Secret Smile (22 page)

He gave a sympathetic smile.

'I wasn't,' he said. 'Not exactly, but
it's not a complete surprise. When tragedies like this happen, people go over
and over them in their head. They ask themselves if they could have done that
or this to stop it. They become obsessed. They need someone to talk about it
with. Sometimes they come in here and go over it with us without being exactly
sure what they want. It feels so like a crime against them, they can't quite
believe it isn't.'

'So you think I'm using you as some kind
of therapy?'

He took a sip of coffee.

'You were the one who found your brother,'
he said. 'That's a big thing to deal with.'

'That's not it,' I said. 'I've got things
to tell you.'

He leaned back in his chair and looked at
me warily.

'What things?'

I told him my suspicions. I'd even brought
the rope with me. I took it from my bag and placed it on his desk. When I'd
finished, he gave a little shrug.

'As I said, these things take time to get
over.'

'Which means you haven't listened to what
I've said.'

'What have you said, Miranda?'

'I knew Troy,' I said. 'Better than
anybody. He wasn't in the mood to kill himself.'

'He was suffering from intense
depression.'

'He was in a good phase.'

'Depression can be difficult to assess
from the outside. Sometimes suicide can be the first visible symptom.'

'This isn't just a feeling. There were all
the other details I mentioned to you. There was the watch.'

He looked at me with a questioning
expression.

'You're not serious about this, are you?
So he forgot to put his watch on after his afternoon sleep. I do it all the
time and
he
was depressed. You forget things when you're depressed.'

'There's the rope.'

'What do you mean, the rope?'

'I didn't have any rope. This was bought
specially. Brendan said he knew nothing about it and then I found this in his
luggage. As I told you, I was looking for it when I was found by him.'

'You see, Miranda, I'm with your sister on
this one. You don't want to go looking through other people's stuff without
their permission. You'll get into trouble.'

'I'm
in
trouble,' I said. 'They're
all furious with me.'

'What can I say?'

'It doesn't matter,' I said. 'The
important thing is to sort this out.'

'I don't understand,' he said. 'What is it
you really believe?'

I paused. I wanted to express this calmly.

'I think that, at best, Brendan encouraged
Troy to kill himself. At worst he, well...' I couldn't say the words.

'Killed him? Is that what you're trying to
say?' Rob's tone was harsher now, sarcastic. 'And what? Staged it?'

'That's what I've been thinking about. I
think it's worth looking into.'

There was a long silence. Rob was gazing
out of the window, as if something had caught his interest. When he turned back
to me, I sensed a barrier between us.

'Troy took pills,' I said. 'He had
terrible trouble sleeping. When he had taken his pills, he was out for the
count.'

Rob picked up a file from his desk.

'Your brother had traces of barbiturate in
his bloodstream.'

'Exactly.'

He tossed the file on to his desk again.

'He was taking medication. There was
nothing beyond what you'd expect. Come on, Miranda. What would
you
do?'
he said. 'I mean, if you were me.'

'I'd investigate Brendan,' I said.

'You mean, just like that. Investigate?'

'To see what you find.'

Rob looked irritably puzzled.

'What is it with this guy, Brendan?' he
said. 'Have you got some problem with him?'

'It's a bit of a long story.'

He was definitely wary now, glancing at
his watch.

'Miranda, I'm a bit pressed...'

'It won't take a minute,' I said, and I
gave him the quick version of the story of Brendan and me as the view from his
window darkened behind him. It "was one of those dark December days. When
I finished, it was harder to make out his expression.

'So?' I said.

'You've had a tough time,' he said.
'Breaking up with a boyfriend.'

'He wasn't exactly my boyfriend.'

'And a death in the family. I'm really
sorry, Miranda, but there's nothing I can do.'

'What about this creep?' I said. 'Doesn't
he sound dangerous?'

'I don't know,' Rob said. 'One of the
things I don't do is get involved in private disputes.'

'Until a crime has been committed.'

'That's right. I'm a policeman.'

'Do you want more evidence? Is that it?'

'No, no,' he said urgently. 'Definitely
not. You've done enough.' He stood up, walked round his desk and put his hand
on my shoulder. 'Miranda, give it some time. In a few weeks, or months, it will
seem different. I promise.'

'And you're not going to do anything at
all?'

He patted a large pile of files on his
desk.

'I'm going to do a lot,' he said.

Laura looked gorgeous. She'd just had her
hair done at a place in Clerkenwell where you virtually have to take out a mortgage,
but I had to admit it was worth it. Streaked and tousled, it glowed like a
beacon on this horrible grey day. It seemed to light up the bar. She looked
smart as well. I'd met her straight from work and she was wearing a suit and a
white shirt with a ruffle down the front. I suddenly became self-conscious and
looked around to see if I could catch my reflection in the window. I had an
uneasy feeling that I didn't look particularly presentable. I didn't seem to
have had the time for a few days. There had always been something more urgent.
I'd been in a hurry to get to meet Laura, walking along Camden High Street, and
I'd been going over in my mind what I wanted to say to her, getting it right,
when I passed two schoolgirls and noticed that they were giggling and one of
them glanced at me. They were giggling at me. I realized I'd been thinking
aloud, walking along muttering to myself, like those people you cross the
street to avoid because you think you might catch their eye and they might turn
scary.

In my sloppier moments, like when I was
working hard, without the time ever to get ready properly, I tried to tell
myself that I had a cute gamine look. I wondered if it had tipped over and I
just looked like someone who had been released into the community.

I brought the bottle of wine over to the
table. Now that was another issue. I was going to start keeping track of my
drinking. I didn't think it was particularly excessive, but I was going to
start thinking about it. Not now, though. I had other things to sort out first.
As I poured the wine, Laura looked at me and with a flicker of a smile she took
a packet of Marlboro Lights and a lighter from her bag.

