I raise an eyebrow to acknowledge what that account might mean to a car snob. “Yeah, yeah. And Mrs. Baxter had had ill health, bit of postnatal depression, and been told by the doctor to take it easy. At first, Ania just worked daytime, but she was so brilliant with the kids—the boy, Alfie, is a bit of a biter apparently—she became their main babysitter, too.”
“A bit of a biter?” I say.
“Yes. Issues with discipline. Anger management. Ania had a way about her, they said. She coaxed Alfie to do things that other people couldn’t, like eat his dinner. She was selfless and warm, the sort of person who really engages with the world. She bought the kids presents at Christmas, made biscuits with them. She took them to Chessington on the train a few weeks ago. On another occasion”—he checks his notes—“they collected frogs’ eggs in Richmond Park.”
“Issues with discipline?” I can’t help laughing. The man who thinks he’s
FIT
looks across at the sound. “Anger management? He only looks about five.”
“Enough about Alfie!” He eyes me over his Guinness. “Alfie is not the focus of our enquiries. They had no idea of anyone who would do her harm. To know her was to love her.”
A sharp twist inside. I think about the photograph Perivale showed me, the children on the climbing frame, Ania smiling. Her whole life was ahead of her. What kind of a mother would she have been? A wonderful one: young, full of energy and enthusiasm.
To know her was to love her
. I start thinking about Millie. I force myself to focus. “Did they know anything about the boyfriend?”
“I was getting to that.” He taps the table a couple of times, with both index fingers, drumming in miniature. “Yes. Tolek, a man from home, her childhood sweetheart. I think he followed her to the UK. A builder. They were engaged, though she didn’t yet have
a ring, and it seemed to be one of those engagements that drags on and on, without any sense of it going anywhere in particular. One of those Catholic engagements, perhaps, that’s just an excuse to have sex.”
“Had they met him?”
“He picked Ania up from work a few times in his van, though Mrs. Baxter said she hadn’t seen him recently. He was on a big job, working funny hours. Nice enough.”
“ ‘Nice enough.’ Is that all? Poor Ania. It’s not much, is it?”
“We should talk to him. Even if he didn’t do it, he might know something.”
One of the men at the bar emits a gutturally pitched bellow. Another doubles up. The
FIT
rower bangs the bar with the palm of his hand.
Jack raises his eyebrows. I try to look just at him, to imagine we’re alone. “What else?” I say.
“She hadn’t told them she was pregnant. The police were the bearers of those glad tidings. She had started behaving differently, though. When she first came to them, she seemed short of cash. She bought her clothes at charity shops. Mrs. Baxter complimented her on a coat she was wearing, and Ania told her she got it in Fara, that charity shop on the Northcote Road: ‘Rich pickings, apparently,’ Mrs. Baxter reported. ‘Kept thinking I should pop over there myself.’ ”
“Even without meeting Mrs. Baxter, I can imagine her saying that. But
my
clothes, do you think? Do you think my clothes found their way to Fara and Ania bought them?”
He shrugs. “It’s a possibility, isn’t it? Just an extraordinary coincidence. But either Ania or her boyfriend seemed to have come into a chunk of money. An enormous bunch of flowers arrived for her at the house a month before she died.”
“I suppose if he had been working on a big job . . .”
More rowers have joined at the bar. Whispering takes place. The newcomers turn to me and stare.
“True,” Jack says, oblivious. “It would explain why Ania was more flush.” He checks his notes. “She started taking taxis home, and she was dressing in a more stylish, upmarket manner—designer, Mrs. Baxter decided, and definitely not secondhand. And once—she was a bit sheepish about noticing this—when Ania came to stay the night, she brought her sleeping things in an Agent Provocateur carrier bag. Mrs. Baxter was impressed. Agent Provocateur—posh undies, aren’t they?”
“Very posh undies. Expensive. Sexy.” There is something about the way I say
sexy
that makes me want to hide under the table.
“They didn’t have a number for the boyfriend, but they did tell me Ania had a friend, a woman called Christa. She babysat for them once when Ania was busy. And”—he stabs a page of his notebook with his finger—“here is her number!”
He looks at me expectantly.
