I tottered inside, calling Peter’s name. The room was vast, white walled, except for the expanse of glass that faced out over the river. On a sunny day it might have been lovely, but now the darkness pressed against the pane, as though it was peering in. There was a tang in the air I couldn’t place, that was neither cleaning product nor food. Three rooms led off the main room: a bathroom, a bedroom, and a study or second bedroom that was totally empty. Peter was not there, nor were there many signs that Peter had ever been there. Where were the books? Where were the records? Peter had liked to express himself through content, back when we didn’t call it content: well-thumbed copies of yellowing paperbacks, videos of foreign films taped off Channel 4 after midnight, vinyl when everyone else was showing off their CDs. All hoarded up in the hope that someone, the right someone, would see them and know him for who he really was. I was the one looking, the one paying attention, but I was never the right person for Peter.
In the wardrobe, there were expensive shirts still in their wrappings. In the bathroom cabinet, a half-empty box of antidepressants. In the shower, hotel soap and shampoo. In the fridge, a flat bottle of tonic and an array of condiments.
Peter slept on a mattress thrown in the middle of the floor, a few short steps from the gleaming black kitchen. The bed was unmade, the sheets in need of a wash. Among the pillows, I spotted a bag of mint imperials and a smile came unbidden: a geography teacher, Mrs. Haines, catching him at it, week after week. Her back to the class as she wrote notes on the board:
“Mr. White, I hope you’ve got enough of those for everyone.”
Until the week he replied that he supposed he did, actually, and she had him get up and divvy them out, only hardly anyone ate them, because they were Peter’s.
The dishwasher had a hint of foulness. I stared into its mouth, and into the pristine oven and the empty bin, and I ran my fingers over the cutlery in the drawer and banged it shut, so that Adewale looked at me in alarm.
An armchair was placed by the window. Was this where Peter had his cornflakes in the morning? Or where he sat in the evenings, at night even, before or after his visitors had come and gone? Upon the glass, an oblong smear. I sat down in the chair and leaned forward to rest my forehead against the window. Below me, the glutinous river snaked toward the sea. When I drew back, some inches below the first smear was now another. And I thought, Oh Peter, this is not what we planned. This is not what we planned at all.
Which was when, looking down, I saw it, at the foot of the chair, as incongruous as a dream image: a red telephone box, six inches high and made of molded plastic, the kind sold in the tourist traps around Piccadilly alongside models of busby-hatted soldiers and teapots in the shape of Big Ben.
This one had been customized. I picked it up and held it in the palm of my hand. The windows of the telephone box were blackened and in places the plastic had melted and twisted. As I turned it this way and that, a sooty, oily residue came off on my fingers. It smelled poisonous, like the bonfires Mr. Hackett used to have at the back of the cowsheds, old tires and baler twine smoldering away in a metal drum.
To almost anyone else it would have meant nothing. But I knew it. I knew what it meant. It spoke volumes to me, and I waited there, holding it in my hands as the minutes stretched out.
Later I would wonder why I was so convinced, how I had taken off so keenly down the wrong path on the basis of such a small thing. Perhaps because it chimed with certain thoughts I’d had over the years, certain suspicions. That melody on the piano, Peter’s face when I came in the morning we found the body. The possibility that in the book written by Peter’s angel was an entry I’d do anything not to read.
Or perhaps it was because—unable to imagine a future, little better than asleep in the present—there was something I had lost among the ruins of the past, something of myself that I had to retrieve. That, in the end, the clue said nothing about Peter and everything about me.
CHAPTER 8
DIAMONDS
Like all children, I kept a list of the things my mother didn’t give me. Mine was more substantial than most: a father, siblings, family in fact of any kind, answers to the most basic of questions. What I had was Peter, and to some extent the Whites—usually good for a roast dinner after church, despite Patricia’s mixed feelings about me—and I had Mrs. East. Mrs. East, who made me cups of tea, and doled out fags and sponge cake, and told me things. Like, when I was a babe in arms, my mother had turned up with me one day in a taxi. Colin, Mrs. East’s husband, had come out to see if he could help with the bags and she’d told him to piss off.
And she told me that during the hours of wakefulness, in the night, in the gray dawn, she would time travel, reenter the past in reverie, that there was a trick to it, like threading a needle with your eyes closed. Done right, she could live it again, certain moments, certain days, not as herself, but as a witness, a will-o’-the-wisp, shadowing younger Mrs. Easts, reliving days fifty, sixty years old:
“I was out at the castle. I used to go there to watch them come home, the bombers, to count them in like hens into the coop. Listening out for their engines. Scanning the skies. I used to think if I could be there to count, I could keep them safe, stop the fox from getting them. I was wearing the lilac cardigan and my brown shoes. The bomber made a funny noise as it came in, the engine stuttering. On the airfield, the men came running. Tiny, they were. The noise stopped, the engine noise, and they were coming down. I felt my heart stop. It stopped in my chest. All the birds lifted from the fields below. They came up and the plane came down over my head, so close I could see the bullet holes.”
We were standing at her back window, watching the day leaving. Late September sunset: a rollout of radiant pink, the sun offering a rose-gold wreath to the earth; the light touched the mist rising from the harvested fields, and the vapor became corporeal, the body of a god as a shower of golden light. Her head lay on my shoulder. She made a gesture with her hand, the one that would have also belonged to one of her parents and charmed those who loved her, a sort of circling indication meant to firm up meaning, to locate it in the ether, when she felt her words were not enough.
“Andy, I think sometimes of all the jobs people don’t have anymore: cartwright, and plowman and lamplighter, coalman, quarryman. It’s like even the words are becoming ghosts, are vanishing into the mist. It’s like souls dying.”
The last times I saw her, in the hospital in Oxford—my third year in London, fourth?—she took my hand and told me that she was sorry she hadn’t done more. “I should have stuck a carving knife in him, Andy my love. That Joe. It’s the only thing I regret.”
“You still haven’t got a nine at Countdown, Mrs. East.”
“I did so.”
“‘Seraphims’ isn’t a word, my darling.” And I kissed her bony hands, and the creases on her cheeks, and when I fell asleep in the chair I thought I heard her say something, one last thing, but my eyelids were too heavy and I missed it, I missed the last thing Mrs. East ever told me.
But on the subject of the diamonds, Mrs. East should have kept her mouth shut.
* * *
From Mrs. East, the bones—a famous theft, a prominent local family, an unsolved mystery. Mrs. East remembering the newspaper reports from the year she was twelve, the gossip raging for months in town, the sightseers who came down from London to stand at the manor’s gates and gawp, before heading to The Polly Tearooms for scones. The flesh we added from books Peter found or ordered from the library, a guide to local history, a compendium of unsolved crimes, a biography of Lady Mary Ashton, the owner of the diamonds. The case we assembled went like this: