I arrived at the Parliament Hill Lido shortly before six, bought a cup of tea and found myself a seat outside the café, overlooking the water. It was a warm, soft evening and the pool was full of swimmers, some of them slow and splashy, others surging strong-shouldered through the chemical blue. It was impossible to know if Charlie was among them. I could barely remember what he looked like, except that he had a trim beard and round tortoiseshell glasses.
Then a young man, broad-shouldered and with a slight pot belly, hauled himself out of the water, took off his swimming cap and goggles and squinted towards the café. When he saw me, he lifted a hand and gestured, then disappeared into the changing rooms. A few minutes later, Charlie was sitting opposite me. He was wearing shorts and a long-sleeved tee shirt and his hair was damp, his face pink from the swim. He rummaged in his rucksack for his glasses and put them on. I felt like I was looking at him for the first time. This was the man who had cared for Skye. But also: this was the man who hadn’t been able to save her.
‘I don’t have much time.’
‘It’s good of you to see me.’
He held up a finger. ‘Before you say anything else, I want to know why you’re so interested in Skye. You met her just the once, you say, but then you turn up at her inquest and you want to go and speak to her mother. Are you a journalist?’
‘No. I’m a teacher, if you want to know. What about you?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘I don’t know. Sorry for asking.’
‘I work for a tech company and if I tried to explain what my job is, you probably wouldn’t understand anyway.’
‘All right, fine,’ I said.
‘So what are you up to? Almost no one cared about Skye, so why do you care? After one meeting.’
I took a deep breath.
‘This will sound strange, but I believe I’m tied to her murder in some way.’
Charlie sat back in his chair. ‘So why are you talking to me? You should go to the police.’
‘I have.’
‘What did they say?’
‘They’re investigating,’ I said, hoping that this vague answer was enough. ‘It’s all complicated, but I think Skye might have had a connection with someone I know and maybe they killed her.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What kind of connection?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re not making sense.’
I paused because I wasn’t even making sense to myself. ‘I don’t know what to tell you. You just need to accept that I’m acting in good faith. I need to find out about Skye because I need to know why she tracked me down just before she died.’
‘She tracked you down?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She came up to me in a restaurant and behaved like she knew me.’
‘What restaurant?’
‘It’s called Angelo’s. Just a little Italian place near London Fields.’
‘And you didn’t know her?’
‘Not that I could remember.’
He considered this. At least he wasn’t running away.
‘Why not just let the police get on with it?’
I thought of Poppy with her little backpack, hand in hand with her grandmother and clutching her teddy.
‘It’s important to me,’ I said softly.
‘I don’t know,’ said Charlie grudgingly. ‘It feels like there’s something about this I don’t understand.’
‘It’s strange to me as well.’
‘All right,’ he said, looking at his phone. ‘I’ve got to go in a few minutes. What do you want to ask?’
‘I’d just like to know what Skye was like, the places she hung out. And I guess most of all I need to know about her and men. If that’s not too painful.’
He looked away from me for a time, staring at the water. Even when he turned back towards me, he didn’t look me in the eye directly.
‘I’m not sure what to say. She would have been twenty-eight next month. She wasn’t born in London. She used to talk about herself as an Essex girl. She went to school in Chelmsford. She was an only child, never knew her father. She was—’ He stopped and grimaced. ‘Was was was. I find it strange saying that. She said that she was a bit of a wild teenager. Drugs and all that. She was really smart, but she didn’t go to uni or anything like that. She worked as a childminder for a bit, before she came to London, and then she did bits and pieces. She worked in a bar in Enfield first of all. The Crown and Anchor,’ he said before I could ask. ‘Then an Italian place that closed down. She said they took her on because she looked a bit Italian. She was a waitress and she worked in the kitchen sometimes. She used to cook a mean pizza.’
Charlie looked out at the pool, the people thrashing past.
‘I thought she was a dog walker.’
‘That was in the last year or so. She really liked that. She loved dogs. She loved all animals. Her dream was to have a refuge place for stray dogs and cats. I don’t think she ever had a realistic business plan for it.’ He tailed off.
‘Where did she walk them?’
‘Where? Mostly in that park near Kennington and in Burgess Park too, I think. It depended on which dogs she was looking after. She’d go to other parts of London as well.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘Is that relevant?’
‘I don’t know. It probably isn’t.’
He pushed a hand into his damp hair so it stood up in peaks.
‘We got talking on a coach journey to London. At the end of it, she wrote her phone number on my wrist in felt tip. We were together for years, on and off, though we never moved in together.’ He paused. ‘She was fun. Really sweet. That’s the thing you have to know about Skye: she could be the sweetest, kindest, sparkiest person in the world. It was like she was giving off energy, do you know what I mean?’
I nodded.
‘You’re probably wondering why someone like her was with someone like me?’
‘I wasn’t,’ I said, not entirely truthfully.
‘She was a bit what I wanted to be more like and maybe things would have been better for her if she’d been a bit more like me.’ He gave a little smile. ‘I mean stolid, organised.’
‘But you got on.’
‘For a time. I was her… I was going to say, her rock. That’s the cliché, isn’t it? But it’s not quite right. I was more like her scratching post. You know, the way cats find some chair they like to run their claws down.’
‘She could be difficult.’
‘Yes. Difficult and destructive. Christ, she was destructive. Destructive and self-destructive.’
