I am not prepared to involve myself in the indolent Saturday morning habits of Annie and her posse. I don’t want to be party to messy fry-ups and people eating in their pyjamas and getting bacon fat on my Guardian, so I’m up as soon as the paper arrives and off with it to The Pumpkin, the off-beat organic café that forms an integral part of my Saturday morning ritual. I used to meet my friend, Eve, here for morning coffee but she’s living in Ireland now, blown west by a storm of scandal a couple of years ago, so now I usually go on my own. This morning, however, I text David before I leave the house. He has not been in touch since our conversation on Thursday afternoon – not even to follow up on my sighting of Karen and Lara on Tuesday – and I am still fairly annoyed with him but I decide to give him another chance. My text is breezy and cool: Prepared to bet you have nothing in for breakfast. I will be in The Pumpkin from 9.30. Join me?
Sitting in the café’s front window, watching the town beginning to come to life, I order coffee with a jug of hot milk and a granola square that comes laden with nuts and dried fruit and is as big as the plate it sits on. David has not replied to my text but he soon appears, dressed not for weekend slouching but for work.
‘Hi,’ he says, sitting down opposite me without a greeting kiss. ‘Paula will be here in a minute. She’s just parking.’
‘What?’ I choke so hard on my granola square that I think I may need him to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre on me. The closest we’re likely to get to physical contact I think grimly as I recover and swallow some soothing coffee.
‘It’s a work day, Gina,’ he says in a tone one uses to an unreasonable child. ‘We’re talking to you as a witness.’
‘Paula’s heard it before.’
‘And she’s filled me in and we both want to ask you some questions.’
‘Would you like some of this granola thing?’ I ask. ‘I can’t possibly manage all of—’
‘No thanks,’ he says.
He summons the waitress. ‘Poached eggs on toast for two,’ he says, ‘and more coffee.’
‘I don’t want poached eggs,’ I protest.
‘They’re for Paula.’
‘How do you know that’s what she wants?’
‘I asked her.’
‘And she said, I’ll have whatever you’re having. How sweet.’
He doesn’t reply and Paula soon appears, also crisply turned out in jacket and trousers for a work day. She sits down next to David so that the two of them are looking across the table at me in full interview mode.
‘Hi,’ she says to me, and then to David, ‘Have you ordered?’
‘Poached eggs.’
‘Perfect.’
I think I may be going to be sick.
‘So, Gina,’ David says, ‘you saw Karen and Lara Brody on Tuesday afternoon with their dog—’
‘Billy,’ I say
‘What?’
‘Billy. The dog was called Billy.’
‘Right. Well, I think that’s a detail we can do without. What time exactly did you see them?’
‘Around four o’clock, I suppose.’
‘The manager of the nursery confirmed that,’ Paula tells David.
‘Good thing you’re here to check up on me,’ I tell her. She ignores me.
‘Did Karen look as though she had been drinking?’ David asks.
I consider. ‘It didn’t cross my mind that she had,’ I say. ‘I’d never seen her before so I had nothing to compare with but she looked quite normal.’
‘But she didn’t attend the performance by the children that the rest of you were at?’
‘She could hardly have taken the dog in, could she? Anyway, she was just picking up a child – Liam – who wasn’t hers, I gather.’ I give Paula a non-smile.
The eggs and coffee arrive and the interview is suspended. I pick at my granola square and watch them eat. I’ve never been a big fan of eggs, and this morning, as I look at the yolks running over the plates and being mopped up with toast, I find them truly revolting. I would take myself off to the loo but I know they’ll talk about me while I’m gone, so I sip my coffee and look out of the window.
‘So,’ David says eventually, ‘once the dog was back on its lead, what did the woman do then?’
‘Which woman?’
‘The woman in the burqa.’
‘Technically, it wasn’t a burqa,’ I say. ‘I explained to Paula. It was a niqab. The difference is that a niq—’
‘I think we’re sticking to burqa,’ David says. ‘Keeps things simple.’
‘Simple’s the word,’ I mutter into my coffee.
‘So what happened to her?’
‘She hobbled off.’
‘Hobbled?’
