52
Saturday, 14 January 2017
London, 3 a.m.
Though her ears ache, her fingers no longer seal them shut and she can hear awful grinding sounds on the other side of the wall. It’s a monster clearing its throat and preparing to devour her! No, that’s just one of the kids’ stories, the one Harry likes with the greedy sheep that swallows the world.
‘I’m still hungry!’
She struggles at first to understand the stiffness in her body, its proneness on a cold hard surface. Has she been dozing? Her hand moves across tile, probing, and reaches a wall of smooth plastic: a shower screen. She is on the bathroom floor, in the flat.
No, not a story.
She heaves herself into sitting position, back against the screen. Light-headed, she counts to ten, twenty, fifty, before attempting to stand. Her legs are dead, buckling under her weight, and she grips the door handle for support. At last, she finds the light cord and pulls – the dazzle makes her flinch – before unlocking the door and opening it as noiselessly as she can.
It is silent in the main room. As she creeps between the cliffs of boxes, particles of light overtake her, flowing from the bathroom towards the kitchen area. On the worktop, she can make out her handbag, a bottle with the residue of red wine; a sheet of yellow paper; a little blue exercise book.
At the mouth of the passageway, she sees him. He is still seated, his legs outstretched, but his head is tipped right back, his face pitched skyward. She takes a step towards him. His eyes are closed. The skull bones are sharp beneath the skin and there’s blunt stubble on his face and throat. There is a crust of vomit on his chin and part of his neck, dirty pink drops of it congealing on the chair. The noises she heard were of him choking, presumably in his sleep, unable to gain consciousness, for there is no evidence that he has woken and done anything to try to save himself.
Nor did she do anything.
He is dead, surely, but she can’t bring herself to touch him.
Her heart begins to punch against her chest, her hands to spasm and twitch. She has an image of herself from last night that cannot be hallucination. Of taking Merle’s sleeping pills from her bag and crumbling them into the wine bottle. She appears almost absent-minded in the image, like when she looks after Rocky and gives him his anti-inflammatory for his arthritis. Just half a tablet, broken into two.
But she wasn’t absent-minded, was she? She was attentive to the point of frenzied. There were six sleeping pills in the pack and not only did she use them all, but she also decided they might not be enough. She went back to her bag and removed the box of antidepressants she’d taken from Bram’s package on Wednesday morning. Not that she’d intended to keep them, but after googling and reading and worrying she’d been running late, she’d still had to shower and dress and get to the station in time for her train to Waterloo to meet Toby, and she’d swept the pills into her bag without thinking.
So she’d added several of those to the wine too.
I killed him and it was pre-meditated. I prepared the poison.
But no, that can’t be right! How was she to know he would drink most of the bottle? How was she to know he’d drink any of it? She’d been delirious with shock, her actions reflexive, involuntary, hardly more than a child’s play-acting.
Except she’d poured herself a glass of wine before she added the pills, hadn’t she? Because she needed a drink or in malicious deception? If she was already drinking, then he’d be more likely to accept a glass, less likely to suspect foul play.
Except she’d worn rubber gloves to handle the pills, hadn’t she?
I am a murderer. She claps her hand to her mouth to catch the vomit. Swallows.
Her phone is in her bag. She brings up the numbers keypad and her finger hovers over the ‘9’ before she gasps and stops. The police can request phone records, see where calls were made. There was that one episode of The Victim where the whole thing hinged on mobile phone masts. She’s read about it in the paper as well, how the police can trace emergency calls to within thirty metres; they use computerized mapping, national grid co-ordinates.
She blinks. Her brain is working better, then, if she can remember that. And now it wants her to turn, take a closer look at the hideous thing still sitting there.
Don’t.
Think.
Move.
Leave.
She takes her handbag and leaves the flat, tears down the corridor and the stairwell, through the lobby, out into a freezing mist. Hurrying through the smothered streets, she calms. The world is quiet, the fog benign, not eerie, as if the streets are respecting her need for anonymity. She avoids the main road around the north of the park and instead loops south around Alder Rise Road and up towards Wyndham Gardens, into Trinity Avenue that way.
At number 87, she rings the bell, just once, balling her hands to stop her from doing it over and over.
At last the voice comes – ‘Who is it?’ – and she dips to her haunches to call through the letterbox. ‘Merle, it’s me. Are you still on your own? Can I come in?’
‘Fi!’ The door opens and heat rushes towards her. Merle is there, sleepy and rumpled in sky-blue pyjamas, feet bare. ‘I thought you were at the flat. Are you okay?’
Say it now or you’ll never say it.
‘I think I’ve killed him,’ she says.
Merle’s eyes flare with fear. Her hand goes to her abdomen. ‘What? Bram?’
‘Toby. But he’s really called Mike.’
There is a sickening moment when she thinks it’s going to go the other way, when she feels sure Merle will decide against her. And she will accept it; she will not run.
‘Quick, come in.’ Merle pulls her over the threshold, closes the door. They face each other in the hallway. The stricken innocence of her friend’s face is something Fi herself will never again convey, not without acting. ‘You mean that guy from last night? You said he was your boyfriend . . . I don’t understand.’
‘He stole the house, Merle. With Bram. He made Bram do it.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘He told me in the car. He blackmailed him.’ Now she’s saying it, she’s understanding the hideousness again, feeling the wrongness swell inside her, ready to split her open. ‘He threw me out of the car. He said I was dumb and useless. He only took me to Winchester because— Oh God! I’ve left my bag in the flat!’
Merle touches the strap of Fi’s handbag in the crook of her elbow. ‘No, you’ve got it, look.’
‘I mean my overnight bag. I need to go back, I need to get it!’
‘Breathe,’ Merle says, gently. ‘Come and sit here.’
They sit on the stair side by side. Merle is a radiator, her face flushed, breath hot. ‘Go back a bit. What happened after you got out of the car?’
‘I went to the flat and I sent him a text.’
‘From your phone?’
‘No, from Bram’s. There was one at the flat, an old one, he must have forgotten it. That’s all he was interested in, getting to Bram. Bram must have the money.’
‘Where is he now? Toby? Mike?’
‘Still there. At the flat.’
‘What did you do, Fi?’
She sucks in warm air. ‘I gave him the sleeping pills.’
‘The ones I gave you last night? All of them?’
‘Yes. And other pills as well. Bram’s medication. He must have OD’d. He didn’t wake up when he was sick and he choked.’
Merle’s throat convulses. ‘You saw this?’
‘No, I was in the bathroom. I was scared, I locked myself in. I sat in the dark just shaking and then things went quiet and I must have passed out. It was hours before I came out and found him.’
‘And he’s definitely not breathing now?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Merle remains very still. ‘Did you mean to kill him, Fi?’
‘No. I don’t know. I think I did but then this morning I don’t recognize that person as me.’
‘You must have flipped. You were in shock yesterday, I can vouch for that. You acted in a fugue state, that’s what they call it, don’t they? It’s diminished responsibility, Fi.’
Fi begins to cry. ‘Merle, I can’t. I can’t go to the police.’
Merle is silent then, consciously choosing her path at the crossroads before rising from the stair. She hurries upstairs, re-emerges in jeans and a jumper and then adds boots and a long black coat, a knitted grey hat low to the brow. She pulls Fi’s hat low too, almost to her eyes, and uses her fingers to brush aside the tears.
‘We have to go there, Fi,’ she says. ‘I need to see him for myself.’