A Room Swept White (39 page)

Ray sighed. ‘Over and over, I had the argument in my head: “But this is so important, Angus.” “And my work, that I’m taking a month off from, that’s not important, I suppose?” “No, but if we miss out on this contract, it’ll be a disaster.” “Let Fiona take care of it – she’s perfectly capable of handling it on her own. And it wouldn’t be a disaster. PhysioFit’s thriving – there’ll be other clients. Why does this one matter so much?” “Because it
does
, and I’m determined to go, even though I can’t justify it.” “And if another equally crucial business opportunity presents itself the week after, and the week after that? You’ll be equally determined to go, won’t you?” ’

‘Was he right?’ I ask.

She nods. ‘I was obsessed with PhysioFit. That’s why it was so successful, because every detail mattered to me so much. My drive and passion were so relentless that the company had to do well – it had no other option. Angus doesn’t understand
what that feels like. He’s never had his own business. Yes, he took a month off when Marcella was born, but so what? Were fewer people going to buy the newspaper because Angus’s photographs weren’t in it? Of course they weren’t. I don’t know, maybe they were,’ she contradicts herself. ‘The difference is that for Angus, work’s something he does to earn money. He doesn’t live and breathe his job the way I did. His passion in life was me. And Marcella and Nathaniel.’ She falls silent.

‘So you never told him about Switzerland? But you went, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. I rang Fiona the following day and told her I was going with her, but not to say a word to anyone. She laughed at me, called me a loony. Maybe she was right.’

I think about myself, hiding from the police in order to make sure I can do my work uninterrupted.

‘It wasn’t only Angus I was frightened of telling. There was also my mum and his mum, both of whom were being super-helpful devoted grannies. If I’d been honest about my plans, I’d have had to have the same argument with them, too. The thought of their concerned faces, the earfuls I’d have got about what I should and shouldn’t do – it made me want to curl up under my duvet and never come out. I wanted to enjoy Marcella, not waste time being told how wrong and stupid I was, and having to defend myself. My mum and Angus’s mum are both lovely, but they’re also rather fond of knowing what’s good for everybody they care about. When they join forces, it’s a nightmare.’

I try not to notice how lonely this story is making me feel. My mum goes to great lenghts to avoid commenting on anything I do, terrified she might offend me. I can ask her
what she fancies watching on TV, and she’ll jerk like a rabbit that’s heard a gunshot and squeak, ‘Whatever you want, you decide,’ as if I’m a fascist dictator who might chop off her head if she says
Taggart
instead of
Come Dine with Me
.

‘As the days went by, I realised I had to make a plan, quickly,’ Ray tells the camera. ‘Fiona had booked my plane tickets. I’d already lied to everyone about how painful I found breastfeeding. It was a doddle, for me and Marcella, but I pretended it was agony so that I could get her onto formula milk, knowing I was going away. I needed a story to get me out of the house for three days without any hassle. I racked my brains but could think of literally nothing, until one day I realised that was it: nothing was the answer.’

I wait. It’s crazy, but I’m tempted to turn to the camera and ask its opinion.
How can nothing be the answer? Do you know what she’s talking about
?

‘Want to hear my brilliant plan?’ says Ray. ‘Step one: start acting vacant and dazed. Get everyone speculating about what might be wrong with you. Step two: pack a bag suddenly and, when asked where you’re going, keep repeating, “I’m sorry, I have to go. I can’t explain it – I just have to go.” Step three: go. Go to a hotel near Fiona’s flat, because Fiona’s flat is obviously the first place Angus will look, so you can’t stay there. Stay at the hotel for a few nights, phoning home regularly to reassure everyone you’re okay. When they ask you where you are, refuse to tell them. Say you can’t come back yet. Step . . . I can’t remember what step I’m on.’

‘Four.’

‘Step four: go to Geneva. Do the presentation with Fiona. Get the contract. Step five: go back to London, this time to a different hotel. Ring home, say you’re starting to feel better.
Instead of being monosyllabic, engage with your husband. Ask after Marcella. Say you’re missing her, you can’t wait to see her again. It’s true; you can’t. You’d rush back straight away if you could, but it has to be gradual. Everyone would be suspicious if you were suddenly normal again – well, as normal as you ever were, which, come to think of it . . .’ She smiles sadly.

