Until it's Over Read online

  ‘I’m not after you,’ I said.

  ‘What time was it?’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When you found it. I mean her, Leah.’

  ‘About half past ten.’

  I saw an expression of intense concentration on his face. ‘I think I saw Mick,’ he said.

  ‘Mick told me he was asleep.’

  ‘I was doing stuff in the house,’ said Dario, frantically. ‘Everyone had gone to work. I met the postman. He made me sign for something.’

  ‘I don’t care, Dario. Tell the police, not me,’ I said. ‘By the way, I’ve got the money. I’ll give you your share before you go.’

  Dario’s whole expression changed. ‘Really?’

  ‘I’ve got to work out the exact amount. By the way, have you seen Owen?’

  ‘He just got in.’

  It took a few seconds of hovering nervously outside Owen’s door before I steeled myself to knock. There was no reply, but I pushed open the door. A travelling bag was gaping wide, with clothes spilling out. The doors of the wardrobe were ajar, revealing rows of empty hangers. Photographs that had been stacked along the walls were now in piles on the large desk. I sat down beside them, and idly lifted a few while I was waiting. Some I had seen before, others were unfamiliar. One, near the bottom of the pile, made me gasp. I put my hand against my heart. There was a sharp pain in my chest and for a few seconds I could do nothing but breathe raggedly.

  The image was of the same woman Owen had photographed several times: perfectly bald, with a high-cheekboned unsmiling face and close-set eyes. But this time the eyes were shut. She was arranged like a corpse and on her face were marks. I stared while the image blurred, then resolved. Slashes scored firmly over her alabaster skin. Unequivocally like the slashes… Bile rose in my throat.

  ‘Hello.’

  I spun round, letting the photos drop back on to the table and fan out.

  ‘Owen,’ I said. Fear was rippling through me and my mouth was dry.

  ‘You look done in.’ He gave me a smile that at any other time would have filled me with pleasure.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Horrible,’ he said. ‘I mean for you.’

  ‘You mean for her.’

  ‘For you. Do you want to tell me?’

  ‘No.’ I felt cold to the bone. Cold, tired, scared, wretched and sick. I wrapped my arms round my body and hugged myself.

  ‘Sometimes it’s better to…’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Owen, I want to show you something.’ I shuffled through the photos on his desk, noticing that my hands were trembling, until I came to the one of the slashed face. ‘There.’

  ‘So?’ He looked at me, his face hardening.

  ‘Is that all you have to say?’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘I want you to tell me – to tell me -’ I found I was having difficulty in forming words; they felt thick and unwieldy in my mouth. I pressed my hands together and continued: ‘To tell me why the marks on this woman’s face match the marks on the faces of Ingrid de Soto and Leah.’

  There was an absolute silence. His face grew grim, as if the lighting had been turned down in the room, and he stared at me.

  ‘Well?’ I asked at last.

  He took a step forward and, though I shrank back, he grasped my arms so hard that I felt his fingers digging painfully into my skin. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘They were mutilated like that,’ I whispered.

  ‘Leah and the other?’

  ‘Yes. Let go, you’re hurting.’

  He dropped his hands but didn’t move away.

  ‘Nobody knows. I wasn’t allowed to tell. How did you know?’

  ‘Shut up for a moment. Let me think.’

  ‘You must have known. Unless.’ I stopped.

  ‘Unless it was me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He gave a sour smile. ‘You think I took the photographs, then went and killed a woman – no, two women to make them look like that. Do you want to make a run for it now, before I attack you too?’

  ‘Stop it, Owen. Tell me.’

  ‘What?’ He gave a short, mirthless laugh. ‘Tell you I didn’t kill them? That would be enough for you, would it? A denial?’

  ‘They’re identical.’

  ‘You need to decide whether or not you trust me.’

  Without knowing what I was going to do, I lifted my hand and gave him a stinging slap on his cheek and he reeled back, lifting a fist. ‘This isn’t about us, you idiot,’ I said. ‘This is about women who are being murdered. You have to explain.’

  Owen looked at me. He lowered his fist, unclenched it, and took a step backwards. His face lost its hard look, and instead became weary and bleak. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I don’t know.?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘The only explanation I can think of is that it’s a nasty coincidence. But I guess you’re sick of coincidences.’

  ‘If I were a detective, I’d want to know when you took the photograph. What day, what time.’

  ‘If you were a detective, I’d tell you I don’t know,’ said Owen. ‘I could tell you within a few days.’

  ‘Isn’t the time printed on the image?’

  ‘I don’t use digital for this. We were both shooting dozens of rolls of film, day after day. This one was taken…’ Owen paused for thought ‘… between something like the beginning of May and a week or two ago.’

  ‘That’s not good enough. Would…’ I hesitated and pretended to search for the name of the woman I’d seen in his photographs ‘… Andrea remember more precisely?’

  ‘I doubt it.’ He crossed to the window and stared out. ‘You say exactly the same?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  He picked up the photograph, looked at it, then said, ‘I guess I have to take this to the police, don’t I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m going out now,’ he said. ‘I might be some time.’

  ‘Owen?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Who else has seen these, apart from me?’

