Wednesday, 15 March, 8.45 a.m.
Julius Zedanski finally rang her early on the Wednesday morning, apologizing very politely for the delay.
‘I’ve been travelling,’ he said in a hoarse voice. ‘I was … away when the news broke. I’m sorry. It must seem impolite.’
Martha was swift to assure him that there was no problem. ‘I take it you’ll be wanting to attend the inquest, Mr Zedanski?’
‘Yes. Yes – of course. I’ll be there.’
‘This is a shocking business.’
Silence on the other end. Martha sensed Julius Zedanski was reining in his emotions very tightly. ‘I could do with talking to you face-to-face before then,’ Martha said gently. ‘One or two things are puzzling me about this tragedy.’
He gave a sour laugh. ‘One or two things, Mrs Gunn? Puzzling? The whole bloody thing doesn’t make any sense. No sense at all.’
She ignored the bitterness and the anger and continued smoothly. ‘You’re in this country?’
‘Yes. I got back as soon as I heard.’
‘Shall we say three o’clock this afternoon then? Can you get here for then?’
‘Yes. I’m staying with my …’ A pause. ‘Mother-in-law.’
‘You know where my office is?’
‘I’ll find it,’ he said shortly, and the conversation was at an end.
Speaking to Gina’s fiancé had set Martha’s mind whirring again and she rang the GP.
Stuart Milligan was an elderly doctor with whom Martha had had dealings on numerous previous occasions. He was a traditionalist who put his patients first and spent as little time as he dared on targets, directives and flow charts. ‘Instinct,’ he’d barked once down the phone. ‘Instinct and experience. They’re what count in General Practice.’ But she saw a different side to him today. He responded to Martha’s questions with quiet, thoughtful answers and she heard real sadness behind his responses.
‘I was shocked when I heard. She was the last person I’d have expected to kill herself.’
He continued almost without a break, answering all her questions in one go. ‘No, Mrs Gunn. She wasn’t a drinker; she didn’t do drugs. She wasn’t depressed. She was happy.’
Martha swallowed the retort that happy people don’t leave their beds at three a.m. to drive their cars into a wall at sixty miles an hour.
He was as puzzled as she was. ‘It doesn’t make any sense, Mrs Gunn. She had everything to live for. She’d found love again. She was marrying a wonderful man with integrity, a world-class journalist. She had a big heart. The warmest heart and the kindest nature. She had a career she loved and was brilliant at. A man she loved. A son she loved. A mother she loved. So many people she would hurt that she couldn’t have wanted to kill herself. She couldn’t have wanted to hurt them.’
But she had. Deliberately.
A thought flitted through Martha’s mind. Unless she thought or believed that by living she would hurt them more.
The thought struck home with some resonance, tumbling around in her mind as Dr Milligan continued, ‘She was an open, friendly, intelligent, beautiful young woman. It makes no sense, Mrs Gunn. When I heard about the tragedy I thought they must be referring to someone else. It couldn’t be her. It wasn’t her.’
This phrase also resonated with Martha and it would continue to bounce around inside her head. It wasn’t her. But it was. She had been identified by the mother she had virtually destroyed by her action.
Dr Milligan was still speaking. ‘She had no money worries. She was beautiful. I cannot, cannot understand it.’ He sounded personally confounded.
And Martha too was floundering. ‘She’d not been on anti-depressants or …’ And now she was stuck for words, questions, avenues to explore. Sensing all of them led to a blind alley.
‘Absolutely not.’ He was vehement, but then something must have snagged his mind. ‘Although …’
It was the first chink of light, the first hint that maybe, just maybe all was not as it appeared. Martha held her breath – and was disappointed.
‘Hearsay,’ Dr Milligan said quickly. ‘Just gossip.’
‘That’s what I’m interested in, Doctor Milligan.’
According to DI Randall there was nothing in the public domain.
He had his answer ready then. ‘Not if it isn’t the truth, Mrs Gunn.’
She bit her lip. She didn’t want clouds covering even this tiny glimpse of veracity. She skipped around his hesitance. ‘She was looking forward to her wedding?’
‘Oh, yes, excited about it.’ A pause. ‘Have you met Julius Zedanski?’
‘No. Not yet. I’ve spoken to him on the phone but we haven’t met face-to-face. He’s coming here this afternoon.’
‘He’s quite a chap.’ The doctor’s admiration shone through. ‘I’ve met him once or twice. He’s very, umm …’ The doctor sounded embarrassed. ‘Charismatic.’
‘And her mother?’
‘Lovely woman. Highly competent. Intelligent. Ex-teacher. Widowed. A character. A personality. You could see where Gina got it from.’
‘Her father?’
‘Died some years ago, I believe.’
‘Her son?’
‘Ah, yes, young Terence. Good chap. They had his name down for Shrewsbury School. Good runner, I think. Sporty boy.’
