The Poison Tree (7 page)

While I’ve got the living room to myself, I switch on the television and flick straight to the twenty-four-hour news channel. I half expect to see footage of him leaving the prison, followed by stills from ten-year-old newspapers with those awful photographs to remind us of the victims. I know I’m being stupid. Worse people than Rex are released from prison and it doesn’t make the news; I don’t think I’ve ever seen footage of anyone outside a prison gate except in dramas. But the blown-up snapshot that fills the screen is not Rex’s. The grainy image is not of anyone I have ever known but of a little girl, a three-year-old, who has been missing from home for two days. This, I have come to understand, is the kind of story that will bury all others. A rich-kid killer from ten years ago can’t compete with a missing child. It’s not “sexy” enough, isn’t that what the media say? It’s a grotesque shorthand for the kind of news stories that people can’t get enough of. The phrase disgusts me but not as much as I disgust myself. I’m unable to suppress a horrible hope that the little girl stays missing for a few more days, just long enough for Rex’s release to be old news. Isn’t that an evil thing to wish for, when we have already done enough? I turn over to the white noise and rainbow blur of a music channel.

Turning out the light so that no one outside can see me, I check the recessed scrub of grass and gravel opposite our terrace that is the unofficial parking lot for everyone who lives here. I’m half expecting to see a man with a camera, but there is nothing out of the ordinary save for a battered maroon Range Rover that I’ve never seen before and a white Nissan Micra. Are either of those the kinds of cars that journalists would drive? As I watch, Dave, my next-door-but-one neighbor, jogs out of his front door and lets himself into the unlocked Range Rover. It must be new, or at least new to Dave. He revs the engine two or three times before pulling out. A churn of mud frills out from his fender and splatters the white paint job of the smaller car. The Range Rover’s taillights illuminate a figure in the driver’s seat of the Micra; man or woman, it’s impossible to tell. Dave tears noisily down the lane and the smaller car, perhaps afraid of being seen by me, quickly follows in his slipstream. I draw the curtains and am glad that nobody witnessed this ridiculous exhibition of paranoia. I turn the light back on—a side lamp, this time—and bring my attention to the telephone.

They must know he is free. There has been a phone call once every two years or so. Sometimes they are print journalists, sometimes they are TV researchers. They are always female, young and well spoken in a confident, blond sort of way. There was a spate of calls at the five-year anniversary and then another when Roger Capel received his OBE. I can’t stop them rerunning old stories about Rex, but so far I have succeeded in keeping Alice and myself out of the news.

Usually, the journalists are easy to fob off with a lie: I tell them that I have the same name as a girl who knew the Capels, that I get these calls every year or so, but I can’t help them. I got the idea when I was translating an interview with a Spanish actress who said that when her fans accosted her, she claimed that she was often mistaken for herself, or that she was a professional look-alike. I even wish them luck chasing their stories. Only one of them, a TV researcher named Alison Larch, was persistent enough to visit me at the house. I knew that she was bad news from the way she knocked on the door: five loud and rapid bangs that made me spill the tea I was carrying. I’d been right about the blond thing, but naive about my deflective techniques. She was working, she said, on a film about “rich kids who went off the rails.”

“I know you knew them,” she said, although she didn’t say how. “I’m going to make this film with or without you: you might as well be onboard.” I called her bluff, and her investigations must have come to nothing, because when the documentary aired six months later, there was no mention of the Queenswood murders. It was after that that I persuaded Rex to change his last name to mine: it is Alice’s last name, after all. I didn’t tell him about Alison Larch. I wonder if she is the one who keeps calling and then hanging up. The journalists who have called in the past have been businesslike and overintimate, wheedling and threatening, but they have never been silent. Perhaps this is a new technique, designed to break me. It is very nearly working. If the police had been half as industrious as Alison Larch, our story could have had a very different ending.

The phone trills, breaking into my thoughts, and even though it is under my hand I fumble to pick it up, fingers groping blindly for the answer button before Alice or Rex can reach the handset in the bedroom. It’s my mother, wanting to know how today went and when will be a good time to visit. I can hear her loading the dishwasher as she speaks and then the whir of the machine fades as she marches her new digital telephone into the living room and sinks into the sofa next to my father. By the time we have finished arranging dates, it is dark.

