Was that it? That couldn’t be it. I gazed at him helplessly.
“Good-bye, Nadia,” he said again, almost pushing me to the door. “Take care.”
I walked with my head down, making my way blindly toward the underground. Poor Zoe, I thought. Fred had struck me as a man almost entirely without imagination, handsome and heedless. I couldn’t imagine him being very sympathetic toward her while she was receiving the threats, whatever he had told the police afterward. I went over what he had said, which was not very much-nothing that made it worth escaping from police protection. A sudden shiver of fear went through me. I was on my own, nobody looking after me. I imagined eyes in the Saturday crowd looking after me.
Suddenly my way was blocked. A man standing in my path looked down at me. Dark hair, pale face, teeth glinting behind his smile. Who was he?
“Hello there, you look miles away.”
I stared at him.
“It is Nadia, isn’t it? The woman with the ancient computer?”
Ah, now I remembered. Relief flooded through me. I smiled.
“Yes. Sorry. Um-”
“Morris. Morris Burnside.”
“Of course. Hi.”
“How are you, Nadia? How have you been?”
“What? Oh, fine,” I replied absently. “Look, I’m really sorry but I’m in a bit of a hurry, actually.”
“Of course, don’t let me keep you. You’re sure you are okay? You look a bit anxious.”
“Oh, just tired, that’s all. You know. Well, bye then.”
“Good-bye, Nadia. Take care of yourself now. See you.”
The house was beautiful. I’d seen it in the photographs of course, but it was grander in real life: set back from the road in its own gardens, steps leading up to its porched front door, wisteria climbing up the tall white walls. Everything about it was substantial and spoke of good taste and wealth. I knew about the wealth of course, but now I could practically smell it. I looked upward to the windows on the first floor. In one of those rooms, Jenny had died. I smoothed back my hair and fiddled nervously with the straps on my cheap cotton shift. Then I walked briskly up to the door and banged the brass knocker.
I almost expected Jenny to open the door herself: to see her narrow face and her glossy dark hair framed in the doorway. She’d be polite to me, in that well-bred and faintly surprised way that says get lost to people like me: the rude and the reckless.
“Yes?” Not Jenny, but a tall and elegant woman with blond hair swept smoothly back, jewels at her ears, wearing a pair of well-cut black trousers and an apricot-colored silk blouse. I had read about Clive’s affair in the file and I had a pretty good idea who she was. “Can I help you?”
“I’d like to speak to Clive Hintlesham, please. My name is Nadia Blake.”
“Is it urgent?” she asked with chilly pleasantness. “As you can probably hear, we’ve got visitors.”
I could hear the rise and fall of voices coming from inside the house. It was midday on Saturday and the bereaved widower Clive was hosting a small social event with his lover. I could hear the clink of glasses.
“It is urgent, actually.”
“Come in, then.”
The hall was huge and cool, and from here the sound of voices was louder. She had lived here, I thought, gazing round. This is the house that she had wanted to turn into her dream home, but now Gloria was presiding over the dream home, for the workmen had obviously come back. The room in front of me was full of ladders and pots of paint. There were drapes over the furniture at the end of the hall.
“Would you like to wait here?” she said.
I followed her through anyway. Together, we went into a large living room, obviously freshly painted in slate gray, with large French windows giving out onto a newly dug-over garden. On the mantelpiece there was a photo in a silver oval frame of three children. No Jenny. Was this what would happen to me, if I died-would the waters just close over me like this?
The room had maybe ten or twelve people in it, all holding glasses and standing in clusters. Maybe they had been friends of Jenny’s and now they were gathered here to welcome the new mistress of the house. Gloria went up to a solid-looking man with dark, graying hair and a jowly face. She put a hand on his shoulder and murmured something in his ear. He looked up sharply at me and walked across.
“Yes?” he said.
“Sorry to butt in,” I said.
“Gloria said you had something to tell me.”
“My name is Nadia Blake. I’m being threatened by the same man who killed Jenny.”
His face hardly altered. He looked around shiftily as if he was checking whether anybody else was paying attention.
“Oh,” he said. “Well, what do you want?”
“What do you mean? Your wife was murdered. Now he wants to kill me.”
“I’m very sorry,” he said evenly. “But why are you here?”
“I thought you could tell me things about Jenny.”
He took a sip of wine and began steering me toward the edge of the room.
“I’ve told the police everything that’s relevant,” he said. “I don’t quite see what you’re doing here. This has been a tragedy. Now I am just trying to get on with my own life as best as I can.”
“You seem to be managing pretty well,” I said, looking round the room.
His face turned purple.
“What did you say?” he said furiously. “Please leave now, Miss Blake.”
I felt in a panic of rage and mortification. I started to make a stammering attempt at self-justification. Even as I spoke, I saw a boy, a teenage boy, sitting alone on the window seat. He was skinny and pale, with greasy fair hair and dark smudges under his eyes, pimples on his forehead. He had about him all the awkward spindly hopelessness of male adolescence; all the messy, terrified confusion of a son who has lost his mother. Josh, the eldest son. I stared at him and our eyes met. He had huge dark eyes, like a spaniel’s. Lovely eyes in a plain face.
“I’ll go now,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you. It’s just that I’m scared. I’m looking for help.”
He nodded at me. Maybe his face wasn’t so cruel, really, just a bit stupid and complacent. Maybe he was just like everybody else. A bit weaker, maybe, a bit more selfish.
“Sorry,” he said with a helpless shrug.
“Thanks.” I turned on my heel, trying not to cry, trying not to care that everyone was looking at me as if I was some beggar who had forced her way in. In the hall a little boy on a trike pedaled furiously across my path and stopped.
“I know you. You’re the clown,” he shouted. “Lena, the clown’s come to visit. Come and see the clown.”
FOURTEEN
“I’ll have everything,” I said firmly. “Eggs and bacon, fried bread, fried potatoes, tomato, sausage, mushrooms. And what’s that?”
The woman behind the counter inspected the contents of the metal container.
“Black pudding.”
“All right, I’ll have that. And a pot of tea. What about you?”
Lynne had gone slightly pale, maybe at the sight of what was being piled onto my plate.
“Oh,” she said. “A piece of toast. Some tea.”
We carried our trays out of the café into the sunny garden on the edge of the park. We’d arrived when it opened and we were the first. I chose a discreet table in a corner and we unloaded our plates and cups and metal teapots. I began eating. I attacked the fried egg first, cutting into the yolk so that it spread around the plate. Lynne looked at me with what I took to be fastidious disapproval.
“Is this not your sort of thing?” I said, wiping my mouth with the paper napkin.
“It’s a bit early in the day for me.” She sipped her tea delicately and took a caterpillar-sized nibble out of her toast.
It was a beautiful morning. Tame sparrows stalked around the table legs in search of crumbs, squirrels were chasing each other along branches of the large trees on the other side of the wall in the park proper. For a blessed few seconds I just pretended Lynne wasn’t there. I took bites of my heart-attack breakfast and washed it down with mahogany-brown tea.