Читать книгу: «Persons Unknown», страница 5
Manon
‘Oh God, you need wine,’ Manon says, pouring Sauvignon Blanc into a glass and handing it to Ellie, who’s sitting at the kitchen table pushing a balled tissue into a nostril. Her eyes are red, her lips cracked. She takes the glass gratefully. ‘Hang on,’ says Manon, making for the doorway, ‘right back …’
Out in the hall, she calls ‘Fly! Fly?’ up the stairs.
No response. She can hear the bath running, knows what they’ll be doing up there. Fly will be lying on his bed reading his latest Anthony Horowitz novel, imagining himself a teen spy, while Solly squats on the carpet constructing the same dinosaur puzzle he works at every night: repetition being a source of unalloyed joy for the 2-year-old.
‘Fly!’ she shouts, a notch louder and with more irritation.
She weighs up her exhaustion and desire to talk to Ellie versus the need to intervene. She very much doesn’t want to heave her bulk up those stairs but knows that Fly’s total immersion in his book means Sol could be drawing on the walls while the bath overflows. Her belly creaks, she yawns, thinks, fuck it. ‘Turn the tap off!’ she bellows, her parting shot as she returns to her sister, whose floodgates have re-opened.
These are feelings entirely not put to bed, Manon thinks, looking at Ellie’s dissolving face.
‘Sorry,’ Ellie says.
‘Don’t be.’
‘It’s just … it’s just … there’s no chance of anything now,’ she says in a watery voice, plucking another tissue from the floral cube beside her, ‘for him and Solly. No chance of a father for Sol. That’s going to be a loss all his life. It’s a fucking tragedy.’ She breaks down again. ‘It, it, it can’t be undone. I can’t ever make this better for him.’
‘His parents are here, did Harriet tell you? There’s a chance to give Solly some grandparents. We should invite them to stay.’
‘I did,’ says Ellie. ‘They didn’t want to but they’re coming to meet Sol tomorrow.’
‘Is part of it,’ Manon begins, girding herself, ‘that there’s no chance for you and Jon-Oliver now?’
‘No. No, it’s definitely not that, not even in my unconscious. I’d never have gone back to him. Jon-Oliver was a great one for fresh starts, saying he was going to change, but you’d have been a complete moron to believe him. You know, when he first reappeared in the summer in London, he said, “I want to be good. I want to be a good father.” And I said, “Right, and you think Solly’s going to make you good? That’s a lot to ask of a 2-year-old.” He said, “I just think I can be a different person if you and Solly were in my life.’’’
‘So he wanted you back? What did you say?’
‘Told him he could leave me out of it.’
‘Are you hungry?’ asks Manon. ‘I could make the tarragon chicken thing.’
‘Christ, is that a threat?’
‘Crisps?’
‘Go on, then.’
In the getting up, opening a cupboard, emptying the Kettle Chips (sweet chilli flavour) into a bowl, Manon says, ‘What was it like with Jon-Oliver?’ Of course they’d discussed it in the past, but never in detail.
Ellie sighs. Sips her wine. ‘He had this slept-in face – and my God he could be funny. Slightly dangerous-funny – irreverent, bit close to the wire. We’d come home from a night out, he’d mix some cocktails and then we’d go out again. And the sex—’
‘Yes all right,’ says Manon, shoving more crisps than seems feasible into her mouth, frightened it might be true – about all the sex she’s missing out on.
‘Anyway, he had all that rich boy’s confidence, and I knew he was a bit of a player – you could just tell from his moves, and I’m telling you, his friends from the City were wankers, I mean boorish, sexist, the works. But Jon-Oliver … I suppose I thought if I was the one he settled down with, then I’d get all the sexiness and the money – the money was a really big part of it, I’m not gonna lie – and the other stuff he’d grow out of. Thought I’d be living in Holland Park and wearing taupe to yoga.’
‘Nearly got there,’ Manon says.
‘Single mum living in Hinchingbrooke? Yep, not far off.’
‘So what happened? Between you and him, I mean.’
