Paradise City (35 page)

Once, she had looked Natalie Kerrins up on Facebook. It turned out that she was married with two freckle-faced sons and worked as an estate agent in Basingstoke. When Esme clicked through the photographs, she took great satisfaction in realising that Natalie hadn’t aged well. Her hair was no longer glossy but hung heavily down to her shoulders. She sported an ill-advised fringe that served only to emphasise the chubbiness of her features. In one picture, she was wearing a sleeveless patterned dress that Esme had seen in Monsoon and the flesh on her arms was thick and loose like a rubbery slice of squid. Her husband was tall and stocky and wore a lot of rugby shirts. At Christmas time, Natalie had posted a photo of the two of them wearing matching jumpers and reindeer antlers with a happy face emoticon and the comment: ‘Happy Xmas to u and urs!!!!’

Looking at the Facebook profile of her one-time nemesis, Esme had felt a curious sense of loss. She had wasted so much time thinking Natalie Kerrins was a demonic harpy, hell-bent on the destruction of Esme’s sense of self, and yet here this woman was, living a life of averages with no idea of the disproportionate havoc her thowaway comment had wreaked. She probably didn’t even remember Esme Reade and her Cubist portrait. Probably didn’t even read the paper to know that Esme Reade had, in fact, turned out to be something. Had, in fact, proved Natalie Kerrins wrong.

At Sloane Square, Esme glances at her watch and sees that she’s now only five minutes behind schedule, which is perfectly respectable. Her phone pings. It is a text from her mother.

‘Have fun with Dominic! Love, Mum xxxx’

A sinking feeling. It dawns on Esme, later than it should have done, that Lilian is obviously viewing this as a blind date. It was nauseating to have reached the age of thirty and for your mother still to be trying to set you up. And Esme knows, without having to meet Dominic, exactly what he will be like: priggish, pleased with himself, the kind of man who tucks shirts into his jeans and wears loafers. Everyone her mother had ever tried to introduce her to had been like this: what Lilian would call ‘a nice boy’.

Daylesford Organic is on the Pimlico Road and rises out of the pavement like a gleaming edifice to poshness. There is a scattering of tables outside, hemmed in by neatly cut box hedges, where a handful of customers are sitting and bravely pretending not to be cold. Three women with long caramel-tinted hair, wearing Ray-Bans and navy cashmere wraps, are sipping on cappuccinos near the entrance, talking too loudly as if their conversation is a performance for a small but enraptured crowd.

‘Do you ever have bad-mascara days?’ asks one of them.

‘Yeah.’

‘Where it just doesn’t go on properly?’

‘Oh God yeah.’

‘And you’re, like, come on!’

‘Totally.’

Esme pushes the door open, her hand pressing against a rough-hewn handle carved to resemble the horns of an ancient beast roaming free across the moorland. Inside, everything is clean marble, blue-veined like the organic Stilton on sale at the cheese counter. Esme, in her grey jeans and her lightly frizzing hair, feels immediately as though she is cluttering up the clean lines of the space.

‘Can I help you?’ asks a waitress in a beige apron, embroidered discreetly with ‘Daylesford’ in looping cursive.

‘Actually I’m meeting someone . . .’ She scans the room and can’t see any obvious candidates.

‘Maybe upstairs?’ the waitress asks. Esme nods and makes her way up the polished white staircase, keeping one hand on the banister made from entwined birch twigs.

The second floor is filled with wooden communal tables and every available seat is taken. Esme begins to ask how long it will be to wait for a seat and whether she could put her name down when she feels a light touch on her shoulder.

‘Esme, is it?’

She turns round.

‘Yes.’

‘Hi, I’m Dom.’

He is tall, somehow taller than she expected, with a thatch of curly brown hair. Dom proffers his hand, then angles awkwardly for a kiss on the cheek, which she doesn’t notice in time so they end up doing an embarrassing half-dance of hands and kisses. His fingers are long, with square nails and tanned knuckles. His handshake is firm. She sneaks a quick glance at his clothes and notes that he is not wearing loafers or a tucked-in shirt, but dark brown boots, jeans and a grey sweater that has a hole in the cuff. She wonders if he might be gay.

