There was, of course, a big difference between the things I knew or strongly believed she’d done – cutting up my photography book, destroying my bag of mementoes – and killing someone. I now knew that she could be jealous, secretive, a liar. But those were things I could deal with, could talk to Charlie about. I didn’t expect her to be perfect. Nobody is.
The crux, I reminded myself, was whether she was jealous, secretive and duplicitous enough to be the one thing that I would never be able to forgive her for. A murderer.
I stared at the filthy streets as they rolled by. I knew where I needed to go next, who I had to talk to.
Harold’s expression changed from puzzlement to delight when he opened his door, his little dog, Dickens, bounding about at his feet.
‘You changed your mind?’ he said.
‘Can I come in?’
‘Yes, please, do. I was just making tea.’
I followed him into what I guessed he would call the sitting room. A fire burned in the hearth and Harold’s dog, Dickens, lay on the rug, chin on paws. The scene reminded me of going to see my grandparents, my mum’s parents, when I was little. They had outlived my parents – I remember them at the funeral, him stoic, her sobbing – but died a few years later within weeks of one another. Couples in my family die in pairs.
Harold came and sat in the armchair opposite mine, putting the tea tray on the table between us and tossing half a biscuit to Dickens, who snatched it up and swallowed it in one gulp.
‘How have you been?’ Harold asked, leaning forward and looking not only directly at me but at the air around me, his eyes roaming about my periphery. It was disconcerting.
‘Not bad.’ I didn’t want to give too much away. ‘I wanted to ask you a couple of questions – about Karen.’
He nodded very slowly. ‘That would be fine. But only if you agree to do something for me.’
I knew what he was going to ask.
‘Let me read your aura.’
What harm could it do? It wasn’t like I believed in any of his hokum. As long as I didn’t let what he said worm into my head, it would be fine.
‘All right.’
He rubbed his hands together. ‘Marvellous.’
‘Do I need to do anything to prepare?’ I asked.
‘Yes, please take off all your clothes, dear boy, and leave them on the chair.’ He smiled wickedly at my expression. ‘I jest. You don’t need to do anything except stand here, in front of the white wall, and relax.’
He stood before me and reached up, his hands hovering over my head, one on either side, then slowly moved them down so they were a couple of inches from my cheeks. I closed my eyes. Harold had terrible breath, like he had rotting meat trapped in his teeth, and I tried not to breathe through my nose. He made a low humming noise as he studied me. Despite the halitosis smell and my scepticism, I could feel my muscles unknotting like I was having a deep tissue massage. At the same time, I felt a prickle on my scalp; my stomach gurgled. My legs felt weak. I lost track of time, went deep inside my head, though when I emerged I couldn’t recall what I’d been thinking about.
I opened my eyes. Harold stood before me, a grave expression on his face. He sat down and picked up his teacup, took a sip, screwed up his face like it was bitter.
‘What did you see?’ I asked, returning to the seat opposite.
His face was covered with his hand, his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. I had expected a full run-down of what he had seen, expected to see a theatrical report, but he looked exhausted, grumpy. Wiped out. His voice was reduced to a cracked mumble. ‘Your aura . . . It’s like a bruise surrounding you. Purples and browns and greys . . . Ropes of black and blood red.’
He looked up at me, his eyes watery, unfocused. ‘I don’t want to alarm you.’
‘Tell me.’ I wasn’t worried. I didn’t believe in it. I wasn’t sure why I was whispering. I knew I shouldn’t allow him to suck me in. This way madness lay.
‘Very well.’ He recovered his voice a little. ‘The mix of brown and grey and pink . . . That usually indicates terminal illness. Cancer or something equally dreadful.’
Now I was alarmed.
He waved his hand before I could speak. ‘But I don’t think that’s it . . . It’s more like . . . a cancer of the spirit. An emotional, spiritual sickness. There’s black there too, which shows that you’re experiencing great trauma, and grey, which indicates depression. It’s hooked into your chakras, here and here—’ He pointed to my chest and throat. ‘And here.’ This time he pointed at my groin.
‘This is a very generalised interpretation, you understand. I could go into far more detail.’
I shook my head. ‘Is it all negative?’
His mouth twitched. ‘No. Not all. There’s pink there too. The pale pink of love and the more vivid pink of sexual desire.’
I nodded.
‘But there’s something else . . . The spirit that has attached itself to you . . . It communicated with me. Showed me a vision. A woman, a woman who is obsessed with you, who believes what she feels to be love. The spirit is acting out her desires, causing havoc, what it sees as mischief.’
I studied him. I wasn’t sure if he believed all this stuff or if it was a deliberate con. If the latter, what was he trying to get out of me? I guessed he would offer me more sessions, help to deal with the negative energy and the dark spirit, at which point he would charge me. Such help wouldn’t come cheap. If it was a con, he was an excellent actor, because he appeared genuinely disturbed and shaken. So perhaps he was genuine, but anyone could have guessed my state of mind. We had met when I’d come here asking about a dead woman. This wasn’t rocket science. The very fact, though, that he had lasered in on my biggest concern, my current obsession, made me feel cold and uneasy.
