Chapter Eleven

I was summoned again to be interviewed. It sounded urgent and I had to cycle up to Kentish Town in the middle of a working day, infuriating Campbell. But after I had locked my bike and been signed in, there wasn’t much of an interview. Kamsky asked me a few questions but I had nothing new to say and mainly he walked up and down in silence. When he said something it was as much to himself as to me.

‘These are the essential questions,’ he said. ‘One: why did the house show no sign of forced entry, unless Mrs de Soto knew her killer? Two: where was the package you were supposed to collect? Three: why were you present at both murders?’

‘I wasn’t present.’

‘Four,’ he continued, showing no sign of having heard me. ‘Who else knew that you were going to Mrs de Soto ’s house?’

‘Nobody. Campbell. I don’t know. I’ve told you everything.’

‘I don’t think so. I think you know something but you don’t know you know it.’

‘That sounds too clever for me.’

‘What were you doing the day before yesterday?’ I asked Owen, as we walked towards the Downs. The men of the house were going to play football with a team who called themselves the Hackney Empire against another team from Enfield. Pippa, Mel and I were going to watch. I had planned to spend the entire day in bed, trying to shut out the horror of the day before yesterday, but the familiarity of the outing was comforting. It was like going back to a time before the horrible things started happening. Except that walking there with Owen was unsettling. I wasn’t like Pippa: I couldn’t just go back to being a friend as if nothing had happened, as if sex was like a day we’d spent at the seaside. I was trying to act casually, speak to him in a friendly and neutral fashion, but my throat felt dry and my stomach lurched when I looked at him. Everything about him, which had been so familiar for months, now seemed mysterious to me. He’d become a beautiful stranger, grim and infinitely desirable. But I still wasn’t going to take my clothes off and sit in front of him while he took unsettling photographs that turned me into an inanimate, tortured object.

‘The day before yesterday?’

‘Were you busy?’

‘Why?’

‘The police will probably ask. You’ll need an answer.’

‘I was at a magazine in the morning with the picture editor and -’

‘Which magazine?’

‘Bella.’

‘Fake alibi?’ said Davy, cheerfully, appearing at my side with Mel in tow.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ But I could feel myself blush.

‘I was with Mel, so I’ve got a witness,’ continued Davy.

Mel giggled shyly and put her arm through his.

‘Here,’ said Davy, ‘can you lend me a fiver, Astrid? I’ve left my wallet at home and I want to pick up a paper or two.’

I fished my purse out of my bag and opened it. ‘I’ve only got some change. I thought I had loads of money. I only took some out a couple of days ago.’

‘Never mind.’

‘I’ve got money,’ said Mel. She was ridiculously eager to please, like a little panting dog. A sleek, pretty dog with large, woebegone eyes.

‘Thanks.’ He pocketed the note and bounded into the newsagent on the corner.

We loitered outside, while Pippa, Mick, Miles and Dario ambled towards us. Dario fished a packet of cigarettes out of his back pocket and stuck one in the corner of his mouth.

‘Doesn’t it make your chest hurt during football?’ asked Mel.

‘Sure,’ said Dario. ‘If I run.’

‘Dario doesn’t run much,’ explained Pippa. ‘He kind of loiters and puts his foot out to trip people up.’

Dario ignored them. He looked at me. ‘I was thinking, I don’t know which is worse. If it’s a coincidence or if it’s not a coincidence.’

‘If it isn’t a coincidence,’ said Miles. ‘That’s clearly worse.’

‘It can’t not be a coincidence,’ I said.

‘Unless you killed them both,’ said Dario, drawing deeply on his cigarette and cackling at the same time. ‘No, no, don’t worry, Astrid, I was just winding you up.’

‘I’m glad someone can laugh at it,’ I said.

‘It can be to do with a sort of energy,’ said Dario.

‘What?’ I said.

‘It’s like a forcefield,’ said Dario, ‘where terrible things happen, or have happened, or are going to happen. They’re like a kind of spiritual magnetism and certain very sensitive people – such as you – are attracted to them.’

‘I collided with her car,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ said Dario.

‘And I wasn’t exactly attracted to the other woman. My boss radioed me and asked me to collect a package.’

Dario took another deep drag and looked mysterious.

‘The attraction doesn’t have to be direct,’ he said. ‘There are collections of forces and they act on particular people. There’s something special about you, Astrid. An aura. We might not be able to see it, but we can feel it.’ I heard Owen give a small sound, almost like a snort, and turned to glare at him, but he looked away. Dario took a last drag on the cigarette and dropped it on the pavement, grinding his heel into it as Davy came out of the shop carrying a bulging plastic bag.

‘Have you thought you might be in danger?’ Mick said suddenly.

We stared at him and he stared back, his pale blue eyes unblinking.

‘I thought it briefly,’ I said finally, ‘after I hit the door of Peggy’s car and I was flying through the air.’

‘What danger could she possibly be in?’ said Davy.

Mick just shrugged.

‘You’re a bloody idiot,’ Davy said, with unaccustomed ferocity. ‘It’s bad enough for Astrid as it is.’

‘Thanks, Davy,’ I said. ‘But I’m OK.’

On the Downs we sat on the warm grass while we waited for the match to start. Davy pulled a bundle of papers out of the plastic bag and tossed them towards me. ‘Something to read while we’re playing,’ he said.

‘Why so many?’ I asked, or started to ask, but then I saw the headlines.

‘I thought you should be informed,’ said Davy, awkwardly. ‘Was I wrong?’

‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘No, I guess not.’

We picked up papers and rifled through them, skimming the front news stories, the features and the comment pieces, avidly swapping bits of information. Of course, I should have expected a lot of coverage of Ingrid de Soto ’s murder, but even so I was taken aback by quite how much there was. Much more than Peggy’s, but then, as Miles remarked acidly, Peggy had been a middle-aged, unphotogenic housewife in Hackney, whereas Ingrid de Soto was blonde, glamorous, rich and the right side of forty. ‘Money, sex and death,’ he said. ‘All that’s missing is religion.’

It was true that money and sex featured in many of the stories, and even God slipped in once or twice, via an interview with a local vicar, who’d clearly never met Ingrid de Soto but was eloquent about the nature of good and evil and the decline of traditional values in our celebrity-obsessed and faith-deprived contemporary culture.

The football started. There was a lot of yelling and grown men rolling over pretending to be hurt. People kept shouting, ‘Ref,’ and holding up a finger. Mick scored two goals, one with his head. Dario lurked by the touchline. Mel went away and came back with three ice-cream cones for Pippa, me and herself. Owen got hit by a high tackle and I saw a bruise shaped like an egg form on his shin.

While it went on, I learned a great deal about the dead woman that I hadn’t known. I found out that she was thirty-two (I’d always fancied her to be older, because of her chilly, well-bred politeness, and her tall, co-ordinated house, which had the kind of affluent respectability that seemed horribly grown-up to someone like me). That she had moved from Hong Kong to London, and to Highgate, seven years ago. That her husband, Andrew de Soto, was the manager of a hedge fund, whatever that was. He was reported to be devastated by his wife’s death. But Ingrid de Soto was rich through her father as well as her husband: William Hamilton was in oil, a millionaire many times over. She was his only child and he was flying to London to see her body. She had no children (I’d known that – no house could ever look so flawless with a child). Highgate neighbours were ‘shocked and appalled’. Friends were shocked and appalled too. They described her as ‘lovely’ and ‘smart’. She had no enemies, apparently: everyone liked her.