struck eight. I was in a fable again.
What I saw when I turned back to the house, I shall never forget. Quick was sitting in the kitchen, upright on a chair. The curtains here were also drawn back, the whole place lit up. I thought I might cry out in shock. Quick had no hair. There was nothing on her head but a few dull tufts, a patched map with no coordinates. She was looking at me, and I raised my hand in greeting, but she did not react, and then I realized with horror that she was not looking at me at all – but at someone – or something – beyond me, waiting in the garden.
I heard a twig snap and my throat closed in fear as I turned to face the darkness she’d lured me to, ready to fight, ready to yell. I was sure there was a presence beyond the shrubbery, concealed behind the hanging branches of the wilderness, but nothing showed.
I whirled back to the house, ran to the kitchen door and forced my way in, desperate to get away from whatever was waiting in the garden. I was in front of her now. She was still upright, still in the chair. There was a macabre perfection to her pale skull, a look of beatitude and finality on her serene face. Her wig lay on the floor like the pelt of an animal. I had no idea she’d ever worn one.
‘Quick?’ I said, the horror churning in my throat.
But of course Quick did not reply, because Quick was dead.
*
I called the police before thinking about how this looked – the house locked, but me inside it, the kitchen door still open, my foot marks in the grass. It wasn’t until the post-mortem revealed the estimated time of Quick’s death, and that her bloodstream contained ten times the amount of painkillers she had been prescribed, and the coroner learned of her cancer, that the suspicion was removed from my head and it was declared an accidental death. It made me so angry, I can’t tell you. That I, the only person she had come to trust, might ever be suspected of breaking into her house and killing her. I was the only one who’d ever been willing to find out Quick’s true story.
After calling the police I came back to the kitchen, and knelt down beside her, touching her body. It was still warm. Perhaps I had missed her by a matter of minutes. She had not strictly invited me that night; it was me determined that she should not be alone. But had she wanted this end? I told her I was coming over – she would know I would be the first to find her. Maybe she had wanted to be saved. I’ll never know.
I looked around. The bottle of pills was in front of her, and half a bottle of gin. This didn’t necessarily mean anything; she loved drinking, and she had been in pain. I could not countenance that what she’d done was deliberate.
‘Police,’ said a voice. I jumped, and went to the front door.
There were two policemen, and they’d also brought an ambulance. I was in shock – their energy was so different as they came into the house; officious yet weary, seen-it-all-before. I was jumpy, new-born with the fear and shock. ‘Who’s her next of kin?’ asked one of them, and I said I didn’t know, but Edmund Reede was her boss – and perhaps they should call him.
Reede was still at work, the exhibition due to open the next day, and he was working to the nail. I couldn’t hear his response as the policeman stood in Quick’s hall, telling him what had been discovered. The call was brief. I sat in the front room, and a policeman came and placed himself opposite me. The clock ticked. He eyed me, and then I realized what he might be thinking, and I envisaged my incarceration, the Carib murderess – the outrage it might cause, the inevitability of it, of people like me.
Reede seemed to appear within minutes. He’d hared down over Waterloo Bridge in his car, and burst through the front door, What the hell’s happened, where the hell is she, what the . . . and the words died on his mouth as he watched the paramedics carrying Quick out. She looked so tiny and frail, and I saw the shock on Reede’s face, a pain that for once