Lasting Damage (6 page)

‘Why a property website, and why Cambridge?’ Sam K asks me. ‘Are you thinking of moving there?’

‘Definitely not,’ says Kit with feeling. ‘We’ve only just put the finishing touches to this place, six years after buying it. I want to spend at least that long enjoying it. I’ve told Connie: if we have a baby in the next six years, it’ll have to bed down in a filing cabinet drawer.’ He grins and reaches for a biscuit. ‘I didn’t do all that work only to sell up and let someone else get the benefit. Plus we run a business that’s based here, and Connie got a bit carried away with the headed stationery, so we can’t move until we’ve written at least another four thousand letters.’

I know what’s going to happen before it happens: Sam K is going to ask about Nulli. Kit will answer at length; it’s impossible to explain our work quickly, and my husband is nothing if not a lover of detail. I will have to wait to talk about the dead woman.

Connie got a bit carried away.

Did he say that deliberately, to plant the idea in Sam K’s mind that I’m an easily-carried-away sort of person? Someone who orders six times more headed notepaper than she needs might also hallucinate a dead body lying in a pool of blood.

I listen as Kit describes our work. For the past three years, Nulli’s twenty-odd full-time staff have been working for the London Allied Capital banking group. The US government is in the process of prosecuting the group, which, like many UK banks, has a long history of breaking American rules about dealing with sponsors of terrorism, and unwittingly allowing blacklisted people and companies to carry out wire-transfer transactions in the US in dollars. London Allied Capital is currently bending over backwards to right the wrong, ingratiate itself with OFAC, the American office of foreign asset control, and minimise the eventual damage, which will almost certainly be a multi-million-dollar fine. Nulli was taken on to build data-filtering systems that will enable the bank to unearth all the questionable transactions that lie hidden in its history, so that it can come clean to the US Department of Justice.

Like everyone Kit tells, Sam K looks impressed and confused in equal parts. ‘So do you have a base in London, then?’ he asks. ‘Or do you commute?’

‘Connie’s based here, I’m half and half,’ says Kit. ‘I rent a flat in Limehouse – a box with a bed in it, basically. As far as I’m concerned, I only have one home, and that’s Melrose Cottage.’ He glances at me as he says this. Does he expect a round of applause?

‘I can see that a small flat in London would have a job competing with this place.’ Sam K looks around our lounge. ‘It’s got bags of character.’ He turns to study the framed print on the wall behind him – a photograph of King’s College Chapel, with a laughing girl sitting on the steps. Does he know he’s looking at a picture of Cambridge? If he does, he says nothing.

The print was a present from Kit and I’ve always hated it. On the mount, at the bottom, someone has written ‘4/100’. ‘That’s not a very good mark,’ I said when Kit first gave it to me. ‘Four per cent.’

He laughed. ‘It’s the fourth in a run of a hundred prints, you fool. There are only a hundred of these in the world. Isn’t it beautiful?’

‘I thought you didn’t like mass-produced things,’ I said, determinedly ungrateful.

He was hurt. ‘The handwritten “4/100” makes it unique. That’s why prints are numbered.’ He sighed. ‘You don’t like it, do you?’

I realised how selfish I was being and pretended that I did.

‘My wife calls houses like this “camera-ready”,’ Sam K says. ‘The minute I stepped over your threshold, I felt inferior.’

‘You should see the insides of our cars,’ Kit tells him. ‘Or rather, our two dustbin-spillover areas on wheels. I’ve thought about leaving them on the pavement next to the wheelie bin on collection day, doors open – maybe the council’d take pity on us.’

I stand up. Blood rushes to my head and the room tilts, blurs. I feel as if the different parts of my body are detaching from one another, breaking off and floating away. My head fills with a woolly throbbing. This keeps happening. My GP has no idea what the cause might be. I’ve had blood tests, scans, everything. Alice, my homeopath, thinks it’s a physical manifestation of emotional distress.

It takes a few seconds for the dizziness to pass. ‘You might as well go,’ I say to Sam K, as soon as I’m able to speak. ‘You obviously don’t believe me, so why should we both waste our time?’

He looks at me thoughtfully. ‘What makes you think I don’t believe you?’

‘I might be delusional but I’m not stupid,’ I snap at him. ‘You’re sitting there eating biscuits, chatting about wheelie bins and interior décor . . .’

‘It helps me to find out a little about you and Kit.’ He’s unruffled by my outburst. ‘I want to know who you are as well as what you saw.’

The holistic approach
. Alice would be on his side.

‘I saw nothing.’ Kit shrugs.

‘That’s not true,’ I tell him. ‘You didn’t see
nothing
– you saw a lounge with no woman’s body in it. That’s not nothing.’

‘Why a property website, Connie?’ Sam K asks again. ‘Why Cambridge?’

‘A few years ago we thought about moving there,’ I say, unable to look him in the eye. ‘We decided not to, but . . . sometimes I still think about it, and . . . I don’t know, it was a spur of the moment thing – there was no particular reason behind it. I look up all sorts of strange things on the internet when I’m restless and can’t sleep.’

‘So, last night, you logged onto Roundthehouses and . . . what? Talk me through it, step by step.’

‘I searched for properties for sale in Cambridge, saw 11 Bentley Grove, called up the details . . .’

‘Did you look at any other houses?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? What made you pick 11 Bentley Grove?’

‘I don’t know. It was third on the list that came up. I liked the look of it, so I clicked on it.’ I sit down again. ‘First I looked at the photographs of the rooms, and then I saw there was a virtual tour, so I thought I might as well have a look at that too.’

