meaningless irrelevance to be ignored, tossed aside. And if I was a person within all this, then I could do something about it.
My mind was working more clearly than it had in months, a stark crystalline clarity that took my breath away like snowy air. I had forgotten what it was like to think this way.
I could hardly track down the burglars and force them to spill the story, my badass Liam Neeson fantasies notwithstanding. But the other end of the thread, the end that lay somewhere here in the Ivy House: that one I could find, maybe, and follow.
Weather or no weather, I needed a cigarette. I threw on my coat and went out to the terrace. Wind roaring high in the trees, the light from the kitchen throwing the hillocks and valleys of mud into stark, distorted shadow. Leaves scuttling, rain shining on the terrace tiles. My heart was beating high in my throat and for some reason I caught myself grinning.
* * *
“What’s that?” Melissa said, nodding at the plastic bag—later, when she had got in cold-cheeked and windblown, and I had tucked her up on a sofa with blankets and hot chocolate, and I was listening to her trade-fair stories and rummaging through the bag of samples she had brought home.
“Oh,” I said, looking up from what appeared to be a tiny knitted condom. “It’s your candlestick. The one the police took away. That detective, Martin, he brought it back.”
“Why?” Melissa asked sharply.
“They’re done with it. The forensic people.”
“Why’d he come himself? Why not post it?”
I didn’t want to tell her anything, not yet, not till I had something solid. “I think he was in the area,” I said.
“What did he want to talk about?”
She was sitting up straight, hot chocolate forgotten. “He didn’t, really,” I said, going back to the sample bag. “He just dropped it off and left. Is this a leprechaun condom?”
Melissa laughed, relaxing. “It’s a finger puppet, silly! Look, it’s got a face, when did you ever see a condom with—”
“I’ve seen weirder. I bet you can get—”
“It’s wool!”
With a little zap of panic I spotted the two empty whiskey glasses, which I had of course forgotten to take away, but Melissa either didn’t notice them or assumed Hugo and I had had a nightcap together. “So, kinky leprechauns,” I said. “What kind of trade fair was this, anyway?”
“Oh, wild. People swinging from hand-blown chandeliers.”
She was happy because I was joking around, and I only realized then just how deeply I had frozen at the first sight of Rafferty and Kerr, just how far I had receded back into some dark echoing space. “Filling Jacuzzis with organic bilberry-elderflower champagne,” I said. “I knew it.”
“We’re a crazy bunch.”
“Thank God for that,” I said, leaning across to kiss her, “or you’d never put up with me,” and felt her smile against my mouth.
We went back to poking through the samples so I could take the piss out of the weirder ones, and after a few minutes Hugo came clumping downstairs in his dressing gown, knuckling his eyes, and we made him a hot chocolate and Melissa dug a packet of sustainable oat-based biscuits out of the bag. Neither of us mentioned Martin’s visit. The next morning, opening the bin to toss something in, I saw the candlestick: sticking out of the rubbish where it had been shoved deep and hard, plastic bag twisted around it tight as a garrote.
* * *
I walked Melissa to work, hung around within earshot while Hugo took his shower, installed him in the study and then told him I was going for a wander around the garden to clear my head. He gave me a vague smile and a wave and turned back to his desk. I wasn’t positive he had registered what I had said, or even who I was.
The wind had died down, leaving rumpled drifts of leaves against the walls. The replanted bushes and the stuff Melissa had brought from the garden center looked disgruntled and out of place; some of them were starting to wither. My mother’s sapling leaned at a dispirited angle in a corner, still in its pot—so far no one had worked up the nerve to plant it in that gaping crater. I hadn’t taken my Xanax the night before and everything felt jagged and discordant, every branch too savagely outlined against the gray sky, the breeze setting off sharp mechanical rattles among the dead leaves. I put a big oak tree