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61
July 2018
Rachel checked into her hotel in Nice and immediately threw off her clothes and took a ten-minute shower, to wash off not just the sweat of the day, but the feeling of Michael’s company. She had not intended to say all she’d said, she’d been planning to play it cooler, stay longer, talk more, find out more about his finances. But she’d managed to gather quite a lot of information during the fifteen minutes or so she’d had alone in his office, more than she’d expected, and she felt an extraordinary glow of centredness after what she’d said. Not closure. Nowhere close to that. Not while Michael had £600,000 of her father’s money. Not while that red Maserati sat obscenely on his driveway. Not while every time Rachel closed her eyes she saw the imprint of those hideous photographs in her consciousness, and the shamed outline of herfather’s back to her as she looked at them on his laptop in his cosy little study.
She put on a silky blue skirt that skimmed her ankles and a black vest top, slung her bag across her chest and headed out into the sultry night air. The centre of Nice felt like a different world tonight to the one she’d experienced back in February. The air was loud with music from restaurants, from fairground rides, from the dozens of buskers and street entertainers that lined every square. Men stood outside restaurants waving menus and trying to entice her inside to eat and she allowed herself to be tempted into one of the restaurants on the main square by a man with tumbling grey locks and a white shirt straining over a wide girth. She ordered a minute steak and frites and a carafe of white wine. The middle-aged waiters buzzed around her, feigning attentive service, oozing paternalistic sexual predation, but she didn’t care. She was like a smooth stone at the bottom of a lake teeming with fish. She was solid, immovable, centred. She looked at her phone when it buzzed. An email from Jonno. His ‘contacts’ were still going through all the information she’d sent across earlier on. Nothing to report yet.
She ordered an extra glass of wine and a slice of chocolate tart, and then, through the aural chaos of the square, came a familiar sound. The opening notes of ‘Titanium’ played on a violin. Rachel pushed her cake away, downed her wine, paid her bill and strode away from the restaurant.
Lucy looked terrible. So thin. Bedraggled. Her lips were dry. The children looked terrible too. Rachel moved a few steps closer, her arms wrapped around her waist. A small crowd started to gatheraround Lucy. Rachel saw coins being thrown into her bowler hat. She passed quickly without making eye contact and threw a twenty-euro note into the hat. She heard a shoutedthank youfrom Lucy and then Rachel moved away again, watched her from across the square until finally, at nearly ten o’clock, she clipped her violin case shut, tipped the money from the bowler hat into a purse, handed the violin, the yoga mat and the dog to her son, roused her sleeping daughter and headed back to the blue building on Castle Hill where Rachel watched her knock on the door, saw the concierge’s face in the lower window light up at the sight of them, saw him fling open the door and say, ‘My girl. My children. My dog! Come in!’
Rachel’s flight on Sunday was not until the evening so after a late breakfast she packed her bag, left it behind the front desk of the hotel and set off in a taxi to Antibes. Jonno had come back to her an hour ago with confirmation that the recipient of the PMX account was closely affiliated to a company called MCR International: Michael’s business operation.
‘So, it’s definitely him then?’ she asked Jonno.
‘Yes. One hundred per cent definitely him. Do you want me to call the police?’
Rachel had paused. ‘No,’ she’d said, ‘not yet. I’m not sure what I want to do just yet. I need to think about it.’
But now, Rachel knew exactly what she was going to do. She was going to go to Michael’s house, right now, and she was going to take the gun from his desk drawer, and she was going to press it hard against his head until he had paid back every last penny of her father’s money.Every last penny.
The housekeeper, he had told her, did not work on Sundays.
They would have the house to themselves.
The taxi dropped her on the main road and she headed down the cobbled turning towards Michael’s house. The red Maserati was there. The shutters were open. The air smelled of barbecue smoke. Rachel peered through the windows to either side of the door and saw a suggestion of movement and ducked.
