The Peacock Emporium(88)
19
Suzanna had spent the last hour and forty minutes, on and off, in the room with the detective sergeant. She learned that he took his coffee black, that he was almost always hungry for the wrong sort of food, and that he thought women should always be addressed as “madam,” said with a kind of exaggerated deference that suggested he didn’t genuinely believe it. He wouldn’t tell her, initially, what had happened, as if, despite her repeated insistence that it was her shop, that her friends had been inside it, all information had to be on a need-to-know basis. She was only allowed odd snippets, offered grudgingly after the detective was called out by whispering underlings, then returned to his desk. She learned about these trivialities because the only one of her senses that seemed to be working efficiently was her ability to register unimportant detail. In fact, she thought she could probably recall any single facet of this room, of the orange plastic chairs, of the stackable public-facility tables, of the cheap foil ashtrays provided in stacks by the door.
What she couldn’t do was take in anything that they said and why.
They had wanted to know about Jessie. How long had she worked at the shop? Did she have any—here they hesitated, looked at her meaningfully—problems at home? They wouldn’t tell her what had happened, but from the unsubtle direction of the questions she had realized it must be to do with Jason. Suzanna, her mind racing headlong into a thousand possibilities, had been reluctant to say too much before she could speak to Jessie, conscious that her friend’s hatred of Jason’s actions was only matched by her horror of people knowing about them.
“Is she badly hurt?” she would say periodically. “You’ve got to tell me if she’s all right.”
“Soon, Mrs. Peacock,” he said, scribbling in an illegible hand on the pad in front of him. He had an unopened Mars bar in his top pocket. “Now, did Miss Carter have any”—hesitation, meaningful look—“male friends that you knew about?”
She made the detective promise that if she told him what she knew he would have to tell her the truth about what had happened to her friend. She owed Jason no loyalty, after all. She had told them about Jessie’s injuries, about her devotion to and reservations about her partner, about her determination to go through with counseling. She told them, fearful of making Jessie sound like a victim, how determined she was, and unafraid, and how loved she was by almost everyone in the small town. She had become breathless as she finished, as if the words had forced themselves out without sufficient thought, and she had sat in silence for several minutes trying to work out whether there was anything incriminating in what she had just told them.
The detective had noted her words carefully, eyed the woman police officer next to him, and then, in tones that had long learned to disguise shock and horror under an exterior of calm concern, told her that Jessie Carter had been killed instantly that evening when someone drove a van into the front of the shop.
Suzanna’s stomach had dropped away. She had looked blindly at the two faces in front of her; two faces, she realized, in a distant, still functioning part of her mind, that were studying her own reaction. “I’m sorry?” she said, when she could make her mouth form words. “Could you repeat what you just said?”
The second time he said it, she experienced a sudden sensation of falling, the same feeling she had had when she was rolling down the hill with Alejandro, the spinning discombobulation of a world off its axis. Except now it was devoid of any joy, there was no exhilaration, just the sickening echo of the policeman’s words as they came back to her.
“I think you must have made a mistake,” she said. Then the detective had stood, offered her his arm, and said they needed her to come to the shop and determine whether anything was obviously missing. They would call anyone she needed. If she liked, they could wait while she had a cup of tea. They understood it would be something of a shock. He smelled, she noted, of cheese-and-onion crisps.
“Oh, do you know an Alejandro de Marenas?” He had read the name off a piece of paper, pronounced it with a J, and she had nodded dumbly, wondering briefly whether they thought Ale had done it. Done what? she corrected herself. They make mistakes all the time, she told herself, feeling her legs raise her as if they were not connected to her. Who said the police always knew what they were talking about? There was no way that Jessie could be dead. Not dead dead.
And then they had stepped out into the corridor, with its stale echoes of antiseptic and old cigarette smoke, and she had seen him, sitting on the plastic chair, his dark head in his hands, the policewoman next to him resting an awkwardly comforting hand on his shoulder.
“Ale?” she had said.
As he lifted his head, the hollow shock, the new landscape of raw, wrenching bleakness on his face as his eyes met hers, confirmed everything the policeman had said. Her hands lifted involuntarily to her mouth as she had let out a great guttural sob; the sound echoed down the empty corridor.
* * *
—
After that the night had become a blur. She remembered being taken to the shop, standing shivering behind the yellow tape with the policewoman murmuring behind her, and staring at the collapsed frontage, the splintered windows, whose top rows still held their Georgian glass as if denying the reality of what had happened below. The electricity had apparently survived the impact, and the shop was glowing incongruously, like the interior of an oversize doll’s house, its shelves along the back wall still intact and carefully stacked, alongside the north African maps, all still neatly pasted, as if refusing to bow to the fact of the carnage below them.