The Dead Lie Down: A Novel Read online

  ‘You’d still have done it, wouldn’t you? Even if they’d been there.’

  ‘They weren’t there! You’re being ridiculous. This is all about your vanity.’

  ‘It’s about your distortions, your . . . exhibitionism! That story about the primary school—was it true? Since the rest of what you said was a load of shit, I have to wonder.’

  ‘You think it was just an excuse, a convenient way into slagging off Catholics?’

  ‘Oh, you don’t discriminate—you’ll slate anything that moves. The more defenceless the better!’

  Charlie stepped back, away from his anger. Stacey Sellers got off lightly, she thought. ‘Who’s defenceless, Simon?’

  ‘So it really happened? The teacher said, “Put your hands together for Grace,” and you didn’t know what she meant? Sorry, but . . .’ His words tailed off. He turned away, rubbed his face with his hands.

  ‘Sorry but what?’

  ‘Do we have anything in common? Do we even inhabit the same world?’

  This can’t be happening. It can’t be. ‘Do what you have to do,’ Charlie said. ‘I’m not going to talk you out of it.’ She left the room and went upstairs.

  In her bedroom, she decided not to slam the door. Instead, she closed it carefully. She wasn’t a child; she wouldn’t be treated like one and she wouldn’t behave like one. Lizzie Proust had liked her speech. Debbie Gibbs had liked it. Her awful speech. What had possessed her? Foul-mouthed, loose-living, promiscuous . . . Simon had misremembered the last bit: bent on annihilating themselves and everyone around them. ‘Oops,’ said Charlie out loud. The sound fell heavy in the silent air. She wondered what Kate Kombothekra had thought of what she’d said; would it be a thumbs up or a thumbs down from the person who’d put her up to making a laughing-stock of herself in the first place?

  The door opened. ‘Talk me out of what?’ said Simon. He didn’t look happy. He never looked happy.

  ‘Dumping me. Here’s your ring.’ Charlie dragged it off her finger. ‘I’m not going to haggle over the world’s smallest diamond. ’

  ‘I’m not . . . that’s not what I’m trying to do. Look, I’m sorry. I got angry.’

  ‘Really? I must have missed that part.’ Charlie would sooner have died than let him see how relieved she was. She was furious with herself for being relieved at all. How many men might she be engaged to at this very moment who would have found her Grace story hilarious? Billions. Dozens, at least. Most of whom would probably want to have sex with her.

  ‘I had a bad day at work,’ Simon told her. ‘I had to tell a man—’

  ‘Oh, diddums! Did the canteen run out of steak and kidney pie before you got to the front of the queue?’

  ‘Shut the fuck up and put your ring back on,’ said Simon.

  ‘I had an evil day yesterday, as it happens,’ Charlie snapped. ‘It totally fucked up my day off today, in fact, but in spite of that, I seem to be able to behave like a civilised human being. Or rather, I seemed to be able to, until you started on me!’ She blinked away tears as she slipped her ring back on. The world’s smallest diamond. She shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t true and it was an unforgivable thing to say. ‘I’m sorry. I love this ring. You know that.’ If our marriage is going to happen, she thought, if it’s going to work, he’ll ask me about my rotten day before telling me about his.

  ‘I spent all afternoon with a man who’s confessed to a murder, ’ said Simon. ‘Trouble is, the woman he reckons he murdered isn’t dead.’

  Charlie’s mind flattened out; all other thoughts fell away. ‘What?’

  ‘I know. Strange. Actually, it gave me the creeps—he wasn’t someone I enjoyed being in a small room with.’ Simon opened his can of lager. ‘Do you want a drink, or is this the last beer?’

  ‘Tell me,’ Charlie heard herself say. It was as if the party and their row had never happened; she was back in the reception room at the nick, trying not to stare at the ribbons Ruth Bussey had wound round her thin ankles. Ruth Bussey with her limp and her frail, reedy voice, who was frightened something was going to happen, but didn’t know what . . .’

  No, no, no. I can’t have got it all wrong, not again.

  ‘I wasn’t there for the beginning,’ said Simon. ‘I only got dragged into it today. When he came in yesterday, Gibbs talked to him.’

  ‘Yesterday? What time? What’s his name, this man?’

