The Lying Room Read online

  Her scrambled eggs. Neve shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ She looked towards Mabel. ‘Make everyone tea and I’ll be in soon.’

  ‘I hear you had quite a party last night,’ said Hitching once they were alone and sitting at the little table at the end of the garden, underneath the pear tree.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Mrs Stevenson.’

  ‘It got a bit out of hand,’ said Neve dully. She just wanted him to get it over with. She had lied and she had done that great clean-up largely to protect Mabel from the knowledge of her affair. For a moment it occurred to her that Mabel knew about it and so she could simply be done with this farce and tell Hitching everything. But no. Mabel was involved now. She had removed the hammer. She had lied to the police.

  ‘Sounds like fun,’ said Hitching cheerily.

  ‘I suppose you know that Bernice found out about Renata and her husband.’

  ‘She mentioned it,’ he said. ‘These things usually come out in the end. But that’s not what I’m here about.’ He picked up his briefcase and put it on the table between them. ‘I’ve something to show you,’ he said.

  His manner had become more formal. Neve forced herself to meet his gaze and hold it.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Mrs Stevenson called me this morning to say that something had been pushed through her letter box. She couldn’t tell me the time. She was a bit the worse for wear after your little party.’

  Hitching clicked open the lock on his case. He dipped his hand into it and drew out a blue folder in a plastic bag.

  ‘You recognise this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You should do. It’s your folder. The one that went missing.’

  ‘It’s not my folder. I’ve never seen it. I didn’t even know it existed.’

  ‘Well, this file you’ve never seen was delivered to Mrs Stevenson’s house. Curious, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you have any explanation?’

  ‘No.’

  Hitching looked at Neve as though he was disappointed in her or perhaps, she thought, like he pitied her. He ran his hand delicately across his pale skull.

  ‘Is that all?’ asked Neve at last.

  Hitching once more dipped his hand into the case. This time he drew out a much smaller packet, also in a plastic bag. It looked like a simple glossy white card until he turned it over.

  ‘This was inside the folder,’ he said and handed it across.

  She recognised it instantly. It was a photograph of her, her hair cut shorter than it was now and blowing in the wind. She was turning towards the person taking the picture, smiling. Towards Fletcher.

  She looked up and saw Hitching’s dark, watching eyes. ‘Oh,’ she said. Was that her voice? ‘How strange.’

  She lifted both hands in a cartoonish gesture of puzzlement. They floated in the air like they didn’t belong to her; she saw that they were shaking. Her legs were trembling underneath the table.

  ‘Again, have you any explanation?’ asked Hitching.

  ‘No.’ She should say something else. What would an innocently surprised person say? ‘It’s not a very good picture,’ she said, horrified even as she spoke the inane words.

  ‘Why would there be a photo of you in the folder?’

  ‘To identify me, I suppose.’

  ‘No one else had one.’

  Oh.’ Neve paused. ‘Oh,’ she repeated after a few seconds.

  ‘It’s not a very formal photo, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You look as if you’re standing on top of a mountain.’

  She had been. Several years ago, she and Fletcher had gone to the Lake District for a long weekend while their children were looked after by Renata and Charlie. It had been just before all their troubles started. They had walked miles every day, up the great peaks, into fog and clouds, pushing themselves until their legs ached and their faces were rubbed raw by the wind.

  ‘Great Gable,’ she said.

  ‘So why would this holiday snap be in Saul Stevenson’s possession?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Did you give it to him?’

  Again, she made herself look into Hitching’s dark, fixed eyes. She could feel all the muscles in her face quivering. ‘No,’ she said.

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?’ asked Hitching in a surprisingly gentle tone.

  ‘I can’t think of anything.’

  ‘Anything that might have slipped your mind?’

  ‘If I think of anything, of course I’ll tell you.’

  ‘That would be helpful.’

  She handed him the photo and he slid it into the case. Then he picked up the folder and turned it over.

  ‘Do you know what that is?’ he said, tapping his finger on a rusty smear across the top.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t either. Yet. But it looks like it might be blood.’

