‘I suppose it depends how you price your time,’ I said, winding the new chain round the chain-ring. I was trying not to look at her. Had she heard any of the conversation?
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It does.’
And that was the end of that. Miles sat and watched me work. Leah read the paper, glancing up frequently to watch us through narrowed eyes. I felt as if I was in a cage in a zoo with people staring at me through the bars.
‘You don’t have to move out until you’re ready,’ said Miles, eventually answering the question that had sparked off his declaration to me.
‘Three months, wasn’t that what we agreed?’ Leah spoke without raising her head from the paper.
‘I don’t remember,’ muttered Miles.
‘I mean, you’re not still students,’ said Leah. ‘You can’t go on living like this for ever. I think it’s amazing that Miles has let you live here all these years.’
I didn’t speak but I did cast a look towards Miles that had an element of sarcasm in it.
‘Strictly speaking,’ said Miles, ‘they paid rent and helped out with things.’
‘If you mean Dario’s DIY, I’m not sure it was necessarily adding value.’
The chain was attached and I sprayed the moving parts with lube. I lifted the bike so that the back wheel was off the ground and worked the pedal so that it spun in a blur of silver. It was a beautiful sight. Time for that beer.
‘What was that woman called?’ said Leah. ‘The one who was murdered.’
‘Peggy,’ I said.
‘Farrell,’ said Miles. ‘Margaret Farrell.’
‘They’ve arrested some people.’
Miles grabbed the paper and scanned it. ‘There’s not much,’ he said. ‘Four teenagers, who “cannot be named for legal reasons”. They’ve been arrested in connection with the murder and robbery of Margaret Farrell. Well, it’s not hard to guess where they’re from.’
‘Where?’ asked Leah.
‘They’re those feral kids from the estate. They’ll probably get two weeks’ community service.’
‘Why couldn’t they just have stolen her purse?’ I said. ‘Why did they have to kill her?’
‘That was part of the thrill,’ said Miles, grimly. ‘They probably filmed it on their mobiles.’
‘It’s funny being so close to something,’ I said. ‘And we don’t really know anything about it and we probably never will. I guess they’ll plead guilty in a few months’ time and that will be that and we’ll never hear anything more about it.’
‘There’s nothing to hear,’ said Miles.
Miles was wrong and I was wrong. After three more days, cleaning, shopping, a couple of parties, a movie with Saul, and three more nights, I found myself sitting in a room with a detective. PC Prebble had met me at the desk and led me through. I sat alone in the room and looked around. There was almost nothing to see. No windows, no pictures. The walls were painted beige. There was speckled lino on the floor, the sort that is easy to clean and doesn’t show dirt. There was a table with two moulded plastic chairs, and two more piled up against the wall.
The door opened and a head poked round. ‘Miss Bell?’
‘I’m Astrid Bell.’
The man came in. He was middle-aged, large, made larger by a grey suit very slightly too small for him. He was almost bald with his remaining hair cut very short. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Mitchell,’ he said. ‘Thank you for coming.’
‘I was surprised,’ I said.
He walked over and sat opposite me. ‘Why?’
‘I talked to the policeman and told him I had pretty much nothing to say, and then I heard that some people had been arrested so I thought that was the last I’d hear of it all.’
He leaned back on his chair with his hands laced behind his head and looked thoughtful. ‘This morning we charged the four young tearaways…’
‘So why…?’
‘With breaking and entering. Namely Mrs Farrell’s car.’
‘If they did that, they must have killed her as well.’
‘Did someone offer you coffee?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ll probably be asked to fill in a form so that we can improve our service to the public. It asks questions like were you made comfortable, were you offered refreshments.’
‘Well, I was.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘You were telling me about the murder.’
‘Was I?’ said Mitchell. ‘Oh, yes. We have CCTV cameras rigged up at various entry-points at the William Morris flats. We clocked these four gentlemen wandering past the Dyson Street camera at eleven forty p.m. on their way out of the estate, and fourteen minutes later we clocked them coming back, passing between them a bottle of Bacardi rum they had lifted from Mrs Farrell’s car.’
