Marianne had been staring out the window opposite her bed but her gaze suddenly switched to me. She was staring at me fiercely: ‘I don’t want you to leave me here.’

  ‘I’m not going to leave you here. I’m not going to leave you anywhere.’

  ‘I’ve had enough. I want to get out.’

  ‘I thought you had to stay here until tonight.’

  ‘I don’t want to. They gave me this disgusting soup. I want to get out now. I don’t want you to leave me here.’

  I drew the curtains round her bed and helped her put on the clothes I’d brought her then helped her up. She was pretty weak but it seemed like she could walk all right. Then once we were in the corridor a nurse came running up to us. Are you leaving, she asked in astonishment, could you please wait until I get Doctor Moran. Marianne stared at her unblinkingly, blankly, leaning on me for support. She wasn’t quite right in the head yet but I knew it would pass. I knew it from her depressive fits in the past.

  The skies were gradually clearing in my mind – everything felt lighter now that Marianne was here beside me in the car, essentially out of danger. The only shadow was the thought that the police would be there waiting for me at home to deny me these last moments with her. For a split-second I even considered not going home at all. I had this vision of driving down to this village by the sea in Dorset where Marianne and I had once gone for a holiday, and where Jessica had probably been conceived. Then again, if I did that, who would pick up Jessica from the crèche? I looked at Marianne and realised she’d be too weak for the trip anyway. There was no way out of it.

  But in the end there was no one waiting at the house. Once I’d got Marianne home, I undressed her and got her into the shower and washed her while she just stood there staring at the tiles on the wall, letting me take care of her like she was an old woman, lifting her arms when I told her to. After I’d dried her I could see the colour rising to her cheeks and she definitely looked better. She said she still felt weak though and needed to lie down for a bit. It was the first time she’d lain down on our bed in a while. As the days had gone by without her there in bed beside me the smell of her body and hair had gradually disappeared from the sheets and the room and even from my memory but it seemed to be almost overpowering me now. She was lying on the bed with her legs up, carefully examining her thighs. Cellulite, she said, I’ve never noticed it before … it’s age, I’m getting old. I could see the glistening of her eyes. Don’t worry, I said, I’m here now. But it was a strange thing for me to say and it occurred to me that the peculiarity of that phrase was that no one who said it could ever be wrong.

  I let her doze for a while, an hour or so, while I sat in the kitchen with a whole stack of papers from the study. I was doing the same thing I’d done at work. I was organising everything to make it easier for Marianne. She’d always left the financial arrangements to me – all the paperwork for the house, bank, taxes, Jessica’s endowment etc. Now I was making a list of where everything was and what she had to do and when, and who she had to contact. She would have to learn to do all that, now that I wasn’t going to be around any more.

  Every few minutes the phone rang. I had the answering machine turned off but the ringing started to get on my nerves and I pulled the jack out of the wall. It was the office or the newspapers maybe, no doubt they were calling about Jarawa and I knew he was still there behind me, that he was there in my mind as I prepared for my not being here any more. Perhaps Jarawa was already dead. I couldn’t think about it. In a way my relationship with him didn’t depend on whether he was dead or alive at this exact moment. I looked up at the picture tacked to the kitchen wall, the one Jessica had drawn. I ripped it off the wall and crumpled it up into a ball and put my cigarette to it until it flamed up and I threw it into the sink.

  Marianne appeared. She’d dressed and put some lipstick on, which had the effect of softening the impact of her shaved head. She looked so much better now than she had at the hospital but I could tell she was still pretty vague. It’s such a lovely day she said, let’s go somewhere. She opened the kitchen door and light flooded in from the back garden. It was true, it was a hot and beautiful day but I hadn’t really noticed until Marianne had pointed it out. What a fantastic summer it had been, how blessed we’d been with warmth … Are you sure you’ll be all right I asked, and she nodded childishly.

  Once we were in the car again Marianne said: ‘I know. Let’s go and get Jessica. Let’s have a day out, just the three of us.’

