The Cradle in the Grave Read online

  ‘I’m turning down the job, Tam.’

  She groans.

  ‘Which means I’ll probably get my marching orders too by the end of the week. We can go to the National Portrait Gallery together.’ Tell her the truth. Tell her why you can’t make Laurie’s film. You have nothing to be ashamed of.

  ‘Bollocks to that!’ Tamsin bangs her fist on the table. ‘If you’re going there, I’m going to the Science Museum instead as a protest at your . . . dickery. Fliss, people dream of things happening to them like what’s happened to you today. You’ve got to take it. Even if you decide to leave me to rot in the gutter while you stock up on diamonds.’

  ‘I’m being serious.’

  ‘So am I! Think of all the time you’ll get to spend with Laurie, him helping you unofficially – hah!’ She gurgles with laughter. ‘It’s so obvious you’re in love with him.’

  ‘It can’t be, because I’m not,’ I say firmly. Maybe it’s not such a huge lie. If I’m aware of all the reasons why I shouldn’t love Laurie, which I am, then that has to mean I don’t, not wholly. At the very least, I’m halfway in and halfway out. If I’m in love with him, how come I can so perfectly inhabit the mindset of thinking he’s a git and the bane of my life?

  ‘You spend hours staring out of your window at his office, even when he’s not in it.’ Tamsin chuckles. ‘I’m not going to waste my breath saying no good can come of it. Some good’s already come of it – a hundred and forty grand a year for us to split between us.’ She gives me a narrow-eyed grin to let me know she’s been winding me up about the money. ‘You’ve been rewarded for your good taste. Laurie might be a freak, but he’s a shrewd freak. He’s seen the way you babble like an idiot in front of him, crazed with lust. You’re his perfect pawn: he gets to distance himself from the film in public while retaining control in private.’

  ‘Why would he want to distance himself?’ I say, determinedly ignoring everything else Tamsin’s just said because if I allowed myself to take it in and believe it, I would have to devote the rest of my life to muffled sobbing. ‘He’s obsessed with it.’

  ‘In case it goes tits up, which it might very well, now that Sarah’s pulled out.’

  ‘Sarah?’

  ‘Jaggard. Oh, my God! Laurie hasn’t told you, has he?’

  My phone starts to ring. I snap it open. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is that Fliss Benson?’ a woman asks.

  I tell her it is.

  ‘This is Ray Hines.’

  My heart leaps, like a horse over a fence. Rachel Hines. I have the oddest sensation: as if this moment was always going to come, and there was nothing I could have done to avert it.

  She can’t know how significant she is to me, how it makes me feel to hear her voice.

  ‘Why is Laurie Nattrass leaving Binary Star?’ She doesn’t sound angry, or even put out. ‘Does it have anything to do with Helen Yardley dying? I’m assuming she was murdered. I heard on the news that her death was “suspicious”.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say brusquely. ‘You’ll have to ask the police about that, and you’ll have to ask Laurie why he’s leaving. I’m nothing to do with anything.’

  ‘Really? I got an email from Laurie saying you’ve taken over the documentary.’

  ‘No. That’s . . . a misunderstanding.’

  Tamsin has found a pen in my bag and written ‘Who?’ on a beer mat. She shoves it towards me. I write ‘Rachel Hines’ beneath her question. She opens her mouth as wide as it’ll go, flashing her tonsils at me, then scribbles furiously on the beer mat: ‘Keep her talking!!!’

  Even if I don’t want to?

  I heard two women on the tube discussing Rachel Hines, the day after she won her appeal. One said, ‘I don’t know about the others, but the Hines woman murdered her children, sure as I’m born. She’s a drug addict and a liar. You know she abandoned her daughter when the poor mite was only days old? Stayed away for the best part of two weeks. What kind of mother does that? I can believe Helen Yardley was innocent all along, but not her.’ I waited for her companion to disagree, but she said, ‘It would have been better for the baby if she’d stayed away for good.’ I remember thinking it was an odd way to put it: Helen Yardley was innocent all along. As if one could start out guilty and then become innocent of a crime.

  ‘I rang to tell you what I’m sure Laurie neglected to mention: that I want nothing to do with the documentary. Evidently you feel the same way.’ She sounds nothing like my idea of what a drug addict ought to sound like.