‘There’s a cord hooked to your crown,’ Harold said, pointing towards the top of my head. ‘It’s draining your life force.’
‘What do you suggest I do?’ I asked, my voice still a whisper.
‘I should do a cord cutting. It’s not as alarming as it sounds.’
‘No.’ I really didn’t want to get involved in any of this. I felt like I was having to turn down a persistent salesman. ‘I don’t really believe in this stuff.’
He looked at my harshly. ‘Then all I can suggest is that you stay away from this woman.’
On the rug, the dog stretched and yawned, breaking the spell.
‘I need to go,’ I said.
He seemed terribly disappointed. As I headed for the door he said, ‘You came here to ask me something?’
In my eagerness to get out – away from the images he had, despite my efforts, implanted in my head – I had almost forgotten why I’d come here.
‘Oh, yes. Of course.’
I showed him my phone, a recent photo of Charlie on the screen, smiling at the camera.
‘Is this your girlfriend?’ Harold asked.
‘Yes. Have you ever seen her near here?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’ He squinted at the picture. Then, unexpectedly, he grabbed my arm. His fingers were sharp and dug into the bone of my arm. ‘But this woman . . . there’s a darkness about her aura too. It’s screaming at me, even through a photograph. Black and red. Blood red. She’s dangerous, Andrew.’ He hissed in my face, a noseful of halitosis. ‘Dangerous.’
I snatched my arm away, rubbed at it. I felt terribly claustrophobic, scared, desperate to get away.
‘Be careful,’ he said, as I yanked open the door. ‘Please. Be careful.’
There was one more place I needed to go before I went home. King’s College Hospital, which dominated Denmark Hill, not far from my flat. Charlie’s old workplace, where she’d met Fraser. I remembered reading in the newspaper reports about Kristi’s attack that she was being cared for there. It had been weeks ago but I guessed she would still be there
, given the severity of her injuries.
As I entered the hospital, I had a growing sense of a clock ticking. I needed to resolve the swirling questions in my head before Charlie got back. Otherwise, how would I be able to act normal around her? So far, all I had were questions and doubts. Everything was ambiguous.
I wasn’t sure which ward she would be in but, after consulting the board in the lobby, I figured she would most likely be in the Brunel Ward, where patients undergoing facial surgery stayed. I would try there first.
I felt queasy with nerves as I negotiated the maze-like corridors. Would she agree to see me? Would they let me? I had no idea, but I had to try.
I eventually found the Brunel Ward and, acting as confidently as I could, told reception I was here to see Kristi Tolka. The woman behind the counter said, ‘Bed thirteen’ and I inwardly thanked God for providing me with this stroke of luck. Dark spirit, be damned.
Bed thirteen had a plastic curtain drawn around it, and I could hear voices from within. I paused. The voices were speaking a language I didn’t recognise. Albanian, I assumed. I cleared my throat and said, ‘Excuse me.’
The curtain was jerked back and a young woman with black hair and suspicious eyes peered up at me. Now I wished I’d brought flowers.
‘Yes?’ she said in a thickly accented voice.
‘I . . . er . . . I came to see Kristi.’ I couldn’t see beyond the curtain to the bed.
‘Who are you?’ the woman asked.
‘My name’s Andrew Sumner. Kristi was my cleaner and I, er, heard about the terrible . . . thing that happened. I just wanted to check how she is.’
Then Kristi said something in her native language, addressing the other woman as Dita. Reluctantly, Dita gestured with her chin for me to step beyond the curtain.
I took a deep breath as Kristi came into view. She was sitting up in bed, a pillow propped behind her, a thin hospital quilt pulled up to her collarbone. The right side of her face was covered with a bandage, which wrapped around her skull and across her chin. Her lips were visible through a slit in the bandage. Only the upper left-hand side of her face, including her undamaged eye, was visible.
She fixed that eye upon me now and said, in a weak, restricted voice, ‘Hello?’
‘Hi Kristi,’ I said, in what I hoped was a friendly, light tone. ‘How are you?’
She looked at me, her eye blinking slowly. I cringed.
‘How do you think she is?’ Dita asked.
‘I’m sorry.’ I turned back to Kristi, who picked up a beaker and sucked up some juice through a straw. I noticed that there were no cards or flowers beside the bed and wondered how many people she knew in the UK. Would she go back to Albania after this? I found her future impossible to envisage. But I knew it would involve pain and suffering. ‘Have they caught the person who did it?’
Dita replied for her. ‘Fucking police are not even looking. Why do they care about some immigrant?’ She spat out the last word.
Kristi said something to her in Albanian and Dita said, ‘She is asking what you want.’
It had dawned on me that by coming here, I was making myself a suspect, particularly in the eyes of these two women. And what I needed to ask Kristi would seem strange to say the least.
I spoke to Dita, while continuing to look at my former cleaner. She had been so beautiful. It’s easy to say that beauty is only skin deep, but I imagined myself trotting out that cliché now. It would be like a barb in her heart. ‘I need to ask Kristi something. I want to show her a photo and ask if she recognises this person.’
