Now – 16th March
We’ve lost another one.
Stacey Frears and her daughter are leaving. Young Beth, I like her. Smart girl, smarter than her mother by such an outstanding degree that I’ve always wondered where that brain could have come from. Not her father, apparently, who they’ve not seen since the night that Stacey brought baby Beth home from the hospital; he went out to buy nappies and Dairy Milk and never came back. A man so stupid even Stacey says he’s as likely to have got lost than done a runner on them.
‘What about your degree?’ I ask Beth, who sits on the cream leather sofa toying with her phone. She’s probably passing on the bad news to her mates and telling her boyfriend this doesn’t have to be an end to their relationship.
‘She can take the points from her first year and transfer them to another college,’ Stacey says, with the confidence of someone who doesn’t realise the huge gulf between the educational standands of a Russell Group university and whatever her new city has to offer. ‘Clever’s the same, no matter where you get your degree from.’
Beth’s brow creases and she curls up tighter, lifting her phone closer to her face. She makes no comment and I’ve never seen her silent before. It’s like the decision has rendered her mute, and I wonder how far she was consulted, if she even considered the option of staying here and making her own future.
I was younger than her when I left home and more than ready for it.
Beth’s position is so much tougher, though, forced to choose between family and education, and she has the added complication of actually being close to her mother. For me the emotional bonds were already severed and the hard realities were so much softer. My generation ‘stood on our own two feet’ thanks to generous grants and affordable rents and no security tags hidden in the back of expensive textbooks, jobs you could pick up and leave on a whim, knowing the place across the road would be hiring. It’s easy to forget how wide and well sprung our safety nets were.
Beth doesn’t have the luxury of independence. Not yet. Maybe not for a very long time. She’s a child of London who might never be able to find her way back here.
‘What have they upped the offer to?’ I ask Stacey. ‘You were at one-eighty with them, weren’t you?’
The same as I’ve been offered.
‘They’ve not upped it,’ she tells me, staring into her tea. ‘They’re never going to.’
‘Not if you don’t dig in, no.’
‘Molly,’ she virtually sighs my name. ‘They’ve got us by the balls and they know it.’
The last two years have aged her. Living in this crumbling building, the uncertainty about her future and the constant low-level fear of break-ins and vandalism. She’s stopped dyeing her hair and now wears it short and grey, a few strands of the black it used to be threaded through at the crown, the same colour as the eyebrows she paints in defiantly every morning. You can always afford eyebrows.
I understand her resignation, but I don’t like it.
Maybe if I had a child to consider I would have made a different decision. Maybe I’d have caved at the first round of offers rather than being one of the last to leave. It’s a test I’ll never be put to, so it’s easy to convince myself I’m better than that.
There’s a knock at the door and Stacey tells Beth to get it.
It’s Ella.
She looks flustered, pink-cheeked from the cold and like she hasn’t had enough sleep. I wonder if the police pulled her in yesterday after they left me. She never called me to report back on what they’d asked her. Has she only just got out of custody? Is that why she’s been silent?
I’ve been worried – just one more layer of worry painted over all the others – and I wish we weren’t here in Stacey’s flat, with the rest of this conversation to be had. The fight for Castle Rise is over, we all know that, and the pantomime of trying to discourage Stacey from the course of action she’s already committed to is wearing on me. I’m sure Ella has no heart for it either.
‘You’re leaving then?’ she asks, not even bothering to remove her coat or sit down.
There’s a trace of exasperation in her voice, but you might take it for anger if you didn’t know her and what she’s going through.
‘We’ve got to,’ Stacey says, meeting Ella’s gaze with admirable defiance. ‘There was a murder here, for God’s sake! How can I keep going out to work nights, leaving Beth here on her own, when whoever did it might come back?’
Ella’s cheeks flush.
My mouth goes dry.
We don’t look at each other.
‘The last time was bad enough,’ Stacey says. ‘I wanted to pack up and leave then, but you two talked me out of it.’
