to work out what’s going on without bankrupting myself. Aren’t you pleased for me, Doctor?
Everything has changed. I no longer need to buy 11 Bentley Grove.
But I still want to. Why? asks my internal Alice. Because it’s in Cambridge, I tell her, and Cambridge is where I want to live. It’s where I’ve wanted to live since 2003. And this house is for sale, and I’ve already offered to buy it, and no one was killed here – I was wrong about that. And . . . when I pressed ‘Home’ on the SatNav, this was the address that came up: 11 Bentley Grove.
I can’t work out whether my reasons are understandable or insane, and I don’t much care.
‘I’m still buying,’ I tell Selina Gane. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t let you down.’ And then I run.
Chapter 20
24/7/2010
‘Thank you.’ Alice Bean smiled as Charlie took the letter from her. ‘Sam Kombothekra looked terrified when I tried to give it to him.’
‘Men are cowards.’ Charlie opened her bag, made sure Alice saw her putting the envelope safely inside. ‘You could give Sam a note for the milkman and he’d worry about getting mixed up in a scandal.’
‘My aim isn’t to make trouble. The opposite. I care about Simon.’
‘Then take this opportunity to help him.’ Charlie reminded herself that she was here to extract information. It would have been too easy to say, ‘Yeah, well, he wants nothing to do with you – why do you think I’m here?’
She’d suggested to Alice that they meet at Spillages café, but Alice had proposed the park instead. It had irritated Charlie at the time – she hated people who talked about being ‘cooped up’ and behaved as if it was obligatory to go and stand directly under the sun whenever it was out – but now she was glad to be in the open air, following the narrow tree-fringed footpath around the lake, listening as the birds overhead conducted a vigorous debate in a language she didn’t understand. Walking alongside somebody, you didn’t have to look at their face, or let them see yours. Sitting across a table from Alice would have been much harder.
Harder to resist the temptation to say, ‘Oh, by the way – guess who got married last Friday?’ Charlie had decided before ringing Alice that she wouldn’t mention it. She knew that to tell her would lead to open hostility between them, even if she didn’t know exactly how it would happen. Probably it would be her fault. In her official capacity as Simon’s wife, she might feel obliged to say, ‘Take your letter and stick it up your arse.’
She hoped she’d be glad later – proud, even – that she’d chosen the mature, non-confrontational path. She certainly wasn’t enjoying it now, while it was happening; hostility, even if you went on to regret it later, was much more fun in the short term.
‘I’ll help if I can,’ said Alice, ‘but . . . can I ask you a question first?’
‘Fire away.’
‘Do you think Simon will ever forgive me?’
That was one Charlie could answer honestly. ‘No idea,’ she said. ‘He might have forgiven you already. Or he might bear a grudge for ever. The only thing I can guarantee is that he’ll never discuss it with anyone.’ Especially not me.
Alice had stopped in front of a wooden bench by the edge of the lake, under a weeping willow. She brushed the trailing leaves off it and bent to read the writing on the gold plaque. ‘I can never walk past one of these without reading it,’ she told Charlie. ‘I’d feel as if I was leaving someone to die alone. Look at this one – two brothers, both died on 29 April 2005. One was twenty-two and one twenty-four. How sad.’
‘Car accident, probably,’ Charlie said matter-of-factly. She didn’t want to talk about sad things with Alice. With anyone. She imagined herself and Liv both dying on the same day as she reached into her bag for her cigarettes; getting one in her mouth and lit suddenly felt like an urgent need. She took a long drag. ‘When I die, I want my park bench plaque to say, “She always meant to give that up.” ’
Alice laughed. ‘That’s good.’
‘Simon’s worried about Connie Bowskill.’ Time to stop pretending you’re friends enjoying a nice day out. With someone like Alice Bean, there was no such thing as small talk, in any case. So far she’d brought up forgiveness, lonely death, family tragedies – what