This woman had a Teflon life, Martha reflected. Everything perfect? One big bed of roses? Did she have none of life’s little frustrations and anomalies? She dug again.
‘What about her ex-husband? Is he on the scene? Even for the boy?’
‘To be honest I don’t know. I never heard her mention him. I think he was an American – as far as I remember. They were divorced years ago. Long before I took her on as a patient.’
Which backed up Alex’s version and sealed off that line of enquiry. Gina’s personal life appeared flawless. A carefully constructed fable, or the truth?
‘There’s nothing more you can add?’
‘No.’
She sensed the doctor was dying to put the phone down – she could hear voices in the background, heard a door open and close and a whispered response. Reluctantly she ended the conversation.
She moved to other work, but Gina Marconi’s suicide was never far from her thoughts.
Jericho rang through at three o’clock to say Julius Zedanski had arrived, ready to talk to her. A punctual man.
Strange, she reflected, how we all feel a frisson at meeting someone famous, whatever the circumstances. She was excited, feeling like a teenager about to meet her superhero, her pop idol, her favourite film star. She even found herself checking her appearance in the wall mirror, trying to damp down her unruly red hair, checking her eyes for mascara smudges and trying to cool her cheeks down.
She shook her head at her reflection and, by the time Jericho had ushered him in, she had composed herself.
Like many celebrities only ever seen on television or screen, he was smaller than she had imagined, thinner, and he looked older, unless that was the result of his grief or a lack of TV make-up. But his features were familiar. He had an olive complexion, an angular, bony face, hooked nose and lovely teeth, but his smile today was cynical, twisted into an expression which was almost painful and his eyes, dark as jet, were pained and restless as though he too searched for an explanation. As she shook his hand Martha reflected that this recent tragedy would forever be nailed to his cross. Or maybe painful cynicism was his habitual expression. Journalists were well known for their objectivity. It was a necessary part of the job. When broadcasting from some war-torn hotspot Martha guessed viewers wouldn’t see much of that lovely smile, even twisted as it was today. She had watched his war reports many times on the television but reality was not quite the same. His eyes were just as dark and unfathomable, his presence commanding, and yet she had the feeling he was also capable of merging into the background rather than standing out. She’d seen pictures of him in camouflage with the military, desert fatigues in Iraq and Iran, a djellaba in Morocco, a suit in London and country tweeds. Today he wore beige chinos and an open-neck shirt.
What she hadn’t realized from the flat screen in her sitting room was that Julius Zedanski exuded a hot charisma. He was positively sexy. He fixed his eyes on her, held out his hand and gave hers a firm handshake. Very precise and, under the circumstances, businesslike.
‘I’m glad to have the opportunity to talk to you about Gina,’ he said in a low voice, not the authoritative tone he used when broadcasting. His accent wasn’t quite English. Maybe the Polish roots weren’t quite so far removed as she’d thought.
She invited him to sit down, asked Jericho to bring tea and sat opposite him, in the bay with the long sash windows which overlooked the spires and town of Shrewsbury. But the view had a disadvantage she hadn’t considered. From this angle it was impossible not to recognize the dome of St Chad’s where their wedding would have been, soon to be the venue for Gina’s funeral when the body was released. Zedanski saw it too as his eyes swept the view. His mouth hardened and his eyes screwed up. He jerked his head away from the window and angled his chair away from the view, even though one’s natural instinct would be to embrace it. On a shining day like today it was lovely. The town of Shrewsbury rises on a small hill enveloped by an oxbow in the River Severn. It looked exactly what it was, the modern-day version of a medieval stronghold, a safe refuge within the river’s hug, although in the past the river had done its mischief too, cutting the town off by flooding its access routes and swamping both main bridges, the Welsh Bridge to the north-west and the English Bridge to the south.
She turned towards him and got straight down to business. ‘You’ve had a few days since Gina’s death,’ she said gently. ‘Have you thought about it?’
His mouth distorted even more. ‘I’ve thought of nothing else,’ he said, ‘but I suspect that isn’t what you mean.’
She shook her head and he nodded.
‘You mean have I thought of any reason why Gina chose to die?’
She waited.
But he shook his head, eyes flickering away. ‘Nothing that makes any sense,’ he said, his bony face and eyes burning with intensity. ‘I …’ He screwed his face up to try and suppress his grief, but it didn’t work. It spilled out of him, shockingly raw, like guts spilling out of a Hara-Kiri slash. His eyes were hot, hurt and angry, squeezing out boiling tears. ‘I …’ He seemed to choke then and was unable to speak.
She leaned forward, put a hand on his shoulder and waited. Sometimes silence is more eloquent than any words in the English language, or any other language in the world, a little space needed for grief to burst. He put his hands over his face and groaned.