‘So they did it.’
‘They didn’t force entry to her car, because it seems to have been unlocked – perhaps because of damage done to it during your collision. They didn’t bother with the CD player. You can’t give them away now. But they emptied her shopping and took two bottles of spirits and her mobile phone, which was attached to the in-car charger.’
‘It doesn’t sound worth killing someone for.’
Mitchell shrugged. ‘The first murder I ever worked on, a kid was killed by a classmate because he wouldn’t hand over his lunch money. Anyway, the receipt was still in one of the bags. It showed that Mrs Farrell completed her purchases at Tesco at seven twenty-eight p.m. What time was it that you saw her?’
‘It was a bit before eight.’
‘You’ll see the problem. We found Mrs Farrell’s body partially concealed behind the dustbins in the area down by the basement at the front of her house. She had been strangled and there were some signs of robbery. Her purse was missing, and so, according to her husband, were her watch and necklace. She had left her car unlocked and the burglar alarm inside her house was still engaged. You see?’
‘Not really,’ I said.
At that moment the door opened and PC Prebble came into the room with a plastic mug of coffee. He placed it on the table with two small plastic milk capsules, two sachets of sugar and a dish on which lay two digestive biscuits. ‘I didn’t know if you took sugar or milk,’ he said, ‘or if you were hungry.’
‘Just black is fine,’ I said, and took a sip. It was stewed and lukewarm.
Prebble didn’t leave. He took one of the seats in the corner and sat on it. Mitchell gave a sign and continued: ‘At about eight o’clock, Mrs Farrell opens her car door and you collide with it. She helps you and is profusely apologetic, but your housemates appear on the scene and take over. Is that right?’
‘Dario and Davy were sitting out on the steps having a… er… just chatting and they saw what happened and came and helped me.’
‘Mrs Farrell has her shopping in the car. She leaves you to be helped into the house. What is she going to do next?’
‘Go into her house, I suppose.’
‘Collect her shopping, take it inside. But from what we can tell, she never went back to her car to take out the shopping and never opened her front door. Her husband was away that night, and the lads from the estate didn’t arrive until four hours later.’
I thought for a moment. ‘On the other hand, they could have attacked her, concealed her body and come back later to rob her car. Under the cover of darkness.’
Mitchell’s hitherto grim face broke into a broad smile and he looked across at Prebble, who smiled back. ‘It’s a theory,’ he said. ‘It’s a crap theory. But it’s a theory.’
‘But you probably didn’t bring me in here to get my ideas about the case.’
‘We’re always grateful for input,’ said Mitchell. ‘But what really interests me is what you saw.’
‘The problem,’ I said, ‘and I feel really bad about this, is that I didn’t see anything.’
‘But you were there,’ said Mitchell. ‘You were there when it happened.’
There was a long silence.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I almost want to say, “Ask me anything but that.” I’ve got a very good memory. Ask me about my first day at primary school, every holiday I’ve ever been on. Next week I’ll remember the colour of the tie you’re wearing. But in that moment when I ran into Mrs Farrell’s car door, I didn’t take in anything at all. I didn’t even know it was her. I hit the door, I hit the ground, I heard someone apologize and I was dragged inside. My memory’s like a faded fax of a bad photocopy. You can use a magnifying-glass, but all you’ll see is a mess and a blur.’
I expected Mitchell to look depressed or cross. I thought he might send me home like a bad girl. But he smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Miss Bell,’ he said. ‘Compared with some witnesses, you’re like Mr Memory. I’m going to bring in another officer and you’re going to say everything you know, and she’ll write it down.’
‘It won’t take very long,’ I said.
He smiled again.
‘Oh, yes, it will.’
