Lasting Damage (44 page)

‘That staircase has always looked the way it looks now,’ Selina Gane insists.

She’s lying.

‘When I woke Kit up and he looked at the tour, the woman’s body had disappeared and so had the white thing from here,’ I say, still clinging on to the post, as if by touching it I can somehow enlist its physicality on my side of the argument. ‘I spent the rest of the night opening the virtual tour, watching it again, closing it, opening it again. I must have done it two hundred times – open, look at the lounge, close – but I didn’t see the woman’s body or the blood again.’ Feeling light-headed, I order myself to slow down, breathe. At first the air resists my effort and won’t go into my lungs. I stop trying and exhale instead, to the pit of my stomach.
Empty
. Then I inhale slowly, steadily, and feel the oxygen rushing in – an emergency service to the rescue.

‘I didn’t see the white disc thing again either,’ I say. ‘It was in the picture of the dead woman, but not the other photo – not the one I’ve seen every time I’ve looked since that first time.’

Another memory rushes back to me: Mum, Fran, Benji and me at Bella Italia in Silsford. We went there for lunch last year, to celebrate the arrival of Benji’s first grown-up tooth. The waitress gave Benji the activity pack they must give to all children: crayons, dot-to-dots, word searches, various games to keep him amused. There was a game that involved looking at two nearly identical pictures of a dog sitting under a tree, and trying to find the seven differences between them. The first three or four were pretty obvious, even to Benji. Between us, Fran, Mum and I identified the fifth and sixth differences, but none of us could spot the seventh. After nearly half an hour of tormenting ourselves, peering at the piece of paper endlessly, we admitted defeat and looked at the answers which were upside down at the bottom of the page. The seventh difference was so tiny that we would never have spotted it, no matter how many hours we’d wasted looking: one extra line on the tree’s lowest leaf in picture two.

‘There’s a name for what you’re describing,’ Selina Gane says. ‘It’s called a mortgage button.’

‘A what?’

She sighs. ‘I need a drink. Come on.’

I follow her through to the kitchen I’ve seen so many times on the screen of my laptop. She pulls a tall stool away from the island at the centre of the room – the obligatory island, Kit called it – and indicates that I should sit there. ‘Tea or whisky?’ she asks.

‘Tea, please.’

‘I think I’m going to need both,’ she says.

I wait in silence while she sorts out the drinks. The words ‘mortgage button’ turn around slowly in my mind. I examine them from every angle, but still don’t understand them. How can something called a mortgage button exist? It sounds too unlikely.

Selina puts milk in my tea, no sugar. It’s what I would have told her to do, if she’d asked me.

She doesn’t sit, but leans against the sink with her back to the window, holding her whisky with both hands. ‘It’s an American tradition,’ she says eventually. ‘When you’ve paid off your mortgage and you own your house outright, you buy a mortgage button and fix it to the top of the newel post, dead centre – exactly where you said you saw it. You can get cheap plastic ones, wooden ones, engraved ones – even ones made of ivory, for those who want to broadcast their affluence and success to all visitors.’ Her tone suggests a low opinion of such people. ‘They look a bit like white draughts – you know, as in the game. In America it’s called checkers.’

Mum and Dad used to play draughts when I was little, before they finally gave in to Fran’s and my protests and bought a television – something every normal person in the country had done several years earlier. ‘That’s exactly what it looked like: an oversized draught.’

‘Then I’m right,’ says Selina. ‘What you saw was a mortgage button. But there’s never been one in this house.’

I can’t hear even the faintest trace of an American accent. ‘But you know what they are,’ I say, hoping it doesn’t sound too much like an accusation.

‘My friend has one.’ Selina’s eyes slide away from me. ‘She’s from New England.’ I feel as if a spotlight that was trained on me has been switched off; I’m no longer the focus of her thoughts. She chews the inside of her lip, staring at the shelf next to her – at a white mug that looks like bone china, with a design of red feathers. She reaches to pick it up, looks inside, then puts it back on the shelf. I hear a clinking sound. Whatever’s in there, she wanted to check it was still there.

The white button? Having denied its existence, would she be so obvious?

‘What aren’t you telling me?’ I ask. The same question I asked Sam Kombothekra a few days ago, the question I’ve asked Kit more than a thousand times since January. I ought to have a T-shirt made with those words printed on it.

‘Nothing. Sorry,’ she says, still looking worried. ‘I was just thinking that I’ve been neglecting my friend recently – all my friends. Too busy with work.’

I nod, pretend I’m satisfied.

‘Talking of mortgages, will you need one, to buy? Assuming I agree to sell you the house.’

I tell her I will, that I can sort it out quickly. I hope it’s true. ‘You won’t get a better offer than mine,’ I say.

‘You’re serious about this?’

‘Very.’

‘I won’t ask why you want to,’ she says. ‘If you really saw what you say you saw . . .’ She stops, shakes her head. ‘I said I won’t ask, so I won’t. If you want the house, if this isn’t the sickest of sick jokes, you can have it. The sooner I’m rid of it and it’s nothing to do with me, the better.’

I can’t help smiling. ‘An unconventional sales pitch,’ I say. ‘When you say I can have it . . .’

‘For 1.2 million,’ she says quickly. ‘That’s what you offered.’

‘Just checking you weren’t proposing to give it to me for free.’

‘I’ll give you my solicitor’s details – ask yours to make the offer official, as soon as possible.’ She drains her glass, puts it down on the worktop. ‘Would you like me to show you round? Or is that a waste of time? You don’t care what the rooms look like, presumably. You want to buy the house because you think someone might have been murdered here – the same reason I want to sell it.’

