Paradise City (39 page)

More and more, she believes this to be true. Now, when she thinks of Uganda, she feels fondness where before there was a lattice of bitterness and fear. As for Susan, she has packaged up the idea of her and put it aside. Beatrice has taken down her girlfriend’s photograph and stored it in the bottom of her chest of drawers, wrapped up in a sheet of newspaper and pressed flat against the wood under a pile of T-shirts.

She is taken aback at how easy it was to do this. It is not that she is unfeeling. It is that she no longer has the energy to feel. Her love for Susan still exists, but it has been built over: a lake filled in, a river dammed, the waves halted, the flow of her affection redirected so that it no longer torments her with its current.

Instead, she has Tracy. And she has her job. For the moment, this is all she needs.

At her desk, Beatrice logs on to the computer (password: matoke) and waits for her email to download. She punches a code into the phone and takes it off voicemail. She notices her postcard of Barcelona has fallen down and sticks it up where she can see it, making sure the edges are nice and straight, bending back the dog-ears. The computer makes a whirring noise like the purr of a mechanical cat. She takes her coat off and slides it onto the back of her ergonomic seat, then crouches down to put her footrest in the right place. The cleaners always move it around at night which annoys her. Beatrice catches herself as she thinks this: has she really become a person who complains about cleaners? She used to be one of them, not so long ago.

She glances over the partition to see if Tracy has got in yet. There is no sign of her, which is odd. Tracy normally arrives half an hour before everyone else to turn on all the lights and raise the blinds. Beatrice starts to open the batch of letters the postal room has left on her in-tray. She likes it when customers send letters as opposed to emails. It appeals to an old-fashioned part of her and it makes her think they must have a proper grievance, if they’ve taken the trouble to put pen to paper and to buy a stamp and then to walk to the postbox and send it.

It is just as she is about to open the first envelope that she hears Tracy’s rapid footsteps coming up behind her. Beatrice already knows the sound of her walk – brisk and familiar along the carpet tiles. She turns in her chair, ready to greet her with a broad smile, but then she sees Tracy’s face, crumpled and tearful, and the smile drops. She stands, for want of anything better to do, and wonders what has happened.

‘Oh Bea,’ Tracy says, the words coming out in gulps. ‘Something dreadful . . . just dreadful.’

Beatrice goes to her and puts a hand on Tracy’s shoulder. She wants to hug her but at the same time draws back. She is aware, all the time, of people getting the wrong impression.

In the end, it is Tracy who rushes towards her and then Beatrice has no choice but to put her arms around her. She can feel Tracy’s heart pitter-pattering through her chest. She is crying, but in a small way. There is no sobbing; no violent rush of tears. Beatrice places the flat of her hand lightly on Tracy’s back.

‘Tracy, what is it?’ she says, trying to keep the worry out of her voice. A thousand desperate scenarios play through her mind. A terminal cancer diagnosis. A house fire in which she has lost everything. A discovery that Beatrice is not who she thinks she is. ‘Tell me.’

Tracy draws back and dabs at her eyes with a balled-up piece of tissue. There is a globule of mascara on the rim of her eyelid and Beatrice wants to reach out and wipe it away. She has never seen Tracy in such disarray. She is normally so immaculate, so in control of herself.

‘It’s Ada,’ Tracy says and when she speaks, her lips quiver at the corners. ‘They’ve found her body.’

Howard

T
hey told him on a Tuesday. He knows this because he was in the car with Jocelyn on his way to the office, and the radio news announcer said the time and date just before the morning headlines and Howard was listening intently to hear what the Chancellor would say in his spending review and then his mobile rang.

