The River House (26 page)

“Then when I saw the TV appeal,” I tell her, “I recognized the man. Maria’s husband was the man I saw.”

“You saw Sean Faulkner’s appeal?”

Sudden interest sharpens her voice. I can almost see her, the way she stiffens, everything alert.

“Yes,” I say. “And I’m sure that he was the man I saw on the river path.”

She wants the date, the time. I give them.

“This is a lead I’m sure we’d want to pursue,” she says. “And it would be really helpful to us if you felt able to give your
name—so we could follow this up in rather more depth.”

“I was with a friend, and it’s a rather awkward situation,” I tell her.

“I understand,” she says, her voice emollient, soothing. “I do understand.” I hear the carefulness in her voice, as if I’m
a wild animal she’s scared will shy away. “And we do appreciate what you’ve done in ringing the line today. But if you
were
willing to talk to the investigating officers, we’d be extremely grateful.”

There’s a little expectant silence.

I stare down the street. Two girls come roller-skating along the pavement. They’re six or seven, wearing cartoon sweatshirts.
They’re messing about, their long hair swishing, waving their hands around, one of them pushing her ponytail up and over the
top of her head, so it flaps on her face like a fringe. They giggle.

“I don’t think I could,” I tell her.

“It would all be very relaxed,” she says. “And they’d see you wherever you chose. Just wherever suited you.”

The girls move on down the pavement, through the woven shadows of trees. The sky is deepening; yellow darkens to bronze. I
don’t say anything.

“It’s really nothing to worry about,” she goes on. “You could just tell them what you’ve told me and answer any questions
that they might have. I mean, is there anything you’d like to ask about what that might involve?”

“No, not really,” I say.

The girl with the ponytail trips and falls. She lands on her knees, breaking her fall with her hands. She holds on to a garden
fence and drags herself to her feet again. Her face is creased with pain, but she’s trying not to cry.

“It’s entirely up to you,” says the woman, “and I do understand it’s difficult. But as you can imagine we’re all so very keen
to get justice for Maria.”

It’s just a little step. I give my name.

T
HEY COME AT TEN IN THE MORNING
, when Greg is giving a lecture and Amber is safely at school. There are two of them, a woman and a man. I see their shapes
through the frosted window in my front door—featureless, darkly dressed, like shadows against the glass. For a moment I think:
I could refuse to see them. But I go to open the door.

The woman is blond and rangy, with long, toned limbs and Princess Diana hair. The man is short and solid and smells strongly
of some over-sweet hair product. I once had a boyfriend who smelled like that: I’m reminded quickly, irrelevantly, of teenage
dates, of fumblings in the back row of a cinema watching Barbra Streisand. They both have briefcases.

“Mrs. Holmes?” says the woman. Her lips curve in a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.

“Yes,” I say.

“I’m Detective Sergeant Karen Whittaker, and this is Detective Constable Ray Jackson. Just call us Karen and Ray.”

“Right,” I say. I take them into my living room. I offer them coffee, but they say they’re fine.

There’s a tender blue sky, light spilling over everything. Out in my garden, there are drifts of pale narcissi in the lawn.
A little wind shivers the tiny new leaves of the pear tree. Along the path by the river house it will all be happening now,
all the fattening and opening up and reaching out of spring—yellow lacquered celandines glinting among the nettles, and a
frail white froth of blossom on the sloe. I long so much to be there.

The woman sits beside me on the sofa, the man on the armchair. The man opens his briefcase and takes out a pen and a notepad,
and eases off the elastic band that holds the notepad shut. The woman crosses her elegant legs and looks around her; she’s
taking in my house, as women do.

“What a beautiful room,” she says.

I feel this is just politeness, that it isn’t her kind of thing; my style would be too bohemian for her. And today it looks
so scruffy. I cleaned before they came, feeling some subliminal fear that they might charge me with keeping a disorderly house
and having illicit snail trails in my kitchen. Yet in the searching spring light that reaches its long fingers everywhere,
I see how tatty everything is—my bookshelves made from reclaimed church pews, and my patchwork velvet cushions, and all my
fringes and unravelings. The worn, distressed textures I love, that seem so rich in a gentle light, look threadbare in the
sunshine. Everything here is lined and fading and old.

