Paradise City (40 page)

He thought about the fact that every tiny molecule, each plaited strand of genetic material, every minuscule hereditary quirk bequeathed by generations of Pinks whom Ada had never known – all of it, which had together created the infinitesimal subtlety of what his daughter was – had been shattered into a million scraps of absence. The entirety of her, the sheer beauty of that crazily complex inherited construct, had gone, had been snatched away, stolen, extinguished, murdered.

He fell to his knees and heaved with the horror of it. He imagined her struggling. He felt her terror. He despised himself for not being there to protect her. He remembered her smile and her touch and the way, as a child, that she wanted the light left on at night.

Ada.

And then, his vision blanked.

Now here he is, uncomfortably balanced on the lowest stool his housekeeper could find, watching the mourners come to pay their respects. He is sitting shiva for his daughter. The reality of it hasn’t struck him yet. He is unable to grasp what has happened, unable to come to terms with the unnaturalness of a parent carrying out this act of mourning for their only child.

He has entered into a period of inward reflection and finds he cannot speak. The words don’t exist. There is no way to describe the million jagged edges of his thoughts, the dislocating awareness that this is the end when for so long he has lived in a state of suspension.

There are people who don’t understand, who think it must come as some kind of relief to know, at last, what happened to her. He can see the logic. One part of his thinking mind appreciates it makes sense and acknowledges that he himself once felt like this – that he would rather know, whatever the truth of it might be.

But the rest of him, the larger part that is not governed by rationality, is bewildered. He is lost, blindfolded, his hands thrashing uselessly in front of him as he tries to make his way through overgrown thickets, studded with thorns. He is a raft cut adrift at sea, buffeted by the waves that spool outwards from a listing shipwreck. He is alive and there seems no point to his continued existence.

And yet he carries on.

Now, he is sitting here, conscious of the ache in his bones, watching the silent guests push the door open and come to sit by him. His non-Jewish friends arrive bearing extravagant flower arrangements and handwritten cards. Bradley Minchin comes. So does Mike, the betting CEO whose surname he can never remember. Tracy arrives with two Tupperware boxes filled with the home-made chocolate brownies which she knows he loves. She looks at him and her face grows pale and he gets up from his stool and hugs her. She is wearing the silver chain with the single pearl he gave her once, to mark ten years of working as his PA, and he remarks on it and thanks her for being here and she tells him how she remembers Ada coming into the office with fairy cakes and how she’ll never forget her, ever, and that he must take as long as he needs off work and not rush back and she will deal with his diary and inform the relevant people that he’s on compassionate leave. He nods and does not resist even though he knows he will return to work as soon as he is physically able to do so because it is the only thing, apart from Penny, which makes him remember who he is. It is the only constant. A refuge.

The Jewish visitors do not speak. In the afternoon, Mark Steiner walks through the door. He is the CEO of Steiner Supermarkets and he has come to pay his respects even though, the last time he met Howard, they’d argued about whether the austerity cuts were damaging to business (Howard said no; Mark said yes) and they hadn’t parted on good terms. Rebecca Spero, the eloquent and impassioned head of an organisation that lobbied to get more women on the boards of FTSE 100 companies, arrives shortly afterwards. She is always trying to persuade Paradiso to appoint more women to senior positions and Howard is always promising to do so and then never acting on it because he doesn’t believe in quota systems but thinks if women are good enough, they’ll make it anyway, and despite his constant prevarication, despite the fact that she knows she will never change his mind, Rebecca Spero is here. He is deeply touched that she would make the effort.

Mark and Rebecca come and take a seat next to him without a word. Mark is hunched over on a foot-stool, his gangly limbs bent out of shape like a large spider and, for a moment, Howard is amused by the vision of one of the world’s most powerful businessmen attempting to cling on to his dignity as he grapples with a seat that is far too small for him. Then the moment passes and Howard is left with the same shivering ache as before. As he watches the flash of lightness recede, he wishes he could get it back. Will anything ever be funny again?

