Authors: David Thomas
‘He is … he is on his own phone, I think. Maybe he will call you back when he has finished. I must go now. The dinner is cooking.’
Then she hung up. And that was odd, too, because Mariana always said, ‘I love you’, or sent me what she called a ‘sweet kiss’ at the end of a telephone call. When she was feeling particularly naughty she’d say something in German and then cut the connection, laughing, before I could work out just how filthy she was being. But she never just hung up.
I wondered whether Andy had been standing nearby and made her too embarrassed to say anything. But Mariana didn’t do embarrassment. I’d learned that from the first moment I’d met her.
Maybe Andy had pissed her off. God love him, my kid brother could be an irritating little tit sometimes. A newspaper reporter has to be persistent even if that infuriates some of the people he deals with, so never knowing when to stop must have come in handy when Andy was investigating a story. But it could be a seriously annoying characteristic in a social context. That might explain Mariana’s tone of voice, though, if the flatness were just suppressed anger.
It took me about another hour to get home. Along the way I ran through a bunch of possible scenarios in my mind, working out various ways of pacifying two people who’d always got on perfectly well until now. Then I put that to one side and turned on the radio. I was the senior partner in a practice called Crookham Church and Partners – Mariana worked there too – and we got a lot of business from footballers. In our part of the world, they were just about the only people still making enough money to pay for fancy new houses. One of our clients was playing in a Champions League game that was about to kick off at Old Trafford. I might as well find out how he had got on.
Shortly before the game reached half-time, I pulled into our drive and parked the car in the triple garage. As the door automatically shut behind me I walked across the gravel towards the front door, my shoulders hunched against the freezing wind. I was just about to put my key in the lock when it swung open.
Mariana was standing there.
Her long, honey-coloured hair was tangled and matted with something liquid that had started to dry in thick, rubbery clumps, as though someone had poured paint over her head.
The stuff was on her face, too, fully dried by the warmth of her skin and then cracked by the movement of her mouth and forehead.
In the half-light of the porch it was hard to see what colour it was. But as I got closer I saw that her dress had been patterned by wild spatters of the stuff.
‘Darling?’ I didn’t know what else to say.
Then she stepped away from me, back into the house and the light, and I could see that the colour was a deep crimson, darkening in places to a purple black.
And now I knew what it was that had sprayed her entire body; that had drenched her hair and her dress; that clung to her face, her arms and her hands; that had been smeared across the flagstones behind her as she walked.
Mariana was covered from head to toe in blood.
2
We stood there silently, motionless, maybe four feet apart. Mariana looked at me but seemed to see nothing. Her tawny, tiger eyes, flecked with gold and green, had always sparkled with intelligence and life. Now they were blank and her face lacked any expression. She seemed entirely indifferent to the state she was in. She just said, ‘
Hereingekommen
’, the German for, ‘Come in’, turned and walked back into the house.
From the back she looked almost normal. She was clean.
Our house was a barn conversion. The way we had designed it, the garage and main entrance were at the rear of the building. A hallway served as a repository for coats, umbrellas and boots. At the far end an internal door led you beneath the sinuous glass and metal curves of the staircase to the showpiece heart of the house, a huge, open-plan living space, open to the full height of the building.
The kitchen area was to the right. The units were ‘Modern Purism’ by Poggenpohl: Mariana’s choice and another one of her surprises. I’d expected something warm and natural, but their sleek, unsentimental efficiency made the kitchen look less like the heart of a family home than an office for cooking in.
Maybe she’d been trying to tell me something. We were so busy perfecting other people’s homes, there’d been no time to give our own place the love and attention we lavished on our clients’. For them we were obsessive about detail. We’d go to any lengths, take any amount of trouble to source the perfect tile, tap, door handle or work surface. When we worked for ourselves, though, it was more a case of getting the basics in fast, and adding all the personal touches later. To make life simpler and quicker we’d bought most of the furniture from the Conran Shop, everything chosen in a single Saturday afternoon. Three Naviglio leather sofas formed a square whose fourth side was a massive fireplace. The dining table was walnut, as were the matching chairs.