For me the police had always been vague, abstract figures. I saw them in their cars, blue lights flashing in the darkness, or walking along the street, and I felt slightly anxious, as if I might be doing something wrong without realizing it, and that when their eyes settled on my face they would see a furtive criminal. Night after night I saw them on Maitland Road and in Hackney, stopping black youths and searching them, standing in pairs with walkie-talkies crackling, shepherding the violently drunk or the stupefied stoned into the backs of their vans. Before Peggy’s murder I had never been into a police station, except the one occasion when I’d reported a stolen wallet, and then I’d only got as far as the front desk. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, and I was sheepishly surprised to discover they seemed quite normal, not brutal or racist or ignorant or fiendishly clever – just slightly bored and harassed men and women doing their job and thinking about what they would do once their shift was over.
Of the three of us, it was definitely Dario who was having difficulty in talking to them.
‘They’re not interested in you taking drugs,’ said Davy, before we were all interviewed that second time. ‘They’re interested in who killed Peggy. Right, Astrid?’
‘I know that,’ said Dario. ‘But I’ve got this feeling I’ll break out in a sweat and just announce it. I won’t be able to stop myself. I once heard about this guy going through Customs. Nobody was interested in him, and he suddenly started crying and confessed he’d got cocaine in the false bottom to a set of knives and forks he was carrying.’
‘Knives and forks?’ said Davy.
‘Yes, but that’s not the point. The point is, I’m going to confess to something. I can feel it. They’ll look at me and I’ll break.’
‘The point is,’ I said, ‘someone’s been murdered.’
‘I don’t know anything. I’ve told them everything I know.’
‘Tell them again. Then sign your name at the bottom and that’ll be that.’
Of course, it could never be that simple. Someone had been killed a few yards from where we lived, a few minutes after we had spoken to her. It almost felt as if she had been killed before our very eyes, but we hadn’t noticed. I knew her face, her name. Every time I passed the house, I looked down into the recess where the bins had stood, and where her body had been crammed, and imagined her there. After a couple of days, the space started to fill with flowers and messages, and after a week or so the flowers started to rot in the Cellophane wrapping, giving out a sweet stench that made me want to gag. I looked at people in the street, at the gangs of youths who hung around in the balmy evenings, and wondered if it had been any of them, or if they knew something they weren’t saying. I had always thought of Maitland Road as rough and down-at-heel, but it was my home and I felt safe there. What had once seemed normal now took on an air of menace. When I heard footsteps behind me in the dark, my heart beat faster; shadows seemed to move; faces were sinister. The road hissed with rumours: the husband had been arrested and charged; the husband had been released; the police knew which of the gang from the estate had done it but had insufficient evidence; there were drugs involved; it was a mugging gone wrong; it was an accident. She had been shot, stabbed, strangled, hit over the head with a stone, raped. I even heard that one of her hands had been cut off. Everyone knew better than everyone else. Everyone knew Peggy better than everyone else. People remembered conversations they had probably never had with her. People who had never said hello to her missed her. People who had never said hello to me now sought me out because – by slamming into her open car door and landing in a dazed, cursing heap on the road – I had become a star witness, someone to know.
At the same time, another change was taking place closer to home. Suddenly we were just temporary tenants. A few days ago I’d been thinking of the seven of us as my strange rag-bag family. Now the others had reverted to a collection of individuals, and I found myself thinking: Will I still know you in a year’s time? Who would I stay in touch with? I felt sure about Pippa; perhaps I would even ask her to share my next flat. And pretty sure about Miles, too – even if he was the ex-lover who harboured nostalgic desires for me and the landlord who was evicting me, even if he was a well-paid economist who was dating a well-paid architect and who owned a desirable property on the borders of Stoke Newington, while I was just a despatch rider. Dario and Davy I was less certain about. I could imagine gradually drifting apart from them, getting together for quick drinks between more important appointments, the intervals between each meeting becoming longer, the common ground dwindling into a series of anecdotes about our shared past. Eventually, perhaps, they would become people I would bump into in a pub and kiss on the cheek and say hello to and promise to give them a call soon, very soon. It was hard to believe that I would keep in touch with Mick – I didn’t feel in touch with him while I was living in the same house. And as for Owen, I didn’t even know if I liked him, and I was pretty sure he didn’t like me. Or perhaps it was simply that he didn’t see me; he couldn’t even be bothered to look.