The lights were off in the rest of the house and the door to our bedroom was closed. I opened it, half-expecting to find nobody there. Marianne was in bed. She was wearing some old nightgown when normally she sleeps naked. She wasn’t asleep though, she was just staring up at the ceiling. Her face looked puffy and tear-stained but I couldn’t really be sure in the half-light.

  ‘What’s the matter? Not feeling well?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re not coming to Frank and Phil’s then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anything I can get you?’

  ‘No.’

  I shut the door, walked through to the kitchen. There was a mess of dirty plates and saucepans in the sink. A couple of empty wine bottles stood on the sideboard. Marianne must have drunk both. I got another bottle off the rack and hunted about for the corkscrew. But I couldn’t find it and after I’d looked in all the obvious places I started going through the kitchen drawers. Then I opened this cupboard that’s like a junkyard of broken stuff and things we hardly ever use. I had half an idea that we had a spare corkscrew in there. I stuck my hand right down to the back and I could feel something small and cold and curved. I recognised the feel of it, I recognised the way it fitted into my hand. It was a Zippo lighter. I pulled it out and then I stood up and got out the other one from my pocket – the one I’d taken from the bedsit – and compared the two. They were pretty similar, it was true, but nonetheless recognisably different. And the one I’d just dug out from the back of the cupboard was definitely the one Marianne had given me.

  I poured myself a whisky and drank it down then poured myself another. I stared at Jessica’s drawing of the man with huge eyes, now pinned to the wall above the kitchen sink. Then I opened the back door and sat down on the back step and got out my cigarettes, I’m still smoking the French brand the man smoked, I don’t know why. When I went to the newsagent’s afterwards, those were the ones I automatically asked for and now I’m used to them.

  There was the slightest of chills in the air and a grey mass of clouds slid slowly across the sky. There’d been the flashbacks of course but apart from that I’d hardly thought about the dead man until now. I’d been living in some kind of animal present, focused on Jarawa and the campaign, I’d hardly even thought about Marianne. And yet all that time I knew of course that he was there. He was waiting outside but looking in, threatening to enter at any moment. Perhaps only now was I coming out of the shock. For the moment I was thinking about the mix-up with the lighters. It was clear in my head that if I hadn’t made that mistake – if I hadn’t been so damned sure that the man’s Zippo was the same one Marianne had given me – then I never would have killed him. How strange to think that a man’s life could hinge on such a trivial mistake. I just sat there smoking my cigarette staring into the night sky. If I’d only had the nerve to have it out with Marianne, the man would still be alive today. But I’d had weeks to do that and I hadn’t. Suddenly I started torturing myself with all these hypotheticals. If only I’d done this, then that would have happened, and if only that had happened, it would never have come to this, and so forth. It lasted for a while, for two cigarettes maybe. But then in the end I got tired of it.

  I found myself slipping back into this horrible self-pity that I knew was all wrong, about the Zippo and chance, how I’d been a victim of fate. But I realised soon enough that I was still kidding myself. I started thinking about how I’d put myself beyond the pale and how I wasn’t normal anymore, how I was a murderer and everything, how perhaps I’d been a murderer all my life, how maybe this was always going to happen from the very moment I was born or even conceived.

  It was the loneliness as well. For the first time since I’d found out about the man, I could feel a wrenching need for physical closeness. I wanted to hold Marianne and comfort her and have her comfort me. I wanted to lose myself in our intimacy. I wanted to touch her body and stroke her hair although I didn’t want to make love. I just wanted to lie with her. I remembered the way she’d walk around the house naked and drunk, at ease with herself and my desire for her.

  Something rustling in the bushes interrupted my thoughts. I looked up and for a split second I engaged with the reflective, alien eyes of some small animal, probably a cat, before it disappeared into the night and broke the connection for ever.

