Eyebrow smiled, she rose above it, she pressed on. “You have impulse control problems, don’t you, Laura? You can’t help yourself, you lash out at people, you try to hurt them—that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”
“Well, I . . .”
“And so, on the boat on Friday night, when Mr. Sutherland rejected you—when he was, as you put it, cold and offensive, you lost your temper, didn’t you? You attacked him, didn’t you? Earlier you said you hit him. You really wanted to hurt him, didn’t you?”
“I wanted to rip his fucking throat out,” Laura heard herself say. Next to her, she felt the solicitor flinch. And there it was—the police didn’t, as she’d said, have fuck all, because of course they had her. They had Laura. They didn’t need a weapon, did they? They didn’t need a smoking gun. They had motive and they had opportunity and they had Laura, who they knew could be counted on, sooner or later, to say something really stupid.
SIX
In the armchair in her front room, her favored reading spot, Irene waited for Laura, who was late. The armchair, once part of a pair, although its partner had long since been consigned to the dump, was pushed right up against the window of the front room. It was the spot that trapped the sun for most of the morning and well into the afternoon too, the spot from which Irene could watch the world go by and the world going by could, in turn, watch her, fulfilling their expectations of the aged: sitting in a chair in a room, alone, musing on the past, on former glory, on missed opportunities, on the way things used to be. On dead people.
Which Irene wasn’t doing at all. Well, not exclusively, in any case. Mostly, she was waiting for Laura to turn up to fetch her weekly groceries, and in the meantime, she was sorting through one of the three boxes of musty-smelling books that Carla Myerson had left for her. The books had belonged to a dead person—Angela. Carla’s sister and Irene’s neighbor, also Irene’s dearest friend.
“They’re not worth anything,” Carla had told Irene when she dropped them off sometime last week, “just paperbacks. I was going to take them to the charity shop, but then I thought . . .” She’d given Irene’s living room a quick once-over, a wrinkle appearing at the bridge of her nose as she said: “I thought they might be to your taste.”
A veiled insult, Irene supposed. Not that she cared, particularly. Carla was the sort of woman who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Not worth anything? Showed what she knew.
It was true that when Irene opened up some of the more ancient Penguins, their bright orange covers tattered and worn, their pages began to crumble beneath her fingertips. Succumbing already to slow fire, the acidification of the paper destroying it from within, eating away at the pages, making them brittle and breakable. It was terribly sad when you thought about it, all those words, all those stories slowly disappearing. Those books, in any case, she’d have to throw out. But as for the rest of them—they were very much to her taste, so much so that she’d already read quite a few of them. She and Angela used to swap books all the time; they shared a predilection for the best sort of crime novels （not the bloody ones; the clever ones, like Barbara Vine, or P. D. James） and for the sort of book club fiction at which the likes of Carla Myerson no doubt turned up their noses.
The fact that Irene had read most of them was beside the point. The important thing—the thing that Carla probably didn’t know, even though this was her own sister they were talking about—was that Angela was a vandal when it came to books: a cracker of spines, a dog-earer of pages, a scribbler in margins. So, when you leafed through Angela Sutherland’s copy of The Haunting of Hill House, for example, you might notice that she’d underscored certain lines （the poor girl was hated to death; she hanged herself, by the way）; when you turned the pages of Angela’s well-thumbed A Dark-Adapted Eye, you discovered how strongly she sympathized with Vera’s feelings toward her sister: exactly this! she had scrawled in the margin next to the line that told us Nothing kills like contempt, and contempt for her came upon me in a hot flood. Every now and again, you might even come across some little scrap of Angela’s past—a bookmark, say, or a train ticket, or a scrap of paper with a shopping list on it: cigarettes, milk, pasta. In No Country for Old Men, there was a postcard purchased at the V&A, a photograph of a house with a white picket fence; in In the Woods, there was a scrap of paper with a drawing on it, two children holding hands. In The Cement Garden, she found a birthday card, blue and white with a picture of a boat on it, the paper creased, worn thin with handling. To darling Daniel, the message read, with all my love on your tenth birthday, kisses, Auntie Carla.