The Other Side of the Door by Nicci French (best novels to read for students .txt) 📕

‘You already told us that.’ Sonia stared at him over the rim of her mug. I could practically hear her crackle with impatience.

‘Here’s the thing. We’ve all done the wrong thing for the right motive. Yes?’

‘Go on.’

‘Now, the only thing we should really feel bad about is if we’re concealing something from the police . . .’

‘Well, of course we’re bloody concealing something from the police!’

‘Hold on, you didn’t let me get to the end of the sentence. If we’re concealing something from the police that would help them in their investigation—in other words, help them find out who killed Hayden. Yes?’

‘How does this help us, Neal?’

‘We can do something.’

‘Do something?’ said Sonia.

‘What we did was to destroy evidence and dispose of a body. But, listen, there were three different crime scenes, or was it four? On top of each other. There was the original one when Hayden was killed. Maybe the killer did something to that, but that was the one I found. I thought you’d done it, Bonnie, so I altered it to make it look as if there’d been a violent scuffle and it wouldn’t seem as if you’d done it. Or something—actually, I wasn’t thinking straight. Then you . . .’ He looked across at Sonia. ‘. . . then you, with Sonia, tried to make it look as if a crime hadn’t been committed there at all. That was pretty stupid, but from what I understand it worked to a certain extent, in that the police still don’t know where the murder happened. My point is that we could be like archaeologists. We could peel away the layers and get to the original murder scene.’

‘You mean go to the flat?’

‘No, that would be way too dangerous. The police don’t know the murder was committed there, but they know he was staying there. If they stumbled on the three of us there, it would be . . . well, not easy to explain. But we could reconstruct it in our heads.’

Sonia looked dubious. ‘I don’t really see how this is going to work,’ she said.

Neal got up and rummaged through a drawer for pens. Then he tore some pages off a notepad and passed a couple each to me and Sonia.

‘What are we meant to do?’ asked Sonia. ‘Draw a diagram?’

‘That would be too hard. Anyway, I don’t know what would be on it. We should all start by writing down every object we can remember from the flat, every single thing. And when we’ve got the list we can try to place where they were and then we can see if what you remember fits with what I remember and . . . and . . .’

‘And then what?’ I said.

‘We can reconstruct the scene.’

‘And then?’

‘I don’t know.’ Neal rubbed his eyes and, for a moment, looked despondent. ‘We can’t tell. But if we get a list of as many objects as possible and place them, some pattern might emerge. If I could tell before we’d done it, what would be the point of doing it?’

‘I’m not sure it’s going to be productive,’ Sonia said.

‘It’s something.’

‘You really think we can re-create the scene from memory?’ I asked.

Neal banged on the table. ‘What’s the point of arguing about whether or not we think we can do it? Let’s have a fucking go at it.’

I turned to Sonia. ‘You’re good at games like this.’

‘Shut up, everybody,’ Neal said, ‘and start writing.’

I picked up my pen and stared at the blank piece of paper on the table. I smoothed it with my fingers as if that would help. For a moment, my mind was as blank as the page. I closed my eyes and tried to make myself see it, to put myself back in the room. It took a particular, painful effort because I had spent weeks making it a part of my mind I would never visit again. The struggle was almost physical, as if I was pulling at a stuck old door to a room I hadn’t entered for a long time. But the door came open with a jolt and I was there. It was blurry and fragmentary, though, and I could only make out a few objects. I started to write. There were the CDs, including the Hank Williams one that I had retrieved. There was a green plastic tortoise thing for keeping pens in. That had been on the table. There had been a little tin of paperclips next to it. There had been a cushion on the chair and a vase with tulips in it tipped over. There was the wedding invite, which I had also taken and got rid of. There had been the broken guitar and some books on the floor. My scarf. The scene seemed to go further into the distance the more I tried to see it.

It reminded me of being in an exam room when I was seventeen years old, spying on the people around me, who seemed to be writing more than I was, and with more concentration. It was certainly like that now. Neal was writing steadily. I couldn’t read the words but he had done much more than I had. Sonia too. As I had thought, she was much better than I was at this sort of thing. Not that it really mattered. I couldn’t seriously imagine that anything would come of this. That hadn’t really been the point. The point, I knew, was to make us feel better about what we’d done. A plaster on a gaping wound.

I had stopped writing. That was like an exam too, those awful last minutes when I had nothing more to say and stared at the clock waiting for the end, wondering whether I should check my work once more.

‘Are you done?’ I said. ‘I can’t think of anything else.’

‘Hang on,’ said Neal, still scribbling energetically.

Sonia had also stopped writing.

‘Can I have a look?’ I said, and she passed her paper across to me.

As I suspected, she had done miles better than I had. She had remembered the phone and the bowl