The Other Side of the Door Page 25

  I realized she was dangerous: she made me feel as though I could confide in her and, indeed, I had an almost overwhelming urge to do just that. I sat up straighter. ‘What do you want me to tell you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sorry. It’s probably been as bad for you as for me. Were you very fond of him?’

  ‘He hit me.’ I hadn’t known I was going to say the words, and as soon as I spoke them, they seemed to swell and fill the room. My face glowed with shame and I felt utterly exposed.

  ‘You poor thing,’ said Hannah. She gazed at me with what almost seemed like yearning. Her eyes were bright with tears.

  I shrank back from her sympathy. ‘Only twice.’

  ‘You must have hated him.’ Her voice was low and soft.

  ‘I didn’t hate him,’ I said. ‘I was shocked.’

  ‘It wasn’t anything to do with you,’ she said. ‘It was him.’

  ‘When he was with you, did he . . . ?’

  ‘No. But he had this anger beneath the surface. He could be like a little boy – I don’t mean in a good way. He had tantrums. Like Joe, when he was two.’ She paused and then said: ‘And he was a real stirrer, wasn’t he?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He liked making mischief, setting the cat among the pigeons and then sitting back to see what would happen.’

  I thought of Hayden with the band, deftly touching off insecurities and playing on exposed nerves. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe it killed him.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘The police think it was some drug thing.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘It would make sense but, then, anything would make sense, really. He made so many enemies. I used to tell him he went out of his way to make them – as if it was a sign of his authenticity or something. Bloody musicians.’

  ‘Are you a musician?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m tone deaf. I never even learned to play the recorder. I’m a speech therapist. It could never have worked, could it – a part-time, tone-deaf speech therapist married to a feckless, charming singer who thought commitment was some kind of fatal compromise?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone, will you?’

  ‘Tell them what?’

  ‘That he hit me.’

  ‘Who would I tell?’ She looked at me curiously. ‘Is something troubling you?’

  Her voice was insidious and all of a sudden I felt she was my enemy – or perhaps that was just another sign that I was going mad.

  Before

  If I could have chosen who I did not want to see as I practically ran from my flat, the list would be, in no particular order of preference: Neal, Amos, Guy, Joakim, probably Hayden and Sonia as well. Oh, and Danielle, the person responsible for creating the mess of the band in the first place. She saw me from a distance, so we walked towards each other with our smiles fixed in idiot grins and her hand that wasn’t carrying shopping bags raised as if I would lose sight of her if she dropped it for a second. She wore a pale blue shift and sandals and looked polished and buffed and blonder than ever. Her lips were glossy, her teeth were white, her legs were smooth and tanned, and I wanted to kick her in the shins as I reached her.

  ‘What a lovely coincidence.’ She touched her lips to my cheek and I caught the waft of her perfume.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, through gritted teeth.

  ‘You look hot – and what’s that in your hair?’

  ‘I am hot and it’s wallpaper.’ I ran my fingers through my hair and bits fell out. ‘I’m in the middle of decorating and I just needed to escape for a few minutes.’

  I felt her eyes on my grubby skin and the sweat marks under my armpits.

  ‘Let me buy you a cold drink. I could do with one myself. How about in here? It looks cool enough.’

  She bought me a tall glass of old-fashioned lemonade and herself a ginger beer and we sat in a dark corner away from the sunlight, which slanted through the café window.

  ‘How’s it all going?’ I asked her.

  ‘Frantic! You wouldn’t believe the things you have to get done before you marry. I have these lists and no sooner have I crossed one thing off than I remember another. It’s like the Forth Bridge.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Not long to go now. But it’s me who should be asking you how it’s going. How is it?’

  ‘You mean . . . ?’

  ‘The music, of course. I hope you don’t think I’ve been neglecting you.’

  ‘No. I don’t.’

  ‘Maybe I could come and listen to you all some time, get a feeling for what’s going to happen on the day.’

  ‘I think it would be better as a surprise.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps that would be more exciting. I can’t tell you how grateful I am. It’ll be wonderful, I’m sure.’

  ‘I wish I shared your confidence.’

  ‘Don’t be so modest, Bonnie.’ She frowned. ‘You have all been practising, haven’t you?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘So you’ll be ready?’

  I thought of our frayed sessions, the arguments and walk-outs, the unpredictable sounds we made. ‘Yes, we will,’ I said firmly.

  ‘Of course, I shouldn’t even ask. You’re a professional. How many sets – is that what you call it? – will you be playing?’

  ‘Just six or seven songs,’ I said.

  ‘Only six?’

  ‘Six is enough, Danielle, believe me.’

  ‘Well, you’re the boss.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s lucky I bumped into you, actually. I was going to ring you to ask you something.’

  ‘Ask away.’

  ‘It’s about what you’ll be wearing.’

  ‘Wearing?’ I looked at her blankly.

  ‘Yes. When you play.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘For instance, will you all be wearing the same thing?’

  ‘Hang on, Danielle.’

  ‘I was thinking something hillbilly would be good. Loose cotton trousers and braces and hats. Or wouldn’t the women like that?’

