I didn’t look at the cutting until lunch-time, when I bought a cheese and tomato sandwich and an apple from a cafe up the road and took them back up to my office. I read the few lines again: the body of twenty-eight-year-old Tara Blanchard, a receptionist, had been found in a canal in East London on 2 March by a group of teenagers.
Adele’s letter had mentioned a sister. I hauled the residential telephone directory off the shelf and flicked through it, not expecting to find anything. But there it was: Blanchard, T. M., of 23B Bench Road, London EC2. I picked up the phone, then changed my mind. I rang through to Claudia, said I was going out, and could she take my calls. I wouldn’t be long.
Twenty-three Bench Road was a thin, beige, pebble-dashed terrace house, squashed between others, and exuding a general air of neglect. There was a dead plant in one window, and a pink cloth instead of curtains at another. I rang the B bell, and waited. It was one thirty and if anyone had lived here with Tara they were probably out. I was about to press the other bells to see if I could unearth a neighbour or two when I heard footsteps and saw, through the thickly ribbed glass, a shape coming towards me. The door opened on a chain, and a woman stared through the crack. I had clearly woken her up: she was clutching a dressing-gown to her, and her eyes were puffy. ‘Yes?’
‘I’m really sorry to bother you,’ I began, ‘but I’m a friend of Tara’s, and since I was just passing…’
The door closed, I heard the chain being slid back, and then it opened wide. ‘Come in, then,’ she said. She was a small, plump woman, young, with a mop of gingery hair and tiny ears. She looked at me expectantly.
‘I’m Sylvie,’ I said.
‘Maggie.’
I followed her up the stairs and into her kitchen.
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
‘Not if it’s a bad time.’
‘I’m awake now, aren’t I?’ she said, quite amiably. ‘I’m a nurse, on nights at the moment.’
She filled the kettle, then sat down opposite me at the grubby kitchen table. ‘You were a friend of Tara’s?’
‘That’s right,’ I said confidently. ‘I never came here.’
‘She didn’t bring people back.’
‘I really knew her from childhood actually,’ I said. Maggie busied herself with the tea. ‘I read about her death in the papers and I wanted to know what happened.’
‘It was awful,’ said Maggie, standing up to drop two tea-bags into a teapot and pour on the boiling water. ‘Sugar?’
‘No. Do the police know how it happened?’
‘A mugging. Her purse was missing when they found her. I always told her she shouldn’t walk along the canal when it was dark. But she always did. It cuts half the distance from the station.’
‘Awful,’ I said. I thought of the dark canal and shuddered. ‘I was mostly a friend of Adele actually.’
‘Her sister?’ A wave of exhilaration rushed through me: so Tara was Adele’s sister, after all. Maggie plonked down my cup of tea. ‘Poor thing. Poor parents too. Imagine what they must feel. They came here to collect her stuff a week or so ago. I didn’t know what to say to them. They were so very brave, but there can’t be anything worse than losing a child, can there?’
‘No. Did they leave their address or phone number? I’d love to get in touch with them to tell them how sorry I am.’ I’d become too good at deceit.
‘I’ve got it somewhere. I don’t think I wrote it in my book, though. I didn’t think I’d need it. But it’s probably in a pile. Hang on.’ She started rummaging through a stack of papers by the toaster – bills in black and red, junk mail, postcards, take-away menus – and finally found it scrawled on the telephone directory. I copied it down on a scrap of used envelope, then put it in my wallet.
‘When you speak to them,’ she said, ‘tell them I’ve thrown away all the odd stuff they left, like they said I should, apart from the clothes, which I gave to Oxfam.’
‘Didn’t they take all her things, then?’
‘They took almost everything; all the personal things, of course, jewellery, books, photos. You know. But they left some bits. Amazing how much rubbish one has, isn’t it? I said I’d deal with it.’
‘Can I look at it?’ She stared at me in surprise. ‘Just in case there’s a memento,’ I added feebly.
‘It’s in the dustbin, unless the binmen have taken it.’
‘Can I have a quick look?’
Maggie seemed dubious. ‘If you want to go through orange peel and cat-food tins and tea-bags, then I guess it’s your look-out. The bins are just outside the front door – you probably saw them on your way in. Mine is the one with 23B painted on it in white.’
‘I’ll have a look on my way out, then. And thanks a lot.’ ‘There’s nothing there. It’s all bits of old rubbish.’
I must have looked crazy, a woman in a smart grey trouser suit rooting through a bin. What did I think I was doing, trying to find out about Tara, who was nothing to me except a shabby means of finding her parents? Whom I’d already found, and who were also nothing to me, except as a way of finding the woman who might be Adele. Who should mean nothing to me. She was just a lost fragment of someone else’s past.
Chicken bones, empty tuna and cat-food tins, a few lettuce leaves, an old newspaper or two. I was going to reek when I got back to work. A broken bowl, a light-bulb. I’d better do this methodically. I started pulling things out of the bin and piling them on to the bin lid. A couple walked past and I tried to look as if this was quite normal behaviour. Tubes of lipstick and eyeliner pencils: this had probably belonged to Tara. A sponge, a torn bathcap, several glossy magazines. I put them on the pavement, beside the overflowing pile on the bin lid, and then peered back into the nearly empty bin. A face stared back at me. A familiar face.
Very slowly, as in a nightmare, I pushed my hand down and picked up the scrap of newspaper. Tea-leaves were stuck to it. ‘The hero returns,’ read the headline. By the bin, crammed in a corner, I found a plastic shopping bag. I unfolded it and put the newspaper inside. I scrabbled around in the bottom of the bin and came up with several more scraps of newspaper. They were dirty and sodden, but I could make out Adam’s name, Adam’s face. I found other sodden papers and envelopes and transferred them all to the shopping bag, cursing the smell and the damp.
A tiny old woman, with two enormous dogs on a double lead, came past and looked at me with distaste. I grimaced. I was even talking to myself now. A madwoman, going through dustbins, scaring herself to death.
Twenty-seven
My hands were oily and stained. I couldn’t go back to the office, not like this, and I wanted to go home and scrub everything about this experience off my body, out of my hair, out of my brain. I couldn’t take this bag of sodden paper back to the flat. I had to find a place to sit down where I could straighten out my thoughts. I had fabricated so much, concealed so much from Adam, that it was now impossible for me to go spontaneously to him. Always I had to think what it was that I had previously told him, what my story had to be in order to fit in with previous lies. That was the advantage of telling the truth. You didn’t have to concentrate all the time. True things fitted together automatically. The thought of this gap I had created between myself and Adam suddenly made the grey day seem even greyer and less bearable.
I walked aimlessly through residential streets looking for a cafe or anywhere I could rest and think, plan what to do. I saw nothing but an occasional corner shop but eventually I came to a small patch of grass next to a school
