‘Can I have one of those?’ She’d regret it later but what the hell; she needed it now. Turk came closer and stooped to light it for her, his face inches from hers. He was what most people would call attractive – for a few months in 2005, he’d been the heart-throb of thousands – but Rowan found him faintly unsettling, she always had. Nothing about him made sense. He was tall and strongly built, for example – burly – but the way he dressed bordered on effete. Even today he’d pushed the concept of a black suit to its limits with his drainpipe trousers and Nehru jacket, the eighties-style skinny tie. The last time she’d seen a picture of him – in the Evening Standard, out with Marianne at some hip event in East London – he’d been wearing a velvet jacket with a cluster of Victorian cameos pinned to the lapel. It was just the latest variation on a theme, though: he’d been like it at seventeen when they’d first met him. He’d gone through a nail-varnish phase long before he’d had any professional justification.
‘What are you doing here?’ he said.
Rowan looked at him but his expression was curious rather than hostile. ‘Jacqueline rang to tell me, and I said I would come.’ She exhaled a lungful of smoke, watched it feather in the damp air and disappear. ‘It wasn’t just that – I wanted to. I needed to, even though Marianne and I hadn’t seen each other for so long, even though we’d fallen out. She was such an important part of my life.’
He shook his head as if he’d despaired of them both a long time ago.
Rowan thought of the letter on her kitchen table, Marianne’s heart-monitor handwriting. ‘Pete, had she mentioned me to you recently?’
He shrugged, shook his head again. ‘Should she have?’
‘No, I just wondered. Now’s she’s gone, I . . .’
‘The whole thing was such bullshit. You should have sorted it out then, the two of you.’ He took another deep drag on his cigarette. ‘Anyway, you’ve missed your chance now.’ His eyes kept returning to a spot in front of him and, following his gaze, Rowan saw a patch of lawn by the patio steps that was completely ruined. The grass was worn away, the earth underneath turned to mud, and with a shock she realised it was where Marianne had landed: the grass had been rubbed away by all the feet that had come and gone since, the paramedics and police. Crime-scene investigators.
‘What do you know about it?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘The accident.’
‘She fell, didn’t she? The roof was slippery and she fell off it.’
‘Do you remember when we used to go up there?’
‘Of course.’ He sounded insulted by the implication that he might have forgotten anything so sacred. ‘We still did it occasionally, she and I, when we had something to talk about.’
‘Was she the same?’
Turk turned and gave Rowan a long look. ‘If you’re talking about the vertigo, yes.’
Her heart thumped. ‘When did you last see her? How did she . . . ?’
With a dull thud from inside, the kitchen door opened. It had always stuck in wet weather; you had to kick it. Holding an old Fair Isle sweater over her head, Jacqueline ran up the steps and across the lawn, the heels of her shoes sticking in the mud. ‘Have you got one of those for me, Peter?’
They stood in a line behind the bead curtain of rain coming off the shed roof. Jacqueline cupped shaking hands around the flame that Turk gave her and her swollen face lit up in the gloom. It was three o’clock at the latest but the day was already shutting down around them, the darkness gathering.
‘I’m sorry, Rowan, about just now.’
‘Please. Don’t even . . .’
‘I had a bit of a moment,’ she said to Turk. ‘It all just . . . overwhelmed me.’
‘You’ve been incredibly brave,’ he said.
‘I’m lost,’ she said. ‘Shipwrecked.’
‘You’re strong.’
‘I don’t know.’ Jacqueline pulled the sweater around her shoulders. It was pilled and a little shrunken-looking and Rowan recognised it as one that Marianne used to wear sometimes when she was painting. Had it been one of Seb’s originally, a relic from the seventies?
‘It’s strange, seeing you both again,’ Jacqueline said. ‘Together like this, I mean. The three of you then . . . I keep expecting Marianne to come through the gate.’ Her eyes filled with tears that she brushed quickly away.
For a few seconds, only the crackle of burning tobacco interrupted the low hiss of the rain but then she asked, ‘What are you studying, Rowan? You said on the phone you were a student.’
‘Seventeenth-century history – I’m doing a PhD.’
‘I thought you were in TV,’ said Turk.
‘I was but I realised it was the research I enjoyed, and the more senior I got, the further away I was from it so . . .’
‘Brava,’ Jacqueline said. ‘It’s hard, giving up a salary.’ She reached over and rubbed Rowan’s arm in a way she’d seen her do to other people a hundred times before, part encouragement, part, Rowan had always suspected, consolation. Then she finished her cigarette and ground the butt underfoot. Her shoes were covered in mud. ‘I just want to stay out here all day but I’d better go back in. I haven’t even spoken to James since the service, or Bryony. Come inside, Peter, have a drink – you look like you need one. I know I bloody do.’