The Light of Day: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

even right then she was thinking of that welcome-home dinner.
    “It’s just me,” I said, “but I cook.”
    “So what’s it tonight?”
    A little line crossed her forehead, but it was a laughter frown. Her lips stayed slightly apart. Simple fun-poking.
    “Mushroom risotto, with porcini and vermouth.”
    “Vermouth?”
    “Of course.”
    Now—where she can only eat what she’s given—we still talk about food. I run through every meal. It was a good sign, a good moment, when she said, like an uppity hotel guest, “The food in here, George—it’s awful.” And she still says: “What’s it tonight?”
    Eat well. Eat well for me till I get out.
    Those tables that still get laid for two after the other’s gone.
    But it matters, I’ll vouch for that. The stomach is next to the heart. I’ve seen it, had it pointed out to me in autopsy rooms—and then, to be mean and to hard-school him, taken the green young constable I’m with to the nearest greasy spoon. Mud tea and egg-and-chips.
    I reached up to the shelf and flipped a packet of dried porcini into my wire basket.
    I suppose if we hadn’t met the day before she might have thought I was one of those sad cases who hang around in supermarkets on the pick-up—looking at what they put in their baskets. (And I suppose that could have been me once too.)
    I said, “About the photographs. It’s best if you could bring them—if you could find a moment. That way I could look at them and they need never leave your hands.”
    I think she may have glanced round—as if spies might have been listening, behind the pasta shelves.
    “You mean—you’d just look, and remember?”
    “My job. File in the head. But you need a history—a history to go with the face. Then you remember the face.”
    She looked away. She was still holding the jar—inside, a dark reddish sludge. If it weren’t for me, she’d have put it back on the shelf.
    “You really rate this?”
    Trolleys were squeezing past. The Friday-evening, home-from-work rush. In supermarkets you can’t really tell who’s happy or miserable, who’s toppling over the edge. There’s a tunnelled expression. We all have to eat.
    I looked at her trolley.
    “Nearly done? Me too. You know, there’s the Café Rio, the new place, just over the street. It’s not so busy around now. If you’ve got—ten minutes. Yes, the
tapenade
’s pretty good.”

7
    The sun flashes off the road where the frost has turned to a black dew. I reach the corner of Beecham Close, as if a magnet has pulled me. I didn’t say I would, she didn’t say I should (and I won’t tell her I did). Though it’s hardly a detour. It’s even a short cut, avoiding the Village. Wimbledon Broadway to Putney Vale.
    But now I’m almost there I have to pull up. I taste the dark taste again, like a gush of oil in the throat. I have to stop. It’s even hard to look.
    Two years and everything is quiet. Frozen. The simple turn into a quiet street. A cul-de-sac with verges and chain-links and houses screened by autumn trees. It could almost be a private road. Private, keep out: not for you.
    I stop by the kerb, some yards back from the corner, engine idling. Two years on, and how are these things managed? Is the date remembered? Ignored? Look—it’s a beautiful day.
    In number fourteen they must be well settled in by now. Their name was Robinson, I know. I never met them of course. The estate agent’s job—the estate agent’s problem. A challenge, it’s true. But the place had been unoccupied for months by then.
    Sell all the stuff, George, get rid of it. As if she might have said: Leave me nothing.
    Thank God I was a private detective experienced in tricky situations.
    They must have known—the Robinsons. But why should they care? What was it to them? A kitchen to die for. At a bargain price. And now they might even have sold on, for a small killing, the new owners never knowing. Until a little bird tells them. The Nash Case—ring any bells?
    And