He smiles at her and Esme realises that she hasn’t said anything and that the silence has gone on slightly too long to be comfortable.

‘I’ve got us a place over there—’ and he gestures towards the window where there is a table laid for two people overlooking the road outside. When he speaks, he leans forwards, as though she is a little old lady struggling with her hearing.

‘Great, thanks. I’m sorry I’m late.’

‘You’re not. I’m early. It’s a terrible habit.’

‘I had to come from Shepherd’s Bush,’ she says, and the words are out before she realises how dull she sounds.

He ruffles his hair.

‘Yeah, I’m so sorry about dragging you all this way. My mother thinks I’m incapable of looking after myself.’

Esme laughs. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got one of those myself.’

She perches on the edge of a stool and glances at the menu. She tries to concentrate on the options but is intently aware of his presence, the shape of him, the sound of his breathing, and she doesn’t know why. He smells of citrus.

‘I’m going to have a full English,’ he says and in one fluid motion he pushes the menu to one side, takes his phone out of his pocket and switches it onto silent. He grins at her, rolls his sleeves up. The watch on his wrist has a leather strap and an old-fashioned face, round and open like the one her grandfather used to wear.

‘Hungry?’ She can’t think of anything else to say. Internally, she is cursing herself.

He nods.

‘We had a heavy one last night. I need to carb-load. What are you having?’

‘Um, I thought I might go for the poached eggs.’ There is a silence as they wait for their order to be taken. She hears a smattering of rapid-fire French from the table behind them, followed by a baby’s piercing scream. Esme looks on as a harassed-looking man in a purple V-neck attempts to reason with a toddler.

‘Non, fais pas ça
,’ he is saying. Then, more firmly:
‘Qu’est-ce que je t’ai dit
?’

The toddler – a chubby girl with bows in her hair – stares at him, then continues to wail at a higher volume than before.

‘Wow,’ Dom says. ‘I’ve always thought that babies’ cries should be pitched at a frequency audible only to their parents. Nicer for the rest of us.’

Esme smiles. ‘You mean, like those dog whistles?’

‘Yeah, basically.’

He smiles, leans back in his chair and considers her. The pause draws out and he’s still looking at her. Esme feels a clamminess across her collarbone, the ridge of her nose. He seems to be analysing her, weighing her up. It is not flirting, exactly, it is something else, something more serious, and it makes her feel uncomfortable, as though he knows all her secrets and is trying to work out if they match up to what he sees in front of him. She is not used to such scrutiny. She wonders, briefly, if this is what her interviewees feel like.

‘So what were you up to last night?’ Esme asks for the sake of having something to say.

Again, he smiles – languorously, as if playing for time.

‘My girfriend’s flat-mate had a birthday party. It got messy.’

He runs his hand through his hair but the curls spring up as soon as the pressure is released. He seems uncomfortable and Esme wonders whether he has already been informed by the maternal grapevine that she’s a desperate spinster.

She scans the room for the waitress, wanting to get this brunch over with as soon as possible. Something about the way he looked at her made her feel she was making everything too obvious, that she was too easy to read, that he was poking fun at her.

Of course he already has a girlfriend. Stupid of her. And anyway, he wasn’t even her type. Too posh. Too sure of himself. Too . . . curly. A bitterness wells up within her. She thinks, without meaning to, of Dave. And then of Natalie Kerrins with her rugby-shirted husband. She is suddenly very tired.

Pushing the menu away, Esme decides on an Americano, no food. Let him have his fry-up if he wants – she’s not going to prolong this encounter unnecessarily. Esme looks up and meets Dom’s gaze with as much disinterest as she can muster and then she says, ‘So, you want to get into the media?’

Carol

She can hear them talking over the fence again. This time, it’s the woman with the brown hair and the broad shoulders, speaking with what Carol thinks is a mild Lancashire accent and the woman is on the phone, saying something about the need to keep the press informed and the fact that there’s a new bone fragment she wants to send to the lab and could they please treat this as a matter of urgency because she doesn’t need to remind the person on the other end of the line that there are now big fish involved higher up the food chain who don’t want to be kept waiting.

