Irene had left Theo Myerson’s terribly shaken. That was days ago now, but she remained shaken. There was a moment—brief but nonetheless terrifying—in which she’d really thought he was going to hurt her. As he advanced toward her with his hands outstretched, she had almost felt them around her neck; she had cowered, terrified, and he had seen her terror, she was sure. He put his arms around her, gentle as a mother, lifted her, and helped her across to the sofa. He was shaking all the time. He did not speak and did not look at her; he turned away and she watched as he knelt before the fireplace, as viciously he tore pages from Daniel’s notebook and tossed them one by one into the flames.
A while later, she left in the taxi he had called for her, almost overcome with shame at the damage she’d done. If he had hurt her, she thought, she might just have deserved it.
Terrible as the afternoon had been, that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it came later: a couple of days after the incident with Myerson, Irene received a phone call from a solicitor saying that Laura Kilbride was due to be released from remand prison, and was asking whether Irene might be able to come out to east London that afternoon and pick her up. Irene was elated; she’d been so excited, so relieved, only for there to be another call from the same solicitor, just moments after Irene had finished organizing a taxi to take her to the prison, saying that Laura would not be released after all, that she had been attacked and seriously injured, that they’d transferred her to the hospital right away. Irene was so upset that she’d taken down neither the solicitor’s name nor the name of the hospital, and when she phoned the remand center for more information, they were no help at all. They wouldn’t tell her how serious the injuries were or how, exactly, she’d come by them or where Laura was now, because Irene wasn’t family.
Since then, Irene had not been able to eat a thing, she’d not slept a wink, she was beside herself. Strange expression, that, and yet it seemed apt, because she did feel as though she were hovering outside herself, living through events that barely seemed real, that felt as though she’d read about them or watched them unfold on a television screen, at once distant and yet oddly heightened. Irene could feel herself on the edge of something. She recognized this sensation; it was the start of a slide into a different state of consciousness, when the world as it really was faded away and she was left somewhere else, somewhere frightening and confusing and dangerous, but in which there was the possibility that she would see William again.
Irene’s eyelids were growing heavy, her chin just starting to drop toward her chest, when she felt a shadow pass in front of the window and jerked awake. Carla was outside in the lane, riffling through her handbag, looking for something. Leaning forward, Irene tapped on the window. Carla started, looked up and saw Irene, and nodded, didn’t bother to smile. Irene motioned for her to wait a moment, but Carla had already turned away; she’d found whatever she was looking for in her handbag—the key to next door, presumably—and disappeared.
Irene sank back into her chair. There was a part of her that wanted desperately to just leave it, to forget the whole thing—after all, Laura was no longer under suspicion for Daniel’s murder. The damage to the poor girl was already done. The police had a new suspect for their crime now; they had Theo Myerson. It was all over the papers: he hadn’t been charged, so the police hadn’t named him, but the secret was out; some sharp-eyed photographer had snapped Myerson exiting a police car at the station, and this, added to the news that “a 52-year-old Islington man” was “helping police with their inquiries” and the fact that charges against Laura Kilbride had been dropped, left little room for doubt.
Poor Theo. Irene closed her eyes. She saw for a moment his stricken expression when he had seen the drawings in the notebook and felt a sharp pang of guilt. While her eyes were closed, Irene saw herself too. She imagined looking in on herself from outside this room, from out in the street, the way Carla Myerson had looked in on her a few moments before. What would Carla have seen? She would have seen a little old woman, bewildered and frightened and alone, staring into space, thinking about the past, if she were thinking about anything at all.
There, in her imagination, was everything Irene feared—seeing herself reduced to a cliché of old age, a person without agency, without hope or future or intention, sitting by herself in a comfortable chair with a blanket over her knees, in the waiting room of death.
Well, bollocks, as Laura might say, to that.