“Someone put a rabbit on our doormat,” Mark explains. “There was blood all over the steps. We wondered if you might have seen anything.”
“Good God. A rabbit? What a peculiar . . . But why?”
I examine his face, looking for any sign that he’s faking. “You didn’t see anyone?” Even as I ask, I’m not sure what answer I’m expecting. Yes, I watched someone put a mutilated rabbit outside your house, but didn’t think to ask what the hell they were doing. Or: Yes, I put it there as a joke. Ha ha. An early Christmas present.
“I wasn’t back till late last night . . . Both your cars were in the driveway, but there were no lights on. And I’m afraid I had a lie-in this morning. Off till New Year. I know: lucky bugger, eh?”
This is stupid. Robert Drake is the sort of neighbor who starts community-watch schemes and reports cold callers. If he had seen someone putting a rabbit on our step, he’d have told us. As for putting it there himself . . . the man’s a doctor, not a psychopath.
I turn to Mark. “We should get going.”
“Sure.” He picks up Ella’s car seat, takes it to his car, and straps it in with no sense of urgency. I sit in the back next to her.
I don’t think Mark is taking this seriously. My parents were murdered. How much more proof does he want? The anonymous card. A dead rabbit. These aren’t normal events.
He stands for a while outside the closed car door, then moves away. I hear the crunch of gravel underfoot. I stroke Ella’s cheek with one outstretched finger and wait for Mark to lock the front door. I have a sudden memory of waiting in the car for my parents, sitting in the back like this, while Dad tapped the steering wheel and Mum rushed back to the house for something she’d forgotten.
“I wish you could meet them,” I say to Ella.
When I left university I desperately wanted a place of my own. I’d had a taste of independence—seen a world outside of Eastbourne—and I liked it. But the charity sector is designed for job satisfaction, not salary goals, and the property ladder remained stubbornly out of my grasp. I moved back home and never left.
Dad was fond of reminding me I didn’t know how good I had it.
“Kicked out at sixteen to learn the trade, I was. You’d never have caught my old man doing laundry for Bill and me past our teens.”
I was fairly confident that Granddad Johnson had never been near a washing machine in his life, his wife having been the sort of woman who reveled in homemaking and shooed intruders from the kitchen.
“I worked twelve-hour days for years. By the time I was your age I had a flat in Soho and a wallet full of fifties.”
I exchanged a conspiratorial grin with Mum. Neither of us pointed out that it had been Granddad who had lined up the apprenticeship at a friend’s garage, and Granny who had sent food parcels up with the car delivery service. Not to mention the fact that in 1983 it was still possible to buy a flat in London for fifty grand. I changed the subject before he claimed he’d been sent up chimneys as a schoolboy.
I was never academic, but I’d inherited my parents’ work ethic. I admired them both for the hours they put into making the family business a success and did my best to emulate them.
“Find a job you love,” Dad was fond of saying, “and you’ll never do a day’s work in your life.”
The trouble was, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I got a place at Warwick to do sociology, scraped a bachelor’s degree with honors, and left with no clearer idea. The first step on my career path was an accidental one. I took a job with Save the Children, collected a red vest and clipboard, and traipsed the streets, knocking on doors. Some people were kind, others less so, but I soon discovered I did have a little of my parents’ charm, after all. I simply hadn’t ever been that passionate about selling cars. I recruited more monthly donors that first month than the rest of the team put together. A temporary promotion to regional supervisor ended when a position became vacant for the national post, and I slid into a desk that felt a world away from the exam halls of an undiagnosed dyslexic teen who would never amount to anything. “Chip off the old block,” Dad said.
I worked closely with the fund-raising team, thought up innovative ideas for raising awareness, and looked after my three-hundred-strong team of door knockers across the country. I defended them fiercely from middle-class complaints about “legalized begging” and praised each and every one of my staff for the contribution they made to children around the globe. I loved the job I’d found. But it wasn’t well paid. Living at home was the only option.
Besides, uncool though it might have been to admit it, I liked living at home. Not for the clean laundry or the home-cooked meals, or my dad’s infamous wine cellar, but because my parents were genuinely good company. They made me laugh. They were interested and interesting. We chatted late into the night about plans, politics, people. We discussed our problems. There were no secrets. Or so they pretended.
I think of the vodka bottle beneath my parents’ desk; the others secreted around the house. Of the kitchen table littered with empty wine bottles, yet always spotless by the time I got up in the morning.
Toward the end of my first term at Warwick I spent the weekend with Sam, a friend from my residence hall, at her parents’ house. The absence of wine at dinner felt strange, like they’d dished up a meal without knives or forks. A few weeks later I asked Sam if her parents minded her drinking.
“Why would they?”
“Aren’t they teetotal?”
Sam laughed. “Teetotal? You should see Mum on the sherries at Christmas.”
My cheeks burned. “I thought . . . They didn’t drink when I came to stay.”
She shrugged. “Can’t say I’d noticed. Sometimes they drink, sometimes they don’t. Like most people, I guess.”