So much else about that morning has already blurred and warped in his mind, coalescing into a slow fog, an impenetrable opaqueness of thought, but he will always remember the radio announcer with perfect clarity. For weeks, the detail of that moment will plague him. He will have dreams about it, picturing the announcer in a black-and-white 1950s newsreel with a jaunty fedora, bending towards an old-fashioned microphone. He will replay each tiny inflection of the announcer’s voice with absolute precision: the intake of breath, the sonorous, modulated tone, the incremental pause that implied a full-stop at the natural end of a sentence and then the five electronic pips that marked the turning of the hour as the minutes passed and the outside world kept on moving, wholly and complacently ignorant of the fact that somewhere in central London, in the back of a chauffeur-driven car on his way to the office, the internal structure of Sir Howard Pink’s world, all the beliefs, the memories, the love, the hate, the kindness, the nostalgia, the exhaustion, the hope, the spite, the jealousy, the grief, the rage – all the experiences he had collected through a lifetime of breathing in and out, out and in – were collapsing into a cloud of dust.

He could see it happen almost as an out-of-body experience: the entire landscape of his soul set out as a skyline of silhouetted towers, the buildings vibrating like a mirage as the lever was pulled and then imploding with the brutal force of the blast. Because none of it meant anything any more. Those teetering monuments he had built up to shelter his own self-importance: it had all been a trick, an illusion, a con. All that was left was rubble. Grey dust. The odd piece of ripped paper, snatched up by the breeze.

On the phone, they asked him to come into the police station. He wanted to refuse, to get them to come to his home instead, but then he thought there might be a reason for it – there might be a chance to see Ada. They might, after eleven years of waiting, have discovered her. He told Jocelyn to drive to the station as quickly as he could and the chauffeur, seeing Sir Howard’s face, wordlessly pressed his foot down on the accelerator so that the big car seemed to float through the traffic like a boat pushing off from a riverbank.

And when they got to the police station in Wandsworth – a strange wooden building on a busy one-way system squeezed next to a carpet shop – he was still telling himself this while at the same time feeling it wasn’t true. He knew that she was dead. The instinct had been there since Ada disappeared, it was just that he had never allowed himself to acknowledge it and, every time he had met his wife’s gaze, he could see the same loss written there, so that, in the end, he couldn’t even look at Penny’s face without fear and he had pushed her away and married someone who couldn’t ever begin to know.

Howard had lived with this self-imposed duality for years. It was the only way he knew how to be. Even when the police had come to his house asking questions a few days ago – even then, he had told himself one thing (that Ada would be found alive) while believing quite another (that she had been dead for years). He was frighteningly good at lying to himself.

He got out of the car, sapped of strength. Like an old man, he uncurled himself slowly onto the pavement. The light was too bright. He wished he had a stick to lean on.

‘Would you like me to come in with you, Sir Howard?’ Jocelyn asked.

‘No,’ he said automatically. ‘You need to find somewhere to park.’

In the station, the first person he saw was Penny. She was sitting on a plastic chair wearing a navy skirt and a cream cardigan buttoned all the way up. Her eyes were closed, lids brushed with light brown powder that got darker at the corners. A small handbag rested on her lap. She looked as she always had done – unobtrusive, gentle.

He touched her on the shoulder and she sprang up and hugged him and she shook in his arms but she didn’t cry and without saying anything, he was relieved that he knew exactly how she was feeling and that she knew too. She knew what lay inside him.

There was a detective in plain clothes who took them into a side room to tell them they believed they had found Ada. That they were still investigating and that it was a complex process, given the time-frame they were dealing with, but that all the evidence so far suggested she had been murdered. It was Penny who asked how. Strangled, the detective said.

Penny started gasping for air. Howard held her hand, told her to breathe slowly in and out. After a while, she began to moan. There were still no tears, from either of them.

Howard asked to see her.

‘I’d like to see my daughter,’ he said and his voice seemed to come from the other side of a cave.

The detective nodded and then spoke.

‘You do understand that, at this stage, there isn’t a body in the conventional sense? What we are dealing with here is’ – the detective looked uncomfortable – ‘remains.’

Penny flinched.