“She’s asleep,” says Rex, sliding onto the sofa beside me, long legs doubling up to avoid the coffee table. It’s only seven o’clock, which means she’ll be up again at ten and then awake until midnight, which means that getting her up tomorrow will be a battle of wills I’m not sure I have the strength for.

“Ah,” I say. “It’s way before her bedtime. We should have talked about her routine before you came home. It’s really important not to disrupt it. We should go and wake her up.”

“She’s had a long day.” Rex sighs. “She’ll sleep.” Frustration balls in my throat and I want to shout at him not to be so stupid. He doesn’t know the first thing about Alice’s sleeping patterns. She’s nine, not six. I draw breath to tell him off but then remember that he isn’t six either. He’s thirty-four. He puts his head in his hands, parting his hair to reveal those shoots of gray hidden around his ears. I take in the delta of veins that bulge on the back of his hand: they are new, too. Tenderness and guilt engulf me.

“I’m sorry. It’s okay. We’ll leave her,” I tell him. There is nothing I can say that will make him better but there is something I can do. I open my arms and he collapses into them. A sleeping spring of desire bubbles up and spills over, as sudden and inevitable as tears, and I’m not sure who is healing whom.

T
HE WEEK UNTIL I saw her again was a long, hot one that dragged its feet like one of my students on the way to an after-school tutorial. The heat wave that had swaggered into the city on Biba’s birthday had settled in for the summer. The sun sucked the river near Brentford into the sky so that the air hung hot and humid and dirty. Running was impossible anywhere but in the middle of the park or in the air-conditioned gym at the tennis club—a place I wanted to avoid in case I saw Simon. The atmosphere at home was hushed and heavy as Claire, Emma, and Sarah crammed for our looming finals. I watched them poring over dictionaries trying to force in words they didn’t already know and wondered why they bothered. At this stage, either you could do it or you couldn’t. Even when the girls weren’t studying, there was a tension in the house. Their breezy hellos when I entered a room suggested sudden ends to conversations, hastily ground out like illicit cigarettes. They had always had more in common with one another than with me, but this feeling that I was on the outside of a circle was a new and unwelcome one.

I spent my days at the library, not because I needed to study but to get out of the house and increase my chances of bumping into Biba again. I even took the stairs everywhere, remembering her aversion to elevators. Queen Charlotte’s library was a square block that squatted next to the humanities building. Stuffy even in midwinter, it now developed a tropical microclimate all its own. The huge picture windows in the languages section could be opened only a couple of inches, reportedly to prevent student suicides at this time of year. The slow ceiling fans did little to relieve the heat but plenty to displace the dust that rose and spun in the slats of sunshine that bleached the spaces between bookshelves. I blamed my lack of concentration on the heat making my skin damp and parching my mouth and eyes, but it wasn’t the need for fresh air that drove me to the drama department two or three times a day. I visited Biba’s mailbox more often than my own but every day another envelope or flyer was wedged into the little wooden hollow. That we had shared the same building for three years without bumping into each other didn’t lessen my disappointment when she wasn’t there.

I spent the weekend in Brentford tutoring teenagers and torturing myself with visions of Biba sitting impatiently in the languages department waiting for me. On Monday my worst fears were confirmed: her mailbox had been emptied but no note had been shoved into mine.

If she wouldn’t come to me, I would find her. I walked the mile from college along Euston Road to Warren Street, hoping that fresh air and exercise would clear my head. I was wrong on both counts: the air was thick and gray with sun-baked traffic fumes, and the walk made me sweat so that the smog stuck to my skin. I submerged myself in the Tube and sweltered my way up to Highgate.

The early evening music of Queenswood Lane was soothing and cooling after my journey. Domestic noises accompanied the rustle of leaves. The chink of silverware and the tinkle of ice cubes, a strain of classical music wafting through a high oriel window all sounded like the carefully orchestrated background noise you hear in a radio play when the director wants to convey upper-middle-class affluence at rest. As I retraced last week’s footsteps up the stone staircase, I felt the echo of last week’s nerves. But this was different. Then, I was nervous because Biba’s world had been an unknown quantity. Now, I was apprehensive because I knew how much I wanted to be part of it.