He meets Mark and Rebecca’s gaze and nods to show his gratitude. There is a relief in knowing no one expects him to talk. Theresa offers them a bowl of hard-boiled eggs and cherry tomatoes which they both refuse. Rebecca has tears in her eyes. Mark reaches across and clasps Howard’s hand. Howard tries to smile.

After a while, Howard is surprised to see that Mark is crying. His shoulders shake and he lets the tears fall onto his trousers, leaving irregular circles of moisture on the fabric. He has two daughters, Howard recalls. Younger than Ada. Their whole lives ahead of them.

Howard has never been observant, but he is grateful now to have a religious ritual into which he can retreat. He has been careful to do everything the way it should be done. He has asked that the front door be left on the latch so that guests can come and go at will without pressing the security buzzer. Tracy arranged for two security guards to stand at the outside gate and ensure no journalists got through. Inside the house, he has overseen the covering of every mirror with black cloth. He has not shaved or washed. He has pinned a torn ribbon to his jacket. He is wearing a yarmulke.

Claudia has kept a respectful distance. She doesn’t understand why, after years of self-declared atheism, her husband has suddenly rediscovered his spiritual side but she tries hard to be sympathetic. When he first called from the police station to tell her they’d found Ada, she had immediately offered to come and be with him but Howard hadn’t wanted her there. It seemed right that it was Penny instead who comforted him. It seemed right that the two of them, the ones who had brought their daughter into being, the ones who had let her down in some indefinable way, should face their failure alone.

It had been after midnight when Jocelyn had driven him home but Claudia had waited up for him. When he walked into the sitting room, the fire was on. His new wife – the one who always seemed new even when she wasn’t – stood in front of the mantelpiece in a silk dressing gown. She didn’t know whether to come to him or not. She was nervous, he could see that.

‘I’m so sorry, Howie,’ Claudia said and she started to walk towards him but he shrank back without meaning to and she started to cry, and he felt sickened by her tears which had no purpose and no reason and were only for show.

‘Why are you crying?’ he asked. ‘You didn’t even know her.’

He had turned, left the room and shut the door behind him.

The following day, as he made preparations for shiva, Claudia wanted to be helpful but he couldn’t find the energy to reach out to her. In the end, he suggested she make herself busy elsewhere and she seized on this gratefully and left. Howard was relieved. It wasn’t that he felt irritated by her, not any more. It was that all the emotion he had been wasting on anger or resentment had been siphoned out of him. There was no space for inconsequentiality. There was no room for any feeling other than loss.

As the guests arrive, Claudia passes round plates of food with manicured hands – mini-bagels, bowls of lentils, sweet round pastries. She has dressed dramatically for the occasion in a corseted black skirt from Alexander McQueen and high, patent-leather heels with red soles. He can see her struggling to find the right facial expression, experimenting first with a delicate frown, then a sad smile, then a familiar vacuity onto which the relevant reaction can be projected by whomever she happens to be speaking to. He feels, in spite of himself, a wave of fondness. Because he knows now it will end. He can no longer pretend.

Penny is not there. Howard had wanted her to come but she said it wouldn’t seem right and she didn’t want to encroach on Claudia’s territory. Besides, she wasn’t Jewish and he knew she’d rather wait to have a proper memorial service when the time was right. Non-denominational, she said, so that anyone could come if they wanted to. He understood, didn’t he? And Howard did. It would all happen in good time, he said.

He hasn’t eaten all day. He picks up a mini-bagel, filled with cream cheese and smoked salmon, but the smell of it turns his stomach and he puts it back on the platter. He hasn’t cried, either. Not since that visit to the morgue to say his final goodbye to Ada. Not since then.

The police had taken him to the morgue in the evening, after they’d dropped Penny back at her flat in Fulham. He had a memory of that night he knew he would never share with anyone else. It couldn’t be expressed and it couldn’t be unseen and it would haunt him now until he died.

