Chapter 21
When I wake up and turn to look at him on the other pillow, I still can’t believe we got from the front step to here. For the first time since Kai died, I really hope he can’t see me, isn’t watching over me, has moved on to something bigger.
I also tell myself the sex we had last night wasn’t the best of my life.
Couldn’t have been. We were both knackered and upset and we’re strangers.
It must just be that it’s been so long and we’d each just infodumped the other one into the kind of intimacy it usually takes years to build.
I know the dead worst about this man: overfocused on work, ready to tell fibs for his image; three times divorced, for God’s sake!
And he might not know the deepest and darkest secrets of my past, but he knows some pretty squirrelly stuff about my present: horny as hell when I should be grieving, from a murky family that’s up to terrible things—I keep hearing Shelley saying “Go with the flow,” worried about my house instead of only thinking about poor Peggy March getting shunted off to that nursing home.
It was asking him that, last night, sitting at the kitchen table, that made my mouth go dry.
“Are you sure there was nothing about the sale that means someone could take it back?” I said.
“If Peggy was coerced to sell, if she was hounded into care, if she never agreed even to her stuff getting cleared . . . then could someone pop up and take it back from me?”
David said nothing.
“I mean, obviously, if she was still alive, I wouldn’t care about any of that, but since she died, could her son suddenly say he wants the house back? It must be his inheritance.”
“But don’t you think it was probably the son who did the hounding and coercing?” David said. “That’s much more likely than that a troika of—I know one of them’s your brother—would target someone who’s got a son. Don’t you think?”
“But don’t you know?” I said to him. “I mean, wasn’t the son involved in the sale?”
He rubbed his face at that. “I don’t know, Lindsay. I can’t remember. It was a while back and I was fitting it around a lot of other things. I can dig out the paperwork and go back over it.”
“Leave it,” I said to him. “You were sure it was okay at the time. That’s good enough for me. I’ll let the house go anyway, if it comes to that.”
“If what comes to what?”
“If dragging the ‘troika’ out into the open comes to eviction.”
“You’re definitely going to?” he asked. “Drag them?”
“I’ve got to! Apart from anything else, if they’re not stopped, they might do it again.”
So how did we get from there to bed? To furious sex, then languorous sex, then giggly sex, and finally sleep, tangled up together, one of us farting softly as we were dropping off, which only made us both laugh again.
I have no idea. I’m still thinking about it when David opens his eyes. “Wow,” he says.
“Wow,” I agree, and we stare at each other for a while until he gets taken over by a yawn, which I catch too, and then we both roll over to lie on our backs and face the ceiling.
“I better go,” he says after a while, scrabbling on the bedside table for his watch.
“Shit!” he says, sitting up. “It’s nearly eleven o’clock.
I meant to go round and offer to take Sean to the fracture clinic.
She’d have refused anyway, and we both knew that, but I need to start building credit to get out of the hole I’m in. ”
“She’s quite . . . Hey, listen, did she put up objections to me seeing the boys? Eileen, I mean.”
“I don’t want to bad-mouth her,” he says, which says everything. “Look, I’ve got a hell of a day. But I could glance at your paperwork again tonight.”
“I’ve had a better idea,” I tell him.
“Oh?”
“Don’t worry about it. Get going and have first bath. Sorry there’s no shower. I’ll go and make the coffee. Are you hungry?”
“Am I hungry? How dare you!” he says, grabbing me and shaking me. “After I put in such a hard shift as a demon lover. I’m ravenous!”
So I’m grinning all over my face as I head downstairs and start gathering a restorative breakfast.
He’s on his phone in the bathroom when I come back up to ask if he can eat cheese in the morning. An omelette is all I can muster and I haven’t got any brunch-style vegetables to go in it, so cheese is the only option. I put my hand on the door but he’s locked it.
“Well, you need to do something,” I hear him saying.
“Today if not yesterday. I don’t really care if you’re not ready.
I’m telling you—scratch that, I’m warning you—if this goes tits up because you didn’t do something today that you could have done today, if you’d just stopped faffing, I will not be standing up saying I’m Spartacus. Got it?”
There’s a short silence. The person on the other end must be speaking.
“We’ll see,” David says. And then I hear his phone hitting a hard surface and a tap turning on.
