‘You know, I wish I had done that tabloid interview I was offered a million times over. Then I could show you the evidence.’
‘Oh, tell me about it.’
She took her keys out of her handbag, then visibly thought better of it. I was fiddling with my phone, glad I had upgraded it recently.
‘I’ll show you,’ I said, and there was my name, in a newspaper report. I was mentioned as a friend of the family who had been waiting with the tragic husband. ‘Look. That’s my name. I can show you ID.’
She looked at the phone for a long time, then back at me, and nodded, and her face changed. She went from grey to a mournful pale green.
‘Look. This is horrific. We all know that. Every time the phone rings … I can’t believe she did what they’re saying she did, but at the same time I can’t see what else … Our dad’s drinking, and Mum’s up to the eyeballs on tranquillisers. If you know Lara, you’ll know about my relationship with her. Do you know that stuff?’
‘You didn’t get on. At all. She lived here with you for a while and then moved out.’
‘Let’s go for a drink.’
‘Sure.’
‘A soft drink on my part. I would love a small glass of wine, but not in public, not when there’s a chance of someone from the press lurking with a camera. And not at the pub down there. Everyone would be listening.’
She set off back up the street without waiting for an answer, and I had to do my fastest walking to catch her up.
The bar was big and clattery and completely anonymous. I could see why Olivia had chosen it. It was populated with a mixture of people in work clothes knocking back drinks with serious levels of concentration, and tourists being happier and more leisurely about it.
I bought her a freshly squeezed orange juice, and without intending to, added a glass of white wine for myself.
‘Oh, you lucky sod,’ she said with a small smile, eyeing up my drink. ‘What is that?’
‘Sauvignon Blanc. I don’t often drink, actually, and when I do it’s red wine, but there was a woman at the bar buying this and it looked nice, so I decided to have one too.’
‘When Lara first turned up at my flat, she had a bottle of Sauvignon with her. I hadn’t realised how nervous she was, but she knocked it back. It was being on my territory, I suppose. She normally drank red too. Look. Iris. Let’s get straight to the point. What do you think’s happened?’
A man pushed past my chair, so close that I could smell the meat he had just eaten. I leaned towards Olivia.
‘Well.’ I saw a woman holding herself together by a thread. ‘I just don’t think she killed him, like I said. I really don’t.’
‘Of course she didn’t kill him.’ Olivia was leaning forward too. ‘The police interviewed me for hours and hours. It was awful, like you’ve suddenly stepped into a TV drama or something. You kind of think you know the script, except that it’s all about your sister and whether or not she murdered her lover. Not in a million years. I kept saying that. Lara and I are not close, but I’ll defend her to the death on this one. She didn’t do it. Cheat on Sam, yes, of course – wouldn’t you? Murder someone? Well – no. That’s just ludicrous. Unthinkable.’
‘I agree with you.’
‘Someone’s set her up.’
‘What did the police say about that?’
She shrugged. ‘That she wanted Guy to leave his wife and he wouldn’t and she cracked up and stabbed him. She would never have carried a knife, so where did that come from? The trouble is, I know I’m right, but when I hear myself saying it, and look at their sceptical faces, I can see that, to them, I’m like one of those people who lives next door to a serial killer and says “but he was so quiet and polite”. They feel sorry for me and they think I don’t have a clue.’ She sighed. ‘Can I have a sip of your wine?’
I pushed it towards her. ‘Thanks. Lara and I hated one another, and that’s actually not too strong a word. Right from when we were children. She was perfect – I could never match up. We’d compete endlessly in everything and she’d always beat me. She was the good girl, so I had to be the bad one. All of that. It was complicated and I’m not proud of certain things. After university she went away travelling and she was in Asia for ages, and that was the only time I ever felt I had the space to be myself. But she came back and reinvented herself as the high-flying professional, and I was in second place again. She had the perfect wedding, while my love life was one long car crash. And then she didn’t get pregnant and I did, without meaning to, and my own parents were insanely furious with me for upsetting her. Neither of them was remotely pleased about the baby, not even for half a second. It was just another bitchy thing I’d done, as far as they were concerned.
