turned feet.
My questions have brought Darcy inside.
‘Is this how you found the house?’
‘Yes.’
‘You haven’t moved anything?’
‘No.’
‘Or touched anything?’
She thinks about this.
‘I used the phone… to call the police.’
‘Which phone?’
‘The one upstairs.’
‘Why not use this one?’ I motion to the handset of a cordless phone, sitting in a cradle on a side table.
‘The handset was on the floor. The battery was flat.’
A small pile of women’s clothes lie discarded at the base of the table- a pair of machine-distressed jeans, a top and a cardigan. I kneel down. A flash of colour peeks from beneath the sofa- not hidden but tossed away in a hurry. My fingers close around the fabric. Underwear, a bra and matching panties.
‘Was your mother seeing anyone? A boyfriend?’
Darcy suppresses the urge to laugh. ‘No.’
‘What’s so funny?’
‘My mother is going to be one of those old women with a herd of cats and a wardrobe full of cardigans.’ She smiles and then remembers she’s speaking of a mother without a future.
‘Would she have told you if she was seeing someone?’
Darcy isn’t sure.
I hold up the underwear. ‘Do these belong to your mother?’
She nods, frowning.
‘What?’
‘She was like really obsessed about stuff like that, picking up things. I wasn’t allowed to borrow any of her clothes unless I hung them up or put them in the wash afterwards. “The floor is not a wardrobe,” she said.’
I climb the stairs to the main bedroom. The bed is untouched, without a crease on the duvet. Bottles are lined up neatly on her dresser. Towels are folded evenly on the towel rails in the en suite.
I open the large walk-in wardrobe and step inside. I can smell Christine Wheeler. I touch her dresses, her skirts, her shirts. I put my hands in the pockets of her jackets. I find a taxi receipt, a dry cleaning tag, a pound coin, an after dinner mint. There are clothes she hasn’t worn in years. Clothes she is making last the distance. Here is a woman used to having money who suddenly doesn’t have enough.
An evening gown slips from a hanger and pools at my feet. I pick it up again, feeling the fabric slip between my fingers. There are racks of shoes, at least a dozen pairs, arranged in neat rows.
Darcy sits on the bed. ‘Mum liked shoes. She said it was her one extravagance.’
I remember the pair of bright red Jimmy Choos that Christine was wearing on the bridge. Party shoes. There is a gap for a missing pair at the end of the lower shelf.
‘Did your mother sleep naked?’
‘No.’
‘Did she ever wander around the house naked?’
‘No.’
‘Did she draw the curtains before she undressed?’
‘I’ve never taken much notice.’
I glance out the bedroom window, which overlooks an allotment with vegetable gardens and a greenhouse guarded by an elm tree. Spider webs are woven through the branches of the trees like fine muslin. Someone could easily watch the house and not be noticed.
‘If someone came to the door, would she have opened it or put on the security chain?’
‘I don’t know.’
My mind keeps going back to the clothes by the phone. Christine undressed, making no attempt to close the curtains. She didn’t fold her clothes or place them on a chair. The cordless phone handset was found on the floor.
Darcy could be wrong about a boyfriend or a lover, but there’s no sign of the bed being used. No condoms. No tissues. Similarly, there’s no trace of an intruder. Nothing appears to be disturbed or missing. There is no sign of a search or a struggle. The place is clean. Tidy. It’s not the house of someone who has given up hope or someone who doesn’t want to live any more.
‘Was the front door deadlocked?’
‘I don’t remember,’ says Darcy.
‘It’s important. When you came home, you put the key in the door. Did you need two keys?’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘Did your mother have a raincoat?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did it look like?’
‘It was a cheap plastic thing.’
‘What colour?’
‘Yellow.’
‘Where is it now?’
She takes me to the entrance hall- an empty coat hook tells the rest of the story. It was raining on Friday; bucketing down. She chose the raincoat but not an umbrella.
Emma is sitting at the kitchen table, attacking a piece of paper with coloured pencils. I walk past her into the lounge, trying to create my own picture of what happened on Friday. I glimpse the ordinariness of the day, a woman doing her chores, washing a cup, wiping down the sink and then the phone rang. She answered it.
She took off her clothes. She didn’t draw the curtains. She walked naked from her house wearing only a plastic raincoat. She didn’t double lock the door. She was in a hurry. Her handbag is still on the hallway table.
The thick glass top of the coffee table is supported on two ceramic elephants with tusks raised and flattened above their heads. Kneeling beside the table, I lower my head and peer along the smooth glass surface, noticing tiny shards of broken crayon or lipstick. This is where she wrote the word ‘slut’ across her torso.
There is something else on the glass, a series of opaque circles and truncated lines of lipstick. The circles are dried tears. She was crying. And the lines could be the edges of looping letters that departed from a page. Christine wrote something in lipstick. It can’t have been a phone number, she could have used a pen for that. More likely it was a message or a sign.
Forty-eight hours ago I watched this woman plunge to her death. Surely it had to be suicide, yet psychologically it doesn’t make sense. Everything about her actions suggested intent, yet she was a reluctant participant.
The last thing Christine Wheeler said to me was that I wouldn’t understand. She was right.
8
Sylvia Furness lives in a flat in Great Pulteney Street on the first floor of a Georgian row that has probably featured in every BBC period drama since the original Forsyte Saga. I half expect to see horse-drawn carriages outside and women parading in hats.
Sylvia Furness isn’t wearing a hat. Her short blonde hair is held off her face with a headband and she’s clad in black spandex shorts, a white sports bra and a light blue T-shirt with a looping neckline. A gym membership card dangles from a bulky set of keys that must help burn calories simply by being lugged around.
‘Excuse me, Mrs Furness. Do you have a moment?’
‘Whatever you’re selling, I’m not buying.’