  ‘You want nothing to do with it,’ I repeat blankly.

  ‘I’ve made it clear to Laurie from the start that he’ll have to do without me, so I don’t know why he keeps copying me in on information I don’t need. Maybe he hopes I’ll change my mind, but I won’t.’ She sounds calm, as if none of what she’s saying matters to her; she’s merely informing me of the facts.

  ‘I’m in a similar situation,’ I tell her, too angry about the way I’ve been treated to be tactful. How dare Laurie inflict her on me without giving me any choice in the matter? Tamsin’s jiggling in her seat, desperate to know what’s going on. ‘Laurie can’t take no for an answer,’ I say. ‘That’s when he bothers to ask the question. This time he didn’t. I had no idea he was sending out my details to everyone. I don’t know why he assumed I’d take on the film without asking me if I wanted to.’

  Tamsin rolls her eyes and shakes her head. ‘What?’ I mouth at her. I refuse to feel bad about any of this; it’s Laurie’s fault, not mine.

  ‘Why don’t you want to?’ Rachel Hines asks, as if it’s the most natural question in the world.

  I imagine myself giving her an honest answer. How would I feel afterwards? Relieved to have it out in the open? It’s irrelevant, since I’ll never have the guts to put it to the test. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t have to explain myself to you.’

  ‘No. No, you don’t,’ she says slowly. ‘This is going to sound pushy, but . . . could we meet?’

  Meet. Me and Rachel Hines.

  She can’t possibly know. Unless . . . No, there’s no way.

  ‘Pardon?’ I say, playing for time. I grab the pen from Tamsin’s hand and write, ‘She wants to meet me’. Tamsin nods furiously.

  ‘Where are you? I could come to you.’

  I look at my watch. ‘It’s ten o’clock.’

  ‘So? Neither of us is asleep. I’m in Twickenham. How about you?’

  ‘Kilburn,’ I say automatically, then mentally kick myself. There’s no way I’m having Rachel Hines in my home. ‘Actually, I’m . . . I’m out at the moment, in the Grand Old Duke of York pub in . . .’

  ‘I don’t go to pubs. Give me your address and I’ll be there in an hour to an hour and a half, depending on traffic.’

  Pros and cons race through my brain. I don’t want her in my flat. I don’t want anything to do with her apart from to know what she wants from me.

  ‘You’re worried about having someone who was once a convicted child murderer in your house,’ she says. ‘I understand. All right, I’m sorry I bothered you.’

  ‘Why do you want to meet me?’

  ‘I’ll answer that question, and any others you might have, face to face. Does that sound fair?’

  I hear myself say, ‘Okay.’ Unable to believe what’s happening, I recite my address.

  ‘It’ll be just the two of us, won’t it? No Laurie?’

  ‘No Laurie,’ I agree.

  ‘I’ll see you in an hour,’ says Rachel Hines. That’s when it hits me: this is real, and I’m scared.

  Three quarters of an hour later I’m at home, trying to cram a drying rack draped with wet washing into my wardrobe. Normally it lives in the bathroom, but that’s a part of the flat that a guest might conceivably see, so I can’t leave my damp underwear on display there. I succeed eventually in stuffing the rack into the cupboard, but then I can’t close the doors. Does it matter? I’m so jittery, I can’t think straight. Rachel Hines is unlikely to force her wa
y into my bedroom.

  A panicked voice in my head whispers How do you know what she’s likely to do?

  I pull the drying rack out of the cupboard. Half the clothes fall to the floor. Even if she wouldn’t see it, knowing it was there would bother me. It’s crazy to put wet laundry in a wardrobe, and I’m not going to start acting like a crazy person before anything’s even happened.

  I shudder. Nothing is going to happen, I tell myself. Get a grip.

  I put the clothes back on the rack, stand it in the middle of my bedroom and close the door on it. Then I run to the kitchen, which I left in a state this morning: plates and magazines strewn everywhere, toast crusts, milk-bottle tops, orange peel. The fat black bin bag that I should have taken out days ago has leaked oily orange sauce onto the lino.

