Huhne is talking to a uniformed officer at the door of the apartment block. She is frowning, he is nodding. I ought to turn round and walk back to the Tube. But I walk forward, slowly, watching Huhne. She has abandoned the skirt in favour of trousers. She is holding an evidence bag, I see, although I cannot make out what is in it.
I stand facing her. She does not look up. I am merely one amongst the other gawpers.
A car drives past, splashing me with water from a puddle. I jump, and the lady next to me squeals. Huhne looks up. She does not see me at first, or rather does not take me in, for she looks back toward the policeman.
Then she looks up again, straight at me.
‘Hello, Debbie,’ I say.
‘Mr Millard,’ she says.
‘What’s happened here, then?’ I ask.
‘An incident,’ she says. ‘I can’t tell you any more than that.’
I nod.
‘You’ll see it in the news,’ she says, ‘in due course.’ She nods over to the street corner. I see a television camera and a reporter. ‘I'm giving them a statement, in a bit.’
Incident, news, statement – sounds like a death.
‘Pearce not giving a statement, then?’ I ask.
‘They’ve realised I don’t need a supervisor to explore cases,’ she says. ‘Old ones or new ones.’
‘Well done,’ I say, to show I am not afraid.
‘Like I say, I can’t tell you anything more right now. What are you doing here anyway, Mr Millard?’
I shrug. ‘I’ve got some time on my hands now, after, you know.’ She nods. ‘And I was here last night with your informant. Whose identity you can’t possibly reveal.’
‘You’ve been here since last night?’ asks DC Huhne.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I went home.’
‘Then came back?’
‘Am I under caution?’ I ask.
Huhne smiles and shakes her head. ‘No, sorry. New case. I see leads everywhere. I’d better get on. Excuse me.’
Huhne turns back to the policeman. I start to walk away.
‘Oh, Mr Millard,’ calls Huhne. ‘My daughter wants your autograph, by the way. To put in her collection. For when you’re famous.’
It is good to have readers before I am even published.
‘I’ll have to get on with the writing first,’ I say. ‘Lots of new material.’
I don’t sign her bit of paper. I continue to walk along the street, rather than returning in the direction I came from. Wouldn’t want anyone to spot I’d come specifically onto the street to see this building. I pass the television cameras, a little way from Huhne. A woman not a lot older than Ally, with too much brown hair, is wearing a stripper mac while a camera man screws and unscrews a tripod. I wonder if they are news reporters or just shooting a porno.
I smile at the reporter.
She smiles back.
‘I saw you talking to the police,’ she says. ‘Did the inspector say anything useful?’
I shake my head. ‘Just that there’s an incident, and they'll be giving a statement soon.’
‘Anything else?’ she says. She seems a little desperate. Like I have something she needs. Information, I guess.
‘I said it sounded like a fatality and she didn’t contradict me,’ I say.
‘Would you mind saying that to camera?’ asks the reporter. ‘We’ve missed the breakfast slot and if we don’t get something soon, I'll miss the lunch window too.’
I make my excuses. It doesn’t seem smart, somehow, to identify myself to the nation right now. ‘But I hope they catch whoever did this to her,’ I say, as if this soundbite offering will assist. I see Huhne is looking up, like she’s heard me. She is staring right at me. First Nicole, then Adam, now Huhne, all staring at me, in that dumbstruck way. It makes sense. I am, after all, one to watch. All this new material will make me and Luke stars. It will be a while until Adam is home for our violin session. So I get the Tube to West Hampstead, find a café, and write.
There are some people who think that writing by hand is archaic. All around me in Wet Fish Café are people on tablets and shiny computers. None of them are eating Fish. I thought there might be lobsters, but no. Anyway, the people on the shiny devices are typing away furiously. I imagine them all at the end of the day comparing their word counts with each other. One thousand or 3,000 or 20,000. Who knows? And who cares? Their words will not be from a soul, either theirs or their characters’. When I write, there is a direct line from my soul to my brain, to my hand, to my pen, to the paper. My veins might as well bleed the words up to the surface of my skin so that they ooze fully-formed from my pores: it is such a natural process. At Feltham, they wanted me to write it all up on a computer, said then I could get my computer skills NVQ. But I knew they would just want to see what I had written – they would log onto the computer to check my inner imaginings were safe. That I wasn’t profiting from crimes. They were talking financial profit. Like book one would ever be released, like Adam would ever agree to go public with our co-authorship.
You can still do a word count on paper, though. It just takes longer. I am still counting book three. When I started, I just counted the average numbers of words on a line, then counted the pages.
But now I realise that some words have double value or even triple. Like Scrabble, almost. And some have negative scores, unless they are used positively. So sometimes Helen is worth minus 20 and then other times – well, the other time, the jubilant time – she is worth 20. Adam is always worth 40. Sometimes I use his name a lot, all at once, so those are very good word-score days. Other good words to use are: love, dead, resting. And close. Close is always good.
Book four words will be a bit difficult to count because it is not autobiographical, like book three. Luke is doing everything. Adam and Nicole won’t get a mention, by name. I think sex and death will need to have pretty high scores, though. Which means I’ll probably hit about 100k in due course.
An important point I will need to consider is that if Luke should die, how I will deal with that. He knows killing now, maybe, but if he were to die himself, how do I do that? Better perhaps to live, I suppose.
‘Can I join you?’ I hear.
I see someone above me, against the sunlight. Ally? I jolt up, and spill coffee all over my lovely words.
It is Nicole. Not Ally. I should have known she would be here, spoiling things.
‘Oh no! Can I help?’ she asks, staring at the spilling liquid.
‘Napkins! Napkins!’ I say. That’s my only hope. But even that is futile. The more I mop, the more the blue blurs and words disintegrate and join again, in ways they weren’t meant to, becoming zero words, minus words, useless. I tear out the pages nearest the spillage – sever them and spare the rest.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Nicole says. ‘Look, I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll take them home, and I’ll blow dry them, and we can save them.’
It is only because I am depending on her for the unwritten words of book four that I don’t just push the papers into her face and smear her with blue, tell her to take her destruction elsewhere.
But because of how important she is, I agree. ‘Yes, good plan, do that.’ It will be futile, I know; the once blue words are too brown or too nothingy to be recaptured. I will have to rewrite them. But that is even better – for then she will feel she owes me something.