The Lying Room Read online

  2

  The Birthday Party

  As Neve crammed the final plate into the dishwasher, so tightly that it probably wouldn’t wash properly, she stopped and – just for a moment – didn’t know where she was. She’d got up, showered, got dressed, exchanged words of some kind with Fletcher, supervised the breakfast, made the packed lunches, shepherded the boys out of the door and somehow done it all in a sort of trance, with her mind on other things.

  She blinked and looked around. Fletcher was sitting at the table with his coffee, reading a magazine. Mabel hadn’t appeared yet.

  She was thinking about the bangle. She saw it when she closed her eyes. She saw it when she opened her eyes. She could feel its absence around her wrist. At every moment, whether she was standing under the shower or spreading butter on bread or asking the boys about the day ahead, she was picturing it lying next to the sink. Fletcher said something about an article he was reading and he might has well have been speaking in a foreign language.

  She needed to get out of here. She couldn’t bear it for another second.

  ‘I’ve got to go to work,’ she said. ‘I need to get in early.’

  Fletcher looked up at her. ‘You remember the party?’

  Party? She had forgotten the party. But now she remembered. Renata. She’d called Neve yesterday and Neve hadn’t called back. Birthday. Fuck.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’

  ‘Have we got her anything?’ Fletcher said.

  ‘Could you do that today if you’ve not got anything on? A book or something.’

  ‘You’re so much better at things like that.’

  ‘I’m going to be a bit busy.’

  ‘She’s your friend, really. You know the sort of thing she likes.’

  Any other day this could have been the beginning of an argument. Not today.

  ‘I’ll try to get something,’ she said.

  ‘If you can’t, just let me know.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  Fletcher was right about this. He was really terrible at buying presents. He had a strange knack of buying people either what they already had or what they couldn’t possibly want. Nothing in between.

  Out in the hallway, getting ready to leave, she found her backpack and rummaged inside for her purse. She felt the familiar bric-a-brac, and then her fingers brushed something right deep down, in one of the unnecessary little side compartments. Was it possible? She pulled it out. There in the palm of her hand was the key to the flat.

  She took a few deep breaths and had several thoughts at the same time. The first was a sense of gratitude that flooded through her like she’d never felt in her life. She thanked everything conceivable: providence, the universe, God, though even at the time she could see that it was a strange sort of deity that looked out for people who tampered with murder scenes.

  Then she felt another emotion, one of alarm. She thought about those times when she was on her bike and started making mistakes: didn’t notice a car turning left in front of her, then hit a pothole because she hadn’t been looking properly at the road surface. On a day like that she always knew that something was slightly askew. It might not be much, perhaps a late night, or she was distracted by worries about one of the children. But when this happened, she tried to tell herself that this was the day when there was a big accident waiting to happen and she’d have to concentrate extra hard to avoid it.

  This wasn’t just about a bad night’s sleep. She had found the body of her lover and though she had felt she was functioning, she wasn’t. She must be in a state of shock. She had tried to eradicate every trace of herself from the flat and she’d left her bangle there, like a calling card. She’d lost the key even though it was in her bag all the time. She thought she’d looked for it everywhere. Calm down, she told herself. Take it slowly.

  ‘What was that?’ said Fletcher’s voice, coming from the kitchen.

  She didn’t realise she’d said the words out loud. That was another sign of madness: talking to yourself.

  ‘Nothing. I was just going. See you later.’

  She set off on her bike in a frenzy, went through a red light on Dalston Lane and almost collided with a van. It screamed to a halt and she ended up leaning against the front bumper with a fiery face screaming silent obscenities at her through his windscreen. She made a gesture of apology and set off more slowly and carefully. Her cheek throbbed with the memory of falling.

  It was infuriating. It felt like every traffic light from Hackney to Holborn turned red as she approached. She tried not to ask painful questions: what if the body had been found? What if somebody saw her coming out of the flat? And the fact that she was trying not to ask them meant she thought about them the whole way.

  Once again, she left her bike round the corner. There was no point in hovering in the street until it was supposedly safe. How would she know? Loitering outside, looking anxiously around, would be one way of being remembered. So she walked straight up to the street door keeping her head down in case an invisible camera was watching her, tapped in the code, went up the stairs, met nobody on the way, and let herself into the flat.

  She had thought that she wouldn’t need to look at the body again. She could just walk to the kitchen, grab the bangle and leave. But she had a terrible, vertiginous desire to go and see it again, to establish that it hadn’t all been a terrible dream. She didn’t give into it. She walked straight into the kitchen.

  The bangle wasn’t there.

  She couldn’t believe it. Its absence was like a hole in reality. She had been so sure. As she entered the kitchen, she had almost been stretching her hand out to pick it up. She closed her eyes. The memory of pulling the bangle off was so clear she could virtually feel it as it passed over her hand. Could it have been in the bathroom rather than the kitchen? She started to run but then heard her shoes clattering on the floor. If anyone was at home in the flat beneath, they would now have heard that someone was here. She stopped and walked as gently as she could to the bathroom. No, it wasn’t there either.

