she pressed play on the remote control and stretched out on the sofa to watch the rest of her film. Alice Fancourt could wait until tomorrow. If Simon could have a guiding principle, Charlie could too: people who ended phone calls without saying goodbye didn’t deserve to have their errands attended to immediately.
‘Sam.’ Kate Kombothekra took the phone out of her husband’s hands and put it down on the coffee table between them. She was wearing her yellow pyjamas, holding a roll of cling-film in one hand. ‘I need your attention for five seconds. Think you can manage it?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Did you remember to get paper for the printer?’
‘No. Sorry. I’ll do it tomorrow.’
‘Did you ring the council?’
‘Was I supposed to?’
‘Yes. To ask about skip hire, get some quotes . . .’
‘Oh, right. No. Sorry.’
Kate sighed. ‘All right, just one more question, and only because I’m desperate to hear a “yes”: would it be fair to assume that you’ve neglected to do all four things you promised you’d do today?’
‘That was Connie Bowskill on the phone,’ Sam told her. ‘She wants me to ask Grint for Jackie Napier’s number.’ Not an unreasonable request, in the circumstances.
‘Oh, not this again!’ Kate whacked the cling-film rhythmically against the palm of her left hand in what would surely have qualified as a threatening gesture had the weapon been less innocuously domestic. ‘Forget Connie Bowskill. Come and help me get the boys’ stuff ready for tomorrow. I’ve nearly finished the packed lunches – if you could dig out their big rucksacks from the cellar. The camouflagey ones, you know.’ Kate performed a mime: a seated person springing up from a chair and breaking into a run.
Sam didn’t move. ‘She’s staying at the Garden House,’ he said. ‘Same hotel as Selina Gane.’ He wasn’t sure why the idea of the two women in such close proximity disturbed him. Was he worried Connie might do something? No. She wasn’t violent. Desperate, though. Much of the violence Sam had encountered over the years had been born of desperation.
He was fighting the urge to ring Grint and tell him to go to the hotel. And do what, once he got there? It was crazy. So was not wanting Connie to talk to Jackie Napier. Sam didn’t like to think of himself as a control freak – the sort of person who made decisions on other people’s behalf and justified it on the grounds that it was for their own good. He could easily have told Connie that Jackie worked for Lancing Damisz, that there was no need for him to bother Grint – Connie could contact Jackie via her work if she wanted to speak to her. It was natural that Connie should want to be put in touch with the only person in the world who would believe her for sure, the woman who’d seen exactly what she’d seen. In her shoes, Sam would also want to compare notes, go over details. So why were his instincts telling him to do everything he could to keep the two women apart?
He couldn’t stop thinking about something Jackie Napier had said when he’d interviewed her, about the woman who pretended to be Selina Gane and put 11 Bentley Grove on the market. She knew all she had to do was talk about people not looking like they do in their passports. If she made me think about all those other people, she wouldn’t have to convince me – I’d do all the work myself. It’s one of those things everyone says, isn’t it? “He looks nothing like his passport photo, I’m surprised he’s ever allowed back into the country.”
Had Sam misremembered? No, he was fairly sure that was what she’d said.
He opened his mouth to ask Kate if he was imagining problems that didn’t exist, but she had already left the room.
‘Pick a number between one and thirty-nine.’
‘Sixteen,’ said Simon. His and Charlie’s wedding anniversary.
Professor Sir Basil Lambert-Wall dragged his index finger along the books on the shelf closest to him, counting them off one by one. When he got to the sixteenth, he worked it loose from the row, hooked his walking stick over the back of the nearest chair and proceeded to try and take hold of the bulky hardback with both hands. Simon stepped forward to help, regretting the sentimentality that had led him to pick what was undoubtedly the heaviest book on the shelf – The Whisperers, it was called. The subtitle was Private Life in Stalin’s