“I can assure you that we are all working hard too,” he replied. Actually, he did look a bit weary, now I came to think about it.
As I went upstairs I passed an officer coming down with a stack of papers. I went into the bathroom and locked the door, leaning on it for a moment. I splashed cold water on my face with one hand. Blood was starting to seep through the muslin wrapped around the other. Afterward I sat at my dressing table and applied more makeup with my inept left hand. I was looking a bit ragged, what with one thing and another. My hair could do with washing. In this heat you almost need to wash your hair every day. I rubbed cream into the smudges below my eyes and put on some lip gloss. I had to admit that this was getting me down. I wished Clive would ring back so I could speak to someone who wasn’t a policeman. I had already told him about my hand and he had been very shocked and insisted on talking to Stadler on the phone, barking questions at him, but he hadn’t come rushing back, as I had hoped, bearing flowers.
Then Detective Inspector Stadler wanted to talk to me about the details of my daily life. We had to retreat into the sitting room because Mary wanted to wash the kitchen floor.
“How’s your hand, Mrs. Hintlesham?” he asked in that soft, deep, insistent voice of his.
On this hot day he had taken his jacket off and his shirtsleeves were rolled up to just below the elbows. There were beads of sweat on his forehead. When he asked me questions, he always looked me directly in the eyes, which gave me the feeling that he was trying to catch me out.
“Fine,” I replied, which wasn’t exactly true. It stung. Razor cuts are always horrible, that’s what the doctor had said when she strapped it up.
“This person,” he said. “Obviously knows that you used to be a hand model.”
“Maybe.”
He picked up two books, and I saw for the first time that they were my appointment book and my address book.
“Can we go through some things?”
I sighed. “If we have to. As I told that senior officer of yours, I’m very busy.”
He looked evenly at me in a way that made me flush.
“This is for your benefit, you know, Mrs. Hintlesham.”
And so I watched my life passing before my eyes. We started with my appointment book. He leafed through each page and fired questions at me about names, places, appointments.
That was my hairdresser, I said, and that was a checkup with the dentist for Harry. That was lunch with Laura, Laura Offen. I spelled out initials, described shops, explained arrangements with handymen and French tutors and tennis coaches, lunches, coffee mornings, reminders. We went farther and farther back, through events I had forgotten, couldn’t even remember when he reminded me of them: all the negotiations for the house, the real estate agents and surveyors and the tree surgeons and planners. The school year. My social life. All the details of my days. He kept asking where was Clive when this happened, when that happened.
Finally we got back to New Year’s Day and Stadler closed the date book and picked up my address book. We went through every blessed name. I took Stadler through the old neglected dusty attic of my social life. So many who had moved away or died. Couples who had separated. And those friends I had just lost touch with-or who had lost touch with me. It made me think about how much of a social asset I’d been over the last few years. Could this person really be one of those names?
As if that wasn’t enough, he produced Clive’s accounts for the house. I tried to tell him that I didn’t deal with any of that, it was all up to Clive, that I have no head for figures. But he didn’t seem to hear. £2,300 for the living room curtains, which we hadn’t hung yet. £900 for the tree surgeon. £3,000 for the chandelier. £66 for the front door knocker that I fell in love with in Portobello Market. The numbers started to blur. I couldn’t make head or tail of them. I certainly couldn’t remember the quarry tiles being that expensive. Dreadful how it all adds up.
When we’d finished, he looked at me and I thought, This man knows more about me than anyone in the world except Clive.
“Is this all relevant?” I asked.
“That’s the problem, Mrs. Hintlesham. We don’t know. For the moment we just need information. Lots of it.”
Then he told me to be careful, just like Links had said. “We don’t want anything else happening, do we?”
He sounded reasonably cheerful about it.
Outside, the leaves on the trees had turned dark, dirty green. They hung limply from the branches, hardly stirring in the sluggish warm breeze. The garden looked like a desert, the earth was baked hard and was run through with cracks, like an old piece of china; some of the plants that Francis had recently planted were beginning to droop. The new little magnolia tree would never survive. Everything was parched.
I rang Clive again. His secretary said he’d popped out. Sorry, she said, though she didn’t sound sorry at all.
Dr. Schilling was different. She didn’t march into the room with a pile of names to check and bark questions at me. She looked at my hand, unrolling the bandage and holding my fingers in her slim, cool ones. She said she was very sorry, as if she was personally apologizing for it. To my horror, I suddenly wanted to cry, but I certainly wasn’t going to do that in front of her. There was nothing she would like better.
“I want to ask you some questions, Jenny.”
“What about?”
“Can we talk about you and Clive?”
“I thought we’d done that already.”
“There are some more details. Is that all right?”
“I suppose so, but look…” I shifted uncomfortably. “This doesn’t feel quite right. I just want to be sure that your questions are just about catching the person doing this. You probably think I’m completely mad and have an awful life, but I’m happy with it. Is that clear? I don’t need your help. Or if I do need it, I don’t want it.”
Dr. Schilling gave an embarrassed smile.
“I don’t think any of that,” she said.
“Good,” I said. “I just wanted to be clear.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Schilling. She looked at a notebook that was open on her lap.
“You wanted to ask about Clive and me.”
“Do you mind that he’s away so much?”
“No.” She waited, but I didn’t say anything else. I knew her tricks by now.
“Do you think that he’s faithful to you?”
“You asked me that before.”
“But you didn’t answer.”
I gave a huffy sigh.
“Since Detective-whatever-he-is Stadler now knows when my next period is due, I suppose I may as well tell you about my sex life as well. If you really want to know, just after Harry was born he had a-a thing.”
“A thing?” She raised her eyebrows at me.
“Yes.”
“How long for?”
“I’m not exactly sure. A year, maybe. Eighteen months.”
“So it wasn’t just a thing, was it? It was rather more serious than that.”
“He was never going to leave me. She was just extra. Men are such clichés, aren’t they? I was tired, I had put on some weight.” I touched the skin beneath my eyes. “I was getting older.”
“Jenny,” she said gently, “you were only, let’s see, in your late twenties when Harry was born.”
“Whatever.”
“How did you feel about it?”
“Don’t want to talk about that. Sorry.”
“All right. Have there been others?”
I shrugged.
“Perhaps.”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t want to know, thank you very much. If he has some stupid fling, I’d prefer he kept it to himself.”