All but one of the walls were painted in Casablanca by John Oliver: a soft, dusty, soothing and completely inimitable white emulsion. The far wall, however, was almost entirely glass, with spectacular views across the North Yorkshire countryside. At night the glass became a shining black backdrop against which we played out our lives.
Or a death, as it was in this case.
Mariana turned right into the kitchen. ‘
Ich muss die Nudeln retten bevor sie überkochen
,’ she said.
Apart from the odd dirty joke, we’d always spoken English. Mariana used to say she preferred it to German, which she only half-jokingly called ‘Hitler’s language’. But out of embarrassment at my own incompetence and just wanting to do something for her I’d spent a few months playing a Speak German course in the car. I’d picked up enough to get the gist of what she was saying. She was worried that the pasta was about to boil over.
I didn’t reply. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the right words. I was simply incapable of speech.
Andy was lying almost directly in front of where I stood, about halfway to the far wall. His face was frozen in an expression of fear and bafflement. His pale-blue, button-down shirt was punctured with stabs, though they were nothing compared to the terrible open wound that had cut his left thigh open almost to the bone.
Andy had died at the centre of a spreading, swirling eruption of blood. It lay on the floor in puddles and smears whose patterns showed the thrashings and spasms of his dying limbs as clearly as angel wings in the snow.
The blood was not confined to the floor. It had been flung across the canvas-white walls like the first scarlet spraying of a Jackson Pollock painting. It was dripping from the fancy leather sofas – one of them in particular was doused in it – and the wheeled bookcases that stood on either side of the fireplace. It soiled our creamy rugs. There was even a single scarlet handprint on the glass opposite me. The floor beneath it was a messy confusion of bloody footprints. Andrew must have reached out for support. Or perhaps it had been Mariana. Maybe she had gone to help him. Maybe that was why she was covered in blood. I mean she couldn’t have … no, that wasn’t possible. Not Mariana.
Up to now I had been numb, as though my brain had been overwhelmed, unable to process the torrent of sensory and emotional information with which it had been flooded. I’d never in my life seen a dead body before. Our father died when I was twelve and Andy was five, but Mum wouldn’t let us see him. She said it would be too upsetting. So I had no idea until then how utterly changed the human form is by the absence of life, how absolute the difference between existence and its termination can be. A corpse bears no resemblance whatever to an actor lying still and trying not to breathe. A corpse that has bled out is doubly emptied: the stuff of life has left it as well as the spirit.
Finally, the reality of Andy’s death seemed to register, like a website that takes an age to upload but then flashes all at once on the screen. I actually reeled back a couple of paces, as though I’d received a physical blow, and that was probably just as well because it took me away from the corpse and the blood. So when I threw up all over the floor in front of me none of the vomit corrupted the evidence.
I straightened up, wiping the spit and puke from my mouth, and walked over to the kitchen sink. I turned on the tap, caught some water in my cupped hands and used it to rinse out my mouth. A second handful was splashed over my face.
Mariana was almost close enough to touch, standing by the hob, ladling spaghetti out of a giant pan into three white bowls. ‘
Viel von Nudeln für jeder
,’ she said in a cheery, almost singsong, voice: plenty of pasta for everyone. And then, more to herself, ‘
Die Männer haben Hunger. Sie müssen genug haben, zum zu essen
’: the men will be hungry, they must have enough to eat.
Her bloodied fingers had left red smears on the white china crockery and the aluminium pan. I had a terrible vision of blood in the cooking water, like squid-ink, and as the pasta came out of the water I half-expected it to be pink. Mariana was working like an automaton, oblivious to the fact that the bowls were piled to overflowing and that the pasta spoon she was dipping into the pan was coming up with nothing but water.
I didn’t know how to react. I didn’t know what to feel. Grief for Andy and anger at his death; fear and concern for Mariana, mixed with love, a kind of pity and an instinctive desire to protect her; above all a total bafflement at what was confronting me. All those emotions swirled inside me, colliding and cancelling one another out until all I was left with was numbness.
