‘My brother,’ I say.
She’s nodding, encouragingly, a faint frown crossing her features. She wishes she hadn’t asked. She has embarrassed me. And that’s what stops me lying – trying, and failing, to be good. It’s not fair to pretend I don’t know what she’s talking about. It is strange, this new world I inhabit with its contradictory rules.
Ed is still in his own world, looking up at the skylight, and so I answer her.
‘He’ll be okay,’ I say. ‘I hope.’ I give a worried, hopeful shrug, playing the role of my life: the sympathetic sister. Sympathetic over a fabricated death.
‘I hope so, too,’ she says, bobbing on her toes. And then she takes Bilal’s hand, shifting the books to her other arm, and leaves again. ‘We’ll be back next week,’ she says.
My body is flooded with cold, cruel fear. I never realized it before, but fear is the worst of all emotions. With sadness, you cry. With grief, you miss somebody. But fear. Fear gets under your skin. And you can do nothing but feel it. Worry about it.
She will be back. There’s no getting out of it. I have to keep the lie going. Package it up, as though it’s the truth. Absorb it into the regular rotation of lies I have told.
I look back at Ed. He’s still looking up at the light, but his eyes are on me. The effect is strange. Almost animalistic. Very slowly, he raises his eyebrows, his expression opening, becoming expectant.
‘Wilf’s girlfriend died,’ I say.
‘What?’ Ed says. His head drops, his mouth opens.
‘A while ago,’ I say, wondering how I will explain it away. My colleague, my friend. There’s no way I wouldn’t have told Ed. ‘He hardly knew her, actually. It was all very early days.’
‘Jesus,’ Ed says. ‘How?’
‘Car crash,’ I say, recalling some statistic about the most likely way to die.
‘God,’ Ed says.
He turns away from me, sorting out the children’s shelf, which is messy and disordered from where Bilal has pulled books out randomly. There are gaps, like missing teeth, making the bookcase grin weirdly. ‘How serious were they?’
‘Just a few dates,’ I say.
Minimize it. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? To dampen the effect of the lie, like slowly, slowly putting out a fire. Next week I’ll tell him it was just one date, actually, and soon he will have forgotten it, like a tattoo gradually getting lasered each week and fading, fading, fading …
‘When?’
‘Just a few weeks ago. I didn’t want to – I didn’t want to make it into a huge deal.’
‘What a shame for Wilf, though,’ Ed says musingly as he neatens up the books.
Ed knows Wilf’s completely blank relationship history as well as I do; he’s forever listening to me moan about how my brother is a workaholic, doesn’t value relationships, only things. Mostly money.
‘And for you, Jojo,’ he says softly. ‘I’m so sorry. You should’ve said.’
I shrug awkwardly. I can’t deal with his intense compassion.
‘I’m so sorry, Jo,’ he says again, glancing at me and holding my gaze.
‘I know. Bad luck,’ I say, bringing a finger up to my mouth and biting the nail.
I tell Ed to drop me back at the office, that my car’s there, waiting for me. I tell him I’ll lock up. He looks up at me, surprised; he almost always drops me home.
When we arrive, he says, ‘I’ve got loads to do here.’
I realize, then, that my working day usually ends long before his. I never knew before.
‘I can help,’ I say, following him inside, even though I will have to come back out to get the clothes.
As he gathers up books, I tug gently on the cupboard where the lost property sits. I can picture all of the items behind it. Jumpers and tops and children’s coats. There’s always loads of it. It will be so easy to hide mine there; they’ll be taken to the tip, one day, but not by me.
But the cupboard is locked. Ed’s keys are always attached to his belt; he wears them like a janitor. There’s not enough time to get to my car and put the stuff into the cupboard without him seeing, anyway. He’s busy tidying up, but close by. Always close by.
There’s no opportunity. He doesn’t leave the office until he’s done, and waits for me, expectantly, then leads me out to my car with him.
I glance behind me as he locks up, wistful, looking at the cupboard through the window, at the opportunity.
Missed.
16
Reveal
It is five weeks After when Sarah telephones me. It was the strangest Christmas, full of foreboding instead of cheer. Where would I be next Christmas?
‘We have witness statements,’ Sarah says. She asks me to go to her office later that day, or the next day, but I want to go now. I can’t wait. She says – reluctantly, it seems to me – that she’s free.
‘Will you come?’ I say to Reuben, standing in my trench coat, which isn’t quite warm enough for the January chill. ‘I don’t know what they’ll say.’
‘Of course,’ he says immediately. ‘Of course I will.’ He isn’t looking at me, fiddling instead with his keys, sorting the flat key out from the others ready to lock up.
I hear him make a call while I am getting my shoes. He is cancelling a meeting. He emerges, his face impassive, and then I see that he is wearing a suit. I don’t ask what the appointment was. Court, maybe. With a client.
We arrive and sit down in Sarah’s foyer. It’s run-down, with a shabby red-carpeted corridor lined with boxes. There is no receptionist.
‘It’s good,’ Reuben whispers as we sit. ‘It means they’re not making too much bloody money.’
It’s called Powell’s. I’ve seen it on signs, I remember now. In less than salubrious areas; above high-rise flats and in back-end car parks. It advertises itself on teal-coloured billboards, posters, business cards left on the tube. As though anyone committing a crime might require their help to deal with the aftermath. And isn’t that true? Look at me.
Sarah comes to collect us and we go to sit in a meeting room. I like her lack of small talk. No discussion of the journey here, the weather, how I’m feeling. She’s wearing a T-shirt, tucked into a skirt suit. It’s styled up, with a large necklace, so it’s just about office appropriate. Her handbag – a leather one from River Island, according to the logo on the zip – and her keys sit nearby. She has a Sea Life keyring, and I wonder why. Perhaps it was her first Mother’s Day present from her child, if she has one. Or an in-joke with her husband, if she has one.
The view from the window is out on to central London. I can see the Gherkin and the Nokia building. I close my eyes and try to imagine that I’m just a high-flyer. That I’m here because I’m smart, not because I am incredibly, incredibly dumb.
The room has a large table in the centre of it, but it’s pine, and rickety, not a mahogany boardroom table. There’s a display of straggly lilies, which Sarah positions to her right. Cheap tea and coffee machines are off to one side.
‘I’ve traced Sadiq, from the business card you gave me,’ she says. ‘I’m hoping he will confirm what you have said about that night.’
I breathe out through my nose. ‘Good,’ I say. ‘Good. He will. It was obvious. Laura will, too.’
‘It will be excellent if Sadiq confirms it himself,’ she says. ‘I’m seeing him next week. Anyway. The victim has woken up. He can’t give a statement. This is from his sister. And then a second one from his treating doctor, about his current condition, which is evidently slightly worse than we thought. We will get another expert statement about his health, but at the moment they both create a picture of it for us.’
She rattles all of this off as though she is talking us through a complicated but tedious paperwork procedure, like how to get a mortgage or to challenge a parking fine.