might have told Joy. But he would have told her that Lucy Smith was coming. Yes. Lucy Smith. But that is not my real name and now I am not even Lucy Smith. I am …’ Her shaking hands find the little felt bag and she pulls out the passports. She flicks to the back and reads the text. ‘I am Marie Valerie Caron. Good. Good. I am Marie Caron. Yes. And Lucy Smith does not exist. Joy does not know where I live. But …
‘School!’ she says. ‘Michael knew where Marco went to school. But would he have told Joy? No. he would not have told Joy. Of course not. And even if he did, they only know Lucy Smith, not Marie Caron. And Stella is at a different school to Marco and no one apart from me and Samia knows where that is. So, what about the passport people? No. They would be somewhere so deeply buried away in the criminal underworld that no one would even think to look. The children: they knew I was here, but they would not tell anyone. Good. OK.’
She paces as she speaks. Then she looks down at Michael’s body. Should she leave it? Leave it for Joy to find tomorrow morning. Or should she move him, clean everything? Hide his body? He is a big man. Where would she hide him? She would not be able to hide him completely, but maybe for just long enough for her and the children to get to London.
Yes, she decides, yes. She will clean everything. She will pull his body down into his wine cellar. She will cover it up with something. Joy will come tomorrow and think he has gone somewhere. She won’t know he’s missing until his body starts to smell. By which time Lucy and the children will be long gone. And everyone will just assume he was killed by someone from the shadier parts of his life.
She pulls open the cupboard beneath the sink. She takes out bleach. She opens a new roll of super-absorbent kitchen towel.
She starts to clean.
29
CHELSEA, 1990
Phin and I sat on the roof of the house. Phin had found the roof. I had no idea it existed. To access the roof, one had to push open a trapdoor in the ceiling of the attic hallway, climb up into a low-roofed tunnel and then push open another trapdoor which opened out on to a flat roof with the most remarkable views across the river.
We were not, it seemed, the first to discover the secret roof terrace. There was already a pair of scruffy plastic chairs up there, some dead plants in pots, a little table.
I could barely believe that my father did not know about this space. He always complained about having a north-facing garden, that he could not enjoy the evening sun. Yet up here was a private oasis which caught the sun all day long.
The tiny squares of paper that Phin had been given at Kensington Market the week before turned out to be comprised of four even smaller squares of paper joined together. Each tiny segment had a picture of a smiling face on it.
‘What if we have a bad trip?’ I asked, feeling unutterably foolish using such language.
‘We should just have half each,’ said Phin. ‘To start off with.’
I nodded effusively. I’d have preferred to take none at all. I really wasn’t that type of person. But it was Phin and I would, to use the parental cliché, have followed him off a cliff if he’d asked me to.
I watched him swallow down the tiny shred and then he watched as I did the same. The sky was watercolour blue. The sun was weak but up here, in this trap, it felt warm against our skin. We felt nothing for quite some time. We talked about what we could see: the people sitting in their gardens, the boats idling down the Thames, the view of the power station on the other side of the river. After half an hour or so I relaxed, thinking that the acid was clearly fake, that nothing was going to happen, that I’d got away with it. But then I felt my blood begin to warm beneath my skin; I glanced upwards into the sky and saw that it was filled with pulsing white veins that became luminous and multi-toned, like mother of pearl, the longer I stared at them. I realised that the sky was not blue