The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

every day of the month?

While Ruth reached up to put a tape in the machine, Charlie surveyed the hall. Apart from the door to the lounge, there were three others: kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, presumably. Only one was ajar, and through it Charlie caught a glimpse of shiny maroon fabric and a pink cushion. That had to be the bedroom. Checking first that Ruth was still busy with the machine and the remote control, Charlie pushed the door gently to open it further.

Yes, this was Ruth’s bedroom, Ruth and Aidan’s, though the only evidence of a man’s presence was a bulky watch with a leather strap lying on the floor. The rest was over-the-top feminine: ornate perfume bottles lined up on the window-sill, a pink voile scarf draped across the bed, silk curtains, also pink, white lacy underwear strewn everywhere, a pink heart-shaped hot-water bottle. Even the paperbacks with creased spines in lopsided piles looked girly, with titles like Hungry Women and Public Smiles, Private Tears.

Ruth was busy rewinding a tape. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘The remote’s bust. I have to keep my finger pressed down on it to make it work. It takes ages.’

‘No problem,’ said Charlie. She leaned into the bedroom to get a look at what was behind the door, and nearly cried out in shock, lurching back out into the hall. She’d seen it only for a split second, but it was enough. What the fuck…? Her mind reeled. It was absurd, the sort of thing you might have an anxiety dream about-too extreme and too ludicrous to happen in real life. But this was real; Charlie knew what she’d seen.

Nearly a whole wall in Ruth’s bedroom was covered with newspaper cuttings about her, Charlie.

She pulled the door to, her heart juddering, the full range of headlines pulsing in her brain, phrases that had haunted her for two years, that she struggled every day not to think about: colourfully worded assaults on her character, selected by hacks for their shock value or alliterative appeal.

Headlines that Ruth had collected and stuck up on the wall beside her bed. Why? More recent articles too, Charlie could swear-though she had no intention of looking again to check-about her return to work, the forum she’d set up to tackle business crime in the area. No, she hadn’t imagined it. As well as the many photographs of her crying at the press conference in 2006, there had been one or two of her in uniform, after her transfer out of CID, wearing her polished I’m-so-proud-of-what-I’ve-done-for-the-community smile. She felt sick.

‘Here we go,’ said Ruth.

Charlie knew she didn’t have long to compose herself if concealment was her preferred option, and all her instincts were screaming at her to conceal, withdraw, hide herself away. To demand an on-the-spot explanation from Ruth would constitute exposure on a level that, in her state of shock, she couldn’t even contemplate. No, she must avoid a confrontation at all costs, or something disastrous would happen: she’d end up attacking Ruth physically, or become hysterical. Later. Deal with it later.

She blinked furiously to banish the tears that had sprung up out of nowhere, and tried to focus on the white bookshelves on the opposite wall that sagged slightly in the middle and made the hallway half as wide as it would otherwise have been. Ruth was evidently a collector of self-help books as well as the self-appointed archivist of Charlie’s disgrace. In a better mood, Charlie would have found these titles amusing: What if Everything Goes Right?, The Power of Now, What You Think of Me Is None of My Business.

She didn’t know what she thought. All she knew was that her insides had liquefied, she felt as if she might throw up and she wanted desperately to leave this house.

‘I asked my landlord to install CCTV when I first noticed the man hanging around,’ said Ruth. ‘He thought I was making a fuss about nothing, but in the end he agreed. Some rowdy lads had colonised the park at night, and I managed to persuade Malcolm that we could kill two birds with one stone. By the time the cameras were in, the man had stopped walking past. I didn’t get him on tape until yesterday.’

Charlie wondered if Ruth had videotapes of her from two years ago, old news reports, the press conference she’d given, the extended interview she’d agreed to at the insistence of the press office, when public opinion was still violently against her three months after the scandal had broken.

Later. Not now. There were other things to think about, like fighting back: finding out everything she could about Ruth Bussey and using it to devastate her sad, inadequate little life. At the moment, Charlie told herself, the advantage was hers; Ruth didn’t know she knew.

She watched the grainy image on the screen change, saw a man in a woolly hat approach the park gates with a black dog. ‘Has Aidan seen this?’ she asked. If by some remote chance Bobble Hat was spying on Ruth, did Aidan know about it? Did he know who the man was? Spying on someone who spied on others, who broke into their private pain and…

‘No,’ said Ruth. ‘Only Malcolm’s seen it, apart from me, and now you. Aidan and I haven’t spoken properly for months.’ She looked bereft. ‘I thought if Malcolm knew what the man looked like, he could look out for him. He’s often here when I’m not-bit of a guardian angel, really. He keeps an eye on things for me. There, look, you can see the man’s face.’

Malcolm. He must have seen the display wall in the bedroom. No wonder he’d reacted oddly when Charlie had turned up in person. Clearly Ruth’s made herself known to you… She didn’t tell me she was going to make contact. Did Malcolm Fenton know why Ruth was obsessed with Charlie? Did Aidan Seed? He had to, surely, if he shared Ruth’s bed. What possible reason could there be? How many other people had seen the wall? Had the men from Winchelsea Combi Boilers seen it? Had they also recognised Charlie this morning?

Her eyes were fixed on the screen, but she wasn’t really looking. Ruth’s voice cut through her thoughts and she realised she’d missed most of the show. ‘Look, you can see his face clearly now. See the way he’s looking at the window?’

No. It couldn’t be.

It was. Bobble hat or no bobble hat, it was him. With a black Labrador, for Christ’s sake? Now Charlie knew two things Ruth didn’t know she knew.

‘He’s probably just a nosey bastard,’ she said. If Ruth noticed that her tone or manner had changed, she showed no sign of it. Charlie couldn’t remember the last time she’d trusted anyone less than she trusted this strange woman who was staring at her wide-eyed, apparently waiting for help of some sort. ‘Why did you seek Mary out?’ she asked abruptly.

‘Pardon?’ Ruth paused the tape.

‘You said she attacked you. You left the gallery and never went back. Sounds pretty upsetting. Yet subsequently you went to her house. Why?’ I’m going to stick my fingers into every hole in your story, bitch, and I’m going to pull and pull until the whole thing snaps and I get to watch you fall apart.

‘For the painting,’ said Ruth. ‘For Aidan. Aidan wanted it. But that was later, much later.’

‘All right, so what happened next? After the incident with Mary in the gallery last June, and you leaving your job? That was six months before Aidan told you he’d killed her, right?’

‘I can’t tell you everything you want to know.’ Charlie heard panic in Ruth’s voice. ‘I can tell you everything I know, everything that happened, but not why, or what it means.’

‘I’ll settle for anything that isn’t a lie.’

‘No more lies,’ Ruth promised. ‘What happened next was that Aidan and I went to an art fair in London.’

7

Monday 3 March 2008

The Access 2 Art fair at Alexandra Palace in London was the first one I’d ever been to. I didn’t know such things existed until Aidan told me. One of the artists he frames for was going to have a stall there, and sent Aidan two free tickets. Aidan tore open the envelope at work one day-it must have been October or November last year. It’s strange, that’s the one detail I don’t remember. Everything else about the art fair is fixed in my mind as clearly as if someone had filmed what happened from start to finish and implanted the footage in my brain.