In the end it was Renée who got in her car on Sunday afternoon, an hour after she’d seen the headlines, and drove round to Juliette’s – if she wasn’t ever going to come to the sodding phone she’d just have to visit her in person. When Juliette finally answered the door, she was in tracksuit bottoms, and a tuft of her hair was stuck up in the air as if she’d gelled it like that for a joke, and the bags under her eyes were definitely over the luggage limit, metaphorically speaking. She stared hostilely at Renée, but Renée wasn’t in the mood for histrionics, and instead pushed past her former friend and stomped into the cavernous kitchen to put the kettle on. Juliette came in and slumped into one of the white Eames chairs at the dining table. She put her head in her hands, avoiding eye contact. The atmosphere was poisonous, like methane.
‘Where are the kids?’ asked Renée, meaning where’s Stephen?
‘At a friend’s house for the afternoon. Stephen’s at work.’
‘Has anyone contacted you yet?’ asked Renée.
‘No,’ said Juliette.
‘What about Stephen? Have you said anything to him?’
‘No.’
‘Have they named her yet?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘So what do we do now?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Juliette, and she looked up at Renée, and for a second it was as if time had turned backwards and none of the stuff with Stephen or with Juliette’s mother had ever happened. They were still simply two best friends gossiping over a cup of tea in their university flat share. When the moment passed – and it was over in an instant – both of them felt hollow, lonely again, devastated for their dead friend, scared for themselves.
‘D’you think this room’s bugged?’ asked Renée then, and she sounded panicked.
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Well, what with Stephen’s job …’ Renée’s voice fell away, embarrassed.
‘Don’t be so bloody silly,’ said Juliette, but for some reason she felt nervous too now, and as it was such a lovely day they both moved instinctively, without speaking, through the sliding glass doors that ran the width of the kitchen, as big as the windows in a car showroom, and out into the garden, which their gardener George had worked miracles on this year. The scent of the summer roses hung in the air, sickly almost, and they sat together on the bench under the cherry tree at the end of the garden, unspeaking at first, as they silently mourned their lost friend, their lost friendship.
‘D’you think anyone else heard?’ Renée said eventually.
‘What do you mean?’ said Juliette, speaking into her sweatshirt as she kicked ineffectually at a weed growing through the concrete between the paving stones, hell-bent on living.
Renée lowered her voice, although no-one else could possibly have heard them.
‘Well, Natasha said that we should just leave her, and that if she ended up drowning we’d just say we’d already left, hadn’t heard the splash. That’s pretty incriminating.’
‘No, she did not,’ said Juliette.
‘Yes, she did,’ insisted Renée. ‘You heard her too. Why are you lying?’
‘I’m not lying,’ said Juliette, and maybe she even believed it herself; perhaps she’d been married to Stephen for too long.
‘Well, what if someone heard us talking?’ persisted Renée. ‘We can’t say we didn’t hear anything if someone witnessed that we did.’
‘I told you,’ said Juliette, but she wasn’t cross exactly, more resolute. ‘Natasha never said we should leave her. She never said anything.’
Renée was confused – why the hell was Juliette trying to protect Natasha all of a sudden? Finally she got it. Even if someone had overheard them, it had been dark; they wouldn’t have been able to tell who said what. But did that make any difference? The fact that someone had said it damned them all, didn’t it? They had all left her, to die as it turned out. They were all despicable.
‘Juliette,’ said Renée, and she was stern now. ‘We have got to work out what we’re going to say to the police. We’ll have to speak to them eventually, we were the last people to see her alive. And we’d all just had a bloody big row. It’s not looking good.’ She stared at the ground, at the edge of the lawn where George had uncharacteristically missed a bit with the strimmer, the few stray blades rising sharp and defiant, glaringly green above the paving stones.
‘Well, I don’t know what you want me to do,’ said Juliette. ‘Get Stephen to keep it out of the papers or something? Talk to his mates at Scotland Yard?’
‘Don’t be so fucking ridiculous,’ said Renée. She waited but Juliette said nothing more. ‘Well, I’ll just have to talk to Sissy and the others then, but if it does all come out I’m not going to lie about what anyone said.’
‘Is that a threat?’ said Juliette, and she pulled at her belligerently sticking up hair, tried to tame it like she was trying to tame her temper.
‘I don’t know,’ said Renée. She hesitated, aware that she should probably leave it there, but this was likely to be her only chance.
‘D’you think it was an accident though?’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Well, some of the things that were said between us … I mean, some people wouldn’t want any of it to get out …’
‘Oh, don’t talk such utter shit,’ said Juliette. ‘If you mean Stephen, he’d have had to push you in, not her, you’re the one who made all the vile accusations. You are such a total drama queen, a complete raving fantasist. You always have been, look at what you were like about tracing my mother, thinking we’d have some beautiful reunion, become like the fucking Waltons.’ She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice.
‘No, I am not!’ said Renée. ‘It’s not my fault Elisabeth’s like she is. I don’t know why you’ve always blamed me.’ Juliette went quiet, just kept her gaze focused on the ground. Renée tried again.
‘Listen, I swear there was someone there the other night, watching us. I could feel it, and then when we were leaving I think I saw someone, crouched behind a tree.’
‘So who was it? Stephen?’ said Juliette, sarcastically. Renée said nothing, just looked away, towards the house.
‘My God, I don’t believe you,’ said Juliette. She felt almost hysterical. ‘So now you’re saying Stephen just happened to be loitering in a bush in Hyde Park and killed her, as well as, according to you, killing Nigel and –’ She stopped. ‘You’ve got a cheek coming round here, after the things you’ve said about my husband.’
‘I’m not saying it was Stephen. I just think there may have been someone else involved.’
‘Well, it doesn’t make any difference then, does it? If it turned out someone did kill her – my God, I can’t believe I’m even saying this – it doesn’t matter whether we heard anything or not.’ She suppressed a sob. ‘We couldn’t have stopped it.’ There was a long, painful, death-throe silence, before Juliette kicked viciously at the weeds again and said, ‘I think you should go now.’
Renée knew that was it, there was nothing more to be said. She stood up from the bench and steadily walked the length of the garden, past the raised vegetable beds, the slide, the trampoline, the goalposts – all screened cleverly with bamboo fencing or evergreen hedging – past the gravelled herb garden with the Rodinesque centre-piece, through the half-open sliding doors into the gleamingly chaotic kitchen, across the book-lined Victorian hall, and out the matt-black-painted door into the front garden full of artfully tasteful topiary. It was only when Renée reached the street and the safety of her car that the really ominous feeling left her, and she knew that all she could do now was tell the truth, she’d done her best, and if you’d done no wrong and you told the truth what harm could possibly come to you?