The Sleeper (19 page)

He laughed, but without smiling. ‘I would. But when she comes back, you can drop in whenever you like. In fact, please, please do. You get to be our friend. No one else. Just you.’

‘Thank you.’

I joined him in the strenuous mental effort he was making to pretend that everything was going to be all right. It was becoming harder. A man was dead and she was missing. That implied so strongly that she was dead too that I had to turn away from the thought. It dazzled me, so bright, so obvious that I had to look in the opposite direction. I had to pretend she was about to arrive home, flustered, with a complicated story, but safe. The policewoman in the kitchen would smile and set off for her next engagement.

I paced around the house. As the upstairs was almost entirely open-plan, there was not much to discover, and I did not like to ask permission to go and poke around.

‘Your bedroom’s downstairs, then?’ I asked.

‘Yep.’ He looked at me and produced an unexpected laugh. ‘Go ahead. Have a look round the house if you like. Nothing to hide. I can see you want to. Lara would too.’

It could end up being a crime scene, but since she had not been home, and that was the whole point, I felt it was safe to give myself a little tour. She had, after all, done the same at my house.

I looked at Jessica Staines. She shrugged. ‘OK, but don’t touch anything.’

Sam ignored her.

‘Unlock the back door down there,’ he said to me, ‘and go into the garden. You should explore properly.’

‘You’ll be OK? Yell if anything happens.’

‘Of course.’

He looked a bit excited, as if a small change in the status quo might have been going to impel the phone to ring. I was secretly hoping the same.

I liked the fact that the house was, to conventional eyes, upside down. At the bottom of the stairs there was what should have been a landing, but as it was on the ground floor I didn’t think it could be called that. Perhaps it was a hall, instead. I pushed the nearest door and found myself in what must have been the marital bedroom.

The duvet was pulled so straight on the king-size bed that there was no crease in it at all, and the room smelled of cleaning materials. It was not the way you would expect the room of a man living alone most of the time to be. Not if you lazily assumed all men to be slobs.

I looked at the photographs, because they were all over every wall. It was, in the light of the circumstances, verging on the chilling. Before my eyes they were morphing into photographs that you see on the news, on the front of newspapers. There was Lara, beautiful and glowing, on her wedding day, standing with her hand on a younger, slimmer Sam’s arm, smiling into the camera. I had no time for weddings in general, but I had to admit that the archaic white dress and the bouquet of rosebuds suited her. Sam was bursting with happiness at her side: I could tell that across the years and through the images.

More pictures showed them on holiday in New York, and on a beach somewhere, and in London. There were many posed photographs, and a few of Lara on her own, looking up and smiling as Sam snapped her while she was watering a geranium, reading a book, cooking in a wok. There were no reciprocal shots of him.

I imagined him sleeping here while she was away, surrounded by her image. The room was a shrine to her.

One of the bedrooms was a study, and that, too, was antiseptically tidy. A laptop computer was open, but switched off, on the desk, and I did not dare go anywhere near it. The bathroom was clean, and I suddenly realised that he had cleaned and tidied the whole place for her, and that he did that every Friday night. The place was poised for her return, immaculate, courting her approval.

It was odd, the futile wait for someone who was not coming, the lurking presence of a police officer a constant reminder that there was unlikely to be a happy outcome. Since there was nothing at all to do, it was both boring and tense, and Sam begged me not to leave.

‘Call your boyfriend, if you like,’ he offered, but I shook my head.

‘He can fend for himself, for once,’ I said, and I thought of Laurie dozing, barely awake enough to notice that I was gone, assuming, when he woke properly, that I was at the shops. He often slept all day because he had little else to do.

I sat on the armchair and flicked through last Saturday’s paper, wondering what tomorrow’s headlines would announce to the world. Sam was waiting for Lara; I was alert for Jessica receiving news. A train arrived at the little station. Both of us got up as soon as we heard the squeal of its brakes, and watched, in spite of ourselves, as Lara did not get off it. This happened every half-hour.

Eventually Sam let me call his brother, who was aggressively surprised.

‘What? You’re saying what? She’s where? He needs us to drop everything, does he?’