Kit reaches over and squeezes my hand.

‘How much was it on for?’ Sam K asks.

Why does he want to know that? ‘1.2 million.’

‘Would that be affordable for you?’

‘No. Not even close,’ I say.

‘So you have no plans to move to Cambridge, and 11 Bentley Grove would be out of reach price-wise, but you were still interested enough to take the virtual tour, even after you’d looked at the photographs?’

‘You must know what it’s like.’ I try not to sound defensive. ‘You find yourself clicking on one thing after another. Not for any good reason, just . . .’

‘She was wilfing,’ Kit tells Sam K. ‘Wilf as in “What was I Looking For?” – aimless web-surfing. I do it all the time, when I should be working.’ He’s covering for me. Does he expect me to be grateful for his support? It’s his fault that I’ve had to make up a story.
I’m not the liar here
.

‘All right,’ says Sam K. ‘So you took the virtual tour of 11 Bentley Grove.’

‘The kitchen came up first. The picture kept turning – it made my eyes feel tired, so I closed them, and then when I opened them I saw all this . . . red. I realised I was looking at the lounge, and there was a woman’s body—’

‘How did you know it was the lounge?’ Sam K cuts me off.

I don’t mind the interruption. It calms me, pulls me out of the horror that’s still so vivid in my mind, and back into the present. ‘I’d seen it in one of the photographs – it was the same room.’ Haven’t I just told him I looked at the photographs first? Is he trying to catch me out?

‘But there was no woman’s body and no blood in the photograph, correct?’

I nod.

‘Let’s leave aside the blood and the body for a second. In every other respect, the virtual tour’s lounge was the same as the lounge in the photograph, yes?’

‘Yes. I’m almost sure. I mean, I’m as sure as I can be.’

‘Describe it.’

‘What’s the point?’ I ask, frustrated. ‘You can log onto Roundthehouses and see it for yourself. Why don’t you ask me to describe the woman?’

‘I know this is hard for you, Connie, but you have to trust that anything I ask, it’s for a good reason.’

‘You want me to describe the lounge?’ I feel as if I’m at a kids’ party, playing a stupid game.

‘Please.’

‘White walls, beige carpet. A fireplace at the centre of one wall, tiles around it. I couldn’t see the tiles in detail, but I think they had some kind of flower pattern on them. They were too old-fashioned for the room.’ I realise this only as I hear myself say it, and feel relieved. Kit might choose tiles like that for our house, which was built in 1750, but never for a modern house like 11 Bentley Grove that can’t be more than ten years old. He believes new buildings should be wholeheartedly contemporary, inside and out.

Therefore 11 Bentley Grove is nothing to do with him.

‘Go on,’ says Sam K.

‘Alcoves on either side of the chimney breast. A silver L-shaped sofa with red embroidery on it, a chair with funny wooden arms, a coffee table with a glass top and flowers in a sort of horizontal display case under the glass – blue and red flowers.’
To match the tiles
. There was something else, something I can’t call to mind. What was it? What else did I see, while the room was slowly circling? ‘Oh, and a map above the fireplace – a framed map.’ That wasn’t it, but I might as well mention it.
What else?
Should I tell Sam K there was something else but I don’t know what? Is there any point?

‘A map of?’ he asks.

‘I couldn’t see – it was too small in the picture. In the top left-hand corner there were some shields – about ten maybe.’

‘Shields?’

‘Like upside-down gravestones.’

‘You mean crests?’ says Kit. ‘Like when a family has a crest?’

‘Yes.’ That’s it. I couldn’t think of the word. ‘Most of them were colourful and patterned, but one was empty – just an outline.’

Was the empty crest the missing detail? I could pretend it was, but I’d be kidding myself. My mind took something else from that room, something it won’t put back.

‘Anything else?’

‘A dead woman in a pool of blood,’ I say, hating the belligerence in my voice. Why am I so angry?
Because you’re powerless
, Alice would say.
We manufacture anger to give ourselves the illusion of power when we feel weak and helpless
.

At last, I hear the words I’ve been waiting for. ‘Describe the woman,’ Sam K says.

Words begin to pour out of me, an uncontrollable flow. ‘When I saw her, and all that blood, when I realised what I was looking at, I looked down at myself – that was the first thing I did. I panicked. For a second I thought I was looking at a picture of myself – I looked down to check I wasn’t bleeding. I didn’t understand it afterwards – why would I do that? She was lying on her front – I couldn’t see her face. She was small, petite, my size and build. She had dark hair, same colour as mine, straight like mine. It was . . . messy, sort of fanned out, as if she’d fallen and . . .’ I shudder, hoping I don’t need to spell it out: dead women can’t make adjustments to their hair.

‘I couldn’t see her face, and I imagined – just for a second, until I got my bearings – that she was me, that I was the one lying there. Stop writing,’ I hear myself say.
Too loud
. ‘Can’t you just listen, and make notes afterwards?’

Sam K puts down his notebook and pen.

‘I don’t want to build it up into more than it was,’ I say. ‘I knew she wasn’t me, of course I did, but . . . it was as if my perception played a trick on me. It must have been the shock. She was lying in the most blood I’ve ever seen. It was like a big red rug under her. At first I thought it couldn’t be blood because there was so much of it, it covered about a third of the room, but then I thought . . . Well, you must know. You must have seen dead people lying in their own blood, people who’ve bled to death.’