The woman looks at the piano, at the framed pictures of my children taken by school photographers and the pictures of family
Christmases. Molly at ten, with hair pulled back and soft, dark licorice eyes, diffident and earnest. Amber as a toddler,
unafraid and gleeful, thrusting bread at pushy geese that come up to her shoulder. The four of us eating Christmas dinner,
photographed by Ursula. The latest school shots of the pair of them, Amber with her closed-lip smile before she had her braces
off, and both of them with illicit makeup, discreetly applied so the teachers wouldn’t see.

“Those are your daughters?” she says.

“Yes,” I tell her.

“What lovely girls,” she says.

She turns back to me and clears her throat and leans a little forward. She pushes a crisp blond curl behind an ear.

“Right, Mrs. Holmes. On Tuesday you rang us and said you had some information that you could give us, about Maria Faulkner?”

My mouth dries. I nod.

“Perhaps we could go right back to the beginning and hear it in your own words,” she says.

I repeat what I said to the woman on the phone. The man is writing it down. When I say that I saw the television appeal, and
realized that the man I’d seen looked like Maria’s husband, they catch each other’s eye—just a tiny look, a flickering.

“OK,” says the woman then, quite impassively. “Let’s take this a step at a time. Now, what date are we talking about? When
you saw this person?”

I tell them.

“You seem very sure,” says the man.

“Yes, I’m sure,” I say.

I take a deep breath, like someone flinging herself into water.

“There’s something I need you to know. I was there with a friend. I know the date because we always meet—met—on a Thursday.”

“Right,” says the woman. I see her glance toward the piano and all the family photos, a rapid, darting blue glance, then back
again to me. There are justifications I’ve used—that I loved him so much, that no one would be hurt if we were secret, that
my affair was in some way keeping me here, helping me hold my family together. Desire pleads its case with such eloquence.
But my arguments dissipate in an instant under this woman’s cool blue gaze.

“There are families involved,” I say. “We’re trying to keep it all very quiet. I don’t want my husband to know.”

“We understand,” she says. She’s soothing, matter-of-fact. Her hands are folded precisely on her lap; she has manicured nails
and a platinum wedding ring. I try to tell myself this is nothing to them—just an ordinary affair, an everyday bit of deception.
They see this all the time. “In the circumstances, we do appreciate you coming to us,” she says. “We’ll go through it all
quite slowly. So—you’re pretty certain you’re right about the date?”

“Yes.”

“And you were where on this date?”

“There’s a place we go to. You go round a bend in the path, and there’s this little house.” The smell of the man’s hair gel
is making me nauseous. I clasp my hands tight together. “It’s a house that’s broken-down, just a single room. There’s a little
quay and a dinghy tied to the quay.” I try to remember it, the crimped light swinging across the ceiling, the thrill of freedom
we felt the first time we went there. But all I can see is the spiderwebs and the way the dirt clung to our clothes.

“We know the place,” says the woman.

“We were in there,” I say. “I mean, I know we shouldn’t have been, I know that was trespassing, really. But the door wasn’t
locked, and it was just so easy …”

“Don’t worry.” The man smiles, indulging me. “We aren’t about to tell you off, Mrs. Holmes.”

“And your friend?” says the woman. Her voice is smooth as Vaseline. “He—this is a he we’re talking about?”

I nod.

“He was with you?” she says.

“Yes.”

“And could you tell us exactly what you saw?”

“I could see out of the window. And I saw someone running along the path—I just thought there was something odd about him.
To be honest, I was worried because I thought perhaps he could see us—I thought he could see in.”

A door slams shut upstairs. I flinch; my pulse races off. But I know it’s nothing, just a stray draft. I must have left a
window open in my bedroom; the breeze will have sneaked through the window and slammed my bedroom door.

The woman reaches out and holds a hand an inch above my wrist, in a little gesture of calming.

“Just relax, Mrs. Holmes,” she says. “You seem a bit jumpy. But, trust me, there’s nothing to worry about. You said there
was something odd about this person?”

