Rita said, “But she didn’t have to do it, did she?”
Looking at me cagily but keenly at the same time, softly but sharply, as if she was a version of Marsh—Marsh in a pale-pink top—and my office had become a nick. My own office, but Rita had hauled me in for a session.
“Stick a knife in him. Take her revenge—like that.”
Looking at me cagily but with a small glint of triumph. Well, George, you got in right out of your depth there. But you’re back on shore now, safe back on shore with me.
Tea, sweet and strong. Not even bothering to ask. Not even bothering to ask if she could step in with her own mug of tea and park herself by my desk. The morning after. She knew about mornings after. Remembering maybe, right then, her own little mission of revenge, or whatever it was. Me waiting outside, looking at the windows of a house. Wish me luck.
“It wasn’t revenge, Reet.”
My own office at nine in the morning. Familiar and utterly weird. I’d been up all night. Nothing odd in that—an occupational hazard. But not under investigation myself.
And now under Rita’s.
“It wasn’t revenge.”
“No?”
This might have been the moment for it all to come out. You can tell Rita, you can tell Rita everything. In your own words, take your time. But I stared into my tea, gripping the mug tight like people do in a state of shock. Why, except for some old, mad sense of duty (duty?) had I even bothered to show up?
I looked up. Rita looked as if she could pounce.
Back again and not back again, George and not George. More like some strange unpredictable animal in a zoo.
George, she might have said, you look a bloody mess.
And suppose on that night, years ago, when she strode up that front path, things had taken a different turn, got out of hand? She’d come back a wild, changed, glaring thing, holding up her spread hands?
“No? Not revenge? So what was it?” she snapped. “An accident? Self-defence?”
She checked herself, bit her lip, but I pictured it—the whole picture: Sarah in the dock, Rita in the jury—the jury a whole jury of Ritas. No discussion: put the bitch away.
I think she saw me seeing it. She looked at me suddenly as if I was floating away. Her face went soft again—scornful and soft at the same time.
Out of his depth, the fool, and still out there, flailing in the current.
“If it was revenge,” I said, “would she have gone about it like that? Involved a detective?”
(Involved!)
“When I phoned her, from the airport, she sounded so—so—”
Something, at last, uncontrollable in my voice. Rita put down her mug of tea. What she was waiting for—like the waiting tray, with clients. Nurse Rita.
“—so glad.”
My office. The oatmeal carpet. The two-tone filing cabinets, some black, some sealing-wax red. All Rita’s work. The vase of flowers. The framed photos on the wall: scenes of Wimbledon a hundred years ago. A horse and cart outside the Rose and Crown. Why this should put clients at their ease I don’t know.
Helen had come once and glanced quickly round. I think she sussed Rita straight away.
I caught myself, collected myself.
“So who knows?” I said. “Who knows how it happened?”
I looked, steadily enough, into Rita’s eyes.
“Who knows?” I said.
She might have given a snort. Who knows? What kind of language was that for a detective? I was supposed to know, supposed to find out. My job. And—so it appeared—I’d been there, I’d been at the bloody scene.
But I did know, of course. And Sarah knew that I knew. And I knew that.
A sort of professional snort. But she moved her head, instead, just a shade, from side to side.
In deeper than he bloody knew. As if I’d been done for just as surely as Bob Nash, as if I’d had it coming too.
She picked up her mug.
“Well,” she might have said, “we’ll see. We’ll see how the wind blows in a month or so.”
She picked up my mug. “More tea?” It was almost like a threat. Nurse Rita. A beast of a patient.
She held the mugs as if they’d just been confiscated.
“Well, anyway, you’re in no fit state, are you, to do anything round here? You’d better let me take over.”
She couldn’t keep it in. “A piece of work, if you ask me, that Mrs. Nash. A nasty piece of work.”