‘Playboys aren’t fun when you’re pregnant. They’re the opposite of fun. First there was just a line over and over again on a bank statement he’d left out by accident. Awork. I Googled it. Adult work – a prostitutes’ website. He came clean, said he was watching porn videos late at night, nothing more than that. But it’s always more than that. The stuff they come clean about is only ever a fraction of it. To be honest, it was a disaster to have got pregnant and I say that with love in my heart for Sol.’
The thought of the unaware baby upstairs makes them both silent.
Ellie rotates her glass. ‘To be honest, I’m not that surprised he’s dead. I know that sounds awful, but the world he moved in … It was all glinting surfaces hiding God knows what. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was trading for dangerous people. There was no heart …’ Ellie is rubbing her fingers together, as if trying to assess a fabric. ‘Nothing real to it, you know? He was a man without any substance. Every now and then, he’d deny himself – no coke, no prostitutes, back to the gym, kale in his NutriBullet, a really superficial bout of CBT. And then he’d rebel against the clean slate so hard it was terrifying. Jon-Oliver liked a cold kind of pleasure – sex without a relationship. I’d say it was some Russian bitch he was shagging. That’ll be who stabbed him.’
They are silent again. Ellie sips her wine. Manon wishes she could have some.
‘He told me some insane stories about the City. Champagne, hotels, piles of drugs, piles of girls. He told me about one party they had where they hired a whole floor of a London hotel and it ended up being a sea of naked bodies.’
‘Don’t get much of that in the police,’ says Manon. ‘Not on cold cases, certainly.’
‘No, there’s not much of it in nursing either. I mean there’s bodies, and they’re often naked, but not in a good way.’
‘In general,’ Manon says, ‘if you’re after the orgiastic experience, public sector isn’t really the way to go.’
She is struck by a drip on the bridge of her nose. She touches it with her fingers, looks at the wetness, looks up at the ceiling. There is a small gathering of drips, trembling on the ceiling, waiting to fall.
‘Fuck!’ says Manon. ‘The fucking bath!’
She gets up and makes for the hallway with every molecule of haste she can muster and generates all the speed of an 80-year-old. ‘Fly! Flyyyyy! Pull the flipping plug out!!!’
Upstairs, the water is tumbling over the edge of the bathtub – rather beautifully, she notices, like an infinity pool at a posh hotel. She turns the tap off and pulls out the plug, wetting her sleeve and hearing the gushing of water down the waste pipe. The sound prompts an urgent need to pee. She grabs all the towels hanging on hooks on the wall and flings them onto the floor to soak up the wet; sighs, closes the bathroom door.
Only five months pregnant. Is it possible she will become still more ungainly?
When she emerges and walks into Fly’s room, he predictably hasn’t lifted his face from the page. Solly is squatting happily in his nappy. ‘Dine-soar,’ Solly says, pointing with his little pointy finger. He sets the universe in order with the naming of things with the pointy finger and she hopes he never grows out of it.
‘Right, so thanks for flooding the bathroom, Fly,’ Manon says.
He doesn’t look up.
‘Fly, listen. There was water coming through the ceiling in the kitchen. Really! Jesus, Fly!’
Was he this disrespectful when they were in London, or is his disdain part of her punishment for uprooting him? For being pregnant? She snatches his book away. He is forced to look up.
‘What?’ he asks, genuinely nonplussed. It’s as if he’s been in a bubble, the outside world on mute.
‘You flooded the bathroom.’
‘Oh my God, sorry. Did I?’
She is furious, but he genuinely didn’t notice.
Day 2
Manon
They cannot take their eyes off Solomon, especially Mrs Ross.
All movement and talk swirls about them in the lounge; offers of tea, isn’t it awful, you must be devastated, but Mrs Ross doesn’t take her eyes off Solly.
Sitting forward, on the edge of the sofa, she drinks him in as he plays with his Duplo, making a tower in order to knock it down. He is delighted by knocking things down.
Fly is at school (Manon hopes). She has been tempted to walk him in each morning, to make certain he arrives, but stopped herself. The headmaster didn’t think it was a good strategy either. ‘You want to rebuild trust, not infantalise him,’ he said.
For everyone else in the room, with grief as with illness, normal service has been suspended, hence the midday tea party.