  ‘What makes you think the men would?’

  ‘You don’t think it’s a good idea?’

  ‘No, I do not.’

  ‘Maybe something more romantic.’

  ‘Romantic?’

  ‘Long and drifty for the women – you could even wear flowers in your hair.’

  ‘My hair’s too short for flowers.’

  ‘And what about light summer suits and hats for the men. Trilbies. Or would that be incongruous? What do you think?’

  ‘You want to know?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘We’ve agreed to play at your wedding. We have not agreed to wear fancy dress.’

  ‘Oh. Well, just let me know in advance, will you?’

  ‘I want to make it quite clear, Danielle, that –’

  ‘Oh, God, is that the time? Must run! I’m so glad we had time for this chat.’

  ‘’Bye,’ I said to her departing back, the bobbed hair that bounced cheerily as she walked away.

  After

  It was Joakim who organized the next rehearsal. I could barely face it but he badgered me. He rang me several times and in the end he said we either had to cancel the performance or get together. Which was it going to be? He talked about Hayden and said that the performance would be our tribute to him. It would be what he would have wanted. Part of me found that idea horribly comic. That was what people always said about the dead. They suddenly became an expert in what they ‘would have wanted’. I had to restrain myself from shouting down the phone at Joakim. Hayden had had no coherent sense of what he wanted even when he was alive. Now he was lying in a fridge in a morgue somewhere in God knew what condition. He didn’t exist any more. What did any of that matter? But I knew that this was my problem, not Joakim’s. He was so young, so hopeful. He still thought he could do something for Hayden. He thought that these gestures mattered. H
e was probably right. I just couldn’t see it any more.

  Joakim actually rang the school and somehow persuaded the school caretaker, who never listened to anyone, to open up one of the rehearsal rooms. I thought there were rules about procedure and insurance that forbade such things but Joakim managed it. As we arrived, he even brought in a tray of coffee from the place across the road from the school. It almost made me cry. We sipped the coffee and then, nervously, as if we were doing it for the first time, picked up the instruments. Joakim coughed and said he had a couple of ideas. He pulled out a piece of paper on which he’d jotted a few chords. I quickly saw that what he’d done was to strip out some complications that would make ‘Nashville Blues’ easier to play without Hayden. It must have taken him hours. I made a couple of adjustments and then we started and, really, the result wasn’t all that terrible.

  When Sonia sang ‘It Had To Be You’, we started to sound a bit better than not all that terrible. Her voice seemed bereft and world-weary, rather than as if she’d just got up.

  An hour later we finished, and as people were gathering their stuff together, I saw that Sonia was huddled with Neal, murmuring something to him, and he was replying in an insistent tone, much louder than hers, although I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I glanced across at Guy and Amos. They weren’t paying attention. I joined Neal and Sonia.

  ‘What’s up?’ I said to Neal. ‘Is everything OK?’

  ‘I’ve had an idea.’

  ‘I don’t think I can cope with any more ideas.’

  ‘No. This is really important. It came to me like a bolt from the blue. I can’t imagine why it didn’t occur to us before.’

  ‘Are you talking a bit loudly?’

  ‘I was thinking about you feeling guilty, and wondering whether we should go to the police.’

  ‘This really isn’t the place to talk about it. How are you getting home?’

  ‘I’ve got the car.’

  ‘We’ll come with you,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t,’ said Sonia. ‘I’m going out with Amos.’

  ‘Make an excuse,’ I said.

  Sonia leaned in close to me and spoke in a whisper: ‘We can’t keep going off as a trio,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t look right.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But we need to hear what Neal has to say.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll join you outside. This had better be good, Neal.’

  Neal and I waited in his car until Sonia came out and sat in the back seat.

  ‘What did you tell Amos?’ I asked.

  ‘You don’t need to know. It’s OK, though.’

  ‘I just wondered if he was suspicious.’

  ‘I told him it was important and he had to trust me.’

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked Neal. ‘Was it the police?’

  ‘No, don’t worry. It wasn’t the police. I was completely effective with them. I didn’t say anything harmful to us. I didn’t say anything that might actually help them to solve the murder, though. Which was what made me think.’

  ‘Think what?’

  ‘Hang on. I’ll take this short-cut. Let’s wait till we get home. We need paper.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Paper. And pens.’

  ‘Are we going to play a game?’ said Sonia, ominously. ‘A parlour game?’

  Neal pulled up outside his house and got out, unlocked the front door and pushed it open. We walked in after him. Sonia made coffee, and when she eventually sat down it was as if we were beginning a meeting.

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said.

  ‘You already told us that.’ Sonia stared at him over the rim of her mug. I could practically hear her crackle with impatience.

  ‘Here’s the thing. We’ve all done the wrong thing for the right motive. Yes?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Now, the only thing we should really feel bad about is if we’re concealing something from the police . . .’

  ‘Well, of course we’re bloody concealing something from the police!’

  ‘Hold on, you didn’t let me get to the end of the sentence. If we’re concealing something from the police that would help them in their investigation – in other words, help them find out who killed Hayden. Yes?’

  ‘How does this help us, Neal?’

  ‘We can do something.’