Sighing at the inconvenience, he said he would talk to their mother. I heard him switching a television on, in the background.

When things happened, they came quickly. Two new police officers arrived, both of them men this time. Sam looked at them, transparently longing for an improbable piece of good news. Instead, they arrested him for Guy Thomas’s murder.

‘It’s the most efficient way of getting him in for interview,’ Jessica told me, as he was led off, blinking and baffled, his mind as yet unable to catch up with this latest turn of events. ‘They’ll get samples from him, take his computer, check his alibi. The most straightforward way of doing all that is while he’s under arrest.’

I tried to imagine whether Sam might, in fact, be responsible for whatever had happened to his wife. I was pretty sure he was not that good an actor, but I did not know the man. He could have got in that blue car and driven to some point along the train’s route. He might have intercepted it, jumped aboard at a stop, and dealt with his wife and this man, Guy Thomas. It was, I supposed, possible.

‘Can Iris come too?’ he asked, standing at the front door, pulling back, and both he and the two policemen looked at me.

‘I have to go home, Sam.’ I said it as firmly as I could, and took my bag. Jessica stayed in the house, and I said a guilty goodbye as Sam got into the back of the car. He looked exactly like what he was: someone who was being arrested. I could see how, on paper, he was the obvious suspect. He mouthed something at me through the window, and the police officer who wasn’t driving glanced at me with interest.

I stood and watched the car go down the hill and around the corner before I set off in the same direction, heading towards my bike, trying to make myself believe that I had not betrayed Sam by abandoning him.

I cycled fast to get to Laurie with the fish and chips while they were still hot. I ate far too quickly and told him everything. He looked back at me, his eyes wide, and listened intently. The story sounded outlandish, yet he believed it. I wondered what I had ever worried about. My secret plans for solo travelling seemed ridiculous. So there was money in the bank: it was our money. I needed to tell him about it. For now, however, I shared my dreadful day. Now that I was away from Sam, I had the mental space to be horribly, grimly afraid for Lara. If she were alive, she could not be anywhere good. I could no longer convince myself that she was fine.

‘So what do you think happened?’ he asked, curling up on the cushions on the floor and eating chips with his fingers. ‘Someone’s killed that poor bloke? And she’s maybe seen too much and run away? Or do you think her husband actually did it?’

I wiped my mouth with the square of kitchen roll I had put on the table for this purpose.

‘I’m sure Sam wouldn’t have had a clue where to start,’ I said. ‘It can’t possibly have been him. Even the police don’t really think it’s him – I think they just arrested him because you have to eliminate the husband first, if Lara was having an affair with this Guy. I suppose she must have seen too much and … I don’t know what. It’s hard to make sense of it. I don’t actually know her well. I like her, though.’

‘You should have invited her over here. Introduced me.’

‘She came when you were away, before Christmas.’

‘She should have come when I was here. She would have got it. You and me. By the sound of it.’

‘I can totally see her leaving her husband. There’s still a chance that’s what happened, isn’t there? I mean, she might not even have made it on to the train. It could just be a coincidence, that this guy was killed and she’d decided to stay in London. But she would have told Sam if she wasn’t coming. You should have seen him today. Lara wouldn’t have done that to anyone, least of all someone she cared about. Her life partner.’ I turned away so he wouldn’t see my eyes brimming with tears. ‘The man she’d wanted to have children with. She’d have told him to his face. At the very least she would have called him. Or written to him. She would have done something. She wouldn’t have left without a word.’

‘She’d have been a monster.’

‘Maybe there’s a letter lost in the post. A phone message he hasn’t picked up.’

‘You realise the chances of her being OK are negligible?’

‘Don’t say that!’

‘You won’t leave me, Iris? I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d be nothing without you.’

I took a chip from his plate even though I still had plenty on my own, just to show how together we were.

‘I’ll never leave you,’ I said. ‘This is the life we’ve chosen. This is our life. It’s all I want.’

I looked into his warm eyes, and he looked back at me, radiating love. I pushed my treacherous daydreams so deep inside myself that I knew he would not see them. I was stifled, but secure. This, I tried to tell myself, would do. Security was enough. Desdemona climbed on to my lap. I started to push her off and then let her stay.

