The Club(86)
All Annie needed to do was give them enough velvet rope to hang themselves with.
Laura
It was going to be a very different funeral from Ned’s, that was for sure. No press, few celebrities, hardly anyone even from Home. Just a few old school friends, two or three colleagues, some mates from uni, one or two of Laura’s friends, for support – and Adam’s parents, of course. Their second funeral in a month. It was typical early March weather: slanting rain and a damp chill in the air. In the doorway of the chapel, Adam’s father Richard was greeting the mourners as they arrived. He looked older, thinner. As they were shaking hands Laura leaned in for a hug and through his jacket she could feel the bones of his shoulders, sense he did not really know what to do with his free arm, whether to put it around her or leave it dangling at his side. Eventually he compromised, resting it briefly, awkwardly, across the small of her back.
‘How are you doing?’ he had asked her, his voice almost catching as he did so.
As well as could be expected, she told him.
Four and a half months. That was how long the police, the coroner, had held on to the bodies. First for the post-mortems, then for the inquests. Four and a half months it had taken for the whole process to be concluded. If you could call what they had reached a conclusion, even then, when it came to her husband. As for the ligature marks around Adam’s neck – discreetly covered up when she had been down to Essex to identify the body – it was apparent immediately that they had been caused by the length of cord discovered wrapped around it, later identified as the belt-rope from Keith Little’s cloak, just as those deep, livid, pale-lipped wounds pictured in her husband’s autopsy report had matched perfectly the ones that had been found on the deceased artist’s hands when the police divers had removed him from the submerged car. As far as who had killed Adam went, it seemed an open-and-shut case. What nobody seemed to be able to explain was why Keith had done it. No one who had attended the party that weekend had seen them argue, heard of any disagreement. Nobody could explain why the toxicology report had shown all that GHB in her husband’s body. Nobody could explain how Keith had even recognized him, with everyone wearing masks and capes. Sometimes, she felt convinced there was some enormous conspiracy going on, with Keith as the fall guy, or Adam, or both of them. Frequently, she cursed herself for not having been there, for having said to Adam years ago that she wasn’t interested in coming along to Home launches and parties, hanging around while he was working, feeling awkward. In her dreams Adam would be there, sitting in their living room or at the kitchen table, and she would ask him what had happened, and he would just smile or shrug, as if to say, don’t you know this is just a dream, your dream, I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know, and it would come crashing down on her, even in her dream, that this was a mirage and she was never going to really see him like this and she was never going to be able to talk to him outside her head ever again.
Rather than wooden pews, there were rows of coloured plastic chairs, the stackable kind that always reminded Laura of school assembly. About half the chairs were occupied.
His mother, hunched up in a warm coat, was standing alone near the front row and Laura went over to offer her condolences. She seemed literally to have shrunk since the last time Laura had seen her: Laura was not a tall person but when she put her arms around Jan, Adam’s mother barely came up to her chest. Jan then took a step back to look her up and down.
‘You look well, Laura,’ she informed her daughter-in-law, sounding thoughtful. ‘Really well.’
As ever with Jan, Laura immediately found herself wondering whether she was being paranoid, or if the slight hint of implied criticism she had detected in the other woman’s tone was deliberate. She couldn’t help it. There was just something about Adam’s mother that Laura had always found terrifying. The very first time she’d met her, the first time Adam had taken her home for the weekend, Jan had welcomed her at the front door, given her a stiff hug, held her at arm’s length, inspected with seeming admiration the brand-new Whistles coat Laura had bought for the occasion, and then told Adam brightly that if his girlfriend was planning to come along to church on Sunday morning, they would need to find her a Remembrance Day poppy. If Jan really was fond of her, as Adam had always claimed, Laura dreaded to think what Jan’s manner had been like with those girlfriends of Adam’s she hadn’t approved of. Even now, even here, the instant Laura started talking to Jan she could hear her voice becoming fake and overenthusiastic, feel her face arranging itself into a fixed, ingratiating grimace.
It reminded her of how she had so often felt around Ned. My God, how hard had she tried to get Ned to like her, when she and Adam had first got together? The amount of time she had spent trying to pretend she liked him. Ned, with his perpetual watchful smirk. Ned with those jokes of his, which always served the purpose of reminding someone of their place in the pecking order. Ned, who in every single conversation she had ever had with him, found a way of making it obvious how much more important what he did was than what she did; who, whenever she and he and Adam were talking, managed to slip in some in-joke she would not get, or launch – without explanation or apology – into a discussion of someone she didn’t know. And always afterwards if she brought it up, Adam would spring to his brother’s defence – so after a while she stopped bringing it up.