‘Yes. It looked as though she had a bad leg – or hip.’
‘So she wasn’t young?’
‘I don’t think so. I thought she must be a grandmother.’
‘And she was on her own?’
‘As far as I could see. She certainly left on her own. One of my students went after her to try and help but she didn’t seem to want help.’
‘Who was the student?’
‘Jamilleh Hamidi. She’s Iranian.’
‘I’d like to talk to her.’
‘You’ll need to be careful. Her husband won’t like the police coming to talk to his wife. Remember that time with the Turkish wives?’
‘It might be better if you talk to her, Paula,’ David says. ‘Maybe you could talk to her at the college, with Gina there to help?’
He turns from her to raise a questioning eyebrow at me. I turn back to the window. ‘Maybe,’ I say.
‘And we need to track down the woman in the bur— niqab,’ he says.
‘The staff at the nursery didn’t know who she was,’ Paula puts in. ‘They thought she must be someone’s grandmother.’
‘Does your Iranian student know her?’ David asks me.
‘No. From the niqab she thinks she might be Somali. She thinks she’s a peasant, anyway.’
‘But she must be related to someone who is studying at the university, or on the staff there?’
‘She might have a very upwardly mobile son or daughter studying or working there. Anyway, anyone who works there can put their child in the nursery – cleaners, canteen staff, ground staff. Only it’s expensive, so it’s mostly academic staff who use it, or students, who get a discount.’
‘Are there many Muslim children in the nursery?’
‘I’m sure Paula has that information,’ I say. ‘She’s the detective, after all.’
There is a silence. We all sip our coffee,
‘Are you going to tell me,’ I ask, ‘how they died?’
‘No.’ David’s reply is instant and brusque enough to make me want to hurl the mustard pot at him.
‘Can I ask why not?’
‘It’s confidential.’
‘And I am not in your confidence?’
‘Not as far as this is concerned.’
Paula says, ‘It helps to weed out the nutters. Any high-profile case you get nutters confessing to the crime. If we haven’t given out details we can quickly establish that we don’t need to waste time on them.’
‘Well,’ I say, gathering up my bags for my trip to the supermarket, ‘you could at least tell me how the dog died.’
She glances at David. ‘Throat cut in the kitchen sink,’ she says. And then, ‘Well, you did ask.’
We go our separate ways, David graciously picking up the tab. I cycle on to Sainsbury’s, where I stock up on locust food and summon Annie to pick it up. When she arrives – in slippers and pyjamas, so I’m the one who has to hump everything onto the back seat – I ask if she and her friends have plans for the evening. ‘Showing them Marlbury nightlife?’ I ask, hopefully.
She looks shocked. ‘It’s Strictly!’ she says. ‘Can’t be missed.’
‘There are frozen pizzas in there,’ I say, nodding to the food bags. ‘You can cook those. I’m not watching Strictly and I’m not cooking.’
‘Well you’re a little ray of sunshine this morning,’ she says, and slams her door closed. Then she winds the window down. ‘The kitchen sink’s blocked,’ she says, and I have to close my eyes because the dog is there, bleeding in my sunny yellow kitchen. I take a deep breath.
‘Soda crystals,’ I say. ‘You’ve cooked a fry-up – I can smell it on you – and you’ve poured a lot of fat down the drain. There are soda crystals at the back of the cupboard under the sink. Use them with boiling water. Do it properly. I don’t want to have to deal with it when I get back.’
‘You are My Sunshine’ she sings as she winds up the window.
I’m not going home with her because I am still avoiding home and I have an excuse. This afternoon I have a rehearsal in the abbey gardens where, in ten days’ time, the Marlbury University Staff Drama Group are to put on a production of Much Ado About Nothing. As ever, I have been tasked with doing the costumes, but I also have a role: I am playing Ursula, the unsexy one of a pair of waiting women. I do have one good scene, though, and I ought to be enjoying rehearsals more than I am.
