Complicit (31 page)

‘You mean go to the flat?’

‘No, that would be way too dangerous. The police don’t know the murder was committed there, but they know he was staying there. If they stumbled on the three of us there, it would be… well, not easy to explain. But we could reconstruct it in our heads.’

Sonia looked dubious. ‘I don’t really see how this is going to work,’ she said.

Neal got up and rummaged through a drawer for pens. Then he tore some pages off a notepad and passed a couple each to me and Sonia.

‘What are we meant to do?’ asked Sonia. ‘Draw a diagram?’

‘That would be too hard. Anyway, I don’t know what would be on it. We should all start by writing down every object we can remember from the flat, every single thing. And when we’ve got the list we can try to place where they were and then we can see if what you remember fits with what I remember and… and…’

‘And then what?’ I said.

‘We can reconstruct the scene.’

‘And then?’

‘I don’t know.’ Neal rubbed his eyes and, for a moment, looked despondent. ‘We can’t tell. But if we get a list of as many objects as possible and place them, some pattern might emerge. If I could tell before we’d done it, what would be the point of doing it?’

‘I’m not sure it’s going to be productive,’ Sonia said.

‘It’s something.’

‘You really think we can re-create the scene from memory?’ I asked.

Neal banged on the table. ‘What’s the point of arguing about whether or not we think we can do it? Let’s have a fucking go at it.’

I turned to Sonia. ‘You’re good at games like this.’

‘Shut up, everybody,’ Neal said, ‘and start writing.’

I picked up my pen and stared at the blank piece of paper on the table. I smoothed it with my fingers as if that would help. For a moment, my mind was as blank as the page. I closed my eyes and tried to make myself see it, to put myself back in the room. It took a particular, painful effort because I had spent weeks making it a part of my mind I would never visit again. The struggle was almost physical, as if I was pulling at a stuck old door to a room I hadn’t entered for a long time. But the door came open with a jolt and I was there. It was blurry and fragmentary, though, and I could only make out a few objects. I started to write. There were the CDs, including the Hank Williams one that I had retrieved. There was a green plastic tortoise thing for keeping pens in. That had been on the table. There had been a little tin of paperclips next to it. There had been a cushion on the chair and a vase with tulips in it tipped over. There was the wedding invite, which I had also taken and got rid of. There had been the broken guitar and some books on the floor. My scarf. The scene seemed to go further into the distance the more I tried to see it.

It reminded me of being in an exam room when I was seventeen years old, spying on the people around me, who seemed to be writing more than I was, and with more concentration. It was certainly like that now. Neal was writing steadily. I couldn’t read the words but he had done much more than I had. Sonia too. As I had thought, she was much better than I was at this sort of thing. Not that it really mattered. I couldn’t seriously imagine that anything would come of this. That hadn’t really been the point. The point, I knew, was to make us feel better about what we’d done. A plaster on a gaping wound.

I had stopped writing. That was like an exam too, those awful last minutes when I had nothing more to say and stared at the clock waiting for the end, wondering whether I should check my work once more.

‘Are you done?’ I said. ‘I can’t think of anything else.’

‘Hang on,’ said Neal, still scribbling energetically.

Sonia had also stopped writing.

‘Can I have a look?’ I said, and she passed her paper across to me.

As I suspected, she had done miles better than I had. She had remembered the phone and the bowl with keys in, which didn’t really count. All flats have phones and bowls with keys in, don’t they? She’d mentioned the guitar case. And I’d forgotten the little brass Buddha and the green bottle and the laptop, and there were various sculptures, which I remembered now. And the mail on the floor. Sonia was amazing. As I read through her list the room really started to take shape again in my mind.

‘I’m done,’ said Neal.

‘Now what?’

‘Now we need to go through the objects and work out where they were. Then you can try to remember which ones you moved and we can work our way back to where everything was when you walked in and found the body. Let me have a look at yours.’

I passed the two lists to Neal and he ran his finger down each one, item by item, like a small child who has just learned to read. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Sonia’s way better at this than you are.’

‘I didn’t know it was a competition,’ I said.