  I look at my watch. Nearly eleven. She said an hour to an hour and a half. That means she could arrive in five minutes. I need at least fifteen to sort out the kitchen. I yank open the dishwasher. It’s packed with shiny clean cutlery and crockery. I swear loudly. Who said dishwashers make life easier? They’re the devious bastards of the household appliance world. When you want a clean cup or plate, you get a stinking cavern full of curry stalactites dripping baked-bean juice. When you want the damn thing empty and ready to receive, that’s the moment it picks to be full to bursting with an entire dinner service, gleaming and ponging of lemon.

  I pile the clean stuff randomly into cupboards and drawers, chipping a couple of plates that were already chipped, as most of my stuff is. Then I load the dirty things without bothering to rinse them as I normally would, and wipe the surfaces with a cloth that’s probably dirtier than the mess I’m using it to wipe up. I’m quite shallow when it comes to cleaning – tidy and bacteria-infested suits me fine, as long as it looks presentable to the untrained eye.

  I take out the rubbish, mop up the oil on the floor and stand back to survey the kitchen. It looks better than it has for some time. The thought pops into my head before I can stop it: maybe I ought to have murderers round more often. In the lounge, to a soundtrack of loud bangs from my pogojumping upstairs neighbours – their getting-ready-for-bed noises – I pick up about twenty DVDs from the floor and shove them in a cloth shopping bag, which I stuff behind the door.

  I don’t want Rachel Hines to know what DVDs I own, or anything else about me. I cast my eyes over the bookshelf that fills one whole alcove of my lounge, the one nearest the window. I don’t want her to know what books I read, but I haven’t got a bag big enough to house them all temporarily, or time to take them off the shelves. I toy with the idea of rigging up some kind of curtain to hide them, then decide I’m being paranoid. It doesn’t matter if she sees my books. It only matters if I make it matter.

  I plump up the sofa cushions and the one on the chair, then look again at my watch. Five past eleven. I pull open the curtains I closed when I got in, and, looking up to street level, see a man and woman walking past. They’re laughing. Her heels clip the pavement as she hurries along, and I have to restrain myself from pushing up my rattly sash window and shouting, ‘Come back!’

  I don’t want to be alone with Rachel Hines.

  In the hall, I scoop up all the letters, bills and bank statements that have piled up on the table and put them in the one drawer in my kitchen that opens properly, underneath the cutlery divider. I’m about to slam it shut when the corner of a thick cream-coloured envelope catches my eye, and I remember that I ran out of the flat this morning without opening the post.

  That card someone sent me at work, the one with the numbers on it – that arrived in a thick cream-coloured envelope with the same ribbed effect.

  So? It needn’t mean anything. A coincidence, that’s all.

  This one’s also addressed to Fliss Benson. And the writing . . .

  I rip it open. Inside, there’s a card with only three numbers on it this time, in tiny handwriting at the bottom: 2 1 4. Or is it supposed to be two hundred and fourteen? The first three numbers on the other card, the one Laurie threw in the bin, were 2, 1 and 4.

  There’s no signature, no indication of who sent it. I turn the envelope upside down and shake it. Nothing. What do the numbers mean? Is it some kind of threat? Am I supposed to be scared? Whoever the sender is, he or she knows where I work, where I live . . .

  I tell myself I’m being ridiculous, and force the tension out of my body, letting my shoulders drop. I concentrate on breathing slowly and steadily for a few seconds. Of course it’s not a threat. If someone wants to threaten you, they use words you understand: do x or I’ll kill you. Threats are threats and numbers are numbers – there’s no overlap.

  I tear both the card and the envelope into small pieces and take them outside to the bin, resolving to waste no more time on what must be some idiot’s idea of a joke. Back inside, I pour myself a large glass of white wine and walk up and down, looking at my watch every three seconds until I can’t bear it any longer. I pick up the phone and ring Tamsin’s home number. Joe answers on the second ring. ‘She’s puking her guts up,’ he tells me.

  ‘Can I speak to her?’

  ‘Well . . .’ He sounds doubtful. ‘You can listen to her spraying the toilet bowl with gin if you want.’

  ‘I’m fine!’ Tamsin shouts in the background. I hear a scuffle; more specifically, I hear Joe losing. ‘Ignore Joseph. He likes to make heavy weather of things,’ says Tamsin, with the crisp enunciation of someone determined to sound sober. ‘Well? How did it go? What did she say?’

  ‘She’s not here yet.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry, I’ve slightly lost time . . . track of time,’ she corrects herself. ‘I thought it was really late.’

