know anything at all about me and he never would. I didn’t have a kind. I was someone else, someone different, and they’d never understand.
‘All that stuff you said before,’ I said, ‘about what I say being used as evidence. I hope someone has noted down that I’ve kept trying to explain that you’ve made a mistake, that I’m completely innocent.’
‘It’s all on tape,’ said Kamsky.
‘I told you,’ I said. ‘I was playing along.’
‘We’ve got you admitting it. You don’t have an alibi. We’ve got the underwear you stole from Leah Peterson. That’s right. We’ve been talking to your girlfriend. It seems she wasn’t entirely convinced by your attempt at an alibi.’
‘Silly little bitch,’ I said. My tongue was thick. There was spit on my chin but I wiped it away. ‘I got that underwear at the sale at our house.’
Kamsky smiled.
‘Which is why Leah Peterson’s credit-card payment is dated the day before she died. We’ve got you, Davy. You might as well tell us what you did. Spare the families of the people you killed.’
I was falling. A steel band was being drawn tight round my skull and no relief from it would ever come.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No. No. You’ve got it all wrong. It wasn’t me.’
Because it wasn’t. Not really.
Epilogue
My mobile rang.
‘Hi, Emlyn,’ I said.
‘What are you doing?’
‘You know what I’m doing. I’m hacking some bushes down.’
‘I know. But I like to hear you say it. It helps me imagine it.’
‘Can’t you ring a chatline for that sort of thing?’
‘I’ve arranged for us to look at a house. The estate agent’s meeting us there in half an hour.’
‘A house? What for? We’ve already got a house.’
‘Astrid. It’s seventy-two Maitland Road. A friend of mind drove past and saw the for-sale sign.’
‘Oh,’ I said, and suddenly I felt cold and the garden turned from autumnal gold to grey. ‘I didn’t know he was selling it. He never said. But what did you arrange that for?’
‘I’m curious to see it because of everything it’s meant to you. And I want to see it with you. You always said you needed to go back one more time at least. But only if you want to.’
I paused for a moment.
‘All right,’ I said.
When we arrived the estate agent was already waiting on the pavement, a clipboard under his arm, a mobile phone at his ear. When we got out of the car, he held up his hand in acknowledgement of our presence but continued talking.
‘Well, you know what they say about verbal agreements,’ he said, and laughed. ‘Cheers, mate. Catch you later.’
He put his phone into his pocket and turned to us. He seemed momentarily confused by our appearance. Emlyn was dressed in a grey suit with a blue open-necked shirt. I was doing my best impersonation of a landscape gardener who had been interrupted while at work.
‘Sounds as if someone’s being gazumped,’ said Emlyn.
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said the agent. ‘But the market’s looking positive at the moment. Very positive.’ He held out his hand. ‘Mart Ponder,’ he said.
‘I’m Emlyn Kaplan,’ said Emlyn, ‘and this is Astrid Bell.’
‘You’ve been told that the property’s already under offer,’ said Ponder, ‘but the owner may be sympathetic to imaginative bids.’
‘Clearly,’ said Emlyn, giving me a sideways glance. ‘In the meantime…?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Ponder. ‘Let’s go inside.’
He took a familiar key with an unfamiliar tag from his folder and opened the front door. I suddenly felt a stab of alarm. ‘Is the owner around?’
‘He’s abroad and has been for quite some time,’ said Ponder. ‘The right cash offer and the buyer could move in tomorrow.’
I’d prepared myself to be shocked by the sight of bare boards and blank spaces on the walls but it wasn’t exactly like that. Miles had never come back and finished the job of moving out. He hadn’t been able to face the house again, so full of memories. There were still the familiar pictures on the wall. I could see a rug through the open door of Pippa’s old room. Still, it was obvious that the house had been abandoned for months. There was a smell like from a cave or a cellar, damp and still, as if the air and the light had been shut out.