'You've started again,' I said.

'I used to love smoking so much,' she
said, taking a cigarette from the packet and placing it between her glossy red
lips. 'And then suddenly I thought: why not? I'll give up again when I'm old.
You want one?'

She flicked the lighter and sucked the
flame into the end of the cigarette and then ejected a dense cloud of smoke. I was
very tempted. The smell of it brought back late nights in a fog of drink and
talk and laughter and intimacy. But I shook my head. Things were bad enough
already. I had to make one gesture towards healthy living, however feeble. It
took an effort. Laura was breathing the smoke deep into her lungs and when she exhaled
she seemed to be savouring its taste on her tongue. I took a gulp of wine to
take my mind off it.

'I'd hoped we could go for a walk,' I
said.

Laura looked through the window with an
expression of distaste.

'In this weather?'

'I wanted to breathe some cold air,' I
said. 'Clear my head.'

'You can do that on your own,' Laura said.
'I'm not dressed for it.'

I had planned what I was going to say to Laura,
so that it would seem coherent and sane, but it all came out wrong. I talked
about Troy and Brendan and going to the police and it turned into a chaotic
exercise in free association, hopping from one subject to another as ideas
occurred to me. By the time I was finished, Laura was on her third cigarette.

'This isn't like you, Miranda,' she said.

I took a deep breath and tried not to get
angry.

'I don't want you to make a judgement
about my psychological state,' I said. 'Or at least, not yet. Just listen to
what I'm saying. It adds up.'

'You know what I've always admired about
you, Miranda? You've always been wonderful about putting things behind you.
When I had snarl-ups in my life, you were the one I'd come to and you'd give me
this amazingly sensible advice.'

'Now
I'm.
the one that's coming to
you.'

'Listen to yourself,' Laura said. 'I'm so
sorry about Troy. We all are. But listen to yourself. I know what it's like to
break up with someone. I know what it's like to be dumped by someone. When Saul
broke up with me, you remember what I was like. I couldn't get it out of my
head. I kept going over and over it, wondering if he would still love me if I
had done this thing or that thing differently. It makes me embarrassed to say
it, but do you remember that I even came up with schemes to get him back. Do
you remember?'

'Of course I do, darling.'

'You do because I poured it all out to
you. And what did you say to me?'

'It's a completely different situation.'

'You told me to bite my tongue, not do
anything I would regret and just let time pass and that you promised it would
look different. I wanted to slap you yet you were absolutely right.'

'This isn't just a break-up and, as you
know,
I
broke up with Brendan, but I don't want to get into that again…'

'For God's sake, Miranda. I've talked to
Brendan. He's puzzled by all this, as much as I am.'

'What?' I said. 'Brendan? Have you been
discussing me with Brendan?'

'Miranda

'You've gone over to him. That's it. I can
tell. You think he's charming? A nice guy? How dare you? How dare you talk
about me to him? What have you told him? Have you given away things I've said
to you about him?'

'Miranda, stop this, this is me.'

I stopped and looked at her. She was
beautiful and slightly evasive. She took a drag on her cigarette. She was
avoiding my eyes.

'You like him, don't you?'

She gave a shrug.

'He's just an ordinary, nice guy,' she
said. 'He's concerned about you.'

'That's it,' I said. I rummaged in my
purse and, dimly feeling I'd done all this before, in a dream, found a
ten-pound note and threw it down on the table. 'There. I'll be in touch. Sorry.
I can't say anything more. I've got to go. I can't be doing with this.'

And I walked out on Laura. Out on the pavement
I looked around, stunned by what I had done. What did I do now? The damp cold
stung me. Good. I walked and walked without knowing where I was going.

CHAPTER 26

There were sixteen days to go until
Christmas and four days until Kerry and Brendan were to be married in the
register office half a mile from my parents' house. Overnight, the weather
changed. It was still cold, but it became greyer, wetter, foggier. I woke in
the morning to darkness outside my windows and the sound of rain, and for several
minutes I couldn't make myself get out of my warm bed. The hot-water bottle I'd
made myself last night was stony cold, so I pushed it on to the floor with my
feet. I thought of having to scrape the ice from the van's windscreen, of
hammering nails into floorboards in the empty and unheated house in Tottenham
with bare, numb hands, and squirmed deeper under my duvet.

I heard the sound of mail being pushed
through the letterbox and thumping on to the floorboards. In twelve days, it
would be the shortest day of the year — and then they would start getting
longer again. I tried to remind myself that there would be a spring, on the
other side of these dark months.

There was grey showing at the edges of the
curtains. I forced myself out of bed, sliding my feet into my slippers and
putting on my dressing gown, and collected the letters. I made a large pot of
coffee, put two slices of stale wholemeal bread into the toaster, turned on the
radio for the company of someone else's voice. I spread honey on one slice and
marmalade on the other, warmed up some milk in the microwave and poured myself
a cup of coffee.

I sat at the table and opened my mail.
There were nine Christmas cards, one of which was from someone I couldn't remember
ever having met. He hoped we'd manage to meet up in the New Year; another was
from Callum, the man I'd met at the party I'd gatecrashed with Laura and Tony.
It seemed ages ago, another life. I had thought then that things had got as bad
as they could and would now begin to get better. I didn't know then what bad
meant. I pushed away Callum's card, with the scrawled invitation to a party. I
didn't think I'd be getting round to writing Christmas cards myself this year,
or going to parties. There were two appeals from charities, a credit card bill,
a bank statement, three catalogues. And there was an envelope with Kerry's
writing on it.