Mixed metaphors, Carol thinks, suppressing her tut of disapproval. Grammar is one of her things. Derek had bought her one of those stocking-filler books for Christmas once called
I Before E: A Pedant’s Guide to Language
. She kept it on the laundry basket in the downstairs toilet.

‘Absolutely not,’ the woman with the accent is saying now. ‘I don’t want the press to get hold of this or they’ll be all over us like flies over shit.’

Carol flinches. There’s no need for that, is there? Everyone seems to swear nowadays, throwing out profanities as casually as discarded apple cores. She is supposed to be watering her plants but can’t help listening in. There’s only a flimsy wooden fence between her garden and Alan’s, so it’s impossible to avoid hearing what’s going on. The fact that she has taken to watering her plants far more regularly than she used to in recent days is, Carol tells herself, neither here nor there. Besides, it has been sunny of late and the rhododendrons have a terrible thirst on them.

The policewoman on the other side of the fence speaks in a clipped tone and doesn’t say goodbye when the conversation is over, just clicks her phone off and puts it back in her pocket. How she can find her pocket given what she’s wearing, Carol has no idea. She has seen them coming and going from the upstairs bathroom window which overlooks Alan’s garden, or what’s left of it: a steady slow-moving stream of crinkly white figures. They are all in forensic suits like you see on the TV. Looking at them, Carol is reminded of the plastic sheeting you spread on the floor before painting a wall to keep the carpet clean. The policewomen resemble giant babies in oversized romper suits and they have masks over their faces which make her think of that picture of Princess Di visiting a hospital – the one that was printed in all the newspapers before lots of people criticised her for wearing too much eyeliner.

Carol’s mind wanders. It has a tendency to do this. The watering can is still in her hand, half-poised to pour, and she finds herself thinking of Diana, shining and beautiful in waiting-room magazines. Diana, long and sleek in a blue bathing costume on the deck of a yacht; Diana in a black evening gown, eyes glittering and hair swept back from her face; Diana sitting on a marble bench in front of the Taj Mahal, her shoulders too thin for her jacket; Diana before fame swallowed her up and spat her out, standing in front of a gate, legs set slightly apart so that the sun shone through the thinness of her skirt.

Poor thing could never do anything right.

When the princess died, Carol had got on the District Line and walked to Kensington Palace to leave a bunch of flowers. Lilies, they’d been. Beautiful, sad white lilies that had stained the cuff of her blouse with pollen. Vanessa had made fun of her when she found out.

‘You didn’t know her, Mum,’ she’d said. ‘It’s not like she was your friend or anything,’ and Carol hadn’t bothered replying because it seemed to her that Vanessa would never understand that you could still be touched by death even if you’d never met someone; you could still feel upset by the loss, by the pointlessness of it, and by the thought of those two shining young boys left without their mother.

She’d been so pleased when William got married to that lovely girl. She’d watched the whole thing on the BBC and wept when she saw Kate in her wedding dress for the first time.

‘Bag it up and send it to the lab.’ The woman’s voice from the other side of the fence sails over and brings Carol’s reminiscence to a juddering halt. She is jerked back to the present. Back to the extraordinary realisation that, for over a year, she has unwittingly been living next door to a murderer who buried a body in his flower bed.

Ever since that day when she and Archie had made their gruesome discovery, Carol has found herself swinging between two states of mind. On the one hand, there was the nauseating shock of comprehension that her neighbour was a cold-blooded killer. She went back over every single occasion she had invited Alan in for tea and biscuits, shivering at the realisation that, with each dunking of a chocolate HobNob, she could have been dicing with death. At least part of the discomfort Carol now feels stems from the fact that her ability to read people has been found to be conspicuously lacking. How could she not have known? She asks herself this again and again, the question chasing itself around like a dog snapping at butterflies. How could she not have suspected? Worse – how could she possibly have thought about setting him up with her own daughter?