  ‘It is – too late to turn up on the doorstep of a complete stranger. Maybe she’s seen sense and decided not to come.’

  ‘Have you – gonna say this carefully, right? – checked your phone for texts?’ It sounds like ‘shrek-ed your phone for sex’, but I know what she means.

  ‘Yeah. Nothing.’

  ‘Then she’s coming.’

  My watch says twenty past eleven. ‘Even from Twickenham, she should be here by now.’

  ‘Twickenham? That’s virtually in Dorset. She could be hours. What’s she doing in Twickenham?’

  ‘Doesn’t she live there?’

  ‘No. Last I heard she was in a rented flat in Notting Hill, five minutes from her ex-husband and the former family home.’

  All I know about Rachel Hines is that she was convicted, and later unconvicted, of killing her two children. Good one, Fliss. Nothing like going into a situation well prepared.

  ‘Why did I agree to this?’ I wail. ‘It’s your fault – you were nodding at me like a maniac as if yes was the only possible answer.’ Even as I’m saying it, I know it’s not true. I said yes because I’d just heard that the film might be about to fall apart. Once that’s happened and Laurie’s at Hammerhead, he’ll have no leverage with Maya or Raffi. They’ll be able to make me redundant: punish me for daring to think I was Creative Director material, even though I never did, and save themselves a hundred and forty grand a year. I agreed to see Rachel Hines in the absurd hope that somehow it might lead to my becoming indispensable at Binary Star, which is pretty embarrassing, even when I’m the only person I’m admitting it to.

  Does that mean I want to make Laurie’s film? No. No, no, no.

  ‘I won’t let her in,’ I say, certain this is the best idea I’ve ever had.

  ‘There’s nothing to be scared of,’ says Tamsin unhelpfully.

  ‘Easy for you to say. When was the last time you were visited by a murderer in the middle of the night?’ I’m not sure Rachel Hines killed her babies – how can I be? – but it makes me feel better to pretend that I am.

  ‘She isn’t a murderer any more,’ says Tamsin. Automatically, I think of the woman I overheard on the tube: I can believe Helen Yardley was innocent all along. ‘Even before she appealed and won, Justice Geilow made a point of saying she didn’t think Ray Hines would ever pose a th
reat to anyone in the future. She as good as said in her sentencing remarks that, though murder carries a mandatory life sentence, she didn’t feel it was appropriate, and implied that cases of this sort shouldn’t be a matter for the criminal courts at all. It caused an uproar in legal circles. God, I feel sober. It’s your fault.’

  ‘Justice who?’

  Tamsin sighs. ‘Don’t you ever read anything apart from heat? If you’re making the film, you’re going to need to familiarise yourself with—’

  ‘I’m not making the film. I’m bolting my door and going to bed. First thing tomorrow morning I’m handing in my resignation.’

  ‘Fine, do that. You’ll never know what Ray Hines wanted to talk to you about.’

  Good.

  ‘One of her objections to the film was sharing it with the other two women,’ says Tamsin. ‘Now that Helen’s dead and Sarah’s pulled out, Ray could be the main focus. Her case. It’s the most interesting of the three by far, though I once said that to Laurie and he almost had me hung, drawn and quartered for treason. Helen was always his favourite.’

  Helen’s case, or Helen the woman? I manage to stop myself from asking. I can’t be jealous of a murder victim who lost all three of her children and spent nearly a decade in jail. Even if it turns out Laurie’s spent years crying into his pillow on her account, jealousy is not an acceptable option, not if I want to be able to live with myself.

  I hear a car pulling up outside. My hand tightens around the phone. ‘I think she’s here. I’ve got to go.’ I hover uselessly by my front door, trying to contain myself until I hear the bell. When I can’t stand it any longer, I open the door.

  There’s a black car outside my house, with its lights on and its engine running. I climb the five steps that lead from my basement flat up to the pavement, and see that it’s a Jaguar. From her telephone voice, Rachel Hines sounded like the sort of person who might own one. I wonder how this fits in with her being a drug addict. Maybe she isn’t one any more, or maybe she’s a heaps-of-cocaine-off-platinum-edged-mirrors junkie, not your bog-standard shooting-up-in-a-dirty-squat smackhead. God, if I was any more prejudiced . . .