  She told herself to think. She could have put the bangle in a pocket. She felt in her jacket; of course it wasn’t there, she’d already known that. The jeans she’d worn were at home. She’d check them later. But she’d already looked there, and anyway, surely they were too tight for a bangle.

  Or she might have picked it up and put it down somewhere else in the flat. Where? She had been into every room in the flat, every cupboard, every drawer. She checked the surfaces first, then the bedside tables and under the bed. She started opening drawers but realised that was ridiculous. She walked along the corridor looking at the windowsills and then into the living room. And there he was.

  He was lying in the same position but he looked different. His eyes were cloudy now. His face was discoloured and blotchy and swollen. He looked like he had been beaten up. But she knew that the change was actually caused by what was happening inside his dead body. There was a smell also, very slightly sweet but in a bad way. She made herself breathe only through her mouth and not look at him, edging around him. She went back to the bathroom just to check she hadn’t missed it the first time. No. It really wasn’t there. Perhaps she had put it in the bin bag. It was possible. If she had done that, it would be fine. It would disappear with the rest of the rubbish.

  Another possibility was that she had taken it with her without realising it. That would be fine too. Just so long as it wasn’t in the flat.

  But what if it was in the flat? Could it be somewhere completely obvious and she just wasn’t seeing it? She knew that every minute she stayed there increased the possibility that something would go wrong. She needed to go. She took a tissue and wiped the few things she had touched, handles on doors and drawers.

  She was about to leave – she had raised her hand to open the front door – when she stopped. There was something odd about the flat. What was it? She thought and thought. She walked back to the living room. Suddenly she realised. It wasn’t what was there. I
t was what wasn’t there. The hammer. The blood-stained hammer that had killed Saul was gone. Someone else had been here. With a flash of horror, she wondered if they could still be here. No. She had been into every room.

  She was utterly confused but somehow it felt even more urgent to leave. Using the tissue, she opened the door and stepped out of the flat. Immediately she heard footsteps. At first she couldn’t tell where they were coming from. She moved her head around. They were coming from upstairs. As quietly as she could, she stepped back into the flat and pushed the door almost closed but not so far that it clicked shut. She waited, holding her breath, and heard the steps get louder, pass right in front of the door and continue down the stairs. It felt like an age until the street door opened and slammed shut. She stepped to the window and saw a man in a suit cross the road and disappear round the corner.

  She left the flat once more, closed the door and got out of the building without seeing anybody. She walked back to her bike and unlocked it but didn’t get on. She needed to think. Somebody took the hammer away. It could only be the killer. He – or she – must have suddenly thought that it was too risky to leave it. Did that mean that the killer also took the bangle? What possible reason could there be for that? She tried to think of other explanations. It was possible that she had taken the bangle without noticing and the killer had come back for the hammer. But she couldn’t think clearly. Her heart was beating too fast, she was breathing too quickly.

  Then she thought of something else: Saul’s body, lying on the floor, and what was happening to it in that flat with its central heating. She knew she had done a bad thing, finding the body and acting only to protect herself and her family. But it was still possible to do a right thing, or at least a part of a right thing. She could report it. But how?

  The obvious answer was to call from a phone box, if it was thirty years ago. She couldn’t remember when she had last used one but she knew that some still existed. She got out her phone and searched for phone boxes nearby. Russell Square.

  It took less than five minutes to get there. She locked up the bike and felt horribly conspicuous opening the door and stepping inside. It felt like any passer-by would be looking at her wondering what she was doing and remembering her. There was a notice next to the phone saying that emergency calls were free. That was something. She pulled her hand inside her sleeve, lifted the phone up and dialled 999. She assumed that calls were recorded, so took the tissue and put in front of her mouth.

  ‘What service?’ said the voice.

  ‘There’s a dead body.’

  ‘Name, please.’

  Neve slowly said the address and then replaced the receiver. She stepped out of the phone box with a feeling that now it really was going to start.

  She stood and looked around Russell Square. There were people sitting on the benches, even a few brave people sitting on the damp grass with their morning coffees. Over the previous twenty-four hours, whatever she had been saying, whatever she had been doing, Neve had been thinking of that body on the floor. She was the only person who knew. She corrected herself. No, there was one other person.

  Now, the woman she had just told would tell someone who would tell someone else. A car would be dispatched. Perhaps it was already on its way. They’d knock at the door and there’d be no answer. What did they do when that happens? Do they call a locksmith? Do they use a battering ram? Then they would find him.

  What Neve really felt like doing was going home and getting into bed and pulling the cover over her head and not coming out until all of this was over. Couldn’t she pretend to be ill? She seriously considered that for a moment, but quickly saw what would happen. Saul would be found dead. It would emerge that Neve Connolly had been away from the office on the day the murder was reported, claiming unconvincingly to be ill. Hiding under the duvet would be no protection at all.

  There was no getting away from it. She would have to get on with her life and behave the way an innocent person would behave. The fact that she was innocent – innocent at least of the murder – was no help at all.