‘I knew she was seeing Guy, because I ran into them in a bar that night – the night she vanished. They were having a beer round the corner. I could see at a glance that she adored him, and I knew her well enough to know that she’d want to leave Sam rather than have a long-term affair. We’re sisters. No matter what baggage there is, we’re still sisters. And she would never, ever have hurt that man, even though the press is going wild for the “good girl turned monster” thing.’
‘So where do you think she is?’
Olivia leaned back in her chair and stroked the bump of her baby.
‘I think,’ she said. ‘No one else wants to hear this. But I think something terrible has happened to her. Whoever killed Guy has done the same to her. Wherever she is, Iris, I’m absolutely certain that she’s dead. But I have no idea who could have done it. A random lunatic is the only option, but that makes no sense. That doesn’t really happen, or if it does they get caught straight away. So then I wonder, could it be someone she knows? I can’t think of anyone.’
She paused.
‘But look. I know for sure that something dramatic happened to her when she was in Thailand. She was up to something. She had a boyfriend, Jake, and then suddenly she was back home and subdued and in her room all the time. That’s the only time Lara was ever different. Mysterious. I’ve been going through her boxes of stuff in the parents’ attic, because you never know. I’m clutching at straws, but there could be something there, couldn’t there? I can’t think what else to do. Jake, with no surname, from, what, nearly fifteen years ago?’
I nodded. ‘If you find anything,’ I said. It seemed presumptuous to ask, so I didn’t finish the sentence.
‘It’s nice that you believe in her,’ she said. ‘Makes me feel less alone. Sure. Let’s swap numbers, and if I find anything I’ll give you a call. You do the same.’
I opened my mouth to tell her about the passport, then stopped. It seemed too ridiculous, and I could not bear to get her hopes up and then dash them. I put a hand on hers and passed her my wine glass.
‘Of course I will,’ I told her.
chapter nineteen
Lara and Guy’s hotel was a functional place for business people, opposite St Paul’s Cathedral. I could see why she wanted to stay here: it was not outrageously expensive (in the central London hotel world, at least), you could check in by machine, and nobody bothered you. The little foyer was filled with men and women, mainly men, in work outfits, bustling around in bubbles of their own importance.
I looked at a few of them, but they seemed interchangeable. I wished I could let them know how easily their bubbles were popped. As well as the ‘work trip to London’ brigade, there were the obligatory tourists carting enormous suitcases in and out of lifts.
My room was number 253. It was a door on a corridor, the same as all the others. Lara and Guy might have used this room, but statistically, they probably hadn’t.
I had not been in a hotel for years. The bland room, the rigorously smooth bed, the little kettle and the tiny plastic tubs of non-milk came together to create an environment that was nothing like the last hotel room I’d been in, yet it took my breath away all the same. Superimposed on this one was a room with character, a room with bare floorboards and a colourful bedspread, huge open windows and a breeze blowing in from the sea.
I closed my eyes tightly. If I kept breathing, in and out, it would be all right. That other hotel room was miles from here. It was not in London. It was in Italy. It had no business intruding here.
Laurie was at home. The Laurie who had taken me to Italy was long gone.
My legs were wobbling, but I managed to manoeuvre myself to the bed. Even when I was lying curled up, my big boots transgressive on the covers, it took a few minutes before it all subsided. I did not like it; but I had known that this would happen. In London, little bits of that other world would seep in.
I concentrated hard and thought of Lara, and soon it was all gone and I was back in Lara’s London life. She and her dead lover had lived in rooms like this, all through the week, for weeks and weeks. I imagined their suitcases side by side, their contents spilling out and mingling. Their work clothes would have hung in a wardrobe like this, on the same non-removable hangers. Then one day they caught the train together, and by the time it reached Cornwall, he was dead and she was gone.