Finally he looked up. ‘I …’ It was a mammoth effort for him to continue. Someone who had seen all the horrors of a hostile world paraded in front of his eyes, someone who took those horrors, sanitized them and presented them to the ‘civilized’ world.
His next sentence confirmed this. ‘I’ve worked in war zones in practically every continent.’ He licked his lips and continued.
‘I’ve seen people – good people, nice people, people I’ve just interviewed, soldiers I’ve got drunk with, colleagues I’ve swapped stories with, children I’ve picked up out of the dirt, given sweets to – I’ve seen them all blown to bits, maimed, screaming with pain, terrified. I’ve seen people starve to death in front of my eyes, too weak to speak and others too emaciated to unwrap the chocolate bar I’ve just given them. I thought I’d seen it all.’ He frowned and rubbed his forehead. ‘I thought I was immune to suffering.’ He looked at her directly then. ‘The life Gina and I planned together would have been a balm for all that, but instead …’ His eyes were on her. ‘Gone. All gone, Mrs Gunn.’ His voice and expression were bleak. ‘I thought when I came home from one of these places that I would have a home to return to. A loving wife. A son. Perhaps more children. And now …’ His hands fluttered.
‘She was …’ He couldn’t find the words and simply shook his head as though trying to shake off the memory. ‘She was a light in the darkness.’
‘And you can think of no reason why …?’
He shook his head but she pressed him.
‘You must have asked yourself this, Mr Zedanski. What did you come up with? Why did she do it?’
‘I don’t know.’ He ran his fingers through his dark and silky hair. ‘I don’t know,’ he said again, calmer now. ‘She had everything to live for. A career, a son. We loved each other. We had a life planned. A wedding. We’d planned to have more children. We both wanted a family. I loved her.’ He looked at her, an angry fire burning now in his eyes. ‘If something was wrong, why didn’t she just confide in me? Tell me? I would have helped her. We would have worked it out. But now?’ He held his hands out wide, letting in this empty future. ‘Now?’ He answered his own question. ‘Nothing,’ he said bitterly. ‘Nothing.’
She remained quiet. There is no need to fill every silence with sound. She let him think.
He did and reached his own unsatisfactory conclusion. ‘The only thing I can think of,’ he said slowly, echoing Mark Sullivan’s words, ‘is temporary madness.’ It was almost a hopeful suggestion but it was an empty cliché – nothing more. And in this case it was not the answer.
‘Anything else?’
His face screwed up tightly again and Martha waited. But he continued down the road of the life they would have had.
‘We had plans for the house – Terence had decided he would board at school when he was thirteen. He was excited at the prospect. He’d be home for some of the weekends. It’s only a couple of miles up the road. Bridget – Gina’s mum – had a bungalow in the grounds. We have a couple of acres. We’re halfway through doing up the house.’
For a split second she realized he had forgotten. His face had changed, softened. Still angular but the angles were less sharp.
‘We planned to landscape the grounds – make part into a nature reserve, a meadow, apple trees, beehives, owl boxes. A patch of Little England.’ He looked around him, cruelly waking now. ‘That was our dream. How could she destroy it?’ His anger was surfacing. Another stage in grief. ‘Why? And why now?’ He scratched his head in bemusement. ‘I have a flat in London. I’ll be going back there. My life is destroyed. It isn’t just her life she’s buggered up. It’s mine too. And Terence’s and Bridget’s. If she had a problem, why didn’t she confide in me? Why put her nearest and dearest – the people she loved and the people who loved her – through this? Our lives will never be whole again.’
And now, for the first time, Martha almost smelt his stinging fury against the woman who had constructed so much before destroying it so completely. Anger is part of grief. But it is the selfish part of grief, the look what you’ve done to me part of grief. And riding on its wings comes an ugly emotion – self-pity.
She sensed that now this had kicked in she would learn no more from Mr Zedanski. He looked up, smiled, slightly sheepish now but engaging her with a frank stare. ‘I suppose,’ he said, with a hint of bravery, ‘I may as well put the house on the market and return to some far-flung war-torn part of the world. There’s nothing for me here.’
What could she say, except, ‘And young Terence?’
‘I can’t pick that up,’ he said, his eyes full on her. ‘She was the thread that would have bound us together. It’s no good now.’
So the boy would lose a hero-father as well as his mother. And for what?
She saw him to the door, closed it behind him and sat down to think.
Even though Julius had gone he’d left behind a room full of turbulence, anger, anguish, pain. She threw open the windows and welcomed in the fresh, clean, cold blast of air. No answers yet.
But ten minutes after he’d left and the turbulence had settled, her mind travelled a different track, somehow bound up with her own daughter, Sukey. Some men are so busy with their aspirations that their partners are dragged along in their wake. Was it possible that Julius’s powerful persona had made Gina feel her own personality was drowned?