“It’s hard to pin down. I mean, it was raining—so it wouldn’t be odd to be running, would it? It was like he was looking for
something. He kept peering round, and I thought maybe he was looking for us. I mean, you do read about people hiring private
detectives. When I thought about it afterward, I realized that was paranoid. That it could have been anything.”

“What was he wearing?” says the man.

I see him clearly in my mind, running between the river and the rowan.

“Suit trousers and a shirt and tie. Office clothes, really.”

They glance at each other. In the woman’s face there are sudden patches of red.

“And the time of day?”

“One thirty. We always met at one—it would have been about one thirty.”

“And you were actually inside this house you describe when you saw him?”

I nod.

“Have you talked about it with your friend?” she says.

“Yes. But he didn’t see anything, and he doesn’t want to speak to you. He has a family too.”

The man has put down his notepad; his elbows are on his knees. He rubs his palms together, like someone separating wheat.
His face is focused, intent.

“How can you be so sure he didn’t see?”

“I asked him. He told me.”

“But if he was there with you?”

“He had his back to the window. I saw this man over his shoulder.”

It’s there in my head, the image: Will and me at the river house, wrapped around each other. I see it quite precisely. But
I don’t want them to imagine this. I know how I must look to them in the unforgiving spring light that floods in through the
window—the lines from my nose to my mouth that seem deeper every morning, the purple stains under my eyes. A middle-aged mistress.
Having a last-chance affair.

“You didn’t remark on it at the time, or point this man out to your friend?”

“I told him, but by then the man had gone.”

“Right, Mrs. Holmes. Anything else you’d like to tell us?”

I shake my head.

The woman tucks her hair behind her ear. She has a slight, placating smile.

“We wanted to ask if you might be willing to make a statement?” she says.

“What are the implications of that?”

“It could form part of the prosecution case.”

Her voice is gentle, level.

I hear Max’s voice in my head: It would be hard to take just one step along that path and leave it there. I don’t say anything.

“It would be very helpful to us,” says the woman. She glances again at the piano, at the photographs. “You have lovely daughters
of your own, Mrs. Holmes. You know just how vulnerable young people are. I’m sure you’ll understand how vital it is that we
find the person who killed this young woman. …”

The man opens up his briefcase and finds a lined pad and takes my statement down. This seems to take a long time. I read it
through and sign. My signature is rather wild: The pen seems alive, as though the paper is slippery, skating over the page.

“Thank you so much,” they say.

I stand. I’m desperate for them to go now.

“I guess you won’t need me anymore?” I say.

Again that quick, conspiring glance between them. The woman clears her throat.

“It’s possible we might need you to come on an identification parade. We’ll obviously have to confer with Roger, our boss.”

Roger: their boss. The little hairs stand up along my arms.

“But that wouldn’t be accurate, would it? If I think I might have seen Sean Faulkner on TV?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be watertight. But it might still help us,” she says.

“I’d much prefer just to leave it there,” I tell them.

“Really, you mustn’t worry,” she says. “It’s absolutely nothing to get concerned about.”

She picks up the briefcase she hasn’t opened.

“Mrs. Holmes, I can assure you, you did the right thing in coming to us,” she says. “So—are you still seeing your friend?”

“I’m not sure.”

What kind of woman doesn’t know if she’s seeing someone?

“Of course, if your friend would like to speak to us,” she says, “that would be very helpful. After all, a woman has died.
But I can see it’s difficult.”

She gives me her card.

“Do get in touch if there’s anything else you want to say. If you remember anything.”

They shake my hand as they leave, and say how grateful they are.

I close the door behind them, lean with my back to it for a moment, breathing deeply. I tell myself it’s over—that I did what
was right, what I owed to the woman who died: and now it’s over. Nothing more will happen: It’s such a little thing I saw.

I go into the living room and open the window wide to get rid of the scent of hair gel, so no one could tell that strangers
have been here. Down the road someone is mowing a lawn, the first mow of the season. A scent of sap and crushed grass floats
in through the window, the promise of summer, the freshest, greenest smell. I drink it in.