  Eventually I got up and went to bed. Marianne was no longer staring at the ceiling, she’d turned away on her side. She was asleep, or probably pretending to sleep. I got undressed and slipped in beside her. Her nightdress gave off a musty smell. I lay there rigid, making sure that no part of my body touched any part of hers. It wasn’t that my yearning for physical intimacy had in any way diminished but the closer I actually got to Marianne, the more impossible it seemed. I was thinking about whether she’d found out, and what exactly she’d found out. Things I hadn’t even allowed myself to think before. I felt a terrible weight of guilt, although less on account of what I’d done to the man than what I’d done to Marianne. All my efforts to ensure that it wasn’t her who found the body counted for nothing – in fact, they were almost acts of vanity.

  It surprised me to realise that I’d never felt guilty about anything in my life before. Of course, I’d felt it in theory. I’d felt sorry, and there were plenty of times in the past when I could see that I’d been in the wrong and that I had to make amends. And yet this was entirely different. This was like being possessed by something. It was as acute as sexual desire. I stared at Marianne’s back. I knew she wasn’t really asleep, because when she sleeps she has this very gentle snore – an adult version of Jessica’s snuffling. I longed to turn to her and comfort her. The intolerable thing was that it was me that was the cause of her suffering. It was me that was inflicting the pain. I could hardly be both torturer and consoler. Such a combination was quite grotesque.

  Eventually I began to drift off to sleep but for the first time since I was a child I found myself afraid of what it might bring. The image of Jessica’s teddy bear came back to me with its partly detached head. I thought about how tomorrow I could sew him up for her, and how she would appreciate that. It made me feel strangely better, thinking about that.

  XI

  A blazing light flooded the room when normally we slept with the curtains closed. I could feel this sense of terrible foreboding as I struggled out of sleep, as though something unutterable and infinitely humiliating was about to happen to me – I didn’t know what it was but I had no power to stop it. Then as the sleep cleared from my mind I gradually realised that I did know what it was, because it had already happened. It was too late.

  Marianne was sleeping profoundly now. Her mouth was open and she was dribbling a little; one of her arms flopped gracelessly over the edge of the bed. She seemed so lifeless that I wondered if she’d taken sleeping pills, as she used to when I first met her. I glanced at my wrist but I’d forgotten that I no longer had a watch and I swung up out of bed.

  Standing under the shower I found myself thinking not about the man or Marianne but about Jarawa. A problem had arisen at work, an awkward matter which was the reason I’d phoned his wife yesterday. I’d opened the mail the other day and in an envelope with a South African stamp I’d found a photocopy of a clipping from what seemed like some local African newspaper, dated June 1997. That would have been when Jarawa was already at the UN. The article reported that Jarawa had separated from his wife. It also mentioned rumours that she had shown up one night at a hospital at two in the morning with a cracked rib and covered in bruises. I hadn’t yet shown the article to anyone and the question now was what to do with it. A lot of the African press is notoriously partisan and libellous but to research the story and rebut it would obviously mean bringing it to light in the first place, which could do harm. And then there was the probability that the sender had posted it to other organisations.

  I was thinking about that and all the things I had to do at work when I realised it was Saturday. I didn’t have to go to work. In fact I couldn’t go to work: Marianne mostly looks after Jessica during the week and then on Saturday it’s supposed to be my turn. It struck me now that all those Saturdays when I was looking after Jessica and taking her to the park and taking her shopping and buying her ice-creams, Marianne had probably been with the man, in the bedsit. The difference was that I didn’t want to hurt her any more because of it. It wasn’t because the man was dead or even that I was the one who’d killed him. It was something else.

  I got dressed and went through to Jessica’s bedroom. She was already up, sitting on the floor, talking to her doll and walking her up and down: ‘She’s getting married. Look, she’s getting married today.’

  ‘Who’s she getting married to?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  It was still early. I made Jessica’s bed then tidied up a bit and started to dress her while she resisted passively. After that we went into the kitchen and I got her some breakfast which she ate, after a fashion, while I cleared up then did the washing up, slowly so as not to break anything. Everything seemed to require so much thought and attention now, even the daily chores.

