I Know What I Saw

‘And you didn’t mention it to anyone? Her parents I mean. About the money? About Ariel disappearing?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Sebastian wouldn’t hear any of it until after the service. And when I brought it up afterwards, he insisted that it was your money and that you’d left it with him, in his charge. Only you could take it. Wouldn’t even consider giving it up to anyone else. You know how bloody uptight he is about all that crap.’

‘So, what, Ariel could have broken in and taken it?’

She considers this for a second. ‘Who knows? We had a kind of wake for her. I looked out for him but didn’t see him. We were half-expecting you to turn up,’ she says then, and her face changes.

I hear the words and then the tears come. I am in mourning. For Grace. For our past. The loss of it all.

41 Friday

The need for new air in my lungs overrides my decision to make my way straight to Seb’s. Some part of me is still feeling the effects of the last day or so layering themselves over the events of the last ten days. I’m struggling with the information. I haven’t processed it yet.

The sun has set into the edges of the street and paints the houses in flame. But the beauty can’t penetrate my anxiety.

I have to find Ariel. I didn’t even go to her funeral. If I could remember where I might have been, that would be something. Perhaps there’d be something symbolic in what I had done that day if I could only put myself there. Did I think about her – specifically – that day? Or dream of her maybe that night? I wasn’t there, but he was at the house. With the money.

And now the money’s vanished. How am I going to get off this murder case? I described every detail of the house to the police, confessed to them I was there. It was as if I’d framed myself.

The idea of finding Ariel clamours in my head. Where do I even begin to look? What could I possibly say if I were to find him? I can’t just accuse him outright of stealing the money with nothing more than an overheard slip of the tongue. I was there – I must have been – and even I can’t be sure that it was him. And if it was, then it must also have been him that strangled her. The idea of that, and the possibility that it could have been him begins to flood my head with noise. Somehow, the notion that he killed her, while I stood by, is more horrific than if it had been a stranger. That I stood – lay – frozen in fear of him.

I make my way to the library as the daylight has all but leaked away, to seek out Amit’s help. He’ll know how to trace the history of a person with a name. He will be able to dive into that fathomless digital world and come up with pearls in his mouth.

The building is etched in the early evening and I surprise myself with the remembrance that I haven’t read a book in months. Books have always been there as joists in my life. They’ve been shelter as much as, no, more than anything else. I always had a book in my pocket. Now the need to pick up a book and read something is returning.

The warmth of the library hits me as soon as I walk in. The glow of low light and bright lights in places adds optimism to the warmth. I cast around in search of Amit but now am quietly pleased that he is not here. I can breathe before it all starts. I go immediately to the French Lit section and flick my eyes across the M’s – Maupassant, Mauriac, Molière – until I find him. And then there he is, my Proust.

I take up a volume and flip it open to a random page and am faced with his madeleine moment. He tastes a crumb of cake and suddenly old memories that were lost to him come unbidden. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest.

The smell and taste of things remain poised, but he failed to mention the sounds. At that moment, as I’m reading this passage, the memory comes rushing back: I’m sitting on a bench in a park with a low wall. No, not a park – the grounds of the Horniman Museum. The grounds my feet keep finding again and again.

But I am there and Grace is beside me. I have this book in my lap. This passage. I am reading, reciting, in fact, as she lies with her head in my lap.

‘It’s too wordy, Xander.’

‘Yes, but listen to what he’s saying,’ I said. ‘He’s saying that what any of us has to say is worthy.’