little square of frosted glass, that the phone table was at an angle. And there was something dark lying at the foot of the stairs. The dark thing had arms. She hoped to God it was a coat.
She opened the door.
It was a coat.
Then she saw the blood. On the stairs. On the hall carpet. There was a bloody handprint on the wall beside the living-room door.
She shouted George’s name, but there was no answer.
She wanted to turn and run and phone the police from a neighbor’s house. Then she imagined the conversation on the phone. Not being able to say where he was, or what had happened to him. She had to be the first to see him.
She stepped inside, every tiny hair on her body standing on end. She left the door ajar. To keep that connection. To the sky. To the air. To the ordinary world.
The living room was exactly as she had left it that morning.
She went into the kitchen. There was blood all over the lino. He had been in the middle of doing some washing. The door of the machine was open and a box of detergent tablets was sitting on the work surface above it.
The cellar door was open. She walked slowly down the steps. More blood. Great smears of it all over the inside of the paddling pool, and lines of it running down the side of the freezer cabinet. But no body.
She was trying very, very hard not to think about what had happened here.
She went into the dining room. She went upstairs. She went into the bedrooms. Then she went into the bathroom.
This was where they had done it. In the shower. She saw the knife and looked away. She staggered backward and slumped onto the chair in the hallway and let the sobs take her over.
They had taken him somewhere afterward.
She had to call someone. She got to her feet and stumbled along the landing to the bedroom. She picked up the phone. It seemed suddenly unfamiliar. As if she’d never seen one before. The two pieces that came apart. The little noise it made. The buttons with black numbers on them.
She didn’t want to ring the police. She didn’t want to talk to strangers. Not yet.
She rang Jamie at work. He was out of the office. She rang his home number and left a message.
She rang Katie. She wasn’t in. She left a message.
She couldn’t remember their mobile phone numbers.
She rang David. He said he’d be there in fifteen minutes.
It was unbearably cold in the house and she was shaking.
She went downstairs and grabbed her winter coat and sat on the garden wall.
64
Jamie stopped at an all-night petrol station on the way home from Tony’s flat and bought a packet of Silk Cut, a Twix, a Cadbury’s Boost and a Yorkie. By the time he fell asleep he’d eaten all the chocolate and smoked eleven of the cigarettes.
When he woke the following morning someone had folded a wire coat hanger into the space between his brain and his skull. He was late, too, and had no time for a shower. He dressed, threw back an instant coffee with two ibuprofens, then ran for the tube.
He was sitting on the tube when he remembered that he hadn’t rung Katie back. When he got out at the far end he took his mobile out of his pocket but couldn’t quite face it. He would ring this evening.
He got into the office and realized he should have made the call.
This couldn’t go on.
It was bigger than Tony. He was at a crossroads. What he did over the next few days would set the course for the rest of his life.
He wanted people to like him. And people did like him. Or they used to. But it wasn’t so easy anymore. It wasn’t automatic. He was beginning to lose the benefit of everyone’s doubt. His own included.
If he wasn’t careful he’d turn into one of those men who cared more about furniture than human beings. He’d end up living with someone else who cared more about furniture than human beings and they’d lead a life which looked perfectly normal from the outside but was, in truth, a kind of living death that left your heart looking like a raisin.
Or worse, he’d lurch from one sordid liaison to the next, grow hugely fat because no one gave a shit about what he looked like, then get some hideous disease as a result of being fat and die a long, lingering death in a hospital ward full of senile old men who smelled of urine and cabbage and howled in the night.
He got stuck into typing up the particulars for Jack Riley’s three new builds in West Hampstead. Doubtless including some typing error or a mislabeled photograph so that Riley could storm into the office asking for someone’s arse to be kicked.
Last time round Jamie had added the phrase “property guaranteed to depreciate between signing and closing,” printed the details out to amuse Shona, then had to snatch it back when he saw Riley standing in reception talking to Stuart.
He wondered sometimes why in God’s name he did this job.
He rubbed his eyes.
He had to stop moaning. He was going to be a good person. And good people didn’t moan. Children were dying in Africa. Jack Riley didn’t matter in the greater scheme of things. Some people didn’t even have a job.
Just knuckle down.
He pasted in the photographs of the interior.
Giles was doing the pen thing over on the facing desk. Bouncing it between his thumb and forefinger then throwing it up into the air and letting it twirl an even number of times before catching it by the handle end. Like Jamie used to do with penknives. When he was nine.
And maybe if it was someone else, Josh, or Shona, or Michael, it wouldn’t have mattered. But it was Giles. Who wore a cravat. And took the foil off a Penguin, folded it in half, then rewrapped the bottom of the bar in the now-double-thickness foil forming a kind of silver paper cornet to prevent his fingers getting chocolatey so that you wanted to put a bullet through his head. And he was making the noise, too, every time the pen fell back into his hand. That little
Jamie filled in a couple of Terms of Business and printed out three Property Fact Finds.
He didn’t blame Tony. Christ, he’d made a total arse of himself. Tony was right to slam the door in his face.
How the hell could you ask someone to love you when you didn’t even like yourself?
He typed up the accompanying letters, put everything into envelopes and returned a string of phone calls from the previous day.
At half past twelve he went out and got a sandwich for lunch and ate it sitting in the park in the rain under Karen’s umbrella, thankful for the relative peace and quiet.
His head was still aching. Back at the office he cadged two ibuprofen from Shona then spent a large part of the afternoon mesmerized by the way the clouds moved very interestingly past the little window on the stairs, wanting desperately to be on the sofa at home with a large mug of proper tea and a packet of biscuits.
Giles started doing the pen thing again at 2:39 and was still doing it at 2:47.
Did Tony have someone with him? Well, Jamie couldn’t really complain. Only the poisoned prawns stopped him shagging Mike. Why the hell shouldn’t Tony have someone there?
That was what it meant, didn’t it. Being good. You didn’t have to sink wells in Burkina Faso. You didn’t have to