‘Step six: after a night or two – a gradual recovery – go back home. Say you don’t want to talk about why you left or where you’ve been. All you want is to be with your family and get on with your life. Step seven: when your mother-in-law harangues you mercilessly for what she calls “a proper explanation”, climb out of your bedroom window and smoke a fag in mid-air, enjoying the knowledge that you’re not scared of anything any more. You’ve proved to yourself that you’re free, and from now on you’ll do what you want.’ Ray looks at me. ‘Selfish, or what? But I
was
selfish when Marcella was born – I don’t know if it was the hormones, but I was suddenly much more selfish and self-obsessed than I’d ever been before. It felt like . . . like an
emergency
, like I had to do what
I
wanted, look after me, or I’d be taken over, somehow.’

‘If you really felt you needed to go to Switzerland, Angus should have let you go,’ I say.

‘Step eight: after a policeman’s pulled you in through the open window, imagining he’s saved your life, and once a shrink has told your mother and your mother-in-law to leave you alone for the sake of your mental health, here’s your chance to improve by leaps and bounds. Another day or so and you’re happy, full of energy. You got away with it. You’ve calmed down a bit, the post-natal panic has faded, and now
all you want is to have a lovely time with your husband and your beautiful, sweet daughter. Your husband’s thrilled – he was so worried about you; he thought he’d lost you. And now here you are: home again, his. Let the celebrations begin.’ She looks anything but joyous.

‘Wouldn’t it have been easier to tell the truth and take the flak?’

Ray shakes her head. ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But it wasn’t. It was easier to do what I did, much easier. It must have been, because I was able to do it, having been
un
able to force myself to tell the truth.’ She chews the inside of her lip. ‘The way I did it, I avoided responsibility. A zombie who doesn’t know what she’s doing attracts pity, whereas a successful businesswoman who casts aside her newborn baby to empire-build attracts only condemnation. Angus understands. It’s funny, he wouldn’t have done then, but he does now.’

‘He knows?’

Ray nods.

Interesting. He doesn’t know she’s staying at Marchington House and he still doesn’t know about the pregnancy, but she’s told him about her eight-step plan to drive him half-mad with worry. What kind of relationship is theirs, exactly?

‘I miss Fiona,’ Ray says quietly. ‘She’s still running PhysioFit. She’s got another business partner now. Before my trial I wrote to her and begged her not to say anything about Switzerland to anyone, and she never did. She thought I’d done it, though – thought I was guilty like everyone else did.’

‘When did you tell Angus about Switzerland?’ I ask.

‘Remember the hotel I told you about, where I stayed when I left prison?’

‘The one with the urn pictures in every room?’

‘When I couldn’t stand it there any longer, I went to Angus, to our house in Notting Hill. That was when we sorted everything out. I’d . . . I’d like Angus to be here when I tell you about that,’ she says. ‘I’d like us to tell it together, because that’s when everything came to a head and things finally started to get better between us.’

I try to look pleased for her.

‘Don’t be cross with him for giving you a hard time, Fliss. He’s very protective of me, and he doesn’t always treat people fairly.’ Ray’s tone suggests this is a legitimate lifestyle choice rather than a character defect. ‘Neither do I, I suppose. We all do what we have to do, don’t we? I lied to my lawyers, lied to Laurie Nattrass, lied in court – was that fair?’

‘Why did you? Why did you tell two different lies about those nine days you were away? Why did you lie about how long it took you to let the health visitor in, and about who you phoned first, Angus or the ambulance?’

My phone buzzes. A message. I grab my bag, as sure as I can be that it won’t be Laurie. Having ignored twenty calls from me in the past two days, he’s unlikely to have decided twenty-one’s my lucky number.
Please don’t let it be him
.

‘I lied in court because—’ Ray begins.

‘I have to go,’ I tell her, staring at my mobile. There on the tiny screen is all the proof I need. I’ve no idea what to do with it. One press of a button would delete it, but only from my phone. Not from my mind.

‘Someone important, by the look of it,’ says Ray.

‘Laurie Nattrass,’ I say neutrally, in the way I might say any old name.

16

12/10/09

They had a profiler.

They also had seven detectives from London’s Major Investigation Team 17, none of whom looked as if they’d appreciated being relocated to Spilling. Simon felt uneasy having them around; his only experience of detectives from the Met, last year, had been a wholly negative one.

