She was standing now. ‘I’ve seen you in the bathroom. Adoring yourself in the mirror.’
An excusable error. My days sometimes began with an unspoken soliloquy. A matter of seconds, usually after shaving. I dried my face, looked myself in the eye, listed failings, the usuaclass="underline" money, living quarters, no serious work and, lately, Miranda – lack of progress, now this. I also set myself tasks for the day ahead, trivial stuff, embarrassing to relate. Take out the rubbish. Drink less. Get a haircut. Get out of commodities. I never thought I’d been observed. A bathroom door, hers or mine, could have been ajar. Perhaps my lips were moving.
But this was not the time to set Miranda straight. Across from us sat comatose Adam. Glancing at him now, at the muscular forearms, the steep angle of his nose, and feeling a prick of resentment, I remembered. As I said the words, I knew I could be making an important mistake.
‘Remind me what the Salisbury judge said.’
It worked. Her face went slack as she turned away from me and returned to the other side of the kitchen. Half a minute passed. She was by the cooker, staring into the corner, worrying something in her hand, a corkscrew, a cork or a flap of wine-bottle foil. As the silence went on, I was looking at the line of her shoulders, wondering if she was crying, whether, in my ignorance, I’d gone too far. But when she turned at last to look at me she was composed, her face was dry.
‘How do you know about that?’
I nodded towards Adam.
She took this in and then she said, ‘I don’t understand.’ Her voice was small.
‘He has all kinds of access.’
‘Oh God.’
I added, ‘He’s probably looked me up too.’
With this, the row collapsed in on itself, without reconciliation or estrangement. Now we were united against Adam. But that wasn’t my immediate concern. The delicate trick was to appear to know a lot in order to find out something, anything.
I said, ‘You could call it curiosity on Adam’s part. Or regard it as some kind of algorithm.’
‘What’s the difference?’
Turing’s point precisely. But I said nothing.
‘If he’s going to tell people,’ she went on. ‘That’s what matters.’
‘He’s only told me.’
The object in her hand was a teaspoon. She rolled it restlessly, worked it between her fingers, transferred it to her left and began again, then handed it back. She wasn’t aware of what she was doing. It was unpleasant to watch. How much easier it would have been if I didn’t love her. Then I could have been alive to her needs instead of calculating my own as well. I had to know what happened in court, then understand, embrace, support, forgive – whatever was required. Self-interest dressed as kindness. But it was also kindness. My fraudulent voice sounded thin in my ears.
‘I don’t know your side of it.’
She came back to the table and sat heavily. She said through a clotted throat she wouldn’t make the effort to clear, ‘No one does.’ At last she looked at me directly. There was nothing sorrowful or needy in her gaze. Her eyes were hard with stubborn defiance.
I said gently, ‘You could tell me.’
‘You know enough.’
‘Is going to the mosque something to do with it?’
She gave me a look of pity and faintly shook her head.
‘Adam read me the judge’s summing-up,’ I lied again as I remembered that he had told me she was the liar. Malicious.
Her elbows were on the table, her hands partly obscured her mouth. She was looking away towards the window.
I blundered on. ‘You can trust me.’
At last she cleared her throat. ‘None of it was true.’
‘I see.’
‘Oh God,’ she said again. ‘Why was Adam telling you?’
‘I don’t know. But I know this is on your mind all the time. I want to help you.’
This was when she should have put her hand in mine and told me everything. Instead, she was bitter. ‘Don’t you understand? He’s still in prison.’
‘Yes.’
‘Another three months. Then he’s out.’
‘Yes.’
She raised her voice. ‘So how are you going to help with that?’
‘I’ll do my best.’
She sighed. Her voice went quiet. ‘Do you know something?’
I waited.
‘I hate you.’
‘Miranda. Come on.’
‘I didn’t want you or your special friend knowing about me.’
I reached for her hand but she moved it away. I said, ‘I understand. But now I know and it doesn’t change my feelings. I’m on your side.’
She sprang up from the table. ‘It changes my feelings. It’s disgusting. It’s disgusting that you know this about me.’
‘Not to me it isn’t.’
‘Not to me it isn’t.’
Her parody was savage, catching too well the meagre tone of my deception. Now she was looking at me differently. She was about to say something else. But just at that moment, Adam opened his eyes. She must have powered him up without my noticing.
She said, ‘OK. Here’s something you didn’t get from the press. I was in Salisbury last month. Someone came to the door, a wiry guy with missing teeth. He had a message. When Peter Gorringe gets out in three months.’
‘Yes?’
‘He’s promised to kill me.’
In moments of stress, and fear is little else, a timid muscle in my right eyelid goes into spasm. I cupped a hand over my brow in an attitude of concentration, even though I knew the writhing beneath the skin was invisible to others.
She added, ‘It was his cellmate. He said Gorringe was serious.’
‘Right.’
She was snappish. ‘Meaning what?’
‘You’d better take him seriously.’
You not we – I saw in her blink and fractional recoil how she took this in. My phrasing was deliberate. I’d offered help several times and been brushed off, even mocked. Now I saw just how much help she needed, I held back and let her ask for it. Perhaps she wouldn’t. I conjured this Gorringe, a large type, stepping from the prison gym, adept in forms of industrial violence. A tamping iron, a meat hook, a boiler wrench.
Adam was looking at me intently as he listened to Miranda. In effect, she was asking for my assistance as she went on to describe her frustrations. The police were reluctant to act against a crime not yet committed. She had no proof. Gorringe’s threat had been merely verbal, made through an intermediary. She persisted, and finally an officer agreed to interview him. The prison was north of Manchester and the meeting took a month to arrange. Peter Gorringe, relaxed and cheerful, charmed the police sergeant. It was a joke, he had said, this talk of killing. Merely a manner of speaking, as in – this was in the policeman’s notes – ‘I’d kill for a chicken madras.’ He may have said something in front of his cellmate, a none-too-bright fellow, now released. This fellow must have been passing through Salisbury and thought he’d deliver the message. He was always a little bit vindictive. The policeman wrote all this down, delivered a caution and the two men, finding common ground in their lifelong support for Manchester City, parted after a handshake.
I listened as best I could. Anxiety is a great diluter of attention. Adam listened too, nodding sagely, as if he’d not been powered down this past hour and understood everything already. Miranda’s mood tone, to which I was so closely attuned, was lightly tinged with indignation, now directed at the authorities rather than me. Not believing anything Gorringe had told the detective sergeant, she’d been to the weekly surgery of our Clapham MP – Labour, of course, a tough old bird, union organiser, scourge of the bankers. She directed Miranda back to the police. Her prospective murder was not a constituency matter.
After this account, a silence. I was preoccupied by the obvious question my own deceit prevented me from asking. What had she done to deserve a death?