With the lights of the village turning out, Elizabeth opens up her appointments diary and attempts today’s question.
WHAT WAS THE REGISTRATION NUMBER OF GWEN TALBOT’S DAUGHTER-IN-LAW’S NEW CAR?
She approves of this question. Not the make of the car; that was too easy. Not the color; that could be guessed, and guessing proved nothing. But the registration number—that takes genuine recall.
As she has done so often before, in a different life, usually in a different country and a different century, Elizabeth shuts her eyes and zooms in. She sees it immediately, or does she hear it? It is both; her brain is telling her what she sees.
JL17 BCH
She traces a finger down the page and reads the correct answer. She is spot-on. Elizabeth shuts the diary. She’ll write the next question later; she already has a nice idea.
For the record, the car was a blue Lexus, Gwen Talbot’s daughter-in-law having done well for herself in bespoke yacht insurance. As for the daughter-in-law’s name, well, that remained a mystery. Elizabeth had only been introduced to her once and had not quite caught it. She was confident that was just a hearing issue and not a memory issue.
Memory was the bogeyman that stalked Coopers Chase. Forgetfulness, absentmindedness, muddling up names.
What did I come in here for? The grandchildren would giggle at you. The sons and daughters would joke too, but keep a watchful eye. Every so often you would wake at night in cold dread. Of all the things to lose, to lose one’smind? Let them take a leg or a lung; let them take anything before they take that. Before you became “poor Rosemary” or “poor Frank,” catching the last glimpses of the sun and seeing them for what they were. Before there were no more trips, no more games, no more Murder Clubs. Before there was no more you.
Almost certainly you mixed up your daughter’s and granddaughter’s names because you were thinking about the potatoes, but who knows? That was the tightrope.
So every day Elizabeth opens her diary to a date two weeks ahead and writes herself a question. And every day she answers a question she set herself two weeks ago. This is her early-warning system. This is her team of scientists poring over seismology graphs. If there is going to be an earthquake, Elizabeth will be the first to know about it.
She walks into the living room. A license plate from a fortnight ago is a real test, and she is pleased with herself. Stephen is on the sofa, lost in concentration. This morning, before her trip to London with Joyce, they had been talking about Stephen’s daughter, Emily. Stephen is worried about her and thinks she is getting too thin. Elizabeth disagreed, but all the same, Stephen wished Emily would visit more often, just so they could keep an eye on her. Elizabeth agreed that was reasonable, and said she’d talk to Emily.
However, Emily is not Stephen’s daughter. He has no children. Emily was his first wife, and had died nearly twenty-five years ago.
Stephen is an expert in Middle Eastern art, perhapstheexpert if you were talking about British academics. He had lived in Tehran and Beirut in the sixties and seventies, and many years later would go back to track down looted masterpieces for once-wealthy west London exiles. Elizabeth had briefly been in Beirut in the early seventies, but their paths had not actually crossed until 2004, when Stephen had picked up a glove she had dropped outside a bookshop in Chipping Norton. Six months later they were married.
Elizabeth knocks the kettle on. Stephen still writes every day, sometimesfor hours. He has an academic agent in London, whom he says he must get up to see soon. Stephen keeps his work safely locked up, but of course nothing is safely locked up from Elizabeth, and she reads it from time to time. Sometimes it is just a piece copied from his newspaper, repeated over and over, but most often it is stories about Emily, or for Emily. All in the most beautiful handwriting.
There will be no more trains up to London for Stephen to have lunch with his agent, or to see exhibitions, or just to look up a little something at the British Library. Stephen is on the brink. He is over the brink, if Elizabeth is honest with herself. She is choosing to manage the situation. She medicates him as best she can. Sedation, to be truthful. With her pills and his, Stephen never wakes in the night.
The kettle now boiled, Elizabeth makes two cups of tea. PC De Freitas and her detective chief inspector are coming to see them soon. That had all worked out very nicely, but she still has some thinking to do. After today’s trip with Joyce, she now has some information to hand to the police, and she would like their information in return. They are really going to have to do a number on Donna and her boss, though. She has a few thoughts.
Stephen never cooks, so Elizabeth knows the place won’t burn down while she’s out. He never goes to the shop, or the restaurant, or the pool, so there won’t be an incident. Sometimes she will come home to evidence of a poorly concealed flood, and sometimes there is emergency washing, but no matter.
Elizabeth is keeping Stephen to herself for as long as she can. At some point he will have a fall, or cough up blood, and he will be exposed to a doctor who won’t be fooled and that will be that, and off he will go.
Elizabeth grinds the temazepam into Stephen’s tea. Then adds milk. Her mother would have had rules on the etiquette of that. Temazepam before milk, or milk before temazepam? She smiles; this is a joke Stephen would have enjoyed. Would Ibrahim like it? Joyce? She supposed no one would.
Sometimes they still play chess. Elizabeth once spent a month in a safe house somewhere near the East German border, babysitting the Russian chess grand master and later defector Yuri Tsetovich. She remembers him crying tears of joy when he saw how well she played. Elizabeth had lost none of her skill, but Stephen beats her every time, and with an elegance that makes her swoon. Though they are playing less and less now, she realizes. Perhaps they have played their last game. Has Stephen toppled his last king? Please, no.
Elizabeth gives Stephen his tea and kisses him on the forehead. He thanks her.
She returns to her notebook and flicks forward two weeks to write that day’s question, a fact she learned from Joanna and Cornelius today.
HOW MUCH MONEY DID IAN VENTHAM MAKE FROMTHE DEATH OF TONY CURRAN?
She writes the answer farther down the page,£12 MILLION, and closes her appointments diary for another day.
25.
PC Donna De Freitas had got the news the previous morning to report to CID. Elizabeth was a quick worker.
She had been assigned to the Tony Curran case as Chris Hudson’s “shadow.” A new Kent Police initiative, something to do with inclusivity, or mentoring, or diversity, or whatever the guy from HR in Maidstone had said when he rang her. Whatever it was, it meant she was sitting on a bench overlooking the English Channel while DCI Chris Hudson ate an ice cream.
Chris had given her the Tony Curran file to get her up to speed. She couldn’t believe her luck. Donna had enjoyed the file a great deal at first. It felt like some proper police work. It brought back all the things she loved about South London: murder, drugs, someone who carried off a “no comment” with a bit of panache. As she read, she felt sure she would stumble across a tiny clue that would crack open some decades-old case. She had role-played it in her head. “Sir, I did some digging, and it turns out that May 29, 1997, was a bank holiday, which rather blows Tony Curran’s alibi, don’t you think?” Chris Hudson would look dubious—no way has this rookie cracked the case—and she would raise an eyebrow and say, “I ran his handwriting through forensics, sir, and guess what.” Chris would feign a lack of interest, but she would know she had him. “It turns out that Tony Curran was actually left-handed all along.” Chris would blow out his cheeks. He would have to hand it to her.
None of this happened. Donna simply read exactly what Chris had read, a potted history of a man getting away with murder and then being murdered in turn. No smoking guns, no inconsistencies, nothing to peel back. But she had enjoyed it nonetheless.