  ‘Nobody. Not even my agent. Not even Andrea. They’ve been here in the folders.’

  ‘I guess it could be a coincidence,’ I said doubtfully.

  ‘Maybe it’s just the way men see women,’ said Owen. ‘That’s what you think, anyway, isn’t it?’

  I frowned at him. ‘Do you think this is funny?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Why do you think I’m leaving?’ He gestured towards his overflowing suitcase. ‘You should leave too.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘There’s a curse on this house.’

  I shivered. ‘Sometimes I’m so scared I can’t breathe,’ I said. ‘And sometimes it doesn’t seem real and I tell myself that soon I’ll wake up and none of it will have happened.’

  ‘So who can you trust? Astrid, who do you trust?’

  I stared at him for a moment and he stared back. Something about him seemed different, darker than I’d known. ‘Terrible coincidences happen, don’t they?’ I said.

  Owen took a step towards me and scrutinized me. It was as if he was trying to see something that even I didn’t know was there. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘But…’

  ‘About Pippa.’

  ‘Things like that don’t mean anything to Pippa,’ I said. ‘But they do to me, and I thought…’ I stopped and turned away from his burning gaze.

  ‘You thought they did to me too?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘If you need to know,’ he said, ‘it was before anything happened between us. I wanted you to know that. It’s important to me.’

  ‘I knew that,’ I said. ‘For what it’s worth.’

  ‘Right, I’m off to the police with this. Why don’t you start packing?’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  ‘Don’t you get it yet, Mel? They think
it’s one of us.’

  I stood outside the kitchen, my hand lifted half-way to the door, listening to his words. The fear that was always inside me seemed to swell now, blocking off my passageways, preventing me breathing or uttering a sound.

  ‘But how can they…?’

  ‘And that’s not all.’ Davy’s voice, more authoritative than I’d ever heard it, cut off Mel’s wail. ‘That’s why Owen’s packing his bag. That’s why Dario’s running round like a headless chicken. That’s why Miles was throwing up in the bathroom and putting all those letters from Leah into the garbage before he’s marched off to the police station. That’s why Astrid looks completely distraught.’

  I put my hand on the slightly open door, waiting to push it.

  ‘But the police are wrong,’ cried Mel, her voice cracking in distress.

  ‘Are they?’

  ‘Yes, of course they are. What are you saying, Davy? You don’t mean this. You can’t. This is horrible, just horrible.’

  ‘We have to look at it clearly, my love, and if that means…’

  ‘I heard what you were saying,’ I said to Davy.

  ‘I didn’t mean to make this worse.’

  ‘No. I agree with you. That’s what the police think and that’s what we’re all trying not to think but thinking anyway.’

  ‘Are the police treating you properly?’

  I shrugged. ‘That’s hardly the point. It’s like a frenzy down at the station. There’s an incident room and photos and charts everywhere, and about thirty police officers charging around. Have you seen Miles?’

  ‘I think he’s in his room. Packing, or clearing stuff out or something. We’re all being interviewed soon. But everyone’s locked away in their own private space, as if that’s the only place they’re safe.’

  ‘Except you.’

  ‘I’ve got Mel.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ I said. ‘What are your plans? Are you moving out?’

  Davy and Mel exchanged a glance.

  ‘We’re working on it,’ said Davy. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I think I’d better make some calls,’ I said. ‘I thought it would end badly. But even so…’

  I left them to their arrangements and went to find Pippa. As I passed Miles’s room I stopped and listened. I heard things being moved around. For a moment I thought I would go in and try to comfort him. He was my friend and once he’d been more. But as Owen had asked me, who did I trust? Not Miles, not any more. Not Miles or Mick or Dario or Owen, though if Owen knocked on my door I would let him in; I would pull the covers over us and in the darkness I would hold him against me. I carried on to Pippa’s door and, at the sound of her voice, pushed it open and stepped inside.

  If her room had been a mess before, now it was in a new phase of chaos. Any clothes that had been in drawers or cupboards had been pulled out and lay in colourful heaps. Any books that had been in piles or on shelves were scattered. Folders were splayed open and papers lay across the floor like leaves in autumn. It took me a moment to find Pippa in the wreckage. She was sitting cross-legged by the side of the mirror, rummaging through a capacious makeup case, tossing stubs of lipstick and cakes of eye-shadow into a bin bag.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, lowering myself to the floor beside her.

  ‘Rough time?’

  ‘Pretty rough.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. There’s nothing left to tell. Everything I say I’ve already said a hundred times before. It all feels like a lie now. Does this additional layer of chaos mean you’re packing?’

  ‘Yup. I’m going to Ned’s tomorrow evening.’

  I didn’t ask who Ned was. Instead I picked up a fringed shawl and held it against my cheek, closing my eyes for a second.

  ‘I’ve ordered a skip,’ continued Pippa. ‘We can dump the stuff we don’t want into it.’

  ‘Is there anything left after your yard sale?’

  Pippa and I looked at each other and didn’t smile. The memory wasn’t so funny now.

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ she said.

  ‘The police might object,’ I said. ‘Disposing of evidence.’

  She pulled a face.