‘I understand,’ Howard replied. His words cracked like dry leather. ‘I’d still like to see her.’

‘Of course you would,’ the detective said. ‘We’ll arrange that for you.’

Hours passed, or maybe it was only a few minutes. A lifetime, no time. The passing of the day acquired a peculiar elasticity.

At some point, they were told all the details of the case including the prime suspect’s name and background. Howard wanted to know everything but as soon as he was told, he found he had forgotten and needed to ask the same questions over again. Penny stayed silent for much of it, head bowed, twisting a cotton handkerchief in her hands. He noticed the handkerchief. She was one of the only women he knew who still used fabric handkerchiefs. He felt reassured that, in the midst of all this, Penny hadn’t changed. Penny was constant: a solid shape in the mist.

The police were patient. Endlessly patient. They suggested a visit to the site where she was found, if that would help. A family liaison officer was given to them. His name was Keith and he spoke quietly, with a soothing professional calm. Keith brought them sugary tea in plastic cups and then, as the morning slid into the afternoon, he gave them sandwiches that stayed untouched in their plastic containers on the table in front of them. One of the sandwiches was cheese and pickle. The other was ham and lettuce. Penny made a half-hearted attempt to open one of them, then left it there. After a while, the bread curled brown at the corners.

They went to the garden where Ada’s body had been discovered. It was a next-door neighbour, Keith said, who had first raised the alarm. They walked up the road and Keith lifted the red-and-white-striped police cordon so that they could get underneath and there was a barrage of camera flashes and a low, dull sound of voices asking questions that Howard couldn’t process and he could hear, dimly, Keith saying, ‘Show some respect,’ and a part of him still found the space to be grateful for that.

There were two uniformed officers guarding the front door of a modern terraced house and it all looked so pedestrian from the outside, so normal, as they opened the wooden gate at the bottom of the path and were ushered through by Keith’s guiding arm. Howard stepped into the hallway and his limbs felt heavy, as if he were walking along a wet stretch of beach, his feet sinking into saturated puddles of seawater that threatened to suck him under. Penny was clutching on to him. He had to keep going for her sake. He had to stay strong.

In the house, there were police everywhere, wearing white suits, brushing powder on bits of furniture, taking photographs. When Howard and Penny walked in, they all stopped what they were doing and stood silently while they passed. They were wearing masks and all Howard could see were their respectful eyes.

On the wall in the hallway there was a framed picture, a bad reproduction of a painting Howard had seen once of Jesus holding a lamp. It had been knocked askew and Howard wondered if the killer had left it like that or if one of the police had let their shoulder brush against it and not realised.

They walked on, through the hallway and into the kitchen which stank of rotting food and unwashed dishes, and then out of the glass doors and onto what would once have been a patio except now all the paving slabs had been removed and some of them lay in a pile of splintered pieces to one side. He thought of the cairns you find on the top of mountains, each stone left by a passing traveller.

In the garden, there was a large white tent that smelled of sweat and chemicals. The grass had been churned up so that curls of mud lay under their feet like wood shavings. At the farthest end of the tent was a dug-out ditch, about 7 foot by 4, overlooked by two large lamps, beaming light into the blackness. At the sight of it, Penny pulled back. She was saying something, crying, and after a while he realised it was the word ‘No’, repeated over and over again, an incantation.

No no no no no.

He prised Penny’s hand off his wrist and handed her over to Keith and he couldn’t say why exactly but he kept moving towards the edge of the ditch, drawn ineluctably to it like a piece of driftwood swept into the current of a vast and bubbling waterfall. He needed to see. He needed to look. He needed the certainty of knowing.

When he got there, he stood underneath the lamp, feeling the hotness of the bulb against the back of his neck. He breathed in, holding the air in his throat as if it were a thing that might break, and then he forced himself to peer into the hole. He saw clumps of soil, pebbles, fragments of twig and leaf. He saw a worm wriggling into the dankness of the earth.