‘And they’d only offered you one-eighty at that point,’ Ella snaps.
‘It’s not about the money,’ I tell her softly. ‘Stacey’s right. She needs to think about what’s best for her and Beth now. Maybe none of us are safe here any more.’
Ella drops on to the arm of the sofa, shoulders sagging.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘Stacey, Beth, you two have been so tough. I’ve got so much respect for you, staying on here when everyone else bolted. Honestly.’ She finds an unconvincing smile from somewhere. ‘I hope they’ve done right by you with the money.’
Stacey doesn’t tell her the figure and I decide I won’t either.
‘What did the police say?’ Ella asks. ‘Did they tell you it was a murder? I thought it was an accident.’
‘“Not ruling anything out,” they said.’ Stacey shrugs. ‘They wouldn’t tell me anything else. They acted like I was being ghoulish even wanting to know what happened. I live here but I’m not supposed to be curious. I’m not allowed to be worried.’
‘It was probably an accident,’ Ella says reassuringly.
‘Probably,’ Stacey agrees. ‘But we don’t feel safe here any more. I’m sorry. I feel really bad about letting the rest of you down.’
‘You’ve got nothing to feel bad about,’ I tell her, getting to my feet. ‘Just let us know if you need any help before you go, though, okay? Paperwork, legal advice, anything like that. And don’t sign the contract without having someone read it through. You know they’ll stiff you at the last minute if they can.’
Stacey nods and assures us she still doesn’t trust them, she knows what they are.
Ella and me leave the flat together and say nothing until we reach the stairwell door. She automatically starts up towards my floor but I stop her.
‘Let’s go down to the Embankment. I need some fresh air.’
We walk to the river in silence and the longer it goes on the thicker the space between us becomes, filled with traffic noise and sirens and the ever-present sound of heavy plant at work; the gap feels freighted, occupied by some invisible third party.
This distance didn’t exist the night it happened or in the days afterwards. Not when she cried in my arms in her bedsit like a child or when she cried again down the phone. This is new.
And it frightens me.
Last night I did some reading up on Ella’s father, Assistant Chief Constable Alec Riordan, and I didn’t like what I found. He’s too clean. For his generation – the one caught up in the miners’ strike and the Birmingham Six, Hillsborough and all those child-abuse scandals quietly covered up or discredited – clean is more suspicious than dirty. It makes me think he was just smarter than the others. He must have dirt on people. The kind that would keep Ella out of prison.
If I was naïve, I’d feel relieved at that, because if she stays out then shouldn’t I stay out too? But sacrificial lambs are always handy to have around and I’m eminently expendable.
As we reach Riverside Walk, my eye is drawn to the bulk of Dolphin Square rising behind a line of bare-limbed trees on the north bank.
‘Do you want a coffee?’ Ella asks.
‘I’m fine.’
‘I’m getting one for myself.’
I can’t wait any longer.
‘Ella, what did the police ask you?’
She holds her hand up as she walks away from me. ‘There’s nothing to worry about, Mol. Just let me get a drink, okay?’
I bite my tongue. Again.
Down on the riverbank the mudlark is back. He’s wearing a wide-brimmed hat, finger-stained at the rim, pulled low to shade his eyes against the morning sun bouncing up off the water, the same too-large waxed jacket and baggy cords tucked into his wellington boots. He pokes in the wet earth with a stick, posture hunched and focused. There’s something bulky in one of his pockets, another unearthed treasure.
I’m not the only person intrigued by him today. A young Japanese couple stand watching from the white-painted river wall twenty feet away, the woman filming him with her phone. A curio himself, unearthed in an unexpected location, as surreal to the girl as anything she will see in this city.
The couple eventually move on, pass me as they head upriver towards Battersea Power Station, their arms linked, looking up into the bright morning sky.
Ella returns with two cups of Waitrose coffee.
‘That’s illegal, you know.’ She gestures towards the man.
‘Mudlarking isn’t illegal,’ I say, surprised.
‘It is here. This is the only stretch of the river where you’re not allowed to do it. Something to do with the MI6 building.’