‘I’ll clear up,’ I said. ‘I love you, by the way.’

‘I love you more,’ he retorted, and I wondered, not for the first time, whether he might be right.

chapter sixteen

February

Guy Thomas’s house was in the wide-open countryside beyond Penzance. I had to take my bike on the train and then cycle up and down hills for half an hour before I reached it. Although I always felt that Falmouth was in the far west, I now remembered that it was not. There were miles and miles between where we lived and the real west Cornwall.

Here the land was rocky, and the light was different. It was almost ethereal. Here, I knew that I was on the very edge of a continent, on the rocks that stood up from the vast bed of the Atlantic. The air was fresh because there were no cities after Truro, which was many miles to the east. There was Penzance, and there were villages.

The Thomas residence was a solid stone farmhouse outside St Buryan, which itself was not far from Sennen and Land’s End. It felt like the end of the world, in a transformative way filled with possibilities. Angels could have glided down from the sky and landed on the road in front of me. Bushes could have burst into flames.

The outside broadcast van parked in the entrance to a field was the first incongruous thing. Then there were cars, half in ditches, all the way up the narrow lane. The gate to what was clearly the Thomases’ house was padlocked, and the crowd of journalists hung over it, chatting, callously casual. Their breath huffed out into the air, making little clouds, and they were stamping their feet and texting and looking both bored and surprisingly young. I had somehow imagined grizzled old Fleet Street hacks, but these rosy-cheeked teenagers looked as if they were on work experience.

I barged straight through them and climbed over the gate. Everyone rushed towards me, and they took photos, just in case, when I was halfway over and looking the most inelegant I could possibly have looked. I would have taken my photo if I had been them: I was, however you looked at it, an unlikely visitor to the grieving widow. They had no idea.

‘Hello, are you a friend of the family?’ said a nice-looking young man. ‘How is Diana doing?’

‘How are the children?’ said someone else.

‘Sorry.’ I felt I had to say something. After that, though, I could not think of anything, so I walked up the drive, past two cars (one small and red, the other huge and black, a four-by-four kind of thing), and pretended I couldn’t hear them.

Everything had changed with the police’s confirmation that Lara had been on the train when it left London, and that she had undeniably been having an affair with Guy Thomas, to the extent that their relationship had spilled over into their London existence and they had both effectively been living double lives. Everybody on the sleeper train knew about them. The staff used to take them breakfast together in the mornings, knowing that, apparently, they would often have pulled down a top bunk so they could spend the night in the same cabin. According to the papers, the beds were not wide enough even for the most star-crossed of lovers actually to sleep together. And now Guy was dead, and Lara was still missing, and, as Sam had swiftly been eliminated as a suspect, everyone had made the grotesque leap to assuming that Lara had killed Guy Thomas (probably by accident, it was generally agreed, after a fight about whether or not he would leave his wife) and run away.

Guy Thomas’s wife, Diana, had discovered first that her husband had been murdered, and then that he’d been wholeheartedly cheating on her. She had the press outside her house, focused on the next day’s headlines. Her husband’s sex life was all over the press and television: the world could not get enough of it. I could not begin to imagine what was happening inside her head.

I was intensely curious about her, and desperate to meet her, and when Sam asked me if I would go to visit her and convey his sorrow and confusion, since he could not bear to leave the house himself, I had leapt at the chance. I made my request through Alexander Zielowski of the Falmouth police, and Diana Thomas had agreed at once.

It might be masochistic
, she had written in her email,
but I feel I would like to hear about Lara from someone who knew her, rather than from the press, which I am attempting, unsuccessfully, to avoid. Why not? Come along. Nothing else can go wrong.

Lara’s disappearance was as mysterious as it had ever been, but the shock faded and her vanishing was now stony reality. A week had passed, it was Saturday again, and very little had changed. The investigation, which was now called Operation Aquarius, was being run from Penzance police station, under the direction of a Major Crime Investigation Team, which, according to Alex Zielowski, was a specialist detective team. Much as he wanted to be, DC Zielowski was not a part of the investigation.