  ‘Maybe they can take everything away,’ she said, ‘on condition they don’t bring it back.’

  ‘I’ve got the money,’ I said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here.’ I tapped my pocket.

  ‘Christ! You’re just carrying it around with you?’

  ‘I didn’t know where else to put it. The police are about to descend on us and go through everything. I thought it would look odd if they found twenty thousand quid in my knicker drawer.’

  ‘Is there anything that doesn’t look odd?’

  ‘I want to divide it up. Can you work out who gets what?’

  ‘All right,’ said Pippa, vaguely. She picked up a pair of tights and started to ravel it up in her hands, then stretch it out again to check for ladders.

  ‘Soon?’

  ‘Fine.’

  I remembered this house when we’d first moved in, every room clean, empty and full of possibility, the floorboards echoing when we trod on them, the light streaming in through the uncurtained windows. Gradually it had filled up – with objects, with people, with noise and with history – until it had become overloaded, like a boat buckling and tipping under the weight of too many passengers. But now we set about stripping it down again, and returning it to its original state. Rooms were being emptied, occupants were departing. Pictures were lifted down from walls, leaving patches behind them that Dario had never got round to painting. Hairballs and dust floated in the corners. The skip filled with the rubbish that had been too worthless even to put out for the yard sale, and I went and looked over its yellow rim at odd socks, cracked plates, torn sheets, a broken chair, a twisted bicycle wheel, yellowing newspapers: everything chipped, ripped, wrecked and unloved lay in the bottom. It was like a tide, I thought, that had swept in over the years, carrying us with it, and now was inexorably sweeping out again. Soon all that would be left in the house was the debris, the flotsam and jetsam of the life we’d led there.

  As we were preparing to go, so the police arrived. Some were in plain clothes and would be conducting interviews with the occupants of seventy-two Maitland Road – DCI McBride and Paul Kamsky were there, and I thought I saw PC Jim Prebble, like a potato-faced hallucination from earlier days, but I didn’t recognize anyone else. Others came in uniform, carrying bags and cameras, not looking us in the eye; they would be picking their way through each room and even, it became apparent, through the skip and the bin bags into which we’d so hurriedly been pouring our unwanted objects. If it felt like an invasion, that was because it was an invasion. They poured over our threshold like a conquering army, with their IDs, their titles, their notebooks, their evidence kits and their suspicions. I saw the house through their eyes and it was full of dark and ugly secrets; I saw us through their eyes and we were a motley tribe, nervous, defensive and scared. It had become impossible to behave naturally or innocently, or to feel that way.

  I watched Dario as he led a male and female officer up the stairs towards his room; he was ashen and red-eyed. Mick scowled at them so that his forehead corrugated and a vein pulsed in his temple. He wasn’t angry, I knew, he was full of terror and uncertainty, and probably all the nightmares from his past were crowding around him again. Only Pippa seemed quite cool, almost interested. She was used to things like this. She moved in the world of law and knew its language.

  I went slowly down the stairs and stood in the hall, outside Pippa’s and Miles’s rooms. As I did so, a policeman came up the stairs from the kitchen and knocked heavily on Miles’s door. After a few seconds, Miles opened it. He was dressed in an oddly formal way, in a dark suit with a white linen shirt I had given him a long time ago. His face looked thinner than it had just a few hours ago, and older as well. He stood back and the police officer entered the room. Miles stared at me for a moment, his eyes gl
ittering. Then he smiled faintly and turned away.

  ‘Astrid?’

  I looked round. ‘Well, if it isn’t Detective Chief Inspector Kamsky. You don’t need to interview me again, do you?’

  We walked out into the back garden together. I took him to my vegetable patch and pointed. ‘Broad beans, runner beans, potatoes,’ I said. ‘Those ones there are asparagus, but it takes two years to grow, so I doubt if any of us will be eating it. I’m moving out, you know.’

  ‘You’ll need to inform us of your -’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said. ‘I won’t run away. I’m going to stay with my friend Saul, not far from here.’

  Kamsky didn’t reply. He seemed preoccupied with things he couldn’t say.

  ‘When will this be over?’ I asked.

  ‘All I can say is what I tell the team, and that is…’

  But I never did find out what he told the team, for at that moment a police officer came walking across the grass towards us and Kamsky stepped away from me. The officer said something, and I saw Kamsky’s face become expressionless. A feeling of absolute foreboding descended on me.

  ‘Don’t let anyone else in,’ I heard him say, as the officer turned away. Then he looked back at me. ‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ he said, with a curious little bow, as if he was deserting me on a polished dance-floor.

  ‘What is it? Have they found something?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They have.’

  Chapter Twenty-three

  From that moment everything changed. Suddenly I was shut on the outside looking in, not able to see. I asked Kamsky what had happened, what had been found, but he shook his head. He was an impersonal official now, estranged from me. He said it was part of an ongoing investigation and he couldn’t reveal any details. I said I didn’t understand. Were they going to arrest somebody? We were still standing out there in the garden, by my doomed vegetable patch. Kamsky started to speak, then hesitated, then spoke again. ‘I think it’s likely that charges are imminent,’ he said.