Neal held our two lists, one in each hand, and studied them intently, first one then the other. He tossed them onto the table and leaned back, staring at the ceiling. His chair rocked. I worried for a moment that he might tip over and do himself a mischief. Finally he let it down with a bump. ‘I don’t even know why we’re doing this.’

‘It was your idea.’

‘It was a stupid one.’

Before

Hayden was crying in my arms. He was crying like a baby cries, he was crying the way he made love and the way he ate and the way he laughed – with abandonment and a lack of self-consciousness that astonished and moved me. I held him against me and I felt how emotion was making his entire body quake. He gulped and groaned and bit by bit he calmed down until at last he was lying still and heavy, like a dead man. I stroked his damp hair and bent to kiss his shoulder.

‘Do you want to tell me?’ I asked at last.

He sat up and used the hem of my shirt to wipe his cheeks. ‘That’s better,’ he said, as if he’d had a long drink of water after great thirst.

‘Hayden?’

‘Mm?’

‘What was that about?’

‘I’m hungry.’

‘Hayden?’

‘You were going to cook me that meal, weren’t you? You even brought your mother’s old cookbook with you. You’ve never cooked for me before. I like firsts.’

‘You might not like this one.’ I stood up and put on the apron I’d also brought – I was wearing a pale grey sleeveless dress I’d picked up on a market stall that morning and didn’t want to ruin it with my incompetence. ‘Sea bass with spices I’ve failed to buy so we’ll have to do without, and rice. OK? Don’t you want to talk about it?’

‘I want to eat. I’m ravenous.’

After

The phone rang and rang. In my dreams, it was the sound of bells. I was trying to walk up a hill towards a small grey church but was hardly able to move. I realized I was in a wedding dress, but one that was ripped, badly fitting and covered with mud, and I was trying to reach Hayden, who was standing near the entrance with water streaming from his hair and a rug around his shoulders. He was smiling at me, or maybe grimacing, but however hard I tried, I couldn’t reach him. My legs dragged. The bells became louder and more insistent, pealing out. I forced myself up out of the sheets and reached for the phone, fumbling in the darkness and still half tangled in the dream. I barely knew where I was, who I was. I found it and lifted it, jabbing at the buttons to answer, but the sound continued and I realized it wasn’t the phone after all. Someone was ringing the doorbell.

I stumbled out of bed and went to the front door, which I opened. Everything seemed unreal. Neal’s face, looking at me through the gap, seemed unreal, something from long ago.

‘We’ve got to talk,’ he said.

‘What time is it?’ I felt jet-lagged – perhaps I’d slept for many hours and it was the next day, but it was dark outside, or as dark as it ever gets in London, not even a band of light on the horizon.

‘I don’t know. Let me in.’

I stood back, suddenly aware that I was wearing just an old singlet over some knickers.

‘Wait here,’ I said in the kitchen, and went into my bedroom for jogging pants and an old top that covered me properly.

‘I had to see you,’ said Neal, as I came back into the kitchen and sat down opposite him.

‘You only just saw me. Remember?’

‘I’ve been thinking.’

‘You should have been sleeping instead.’

‘I was sleeping, and then I woke with a jerk. Do you ever do that?’

‘Yes.’

‘And it occurred to me.’

‘What did? Hang on.’ I stood up and opened the fridge. ‘I need something to calm me down.’ I pulled out a carton of milk. ‘Do you want some hot chocolate?’

‘No.’

‘Whisky?’

‘No. I need to keep a clear head. So do you.’

I poured the milk into a mug and drank it cold. ‘That’s better,’ I said. ‘Now. Why do I need a clear head?’

‘Look.’ He handed me a piece of paper. ‘Talk me through this,’ he said.

‘Am I still dreaming, or didn’t we already do this earlier?’

‘Go on, look,’ he insisted.

‘This is Sonia’s list.’

‘I want to check that our memories coincide on this.’

I started to read the list out loud. ‘Really, it’s all pretty straightforward. Sonia’s got more things because she’s got a bigger brain than I have. But I’ve no problem with any of it. I only have a problem with you waking me in the middle of the night to go over it again. Because I’m tired, Neal, I’m so tired that I feel as if everything’s fraying inside me.’

Neal leaned forward with his elbows on the table, rubbing his head with his hand as if there were an itch deep inside that he couldn’t get at. ‘What about those two sculptures?’