‘Isn’t he like Jonno?’ Mrs Ross whispers to Mr Ross. (They have not offered their first names – not, Manon suspects, because they are formal, but because the moment has passed and they are not smooth operators who can re-route the social flow.)
A smile plays about the corner of Mrs Ross’s mouth as if she dare not find happiness at a moment such as this.
‘The very spit,’ says Mr Ross.
Their voices have a lovely Welsh song to them, but subtly and not all the time.
‘We never met you,’ Mrs Ross says, looking up at Ellie as if she is confused by the way in which Ellie and Jon-Oliver had this child, without marrying or meeting the parents.
‘Where are your people?’ Mr Ross asks. He holds his tea with one hand under the mug’s base. Thick hands.
‘Our dad’s in Scotland,’ Manon says. She is about to say, ‘With our stepmother Una,’ but it is all wrong. There is nothing of the mother in Una. Instead she says, ‘Mum died when we were kids – teenagers.’
‘Oh how terrible for you,’ says Mrs Ross.
‘Yes, it was,’ says Manon.
Mr and Mrs Ross have gone back to drinking Solly in, as if they can soak up enough of him to take back to Wales.
‘You’ll have to visit us,’ Mr Ross says. ‘We’ve got a tractor, Solomon. Do you like tractors? I could take you on a ride in it.’
Sol looks up at his grandfather. Manon has been observing her nephew and he seems to have got around the difficulty of this social occasion by ignoring these elderly interlopers entirely. But the tractor is too much. He is awed by chunky vehicles. Manon has become accustomed to screeching to a halt in the car and bellowing, ‘DIGGER!’ She’s even found herself doing this when no one is strapped into the back seat.
‘Yes,’ Mr Ross is saying, and his whole face crinkles in a most kindly way, ‘a real tractor. Brum brum! Would you like that, Solly?’
‘Trac-tor,’ says Solly. He swills words, like a wine taster. ‘Too-day’ and ‘birf-day’ and ‘Babe Buntin’ when they’re reading Each Peach Pear Plum.
‘Trac-tor,’ says Mrs Ross, with a look of wonderment. ‘Oh he’s wonderful,’ she says to Ellie. ‘You are wonderful,’ she says to Solly.
Ellie smiles at them but Manon thinks it is brittle. Then Ellie leaves the room. She has not sat down since they arrived, first making the tea, searching for biscuits, asking where they’d like to sit, plumping cushions, offering to open or close windows, put the fire on. In and out of the room. It has reached such a pitch of fidgetry that Manon is concerned her sister is being rude. As Ellie makes for the door, she hisses, ‘Can’t you sit down for one fucking minute?’
‘Fresh pot,’ Ellie says.
Manon frowns, nods at the olds. Perhaps it is next to the Rosses’ stillness that Ellie seems manic and incapable of contemplation.
‘She’s off again!’ Manon says to the room, as Ellie bustles out with the teapot.
Sol starts to fuss and whine. Mrs Ross immediately pitches onto her knees on the floor next to him, proffering him another block for his tower.
‘You really should stay here with us,’ Manon says. ‘It’d be no trouble.’
‘We don’t like to be a burden,’ says Mr Ross. ‘It’s a nice place, where we’re staying. Mrs Linton, she cooked a full English this morning. Not that we felt like it. We’ll go home tomorrow, I think. Police – well,’ he nods at Manon, ‘you’ll know better than me. But they can’t see a reason for us to hang on.’
The double meaning of those last words seems to suspend in the silence that follows.
Solly’s whining is increasing, harder to mollify because really, he needs a nap but doesn’t always take one (Ellie and Manon are clinging on, resolutely putting him to bed at lunchtime in the vain hope of retaining their midday hiatus). Sol is doubly exhausted by all the tension between the adults; tired from being lapped up by his grief-stricken stranger-grandparents.
‘I’m going to have to put this one to bed in a minute,’ says Ellie, bustling back in with the teapot.
‘I think we’ll go back for a nap too, Gareth, shall we?’ says Mrs Ross. ‘We didn’t sleep much last night.’
‘Won’t you have a fresh cup first?’ asks Ellie.