She almost called out. But she didn’t. She waited for a few minutes and then went to the gate at the side of the house and opened the catch. It led her to the garden, where she saw the sparkling teal of the swimming pool, colourful birds flitting through the flat arms of the banana trees and tiny hummingbird moths hovering around lavender bushes. It was a perfect, beautiful oasis in the city, but the air felt heavy and black somehow.
She peered through the tall glass doors that opened into the kitchen and for a moment she assumed she was watching Joy, the maid, cleaning the kitchen. A woman with dark hair, wearing rubber gloves, spraying bleach on to surfaces, scrubbing hard. She saw the woman pick up a handful of what looked like red fabric, but then she saw it was not red fabric but was something that had been stained red and she followed the red patch on the floor with her eyes and saw it led to what looked like a foot. A bare foot, tanned, with a suggestion of hair.
Rachel knew whose foot it was. She would recognise it anywhere. Such lovely feet he had, Michael. Then the woman turned slightly and Rachel saw, with a hard jolt of recognition, that it was not Joy, that it was Lucy, and she watched, transfixed, sickened, euphoric, as Lucy wrapped Michael’s lifeless body up in a sheet,and then rolled him on to two bin bags laid out side by side. She watched Lucy drag him across the cool white granite tiles out of the kitchen and into a room at the back, the room that Joy had gone into the other day when Rachel had been here speaking to Michael. A few moments later Lucy returned and began once again to scrub, to spray, to bleach, tossing endless scarlet-stained bundles of kitchen towel into an open bin bag on the floor. Then finally, after another half an hour or so, she peeled off her rubber gloves, dropped them into the bag and tied a knot in it.
A moment later Rachel heard the front door slam closed. She stood silently, her breath caught somewhere between her gut and the back of her throat. What had she just seen? Was it possible? Really? Had Lucy murdered Michael? Surely not? Surely not?
Finally, she moved, shook out her frozen shoulders, took a few steps closer to the house. She took a tissue from her handbag and used it to try the handle of the garden door. It slid open easily. She spied a pair of Michael’s flip-flops by the back door and changed into them from her sandals, which she left in the garden.
Slowly, quietly, she tiptoed around the house, trying to piece together what might have just happened. But it was perfect, immaculate: the kitchen gleamed, the dishwasher thrummed quietly; there was no sign anywhere of anything being awry. Rachel’s heart raced with a sick excitement. The drama of it. The wonder of it. The sheer fucking kick-ass-ness of it. Lucy had killed him. She’d bided her time and then she’d come to him, and she’d killed him, and now – now he would never be able to hurt another woman again. Rachel’s heart pounded with relief, with adrenaline, with nausea, with awe.
And as she thought this it occurred to her that if Lucy hadreason to kill Michael, then so too did she and that she should not be here,she should not be here at all. But she needed to see him. She needed to know for sure that he was gone. And so, quickly, stealthily, she went to the room behind the kitchen, which turned out to be a kind of utility room, and in there was a narrow staircase leading down to a basement. She turned on a light and descended quickly. The basement was used as a wine store; the walls were hung with framed prints of grapes and vineyard insignia. There was a small glass bar with two wooden stools and a row of wine glasses on a shelf, behind which hung a vintage-style etched mirror with an art nouveau image. And there was Michael, in a black plastic cocoon. The bags were not sealed and Rachel bent down to pull back the black plastic with the tissue. She saw his midriff, the whorls of soft hair encrusted with blood. She saw the deathly tips of his fingers. She saw his T-shirt, bunched up around his chest, the dip in his throat and the slack jaw, his mouth hanging to one side, his eyes staring through her.
She pulled the bag over him and left him there, stopping briefly at the top of the steps to look back at him. Pathetic, she thought, pathetic.
In the kitchen, she kicked off Michael’s flip-flops, put her own shoes back on, pulled the sliding door closed again with her covered hand and headed down the cobbled lane, into the busy streets, towards a taxi rank and then to her hotel, where she collected her bag from the receptionist and headed to the airport.
