The cemetery is completely empty. I take a deep, chilly breath. I am alone with him. He’s here somewhere. Imran. I’ll stop a grave or two away – I can’t risk going right up to him – and pay my respects to him from a few feet. I’ll pretend to be visiting someone else.
They are different to Christian graves, to secular graves. The headstones are mostly smaller, but some of them have entire tombs, crypts, shining white in the sun. They are all pointing in the same direction, I notice immediately. It gives a strangely uniform effect. Rows and rows and rows of them, evenly spaced, like somebody has neatly laid out piles of paper.
I find his grave – marked with a wooden stake. I don’t know how long I stay there for. Just looking, three along from his grave. This is close enough. If he could see me now, he would know. He would know that I’m sorry. He would want you to hand yourself in, a voice inside my head says, but I gulp back tears and ignore it.
Instead, I just stand there, my feet cold in the frost, breathing deeply, apologizing with each breath.
‘Rubbish, isn’t it?’ a voice beside me says.
I turn and see a woman standing next to me. I didn’t hear her arrive. And, then, with a panicked lurch, I realize that it is obviously, unmistakably her. Ayesha. His sister. Her face is more drawn than it was on the television, but I recognize the turned-down lips, the mole. I can see hollows underneath her cheekbones. Like she is biting her cheeks.
I want to back away, to turn and run, but I can’t. I can’t do that to her – scare her in this peaceful graveyard, where her brother rests. So recently buried.
‘I’m not supposed to be here again so soon,’ she says. ‘But I can’t stay away.’
She raises her face to the sun. It kisses her features – lighting her forehead and shadowing underneath her bone structure – and I look away, embarrassed.
It wasn’t right to come. It wasn’t right at all, I think, wanting to run far away. I am a monster, a killer, following the same murderous instincts that have preceded me for hundreds of years. Returning to the scene of the crime. Coming to the grave. Stupid. Selfish. Predictable.
‘I – I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m here to …’
She’s looking at me expectantly and I wonder why I spoke at all. I can feel my eyes darting around the graveyard. I can’t pretend to have known him: that is a step too far. I will just … my gaze lands on a gravestone bearing the inscription Hanna Ahmed: lost too soon. It has this year’s date on it. She was born in 1983.
‘My brother’s girlfriend died,’ I say, the lie escaping my lips before I can really stop it, thankful for my fast brain, always good with numbers right from when I was young. ‘I’m just – I’m so sorry to have … disturbed you.’
Her expression is soft, and I realize she wasn’t asking me. Her expression looks questioning, but it is only grief. Hollow grief that I have caused. Her eyes meet mine. They’re a dark brown, almost black, the pupils lost inside.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, gesturing to the grave, almost as new as Imran’s, the earth piled on it, covered in plants and flowers. ‘About your brother … about his girlfriend.’
I wave a hand, like it doesn’t matter, which she must think is strange.
‘They’re at rest now,’ she says, looking out over the graves. ‘Mecca’s somewhere that way,’ she says. ‘You know?’ She looks at me. ‘I never believed all that, but he did. I think.’ She speaks with a cockney accent.
She doesn’t care that I’m not answering. That I’m thinking about Imran and every grave in here. She leans down, looking closer at Hanna’s grave. ‘She was young, too. Did they bury her fast? As soon as the post-mortem was over, we got the body. It’s hardly been any time at all.’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, a blush creeping across my cheeks.
I take a step back, the panic descending again. What am I doing here? I have to get away. I can’t be doing things like this. Risky things. Cruel things. Things that don’t make any sense.
I take two steps back, but, as I leave, I can’t help but wish her well. She nods gratefully, her eyes still on me.
I dream of Imran again and wake up sweaty.
I shower, my arm feeling wasted without its splint on, ashamed at the strange concoction of emotions inside me. Sadness – it’s almost all sadness. But there are other things, too. Sadness is the main course, but there is a starter of guilt. No, make that a sharing platter.
But then also, right at the end, after pudding – a biscotti on the side of the coffee, maybe – is something else. I see it for what it is, and wince as I realize.
It’s relief. A chink of relief, because, as each day passes, it’s looking like I might have got away with murder.
I am despicable.
14
Reveal
Reuben finishes playing for me. His head is bent low, the fingers finishing the piece with the softest, quietest, most understated ending. A musical sentence, trailed off.
‘Calmer?’ he says, turning to me with a smile. He hardly ever plays for me.
I nod, but I’m not really. ‘Yes. No,’ I say. We are about to leave to go to my parents’. Wilf has said he will be there, too. We’re telling people. We can’t avoid it any longer.
Nobody saw my bail hearing in the press, of course. They wouldn’t have believed it if they did; would think it was a coincidence. Somebody with the same name. That’s what I would think. It would be too far out for me to even consider it.
‘They’ll think I’m pregnant,’ I say, as I take my trench coat from the hallway.
‘Fuck ’em,’ Reuben says, as I walk back into the spare room.
He closes the lid on the piano keys. As he does it, I think suddenly of Imran, on some life support somewhere. I think of him dying. I think of my charge changing to murder.
Mum and Dad live in Kent. They call it London, but it isn’t. Not proper London. There are open, green spaces and its own town centre, and houses, not flats. There are no London buses or tube stations or constant sirens. There are no jaunty, confident urban foxes or pop-up yoga studios or night buses. It is not our London.
Reuben’s father texts on the way. Reuben got me a new phone, this afternoon. It’s a different type, and I’m not used to it. Transferring my number over was a pain. Reuben glances across as it beeps.
‘Does your dad know?’ I say, before I open the text.
Reuben nods, his hair flashing, orange and then auburn, orange and then auburn, as we pass underneath street lamps.
He doesn’t defend telling him. I’m glad he doesn’t. But … there is something strange about it. I would have liked him to have asked me, maybe. But no. I won’t let the thing that I have done create a space between us. We are seeing my parents and it is only right that Reuben’s should know too.
I look down at the text. Hope my boy is treating you well, it says. I frown. He has never sent such a text, has never needed to. Reuben has no temper, no moodiness, no edge. Not with me, anyway.
I tap out a response, not looking up at Reuben. Always, of course xx, I say.
You know where I am. All sounds very unfair to me, Jo. Hope R is good to you. You know how he can be, he writes. I feel my mouth slacken, my eyebrows knit together. How he can be?
I can’t ask what he means by that. You know how he can be. It would be awkward. And so I don’t; I avoid it, but I do think about it as I watch London spread out as we travel, like the universe is expanding as we drive. Perhaps he means because he can be blunt. Perhaps he means because Reuben is always completely honest about what he thinks of people and their actions, is moralistic. But he’s not, with me. No, not really.
But none of these things really makes sense. There is no obvious thing that would necessitate a text like that.
‘He alright?’ Reuben says while we are paused at a set of traffic lights.