He had been determined to visit Ada for one last time; had insisted on it in spite of Keith saying that it might upset him. He hadn’t known what to expect, although the police did their best to try and warn him. But when he got to the morgue, the strip lighting and the sterile chrome metal trays confused him. Howard had imagined a funeral parlour, with soft music playing and a bed with sheets and flowers. Stupid of him, really. After eleven years, there wasn’t going to be anything of Ada left behind. Especially not after what the detective had told him about the murderer throwing fistfuls of maggots over her corpse. Especially not after that.

But when, in the morgue, they said it was Ada in front of him he thought at first there had been some terrible mistake. It was a collection of bones. Not even a full skeleton. Two ribs. Half an arm. A few fingers. And her skull: smaller than he’d imagined and uglier too, with none of the softness of her real face. A faint crack on the top of her head, where her parting would have been. Part of her jaw missing. No heart. No lungs. No skin.

He buried his face in the palm of his hand so that they would not see him weep. But after a while, the tears were coming so fast that it seemed pointless to disguise it.

Keith offered him a stack of tissues.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.

When they finally led him out of that cold, clinical space, Howard sensed a pure, stabbing jolt of anger. He could feel his veins pumping and throbbing, as though his bloodstream had become corrupted by a liquid cloud of rage. He could sense it thickening into black, sticky clots.

He started shouting and swearing, his limbs flailing uselessly as the police held him back. He thought of what that bastard had done to his daughter and he wanted him dead. He had never experienced such distilled hate. An electric surge of it coursed through him. Every nerve ending, every filament of muscle seemed to burst into simultaneous flame. It felt too much to bear and, at the same time, it had to be borne. This was his fate. This is what it meant. And in the midst of it all, from the depths of this riotous collision of thought, was Keith’s voice: calm, clear, certain.

‘We’ll find him, sir,’ Keith said. ‘We will.’

Esme

T
he
Tribune
newsroom is in overdrive. Ada Pink’s identity is confirmed on Friday evening, which means the entire section has to be redesigned in under twenty-four hours. A guilty frisson of excitement spreads through the office. The sound of typing becomes a frantic metronome. There are large television screens on each wall, filtering the muted words of every major news channel into the office. Polystyrene cups of tea are left to cool. Ringing phones are answered with a swift, one-syllable ‘Yes?’. There is no extraneous chatter and yet it feels as though they are able to communicate and move telepathically as one. Every word that is written seems to emerge from the depths of a synchronised, collective consciousness. They are a multi-headed beast, a fearsome hydra of news.

They had suspected since this morning that it was Ada Pink, ever since Cathy had come back with her scoop: an exclusive, sit-down interview with the woman who had made the discovery while watering her neighbour’s plants.

Dave had whooped with delight when he heard.

‘It’s almost too good to be true,’ he said when Cathy told him. ‘Tripping over the remains of one of the most famous missing persons in the country while watering the wisteria.’

‘Jasmine,’ Cathy interjected.

‘Whatever,’ Dave said. ‘Write it up at 1,500 words. Loads of colour about the old dear, the fact she never suspected bla bla bla, he seemed perfectly nice, et cetera, never had any trouble from him but little did she know she was living next door to a cold-blooded killer. You’re a pro, you know the kind of thing.’

Cathy nodded. ‘What about the Ada Pink line? I know it’s her. The look she got in her eyes when I mentioned Ada’s name – it was obvious.’

Dave hesitated. There was an undone button at the bottom of his shirt and when he crossed his arms, the material gaped and Esme could make out the slightest curlicue of dark hair beneath. She tried not to think about it. Ever since that pint with Dave a few weeks ago, she had felt differently about him. It was an almost imperceptible shift but she was hopeful that the ill-advised crush she had nurtured for well over a year was, at last, receding. About time, she thought gratefully.