The problem is the director. His name is Dominic and he is ‘A Professional’. This means, I suspect, that amateur groups have occasionally paid him small sums, as we have done, to direct them. Dominic likes to remind us at every opportunity of his professional status. What you’re doing, dear,’ he said to our Beatrice at one rehearsal, ‘is what we in the profession call upstaging.’ Is there anyone with only a passing interest in the theatre, who doesn’t know what upstaging is? Let alone Alison, who is playing Beatrice and is a senior lecturer in theatre studies? What’s more, the scene she was playing was her big scene in which she challenges Benedick to kill his best friend, so she’s entitled to upstage him if she wants to, isn’t she?
Dominic and I have had our run-ins but we have now reached a state of armed truce. He has felt the need to slap me down ever since the first rehearsal, when he gave us his spiel about the play with heavy emphasis on smutty stuff about the meaning of ‘Nothing’ in the title. (No thing is a reference to the female sexual organs; we have no thing. Get it? Clever stuff from the boys, isn’t it?) He is right, actually; Shakespeare uses it like that in the sonnets. However, there was no need for Dominic to use quite so many little-boy-showing-off four-letter words in his explanation and it is generally unwise to lecture a group of academics on their home ground. Mervyn Lewis, the professor of Renaissance literature, and I started up a counter-commentary on the lines of nothing being also noting. The play is full of people noting things – often incorrectly. In the first half of the play, people spy, overhear, misinterpret and misreport, heading for the climax, the super-misinterpretation in which Claudio, deceived by the villainous Don John, wrongly believes that he sees his fiancée invite another man into her bedchamber the night before their wedding. It’s a much more interesting line than the no thing one and it also, as I unwisely pointed out, makes nonsense of performing the play in the open air. The play actually requires curtains and nooks and shadows and spy-holes.
Dominic has a sidekick, Terry, who is the technical director, and the two of them have very loud, jargon-ridden conversations designed to intimidate us and keep us in our amateur places. At the last rehearsal, however, we had sound effects for the first time and they were less than perfectly timed. When, finally, a flourish of sprightly dance music interrupted Leonato’s distraught lamentations over his daughter’s dishonour so that the actor stopped dead, I spoke into the silence more loudly than I had intended. ‘And that,’ I said, ‘is what we in the profession call a balls-up.’ Dominic, I think, would like to sack me but he needs my costumes.
I retrieve my bike from the bike blocks outside Sainsbury’s and cycle round to The Burnt Cake, the health food shop just outside the back gates of the abbey. There I buy a wrap with hummus and red peppers in it for my lunch, and a selection of pots of salad for my supper tonight. If my sitting room is going to be full of overdressed and overexcited celebrities and my lover is blanking me out, then I shall go to bed. I shall read Bring up the Bodies and I shall eat my supper in bed. I shall feel hard done by and I shall get guacamole on the duvet cover. How’s that for a risibly middle-class mishap?
I go into the abbey close and find myself a bench under a tree. I get my script out to go over my lines but I can’t concentrate. I’m thoroughly pissed off with David, of course. I do understand that he has to get a grip on the murder inquiry and I want him to find the killer as much as anyone but I resent not even being acknowledged, being shut out and having bloody Paula waved in front of my face. And I want to know what happened. All I know is that I saw them, the three of them, a young mother, a little girl and a dog, just out on an ordinary summer afternoon, and they went home and they died. And I keep imagining what happened, and all the time, buzzing away underneath the teaching and the cooking and the shopping and the talking and the wondering where exactly David and I are, my mind goes round and round it, imagining. Who died first? The dog, I suppose, because he would have tried to protect them. And then? Did Karen have to watch her daughter die? Or Lara watch her mother? Was it quick? Now I know about the dog, I know there was a knife. Were all their throats cut? The terror is what I come back to, over and over again. And David could give me the answers to some of these questions but he doesn’t trust me; he chooses to leave me in the dark with my wondering and I don’t think I can forgive him for that.