“Good work,” I say. And I mean it. He has surprised me. He is taking this more seriously than I expected. I’m grateful. I wouldn’t have known where to start with the Baxters. And this is something, this is a beginning. If the few facts he has collected make us both feel closer to Ania then, surely, that must be good.
“Are the Baxters kind?” I say. “I know it’s not strictly relevant, but I would like to think that they were kind to her.”
“Yes. Do you know, I think they were.”
“Are you sure you’re not just one of those people who sees the best in others?”
He looks thrown, opens his mouth and closes it. “I think they cared about her. I would say they were good employers, yes.”
“Had they been to her flat?”
“No. Never.”
“It’s weird how lopsided this sort of relationship is, isn’t it? I
mean, she will have known so much about them, been part of their lives, been bitten by little Alfie, for God’s sake, and yet they will have stopped thinking about her the moment she walked out of the door. The Baxters thought they knew Ania, and yet did they have a clue about what she was really like, or what was really going on in her life? And were they natural with her, or did they put on the act of employer? We all present such different faces to each other. Marta, for example—maybe she finds me as evasive and weird as I find her. We are all lots of different people, and sometimes we pretend to be something we’re not.”
Jack looks alarmed.
“Sorry. Bit heavy. I keep thinking, you know, she’s dead, that’s all. She was murdered.”
He stares at the phone number scrawled across the page of his notepad, under- and over-scored with double lines.
“Let’s ring Christa,” I say. “She might know something. At the very least, she might have a contact for Tolek.”
He nods. The pub is filling, the noise level rising. The Lombard reflex: an instinct people have to talk louder and louder over themselves to be heard. (We had a sociologist on the show the other day to talk about a southeast England survey on noise pollution.) Jack has gulped down his Guinness and I can’t pretend to sip my shandy any longer. A bare-legged couple, fresh from the river, have been eyeing our table. I give them a signal and wait for them to barrel over. They look away when they reach me, don’t even say thanks.
• • •
It’s not as cold, or as blue, outside as it was. The wind has dropped. A haze of disconsolate cloud covers the sky. There is a bench, and we walk over to it and sit down at opposite ends from each other. Why did I have that outburst? It has left an awkwardness. While Jack punches in the number on his phone, I stare at the roiling expanse
of brown river. The people in the pub, they have got to me. After a few moments, Jack says, “Shall I leave a message?”
I shake my head. I feel a wave of despair.
He puts the phone in his back pocket. “You all right?” he says. “Those men in there—no style.”
So he
had
noticed. Perhaps he picks up on more than he pretends to.
“I’m fine,” I say. “You know—if you put yourself out there . . .”
“Sundays are always the worst,” he says. “Full of lies.”
More pictures of bruised shins today, then. “I haven’t looked at them,” I say. “I’ve been stuffing the papers under the sofa.”
He grins. “Good ploy.”
We sit for a bit longer. Jack says something about lunch.
“Didn’t you have a sausage roll only a couple of hours ago?”
“No . . . How . . . ? It wasn’t a sausage roll. It was a homity pie.”
“A homity pie! What’s that when it’s at home?”
“I was hungry,” he says, aggrieved. “It’s giving up the cigarettes. Plus I didn’t have time for breakfast, and there’s this great organic bakery near Brixton tube.”
“I’m amazed you’re not fat.”
“I work out most mornings. Feel.”
He thrusts a bicep toward me. I squeeze it, a clutch of muscle, and then immediately look away, flustered.
“Quick stroll?” he asks.
“A stroll rather than a walk?”
“Let’s start with a stroll and see how we get on.”
The tide has gone down since we arrived—an arc of beach at the bottom of the slipway. Debris—tires, splintered wood, old plastic bags, the occasional dead rat—dots the water’s edge. A woman with bare tanned arms sculls past.
“Tolek,” Jack says. “We need to find Tolek.”
“If only Tolek hadn’t been in Poland. If he had been in the
country maybe Perivale would never have fixated on me. He could have fixated on
him
.”
“Can’t really beat Poland as an alibi, pretty cast-iron.”
“What is a ‘cast-iron’ alibi? It’s such a cliché, stops people from looking any further. I mean, he could have slipped back into the UK in the trunk of someone’s car, and then been smuggled out again. Couldn’t he? And
not
having an alibi—like me, both for the night Ania was killed, and for the credit card receipt: it doesn’t mean I’m guilty. It just means I don’t have enough friends.” I laugh to show I’m not being completely serious.