I creep back downstairs. He doesn’t sound like someone who would quail at the idea of eating cheese for brunch.
He sounds like . . . My God, he sounds like Kai.
Different accent, obviously, and older. But he sounds like Kai when someone pissed him off by not doing their job properly for a crummy reason.
I never minded Kai being such a hard nose at work.
I got the benefit of it once everyone in the industry knew I was married to him.
I never had to do any of the tough stuff for myself.
But, thing is, Kai was the same at home. He flossed and exercised and never ate junk. He always kept his receipts and was the first one to send them to our accountant. Sometimes, he made me feel kind of . . . inadequate? Judged? Below average on some scale I never named.
Name it now, I tell myself, standing whisking eggs for David’s omelette.
The Goody-Two-Shoes Scale. It comes into my head without invitation.
I put the whisk down and hold my hand over my mouth, the cheese smell sickening me.
I can’t help it though. Kai would never have lied about three ex-wives or palmed his kids off on their stepmother.
If I’m honest, Kai would never have laughed at a fart in bed.
I jump back to life as David comes into the kitchen.
“I might have used all your hot water,” he says.
“So I’ve left it in for you. I washed my bum at the sink first, though, so it’s not too revolting.
” As if he’s on a mission to make my darling American husband, love of my life, look like a prissy little idiot in comparison with him.
“And can I just say this, Lindsay? Not to nag but you might not have so many nightmares if you read something a little milder at bedtime.”
“Did the plain brown wrapper fall off or something?” I say. “It is a horrible jacket, right enough.”
“It was the plain brown wrapper that piqued my interest. I’m serious, though.” He gives an ostentatious shudder. “Why would you want to curl up and read about the ghosts of seven dead?”
“What?” I say in a voice so tiny I can hardly hear myself. I don’t know if he hears me but he says no more.
And I don’t ask again.
But once he’s gone I go back upstairs and pick up the book, willing it to be what it must be.
What I know it is: Dame Agatha toying with her readers, making them wait, and then solving it all, smoothing and soothing and settling.
I open up at page one again and, once again, it’s George Lee Lutz, of Deer Park, Long Island, and his wife Kathy for the second time and for real, right here by my bed, the Reeds, young and in love, aren’t moving to Dillmouth to have an adventure; instead, the Lutzes are moving to Amityville, to start the descent into unending helpless horror.
Amityville. Where a family was murdered.
Were there seven of them? Could be. And the worst thing of all is that I think I remember hearing that it was true.
I’m not panicking this time. Maybe because of the daylight, or maybe because I’m numb, I feel a sort of calm.
“Peggy,” I say out loud, sitting on the edge of my bed.
“I don’t believe in this. I realise there’s something wrong with my brain, or my mind, nothing to do with you.
I don’t actually believe in you. I don’t even know who I’m talking to. ”
But I know who I want to talk to next.
Walking down my drive, I take my first proper look at this bit of the garden.
From the house, or sweeping past in the car, it’s just a lawn with bushes round the edge but, when you get close up, there’s about eight feet of dead leaves and bare branches hidden from view.
There are ancient crisp bags and dented Coke cans that must have been thrown over the wall year after year by schoolkids on their way past. There’s even one of those half bags of cement, now a tatter-covered lump, where a lazy builder hid his leftovers instead of carting them away.
And there’s the skeleton of a small animal, desiccated and pitiful, with a few scraps of fur left stretched over the ribs and the remnants of a bushy tail.
“Poor Br’er Fox,” I say to it. “No one to bury you, eh?” It strikes me, though, that if Peggy March didn’t notice the smell of a decomposing fox, maybe it wasn’t wrong for her son to .
. . Well, the phrase is put her in a home, isn’t it?
I know from the guff of that fox at Lord’s Yard that no one in completely robust health could miss it happening in their garden.
And what about Bunny, Colonel of the Neighbourhood Watch, for that matter? He obviously didn’t notice it either.
As if I’ve summoned him, I hear the heels of his brogues coming along the road and go to meet him.
“I need to pick your brain,” I say.
“It’s been many a year since anyone needed my muscle, right enough,” Bunny says.
“But what I have to tell you might be upsetting,” I add.
“How many times must I tell you?” says Bunny. “I am not the least concerned. The more the merrier.”