“What if she kills someone else?” said Laura.
“We’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“You worked with Des Crisp, right?” asked Laura.
“Not with him, really. I was still a baby bill when he left. Knew him a bit.”
“What was he like?”
“Oooof,” exhaled Bob.
“Are the rumors true?”
“Trust me, Laura, you don’t want to know.”
Laura got into the car and waited for Bob to get in at the passenger side.
“What if I do? What if I do want to know?” she said as Bob strained with the effort of sitting down and shut his door.
Bob threw his cigarette out of the window and popped some nicotine gum into his mouth. “He was scum. And now we’ve got to clean up his mess.”
Laura growled. “Now we’ve got to clean up his mess.”
“What?”
“Never heard that one out loud before.” She went into the character of “grizzled old cop.” “He was scum, kid. Scum. And now we’ve got to clean up his mess.”
Bob laughed. Playing along, he attempted a New York accent. “Now we gotta clean up his mess.”
“I got enough mess of my own. Now I gotta clean up this punk’s mess too?”
They went silent, each deciding the joke had run its course.
“Maybe he did just fall off,” said Laura.
“Wouldn’t that be lovely?”
—
Carol stayed inher chair, stewing, while the other residents shuffled out. She’d tried to blend in, just to be another person, and she’d failed. As a child, she’d never really felt like one of the other children. At thirteen she’d moved schools and seen it as a chance to restyle herself as a “normal girl,” wearing what they wore, talking how they talked, but it hadn’t worked. Kids can tell.
Now it had happened again. All because she was a murderer. All that finger-pointing, all those accusations: It had hurt. Maybe she should embrace the role, stop pretending, be who she was. She’d never killed a whole roomful of people at once. Just a few minutes before, when all the eyes had been on her, if there had been a button that could have extinguished the lot of them, melted them, turned them into nothing more than puddles on the floor, would she have pressed it? Tempting.
While it was on her mind, Carol took her phone from her handbag and googled “Sir Desmond Crisp.” She immediately saw a picture of him in uniform that looked about thirty years old. Heappeared harder, steelier, more cynical. Not like the cuddly, retired Desmond she’d known.
Below the picture was a caption:Sir Desmond Crisp. Former head of the Metropolitan Police.
She smiled at the absurdity of it. Trust her to go to a retirement home packed with ex-police.
Thirteen
Catherine smiled atMarco, the square-jawed waiter. “Can I get you something to drink?” he asked.
“I’m sure my friends won’t be long.” Catherine thought she had to start dragging the others out once in a while. The fancy café with the tattooed staff was as adventurous as it had got. They were in London, for heaven’s sake. Hampstead was on their doorstep, with its charming little Italian restaurants, and Vietnamese and Indian and Greek and Lebanese and Turkish, and yet when they ate together they always ate here, in the home’s on-site restaurant, the Apple Tree. It felt sanitary to Catherine, as if everything had been bought from a website called restaurantfurniture.com. They could have been in a four-star chain-hotel restaurant anywhere in the world. It had no character.
There was also the fact that every one of the diners was elderly. Catherine was to blame, of course. She’dchosento be here, but she’d retired from work, not the world. She had not intended to sequester herself like this. She was an old person and she wasin an old person’s development, but that wasn’t all she was. She’d have liked to be around young people, too, and yet she’d voluntarily hidden herself away from them.
It was all Nigel’s fault, of course. Bastard. They’d always planned on retiring to the South of France together. They’d never got as far as buying a place, but Annecy looked nice. Catherine had even been brushing up on her French in preparation, diligently hitting her targets on the app on her phone.