‘No thank you,’ says Mrs Ross. They have risen. ‘I wish I’d brought him a present. I didn’t know …’
‘No need for presents,’ Ellie says, stiffly.
‘You will let us see him, won’t you?’ Mrs Ross says. ‘We don’t expect anything from you, only to see him and to get to know him. We can help you, in holidays and things. It can’t be easy, having him on your own. Although I know you’ve got …’ She trails off.
Ellie blusters her way through the departures, avoiding eye contact. ‘Well, it was nice to meet you.’
Busying herself with Solly.
Hiding behind Solly.
Manon cannot understand it. These are visibly good people in search of a connection.
‘What the fuck was that all about?’ she says, after the front door has closed and after a respectful beat of silence so the Rosses can be safely out of earshot.
Ellie has Sol on her hip, stroking his forehead.
‘Language,’ Ellie says. ‘I’m going to put him down.’
‘My not tired,’ says Solly, through the oval of a yawn.
Davy
He’s standing in front of a Georgian townhouse with a polished brass plaque saying Dunlop & Finch. The black gloss door is adorned with a wreath of greenery and red berries. Davy thinks it looks like a traditional Christmas card image. His two detective constables flank him and Davy presses the buzzer.
They are buzzed into a hallway with black and white floor tiles. An enormous ornate mirror hangs on one wall. An oversized vase of white lilies fills the air with heavy perfume. The DCs – two lads who have been seconded to him from team two and whom he barely knows, follow him into reception. On the train, Davy was anxious to brief them thoroughly. ‘You’re looking for strains and pressures on the victim, any fallings-out, office politics which might’ve got out of hand. Any backstory which colleagues were aware of – girlfriends, friendships gone awry.’ The DCs were too relaxed to his mind and he didn’t want to join in their banter during the rest of the journey, preferring to read his case file or gaze out of the window; making notes in his hardback notebook when questions occurred to him that he must not forget.
They are met with hushed tones from the receptionist. ‘Ah yes, of course, take a seat.’
Davy remains standing and is annoyed when his DCs take up chairs.
A woman in a pencil skirt and tucked-in shirt comes to fetch them, leading them up a carpeted staircase with a polished banister. ‘It’s so terrible,’ she says as she leads. ‘We’re all in shock.’
After some preamble and apportioning of interviews, Davy takes Giles Carruthers.
He is shown into a bright room with a large desk in front of the window. Around the fireplace is an arrangement of deep armchairs at the centre of which is a square coffee table set with a silver coffee set.
‘I’m in shock,’ Giles says. ‘We all are. Can’t believe it to be honest.’
He wears an impeccable suit of darkest navy and his white shirt shines brightly against it. Cufflinks. A slight tan. After some generalities about his friendship with Ross, their positions in the firm, Davy says, ‘Was there much rivalry between the two of you? I understand you held equal positions as vice presidents, below van der Lupin.’
Giles says, ‘I wouldn’t call it rivalry. Look, we were up against each other but it was all friendly stuff. Coffee?’
Davy demurs. He doesn’t like to take anything from anyone when he’s on the job, not so much as an orange juice. Even coffee, with those sugar crystals that are all different shades of brown, like semi-precious stones. When his dad had taken him out once as a kiddie, Davy had rolled them against his teeth secretly.
‘Markus – van der Lupin, our boss – he likes to foster a bit of competitiveness. Thinks it gets the best out of us. Happens all the time in the City. Jon-Oliver and I were your classic public school boys, you know?’
Davy nods. Smiles. Not a clue, he thinks.
‘We couldn’t play a game of squash without wanting to thrash each other. All good fun. But he was my friend. I’m gutted. Still can’t believe it.’
Having met Ross’s parents, Davy would be very surprised if Ross had been privately educated. Giles Carruthers is working hard to insinuate Davy into a world that couldn’t be more alien to him. Above all, Davy doesn’t like him. Is this political? Is it class? Is he stereotyping? A bit of all three and a gut response.
‘Where were you on the night Mr Ross died?’ Davy asks.
‘At home,’ Giles says quickly. He has one hand on the arm of the chair, which is boxy and leather. The other hand lifts and smooths his tie a noticeable number of times. ‘I got a Chinese takeaway and I ate it in front of the telly by myself. Rock ’n’ roll, eh?’
