It’s only when I hand over the jacket, in the glare of the shop lighting, that I notice the lipstick. There is a smudge of it, on the jacket pocket, a pink rim around the opening. The same lipstick as Ally wore and that is on the note. From Luke. In Ally’s flat.
I raise a hand to snatch back the suit, but the assistant has sheathed it in plastic, zipped up like a bodybag. I can’t ask for it back. He has already over-noticed me, as I had to buy some other trousers to change into, out of the suit ones. I need to be incognito, not to attract attention to myself. It will be difficult in plum-coloured cords. But they were the cheapest. I run my hands down them, to wipe off the sweat. I notice they already have pre-ploughed furrows, for forks.
If Ally is alive, creaking round inside her flat, it doesn’t matter that the lipstick is on the jacket. She won’t report it; people don’t. She’ll just put it down to naiveté – a bad sexual experience. The police will think she had a good sexual experience, and is ashamed.
I don’t think of it as a sexual experience at all.
And even if she is dead, if that creak was something else, then what does it matter? There is nothing to link that jacket with the flat. Not any more. That’s why I bought it back. I am safe.
‘Aye, aye, what’s this?’ asks the assistant as he processes the trousers. He puts his hand in the pocket and it comes out jingling. Keys. Ally’s keys. ‘You wouldn’t want to forget about these!’ says the assistant, dangling the keys over to me.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I wouldn’t.’
I take the keys and place them in the pockets of my new trousers.
As I walk to the Tube I feel the pressure of Ally in my pocket. Her keys dig into me. I should discard them, throw them under a train, or into the Thames. They are Evidence. But what if I need them again? What if I need to, I don’t know, plant or unplant something in the flat?
Or what if a neighbour notices they are missing? Or the ex-boyfriend, the one she says she just broke up with, tells the police that always, without fail, she kept the keys under the mat. I should put them back.
My feet guide me back round Soho Square, Dean Street and then Old Compton Street.
When I get to the corner I see the incident tape. And DC Huhne.