  ‘Whose blood?’

  He frowned.

  ‘I just told you. We don’t even know if it is blood.’ He put the folder into the case and then clicked it shut. ‘We’ll know by tomorrow.’

  Neve ushered him out, through the kitchen full of people and the smell of cannabis and burnt toast and ruined eggs, to the front door. Fletcher accompanied them.

  ‘What did he want?’ he asked after Neve closed the door.

  ‘Not much. They’ve found my personnel file that had gone missing.’

  ‘So?’ he asked, a furrow between his eyes.

  ‘He just wanted to keep me informed,’ said Neve. ‘To clarify things. He doesn’t seem to delegate anything.’ Was she gabbling? ‘Like I said, nothing.’

  Fletcher nodded. ‘You must be shattered.’

  ‘I am.’ Her eyes felt gritty with tiredness. ‘Get rid of them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get rid of them.’

  ‘I can’t just chuck them out.’

  ‘Ease them out then,’ she said. ‘Half an hour more of this, and I’ll start howling like a wolf.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’ He gave her a strange smile. ‘Then I’ll wash everything up,’ he said. ‘Leave all of that to me.’

  Neve hauled herself up the stairs, into their bedroom. She took off her shoes and lay down. Her brain fizzed and hissed and her body felt itchy. She sat up again. A thought occurred to her and she went to the chest of drawers, pulled open the top one, full of her underwear and rummaged around at the back of it. There it was. She took out a crumpled pack of cigarettes, only four left inside, and one was torn. She pushed her hand in again and found a plastic lighter.

  Feeling like a teenager, she went up the next flight of stairs to the landing, opened the little window and squeezed through it on to the small patch of flat roof, covered in moss and dead leaves. She smoked about once every six months and it was always a surreptitious act because Fletcher disapproved, Mabel treated it like a pathetic and yet powerful act of maternal treachery and Rory looked at her as though she was going to die. The last time had been on a beautiful spring night, stars in the sky and a balmy softness in the air; she’d cadged a cigarette from Renata and they’d sat in companionable silence.

  She cupped a hand round her lighter, pressing her thumb on the wheel. The little blue flame fluttered and died. She shook the lighter and tried again. She tried not to imagine how ridiculous she looked, crouched in hiding from her children and her husband with a stale cigarette. She wanted not to think; she wanted two inches of time just to sit on this grubby little roof, hidden from view, and do something foolish and unmotherly and trivial.

  At last she managed to suck the flame into the tip of the cigarette, feeling the burn in her throat and then a rush of dizziness. She remembered being fourteen, sitting in a circle with a group of friends, and trying to pretend that she was an old hand while the acrid bitterness filled her mouth and she thought she might be sick. Her first boyfriend had told her that it was something y
ou had to persevere with. Neve smiled as she thought of him, stocky and intense; she smiled as she thought of herself then, trying to be grown up. Why had she been in such a hurry to leave childhood behind?

  She blew the smoke out and watched as it hung in the air and then dissolved.

  Smoking in bed – with whom? She couldn’t remember, just the feeling of lying in the darkness in the small hours with the tips of two cigarettes fading and glowing.

  Or smoking that mad weekend that seemed somehow like a hinge, swinging her out of a life of reckless, carefree pleasures into one that was more serious: commitment, motherhood, reciprocal and painful love.

  She stubbed the cigarette out on the damp moss and left it there. Maybe she’d come up here again in six months’ time. Then she slid back through the window again.

  She went into the bathroom and cleaned her teeth vigorously then gargled with mouthwash – although Mabel would always be able to tell. She looked out of the window into the garden where the sun was sinking and the sky a soft grey. They were still there, though clearly in the process of leaving. The greenhouse swayed where it stood, a half-skeleton of metal.

