The handsome man left, and Irene did as she was told; she ate a piece of toast with some honey on it and drank two large glasses of water without electrolytes because she didn’t have any of those, and was at last starting to feel a little more like herself when she heard the most terrible crash from outside, a terrifying sound and, heart racing, hurried to the window in the living room. There were men out there, men in uniforms using a sort of metal battering ram to smash Angie’s door down. “Oh dear,” Irene said out loud, thinking—stupidly—that Angela wasn’t going to be pleased about that at all.
Somehow, still, the penny had not dropped, that Angela would never be pleased by anything ever again, and it wasn’t until another police officer, a different woman, not in uniform, came round and sat her down and explained that Angela was dead, that she’d fallen down the stairs and broken her neck, that finally Irene understood.
When the policewoman told Irene that Angela might have been lying there for days, for as much as a whole week, Irene could barely speak for the shame. Poor Angela, lying alone, on the other side of that wall, and Irene—having one of her turns, letting herself slip away into confusion—had not even missed her.
“She didn’t cry out,” Irene said, when at last she found her voice. “I would have heard her. These walls are paper thin.” The policewoman was kind; she told Irene that it was likely that Angela was killed instantly when she fell. “But surely you can tell when it was that she died?” Irene knew a little about forensics, from her reading. But the woman said that the heating had been on, turned up very high, and that Angela’s body had been lying right up against the radiator at the bottom of the stairs, which made it impossible to ascertain her time of death with any accuracy.
No one would ever know, not really, what had happened. The police said it was an accident, and Irene accepted that, though the whole thing felt wrong to her, too hastily concluded. There was conflict in Angela’s life, plenty of it: she argued with her sister, she argued with her son—or rather, it seemed to Irene, one or the other of them came by to harangue her, leaving her upset, setting her off on a binge. Irene mentioned the arguments—over money, over Daniel—to the police, but they didn’t seem interested. Angela was an alcoholic. She drank too much, she fell, she broke her neck. “It happens more often than you’d think,” the kind policewoman said. “But if you think of anything else, anything that might be relevant,” she said, handing Irene a card with a telephone number on it, “feel free to give me a call.”
“I saw her with a man,” Irene said, suddenly, just as the woman was leaving.
“Okay,” the woman said carefully. “And when was this?”
Irene couldn’t say. She couldn’t remember. Her mind was a blank. No, not a blank, it was fogged. There were things in there, memories, important ones, only everything was shifting about, hazily; she couldn’t fix on anything. “Two weeks ago, perhaps?” she ventured, hopefully.
The woman pursed her lips. “Okay. Can you remember anything else about this man? Could you describe him, or . . .”
“They were talking out there, in the lane,” Irene said. “Something was wrong; Angela was crying.”
“She was crying?”
“She was. Although . . .” Irene paused, caught between resistance to disloyalty and an urge to tell the truth. “She’s quite often tearful when she has a little too much to drink; she gets . . . melancholic.”
“Right.” The woman nodded, smiled; she was ready for the off. “You don’t remember what this man looked like, do you? Tall, short, fat, thin . . .”
Irene shook her head. He was just . . . normal; he was average. “He had a dog!” she said at last. “A little dog. Black and tan. An Airedale, perhaps? No, an Airedale’s bigger, isn’t it? Maybe a fox terrier?”
* * *
That was eight weeks ago. First Angela had died, and now her son too. Irene had no idea whether the police had ever inquired about the man she’d seen outside with Angela; if they had, it came to nothing, because her death was recorded as accidental. Accidents do happen, and they especially happen to drunks, but mother and son, eight weeks apart?
In fiction, that would never stand.
SEVEN
Theo’s bedroom window overlooked a small walled garden, and beyond the wall, the canal. On a spring day like this one, the view was a palette of greens: bright new growth on the plane and oaks, the muted olive of weeping willows on the towpath, electric lime duckweed spreading across the surface of the water.