‘Like how?’
‘Drinking too much, smoking too much, too much of whatever. Letting friends down. Getting into fights. Anyone who got in her way, which was me mostly. And yeah, like fucking other men sometimes, or rather, letting them fuck her, because she felt like a worthless piece of shit and so why not behave like one? And then she’d feel awful, terrible. She hated herself. It was like a spiral she went into.’
‘So it ended between you?’
‘It kept ending. And then it ended for good. She was very loveable, despite everything, but I couldn’t deal with it anymore.’
‘When was that?’
He thought for a moment.
‘About eighteen or twenty months ago. I didn’t see her for a few months, but we stayed friends. I don’t think she had any other friends by the end. She was too much for them. It took a lot to stay friends with her.’
‘So there’s no one else you can think of who I should talk to?’
Charlie shrugged. ‘Not really. Which is terrible when you think of it. Or if there is I don’t know who they are.’
‘Did she tell you about the men after you?’
‘She’d come and cry on my shoulder sometimes, weeping over the mistake she’d made about this one; the way that one had let her down, how she was a fool for never learning from experience.’
‘How did she meet them?’
‘She used dating apps sometimes – but the police must have checked those. And then, I guess she just met guys here and there. She was very good at that. You’d be out with her and she’d strike up conversation with the homeless guy, or the woman at the checkout, or whatever. She was always interested in them.’ Charlie’s eyes looked slightly red; perhaps it was the chlorine.
‘Was there anyone like that just before she died?’
‘She told me about a guy,’ he said. ‘He’d picked her up when she was out of it. That’s not what she called it, mind. She said he’d come to her rescue. She said he was handsome and kind and she was sure he wasn’t going to let her down.’
‘So did she see this guy again?’ I kept my voice light.
‘A few times, I think. She said there were complications, but it was going to be all right. She wasn’t going to let this chance of happiness get away.’
‘Nothing else?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. It was the same old story.’
‘Did she go to his house?’
‘I don’t know. I think she said he had a nice place. But maybe that was another guy, another time.’
‘Right.’
‘I shouted at her, told her not to be so childish and idiotic, but she just laughed at me and told me not to be so cynical. She said she was following her dreams.’ He ran his fingers through his damp hair. ‘The thing is about Skye, she was born with less layers of skin than other people. She was so unprotected. Like a little kid really. A lonely little kid. She thought someone would save her, make her all right. But they didn’t.’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ I said uselessly, just as I had said to Felicity.
Charlie turned back to me. ‘Who are you to say that?’ His voice was harsh and grating. ‘You met her once. She left me a couple of crazy messages just before she died and I never got back to her. I was busy, but the real reason was that I couldn’t quite face it.’
‘What were they about?’
‘Nothing really. She was gabbling.’
‘Do you still have the messages on your phone?’
He blinked slowly. ‘I never thought. Maybe.’
He took out his phone, scrolled down, then laid it flat on the table between us and pressed play. And then Skye was speaking.
‘Charlie, Charlie!’ Her voice was high and clear, like a girl’s. ‘Darling Charlie, where have you got to? Pick up!’ There was a brief silence. ‘Something’s happening. I’ve got this plan. It’s like that film we once saw. What was its name? I can’t remember. I want to talk to you. I’m desperate – no, not desperate.’ A rippling, silvery laugh. ‘Excited.’ There was a clatter of noise in the background. ‘Got to go. Call me.’
The voice ended. Charlie put the phone back in his pocket and stared out at the blue receptacle of water.
‘What film?’ I asked eventually.
‘I have no idea.’
‘Can you think of—?’
He jerked his head up and glared at me with bloodshot eyes.
‘I told you. I don’t know! She was probably imagining it anyway.’
‘Right.’
‘All that chaos.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’ll have to live with it, I guess. Letting Skye down.’
‘I’m going to give you my details in case you remember something,’ I said. ‘Anything. Can I have your email?’
I took out my phone, keyed it in, wrote down my address and mobile number.
‘Also,’ I said. ‘I wonder if you’d email a couple of photos of her to me.’
‘Why?’
‘So if I’m asking people about her, you know.’
‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘I should go now. I’m running late.’
‘Thank you for giving me this time.’
‘I’ve got a girlfriend,’ he said. ‘It’s only been a few months, but I like her.’
‘Talk to her,’ I said. ‘Tell her how you’re feeling.’
He stood up and slung his rucksack over his shoulder.
‘The weird thing is that everything I’ve just told you, I’ve never said that to anyone. I’ve never spoken it aloud.’
I could see he was close to tears. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve made things more painful.’
He shrugged. ‘Go carefully with Peggy. I can’t imagine how she’ll live with this.’
I watched him as he walked away, then bought another cup of tea. I sat for a long time, eyes on the swimmers moving up and down the pool, flickering abstract shapes in the blue water.
On the bus, I took out my mobile. Charlie had sent me three photos of Skye. One was a close-up, slightly out of focus. Her hair was cut short, almost to a bristle, and she had a piercing in her nose. She was smiling widely and there was a dimple in her left cheek. The second was of her sitting on a chair with a yellow shawl round her shoulders and a large black cat on her lap. In the third she was outside, wearing walking boots and a padded jacket. She was holding on to several leads and leaning back slightly as if she was being pulled, although the dogs were out of the picture. I studied her: small, slender, pretty. And young, I thought. So young.