  Hitching had forgotten to ask a question about the photograph. He had asked what it was. He had asked why it was in the file. What he hadn’t asked is where the photograph had come from. If Hitching had asked, Neve would have to have answered. She didn’t need to go down to the kitchen to check. Just by the door to the hallway, there was a corkboard with a collage of snapshots. She knew them so well that she could see them if she closed her eyes: there was Fletcher looking almost like a teenager in an old leather jacket holding a month-old Mabel. There were children on their first bikes, on beaches, at Halloween and at Christmas. There was an image of Mabel, about nine years old, sitting in the corner of a sofa reading a book that made Neve almost cry whenever she looked at it, though she had seen it thousands of times.

  And there, in that collage, towards the top right, was the picture of Neve on the top of the mountain looking at her husband. She didn’t need to go down to the kitchen to check. If Hitching had asked where it had come from, Neve would have pointed to the space on the corkboard. Hitching’s next question would have been: how did the picture get from your kitchen into a personnel folder pushed through the letter box of Bernice Stevenson’s house?

  Neve couldn’t answer the question. But she could ask it. Who could have taken it? It felt so confusing and impossible. Perhaps if she waited – for a proper night’s sleep, for some peace and quiet – it might become clearer in her mind. But she couldn’t wait.

  There was only one obvious connection between her house and Bernice’s house: Bernice. Hitching only had Bernice’s word about the file having been posted through her door. The easiest explanation was that Bernice had removed the photo herself and then fabricated the story as a way of getting the file to Hitching.

  There was another scenario, of course. Who could hate you as much as the person closest to you, the person you love?

  She walked out on to the landing where she stopped and listened. She could still hear Fletcher rattling around in the kitchen. She would have a few minutes.

  She opened the door to Fletcher’s office and stepped inside. She didn’t know where to begin. Fletcher had a drawing board on one side and on the other, near the window, was his desk. On it were piles of papers, old newspapers, several mugs, a pile of CDs, books, cables. There were several different-sized light bulbs, which he had taken days or weeks ago as a reminder to buy new ones. Neve found the sight of it somehow alarming, as if it represented the bit of Fletcher’s interior life that worried her. The chaotic, hopeless side. She felt a disastrous urge to attack it, clear it up, throw most of it away.

  In the middle of the desk was his closed laptop.

  She would like to have looked at what was on it, at his emails, his search history, just to get some idea of what had been on his mind over the last couple of weeks. But neither of them knew the passwords for each other’s phone or computer. They’d said that it represented the last bit of privacy, the last locked door. They kept saying that they should write them down and put them in a sealed envelope, just in case one of them developed dementia or was killed in an accident. But they’d never got around to it.

  She pulled open a couple of drawers and saw receipts, instruction manuals, postcards. Where could she even start? Then she saw his desk diary, lying open on the desk. It was at today’s date. She turned the pages back slowly one by one. She saw what she expected to see: appointments with clients and friends. She recognised all the friends and most of the clients. There weren’t many of them. So far, so boring.

  Then she noticed something.

  At first she thought it was just a squiggle on the page, as if he had been testing whether his pen was working. But she turned the page back and saw another one, almost identical. Just a little wavy line but it was the same wavy line. She looked at page after page. There were several more. She turned quickly back to earlier in the year, to February, and couldn’t find any of the marks. Then she turned back to the present day and worked her way back. The first she got to was a week earlier. She flicked back, checking the days they were on. There were none on weekdays. She checked to see if any of them were on her day off. She couldn’t find any. She ought to write them down, she ought to—

  ‘What are you doing?’

  She looked round. Fletcher had come in behind her. She looked back at his desk. The coffee cups. She picked them up.

  ‘Since you’re doing the washing up,’ she said.

  ‘I thought I’d finished.’

  ‘When you think you’re finished, you always find another mug.’

  He smiled at her, too widely. ‘I know it’s just an excuse to go through my things,’ he said.

  ‘It’s what I do.’ Neve forced a grin, pretending it was all good fun. ‘Whenever I get the chance.’

  ‘Finding my secrets.’

  ‘Everyone has secrets,’ she said. She couldn’t bear this conversation to continue. It was like he was the enemy.