  ‘So what do you want to do today? Go up to Battersea Park and see the wallabies?’

  Jessica was being unusually quiet: ‘Where’s Maman?’

  ‘Mummy’s not well.’

  ‘I want to be with Maman today.’

  ‘Well you know you can’t. On Saturdays we leave Mummy on her own because she needs time to herself.’

  ‘I want to be with Maman.’

  I crouched down to her level. It was this feeling of powerlessness faced with her and it hurt me that she wanted to be with Marianne when normally she looked forward to our Saturday excursions.

  ‘How about I fix Teddy for you? Sew his head back on.’

  ‘Where’s Maman? Is Maman dead?’

  ‘Of course she’s not dead. Whatever gave you that idea? She’s in bed.’

  ‘I want to be with Maman. I don’t want to be with you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She suddenly jumped down off her chair and started running towards the door. I grabbed her hand and jerked her back quite brutally, it must have hurt her. I hadn’t meant to do that and she screamed. I looked up to see Marianne standing in the kitchen doorway. Weirdly it took me a moment to register and recognise her. Her greyish nightgown hung listlessly off her shoulders and her face was lined and ghostly.

  ‘What are you doing to her?’

  ‘She wanted to wake you up. I was trying to stop her.’

  I let Jessica go now: she ran over to Marianne, put one arm around her mother’s knees and sucked the thumb of the other hand.

  ‘Well I’m awake now.’ Marianne’s voice was flat. She hoisted Jessica into her arms and whispered something French into her ear. She said coolly: ‘I’ll look after her today. You go and do whatever it is you have to do.’

  I wondered what exactly she meant by that but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to talk. I wasn’t in the mood for any kind of confrontation. I just picked up the car keys and went out the door.

  There were some letters in the letterbox although it was too early for the postman to have come by: they must have been from the day before. It was another symptom. Picking up the mail is one of those things Marianne never forgets to do: her cheques arrive by mail and she still writes to people in France. I glanced through the bills and letters and immediately recognised Christian’s spidery, boyish scrawl on one of the envelopes. I put the rest of the letters back in the letterbox and tore the envelope open. There was a cheque inside. I pulled the envelope apart but there was nothing else in it, not a note or even a return address marked on the outside. The cheque was made out for sixty pounds. For a moment it mystified me but then I remembered the night I’d met Christian in that pub in Camden, and how I’d paid for his hotel and given him money to get home. Now he’d sent a cheque to cover my expenses. I ripped it up, got in the car and stuffed the bits in the car ashtray.

  At first I thought I’d go into work but then once I’d started the car all I ended up doing was driving around South London, thinking, smoking. I was thinking about the dead man. I spent a long time reflecting on why he’d died so quickly, when all I’d done was hit him with a not very heavy glass vase. I couldn’t see how that could have been enough to kill him within minutes. For a while I played with the idea that a piece of glass must have lodged itself somewhere vulnerable, in his jugular vein for example, but then finally I came up with a more likely explanation. The floor was tiled, he must have slipped and his head had come down hard on the tiles, fracturing his skull, causing fatal internal bleeding. For a moment or two this reading of the events seemed like a revelation and I congratulated myself for my acuity. It suited me to think that it was not the vase but slipping on the tiles that had killed him. It took away some of my own blame, if only an extremely minute part of it.

  The sound of a siren cut through my thoughts. I glanced at the rear-view mirror: a police car was signalling for someone to pull over and it was a second or two before I realised that it was me. Then it struck me that some time before – maybe a half an hour ago but I couldn’t be sure – I’d been vaguely aware of a police car behind me for a good few minutes, almost as if it had been following me … I pulled over abruptly. One of the policemen had got out of the car and was walking towards me but he seemed to be moving in slow motion and it felt like I had minutes, even hours to consider my response. Of course there would be no question of doing anything stupid. And there would be no question of lying. I swallowed but my throat was dry and it was painful, then I wound down my window.

  ‘Could I see your licence please?’