Mariana’s mood suddenly changed. Her head darted from side to side. She was obviously looking for something.
‘Wo setzte ich der carbonara Soße?’
She was wondering what she’d done with the carbonara sauce. The hob had nothing on it apart from the pan that had held the pasta. For a second, I too looked about me for the sauce, as though it could be magicked into being, that normality could somehow be restored.
That was when I saw the knife.
Mariana had bought a set of Japanese chef’s knives: the Ryusen Blazen series. They featured a core of powdered tool steel, sandwiched between two layers of soft stainless steel, with cutting edges honed to the thinness of a razor blade. The biggest knife in the set had a wide blade 240 millimetres long, which tapered to a point sharp enough to draw blood if you so much as rested a finger against it. It was called a Western Deba. It was lying just the far side of the three white bowls, and the last drops of stringy, semi-coagulated blood were still falling from its blade to the pure white of the Poggenpohl work surface.
Finally, I found my voice.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘What it looks like. I serve the meal.’
Finally, Mariana had spoken English, but her accent was still more Germanic than usual. She sounded like a different person.
‘But Andy’s dead!’
She looked at me uncomprehendingly.
‘Sorry? I don’t understand. Your brother is now not coming to supper?’
3
I dialled 999. When the woman on the other end of the line asked me which service I wanted, my mind seemed to scramble. ‘I don’t know,’ I blurted. ‘Someone’s dead at my house. He’s been stabbed. Somebody killed him.’
She took my name and address and told me to stay where I was: ‘The police and an ambulance will be with you soon.’
When she mentioned the police I thought of all the thrillers I’d read, the TV cop shows I’d seen: detectives always suspected the family first. What if they thought we’d done it? Somewhere inside I must have known that Mariana was the only possible suspect, but I was a long way from admitting that to myself or anyone else just yet. I speed-dialled my lawyer, Jamie Monkton. He handled all the practice’s contractual work. Jamie wasn’t the kind of lawyer who hung around a lot of police stations. But he was the only one I knew.
‘I need your advice,’ I said.
‘No worries,’ he replied. ‘Give me a call in the morning. Can’t talk right now, I’m afraid. We’ve got people over for dinner.’
‘No, this is an emergency. My brother Andrew is dead.’
‘Oh shit, I’m so sorry. When?’
‘Tonight, at the house. He’s lying on the living-room floor. There’s an ambulance on the way. They’ve probably notified the police, too.’
‘My God, what happened?’
‘He was stabbed. He was lying there when I got home.’
‘Stabbed? Jesus … I’m sorry, Pete, I don’t know what to say … How’s Mariana?’
‘She’s here. She’s not doing too well. I mean, physically she’s fine, but she’s in a hell of a state mentally. They were the only people in the house.’
‘Oh, right … I see.’ Monkton’s voice changed as he took in the implications of what I’d just said. He seemed to be casting aside his role as my friend and, for the first time, looking at the situation through lawyer’s eyes. ‘Look, this is a bit out of my territory. You’re going to need criminal lawyers – both of you, I should think. And they’re pretty hard to find these days. No money in it, you see, and you have to be specially registered to be able to take legal aid cases.’
‘We don’t have much time, Jamie. Would it just be quicker for me to look in Yellow Pages?’
‘No, I’ll find someone … hang on, there’s someone here … Samira something: one of our friends brought her as his plus-one. I’m sure she said she did legal aid work. She might be able to help. Look, I expect the rozzers’ll bring you both down to York nick. They might move you to the force HQ at Newby Wiske later if they think the case is important enough. But the first stop will definitely be York, so I’ll meet you there, with anyone we can rustle up. In the meantime, don’t touch anything that looks remotely like evidence. And when the police arrive, say nothing. Keep it to name, rank and serial number.’
‘Sorry about your dinner party,’ I said, still under the mistaken impression that I was living in a world in which any of the normal rules and manners of my past life still applied.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Monkton, ‘that’s the least of our worries. Listen, Pete, be careful, OK? This is serious stuff … Right, I’d better go and get things moving. I’ll see you later.’