‘No. Somewhere outside, public.’
‘All right, Blackfriars Bridge. North side. In one hour.’
‘It’s raining,’ I said stupidly.
‘Indeed. I’ll bring my umbrella.’
I hung up and ran my wrist under cold water for several minutes until it went numb. I considered changing out of my work clothes but in the end I didn’t. After all, I no longer needed to pretend to be anyone other than myself. I searched in the cupboard under the stairs for an umbrella, but only found one with a broken spoke, which flopped uselessly when opened. I would just have to get wet.
I arrived wet and cold, smelling of glue and dressed in paint-spattered canvas trousers under a streaming waterproof. David was as dry as a bone under his large black umbrella.
I stopped a few feet from where he stood on the deserted pavement, and gave him a stiff nod. His beautiful camel-hair coat was familiar, as were the brown shoes that shone like new conkers. I couldn’t have pointed to any particular change in his appearance, yet I was struck by a difference in him. His skin seemed to be drawn tighter over his bones than the last time we’d met, giving him a pinched, sharp expression.
‘This won’t take long,’ he said.
I waited. He had asked to see me and I wasn’t going to be the first to speak.
‘My wife trusted you,’ he said. I didn’t respond. There didn’t seem to be anything I could say. ‘She liked you,’ he went on. ‘For once she showed bad judgement. Catastrophically bad judgement.’
‘I didn’t kill her.’
David gave a shrug. ‘That’s for the police to decide,’ he said indifferently.
‘Did she trust you as well?’
‘You mean, because I was unfaithful to her? I know, of course, what you told the police.’
‘I told the police what was true – that you had an affair with Milena.’
I had also, I thought, told them that Frances had had a lover. Did David know that? I stared at him, his unreadable face. Had he discovered that, and was that why Frances was dead?
‘You disapprove of me,’ David said. ‘Of course you do. After all – and let’s put the whole thing with Johnny to one side, just for the moment, shall we? – you think you’re living in a romantic novel where husband and wife marry and live happily ever after, where first love doesn’t fade, where your precious husband couldn’t possibly have deceived you because he loved you so much. What makes you think Frances didn’t know?’
‘Did she?’
That dismissive shrug again.
‘I’ve no idea. If she did, she would have had the good sense not to muddy the waters. She was sensible. We understood each other. We suited each other.’
‘You mean you turned a blind eye?’
‘That’s one way of putting it. Another is to say that we didn’t snoop, pry and poke around in each other’s worlds, thinking we had a right to know everything about each other. We treated each other like grown-ups. There are worse ways of being married.’
‘Are you saying she would have understood about you and Milena?’
‘You’ve no right even to ask that. You were an outsider who came blundering into our house, putting your nose into business that didn’t concern you.’
‘Did you love her?’
Real anger flared in his face and suddenly he stepped out of the circle of his umbrella so that large drops of water splashed on to his coat. ‘You want to know what I felt?’ he said, his face a few inches from mine. ‘You still want to find things out? Frances was a good woman and Milena was a bitch. A hard-core, monstrous bitch. Bitches always win. She played with people. She played with me, lured me, hooked me, pulled me in, and when she was done with me she threw me back into the water. She never loved me. She was only interested in me because she could use me to get back at Frances. Yes, yes. I know there was another man in Frances’s life. Milena told me when she dumped me that I had been her revenge on my wife, who’d stolen someone from her.’
As I watched him, he seemed to crumble. His mouth trembled, and for a moment I thought he was going to cry or hit me.
‘If you want to know who he was, I can’t tell you. I never asked. I didn’t want to know. I’m not like you. Some things are best kept hidden. We depend on that; we’d go mad if we knew everything. So if this had anything to do with your precious husband, I can’t tell you. Nobody can now. Everyone’s dead.’
He snapped his mouth shut and stepped back under his umbrella. We stared at each other.
‘I liked her a lot,’ I said at last. ‘I felt very guilty that I deceived her.’
‘Her, me, Johnny, everyone.’
I walked all the way home in the rain, barely noticing the Christmas lights, the festive shops billowing out warmth through their open doors, the brass band on Camden High Street playing carols and collecting for the blind. Cars and vans thundered past, spraying water from puddles all over me. David must have arranged to see me because he wanted to prod me, taunt me, play with me, scare me. Had it just been sadistic revenge or something else?
I sat in the living room and stared at the empty grate. Greg used to love making fires. He was very good at it, very methodical. He would never use fire-lighters, saying they were a cheat, but started instead with twisted pieces of paper, then kindling. I remembered how he would kneel and blow on the embers, coaxing them into flames. I hadn’t lit the fire since he died and I thought about doing so now, but it seemed too much effort.
Out of the blue a thought occurred to me that was both trivial and irritating. I tried to brush it away, because I was done with my botched attempts at amateur sleuthing, but it clung like a cobweb in my mind: why hadn’t Greg written down his appointment with Mrs Sutton, the old lady I had met on the day of his funeral? I was sure she had told me she’d arranged to see him on the day after his death, but it hadn’t been in his diary.
I told myself it didn’t matter, it was meaningless. I made myself a cup of tea and drank it slowly, sip by sip, then rang the office.
‘Can I speak to Joe?’ I asked.
‘I’m afraid Mr Foreman isn’t here.’
‘Tania, then?’
‘Putting you through.’
After a few seconds, Tania was on the line.
‘Tania? It’s me, Ellie.’
‘Ellie,’ she said. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine. Listen, Tania, can you do me a favour?’
‘Of course!’
‘I need the number of one of Greg’s clients.’
‘Oh,’ she said doubtfully.
‘I met her at the funeral. A Mrs Sutton, I think – I don’t know her first name. She was very nice about Greg and there was something I wanted to ask her.’
‘All right.’ There was a pause and then her voice again: ‘It’s Marjorie Sutton and she lives in Hertfordshire. Have you got a pen handy?’
‘Hello?’ Her voice was crisp and clear.
‘Is that Marjorie Sutton?’
‘It is. Who am I speaking to?’
‘This is Ellie Falkner, Greg Manning’s widow.’
‘Of course. How can I help?’
‘I know this sounds peculiar, but I was tying up loose ends and there was something I wanted to ask you.’
‘Yes?’
‘You told me you were going to see Greg the day after he died.’
‘That’s right.’
‘You’re quite sure about that? Because there’s no record of an appointment in his diary.’
‘He’d only arranged it the day before. It must have been just before the accident. He was very insistent that he should come and see me.’
‘Do you know what it was about?’
‘I’m afraid not. Is there a problem?’
‘No problem,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much.’
I put the phone back in its holster and returned to my chair by the empty grate.