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62
June 2019
I stare at the screen. There are two detectives, one black, one white. The black detective is called Samuel and appears to be the man in charge. He rests his elbows on the table in the room in London he’s talking to me from and smiles at me, warmly.
‘Henry Lamb,’ he says. ‘We meet at last.’
‘I hadn’t been aware that you’d been looking for me,’ I point out.
‘Well, no. I suppose not. You’ve been somewhat incognito.’
‘I’ve been under a lot of stress at work. I needed to get away. Properly.’
‘And also, of course, you have just come into quite a large sum of money?’
‘Yes. Although that had nothing to do with it. I already had alarge sum of money before I acquired this large sum of money. I just needed to escape. To let off some steam. I’ve been squashed into a flat with my sister and her children and her dog for over a year and I needed some space.’
‘Which explains why you haven’t been answering your phone or replying to any messages?’
‘Precisely.’
I glance at the white detective. I can tell he despises me, that I am everything he hates. I throw him a slightly flirty look, just to watch him squirm. He does.
Samuel, the black detective, runs the results of his investigation past me briefly. He’s very pleased with himself, I can tell. And to be fair to him, he has just cause. But really, I made this all so easy for him.
Over and over again I replay those moments through my mind: The day in June last year, just after I’d seen Libby taking ownership of 16 Cheyne Walk. The warm evening sun beating down on my shoulders as I climbed on to the roof, pulled back the tarpaulin behind the chimney stack and scraped away the dead leaves, the broken twigs and the branches scattered by winter storms long past, and stared blindly for a moment at the dirty sarcophagus of old towels and sheets hidden underneath. I see myself peeling away the fibrous layers and staring in shock and awe at the tiny skeleton within, then quickly dropping the bones, one by one, into a black plastic bin bag. I remember clambering back through the house and then sitting for a while with a cold beer, which I opened and sipped in the sun, with Birdie’s bones at my feet, then lighting a small fire to burn the towels.
I recall how I waited for the day to grow darker, then took mytwo empty beer bottles and the small black bag and stood for a while down by the Thames, watching the sun setting over it, wreathing the surface of the water in vibrant ribbons of colour. I waited for a pause in the river traffic and was about to open the bag and toss the bones into the water when a barge somewhere out of sight hooted its horn and I jumped and I lost my footing and the bag fell from my hands and into the water. I stretched to reach for it, but it drifted away from me and then there was nothing I could do but stand and watch as it bobbed its way downriver, the whole of Birdie, every last bit of her, and all the forensic bits and pieces that were probably still attached to her, and off she went. Would she be found? I had no idea. I could only hope that if she was, that it would be by fish or by birds, that she would be picked apart ten years, a hundred years, athousandyears from now, and that I would never hear from her again.
But as it transpires, she lasted a year before making her presence felt once more and that, annoyingly, is my fault and only mine.
‘So, Mr Lamb—’
This is the first time, possibly in my whole life, that I have ever been called Mr Lamb and I almost turn to see if my father has somehow appeared in the room.Mr Lamb. For that is me, whatever other names I may have ascribed to myself. But I had almost forgotten.
Samuel continues: ‘Someone returned to the house on Cheyne Walk at some point last summer and removed the remains of Miss Dunlop-Evers from the roof and disposed of them in the Thames. Do you have any idea who that might have been? Assuming of course that it wasn’t you?’
Samuel looks at me and even from all these thousands of miles away, even on a screen, I can see the hot burn of human understanding in his eyes and I know that he could read me, every inch of me, every atom, if I let him. But he underestimates me. I have spent my whole life finding ways to tamp down my body language, to hide the truth of who I am and what I am. He will get nothing from me. Nothing.
‘Well. It wasn’t me. And it wasn’t Lucy. Have you considered the possibility that it might be someone else who was present at the time?’
‘Ah, yes. You mean, for example, the Thomsen children. We have accounted for their whereabouts since the beginning of last year. They were not in London. And even if they were, they could not have gained access to the house without a key. And it seems, according to everyone we’ve spoken to, that only you, your sister and Libby had access to keys.’
‘You’re wrong,’ I say triumphantly.
‘In what way exactly am I wrong?’
‘You’re wrong that the only way into the garden is through the house. There’s a gate.’
I see both detectives flinch slightly as their watertight theory starts to leak.
‘A gate?’
‘Yes. In the back wall. It leads into the garden of the house behind. It’s totally overgrown with wisteria. You may not have noticed it.’
‘So, you’re saying that someone who lives in the house behind may have used this gate to enter the garden of your house, climb on to the roof and remove Miss Dunlop-Evers?’
‘No. I’m not saying that. That house is converted into flats and the back garden has actually been turned into a small car park. Easily accessible from the street. Anyone could get through it.’