  They were very funny with us at the crèche and the supervisor looked strangely at Marianne with her shaved head. She kept on asking all these questions as to why we wanted to take Jessica out as if she had some say in the matter. It made me wonder: would Marianne have some social worker coming round every week to annoy her and tell her to stop drinking once I’d gone? The kids in the crèche were all watching a cartoon on television and at first Jessica didn’t want to leave but when Marianne started to get upset and tearful she seemed to change her mind: ‘Pick me up then.’

  ‘Daddy’ll pick you up. You’re too big for me now.’

  We were in the car again, all three of us. There seemed to be such a lot of police cars on the road, or perhaps there always were and I was only noticing it now. Every time we passed one, I started shaking again until the car was out of sight and then the shaking would subside.

  ‘So where do you want to go Jessica? To the park? The zoo? We’ll take you anywhere you want.’

  ‘The toy shop. Can you open the roof Daddy?’

  We’d just crossed the river, over Albert Bridge. I remembered that story about the man who’d tipped a total stranger into the river from Albert Bridge. Just the day before at the office I’d come across a second article about it, in the Guardian, it was an interview with the victim after he’d been to see his assailant in custody. What had impressed him, he’d said, was how very mild-mannered his attacker was. The man had never alluded to why he’d done it, he’d just very politely apologised and seemed incredibly relieved when his victim forgave him. And then he’d said that he would have had to kill himself if his victim hadn’t forgiven him.

  I parked the car off the King’s Road and we walked to Peter Jones and went to the toy department. Jessica was getting all excited and started running around the place. Marianne was trying to calm her down and bent down to pick her up but then she came over all giddy and had to sit down for a while. We left her by the till and we started going round the shelves to pick out some toys.

  ‘How about this teddy bear,’ I said, grabbing one from the shelves. ‘He’s a very handsome bear, don’t you think?’

  Jessica took the bear wordlessly.

  ‘What are you going to call him then Jess?’

  ‘Dunno …’

  I could see her attention had already been drawn by something else. It was a snowdome, with an out-of-season nativity scene: Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus and a few animals.

  ‘You pick it up and shake it. See?’

  I’d given it a good shake then crouched down with it so Jessica could see too and we were both staring intensely at the little figures. It was a cheap model from Taiwan, the plastic figures had been painted in a very approximate fashion without any attempt at expression. Joseph stood by impotently with his crooked staff but in the emptiness of Mary’s face I fancied I could see and understand the suffering open up to me.

  ‘Who are they? Who are they Daddy?’

  I tore my gaze from the snowdome: ‘Maybe they’re us.’

  ‘Are they? No they’re not.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘’Cause inside it’s a baby but I’m not a baby anymore. I’m grown up.’

  ‘You’re right. I hadn’t thought of that.’

  She was still staring at it with wide-eyed fascination: ‘Shake it again.’

  I shook it: ‘But if I buy it for you, you’ll have to be careful with it. They’re very easy to break. You couldn’t drop it, for example.’

  ‘I’ll be careful with it. I promise.’

  I paid for the teddy bear and snowdome and looked round for Marianne but she’d disappeared. For a moment I panicked but that peculiar sense of strain had left me. We hung around the toy department waiting for her and I showed Jessica how to shake the snowdome slowly with both hands so it wouldn’t slip out of her grip. I saw a kid Jessica’s age and his mother, walking down the aisles. They were holding hands. I didn’t think anything of it, but then I saw that the kid had something stuck on a finger on his free hand. It was the little banana man I’d given him at the police station, a couple of weeks before. As they walked by, the woman gave me that vacant smile parents give each other. She hadn’t recognised me. Her son had though – he stopped all of a sudden in front of me. He looked up and showed me his finger. I noticed his almond eyes and stubby hands. I saw what it was about his elfin-like face now: he was Down’s syndrome, I hadn’t realised before. His expression seemed preternaturally solemn. In its stillness, it was as though the child were not three or four but eighty-four.

  Eventually Marianne came back, all smiles. She suddenly took out something from behind her back: ‘Happy Birthday!’