‘Which takeaway was that?’ Davy asks, pen poised.
‘The Lotus Blossom, Upper Street.’
At the end of the interview, they stand and Davy asks to speak with the office manager, a woman called Linda Kapuschinski.
‘Not sure she’s relevant,’ says Giles. ‘Leaving us this week, sadly.’
‘Think I’ll interview her all the same,’ Davy says.
‘Fine. Why not use my office? The coffee’s there, you can use the comfortable chairs. I’ll just sit over here and get on with some work. You won’t even know I’m here.’
‘Ah,’ says Davy, looking at the proximity of Giles Carruthers’ desk. ‘That’s jolly kind of you, but we’ll need a private space. One of your meeting rooms, perhaps.’
Linda Kapuschinski is giving him nothing. Yes/no answers, pulling at a lip of skin to the edge of her thumbnail. Pulling at it so it’s getting red.
‘You’ll do yourself an injury,’ Davy says, nodding at her hand. He leans back in his chair, taps his pen onto his pad. ‘Look, I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. What would you say to going out and grabbing a sandwich? We could carry on chatting while we eat.’
Two blocks away they find a café with steamed-up windows and, with the churn and spit of the milk warmer filling the air, Linda starts to relax.
‘So,’ he says. ‘Pastures new.’
She nods.
‘Got another job to go to?’
Linda has health problems, she tells him, brought on by stress at work. Insomnia, alopecia, she says, touching the underside of her hair. She lifts a clump of it and he sees a bald patch beneath.
‘Gosh,’ he says.
‘I’ve had some compassionate leave but …’ She pauses. ‘It was never going to work. This place, the City … well, they don’t believe in looking after people, put it that way. I’m surprised they’ve allowed me to work my notice. Probably because I’m only back room. Front-room staff are out without warning. The executions.’
‘Sorry?’ Davy says, alarmed at the word.
‘That’s the term for firings – executions, or the cull. Most people who’ve been culled aren’t even allowed back to their desks. They’re marched out by security.’
Davy blows out through pursed mouth.
‘Last week it happened to my friend Emma. She called my mobile and said, ‘Can you get my coat and bag?’ She was out on the pavement with a blocked security pass. You think you can get hardened to it, but it has an effect on people, that culture. No one feels safe. You feel powerless.’
‘What about Mr Ross and Mr Carruthers, how did they feel about the cull?’
‘Jon-Oliver? Indifferent I’d say. Teflon man. But Giles thrives on it. He’s the master of executions. He’s always saying how it keeps the organisation lean, keeps people sharp. I think the opposite is true. It makes people not themselves, twisted with anxiety. It’s also a massive disruption to the work – people’s projects are halted midway, handed to someone new. Takes a while to hire new people. It’s a macho thing; it doesn’t make us efficient. Giles is wedded to it. He’s always going on about how he came from Goldman Sachs but my guess is he was culled at Goldman Sachs and he’s somehow playing it out, forever.’
‘You don’t like Giles then?’
‘I don’t dislike him. I just think he’s the most damaged person I’ve ever come across.’
‘Damaged how?’
‘He can’t be contradicted, he can’t listen or change position. He’s vengeful. If you cross him, you’re out.’
‘Did Jon-Oliver cross him?’
Linda shrugs. ‘Jon-Oliver was his equal. Giles couldn’t touch him.’
‘How does the cull work?’
‘Every autumn they fire their worst-performing staff. They do it in autumn to avoid paying Christmas bonuses – means there’s more in the pot for everyone else. Happens all over the City. It’s normalised, as if you shouldn’t be a cry baby over losing your job.’
‘How was Jon-Oliver’s relationship with the boss, Markus …?’
‘Van der Lupin. He’s very softly-softly as a person, everything unspoken. He’ll say something vague in a meeting, like “Brazil, rather untapped for us. Any leads?” And he’ll leave it hanging, undelegated, so that everyone falls over themselves to solve the Brazil problem. Giles and Jon-Oliver were at the top and there was an unspoken rivalry – they were both after the top job, as deputy chairman to Markus, but he left them to fight it out. Jon-Oliver had more or less blown Giles out of the water by signing the Chinese billionaire, Xi Ping. Now Giles will get his clients. And his bonuses of course.’ She stops.
