‘It’s all right – you can say.’
‘Honestly, no. Now that I understand. I didn’t know about the . . . waving. I didn’t know they were friends. I’ve lived in London for a long time; I was out of touch with Marianne’s life, day to day. At night, sometimes, when I saw him . . .’ Rowan tried a laugh and shook her head to convey embarrassment. ‘Over-active imagination.’
Her eyes came to rest on the pair of bolts and, as if she’d seen and followed the chain of thought, Sarah said, ‘He’s not dangerous.’
‘No, of course not. I didn’t think . . . Now I know they were friends, it makes total sense.’ She glanced back towards the sitting room, making sure he hadn’t returned. She spoke quietly anyway. ‘Did he see Marianne’s body?’ she asked. ‘From the window, I mean. I didn’t like to ask him but . . .’
‘Yes,’ Sarah said. ‘Not that night, he didn’t see the accident, thank God, but in the morning, when it got light enough to see the garden. He was . . . very upset.’
‘It must have been traumatic for him. For you both.’
‘Horrible. It was . . . horrible.’
‘We’re sorry to have bothered you,’ Cory said smoothly. ‘I hope we haven’t caused you any more distress. Because Marianne died there, I think you’ve been a little jumpier than usual, haven’t you, Rowan?’
She nodded. ‘A bit. It’s a big house if you’re there on your own.’
‘It was strange to me, that,’ said Sarah. ‘I never understood why she wanted to live on her own.’ She looked at Cory. ‘But I’m not an artist, so . . . Marianne was a lovely girl, wasn’t she? So generous. Not with money, I don’t mean,’ she said hurriedly, as if they might suspect her of freeloading. ‘But her time. When she wasn’t working all the hours that God sent, she used to take Martin out – mostly the cinema, lunch sometimes, or a gig – he likes his music. She never said it but I think she knew it was almost as nice for me as it was for him. A break, if you know what I’m saying.’
Twenty-seven
As soundlessly as possible, Rowan slid the little bolt across. If Cory should take it into his head to kick down a second door today, this one on the bathroom would put up no resistance at all but she needed the symbolism of it anyway, just a few minutes in a locked room, alone.
She went to the basin and leaned forward until her forehead touched the mirror. The cold glass felt good and she tried to concentrate on the sensation, let it calm her whirling thoughts. Downstairs in the kitchen, Cory would be putting a neat cross next to Martin Johnson’s name, moving on to a new line of inquiry, but she had no idea what to do next. Unnerved as she had been by him, at least the man who watched at night had represented a potential way inside the puzzle. Now he’d become yet another dead-end.
Her breath clouded the mirror. How had she let herself get so very vulnerable? She gripped the edge of the basin until her hands hurt. She should have burned the drawing of the fire – why the hell hadn’t she? It would have been so easy. Here, in the basin: put it in, drop a match on top and watch it burn, flame eating flame. Run the tap and wash away the cinders.
Standing straight, she looked herself in the eye. She’d made a big mistake.
—
Cory had left the main light off, and the kitchen was lit instead by the series of lamps that Jacqueline had dotted around the room. Like her daughter, she’d disliked overhead lighting, and it was true that the room looked better like this, the corners softened, units half-hidden in shadow, the focus centred on the long table where Cory sat with his glass and the bottle of brandy. Seeing Rowan in the doorway, he looked up. ‘I was beginning to wonder if something had happened to you.’
She came to the table and sat down. ‘That was excruciating,’ she said, tipping her head in the direction of the flats. Despite the emptiness of the street, they’d walked back from Benson Place in silence.
‘Poor woman,’ he said.
‘Getting in there like that, saying we wanted to talk about Marianne, you standing out of the way until she’d opened the door . . .’
‘I know.’ He nodded. ‘But we had to; she wouldn’t have opened it otherwise.’ He reached for the pad of A4 again. ‘Can I?’
She shrugged. ‘Go ahead.’
‘You, I mean.’
‘What, draw me?’
‘Why not? Just while we talk.’
He took the pencil from his pocket again and she watched as he began to sketch out the first framing lines of her brow. There was something soothing about the motion of his hand over the paper, the apparent ease of it; she started to feel calmer almost immediately. He held the pencil loosely between his fingers, as if it decided where it needed to go and he merely provided the support, a medium at the Ouija board. Every few seconds he glanced up and looked at her face, appraising, before looking down again. The soft scratch of pencil on paper was lulling, almost hypnotic.