  I made a show of rummaging around my glove compartment: ‘I’m afraid I don’t have it on me. I must have left it in my wallet at home.’

  ‘You know that driving without your licence in the car is an offence?’

  ‘I didn’t know that. I thought I had twenty-four hours to produce it.’

  The policeman was silent for a moment. He looked away, seemed to stare into space, then turned back to me: ‘You just went straight through a red light. Do you realise that?’

  ‘No. I didn’t realise that.’

  ‘Wait there, please.’ He went back to the police car. I could see him conferring with his partner, who then started speaking into a walkie-talkie. This all took around five minutes or so, then eventually the first policeman came back: ‘OK. So I’m going to have to ask you to get out of your car and accompany us to the station.’

  ‘You want me to just leave my car here?’

  ‘You can either leave it here or my colleague can drive it back to the station for you.’

  We walked over to the police car. The policeman had me put my hands against the car and watched as his partner searched me peremptorily. After that I made to get in the back of the car but the policeman said: ‘Can you get in the front please?’

  I watched him as he drove. He was about my age and had fine blonde hair and two small pimples in the left-hand corner of his mouth. He didn’t seem nervous but it was hard to tell. At one point the car radio broke into a crackle of interference and incoherent South London dialect, to which the policeman replied laconically: ‘OK … it’s an SR104, St John’s Hill, the usual.’

  We passed by the low wall of a cemetery. Its stunted forest of grey headstones sprouted up out of the hard ground, stone saplings that had struggled and died. I tried to concentrate and prepare myself for what was going to happen next but nothing came to mind. I could feel a dull throb in my finger and I held it up to the light to examine it: there was a hairline cut on the tip and a little dried blood that I rubbed off. It was a paper cut – I must have got it opening the envelope from Christian. I started thinking about him and the cheque he’d sent me. If he’d done it before the bedsit there would have been nothing odd about it, but sending the cheque afterwards hit me hard. It was like a final settling of accounts, a definitive sign that he wanted nothing further to do with me. It was ridiculous to think of it now but I couldn’t stop myself.

  I wondered how I could explain everything to the police without mentioning Christian and realised how impossible that would be. For a start, I would never be able to find the cave in the forest on my own. It was only now that the reality of this problem really hit home. I couldn’t keep Christian out of it, any more than I could keep Marianne out of it. Then there was Jessica. Among other things, she’d grow up fatherless. But perhaps she’d already sensed this truth. Perhaps in her way she’d been more prescient than any of us – me, Marianne or her lover. Perhaps she was already preparing herself for this new life, through her new-found antagonism toward me.

  ‘So what’s the procedure? Why do I have to go to the station?’

  We were stopped in traffic but the policeman didn’t take his eyes off the road: ‘Going through a red light is a serious offence.’

  ‘And you do this every time someone breaches the traffic code? You pull them in?’ He didn’t answer. After a minute of silence I continued: ‘I mean, if you pulled in everyone you caught speeding or going through red lights, the system would pretty soon collapse under its own weight, wouldn’t it? I mean, what about the real crimes? What about all the unsolved murders out there?’

  ‘Hey. I’m trying to drive.’

  I’d been about to come out with even more ridiculous things but I’d caught myself in time. I fell into a kind of reverie. Then after an eternity, the policeman said: ‘We’ve got to breathalyse you.’

  ‘You’re taking me in just to breathalyse me?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The car radio had broken out into a confusion of voices again but this time the policeman didn’t answer. We’d arrived at the police station, a squat grey box of a building that resembled a miniature prison. Inside there was a large room with a row of counters behind a glass front, like in a bank or a dole office. We stopped there a moment while the policeman picked up a form from one of the counters, then he led me through a side door, down a corridor and into another much smaller room. It had a big metal door and you could tell that it had been a cell once. The policeman told me to wait there until my name was called, then walked off. I sat down on one of the plastic chairs. It was the same garish shade of orange as the ones at the hospital waiting room where I’d identified Susan Tedeschi’s body.