Carla got to her feet. “You need to go back to bed,” she said briskly, carrying her mug back to the kitchen. “I’ve kept you up.”
“Well, I don’t sleep terribly well anyway,” Irene said. “It’s all right, if you’d like to rest here, if—”
“Oh, no,” Carla said, as though the idea were abhorrent. She was back from the kitchen, all trace of emotion wiped from her face. She stood in the doorway, back straight, chin tilted toward the ceiling moldings, her mouth a line. “Don’t get up, Irene, please,” she said. “Thank you for the tea. And I’m sorry about the disturbance, I’ll . . . I’ll be going home now, so I won’t bother you again.”
“Carla, I . . .” Irene paused. She wanted to say something reassuring, something hopeful, something conciliatory. She couldn’t think of a single thing. Instead, she asked: “You will be all right, won’t you?”
For a moment, Carla appeared not to understand that question, and then she blushed. “Oh, God. Yes, of course. You don’t have to worry about that. I’m not sure I ever would have gone through with it. The imagining of it is one thing, isn’t it, and then the reality . . .” She tailed off. “I brought the dog’s lead,” she said. Irene shuddered, her skin crawling from her tailbone to the nape of her neck, at the thought of it, of another body next door, waiting, undiscovered, behind those paper-thin walls.
“Not my dog, of course,” Carla was saying, “I don’t have one. My ex-husband did, though, and I think that somewhere in my subconscious I was ensuring that I wouldn’t go through with it.” She smiled, a strange, private smile. “I think I must have known that I would look at the lead and I would think of his little dog, I would think of how much he loved the dog, and of how much he loved me, and that would pull me back.” She shrugged, her expression soft. “That’s what I think now, anyway.”
“Oh!” Irene said, remembering all of a sudden. “I forgot to say. Your ex-husband, he came looking for you. He was here—”
“Here?”
“Well, outside, in the lane, knocking on Angela’s door. I didn’t recognize him at first, but then I remembered that he’d come before, I’d seen him out there talking to Angela, so—”
Carla shook her head. “No, that couldn’t have been Theo.”
“It was, it was definitely—”
“You’re mistaken, Irene, there is no way that my husband—”
“I saw him with her,” Irene insisted. “I saw them, out there, in the lane. She was crying. Angela was crying. I think they were arguing.”
“Irene.” Carla’s voice rose, two spots of dark color appearing in her cheeks. “Theo didn’t speak to my sister, he would never—”
“He had his little dog with him. A little terrier of some sort, black and tan.”
Carla blinked slowly. “You saw him with Angela?” she asked. Irene nodded. “When?”
“I’m not sure, it was—”
“How many times?”
“Just the once, I think. They were outside in the lane. Angela was crying.”
“When, Irene?”
“A week or two,” Irene said, “before she died.”
* * *
? ? ?
Back upstairs in bed, Irene lay awake, watching a gray light creep through the gap in the curtains. It was almost morning. She’d returned to bed feeling exhausted, knowing it was unlikely she would sleep. It was true what she’d said to Carla about her wakefulness, short sleeping being yet another side effect of old age. But she doubted she’d have slept no matter how she’d been feeling or what her age; the stricken look on Carla’s face when Irene had mentioned Theo Myerson’s visit would have kept her awake no matter what.
NINETEEN
Will you just. Fucking. Let me in?”
Half past nine in the morning in the pissing rain and Laura stood on the pavement outside the launderette, her breath ragged, only vaguely conscious of wage slaves beneath umbrellas hurrying past, keeping a wide berth of the nutcase on the street, the one who was now swinging her backpack around in the air, who was hurling it at the launderette door as hard as she could. “It’s not about the job,” she yelled. “I don’t care about the job, you can stick your fucking job! I just wanted to talk to Tania! Maya! For fuck’s sake! Let me in!”
On the other side of the glass door, Maya stood, square-shouldered and impassive, her arms folded across her chest. “Laura,” she called out, “you need to calm down. I’m going to give you thirty seconds, all right, to calm down and walk away, and if you don’t, I’m going to call the police. Do you understand me? Laura?”