“Samantha.” He hoped her name would be enough to carry all he wanted to say.
“Thank you for your card.” Her voice was quiet, a whisper. She paused. When she spoke again her voice broke across his name. “Oh, Michael.”
For a few minutes she cried. Michael listened, then asked if she wanted him to come round. No, she said, not yet. But could he, she wondered, go for a jog on the Heath? With Josh?
“He needs it,” she said. “He needs to get out, to talk.”
“It’s very soon,” Michael said.
“I know, but honestly, he needs to get out.” She paused. “I need him to get out. Just for a bit.”
“Yes,” Michael said. “Of course.”
“I think he’ll talk to you,” she went on. “Because. Well…”
“Yes,” he said again. “I know.”
After Samantha hung up, Michael stood for a while where he’d answered the phone, looking out at the street below. Then he’d gone into his study, selected a Beethoven string quartet on his iPod, and sat at his desk, letting the long, reverberating notes wash the room, and him.
Hearing her voice, he’d wanted, desperately, to tell her. On the wall above his desk was a postcard of a Grecian urn with Keats’s lines written underneath—Beauty is truth, truth beauty. He was consigning himself to ugliness, to a single lie that would bleed through the years ahead of him. He would be a deceiver forever. Not as he was in his writing, in pursuit of a greater clarity, but in his life, in pursuit of an omission, a lie. He’d become a manifestation of his authorial technique, disappearing himself from those minutes in the Nelsons’ house just as he’d always disappeared himself from the page.
But he was determined. And as the music moved on to the next movement, it seemed to confirm the rightness of his resolution. The sacrifice of it. So he’d resisted and said nothing. He hadn’t called Samantha back. Instead, he’d done as she’d asked of him and woken early this morning, dressed in shorts, T-shirt, and trainers, and gone next door to call for Josh.
Michael found him already waiting outside their front door. He could tell he hadn’t slept. The skin below his eyes was bruised with tiredness. As Michael had answered Samantha’s call with her name, so as he approached Josh he met him with his.
“Josh.”
He didn’t reply, but just nodded and began walking down the street towards the Heath, as if they had a job to do that was best done, if at all, quickly. Turning onto the grass at the bottom of the street, they began their usual route, walking in silence up through the colonnade of London plane trees, through the worn fields of the fairground sites and on into the shaded path of the boundary road. As they crossed the South Meadow, Michael felt his calf begin to loosen, the knots of muscle opening like a rose. But Josh, pacing beside him, remained closed. Michael didn’t want to be the first to talk. He knew, from those first days after Caroline had died, when Peter had been so often in the cottage — coming by, cooking him meals — that for Josh his silence would feel like the only part of himself he still owned, that he might still understand.
On reaching Highgate Gate they dropped down through the trees into the grounds of Kenwood, then rose again onto the gravel path that traversed the façade of the house. As they passed its shuttered windows they heard the attendants preparing for the day inside. Opening the shop, stocking the tills. Somewhere in the gardens a strimmer worked at a hedge. In the last window Michael caught a glimpse of them both — Josh walking with his head down, as if following a guideline just in front of his feet. Michael, tall beside him, his amputated stride arriving in his shoulder as an awkward jerk. At the end of the house they followed a stream down between the layers of Bagshot Sand and Clayton Beds, then crossed a footbridge over Wood Pond and on up into the South Woods itself. They began jogging without any communication, picking up their pace exactly where they always did, at the edge of the Duelling Ground, crossing its oval of scotched turf to join the path leading down towards Hampstead Gate. Their route remained unchanged, undisturbed. And everything else about their run, too, was the same as it always had been. Except for the air they bore with them, polluted as it was with the unspoken knowledge of Lucy’s death, partly known in each man, but only completely between them both.
On reaching Parliament Hill they slowed up the slope, walking the last few metres to the scattering of benches on its summit sitting in salute to London below. Michael sat on their usual bench, then felt the wood beneath him give as Josh added his weight beside him.
The heat wave had broken. Armadas of high cumulus were patching the city’s mosaic with shadow. A cool breeze spoke of rain, approaching from the north behind them. A flock of starlings rose and fell on the sports fields below, like a sheet shaken over a bed.
Michael looked across at Josh. Apart from his tiredness, he looked unchanged. Although his eyes, he saw, had lost the distance of their focus, as if they could no longer bear the promise of a horizon.
“I’m sorry,” Michael said, and he meant it, in the full scope of the word, more than he’d ever meant it before.
Josh didn’t look at him. “How did you hear?” he said.
“The policewoman. She came to the flat.”
Josh was already shaking his head, biting his lower lip. A vein, like a sudden worm, appeared across his forehead.
“That bitch,” he said. “Treating me like a fucking criminal. A suspect!”
Josh turned to face him, anger enlivening his eyes. Michael saw how deeply it was rooted, below his heart, his stomach. “I mean can you imagine if after Caroline…someone had come along and pointed a finger and—” He broke off. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking away again. “It’s just…”
“I know,” Michael said. “It’s okay. Really.”
Josh leant back against the bench. “At least that’s done with now, anyway. The DCI, or whatever he’s called. Her boss. He said there was no case.” He let out a breath in disbelief. “No case? Of course there’s no fucking case!”
“I’m sure it was just procedure,” Michael offered. “Standard stuff.”
“Yeah?” Josh said more quietly. “Well, then they should take a hard look at their fucking procedures.”
There was no case. Michael leant forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he took in what Josh had said. For the last two days he’d been sure he would see her again. Detective Sergeant Slater. He’d waited, each morning, for the intercom to buzz, to hear the taps of her footsteps in the stairwell. To watch as she drew out her notebook and pen once more. He was sure his false day would have been tested and found untrue, his deleted minutes resurrected.
“The coroner gives his judgement today,” Josh said from beside him. “They did the autopsy—” His voice broke over the word, the images it conjured. The smallness of her body. Silently, he began to cry.
Michael reached out and laid a hand on his back. It was the first time the equation of their contact had been reversed. He felt the muscles of Josh’s shoulder blades spasm under his palm; the physicality of his pain.
“Christ, Mike,” Josh said, when he could speak again. “I’m telling you. When you have kids. No one tells you…I mean, they do, but…” He rubbed his hands roughly across his face, then looked at them, as if expecting to see a stain of his grief. “The love,” he said. “It’s…it’s…” He couldn’t find the word, and when he did it came in a whisper. “Cruel.”
Michael took his hand away. To feel Josh’s fragility, to touch it, was too much. “How’s Sam?”