He Said/She Said(74)
‘Well, neither did I,’ I said. In the swelling silence we both put together the same puzzle. Mac and Ling aside, there was only one person who knew our flat, one person who knew where the candles were. I remembered with a swoop of horror the day I’d left her alone in our flat. She’d had eight hours to get herself a key cut. It was the only opportunity she’d had.
She’d wanted control from the start.
The firefighter’s face took on a completely different expression. ‘You’re sure neither of you did it.’
‘Absolutely not,’ we said in unison.
The firefighter nodded the answer to some internal question. ‘Right. We’ll take this seriously. We’ll get forensics to look for signs of forced entry. There’s CCTV on the kebab shop next door, it might yield something. You’ll have to make statements to the police. You wait here—’ as if we had any choice – ‘while I go and call a colleague.’
After his departure, we sat there in stunned silence for a while, watching the firefighters traipse in and out of our smoking building.
I finally faced the naivety that had made me lie in court and risk my relationship, risk my life. Taking as deep a breath as my charred lungs would allow, I said to Kit, ‘It’s not arson, is it? It’s attempted murder.’
Totality
Chapter 39
LAURA
28 September 2000
Seven days after the fire, I drove Ling’s old van round and round Clapham Common, looking for somewhere to park. Kit sat beside me, his left hand still in its big white mitten. On my third loop I finally found a metered space outside our flat. I managed to manoeuvre the van in without scraping the paint off the vehicles at either end, and we fed the meter enough coins to give us two hours.
‘I half expect her to be sitting on the doorstep,’ I said as I slammed the doors.
The police hadn’t been able to question Beth. Although they’d ‘had a chat’ with her, it wasn’t as a suspect. There were no witnesses and the CCTV camera on the side of the kebab shop turned out to be a dummy. The fire brigade had broken the door when they put out the fire, corrupting any evidence of forced entry. I braved Kit’s fury – ‘What were you thinking, leaving a stranger in the house?’ – to tell them about the possibility of a copied key, but all the local locksmiths drew a blank. Beth’s DNA was all over our house – she had let herself out only hours before the fire – and so forensics would have been meaningless. There was nothing to stop Beth coming after us. My bottomless reservoir of compassion had dried up. Empathy wasn’t going to save us when we were choking.
Beth wasn’t on the doorstep. Apart from a shiny new lock and hinges, the front door looked like it always did, today accessorised with an empty KFC box and a little sun-dried pool of vomit. A glance upwards at the black feathers around our boarded-up kitchen window told the real story. Fatigue hit me like a wave. I was running off caffeine and panic. I had not slept through the night since the fire, not because I was scared – it was still too early for that – but because there was something I had to do, a cold insistence that peaked in the small hours. Each night I lay awake on the lumpy sofabed in Adele’s spare room and vowed I would do it the following day, but days were taken up with hospital appointments, flat viewings and long, circular calls to our insurers and our landlord.
We opened the new lock using a new key. One of the first things Kit had done, almost immediately he was out of the hospital, was to get all our mail redirected to Adele’s house; I had transferred my morning post routine wholesale to her doormat. The only letters here in Clapham were the usual flyers and delivery leaflets. The stairwell stank of stale smoke and smut was thick on the walls. I held Kit’s good hand.
The carpet still squelched with filthy water. It wasn’t the staircase itself that had caught but the walls with their layers of ancient paint and paper. Everything in the sitting room had burned or, in many cases, melted. The television, Kit’s camera and laptop were lumps of plastic and wire, shot through with ribbons of silicone and glass splinters. He’d only lost a week’s work, having backed most of it up on his computer at UCL, where, for all I know, it still is, waiting patiently on some long-buried hard drive. (His department gave him sick leave, which I encouraged him to extend: I hadn’t told Beth where my new job was, but she knew where Kit spent his days. When I fell apart, Kit’s sick leave turned into indefinite, but unpaid, compassionate leave. I encouraged him to stay away; theoretically, he could still go back and complete his doctorate, but I have learned to stop reminding him of that.)
Both our mobile phones and our landline and answering machine had been destroyed, the latter a black pool of cooled lava on the table. We had already replaced them with new numbers. Almost all our books would have to go. The burning around the photo of my mum was so bad that I couldn’t even identify which bit of charred mess had once been the frame.
Kit’s coat had been hanging on the back of the bedroom door. All that remained were metal buttons, the skeleton of a Swiss Army knife and some blackened coins from his pocket.
He stood in front of where his eclipse map had been. My hand flew to my mouth. ‘Kit! All your memorabilia!’
‘That’s what I thought,’ he said. ‘But actually most of it’s in storage at Mum’s. There’s only really the T-shirts here and they might be ok.’