“Any sign of Perivale recently?” Jack asks.
“He was outside the house again today. I wish he would be more obvious, get it over with. It’s like waiting to be called into the headmaster’s study.” I turn to face him. “Am I being paranoid to think he’s out to get me?”
“No.” He stuffs his hands in the pockets of his jeans with a sort of confirmatory vigor. “I don’t think you are. He’s got some weird twisted agenda.”
“I feel so jumpy all the time. I felt like I was being followed this morning.”
“I’m sure it’s just your imagination. You’re bound to feel twitchy.”
“Like an itch in a missing limb. Or that kids’ book
The Hairy Toe
? You know the one,” I say, putting on a scary voice: “ ‘Who’s got my hairy toe?’ ”
“No, don’t know it.”
You can’t talk about kids’ books to a man who doesn’t have kids. “Not a very good book,” I say.
We pause to wait for a rowing crew to pass in front of us. We watch them shoulder their boat, like a trophy, a ceremonial dead shark, into the bowels of the boathouse, and then we walk for a few minutes in silence. We pass a playground: the cries and shouts of children, the distant whack of balls.
I wonder what Millie is doing. I hope she isn’t homesick. I feel a sharp pang of longing.
“What about Marta,” Jack says. “Does she have an alibi for the time of the credit card receipt?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
“And Ania’s increased wealth. I’d like to know more about that.”
When we have reached the place where the road ends and the towpath begins, I lean on the balustrade, rest my chin on it, look down into the eddying waters of the Thames. I’m wondering if this is all a bit pointless. Can Christa really tell us anything useful, even if we do get through to her? It smells here of deep, dark mud. I imagine we will stay here for a moment or two, reflect on all this deep, dark muddiness, and then go back to the car.
“Shall we keep going?” he says.
“I don’t know.” I straighten up. “Is this a stroll, or is this a walk?”
“Could we continue a bit farther without committing either way?”
“We could.”
Ahead of us is a deserted stretch of towpath, scraggy trees and a shrubby fence on one side of us, a brick wall sloping steeply down to the river on the other. The ground is bumpy, half gravel, half soil, with pitty holes where rain has collected. There is the dank, brackish smell of wet clothes and rotting vegetation.
“Did you like your job?” Jack asks suddenly.
“I did.
Do
.
A silence.
Have
I still got a job? Anxiety rises and spills, a dull, murky unease. Terri hasn’t rung. Should I ring her? I wasn’t needed while the investigation was “ongoing,” she said, but she might have had second thoughts. Perhaps she is missing me. Have the ratings dropped? Should I ring her later just to check? Dare I hope?
Jack is looking at me oddly.
“Good bits and bad bits,” I say.
“Like?”
I think carefully. This is the sort of information that will go in the profile. I should be cautious. “Bad bits: early starts, being recognized on the street, people thinking they know me—I’m not very good at that, though obviously it’s deeply flattering. Good bits: I like meeting people. Sometimes it’s just celebrities, but often it’s ordinary people with extraordinary stories. Or experts in a particular field. You pick up all sorts of random information that can come in handy.”
“Such as?” He raises an enquiring eyebrow.
“The other day when I was at Battersea Police Station, Perivale’s boss was there, DCI Fraser, and he was Scottish. We’d had a voice coach from the National Theatre on recently, talking about accents, how the landscape of the area has an effect on how people talk—the tonality of East Anglia is as flat as the Fens, while an accent from Wales lilts up over the hills and down into the valleys. Every accent has a point of tension.”
I point to just below my nose. Jack’s eyes follow my finger. “Just here,” I say, “is the point of tension in an Aberdeen accent. It’s because it’s bitterly cold up there and everybody wanders around with their mouths shielded against the wind. Anyway, I took a bit of a guess and asked if he was from Aberdeen. I think it played into my hands. I don’t think he minded.”
“Clever,” he says. “What is there to say about mine?”
“Somewhere with hills but a lot of open space. I think the voice coach said the Yorkshire accent was in a major key—ends on a definite note, makes you sound sure of yourself. And of course reliability, trustworthiness—both qualities one associates with the Yorkshire accent. Perfect for a journalist.”