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Nobody here knows that I was married to Anna Andrews. Just as I expect nobody she works with knows about me. Anna has always been intensely private, a condition she inherited from her mother. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Don’t ask, don’t tell works for me too when it comes to my life away from the job.
Like a lot of people who have been in a relationship for a long time, we would regularly say ‘I love you.’ I don’t remember exactly why or when it started to lose its meaning, but those three little words turned into three little lies. They became more of a substitute for ‘goodbye’ – if one of us was leaving the house – or, ‘goodnight’ – when we were going to sleep. We dropped the ‘I’ after a while; ‘love you’ seemed sufficient, and why waste three words when you could express the same empty sentiment with two? But it wasn’t the same. It was as though we forgot what the words were supposed to mean. My stomach rumbles loudly and I remember how hungry I am.
When I was a child my mother didn’t let us eat between meals, and sweets were banned from the house. She worked as a receptionist at the local dentist and took tooth decay very seriously. The other kids would all take snacks to school – crisps, candy bars, biscuits – I got an apple, or, on special occasions, a tiny red box of Sun-Maid raisins. I remember the rush of anger I felt whenever I found them in my packed lunch – the box said the raisins came all the way from California, and I realised that even dried fruit had a more interesting existence than eight-year-old me. The most I could hope for was a Golden Delicious, which was a misleading description because in my opinion those apples were neither.
The only time I ever tasted chocolate as a child was when my grandmother came to visit. It was our little secret, and it tasted like a promise. Nothing else I remember from my childhood gave me more unadulterated pleasure than those small brown squares of Cadbury Dairy Milk melting on my tongue.
I eat a chocolate bar every day now. Sometimes two if things are bad at work. No matter which one I buy, or how much it costs, it never tastes as good as the cheap chocolate bars my grandmother used to bring. Even they don’t taste the same. I think when we finally get what we think we want, it loses its value. It’s the secret nobody ever shares, because if they did, we would all stop trying.
Anna and I got what we thought we wanted.
It wasn’t a never-ending supply of chocolate bars, or a private island in the sun. First it was a flat, then a car, then a job, then a house, then a wedding, then a baby. We followed the same safe paths that older generations had carved out for us, trampled into permanence by so many previous footsteps that it was only too easy to follow. We were so certain we were headed in the right direction, we left tracks of our own, to help future couples find their way. But we didn’t discover a pot of golden happiness at the end of the rite-of-passage rainbow. When we finally got where we thought we wanted to be, we realised that there was nothing there.
I think it’s the same for everyone, but as a species we are pre-programmed to pretend to be happy when we think we should be. It is expected of us.
You buy the car you always wanted, but in a couple of years you want a new one. You buy the house of your dreams, but then decide that your dreams weren’t big enough. You marry the woman you love, but then you forget why. You have a baby because that’s next on your list of things to do. It’s what everybody else does, so maybe it will fix the thing that you’ve been pretending wasn’t broken. Maybe a child will make you happy.
And she did for a while, our daughter.
We were a family and it felt different. Loving her seemed to remind us how to love each other. We had somehow made the most beautiful living thing that my eyes had ever seen, and I would often stare in wonder at our baby, amazed that two imperfect people could somehow produce such a perfect child. Our little girl saved us from ourselves for a short while, but then she was gone.
We lost a daughter and I lost my wife.
The truth is that life broke us, and when we finally acknowledged that we didn’t know how to fix each other, we stopped trying.
‘The body has been moved, sir,’ says Priya.
I don’t know how long I have been standing outside the tent in a world of my own. Even if nobody else finds out about last night, I can’t help worrying that Anna somehow knows something. She could always see through my lies.
We both ran away from what happened. She hid inside her work, and I came back here – to a place where I knew she wouldn’t follow me – not because I wanted to, but because I couldn’t bear the way she looked at me anymore. Anna never actually blamed me for what happened, at least not out loud. But her eyes said all the things she didn’t. Full to the overflowing brim with hurt and hate.
‘Sir?’ says Priya.
‘That’s good, well done.’
I had deliberately asked the team to move the body from the scene while I was giving the press conference. There are some things that should never be captured on camera.
Priya is still waiting beside me, I’m not sure what for. When I don’t speak, she does, and I find myself staring at her rather than listening. She always looks the same to me: ponytail, old-fashioned hairgrips pinning any stray strands off her face, glasses, shiny lace-up shoes, and ironed blouses or whatever it’s called when a woman wears a shirt. She’s like a walking Marks & Spencer catalogue; lamb dressed as mutton. Not like my ex-wife, who is always so stylish. Anna looks even better now than when we were together, unlike me.
I think maybe solitude suits her. She’s lost some weight, I notice, not that I ever minded. She was never big, even when she thought she was. She used to say that she was a size eleven – always somewhere between a ten and a twelve. Christ knows what she is now… an eight perhaps. Loneliness can shrink a person in more ways than one. Unless perhaps she isn’t lonely.
I always used to wonder about the cameramen Anna went on trips with. She was sometimes away for days at a time, staying in hotels, covering whatever story she had been deployed on as a correspondent. Her job always came first. Then what happened, happened. Anna was broken, we both were. But when she got her lucky break and started presenting, things were better between us for a while. She worked more regular hours and we spent more time together than we had before. But something was missing. Someone. We could never seem to fully find our way back to each other.
It was Anna who asked for the divorce. I didn’t feel like I had any right to argue. I knew she still blamed me for the death of our daughter, and that she always would.
‘I don’t understand how she knew.’
‘Sorry, sir?’ Priya asks, and I realise that I said the words out loud without meaning to.
‘The object inside the victim’s mouth. I don’t understand how Anna could have known about that.’
DS Patel’s eyes look even bigger than normal behind her tortoiseshell glasses, and I remember seeing her and Anna talking before the press conference.
‘Please tell me that you didn’t tell a journalist something which I specifically told you not to?’
‘I’m so sorry, sir,’ she says, sounding like a child. ‘I didn’t mean to. It just sort of slipped out. It was as though she already knew.’
I don’t blame Priya, not really. Anna always found the right questions to ask in order to get the right answers. It still doesn’t explain why she is really here though.