  It was a package, wrapped like a present. I hadn’t exactly forgotten that it was my birthday. Rather everything had been subsumed by Jarawa, he’d taken over my birthday until in reality it was his day now not mine. Still it was strange to think that I was now thirty and would never again be in my twenties. I opened the present. It was a watch. I’d never said anything to her but she’d nonetheless noticed that I’d lost my watch and she’d bought me this new one. The hands were still but then I shook it and the second hand immediately sprang to life.

  We bought some food and we were going to go to the park but then Jessica suddenly said I want to go home now. OK, I said. I could have insisted on the park but perhaps she was right after all. The fear of the police was still there but it was fading fast. And all the time I was driving I was thinking of the doctor who’d pushed that man into the river. What really struck me now was the fact that he’d said he’d have killed himself if he hadn’t been forgiven, it was something that only weeks ago would have been quite incomprehensible to me. I knew that if by some miracle Marianne’s lover were to walk into our house now he would have the perfect right to destroy me and I couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything to stop him. And yet at the same time I felt curiously angry with him, or was it maybe angry at myself, for letting him so definitively have the last word.

  There was a slight tightening of the heart muscles as I rounded the corner of our street but there were no police there. Jessica went outside to play in the garden with her new teddy bear and the snowdome while Marianne and I prepared lunch. But after a few moments I put my arms around her for the first time in ages and it felt good. We stayed like that for a while with Marianne’s head resting on my shoulder then eventually we disentangled ourselves and sat down wordlessly at the kitchen table. I looked up at where Jessica’s drawing had been tacked to the wall before I’d ripped it down and I could see the pin holes in the wall that marked its absence. Marianne had her elbows on the table, she was staring into the garden and seemed very far away: ‘There was a time when I was going to leave you.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘I’m not going to leave you now. Ever.’

  ‘I know that.’

  She was still staring through the open door to Jessica, who was sitting on the grass shaking the snowdome then shaking it again: ‘She’s going to break it.’

  ‘No she’s not. She promised me she wouldn’t. It’ll be all right.’

  Marianne was speaking slowly and unnaturally like she sometimes does after taking sleeping pills: ‘It’s like I’ve been drifting through life … It’s the routine that destroys me. Then when the storm came I had to lash myself to the mast.’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied mechanically, ‘lashed to the mast.’

  The sun splashed through the door drenching the room, draining Marianne’s face of colour like she was a saint in a medieval painting. It was hot, so hot and yet the whisper of autumn was not so very far away … there would be relief from the heat, the first coolness in the air, the nights getting longer, darker … I got up to take the lunch things through to the table in the garden and grabbed a bottle of white wine from the fridge.

  After lunch we lay down on the grass together, with Marianne’s head resting on my stomach. The heat was mesmerising. I could feel it penetrating and relaxing the muscles throughout my body and I watched Marianne’s chest and stomach expand and subside slowly and regularly with her breathing. I was about to close my eyes but then my attention was drawn to a bird, a sparrow, that was daring to come right up to us to peck at the crumbs we’d left. It was so close that I could have hit it with a swing of my arm and killed it. I watched it without moving. I could see its tiny breast palpitating so frantically, so desperately compared with the slow, solemn pulse of Marianne’s heartbeat that seemed to reverberate right through me. It was as if I were beyond anything that could harm me now and not even death had the power to take anything away from me. I remembered the extraordinary sense of well-being that had possessed me that day in the park after identifying Susan Tedeschi’s body. It had perplexed me at the time but what it had been, I now realised, was merely an anticipation of this moment, because I was sure that I’d never felt happier than I felt now, as if I were somehow frozen in free fall and staring down at the most bewitching landscape.

