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

‘Who’s this?’

‘My name’s Ross. You don’t know me. Nat said you want to find out about Miriam Sylvester.’

‘Yes, yes, that’s great. Thanks for calling.’

‘So what do you want to know about her?’

‘I don’t want to know anything. I just want to talk to her.’

‘All right. You got a pen?’

It was that easy.

ON THE TRAIN I stared out of the window the whole way to Sheffield. I’d handed over a fistful of notes for my return ticket. I wondered if I was being stupid. Should I have done this over the phone? No. It had to be face to face if it was going to be done at all. The last time I’d been on a train out of London it had been with Hayden, an impulsive journey to the seaside just to show we could do it if we wanted to, go anywhere without anyone knowing. Every field, every piece of green had been like a secret message of escape, a sign that we didn’t need London, that we were not trapped by our duties and responsibilities. This time it felt different. The countryside was just something to be got through. It was probably at its best in the late-summer sun, but what was the point of it? What did people do there? I saw people playing cricket, tractors, church after empty church. I started to nod off and worried that I might sleep through Sheffield and wake up somewhere far to the north. So I drank a cup of horrible black coffee to keep me conscious.

I got into a taxi at the station and read out the address that the man I had never met had given me over the phone. ‘Is it far?’ I said.

‘No,’ said the driver.

As he drove, I looked out of the window. Another place I’d never been before, and because of that the shops and the people seemed just a little bit foreign, a little bit interesting. I knew that if I stayed a day or two the novelty would go and it would look the same as everywhere else. But I wasn’t going to stay a day or two. He turned off a shopping street into an area of old red-brick terraced houses on a hill. Some had been gentrified and others hadn’t. Number thirty-two, the address I’d been given, was definitely one of the houses that had been. I got out and, once again, paid more than I’d expected. I knocked at the door. God, wouldn’t it be stupid if nobody was at home? But the door opened.

‘Miriam Sylvester?’ I said, although I had immediately recognized the woman I’d talked to on the stairs at the party. Now she was just wearing jeans and a red T-shirt and her face, then exotic with kohl and lipstick, was bare of makeup.

‘Yes,’ she said, slightly puzzled. ‘You must be the woman who rang earlier?’

‘Yes, I talked to your, erm, er . . .’

‘Partner, Frank, yes,’ she said.

Her partner. And I remembered her flirting with Hayden on the stairs. Because that was what women seemed to do around Hayden, like bees around honey.

‘We met at a party,’ I said. She looked blank. ‘You’d heard about me. As far as I remember, you’d heard something about me and my banjo.’ She looked less blank but a little more puzzled. This wasn’t starting well. Was it possible I’d wasted my time? ‘I was there with Hayden Booth.’

‘Hayden,’ she said, and her expression changed to one of intense engagement. ‘Oh, God, Hayden. I read about it in the papers. It’s the most terrible thing. At first I couldn’t believe it was the same person. Yes, come in, please.’

I’d worried that she might be so freaked out by the thought that I’d come all the way from London to see her that she might not want to talk to me. But it quickly turned out that that was exactly the advantage. I was her first-hand source for the whole Hayden story. She invited me in, sat me down in her kitchen, offered me lunch and, when I turned that down, made me mug after mug of coffee. Being questioned in detail by a virtual stranger about Hayden’s death and the police investigation was pretty much the thing in the world that I least wanted, but I thought it prudent to go along with it. So I sat there for more than an hour and answered her questions and listened to her talking about how shocked she was. I calculated that the more I responded to her the more she would have to respond to me.

And so, after she had asked every possible question she could think of, after she had talked about the death of someone else she knew, after she had cried a bit and I had comforted her, after all that, I took a deep breath and asked her the question I had travelled right across England to ask.

Before

Amos and Sonia arrived shortly after Joakim. Amos was wearing a pair of flowery shorts and a clashing T-shirt and looked slightly ridiculous and very happy—happy in a way I remembered from the past. He kissed me on both cheeks, heartily, and I thought: He’s completely over me at last.

He was holding Sonia’s hand when I opened the door to them and he didn’t let go of it as they entered the flat, so that they had to wind their way through the mess into the kitchen. Sonia was wearing a sleeveless white shift that made her dark hair and eyes seem even darker; her skin was creamy and clean. She glowed with a health that made me feel like a creature who’d been found under a stone, squirming in the sudden unwelcome light. She kissed me too, then held me by my shoulders and said in a quiet voice, so Joakim and Amos wouldn’t overhear, ‘Are you OK?’

‘Me?’ I feigned surprise. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘You look a