I don’t care.
‘What did the police ask you, Ella?’
‘Just about the party,’ she says. ‘They wanted a guest list. I suppose they’re trying to work out if anyone’s missing from it. I told them we had some extra walk-ins. I said we tried to keep it to donors and press only but people brought friends along and I couldn’t really keep track of everyone who was there.’
‘That was a good idea.’
‘It’s true,’ she says. ‘Which helps. I saw a whole bunch of people I didn’t know.’
‘And what about him? Are they going to find him on the list?’
Ella sips her coffee, it must be scalding hot. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You must know his name. Come on, Ella.’
‘I told you, I can’t remember. He was a one-night stand.’ The flush on her face creeps down her neck. ‘It wasn’t like I was screaming it out.’
‘But what about the emails he sent you?’ I ask, feeling like a detective myself, poking holes in her story. ‘He must have signed them.’
‘He always signed them “M”, with a kiss.’
‘What a fucking romantic,’ I sneer. ‘How about his email address?’
‘It was his blog name.’ Ella screws her face up, thinking. ‘It was something stupid – something techie – shit, sorry Molly, I can’t remember. But I think he was a Matt or a Max, maybe. Max?’ She rolls the word around in her mouth a few more times, before she shakes her head. ‘I don’t think he was a donor, anyway. He was skint; he couldn’t have afforded to drop two hundred quid to get an invite. I think he must have seen me posting about the party and decided to crash it.’
‘So he shouldn’t be on the list?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘He was skint?’ I ask and she nods. ‘Was he in a shared house? Are there people who might report him missing?’
‘Yeah, he was renting a room. He said he didn’t get on with any of his housemates because they were all stuck up. That should have been a red flag, shouldn’t it?’
I nod. ‘What about work?’
‘Freelance something or other.’
‘So he probably won’t be missed in the office.’
‘No. Not for a while, anyway.’
‘Family?’
‘We didn’t talk about our families. I suppose he has one,’ she says, her voice dropping, as if this is the first time she’s considered the possibility, that there are people somewhere who might be missing him already.
But maybe the relationship she has with her own family is behind that mental block. She hardly ever mentions them. Only when absolutely pressed and then reluctantly, briefly and with little affection. I know she doesn’t speak to her mother from one month to the next, her father even less frequently.
Has that changed, though? These are times when even the weakest family bonds can strengthen more than anyone involved would have believed possible.
She’s looking increasingly uncomfortable. She won’t meet my eye, but instead stares out across the river where a procession of goods barges are making slow progress, carrying some elaborate prefabricated structures. The pieces have been wrapped in plastic, but in places it has come loose and snaps in the wind, revealing elegant arcs of copper.
‘The woman,’ Ella says. ‘Wazir – she thinks he was murdered.’
‘Did she say that?’
‘Not in as many words, but she was too thorough for an investigation into an accident. And she was very interested in who had access to the building either side of the party. What did I think about the remaining residents? Why hadn’t you all moved?’ Ella bites her lip, forehead creasing. ‘They must be wondering if he was anything to do with the party at all. I don’t know how precisely they can fix the time of death.’
Maybe you should ask your dad, I think, but keep it to myself.
She says, ‘If they can’t get a precise time of death – the party was only three hours, he could have died before or after, right? I think they’re wondering if it’s something more personal with one of you and him.’
I shiver inside my coat, draw it closer around myself and tuck my chin down into the funnel collar.
‘If they find the flat. . .’ Ella looks across her shoulder sharply as feet pass behind us, but the man has huge bright-red earphones on, drowning in music. ‘We’re done for if they work out that’s where it happened.’
‘I cleaned up,’ I tell her, remembering the smell of the bleach and the sting of the fumes rising into my eyes. ‘There’s nothing visible to make them look closer. They’ll only know to give the place a thorough search if someone tells them it’s that one.’
She nods, gaze fixed on the water once again. ‘Then we’re safe.’
But I don’t feel safe.