I thought that, if Charlie had been behind the attack, she would have had to follow Kristi at some point so she knew her route home, which would tell her where to lie in wait. The report had said that the attacker was a man in a balaclava and black leather jacket. But wouldn’t it be easy for a woman dressed like that to be mistaken for a man? Especially if it happened quickly, in the dark, and the victim was half-blinded? I wanted to know if Kristi had seen Charlie.
‘I need to know if you ever saw this woman,’ I said. Dita translated.
I brought up my girlfriend’s photo on my phone and held it close to Kristi’s face. She reached up with an arm that was also wrapped in bandages and took the phone.
She scrunched her one visible eyebrow. ‘Your girlfriend,’ she said in English.
‘Yes. You saw her at my flat. But did you ever see her anywhere else? In the street.’ Again, Dita translated.
The wait for her response was agonising. She stared at the picture. I could hear her breathing, a wet, rasping sound that emerged from the slit in the bandages.
She spoke to Dita in Albanian, and I waited impatiently for the translation.
‘What did she say?’
Dita stared at me, her face pale and hostile. ‘She says that your girlfriend is crazy. That she offered her money to stop cleaning your flat.’
My blood ran cold. ‘When was this?’
The two women spoke and Dita shrugged with one shoulder. ‘She doesn’t know exactly. A day or two after she first met her? This girl, your girlfriend, was waiting outside the cleaning agency office when Kristi went to get wages. She asked Kristi to refuse to clean your flat, that she would give her £100 to stop.’
They spoke together for a moment.
‘Your girlfriend had translated her words into Albanian on the internet – she had words printed out.’
‘What did Kristi say?’
Another exchange.
‘She said nothing. She just laughed at her. Laughed in her face.’
Thirty-three
I walked home from the bus stop, picturing myself surrounded by a bruise-coloured halo, invisible hooks and cords turning me into a living marionette, and when I went inside I was shivering and sniffing from the damp, clinging cold. Harold’s and Kristi’s words echoed in my head.
I could picture Charlie’s reaction when Kristi laughed at her. The anger that would have bubbled up. Anger that could lead to her attacking the woman who had rejected her offer. Would Charlie really go that far? All I knew was that Charlie had felt threatened enough by Kristi to try to stop her cleaning my flat. My cleaner, who was attractive, yes, but whom I had never shown any sexual interest in. If Charlie had done what Kristi said – and I couldn’t see any reason why Kristi would have lied about it – then some of the other things I suspected Charlie of seemed more in character, like setting up Victor to stop me working in his office and becoming ‘exposed’ to all those attractive women.
As if that wasn’t enough, when I got home I found an email from Sasha in my inbox.
Hey A
How’s it going? Just wanted to let you know all is quiet here at the moment. No more threatening texts or weird things going bump in the night (I have to joke about it because otherwise I’d spend every day hiding in bed, unable to go out!).
I’m sure I saw Charlie yesterday afternoon in Farringdon. She was going into the chemist’s. I tried to catch her eye, not wanting to be unfriendly, but she blanked me. Hope all is good with you two. I’d like to meet up with her again, try to make amends for last time. I don’t want there to be any crap between us, anything that makes it harder for me to see you.
Anyway, hope all good with you. Call me.
S xx
I called her immediately.
‘I just got your email,’ I said.
She mimicked my voice. ‘Hi Sasha, how are you? I’m fine, thanks. How about you?’
‘Sorry. It’s just . . . are you sure you saw Charlie yesterday afternoon?’ I was light-headed, the walls of the flat closing in on me.
She hesitated. ‘I’m pretty sure it was her, yeah. Like I said, she blanked me. Though I don’t—’
‘What time was it?’
‘Um. I finished work early, got back into Herne Hill about four, so it would have been just after that.’ br />
‘It can’t have been her. She’s in Newcastle on a training course.’
‘Oh.’ There was a long pause. ‘Well, I didn’t see her face. Not properly. She was ducking into the doorway.’
‘But you said you tried to catch her eye.’
Again, she took ages to respond. ‘Yeah. I meant I was waiting for her to turn her head. Maybe it was someone who looks like her, wears similar clothes.’
‘That must be it. Sorry.’
I hung up before Sasha could say any more. Had Charlie lied about going to Newcastle? She had given me the name of the hotel she was supposedly staying at so I looked up the number and called it. A young woman with a light Geordie accent answered.
‘Hello. I need to speak to one of your guests. Charlotte Summers.’
‘Do you have her room number, sir?’
I told her I didn’t.
‘Hold on.’
The line beeped for a while, then started ringing. If they were trying to put me through, at least that meant she was indeed at the hotel. I looked at my watch. It was five-thirty. Surely her training would have finished for the day. But then I was talking to the receptionist again. ‘Sorry, sir, there’s no answer. Can I take a message?’
‘No, it’s fine. Can you tell me when she checked in?’
An intake of breath. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not able to do that. But I can take a message.’
‘It’s all right. I’ll try her mobile.’
I stared at my phone. Sasha must have got it wrong. Of course she had. Normally, I would have known that straight away, but with everything that was going on . . . I sent Charlie a text, asking her to call me when she got a minute. After that, I looked in the fridge and took out a bottle of wine. I needed to get drunk.