The Lonely Dead

Then she turned back and asked, as if enquiring after the name of her interior designer; 'What was your husband doing on Monday evening?'

The woman stared at her. 'Excuse me?'

'What was your husband doing on Monday evening? From your understanding of his schedule?'

'He…'

Nina watched as the woman realized she had hesitated too long, that the question, dealt unexpectedly out of nowhere, had penetrated a weak defence she hadn't realized she had to build. 'Was he out, that evening?'

'Yes. He… he had a meeting. A late meeting.'

'How late would that have been?'

'I don't remember. It was late.'

'This was a meeting relating to his work?'

The woman saw Nina staring at her.

'Yes,' she said. 'I think.'

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'We're going to go,' Olbrich said, quietly. He, Monroe and Nina were now alone in the kitchen. 'Two people at his company confirm he was at or near his desk by the usual time on Wednesday. He was out late Monday evening, as you found, and it wasn't a meeting. What it was, he claims, is a strip club with a client. The alleged client is now back in England.' He looked at his watch. 'McCain has no personal address for this person, and so we're going to have to wait until UK business hours to chase that down. But frankly…'

He tailed off.

Nina yawned massively. 'We don't have shit to hold him on and he doesn't look like the guy Jessica was seen with in Jimmy's.'

'Right. Yes, he watched Jessica. Yes, he occasionally goes to strip clubs. When he 'has to'. Nice work if you can get it. Any more than that and he's a dead end. His lawyer's with them now and he's pumped up to fight, and he's got a point. We either have to make this serious or leave it alone for now.'

Monroe shook his head and stalked out into the hallway.

Olbrich looked at Nina. 'What's his problem?'

'Doesn't like leaving empty-handed when we came in this heavy.'

'It was his call. I told him it should be more subtle.'

'Monroe's more of an 'Advance straight to Go' kind of player.'

They followed her boss along the hallway and stopped outside the door to the living room. Nina was expecting sass from one or other, and most certainly the lawyer — it seemed like everyone in television or movies was forever talking back to the police nowadays, and so everyone in real life felt they had to do it too, as if to stay in character — but there was none forthcoming.

Olbrich apologized without apologizing. Monroe asked that they take no out-of-town trips for a few days. Nina was going to just breeze on out without a backward glance, but then she heard her name being called in a female voice.

Go ahead, sister, she thought, as she turned. Push a little harder and just see what happens.

The McCains were standing together facing her. Their lawyer had faded to the back of the room and wasn't looking happy.

'My wife says I should give you this. My lawyer disagrees.'

The husband was holding something out to her. It was smaller than a paperback book but about as thick.

'What is it?'

'A portable hard drive. I, uh…'

His wife looked at the floor. 'Get on with it, Greg.'

'There are some pictures on it,' he said. 'Movies, too. Recorded from the site. I don't know whether it's any use but…'

His wife finished for him. 'We don't want it in the house.'

Nina took the disk. 'That's very helpful.'

Once it was out of his possession, the man's shoulders seemed to slump with relief. Nina realized that far from being an all-out disaster the evening might even work in his favour. A minor middle-class guilt, now blown into the open, fate taking the secret out of his hands. Sure, his wife would give him hell for it, and be hurt, and he was going to have to accept the role of house scumbag for a while. It would sure as hell Come Up In Conversation.

But it wasn't a secret any longer, and being able to throw open the windows of your dark private rooms can be worth quite a price. His wife wasn't going anywhere: they had this lovely life together and who the fuck wants to start dating again? A couple of months down the line this evening's embarrassment might even have been parlayed into a revivified sex life.

Some people just float.

'I didn't know she was dead,' he said. 'I'm sorry to hear about it.'

'The circumstances have not been widely reported, and we'd like to keep it that way.'

He nodded, looked away. His wife took a step back, as if unconsciously detaching herself from the evening, but then came forward with her husband to see Nina to the door: to see her off the premises, in effect — woman dealing direct with woman in a way men never really seemed to realize was going on. Saying things without saying, pushing without raising a hand.

As she walked down the path to the cars Nina made her own small side-step in her head, and slipped the disk into her pocket before it was visible to the men. Tomorrow it would join the rest of the evidence, such as it was.

Not tonight.

15

I got to Nina's mid-morning. The cab driver who dropped me off looked down at the house dubiously.

'You live here?'

'A friend of mine does.'

'Brave friend,' he said, and backed off up the road.

I walked down the vertiginous driveway that curved around to the front of the house. I had been to Nina's only once before, briefly and three months previously, sleeping on the sofa for a night after she, Zandt and I had returned Sarah Becker to her home and family. Nothing good seemed to have happened to the house's exterior since. The property was old school California Modern: a row of square rooms with a kink for the kitchen turning it into an L, like a very small motel. Possibly something of a big deal in the late 1950s, a kind of low-rent Case Study house, but from a stone's throw away you could tell its days were numbered.

I knocked on the door. 'It's open,' a voice said, from a distance. When I stepped inside I could see Nina out on her balcony, talking on the phone. She waved distractedly without looking at me.

I dropped my bag and hovered for a minute in the main living space. The space, anyway. It didn't look like much living had taken place there recently. It wasn't dusty, particularly, or markedly untidy, but that was because the room held virtually no personal possessions bar the racks of books and files on the long cases over on the other side. I walked into the kitchen area and opened the fridge: inside were two bottles of wine, a carton of orange juice and another of milk. Nothing else, and nothing in the cupboards either. Nina evidently subsisted on liquid fuel alone.

When I turned back to face the main area it somehow looked even quieter and more still. I had read once how in first millennium Britain the locals would use the long-abandoned remains of Roman villas and ruined churches for shelter on journeys across a land that was otherwise largely uninhabited. They called these places 'cold harbours', because while a night's protection from the elements could be found there, they harboured no other life or warmth. Nina's house felt like that, and I thought this as a man who had stayed nights in motels and factories with boarded-up windows and big demolition notices nailed to the walls.

'Hey, Ward.'

I looked over to see Nina was off the phone and standing in the doorway. Her hair was a little longer than it had been, and it seemed like she'd lost a few pounds from a frame that had always been slim. Something about her put me in mind of something, or someone, but I couldn't immediately work out what it was.

'Should call the cops,' I said. 'Someone's stolen all your food.'

'You didn't look hard enough. It's all stacked right where I need it. In the supermarket.'

'You have any coffee on site, at least? Or is Starbucks looking after that for you?'

It turned out she had lots.

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