I had expected to hide in my room that evening, sheltering from London and its barrage of reminders, but in fact the city was strangely welcoming. I could go anywhere and do anything, and I felt certain that nobody would notice me. I sat in a pub that was busy despite its being a January Monday. There I had a glass of orange juice and a plate of cheerily generic fish and chips, and tried to decide what on earth I should do next. Olivia had spoken to me, and, unexpectedly, I liked her. I was supposed to be investigating, but I had no idea how.
Someone had left a newspaper on the next table, and I grabbed it and flicked through the pages. There was nothing new in the news pages, just speculation and some weak sightings. I flicked past a cobbled-together feature about people working away from their spouses. While it said very little about Lara and Guy, the words ‘they spent their evenings in the bars and clubs of central London, living openly as partners’ jumped off the page. It went on to list a sparse set of unconvincing sightings of them that journalists had assembled.
‘Eyewitnesses report seeing them in a seedy underground cabaret bar in a former toilet in central London, the day before the murder,’ I read. ‘Lara Finch might already have known what she was going to do the very next night.’
I knew about the underground bar, vaguely, but I had not given it much thought. In the absence of much else to go on, and before I worked out a way of talking to Lara’s colleagues, I would retrace their steps. If I could go, alone, to a seedy bar in a converted toilet, I would be able to do anything.
With some relief, I reminded myself that there was no point going to a dodgy bar on a Monday. I would have to wait until the end of the week for that challenge: in fact, I would go on Thursday, as they had. For now, that meant I could put it out of my mind.
I realised slowly that someone was looking at me. People were leaving the pub, and everything felt as if it were winding down. There was only a handful of people left, all of a sudden, one of whom was standing across the room from me, looking at me without even trying to pretend he wasn’t.
I looked up, looked away, and looked back again. For a fraction of a second I wanted to run. My heart struggled in my chest as if, given half a chance, it would escape my rib cage altogether and run away. My legs tensed up, ready to go.
Then it was over. He was just a man in a bar, staring at a woman because she was on her own. That was all. I had mistaken him for someone he could not possibly have been. This man had thick black hair, and he was about the right height, and his skin was the same caramel colour that spoke of a mixed heritage of a similar sort. He was the right kind of age. That was all.
He could not be Laurie, because I had left Laurie in Cornwall. Laurie would not have followed me here and ambushed me with accusations.
I looked back up at him quickly. The man smiled and started to walk towards me. I stood up, grabbed my bag and left, without looking back. I hoped he was not taking that as an invitation, and I started to run, in case he did.
The hotel’s corridors were identical, inevitably. I could have gone straight to my room, but instead I started at the top floor and walked around and down. I passed door after door, many with ‘do not disturb’ signs on them, others with empty trays outside. I was passing every room in which Guy and Lara had ever stayed.
I wished I had known her better. I wished that she had confided in me, even though I had only met her four times. I longed to know whether she was in love with him, whether her time in this hotel was spent in a whirlwind of non-stop talk and sex and obsession, or whether she was bored at home and miserable and seeking solace in destructive behaviour. I hoped it was the first one. I pictured the two of them ripping one another’s clothes off the moment the hotel door clicked shut behind them.
It was bland here. Everything was uniform – it was a place to sleep and that was all – so the entire building became a surreal blank canvas for anything anyone wanted to do. Every few steps took me past another room, with another bed. Anything could have been going on behind those doors.
I walked quickly, trying not to think about the man in the bar. He had done nothing wrong, even though approaching a strange woman in a pub was completely out of character. It was not necessarily out of his character, not out of the real man’s character. It would only have been odd behaviour for the man he looked like.
It would have been odd behaviour for Laurence. Laurie was at home in Cornwall. He was in our home, where we lived.
Finally, on floor four, I found a chambermaid’s trolley. I stood beside it, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, fiddling with my hair, picking at a loose corner of wallpaper, until a woman appeared. She was small, her hair scraped back, and she was wearing a grey and white uniform.
‘Good evening,’ she said, her eyes cast down.
‘Hello.’ I tried to think what would make her talk to me. I needed to get this right. ‘Hi. Um. Do you work here every day?’
She was suspicious. ‘Mostly. Do you have a problem with your room?’