  ‘Aidan Seed.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Not exactly. What time did he come in yesterday?’

  Simon screwed up his face, thinking. ‘Must have been some time between one and two.’

  Charlie let out the breath she’d been holding. ‘At ten to twelve, his girlfriend was waiting for me when I turned up for my shift.’

  ‘His girlfriend?’

  ‘Ruth Bussey, she said her name was.’

  Simon nodded. ‘He mentioned her. Not her surname, just as Ruth. What did she want?’

  ‘Same as him, by the sound of it. Told me her boyfriend was adamant he’d killed a woman called Mary Trelease . . .’

  ‘Right.’ Simon nodded.

  ‘. . . but that he couldn’t have, because Trelease is still alive. I thought she was deranged at first, so I asked a few background questions. The more she talked—’

  ‘The more you thought she seemed sane?’ Simon cut in. ‘Preoccupied, upset, but sane?’

  ‘Preoccupied’s an understatement. I’ve met human wreckage before, but this woman was in a worse state than anyone I’ve seen for a long time. Shaking with fear, crying one minute, then staring into the distance as if she’d seen a ghost, telling pointless lies that made no sense. She had something wrong with her foot, and claimed at first that she’d sprained her ankle. When I said it didn’t look swollen, she changed her story and said she had a blister.’

  Simon paced the room, chewing his thumbnail as he often did when he was concentrating. ‘Seed was the opposite—not changeable at all. He was very controlled. At first I thought he had to be asylum material, but . . . he didn’t seem it, even though he was insisting on the impossible and wouldn’t listen to anything I said. Twenty-eight times, he told me something I knew couldn’t be true; tried to use logic, even, to make me believe it.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘I asked him to describe the woman he killed, which he did in great detail. Point for point, his description matched the woman I saw and spoke to this morning.’

  ‘You’ve met Mary Trelease?’ The idea made Charlie feel funny; she wasn’t sure why.

  ‘I have and Gibbs has. We’ve both seen her passport, her driving licence. Today she showed me the deeds of her house with her name on, all the paperwork from her solicitor from when she moved, her bank statements . . .’

  ‘Why so much?’ said Charlie. ‘Passport and driving licence should have been enough.’

  ‘I think she was worried one of us was going to turn up every day and ask her to prove all over again that she’s who she says she is. She gathered together a stack of stuff to show me how absurd the whole thing is. She acted like . . . like she was afraid I was trying to steal her identity or something.’

  ‘Afraid, literally?’

  Simon considered it. ‘Yeah, underneath her chippiness, I reckon there was some fear there.’

  Two frightened women. Charlie didn’t like the feel of this at all. ‘So how did you get dragged in? You said Seed saw Gibbs first?’ She waited to be told that Seed had at some point requested Simon’s involvement, asked for him by name. She wasn’t quite ready to believe this wasn’t all a cruel hoax aimed at her. If Ruth Bussey and Aidan Seed knew she and Simon were engaged . . .

  ‘Kombothekra said Gibbs was needed elsewhere,’ Simon told her, ‘Reading between the lines, he didn’t trust him with it.’

  ‘He doesn’t think Gibbs is capable of checking if someone’s alive or dead?’

  ‘Mary Trelease wouldn’t let him in,’ said
Simon. ‘He didn’t see the house. Most importantly, he didn’t see the master bedroom, the one facing the street. According to what Seed told Gibbs yesterday, that’s where he left Mary Trelease’s dead body, in the bed in that room . . .’

  ‘Hold on. When did he say he’d killed her?’

  ‘He wouldn’t say. Nor why, though he did say how: he strangled her.’

  ‘Ruth Bussey said Seed had told her he’d killed Mary Trelease years ago.’

  Simon blinked a few times. ‘Sure?’

  ‘Me or her? I’m sure she said it, and she seemed convinced that was what he’d told her. I think she quoted his exact words as, “Years ago, I killed a woman called Mary Trelease.” ’

  ‘Makes no sense,’ Simon muttered, turning to face the window. Which was why Sam Kombothekra hadn’t wanted Gibbs on it, thought Charlie. Most of what CID were called upon to investigate had some logic behind it. People hurt or killed each other over money, or drugs, usually some combination of the two. They stole from shops, disturbed the peace or terrorised the neighbourhood because they saw it as the only way out of a hopeless life—it was grim, but you could see the reasoning.