“I guess so.”
Most people didn’t drink every evening? Most people didn’t fix a gin and tonic when they got home from work, saying it was “six o’clock somewhere”?
Most people.
“All set?” Mark gets into the car and puts on his seat belt. He looks at me in the rearview mirror, then twists around to see me properly. He clears his throat, a subconscious habit I recognize from our early meetings. It’s a form of punctuation. A full stop between what’s been said and what he’s about to say. A way of saying: Listen to me now—this is important.
“After we’ve been to the police . . .” He hesitates.
“Yes?”
“We could make an appointment for you to see someone.”
I raise an eyebrow. See someone. The middle-class euphemism for go find a shrink—you’re going nuts. “I don’t need to see another counselor.”
“Anniversaries can do funny things.”
“Hilarious,” I joke, but Mark doesn’t smile. He turns back around and starts the car.
“Think about it, at least.”
There’s nothing to think about. It’s the police I need, not a shrink.
But as we pull out of the drive I take a sharp breath and lean across Ella to put a hand on the window. Maybe I do need a shrink. For a second, that woman walking . . . It isn’t Mum, of course, but I’m shocked by the intensity of my disappointment, by the very fact that a part of me thought it might be. Yesterday, on the anniversary of her death, I felt her presence so strongly that today I’m conjuring up ghosts where none exist.
And yet I have the strangest feeling . . .
Who says ghosts don’t exist?
Doctors? Psychiatrists?
Mark?
Maybe it’s possible to summon the dead. Maybe it’s possible they return of their own accord. Maybe—just maybe—my mother has a message for me.
I share none of this with Mark. But I stare out the window as we drive to the station, willing myself to see ghosts, to see some sort of sign.
If Mum’s trying to tell me what really happened the day s
he died, I’m listening.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
I’ve been here too long. The longer I stay, the more likely it is that someone will see me.
But I have to do this now—it could be my only chance.
Mark clicks the car seat into the base in the back of the car, and Anna slides into the adjacent seat. Mark closes the car door. He stands for a second with his palms flat on the roof of the car. Like that, he’s concealed from Anna, but I can see the anxiety on his face. Is he worried about Anna? The baby? Or something else?
He walks back to the side of the house, where Robert is lingering, pretending to move some pots about. I feel panic building inside me, even though he can’t touch me, can’t even see me. The two men talk in low tones through the railings, and I wonder if Anna can hear the same snippets I do.
“. . . still grieving . . . very difficult . . . a touch of postnatal depression . . .”
I wait.
Mark drives away. Robert abandons his plant pots and goes back inside.
And then it’s time.
A single breath later I’m through the locked door and standing in the hall. Instantly I’m overwhelmed with sensation, assaulted by memories I never imagined would have lingered.
Painting the baseboards, kneeling awkwardly over my growing bump. Piling duvets on the stairs for a pint-sized Anna to sledge down, you egging her on, me with my fingers over my eyes.
Playing happy families. Hiding how we really felt.
How easily life changes. How easily happiness disintegrates.
The drinking. The shouting. The fights.
I kept it from Anna. I could at least do that for her.
I check myself. The time for being maudlin is long gone; too late now to dwell on the past.
I move quickly and silently through the house, my touch featherlight. I leave no mess, no prints. No trace. I want to see the papers Anna put to one side. My appointment book. The photographs that tell a story only when you know the way it ends. I look for the key that will tell everyone why I had to die.
I find nothing.
In the study, I work my way efficiently through the drawers. I ignore the stab of nostalgia that pierces deeper with each trinket and notebook I pick up. You can’t take it with you; that’s what they say. I remember an old school project of Anna’s on the grave goods selected by ancient Egyptians, designed to smooth the deceased’s passage to the afterlife. Anna spent weeks on a painting of a sarcophagus, surrounded by carefully drawn images of her own precious belongings. Her iPod. Salt-and-vinegar crisps—six packets. Portraits she’d drawn of you and me. A favorite scarf, in case she got cold. I smile at the memory and consider what I would have taken, had it been possible; what would have made my afterlife more bearable.
There is no key. Not in any of the bags dotted about downstairs, or in the drawer of the dresser in the hall where everything accumulates when it doesn’t have a home.
What has Anna done with it?
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
MURRAY
“I found my mother’s datebook from last year.” Anna handed him a thick A4 appointment book. “I thought it might help piece together her movements.” They were sitting in the kitchenette behind the front desk at Lower Meads Police Station, where Murray had first spoken to Anna Johnson. Anna’s partner, Mark, was with her, and together they had reported one of the strangest occurrences Murray had ever been asked to investigate.
Mark Hemmings had thick dark hair and glasses that were currently pushed up on his forehead. He was sitting back in his chair with one ankle on the knee of his other leg. His right arm rested on the back of Anna’s chair.
Anna Johnson took up half the space of her partner. She sat on the edge of her seat, leaning forward with her legs crossed and her hands clasped together as though she were in church.
There were various leaflets and business cards filed within the pages of the datebook, and as Murray opened the front cover, a photograph fell out.