‘I remember them,’ I said.

‘But they weren’t on your list. I’ve got that here. Look.’ He leaned down and pulled the sheet of paper out of the canvas bag he’d brought with him, waved it at me as if he was trying to attract my attention.

‘I remember them
now
,’ I said. ‘They went out of my mind when I was trying to think of things. I’m really amazed I got as much as I did. What is this?’

‘Describe them to me,’ said Neal.

I looked back at the list and made myself concentrate.

‘One of them was a sort of grey-metal abstract thing. It was like two figures with something over them, a cloud or an umbrella.’

‘What about the other?’

I looked again at Sonia’s mention of it. That was harder to remember but it was vaguely familiar.

‘It was a kind of rough-textured vase. Was it bronze? It had a sort of greenish tinge, like old metal statues. And I hate to say this, but I’ve got a feeling that it had breast-like protrusions. I suspect it was meant to echo the female body.’

‘That’s very precise,’ said Neal. ‘Why didn’t you put it on your list?’

‘I told you,’ I said. ‘It was like the other sculpture. I didn’t put it down because I didn’t remember it.’

Neal nodded his head slowly, many times. I gazed at him, wondering if he’d finally gone mad. There was a new glitter in his eyes, a sense of contained excitement.

‘It’s not like the other sculpture,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘It’s not like the other sculpture,’ he said. ‘You didn’t remember the first sculpture because you forgot it.’

‘Well, exactly.’

‘But you didn’t remember the second sculpture because it wasn’t there.’

I looked down at Sonia’s list, written in her neat, bold hand. This made no sense to me.

‘What do you mean it wasn’t there? How do you know it wasn’t there? Of course it was there. Sonia remembered it. I remember it now – kind of. I’ve described it to you. Are you all right?

Neal leaned down again and opened the flap on the bag at his feet. He removed a bulky object and placed it on the table.

‘It wasn’t there,’ he said, ‘because it’s here.’

‘Here?’ I said stupidly.

‘Look.’

I looked. A vase in the shape of a female body. Ugly. Who’d want to put flowers in that?

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. My tongue felt thick in my mouth; I shaped the words with difficulty. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

‘I took it away.’

There was no doubt about it. That was the vase. The vase with tits.

‘Why? What’s it doing here now?’

‘It’s the wrong question – not why,
when
.’

‘When?’ I asked obediently, although I still didn’t understand why that was the right question.

‘On that evening, Bonnie – on August the twenty-first, the day Hayden was killed – I took it away because I thought it might have been the murder weapon. It was lying there on the carpet in the patch of blood. It’s got that funny handle thing on it. I imagined that someone – you, Bonnie, yes, you – during a row might have picked it up, lashed out, caught him on the head, killed him.’ He looked at me. ‘I know you remember the vase, because you saw it when you were there with Hayden, or maybe when you visited the flat before. And I know why you didn’t put it on your list. Maybe because you’ve got a bad memory or, even more probably, because it wasn’t there. Now do you understand?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No. No.’ I wanted to cover my ears with my hands, or curl up in a small, tight ball. ‘I don’t.’

‘Don’t you see?’ His voice was calm and patient, as if he was trying to explain something to a particularly stupid child. ‘You didn’t remember it was there. But I remembered it was there. And Sonia remembered it was there, the first time.’

I could hear the words Neal was saying but they were only partially making sense.

‘What do you mean, the first time?’ I said.

‘The first time,’ said Neal. ‘Earlier in the evening. When she killed Hayden.’

Before

Days often seemed like nights with Hayden, when we would draw the curtains or pull down the blinds, tug the sheets over our heads and explore each other in our own twilight world, the sunlight pouring down unheeded outside and the birds singing in the plane tree by the window. And nights could merge with days, losing all boundaries, because Hayden didn’t keep to the same hours as other people and didn’t even have an approximation of a structure. He didn’t own a clock or a watch, and though he had the time on his mobile, he rarely if ever checked it. He ate when he felt like it, slept when he was tired, had difficulty keeping any appointments, including appointments with the band – the only reason he turned up for rehearsals as frequently as he did was that I was often with him.