  She got on her bike and headed back east, wobbling between buses and lorries. She stopped at lights and noticed on the pavement a white bike locked to a railing as a memorial to a cyclist who had died at that spot. Ghosts everywhere. In a flash, she imagined herself in an accident here, a car hitting her, an ambulance arriving, and she would have to explain why she was here, why she was approaching work from the wrong direction. It would be almost as bad as being caught in the flat. The thought hit her with a jolt of adrenaline, clearing her head as she cycled back along Theobalds Road and Clerkenwell Road and then turned off, just before the Old Street roundabout.

  She locked the bike up. She felt like she was going to walk onstage playing the part of herself. What did she normally do? She bought a coffee in the café along the street because that was what she usually did. Should she buy coffee for the rest of the office? No, that would be too memorable. What was crucial was that nobody said, ‘She seemed different that morning, as if something were on her mind.’

  She got in the lift with a couple of people she didn’t know and got out on the fourth floor, which was entirely occupied by Redfern Publishers. Most of it was open-plan – ranks of desks and computers and waist-high partitions – but there were large glass-walled rooms round the edge, one of which had been allocated to Neve and her friends when they moved here. They had imported some of their old things from Sans Serif, and Renata had insisted on putting some of their tatty posters up on the glass walls and bringing their old mugs with them. It was as if they were pretending nothing had changed, thought Neve. Gary in particular rarely ventured out of their room or made an effort to get on with the rest of his colleagues.

  To get to her office, Neve would have to walk past Saul’s office and then the office of his assistant, Katie. What was so difficult about that? As she passed Katie’s office she glanced through the door and saw it was empty. She was just feeling a sense of relief when she saw Katie coming towards her at the far end of the corridor, business-like in dark grey, walking briskly. Neve tried to compose her expression into something impassive.

  ‘Yes?’ Katie stopped in front of her, blocking her way.

  ‘What?’ said Neve.

  ‘You looked like you were about to say something.’

  Neve tried to think of the sort of thing she might normally be expected to say. ‘I was wondering if Saul was in today.’

  Katie’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Didn’t you get the email? He’s at a conference today and tomorrow. So he won’t be back till after the weekend.’

  ‘Yes, sorry, I forgot.’

  ‘But you could call him. Have you got his mobile number?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Neve. ‘It’s not important.’

  ‘Or is it something I can deal with?’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll talk to him when he gets back.’

  She walked past Katie towards her own office, and stood in the doorway to look in. Renata and Gary were already sitting at their desks. During the move, they had bagged the good desks, next to the window. It wasn’t the most beautiful view in the world: the permanently traffic-clogged roundabout and the bombastic apartment buildings beyond, but at least it was light.

  ‘Morning,’ she said.

  The two of them looked up. Neve had known them so long – twenty-five years, a quarter of a century – that she barely saw them anymore. They had become a part of her landscape. Now, in her stressed state, she glimpsed them as if she were seeing them for the first time. Renata’s curly hair that was the colour of horse chestnuts and used to fall past her shoulders was cut short and streaked with grey; her large, dark eyes were framed with little wrinkles. She was wearing a colourful, patterned sweater, the sleeves pulled up to her elbows. She was still lovely, thought Neve, with her small, soft body and her smooth skin and her expressive face. Gary was leaning over his computer screen. His hair was entirely grey and his beard was just a beard, not a fashi
on accessory like the men just up the road in Hoxton and Shoreditch. He was wearing a baggy, fawn-coloured shirt. Both of them seemed dressed in a style designed to tell the world: we’re not corporate, we’re different from everyone else, we don’t really belong here.

  ‘She didn’t do it,’ said Gary to Renata.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What?’ asked Neve.

  ‘We had a bet on. That you’d come in singing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s what you always do when one of us has a birthday,’ said Gary. ‘You come in singing “Happy Birthday”.’

  Yes, thought Neve with a stab of guilt, she did. And she usually brought flowers or a tin of biscuits, even a cake she’d baked.

  ‘Happy birthday,’ she said, walking over and kissing the top of Renata’s head, smelling the nicotine and the limey shampoo she’d used for as long as Neve could remember. ‘Sorry I didn’t sing. It’s been one of those mornings.’

  Neither of them asked what she meant, because they knew – or thought they did. She meant Mabel, she meant Fletcher; she meant last-minute homework and lunch boxes and PE kits and bills and leaking pipes and a lost wallet and a puncture and the guinea pig to attend to – oh fuck, the guinea pig, thought Neve. She hadn’t fed it.

  ‘No worries. It’s not a very distinguished birthday,’ said Renata. ‘You can sing tonight instead.’

  Tonight: the party, the little speech she had promised to make, the present.

  ‘Of course.’ She nodded energetically several times, made herself stop nodding.

  ‘You’ll arrive early, won’t you?’

  ‘I’ll try. Anyway, you always worry about parties until they start and then you have a great time.’

  ‘You mean I drink too much.’

  ‘You drink just the right amount. Where’s Tamsin?’

  ‘She’s having a shower,’ said Gary. ‘This running can’t be good for her. She came in looking like she’d finished a marathon.’