“This is about Daniel?” Irene said, and Laura pulled a face.
“Yeah, of course it is! Of course it’s about Daniel—I haven’t slept with anyone else who’s carked it lately, have I? I’m a witness, that’s all; I was the last person to see him, you know, alive. It’s nothing to worry about.” Irene saw her to the front door. Helping her into her still-damp coat, she asked if Laura had a solicitor. Laura laughed, started off down the lane, limping a little more than usual, and then she turned back, a grin on her face, all traces of tears banished. “Does the pope shit in the woods?”
* * *
Irene was thinking, as she popped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster, how much William would have liked Laura. She would have made him laugh. He’d not been overly keen on Angela—he was never unkind to her or anything like that, he was just wary. She’s on the edge of something, that one, he’d said. And when she goes over, you don’t want to be anywhere nearby, she’ll catch hold of you and whoop! Off you’ll both go. William never really got to know Angela; he never got to see how kind she was.
Toast buttered, Irene sat at the kitchen table with the memoir open in front of her and Theo’s novel next to it, for comparison. Something about singing, she was saying to herself as she flicked through the pages. Something about—oh.
Right at the back of Theo’s book, tucked into the flap of the jacket, she discovered an envelope, addressed to Theo Myerson. Odd, since this was Angela’s copy of the book. Inside the envelope, she found a sheet of A4, apparently torn roughly from a pad, on which there was a pencil drawing of a woman sleeping, the bedclothes flung back to expose her naked torso. At the bottom of the page, in a spidery hand, was written, hello old man, been doing some sketching, thought you’d like to see. The note was unsigned, but the drawing looked very much like one of Daniel’s. And the woman in the picture was unmistakably Carla Myerson.
TWENTY-SEVEN
On Carla’s bed lay her suitcase, half full. The wardrobe was open too, and bits and pieces of clothing were strewn all over the counterpane. She was having trouble making her mind up what to pack; she’d no idea how long she’d be gone, or what she’d need. The weather had turned cold here, but it would be warm farther south, wouldn’t it? Mindlessly, she grabbed things from her shelves, T-shirts and jumpers, a dress she’d not worn in years. Somewhere in the house her phone was ringing, but then, her phone was always ringing. It never stopped.
She would have to speak to Theo at some point, she knew that, to ask him to forward her mail to wherever it is she decided to go, to deal with solicitors, with the estate, with the sale of Angela’s house.
There would be an argument, inevitably, which is why she was considering taking the coward’s option and calling him from abroad. She wasn’t sure she could do that to him, to just leave, without seeing him again. She wasn’t sure she could do that to herself.
She needed to tell him that she’d looked at his latest piece of writing too, that she didn’t like it, all the to-ing and fro-ing, all that jumping around in the timeline. Like the last one, the awful crime thing. Just start at the beginning, for God’s sake. Why couldn’t people just tell a story straight any longer, start to finish?
* * *
The year before Angela died, Daniel turned up on Carla’s doorstep one Sunday night around eight. He was upset and agitated, a graze across his cheekbone and a cut on his lip; he had a long and complicated story about an argument with a girlfriend, followed by a mugging—Carla couldn’t quite follow the thread, but he said he had nowhere to go. He didn’t want to call the police and he certainly didn’t want to go to his mother’s. “She doesn’t want me there,” he told Carla. “She’s never wanted me there.” Carla said he could stay. She opened a bottle of wine, which they seemed to drink very quickly, so she opened another. About halfway through that, she knew she had to stop.
She went upstairs, showered, teetered unsteadily straight from the shower to bed, still wrapped in her towel. She woke with a fright, the way she often did from drink. She lay still, her heart hammering in her chest, and it took a while for her to realize that she’d thrown off the covers, thrown off her towel. It took a while for her eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness and for her to realize that she wasn’t alone. That he was sitting on the floor next to the door, looking up at her, his sketchbook in his lap. “Daniel,” she whispered, pulling the covers up sharply, “you scared me.” In the gloom, she could not make out his expression, only the whiteness of his teeth. “Couldn’t help myself,” he replied.