The profiler – Tina Ramsden BSc MSc PhD and most of the rest of the alphabet after that – was petite, muscular and tanned, with shoulder-length blonde hair. Simon thought she looked like a professional tennis player. She seemed nervous, her smile veering towards the apologetic. Was she about to confess that she hadn’t the foggiest? Simon had a few ideas if she didn’t.

‘I always introduce my profiles by saying there are no easy answers,’ she began. ‘In this case it needs saying all the more emphatically.’ She turned to Proust, who was leaning against the closed door of the packed CID room looking as displaced as a disadvantaged character from the Goldilocks story:
Who’s been standing in my spot
? ‘I’ll apologise in advance, because I’m not sure how much help I can be with the externals that might enable you track this person down. I wouldn’t want to commit myself to age group, marital status, ethnicity, social and educational background, occupation . . .’

‘Let me commit to some of them on your behalf,’ said Proust. ‘Baldy’s been seen by two eye-witnesses: Sarah Jaggard and our very own Sergeant Zailer. We know he’s between thirty and forty-five, white and shaven-headed. We know he has a Cockney accent. There’s some disagreement over the shape of his face . . .’

‘I discounted the two eye-witness statements,’ Ramsden told him. ‘A profile’s useless if you create it around any givens. You look at the crimes – nothing else.’

‘Could
he be a thirty-nine-year-old white Cockney skinhead?’ Proust asked her.

‘On age, race, job, qualifications, whether he’s single or in a long-term relationship – all the externals, as I said – I wouldn’t want to commit,’ said Ramsden. ‘Character-wise, he could be a loner, or very sociable on the face of it.’

‘It isn’t particularly helpful to hear that he could be anyone, Dr Ramsden,’ said the Snowman. ‘We’ve had more than three hundred names suggested since Baldy’s ugly mug desecrated the papers on Saturday, and another hundred or so wild theories about the sixteen numbers, each more preposterous than its predecessor.’

‘You want to know what I’m able to tell you about this man? The most striking thing about him is the cards he sends and leaves at the scenes of his crimes. Sixteen numbers, the same ones in the same order in each instance, arranged in four rows of four.’ Ramsden turned and pointed to the board behind her. ‘If we look at the ones retrieved from the bodies of Helen Yardley and Judith Duffy, and the one Sarah Jaggard found in her pocket after she was attacked, we see that our man likes to be neat and consistent. Wherever the number four occurs, for example, it’s written in exactly the same way.
Same with the number seven, same with all the numbers. The distances between the digits are also highly regular – they look as if they’ve been measured with a ruler to get them exactly the same. The rows-and-columns layout tells us that he values order and organisation. He hates the idea of doing anything in a haphazard way, and he’s proud of the workmanship that goes into his cards – that’s why the card he uses is thick, high-quality, expensive. Though, unfortunately for you, widely available.’

A few groans from the poor sods who’d spent days establishing precisely how wide that availability was.

‘Obsessed with order could mean military,’ Chris Gibbs suggested. ‘Bearing in mind he’s killing with a US army-issue gun.’

‘It could mean military,’ Ramsden agreed. ‘It could also mean jail, boarding school, any institution. Or you could be looking for someone who grew up in a chaotic, unstable family and reacted against it by becoming highly controlled. That’s not unusual – the child whose bedroom’s unbelievably tidy, but outside his bedroom door, the place is a tip: crockery flying, parents screaming at each other . . . But, as I said, I don’t want to talk about the externals because I’m not sure about them. The only thing I want to get specific about is the mindset, at this stage.’

‘You say he’s highly controlled,’ Simon called out from the back of the room. ‘Assuming he’s got family and friends, won’t they have noticed that about him? Sometimes mindset spills over into externals.’

‘Aha! Thank you, Detective . . .?’

‘Waterhouse.’ Simon disliked many things, but high up on the list was having to say his name in front of large groups
of people. His only consolation was that no one knew how hard he found it.

‘I didn’t say he was highly controlled,’ said Ramsden, looking pleased with herself. ‘I said he might have come from a family that was both practically and emotionally messy.’

‘And he might have reacted against it by becoming highly controlled.’ Simon knew what he’d heard.