‘What were you doing downstairs?’
Felix was standing too close to her. Nancy made an effort not to step away.
‘Nothing really.’
‘What did he mean about damp? We haven’t got damp?’
‘Some sort of misunderstanding. He must have been thinking of Harry and Olga.’
‘Is everything okay between you and Michelle?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I know she feels terrible about you being sectioned. It wasn’t easy for her to come and tell me what you had said to her.’
‘She doesn’t seem to feel that terrible.’
‘I knew you were still upset with her.’
‘I’m not upset.’
‘And you’re angry.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You seem a bit angry.’
Nancy contorted her mouth into a smile. She could feel her blood pulsing.
‘I’m not angry, but if you keep on telling me I am, then I probably will be before long.’
He held up his hands.
‘Okay. Let’s decorate the tree.’
‘Great idea,’ Nancy said.
‘We have to start with the lights.’
Felix took a roll of lights out of their plastic wrapping and carefully unwound them.
‘I bought them when you were in hospital,’ he said. ‘In hope.’
He pushed the plug into the socket and turned the switch. Nothing happened. He turned the switch on and off: still nothing. He crouched down and examined the wire, muttering.
‘That’s irritating,’ said Nancy mildly. ‘Maybe we have to do without lights this year.’
She took a yellow metal bauble out of the bag Michelle had left and hung it on a branch.
‘What do you mean, do without lights? I only bought them a few days ago. They weren’t cheap and they’ve never been used.’ He seemed to make up his mind and stood up, coiling up the rope of lights. ‘I’m going to return them.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where did you get them?’
‘I saw a shop selling Christmas things on my way back from work. Fifteen or twenty minutes, less if I walk fast.’ He looked at his mobile. ‘I’ll be back before one. You can have lunch waiting and we’ll decorate the tree this afternoon.’
‘I don’t mind waiting till Monday.’
‘We’re doing it today. That was the plan.’
He pulled on his jacket and left in a demonstrative hurry. Nancy went to the window and watched him go, breathing out a sigh of relief. It felt like a small gift to have this unexpected time to herself. She would look at her things and decide what she was going to take, make sure her passport was where it should be.
But as she was thinking this, she saw Michelle and Dylan pass under her window, away from their house. They were both wearing waterproof jackets, gloves and scarves and Dylan was carrying a small backpack. They looked as if they were setting out on a wet winter walk.
This is your chance, said the voice.
‘No,’ said Nancy, almost in a moan. She wanted to put her hands over her ears, but she knew the voice wasn’t real. It was inside her.
She knew she mustn’t. She absolutely mustn’t. All she had to do was to wait out the rest of this day and tomorrow, and she would be free. Nothing else mattered. Kira – poor, homesick, gregarious, hopeful Kira – didn’t matter anymore. She was dead. The case was closed. Nancy had done her best, and her best had nearly wrecked her.
Nancy stood at the window. She thought about her time in the hospital. She couldn’t go back there. She thought about Kira, staring wildly at her by the door, asking for her help, and about Kira’s mother screaming in pain. She thought about Kira’s body swinging on the rope.
The blue rope.
She thought of Dylan’s scratched nose the first time she had met him, the day Kira had died. She thought of the way Michelle looked at him, of the way Michelle now looked at her, of how Michelle had got her sectioned – with Felix’s help of course.
You have to know.
Nancy resolutely ignored it.
You’ll always wonder. It’ll drive you mad.
‘No,’ said Nancy out loud.
Think of Kira.
Nancy looked down at Michelle and Dylan’s garden, with its little shed at the end.
She went to her bag and took out her purse. She opened the purse and took out the thin nylon strands she had pushed inside. Blue strands. Strands from the rope, from when it had been cut? What else could they be?
She returned the strands to her purse. Felix was out of the house for a minimum of half an hour. Michelle and Dylan looked like they would be gone for hours.
Oh no you don’t, she urgently instructed herself, even as she strode to the kitchen door, yanked it open, and before giving herself time to think, went down the metal steps into the garden.
There wasn’t much of a separation between their patch of earth and the yard that the ground and basement flats had access to, just a disintegrating wall that was more symbolic than practical. But the fence between their house and Michelle and Dylan’s was a robust wooden lattice on top of a low brick wall, with bare rose stems and other climbing plants twined into it from their side. Nancy gave it an experimental push, but it stood firm. There were no gaps between its sections. She looked back at the house, scanning the windows, and then, before she could lose her nerve, pulled a rickety table across. It was green and slimy and covered in bird shit.
She clambered on top. She scissored one leg over, hooked a foot through the lattice work, and launched herself. Her jersey caught on the fence. She heard it tear and she heard the fence creak and give way. Then she was thumping to the ground on the other side, landing on a spiky green bush, rolling over onto soil and then gravel. A spike of pain went through her shoulder. She was lying spreadeagled, her feet stretched out and her cheek pressed into the sharp pebbles.
She felt slightly sick and stayed where she was for a few moments, getting her breath back, then stood up and wiped the mud off her face with a sleeve of her torn jumper. She examined the fence, which she had pulled apart in her fall so that there was now a gap. One of the roses had been torn off the lattice and broken at its base.
Now what? She eyed the shed at the end of the garden. It was padlocked but the padlock looked pretty flimsy. She saw a small rock near the base of a little tree and picked it up. She rapped it against the padlock. The padlock did not fly apart as she had hoped. She banged it again, several times, and harder. The sound rang out in the cold air, and Nancy eyed her surroundings nervously, anticipating a face staring at her from a window.
This, she told herself, was both reckless and useless. She should just leave now.
But she walked round to the side of the shed and found a window that was dark with grime. She tugged its small handle, and it swung open. Nancy thought she could just about clamber through it, but when she tried to pull herself up, pain shot through her shoulder. She dragged a little wrought-iron bench across and clambered onto it. It swayed as she stood on it but held fast. And from there it was easy to squeeze through the window and into the dark shed, feeling cobwebs stick to her face as she did so.
She landed on something soft. She squinted in the gloom and saw she was standing on a bag of compost. She stood down from it, among a cluster of objects that were hard to make out. There were things that belonged to a garden shed – a strimmer, a spade, a box full of trowels, secateurs, garden twine and gloves, a precarious tower of plastic pots, a large watering can, several saws of different sizes. There was a chair with no legs, a bicycle wheel, an old window frame, multiple large pots of paint in stacks. There was something large in the darkest corner that when Nancy put her hand out to touch it, moved. It was Dylan’s punch bag.
Nancy was looking for a coil of rope. There were two shelves high up on the wall and she reached up to feel what was on them. A series of small paper packets with sharp corners fell on her face, some scattering seeds all over her. There were empty jam jars, plastic containers of rose food. No rope.
Nancy knew that even if the fibres she had picked up from Kira’s flat came from the rope used to hang Kira, and even if Dylan was the owner of that rope, it was a slim chance that he would have kept it, and if he had kept it, had put it in this shed. She was only looking in here because it was possible to look here.
Just as she was thinking she should give up and climb out, she heard a sound. There were voices in the garden.