Anna reached for it. “Sorry, I put it there so it didn’t get creased. I was going to get it framed.”
“Your mother?”
“There, in the yellow dress. And that’s her friend Alicia. She died of an asthma attack when she was thirty-three. Her daughter, Laura, is Mum’s goddaughter.”
Murray remembered the pocket notebook entry from the attending officer. Laura Barnes. Goddaughter. The women—girls, really—in the photo were laughing outside a pub, their arms entangled so they looked like extensions of each other. In the background of the photo was a table of young men, one of whom was looking across at Alicia and Caroline admiringly. Murray could make out a wagon and horses on the swinging sign outside the building behind them.
“Funny place for a holiday—about as far as you can get from the sea—but Mum said they had the best time.”
“Lovely photo. You never met Anna’s parents, Mr. Hemmings?”
“Sadly not. They’d both passed away before we met. In fact, it was because of them we met at all.” Instinctively both Mark and Anna looked at their daughter, who, Murray supposed, would not have existed without the tragedy that had befallen the family.
“I’ll speak to a crime scene investigator about the rabbit, but without examining it—”
“I’m sorry. We didn’t think.” Anna shot a look at her partner.
“I’ll just leave it there next time, shall I?” Mark said. He spoke mildly, but with an undertone that suggested this was a conversation already had at least once. “Let the flies have a really good go at it?”
“It can’t be helped. I’ve submitted the anniversary card to forensics. They’ll check for fingerprints and DNA and try to enhance the postmark so we have a better idea of where it came from. And I’ll take a look through this datebook, thank you.” Murray passed the photo back to Anna, but she didn’t put it in her bag. She held it in both hands, staring at the image as though she could bring it to life.
“I keep thinking I see her.” She looked up. Mark moved his arm from the back of her chair to her shoulders. His lips were pressed tightly together as Anna tried to explain. “At least . . . not see her exactly. But feel her. I think . . . I think she might be trying to tell me something. Does that sound mad?”
Mark spoke softly, as much to Murray as to Anna. “It’s very common for people who are grieving to imagine they see their loved ones. It’s a manifestation of emotion; you want to see them so badly you think—”
“What if I’m not imagining it?”
There was an awkward pause. Murray felt as though he were intruding and wondered if he should fabricate a reason to leave the couple alone. Before he could move, Anna turned to him.
“What do you think? Do you believe in ghosts? In an afterlife?”
Police officers were, by nature, a cynical breed. Throughout his service Murray had kept his thoughts on ghosts to himself, avoiding the ribbing that would inevitably have ensued. Even now, he didn’t commit. One’s belief or otherwise in the supernatural was a personal matter—like religion or politics—and not one to be debated in a side room of a police station.
“I’m open to it.” There were more things in heaven and earth, Shakespeare had said, than anyone could ever imagine, but that didn’t make Murray’s job any easier. He couldn’t go to CID with a report that Anna Johnson was being haunted by a murdered relative. He leaned forward. “Do you get a sense of what she might be trying to tell you?” Murray ignored the almost tangible disparagement that was emanating from Mark Hemmings.
“I’m sorry. It’s just a . . . feeling.”
It was going to take more than a feeling to convince CID that Tom and Caroline Johnson had been murdered.
* * *
• • •
Nisha Kaur had been a crime scene investigator back when they were called scenes of crime officers.
r /> “Same shit, different job title,” she’d say cheerfully. “Give it another ten years and some bright spark upstairs will be rebranding us all SOCOs again.”
Not that Nish would be there in ten years’ time. She had been new in the post when Murray was a young detective; she joined the force with a diploma in photography, a strong stomach, and the enviable ability to get on with everyone. Thirty years later she was principal CSI, responsible for the force forensic team, and counting down to her own retirement.
“Pet photography,” she said, when Murray asked her plans. She laughed at the surprise on his face. “The uniform’s better, there’s less blood, and have you tried being depressed when there’s a kitten in the room? I can pick and choose my jobs—no more arsey customers for me—and work my own hours. All very low-key. More of a hobby than a job.” They were sitting in the closed canteen, where a triptych of vending machines served the weekend workers.
“Sounds like a good plan.” Privately Murray doubted Nish could do anything on a low-key basis. Within eighteen months of retirement she’d be working flat out again. “What are you doing over Christmas?”
“On call. You?”
“Nothing special. Quiet one. You know.”
“Is Sarah . . . ?” Nish didn’t do the head tilt.
“At Highfield. Voluntarily, this time. She’s fine.” It sounded insincere, even to Murray. You’d have thought he would have found Sarah’s admissions easier as time went by, but the last few occasions had drained him more than ever before. He was getting older, he supposed, finding stress harder to handle.
“What did you want to see me about?” Nish, perceptive as ever, changing tack.
“How much blood is there in a rabbit?”
It was a measure of the variety of Nish’s job, and the breadth of her experience, that the question provoked no surprise.
“A couple of hundred milliliters, if that. A small glassful,” she added, seeing Murray’s blank look.