Lasting Damage (15 page)

‘Find him. Ask him.’

‘You find him and fucking ask him,’ Charlie snapped. ‘And if he says it wasn’t him, then he’s fucking lying!’

‘You’re shaking,’ said Simon, walking towards her. She steeled herself for another verbal assault, but all he did was pat her arm and . . . was that a grin on his face? ‘All right, game over,’ he said. ‘I wrote it.’

‘Pardon?’ Charlie felt as if she’d been turned to stone.

‘I wrote it, and left it there for you to find.’

Words that made sense. And yet didn’t make sense.

‘Are you . . .
experimenting
on me?’

‘I knew I’d have to spend the rest of the day grovelling, and that’s what I’ll do.’ Simon smiled, proud of himself. He had it all worked out.

‘This is something to do with work, isn’t it? It’s our honeymoon, and you’re fucking working! I
knew
something was on your mind.’

‘It’s not exactly work,’ he said. ‘You can tell me later what thoughts are and aren’t permissible on a honeymoon, but I need to ask you while it’s fresh in your mind . . .’

‘It’ll be fresh in my mind in twenty years’ time, Simon.’
Like all the times you’ve hurt me in the past: fresh as a field of daisies, one flower for each wound
.

‘Did you believe me? That I hadn’t written it? Did you start to wonder if there was any way you might have done it and not remembered?’

Charlie shuddered; the adrenaline was still coursing round her body. ‘I hate you,’ she said. ‘You scared me.’

‘You believed me, but only because you were desperate for me to believe you,’ said Simon. ‘You offered me a deal: reciprocal immunity from doubt. Which might have worked, thanks to Domingo. He’s the only other person here, and he means nothing to us. If he’d said he hadn’t written it, we could have dismissed him as a liar and it wouldn’t have mattered to us, because we have no relationship with him. What if Domingo wasn’t here, though? If you knew you hadn’t done it, and I kept swearing I hadn’t either, what would you have thought? Would you have started to wonder if you were going mad? Would that have been preferable to concluding I was a liar – one you couldn’t force the truth out of?’

‘You’d better tell me, right now, what all this is about,’ Charlie said shakily. ‘I’m not spending the rest of our honeymoon—’

‘Relax,’ said Simon. ‘I was always going to tell you.’

‘Then why not just tell me – at the airport, on the plane? Why drag it out, why torture me? I
knew
you had something on your mind. You denied it. You
are
a liar.’ Was she making too big a deal of this? Should she laugh it off?

Simon was trying to. ‘I thought I’d make you wait a bit,’ he teased her. ‘Build up suspense, get you really interested . . .’

‘I see – so the same principle you apply to our sex life, then?’

The smile vanished from his face.

Chapter 7

Monday 19 July 2010

Kit holds my hand under the table as Sam Kombothekra turns the laptop round to face us. I flinch; I don’t want to see that room again. ‘Don’t worry,’ says Sam, as I turn away and lean into Kit. ‘You’re not going to see anything unpleasant – only an ordinary lounge that you’ve seen before, with nothing in it that shouldn’t be there. But I do need you to look. I need to show you something.’

‘Do we have to do this here?’ I ask. It doesn’t feel right. Sam should have come to Melrose Cottage again, if this is the best alternative he can offer. We’re in a canteen the size of a school assembly hall, hemmed in on all sides by the sound of trays clattering, dishwashers whirring, loud conversations on both sides of the serving hatch, as well as across it – two elderly scarecrow-like dinner-ladies, if that’s what they’re called, giggling uncontrollably at a joke made by a young, shiny-faced policeman in uniform. Along one wall there’s a row of arcade-style machines, flashing their lights and bleeping.

I feel invisible. My throat is already sore from shouting to make myself heard; the combination of the intense heat in here and the sausage and egg smell is making me nauseous.

‘Connie?’ Sam says reasonably. Everyone is oh-so-reasonable, apart from me. ‘Look at the picture.’

Do you want only part of the truth, or do you want all of it? What if it was all or nothing?

I force myself to look at the laptop’s screen. There it is again: 11 Bentley Grove’s lounge. No dead woman on the floor, no blood. Sam leans over and points to the corner of the room, by the bay window. ‘Do you see that circle, on the carpet?’

I nod.

‘I don’t see it,’ says Kit.

‘A very faint brown curved line – almost a circle, but incomplete,’ says Sam. ‘Within it, the carpet’s a slightly different colour – see?’

‘The line, yes,’ Kit says. ‘Just. The colour looks the same to me, inside and out.’

‘It’s darker inside the ring,’ I say.

‘That’s right.’ Sam nods. ‘The mark was made by a Christmas tree.’

‘A Christmas tree?’ Is he joking? I wipe sweat from my upper lip.

Sam lowers the lid of the laptop, looks at me.

Just say it, whatever it is. Tell me how you’ve managed to prove I’m wrong and mad and stupid
.

‘Cambridge police have been very cooperative,’ he says. ‘Far more so than I expected. Thanks to their efforts, I hope I’ll be able to allay your concerns.’

I hear Kit’s relieved sigh. Resentment hardens inside me. How can he do that, before he’s heard anything, as if it’s all over? Any minute now he’ll whip out his BlackBerry and start muttering about having to get back to work.

‘The owner of 11 Bentley Grove is a Dr Selina Gane.’

So that’s her name
. Sam has found out more useful information in forty-eight hours than I have in six months.

‘She’s an oncologist, works at Addenbrooke’s hospital.’

‘Know it well,’ says Kit. ‘I did my undergraduate degree at Cambridge. Addenbrooke’s relieved me of a putrid appendix, about an hour before it would have killed me.’

