LITMIR.BIZ

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Maxine’s voice, which whispered out of my own bones that if I was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen it was only because I bore a likeness to Jane. He looked so pleased when I moved my hands down his back, when I kissed him, when I whispered that I wanted him so much and I couldn’t wait until he returned.

      ‘But will you always feel that way?’ He moved a hand up my thigh, under my dress, beneath my underwear. ‘Are you sure you’ll never change your mind?’

      ‘Yes.’ I was unfastening his belt. ‘I’m sure.’

       Now The Woman in the Room

      Two years and four months later

      Bath, Tuesday, 2 April 2019

      At first, I try not to look at the woman who has drawn so many police officers and forensic scientists to this house. I try to look at everything but her. I focus on the room.

      The carpet is pale beige. It is clean and soft and probably the last thing she walked on. There is little in the way of furniture. A small pine wardrobe, a television screen attached to the wall, and a four-poster bed of shiny fake wood. The white sheets are so tangled I cannot help but imagine the aftermath of recent sex. It makes me think of another room, and another tempest of a bed, in a faraway house that rests on top of a plague pit by the sea.

      ‘What do you see?’ The voice is Maxine’s and she is talking to me.

      ‘The bed doesn’t go.’

      ‘I mean the woman.’

      What I had wanted to say was that the mess of the bed doesn’t go with everything else in the superhumanly clean and empty house. ‘Nobody could die that neatly, in such a messy bed,’ I say.

      She is naked, as far as I can tell, though the quilt hides her middle, going from the top of her thighs to the upper edge of her breasts. She is delicate, and probably a few centimetres shorter than I am, though it is difficult to be sure with her lying as she is. Her arms are by her sides, resting above the quilt and curved like parentheses. Her legs are as straight as a ballerina’s, though her toes are not pointed. I wonder if she was arranged in this position before her body grew stiff and cold.

      I can’t look at her face. I put my hand to the side of my right eye to stop myself. I am too afraid, and I do not care if Maxine and Tess know it.

      ‘Were you wanting to say,’ Tess asks, ‘that the messy bed is out of place in context with the rest of the address?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Be back in two minutes.’ Tess hurries from the room.

      I crouch by the side of the bed. I long to smooth her hair. But again, I am too frightened that if I do I will see her face. If I were alone, I would tell her how sorry I am that I failed her, that I didn’t do enough to help to find her in time.

      Where have you been, I silently ask, for the last six years?

      My hand curls around hers, an impulse to comfort somebody who is beyond help. Even through the thin blue gloves they made me wear, I can feel that her warmth is gone. She is the temperature of the pine wardrobe. I remember imagining how my baby would pink up, as I fantasised about her birth. What has happened here is the opposite of pinking up. The hand in mine has lost its softness, its human sponginess. There is no give any more. The give, the warmth, the pinking up, that is what makes us human. But this hand is a plastic doll’s.

      Maxine crouches beside me. ‘You can’t touch her.’

      As I release my grip, I notice the nails. They are well cared for, and though they protrude no more than a few millimetres beyond the tips of her fingers, they are painted pinky-nude. They are not broken – there is no obvious evidence that she fought or struggled.

      I want Peggy. I want her to fold me in her arms and let me press myself into her plump softness the way I did as a child.

      Tess comes back into the room.

      ‘Can I ask when this happened?’ I say.

      ‘The early hours of this morning.’

      What I can see of her skin is like a waxwork, but there is a blue tint to the jaundiced-looking yellow.

      ‘Are those pressure marks on the face?’ Maxine asks. ‘Though they’re not very pronounced.’

      The question prompts me to look. It is an accident, a reflex, my movements so quick and panicked that everything is blurred. Before I can tear my eyes away, I glimpse skilfully dyed blonde hair. And I see her face. Her nose and mouth, I think, had oozed blood. The skin around them is extra pale, and her tongue sticks out as if she had bitten it. Her cheeks are dotted with red pinpricks that I think must be some kind of bruising.

      ‘Could be from post-mortem postural changes,’ Tess says.

      What is not pronounced to Tess and Maxine is very pronounced to me.

      I have learned too much from Zac. I cannot stop what comes out. ‘It’s suffocation of some kind, isn’t it?’ My voice is quiet. I force my eyes upwards, stop them at her neck, quickly close them before turning my head towards her feet. ‘I can’t see any marks on her neck, so maybe smothering more than strangulation.’

      ‘And you know this how?’ Tess says.

      ‘I used to date a cardiologist.’ There is a twinge of fear at saying this, as if Zac were in the room, listening. Even now, I imagine how he would bristle at the word date, and especially at the words used to.

      Dating is a word from women’s magazines filled with things that rot your brain. It’s the worst kind of cultural vulgarity.

      We will never be in the past tense, Holly. You and I are forever. You don’t go through what we have, invest what we have, only to give up.

      This is why I say date. This is why I say used to.

      ‘Explain what you see, please,’ Tess says.

      So I try, in a strange blend of Maxine’s lack of inflection with Zac’s words. What I remember about his saying them to me was his charm, the way he smiled, as if he was telling a dark joke. And that I smiled back, and my face grew flushed, and there were shivers all the way down my arm as he traced a finger over my bare shoulder.

      ‘It’s the blue tint to her skin. What happens to the heart, and the skin, if someone dies from a cardiac arrest, it’s the same as what happens with suffocation or strangulation. The heart continues to pump blood around the body for at least a couple of beats, but that blood doesn’t have as much oxygen, so it’s less pink. That’s why her skin has the blue tinge – the blood beneath it is deoxygenated.’

      Tess nods. ‘Correct. Plus, the eyes are bloodshot.’ I nearly ask how she can know this, but realise she must have prised them open to look before we got here.

      Maxine says, ‘Can Helen see her right ankle, please, Tess? You’ll need to go round to the other side of the bed, Helen.’

      The oval is there, on the outer side of the lower calf, though I’d already half-glimpsed it. A smoky purple circle the size of a two-pence coin, slightly above the ankle bone. A bruise like a black star sapphire, perfectly cut, and set against the blue-tinted skin.

      I am staring at that oval. Maxine is staring at me. ‘I’m not expecting you’d recognise her face in the circumstances, but have you seen the mark before?’ she says.

      I can taste bile. The last time I tasted that was when I woke in hospital after it happened.

      ‘No,’ I say.

      ‘You’re sure?’ she says. ‘It doesn’t remind you of anything?’

      Three years ago, looking at the photo in Zac’s bedside table, I’d wondered if it was a tattoo.

      ‘It’s a birthmark,’ I say. ‘A dark circle, that’s all.’

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