  ‘Do something?’ said Sonia.

  ‘What we did was to destroy evidence and dispose of a body. But, listen, there were three different crime scenes, or was it four? On top of each other. There was the original one when Hayden was killed. Maybe the killer did something to that, but that was the one I found. I thought you’d done it, Bonnie, so I altered it to make it look as if there’d been a violent scuffle and it wouldn’t seem as if you’d done it. Or something – actually, I wasn’t thinking straight. Then you . . .’ he looked across at Sonia ‘. . . then you, with Sonia, tried to make it look as if a crime hadn’t been committed there at all. That was pretty stupid, but from what I understand it worked to a certain extent, in that the police still don’t know where the murder happened. My point is that we could be like archaeologists. We could peel away the layers and get to the original murder scene.’

  ‘You mean go to the flat?’

  ‘No, that would be way too dangerous. The police don’t know the murder was committed there, but they know he was staying there. If they stumbled on the three of us there, it would be . . . well, not easy to explain. But we could reconstruct it in our heads.’

  Sonia looked dubious. ‘I don’t really see how this is going to work,’ she said.

  Neal got up and rummaged through a drawer for pens. Then he tore some pages off a notepad and passed a couple each to me and Sonia.

  ‘What are we meant to do?’ asked Sonia. ‘Draw a diagram?’

  ‘That would be too hard. Anyway, I don’t know what would be on it. We should all start by writing down every object we can remember from the flat, every single thing. And when we’ve got the list we can try to place where they were and then we can see if what you remember fits with what I remember and . . . and . . .’

  ‘And then what?’ I said.

  ‘We can reconstruct the scene.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Neal rubbed his eyes and, for a moment, looked despondent. ‘We can’t tell. But if we get a list of as many objects as possible and place them, some pattern might emerge. If I could tell before we’d done it, what would be the point of doing it?’

  ‘I’m not sure it’s going to be productive,’ Sonia said.

  ‘It’s something.’

  ‘You really think we can re-create the scene from memory?’ I asked.

  Neal banged on the table. ‘What’s the point of arguing about whether or not we think we can do it? Let’s have a fucking go at it.’

  I turned to Sonia. ‘You’re good at games like this.’

  ‘Shut up, everybody,’ Neal said, ‘and start writing.’

  I picked up my pen and stared at the blank piece of paper on the table. I smoothed it with my fingers as if that would help. For a moment, my mind was as blank as the page. I closed my eyes and tried to make myself see it, to put myself back in the room. It took a particular, painful effort because I had spent weeks making it a part of my mind I would never visit again. The struggle was almost physical, as if I was pulling at a stuck old door to a room I hadn’t entered for a long time. But the door came open with a jolt and I was there. It was blurry and fragmentary, though, and I could only make out a few objects. I started to write. There were the CDs, including the Hank Williams one that I had retrieved. There was a green plastic tortoise thing for keeping pens in. That had been on the table. There had been a little tin of paperclips next to it. There had been a cushion on the chair and a vase with tulips in it tipped over. There was the wedding invite, which I had also taken and got rid of. There had been the broken guitar and some books on the floor. My scarf. The scene seemed to go
further into the distance the more I tried to see it.

  It reminded me of being in an exam room when I was seventeen years old, spying on the people around me, who seemed to be writing more than I was, and with more concentration. It was certainly like that now. Neal was writing steadily. I couldn’t read the words but he had done much more than I had. Sonia too. As I had thought, she was much better than I was at this sort of thing. Not that it really mattered. I couldn’t seriously imagine that anything would come of this. That hadn’t really been the point. The point, I knew, was to make us feel better about what we’d done. A plaster on a gaping wound.

  I had stopped writing. That was like an exam too, those awful last minutes when I had nothing more to say and stared at the clock waiting for the end, wondering whether I should check my work once more.

  ‘Are you done?’ I said. ‘I can’t think of anything else.’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Neal, still scribbling energetically.

  Sonia had also stopped writing.

  ‘Can I have a look?’ I said, and she passed her paper across to me.

  As I suspected, she had done miles better than I had. She had remembered the phone and the bowl with keys in, which didn’t really count. All flats have phones and bowls with keys in, don’t they? She’d mentioned the guitar case. And I’d forgotten the little brass Buddha and the green bottle and the laptop, and there were various sculptures, which I remembered now. And the mail on the floor. Sonia was amazing. As I read through her list the room really started to take shape again in my mind.

  ‘I’m done,’ said Neal.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘Now we need to go through the objects and work out where they were. Then you can try to remember which ones you moved and we can work our way back to where everything was when you walked in and found the body. Let me have a look at yours.’

  I passed the two lists to Neal and he ran his finger down each one, item by item, like a small child who has just learned to read. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Sonia’s way better at this than you are.’

  ‘I didn’t know it was a competition,’ I said.

  Neal held our two lists, one in each hand, and studied them intently, first one then the other. He tossed them onto the table and leaned back, staring at the ceiling. His chair rocked. I worried for a moment that he might tip over and do himself a mischief. Finally he let it down with a bump. ‘I don’t even know why we’re doing this.’