“No probs,” DC Miles said. “Leave it with me.”
He disappeared and then came back a few minutes later and said, “She’s expecting you. We’ll give you a lift in a patrol car.”
I nodded. A sense of immense weariness was washing over me. The police interview might be over—but somehow the idea of calling Helena had made me realize something I should have known all along: that this nightmare was only just beginning. I would have to tell Hel what had happened. And then her husband, Roland. And they would have to tell their twin girls—something two little four-year-olds should never have to understand. How could they comprehend something I could barely process myself—that Uncle Gabe would not be coming to see them ever again? That he was gone?
And after Hel, it would be Gabe’s parents, and our friends, and the bank and the broadband company and—and—and—
I thought back to when our parents had died, the numbing stream of admin, the endless spreadsheets that Helena had compiled. Inform the mortgage company. Tell the insurers. Cancel the TV license. Write to the GP. It had gone on and on and on for months.
I couldn’t do it all again. Gabe hadn’t even made a will, that I knew of. Why would he, when he was barely thirty and as healthy as anyone we knew?
“Jack?” DS Malik said, and I looked up, and realized the police officer was speaking to me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. My lips were dry and stuck together. “I—I wasn’t listening. Can you say that again?”
“We’re ready to go,” she said gently. “If you want. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said. But it wasn’t true. I wasn’t okay. I would never be okay again.
Hel was standing on the doorstep as the patrol car drew up outside their neat little white-painted London semi, her face twisted with worry, a worry that cleared, but only slightly, as we came around the corner.
“Jack.” She hurried down the checkered front path and I fell into her arms, burying my face in the familiar scent of her hair. “Oh my God, Jack,” she said again, and her voice cracked. “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it’s true.”
“We’ll leave Jack with you, Mrs. Wick,” DS Malik said. Her tone was sympathetic. “Is there a number we can use to be in touch? We can’t release her phone yet, unfortunately.”
“Yes,” Hel said. She sounded distracted. “Yes, of course. I mean, I guess… mine? Probably? You’ve got it, right?”
“Yes, we’ve got it. Is there a landline to the house?”
“Yes,” Helena said. She made a frantic motion to someone inside, who I guessed was Roland. “Rols, Rols, can you give them a card?”
“Sure,” Roland said, and I heard his footsteps retreat up the hallway and then come back.
“Thank you, Hel,” I said. I pulled away from her, but she kept hold of my hand. “I’m so sorry—this must have been—”
“Fuck that,” Helena said shortly. Her hand tightened around mine, her grip crushing my ring into my knuckle, so hard it was almost painful. “Don’t be stupid, Jack, you don’t have anything to apologize for.”
She took the cards Roland held out to her and passed them to DS Malik.
“There you go. That’s my office number at the bottom—I’m a journalist and I work from home. You’ll always find me on either that or my mobile. And that one”—she pointed at the other business card, underneath—“that’s my husband’s. He’s a solicitor.”
“Great,” DS Malik said. “Thanks. And Jack, thanks for being so patient. I know this has been a horrendous experience. We’ll be in touch very soon, and you’ll be assigned a family liaison officer who’ll be able to help you through the process and hopefully answer any questions you have. She’ll be in contact sometime on Monday, I imagine. Is there anything else I can do before we leave you?”
I shook my head. I wanted nothing more than to curl up in the small white bed in Hel’s spare room and cry myself to sleep. But the tears still wouldn’t come.
* * *
WHEN I WOKE, THE STREET lamps were lit in the road outside, the yellow rays slanting under the curtains Helena must have drawn before she left the room. They fell on my face, making me blink and struggle to sit up, squinting against the glow.
For a moment I knew where I was—Hel’s attic room was as familiar to me as my own bed—but not why, and I sat there, feeling an ache in my head and a bone-deep tiredness in my limbs, and trying to remember what had happened and why I felt such a strange sense of dread. The clock by the bedside said 6:45 and I rubbed my eyes confusedly as I realized—the street lamps must have only just come on—it was dusk, not morning. The realization gave me an odd sliding sense of everything being upside down, out of kilter, off-balance.
Then it came to me. Or no, came is the wrong word. It didn’t just come, it hit me—sucker-punched me with a blow to the gut that left me doubled up and gasping with grief.
Gabe was dead. Gabe was dead.
For a long time I simply sat there, curled over my knees, my head in my hands, trying to make sense of it, trying to cram the fact into my brain. Was this going to be what it was like, every morning from now on? Was every day going to be a process of waking up, reaching for his warmth, and losing him all over again?
I remembered how my grandfather had been after my parents died. The way he would look around vaguely, ask for our mother, and Hel would say gently, “Mum’s dead, remember, Grandad? She and Dad died two years ago.” And then three years ago. And then four.
And every time, he would react with the same grief, his face crumpling, his blue eyes filling with unexpected tears. The shock wore off a little as the years passed—as if the knowledge had lodged in there somewhere, in spite of his Alzheimer’s—but the grief… the grief never lessened.
After a while, as his memory deteriorated even further and the dementia made its last ravages on his brain, we simply stopped telling him.
“They’re on their way, Grandad,” Hel would say. Or, “I don’t know, Grandad. Do you know where Mum is?” and he’d say, comfortably, “Oh, she’ll be making tea, I expect. Would you like a cup?”
Maybe that would be me. Hel coming in with a cup of coffee. Gabe just rang. Said he’d call back later. And the strange thing was, I could almost imagine it. If I shut my eyes, I could picture him—back at the house, hunched over his computer, typing away on some impenetrable bit of code, utterly absorbed. The thought gave me a kind of peace, the idea that he could be out there somewhere—just beyond my reach. But it was a dishonest peace, and I knew that as much as I could fool myself if I tried hard enough, all I was doing was pushing the pain further down the line until the moment I stopped pretending and let the agony wash back over me.
At last, I forced myself out from under the covers and stood up, swaying a little. I stank. Mostly of sweat. The smell was the combined exertions of a night spent running around Arden Alliance, evading security guards, and then a morning in a hot interview room being interrogated by two police officers, and then a day passed out in the same clothes under a winter duvet. I smelled of adrenaline and fear—a smell I knew well from my fairly frequent brushes with tricky situations, though I had never been so scared as I was last night.
Someone had killed Gabe. But why? What could sweet, funny, loving Gabe have possibly done to upset anyone to that extent? Had they got him mixed up with someone else? But how—how could a case of mistaken identity get taken as far as murder? It didn’t seem credible. But then, neither did any of the alternatives.
As the room settled around me, I tried to push the questions away. I couldn’t answer them—I had spent half the night and most of the morning going over variants of the same in my own head and with the police. And I realized now that I was extremely hungry—almost faint with hunger, in fact. I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything apart from coffee for more than twenty-four hours.
The smell of something deeply savory—sausages, perhaps—was wafting up the stairs. And suddenly I had the strangest feeling of disassociation. Because how could I be hungry when Gabe was lying in a police morgue somewhere, dead and gone forever? How could anything as mundane as food possibly matter?
And yet it did, and I was. The smell of the sausages brought water to my mouth, leaving me almost dizzy with hunger. And I knew that Gabe would be the first to understand that. You’ve got to eat, he would always tell me before a job. You can’t think on an empty stomach. And I needed to think. I needed to think very badly indeed.