I get out my wrap and munch away at it. It was a stupid choice, really, because the hummus squidges out of the sides and I drop bits of red pepper on my skirt. Halfway through I give up and donate the rest to the pigeons who have gathered round me, knowing in their scary, avian way, that I am the kind of person who will drop my food. Then I ring my mother. I haven’t rung her since the murders and Annie’s invasion of my house. I’m never sure how important my phone calls are to her. She is eighty-nine, lives on her own and is in some pain from arthritis, I suspect, though she won’t admit it. She was a GP and seems to think that illness is only for other people. She has friends and someone who does her shopping for her; she reads a lot, potters in her tiny garden, listens to the radio, watches documentaries on television, and goes out to concerts sometimes. When I ring, she always suggests that she is perfectly content and has no need of anything from me, but I continue to call twice a week and give news, in which she takes a moderate interest. Would she notice if I stopped ringing? I think she would but I’m not sure.
This afternoon, though, there is something odd about her. She asks after the girls and Freda and Nico, but I’m not sure that she’s listening to the answers. When I ask what she has been doing she is vague – ‘Not a lot, a quiet week’ – and when I press for details she tells me snappily to stop interrogating her. In the end, although I know it will make her cross, I ask if she’s all right. ‘Of course,’ she says, and rings off.
The rehearsal begins badly. I’m not in the mood for it and I have a major run-in with Dominic about costumes before we even get started. He sees a class war element in the play: the aristocrats – the Prince of Aragon, and Count Claudio – versus the middle-class family of Leonato, whose daughter is to marry Count Claudio. To this end, he wants Hero and Beatrice, daughter and niece of Leonato, to appear in aprons at every opportunity, suggesting that they personally are doing the catering for the crowd of army officers who have descended on the house.
‘Dominic!’ I protest. ‘The very reason why all these aristocratic army officers are staying with Leonato is that he’s the biggest man in Messina. He’s the Governor of Messina, for heaven’s sake. His womenfolk aren’t kitchen maids. They’re Lady Beatrice and Lady Hero. Even their maids aren’t kitchen maids, I would hazard. We’re waiting gentlewomen, though if you want me to wrap myself in an apron I’m happy to do so. It’s a costume I’m well used to.’
‘So it’s really a kitchen-sink drama we’re in, I see,’ Mervyn Lewis mutters sotto voce and I quip back, ‘On an apron stage!’ before the image of the dog can fell me again.
Dominic has gathered himself for what he clearly regards as his clinching argument. ‘I suggest a little more attention to the text, my dear,’ he drawls. ‘When Beatrice comes to fetch Benedick into dinner, she says, ‘Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner.’ She has been sent on an errand, against her will. Doesn’t that tell you something about her status in the household?’
‘God, Dominic! Do you understand this play at all? She says she’s been sent against her will because the scene isn’t funny unless she’s unequivocally unfriendly to him. He’s been told that she’s in love with him and then she comes in and is rude to him and he tells himself that there’s a double meaning in that, when there can’t possibly be. That’s why it’s funny!’
Silence has fallen. I know I’m being more vehement than the situation requires but I can’t back down. ‘Benedick, as men so often do, has let her down in the past. He won her heart from her with false dice – she tells us so. So she’s armed against him. She’s not going to give him a chance to let her down again. She—’ I stop. Where am I going with this? I am being ridiculous; Dominic is smirking at me. ‘Well, if you want sodding aprons you can have them,’ I shout. ‘I’ll just go and order a hundred yards of calico, shall I?’
He opens his mouth but I’m done. I stomp off into the abbey cloisters and demand a cigarette from the young chap who is playing Claudio and is having a quick pre-rehearsal smoke. I have given up smoking, really I have, but there are times when a cigarette seems to be the only answer.
We limp through the rehearsal and we are none of us at our best. It is a sunless afternoon and a brisk little wind is blowing our voices all over the place. A few tourists watch us desultorily for a while but soon depart; Dominic is clearly bored and disappointed with us and at one point wanders off, leaving us to our own devices. Things fall apart quite quickly when we realise that he’s not there; nothing exposes the oddness of performance as sharply as having no-one to perform to. Soon after this, he calls an early halt and we disperse with relief to the disparate pleasures of our Saturday evenings.
Pleasure features little in my evening. David does not ring to suggest dinner as I secretly hoped he would, the bump and grind of Strictly penetrates into my room enough to distract me from my book and my supper is disappointing, largely because it is an inappropriate meal to eat in bed. And, yes, I do get guacamole on the duvet cover.