Davy turns his cup in its saucer a fraction. Waits.
‘I’ve got some part-time work at my local health food shop.’ She says this to Davy defiantly, as if he might deride her about it.
‘That’ll be good,’ he says. ‘Change of pace.’
‘From success to failure, you mean? I thought I could change myself to fit into the culture here, but now I realise you have to make yourself cut off to do that. Stupid thing is, a part of me still wishes I could’ve made it work.’ The end of her sentence tilts upwards as if it were a question.
‘Natural, I suppose,’ says Davy. He considers offering Linda another coffee – cappuccino for Kapuschinski? – but he has glanced at his watch and it’s getting late. He wants to hug his public sector pension to his chest. In his job, there might not be brass plaques and lilies, but there was none of this culling or execution abomination either. You could put an awful lot of feet wrong before you were sacked from the police.
He escorts Linda back to the black gloss door in the gathering dusk and picks up his DCs for the journey home.
On the walk back to the tube station, his constables chatting away behind him, Davy notices how the Christmas lights of Mayfair are almost exclusively of the white pin variety – understated compared to the winking green, red and yellow cacophony above Huntingdon town centre; love hearts and sleighs.
While walking, he takes out his mobile and calls the Lotus Blossom but is unable to get to anyone with enough English to answer his questions about Carruthers’ takeaway.
‘You wan order?’ a girl keeps shouting, over the hiss of frying.
He should visit the place in person, but not tonight. He is anxious to get back to Huntingdon tonight. Doesn’t want to spend it in a Premier Inn.
On arrival at Huntingdon station, he says goodbye to his constables, who are heading off for a pint together.
‘I’ll see you lads. I’m going in here to get myself a sandwich,’ he says to them, before heading into the station buffet.
After paying, he slides the receipt alongside others in his wallet, thinking how these jobs put a serious dent in his efforts to eat his five a day. It is with relief that he sinks into the seat of his car, throwing his sandwich onto the passenger seat. Cars at night are lovely – warm and easy.
Headlights sweep past him both ways, illuminating the smears on his windscreen, then returning him to darkness on Hinchingbrooke Park Road.
He is within sight of Judith Cole’s house. He can see her front door, but his car is under the shadow of a tree and as good as invisible. If she’s lying – and that’s the consensus in the department – then he wants to know why, even though he has been denied authorisation for any kind of trace or surveillance.
Another wash of headlights. Her front door opens, a slice of yellow light from her hallway. She pads outside to put a bulging bin bag into a black bin to the side of her driveway. She’s wearing slippers. The front door closes again as she goes back in.
Anyway, this isn’t surveillance. He’s just parked here, in the dark in an unmarked car, eating a cheese sandwich for his supper.
The darkness of the car is soporific. He yawns, brushes the sandwich crumbs off his lap, checks his mobile. He Googled Giles Carruthers while on the train and apart from the Dunlop & Finch web pages on which he was featured, with its expensive profile photography, Davy unexpectedly found a Wikipedia page. He had the urge to check the IP address, on the suspicion that Carruthers had written the page himself. He was a boarder at Gordonstoun from the age of eight; his father was a stockbroker, his mother a housewife who went on to become a magistrate and active in the local Conservative Party. As mentioned by Linda, Carruthers had been on the Goldman Sachs training scheme before joining Dunlop & Finch.
Davy is so tired and Judith Cole is wearing slippers so his hunch hasn’t paid off. He looks at his phone again out of boredom – looks at it far too much, like it’s an addiction. When he’s not looking at it, he’s thinking about looking at it.
Yawning, he accepts he might be wrong about Judith Cole. The idea had come to him in the middle of the night; made him sit bolt upright. It was the moment Judith Cole’s husband had said he was ‘unexpectedly working from home’ on the afternoon Ross was killed.
Davy starts the engine. Tonight his moment of inspiration has proved a dud – that can happen with ideas, he finds. They need to be road-tested. But he’ll stake her out again, just in case.
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