Kit’s undergraduate degree is his only degree. He could have said, ‘my degree’, except then Sam Kombothekra wouldn’t have assumed it was one of many.

If the University of Cambridge offered an MA course in Thinking the Worst of People, I’d graduate with distinction.

‘Dr Gane bought the house in 2007, from a family called the Beaters. They bought number 11 from the developers when it was first built in 2002. Bentley Grove didn’t exist before then. The Beaters’ sale of the property to Dr Gane was handled by a local estate agent called Lorraine Turner. Lorraine is also the agent marketing the property now, coincidentally.’

‘Not coincidentally at all,’ Kit corrects him. ‘If you want to sell your house, why not put it on with the person you know sold it successfully last time – to you? That’s what I’d do, if I were selling Melrose Cottage.’

‘
You
wouldn’t be selling Melrose Cottage,’ I can’t help saying. ‘
We
would be selling it.’ I want to apologise to Sam for Kit’s interruption; I hate it when he shows off.

‘Cambridge police spoke to Lorraine Turner yesterday. I spoke to her on the phone this morning. I think you’ll be reassured when I tell you what she told me. In December 2006, the Beaters decided to put 11 Bentley Grove on the market – they wanted to move out to the countryside.’

Why, for God’s sake?

‘The day they made their decision was also the day Mrs Beater sent Mr Beater out to buy a Christmas tree.’

‘Shall I get us each a mug of cocoa?’ says Kit. ‘This sounds like the beginning of a bedtime story.’

‘You’ll see why it’s relevant shortly,’ Sam tells him.

In other words, don’t interrupt again
.

‘She wasn’t in when he got back, and so wasn’t able to remind him to put something down to protect the carpet before setting the tree down on it, in its pot. The pot had holes in the bottom, the earth in it was wet . . .’

‘What a fool.’ Kit laughs. ‘I bet Beater wife gave Beater husband a tongue-lashing he’ll never forget.’

‘I’d say that’s likely.’ Sam smiles.

Why is everyone having a good time here except me? I can’t take this seriously, any of it – all this trivia about Christmas trees and people who mean nothing to me; at the same time, I can’t see anything to laugh about. My mind fills with a disgusting image: scratching my face until the skin comes off, until there’s nothing left but a red-raw featureless bulb where my head used to be.

‘When Lorraine Turner turned up to value the house, the first thing Mrs Beater showed her was the damaged lounge carpet. She had a lengthy moan about her husband’s incompetence: “Typical useless man – the very day we decide to try and sell the house . . .” Et cetera. You get the idea. Mrs Beater hired a professional carpet cleaner, but the stain refused to disappear completely. A brown ring-like mark was left that couldn’t be shifted.’

Sam turns from Kit to me. ‘Last Monday, Lorraine went to value 11 Bentley Grove for Dr Gane. Three and a half years after she first set foot in the house, the stain was still there. She made a joke about it, apparently, then regretted it because Dr Gane seemed to take it the wrong way – as if Lorraine was implying she was slovenly, not having replaced the previous owners’ ruined carpet. Lorraine said it was a bit awkward.’

Am I expected to feel sorry for an estate agent I’ve never met? Kit is chuckling: the perfect audience.

‘She filmed the house and garden for the virtual tour, took photos to put in the brochure and on the agency’s website,’ Sam goes on. ‘One was of the lounge, with the Christmas tree mark on the carpet clearly visible – that’s the photograph we’ve just looked at.’

‘So what?’ I say, more rudely than I intended. ‘What does any of this prove? What’s it got to do with the dead woman I saw?’

‘Connie,’ Kit mutters.

‘It’s okay,’ Sam tells him. He feels sorry for him, I think.
Can’t be easy, being married to a mad woman
. ‘This Saturday afternoon just gone, so nearly twelve hours after you saw the dead woman on the virtual tour, Lorraine Turner showed a young couple round 11 Bentley Grove. She told them the Christmas tree story, showed them the mark. It was the same mark, Connie – Lorraine says she’d swear to it. The rest of the carpet was immaculate. No blood.’ He waits for this to sink in. ‘Do you see what I’m saying?’

‘You’re saying it means that the carpet can’t ever have had blood on it. Are you sure that’s true? I’ve washed clothes with bloodstains on them, and the blood’s completely disappeared.’

‘Connie, do you really have to . . . ?’ Kit tries to shut me up.

I talk over him. ‘It’s easy to get rid of blood: cold water, soap . . .’

‘Believe me, if someone had bled to death on a beige carpet, you’d see a mark,’ says Sam. ‘However much soap and cold water and Vanish was applied afterwards.’

I run my hands through my unbrushed hair, fighting the urge to lie down on the sticky canteen floor, close my eyes and give up.

‘Connie, when you saw the woman’s body, was that mark there in the corner of the room, in the same photograph?’ Sam asks. ‘The Christmas tree mark?’

‘I don’t know.’
No. I don’t think it was
. ‘I didn’t notice it, but . . .’ I cast around for a likely explanation. ‘Maybe the photograph of the dead woman was taken years ago, before Mr Beater put his Christmas tree down on that spot. Have you thought of that?’

Sam nods. ‘You described a map on the wall – do you remember?’

‘Of course I remember. Why wouldn’t I? Saturday was only two days ago. I’m not senile.’

He pulls a notebook out of his shirt pocket, opens it and starts to read. ‘“Comitatus Cantabrigiensis Vernacule Cambridgeshire, 1646. Jansson, Johannes.” Otherwise known as Janssonius.’ He looks up. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard of him?’