I can’t be bothered to defend myself. If she wants to think I’m doing this for ghoulish reasons, let her. ‘I’d like to look round,’ I say.

‘Let’s get it over with, then,’ she says brusquely. ‘I need to get out of here.’

As we go from room to room on the ground floor, she says nothing. Not a word. She hesitates for a few seconds by each door, as if afraid to open it and walk in. There’s a conservatory that wasn’t in the pictures on the website – plastic, not wood. Kit would hate it.

At the bottom of the stairs, Selina says, ‘If you’ve got any questions, ask.’

‘I already have,’ I tell her.

‘I mean about the house – the central heating, the burglar alarm . . .’

‘I’m not interested in anything like that.’

I follow her upstairs. Standing in one room after another, I look around, pretending to pay attention, not really seeing what’s in front of me. I’m still thinking about the china mug with the red feathers on it, the hard thing inside it that made a clinking noise.

As Selina leads the way into the bathroom, I say, ‘Oh – hang on. I think I can hear my phone ringing in my bag – I’ll just go and grab it.’ Without waiting for her reaction, I turn and run down the stairs.

On the threshold of the kitchen, I freeze. Did I mention my mobile phone being broken, in the letter? No, I don’t think I did. I told her to ring me in my hotel room, but I said nothing about having no mobile.

I move towards the red feather mug. My hand shakes as I lift it off the shelf and look inside. There’s no white button or disc in there, only a set of keys attached to a yellow plastic fob. The hammering of my heart throbs in my ears. There’s a label on the fob, words written in small handwriting. I pull it out very slowly, so that the keys don’t knock against the side of the mug, and take a closer look.

I read it again and again, my eyes racing over the small print. It can’t mean what I think it means.
It must
. Why else would Selina have looked at the mug when she did, picked it up to check the key was there? A loud roaring fills my head. My breathing speeds up. I can’t control it; it’s running away from me.

Oh, my God.

How could I not have known, all this time?

I think of what I told Alice, what Kit said about naming our Cambridge house:
It’s growing on me the more I think about it – the Death Button Centre. We could get a plaque made for the front door. No, I know, even better – let’s call it 17 Pardoner Lane.

How could I have told Alice that he said that, and still not realised?

‘Connie?’ I hear Selina’s footsteps above me.

‘Coming,’ I shout. I stuff the keys into my pocket, replace the empty mug on the shelf, and run back upstairs. ‘I’ve got to go,’ I say. ‘I just . . .’ No convenient lie springs to mind. ‘Something’s come up.’ It’s the best I can do. I have to get out of here before Selina realises I’ve taken the keys.

Why did you take them? What are you planning to do?

She frowns. ‘You’re still buying though, right?’

For a second, I’m afraid I’ll laugh in her face. What would she say if I told her I don’t need to pay over the odds for her house any more?
I’m so sorry, but I’m going to have to pass – I’ve managed to work out what’s going on without bankrupting myself. Aren’t you pleased for me, Doctor?

Everything has changed. I no longer need to buy 11 Bentley Grove.

But I still want to.
Why?
asks my internal Alice.
Because it’s in Cambridge
, I tell her,
and Cambridge is where I want to live. It’s where I’ve wanted to live since 2003. And this house is for sale, and I’ve already offered to buy it, and no one was killed here – I was wrong about that. And . . . when I pressed ‘Home’ on the SatNav, this was the address that came up: 11 Bentley Grove.

I can’t work out whether my reasons are understandable or insane, and I don’t much care.

‘I’m still buying,’ I tell Selina Gane. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t let you down.’ And then I run.

Chapter 20

24/7/2010

‘Thank you.’ Alice Bean smiled as Charlie took the letter from her. ‘Sam Kombothekra looked terrified when I tried to give it to him.’

‘Men are cowards.’ Charlie opened her bag, made sure Alice saw her putting the envelope safely inside. ‘You could give Sam a note for the milkman and he’d worry about getting mixed up in a scandal.’

‘My aim isn’t to make trouble. The opposite. I care about Simon.’

‘Then take this opportunity to help him.’ Charlie reminded herself that she was here to extract information. It would have been too easy to say, ‘Yeah, well, he wants nothing to do with you – why do you think I’m here?’

She’d suggested to Alice that they meet at Spillages café, but Alice had proposed the park instead. It had irritated Charlie at the time – she hated people who talked about being ‘cooped up’ and behaved as if it was obligatory to go and stand directly under the sun whenever it was out – but now she was glad to be in the open air, following the narrow tree-fringed footpath around the lake, listening as the birds overhead conducted a vigorous debate in a language she didn’t understand. Walking alongside somebody, you didn’t have to look at their face, or let them see yours. Sitting across a table from Alice would have been much harder.

Harder to resist the temptation to say, ‘Oh, by the way – guess who got married last Friday?’ Charlie had decided before ringing Alice that she wouldn’t mention it. She knew that to tell her would lead to open hostility between them, even if she didn’t know exactly how it would happen. Probably it would be her fault. In her official capacity as Simon’s wife, she might feel obliged to say, ‘Take your letter and stick it up your arse.’

She hoped she’d be glad later – proud, even – that she’d chosen the mature, non-confrontational path. She certainly wasn’t enjoying it now, while it was happening; hostility, even if you went on to regret it later, was much more fun in the short term.

‘I’ll help if I can,’ said Alice, ‘but . . . can I ask you a question first?’