  She went downstairs, feeling like she was in a fever. She felt her face must have gone red and flushed. She heard Fletcher come into the kitchen behind her but she didn’t turn round. He was talking and she quickly realised that he wasn’t talking to her. He was on the phone and she heard him bring the conversation to a close and then the door to the garden opening and closing. She looked round and saw two things at the same time. Fletcher had gone into the garden and he had left his phone on the kitchen table.

  Almost without thinking, she stepped forward and picked it up. She didn’t need the password. He’d only just stopped using it. She looked outside. He had walked over to the far side of the garden, joining Mabel, Jackie and Will. She scrolled quickly through his mail: a couple of friends, notifications from Amazon, Russian women wanting to get to know him, a couple of newsletters he subscribed to. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  Then she looked at his texts, scrolling down the names. Her, Mabel, various friends, Charles, work texts, then she saw a name she wasn’t expecting.

  Sarah.

  She clicked on the name. A string of tiny messages: with you in 10 – tomorrow? – running late – where are you? – miss you. And lots and lots of x’s.

  Sarah.

  She turned it over in her dull, tired mind. Sarah. So that was the squiggle in the diary. S. It marked their meetings.

  Sarah.

  Who was Sarah?

  And then she knew. Oh. Sarah. Elias’s mother. Sarah and Fletcher. Fletcher and Sarah.

  Very carefully, she replaced the phone on the kitchen table where Fletcher had left it.

  She went out into the empty garden and walked backwards and forwards on the lawn, beside the unfinished greenhouse, peering under bushes. The hammer was nowhere to be seen. Whisky’s face peered out at her. He cheeped like a canary through the wire.

  Renata came blearily into the kitchen, her face creased and puffy from sleep.

  ‘O
nly me left,’ she said.

  She didn’t ask, but it was clear she was going to stay the night. Neve made sure that Connor and then Rory had baths. She put their dirty clothes into the washing machine and turned it on, then put out their clothes for the following day. She looked into their school bags and saw that Connor hadn’t done his homework, and she sat him down at the kitchen table and put his books and pens in front of him. She looked into the fridge and wondered what she could use in their sandwiches tomorrow. Maybe it would just have to be peanut butter. She ordered a Thai takeaway from up the road and Fletcher went to collect it while she made a bed up for Renata.

  She didn’t know how she was still standing.

  Thoughts shimmered in her mind. Sarah. Fletcher. Sarah and Fletcher. The hammer. The folder. The photo. The present that was going to be delivered. Hitching’s newly serious manner. Tamsin protecting her. Mabel’s false alibi for the morning of Saul’s death. She thought about the allotment; everything rotting in the gold autumn light. She thought of her life and it seemed like an avalanche, sliding away down the mountainside, gathering everything up in its roaring descent.

  Fletcher arrived back with the takeaway. Neve laid the foil containers out on the table, steam rising from them and the scent of lemongrass and coconut. She put out plates, cutlery, glasses, a jug of water, lit the candles. The sun was low in the sky, the light soft. The boys were in their pyjamas, smelling of soap. Renata had showered and was in Neve’s dressing gown, her injured arm tucked inside it in a sling. Mabel had changed into old black leggings and a baggy plum-coloured jumper that also belonged to Neve. She seemed dazed. Everyone was tired and slow and muted.

  ‘What a weekend,’ said Fletcher, spooning rice on to his plate.

  Neve looked up. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  He looked at her. She knew his face so well; and not well at all.

  ‘Tomorrow we’ll be back to normal,’ he said.

  Mabel leaned towards her, baring her teeth in a not-smile.

  ‘You’ve been smoking,’ she said.

  Fletcher cleared the dishes. Renata sat in the garden smoking a cigarette. Neve went upstairs with the boys and made sure they cleaned their teeth. She drew the curtains in both their rooms, pulled back the covers, picked up damp towels from the floor. Mabel put her head in briefly, then withdrew. They were like spies in their own lives, thought Neve, picking up a pair of socks, a curl of orange peel. She saw Connor and Rory into bed, kissed them both on their foreheads, turned off Connor’s light and pulled the duvet round him.