The front door stood slightly ajar, which made me hesitate more than if it had been closed. A muffled “Come in” sounded from somewhere in the building’s foundations before I had a chance to knock; I pushed the door open and made sure I closed it at the exact same angle. “Down here!” sang a female voice that wasn’t Biba’s. I followed it, and the hiss and crackle of a radio, down a narrow set of sagging steps into a huge and shabby basement kitchen as vast and busy as the little galley upstairs was tiny and bare—although they were equally grubby. Children’s drawings were tacked onto grimy whitewashed walls and appliances and utensils cluttered every available work surface. In the middle, like a dais, was a battered table that might once have been pine or larch but was now colorless. The woman I thought of as the fat girl from the party sat at its head, her fingers in a mixing bowl. She was older than I, closer to thirty than to twenty, and she smiled as though she had been expecting me.

“Nina Vitor,” she said, holding out a floury hand to me. When I shook it, the bangles on her wrist jangled like gypsy bells. “You must be Karen. We didn’t meet properly at the party but I’d have recognized you anyway from Rex’s description.”

Irritation that he had been talking about me wrestled with disappointment that his sister hadn’t.

She gestured to a chair. “Sit down. Have a drink. I’ve made far too much coffee to drink on my own, and I could do with some
adult
company,” she said, rolling her eyes and her
r
’s. The lilt in her voice confirmed the Portuguese origin her name suggested. She was mixed race, although I couldn’t say which races were in that mix. She was all swoops and curves: her honey-colored hair was like a tangle of question marks, her short, wavy eyebrows like two tildes. Rolls of fat oozed over the top of the purple sarong she wore and the nut-brown skin of her hips and breasts was slivered with pale fawn stretch marks, but a pair of cheekbones that her excess flesh couldn’t disguise made her beautiful. I slid onto a bench that ran the length of the table, hoping I hadn’t been staring at her. Nina’s smile suddenly expanded.

“Oh, my babies,” she cried. I thought she was talking about Biba and Rex until two small children, urchin-filthy, toddled into the kitchen. The little boy licked his hand and smoothed down his curls.

“I’m four and a half,” he announced.

“This is Inigo,” said Nina, ruffling his hair so that his curls were loosened. She scooped the girl up onto a generous hip. “And this is Gaia.” The little girl picked her nose and ignored me.

“She’s not four yet,” said Inigo, and then, “What are you doing in my house?”

“I didn’t think it
was
your house,” I said before I could stop myself, but I hadn’t offended Nina.

“We’ve got the whole of the basement,” she said, only partially enlightening me. “There’s a couple of bedrooms back there that are sort of tucked under the garden steps. Didn’t you notice the other night?” I twisted my spine to see that the back wall of the kitchen was made up of long, tall shutters that reached from floor to ceiling. One of these wooden panels had evidently swung open to let the children in.

“I didn’t make it this far down,” I replied, but she was distracted. Gaia tugged on her mother’s earring, a piece of jewelry as complex and beautiful as a coil of human DNA. Beads of yellow and green amber like fat raindrops were suspended in silver cork-screws. I fingered the silver coffee bean on a filigree chain around my neck, a gift from Simon, and wished I wasn’t wearing earrings that matched.

“How long have you lived here?” I asked, sipping my coffee. It was hot and bitter, not like English coffee at all, and I knew it would keep me awake for hours.

“About a year and a half. No, two years, I met Biba in summer ninety-five,” she remembered. “And I started going out with Rex on Carnival weekend.”

“Rex?” I said, picturing the brittle, shambling figure I’d last seen slurping tea and staring forlornly into the new day. Then I looked at Nina, sexuality as abundant as her flesh. It was easier to believe that she’d eaten him than been his lover. “Rex?” I said again. “
Really
?” Gaia slid off her mother’s lap and waddled up the stairs. I tried to find a polite way to phrase the obvious question. “So why did . . . I can’t imagine . . . what did . . . how did you two meet?” I asked.