  Marianne was saying: ‘Let’s get away, I mean for good, I’m sick of London, I’m sick of cities … Let’s sell up and buy a house near Montargues, near Papa, sooner or later he’ll need someone to look after him and there’s only me …’

  ‘Yes, let’s do that,’ I replied, momentarily buried in this fantasy of moving to the south of France, deep in a memory of that stream we’d found one summer that cut through the dry rock of the Midi and the peculiar echoing sound of water on pebbles. It was a dream that fed off a suspicion, which even now was so hard to be completely rid of, that such things were still possible. I had to fight against this temptation to believe in a future: it was the poison that would ruin everything between Marianne and me. I watched Jessica shaking the snowdome, in turns curious, delighted, impatient but never bored. The thing that impressed me was her concentration on it to the exclusion of everything else, even to the exclusion of herself. Why was it such a beautiful thing to see?

  ‘I know,’ Marianne suddenly said, ‘Let’s play backgammon. We haven’t played backgammon in such a long time.’

  It was true that we’d used to play it a lot in the early days before Jessica, and often in bed after we’d made love in the mornings. I got up now and went inside to get the board. I stopped in the kitchen, still dazed by the heat. My new watch glinted in the sun, reflecting its rays and making curious patterns on the white walls. I thought of turning on the radio to listen to ‘The World at One’, surely they’d have the news about Jarawa by now. I couldn’t bring myself to do it though. In a way, it didn’t seem to matter any more. I wondered what would happen to his cousin, his wife. A vision of Jarawa filled me, it was that old photo of him in his three-piece suit, expanding in my mind until it enveloped everything. His mouth was moving, he was telling me something, it was important. The stone had been rolled away. He was alive again. The living presence of the dead rose up around me, transfiguring the day.

  I was watching Marianne from the kitchen, she was still lying on the grass. I was remembering various things about her, going right back to the beginning and those first few nights together in her flat in Menilmontant. What was it that we’d created out of thin air? What was that impossible thing we’d never talked about because we never wanted to disturb it, were afraid that it wouldn’t survive such an expression? It was the memory of all the things I’d lost… the pleasure of drinking wine and lying on the grass … the pleasure of seeing Marianne naked …

  I heard the sound of a car and I looked up through the kitchen window. It was a police car pulling up outside our house. In any case I’d already known that the moment had come, I’d felt it inside me. I almost wasn’t thinking about it but then I could hear the doorbell, that annoyingly suburban ding-dong I’d been meaning to change to a buzz for so long and now never would. I went out of the kitchen and walked down the corridor – it seemed such a long way to the front door and so difficult to get there, as if somehow I were a child once again, taking my first steps. There was the mirror hanging in the corridor but in my mind’s eye it was an altogether different mirror, the one that had hung above the fireplace in the bedsit where I’d killed a man, not so long ago. I could see myself staring into it and touching it with my hand, trying to connect with this image of myself that perhaps I believed I could dissolve into. The doorbell rang again.

  Now I was at the front door and I opened it. On the doorstep were the same two policemen, the tall one and the bulky one. Why had I finally waited for them to come to me rather than going to them? It was the sole thing that came to mind because the rest was calmness and surrender. The tall one seemed momentarily lost for words and I took the initiative: ‘Could I at least say goodbye to my wife and daughter?’

  ‘Of course.’

  I noticed that the bulky one had a holster and gun, which was unusual. On the other hand, perhaps it was standard issue for policemen who were about to arrest a murderer. A crazy notion to lunge for the gun seized me but it was a confused idea. Was it to kill myself or was it to escape? But neither of those options were of any use to me. Neither took me to a place that I would have preferred to go, anywhere better than where the police were about to lead me. Fragments of memories kept returning to me, things I’d suppressed. I remembered now how I’d woken up on the morning of the murder with a horrible sense of dread that was quite new and strange. I remembered thinking: What’s wrong with me? What’s got into me? I’d walked to my car with this intolerable sadness weighing down on me so that I could almost feel it as a physical burden and it took all my strength to keep moving. I remembered being down by the canal in Camden and the tears streaming down my face. Perhaps at the time I’d thought – if I’d thought at all – that they were in some way related to what I’d just gone through with Charlotte. Now I knew otherwise. They were the tears of anticipation. Tears of mourning for what I was about to do.