  Charlie was about to ask Simon what he’d meant about Seed trying to use logic to convince him Mary Trelease was dead, but Simon was already saying, ‘He killed her years ago, left her body in the front bedroom at 15 Megson Crescent, and expects it to be there, undisturbed, for us to find several years later when he decides to confess? No.’ Charlie watched him junk the hypothesis. ‘Trelease didn’t live in that house years ago. She bought it in 2006, from a family called Mills.’

  ‘That’s two years ago,’ she pointed out, knowing what the response would be. Would she ever be able to hear ‘2006’ without experiencing a small earthquake in the pit of her stomach?

  ‘The phrase “years ago” implies longer,’ said Simon, on cue. ‘You know it does.’

  She couldn’t argue. Ruth Bussey had said Seed had confessed to her last December, at which point 2006 would only have been ‘last year’. ‘What else did he tell you, apart from that Trelease’s body would be on the bed in the master bedroom and that he strangled her?’

  ‘In the bed, not on. He said she was naked, she’d been naked when he killed her. And her body was in the middle of the bed, not on one side or the other—he made a big point of that. Apart from saying several times that he didn’t rape her, that was all he told me.’

  ‘Ruth Bussey mentioned none of this.’ Charlie pulled a cigarette out of a packet on the window-sill. She had nothing to light it with. ‘Was he in the bedroom with her when she took her clothes off? Had they gone to bed together?’

  ‘He wouldn’t say.’

  ‘Did he have his clothes on when he strangled her?’

  ‘Wouldn’t say.’

  Charlie doubted she’d be able to come up with a question Simon wouldn’t have put to Seed. Everything Gibbs would have neglected to ask, Simon would have asked several times over.

  ‘He answered some questions willingly and in great detail—others, he wouldn’t open his mouth.’

  ‘His girlfriend was exactly the same,’ said Charlie.

  ‘I’ve never come across anything like it before.’ Simon shook his head. ‘You know what it’s like normally: people talk or they don’t. Sometimes there’s nothing doing at first, then you twirl them and they spill the lot. Other times they spout crap until you point out to them how they’ve landed themselves in it, at which point they clam up. Aidan Seed: none of the above. It was like he had this . . . this checklist in his head. Two lists: the questions he was allowed to answer and the ones he wasn’t. When I asked him the questions on the first list, he went out of his way to be informative. Like I said, I got every detail of Mary’s appearance, from the tiny caramel-coloured birthmark beneath her lower lip—he actually said “caramel-coloured”—to her small earlobes, her wiry, curly hair, black with the odd strand of silver.’

  ‘Is she attractive?’ Charlie asked. ‘Don’t look at me like that. I’m not asking if you fancied her. I just wondered.’

  ‘She’s not pretty,’ said Simon after some thought.

  ‘But striking? Sexy?’

  He shrugged. ‘Dunno.’

  Aidan Seed’s not the only one with a list in his mind of questions it’s not safe to answer, thought Charlie. ‘Did he say if he killed her in the bed or moved her body there later?’ she asked, a question she knew would be on Simon’s acceptable list. Is there anything I wouldn’t do to please him? Would I take early retirement and roam the country with a set of golf clubs, wearing dreadful sweaters?

  ‘She was in the bed when he killed her, he said. But . . . listen to us.’ Simon took a swig of his beer. ‘ “Did he move the body?” If Seed and his girlfriend are mad, we’ve nearly caught them up. What body? Mary Trelease is alive.’

  ‘You said “the questions he’s allowed to answer”,’ said Charlie. ‘Who’s doing the allowing? Ruth Bussey? She also seemed eager to talk, but only in response to certain prompts. And then I’d ask her something else—in most cases, the obvious next question—and she’d button it. Not a word, not even, “Sorry, I can’t answer that.” ’

  ‘Could there be a third person involved, someone who’s telling them what they can and can’t say?’

  ‘Mary Trelease?’ Charlie suggested.

  Simon waved the idea away. ‘Why would she tell them both to go to the police and pretend Seed believes he killed her? Why would they go along with it?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, knowing she didn’t have one. ‘Gibbs asked Trelease if she knew an Aidan Seed. She said no, but he thought she was lying. I asked her again today, told her he was a picture-framer, how old he was. She said no. Seemed genuine enough, but then she’d had a day to polish up her act. Seed, though—he wasn’t acting. He feels guilty about something, that’s for sure. Whatever’s in his head, I wouldn’t want it in mine. He kept saying, “I’m a murderer.” Said he’d felt like he was dying himself when his hands were round her neck, the nail of his left thumb pressing into his right thumb . . .’

  ‘He said that?’

  Simon nodded.

  ‘But he hasn’t strangled her. Nobody has.’ Charlie shuddered. ‘This is starting to do my head in. I’ve heard plenty of people confess to crimes they haven’t committed, but they’re always crimes someone’s committed. Why would anyone confess to the murder of a woman who isn’t dead? According to Ruth Bussey, Seed didn’t tell her any of that stuff about the bedroom, or strangling Mary—why not?’

  ‘You wouldn’t want to put that sort of image in your girlfriend’s head,’ Simon suggested.

  ‘What did Seed say his relationship with Mary Trelease was? How did he know her?’ Seeing Simon’s expression, Charlie guessed the answer. ‘He wouldn’t say.’ She cast around for something else to ask, as if the right formulation of words might shed sudden light. Nothing came to mind. ‘We should be doing the pair of them for wasting police time,’ she said.

  ‘Not my decision. For once, I’m glad. Seed’s not like any bullshit artist I’ve ever seen. Something was bothering him, something real.’

  Charlie had felt the same about Ruth Bussey until she’d found the article.

  ‘Kombothekra’s got to decide where to go next with it,’ said Simon. ‘If it was my call, I don’t think I’d want to risk not taking statements from everyone involved. From Seed at the very least. Though I’ve no idea what I’d do with his statement once I had it.’ He frowned as a new thought occurred to him. ‘What did you decide to do? After you spoke to Ruth Bussey?’

  Charlie felt her face heat up. ‘Err on the side of negligence, that’s my motto,’ she said bitterly. ‘I wasn’t planning to follow it up, even though she told me she was afraid something really bad was going to happen, and even though a fool could have seen she was seriously fucked up. I hadn’t even checked, like you and Gibbs did, that Mary Trelease was alive.’ Charlie put the cigarette she was holding in her mouth: comfort food.

  ‘I don’t get it,
’ said Simon.

  She left the room, started to go downstairs.

  ‘What?’ He followed her. ‘What did I say?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m getting a lighter.’

  There were a few to choose from on the mantelpiece in the lounge, all plastic and disposable. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’ Simon asked.

  ‘That’s a question from the wrong list. Sorry.’ Charlie tried to laugh, lighting her cigarette. The wonderful tranquillising power of nicotine started to do its work.

  ‘You said before that Ruth Bussey was waiting for you when you went into work yesterday.’

  ‘Did I?’ Too clever for his own good. And everyone else’s.

  ‘Why you?’

  Charlie walked over to her handbag, which she’d left dangling from the door handle, and pulled out the newspaper article. ‘She left her coat behind. This was in the pocket.’ Did he have any idea how hard it was for her to show it to him? Chances were he hadn’t seen it at the time; Simon didn’t read local papers.

  She left him alone in the lounge, took her cigarette through the kitchen and out to the backyard, even though it was cold and she had no coat or shoes on. She stared at what Olivia called her ‘installation’: a pile of broken furniture, things Charlie had dismantled and thrown out two years ago. ‘How hard is it to hire a skip?’ Liv said plaintively whenever she visited. Charlie didn’t know, and didn’t have the time or the inclination to find out. My neighbours must pray every night that I’ll move, she thought. Especially the ones who’d replaced their neat, paved yard with a little lawn and flower-beds as soon as they moved in. Now they had colour-coordinated borders: red, white and blue flowers in a pattern that was overbearingly regular. What a waste of time, when your garden’s the size of a fingernail.

  Charlie felt something touch her and cried out in alarm before realising it was Simon. He put his arms round her waist.

  ‘Well? Did you read it?’

  ‘Slander,’ he said. ‘Like the way you described yourself tonight. ’

  ‘It wasn’t negligent, to take no action over Ruth Bussey?’ She knew he was talking about the party, but chose to misunderstand.