Page 61 of Don't Let Him In

She returns with something wrapped in a handkerchief. Before she unwraps it, she turns to me and says, “I worry about you, André. I know you say you’re happy, but I don’t believe you. A man like you should have a family, a life, a future.”

My flesh ripples with goose bumps.

“Here.” She unwraps the contents of the handkerchief. Inside is a pebble.

A pebble.

She passes it to me, and I throw her a questioning look.

“I picked this up on the beach when I was twenty-one. Just down there.” She gestures below. “The day we moved into this apartment. I put it in my pocket, and I said to myself, Jessie Bland, you have your whole life ahead of you, but this pebble will be here long after you’ve gone. Someone else might pick it up one day and carry it with them for a while. So, I want you to have it now. And I want you to think of me when you look at it. And I want you to think of your future. And once you’ve found your way, I want you to pass this pebble on to someone else who’s lost. Will you do that for me? Do you promise?”

I blink, very slowly, and stare at the pebble. The pebble is nondescript, verging on ugly, and Jessie’s accompanying monologue is trite and meaningless. I have no idea what she was thinking, and I have no idea what to say. Rage pulses gently at my temples, my fist closes hard over the pebble, I make my face into a pleasant smile, and I say, “Yes. I promise.” But then, from nowhere, more words appear. “Ha!” I say quite forcefully. “For a minute there I thought you were going to give me something valuable! To set me up in a new life!” I laugh, overloudly, so that she thinks I am making a joke. But I can tell she knows I mean it and she gives me a sympathetic look that makes me feel quite murderous.

“Oh, André,” she says, folding the handkerchief neatly into a square. “I wish I could. I would love to give you everything. But those wretched children of mine—I can’t do that to them. That would be an act of such cruel vindictiveness, I couldn’t live with myself.”

Her words hit me like a slingshot to the gullet. I picture my mother, although I was not there to witness the moment, sitting at a big leather-topped desk in her solicitor’s office thirty years ago, signing the piece of paper that robbed me of my inheritance, that changed the course of my life, that brought me from there to here. And then, in my mind’s eye, my mother’s face morphs into Jessie’s face, and I picture myself forcing the pebble deep down Jessie’s throat. I picture it so clearly that for a moment I almost imagine I might do it. But that moment passes, the swishing and swooping in my head subsides, the ringing in my eardrums quietens. I tuck the pebble into my pocket, and I pat Jessie’s hand. “I understand,” I say. “I was only kidding you. Of course I don’t want your money.”

“Just my body, yes,” she replies with a wink that almost turns my stomach.

“Exactly,” I reply. “Exactly.”

When I leave Jessie’s apartment half an hour later, I remove the pebble from my pocket and toss it forcefully across the beach, where it lands with a smack against the others. It feels symbolic in some way, but I’m not sure how.

In my other pocket is the envelope of cash that Jessie insisted I take with me, even though we didn’t have sex—£500. And in the inside pocket of my jacket is a man’s watch. In my haste to take it, I could not tell if it was of any value, but I couldn’t bear to leave her house with nothing. The watch was in a drawer, inside a box, beneath some paperwork and a tangle of chains and necklaces. She might wonder if it was me, when she notices. She might even reportit to the police. And if she does? So what? André doesn’t even have a surname, let alone any other form of identification. And how would she explain my presence in her home? A fifty-three-year-old man of no fixed abode. A man who, if traced by the police, would simply tell them what he was—a male sex worker for whose services she had been paying for over fifteen years. And what would her precious children think of that?

I pull the watch out of my pocket once I am in my car and examine it. It’s a Cartier. Then I put the car into drive and head for a village along the coast from here called the Riviera.

Nina Swann wears utility-style jeans, quirky knitwear, and oversized reading glasses. Her hair is dyed an improbable shade of dark mahogany with a blunt fringe and she drives an electric car. She is, I should mention, very beautiful, but really not my type. Too tall. Too angular. Too tomboyish, almost. And I have aways preferred blondes.

Every Tuesday and Thursday from twelve until five, she goes to work at an upmarket fruit-and-vegetable importer in Dover where she sits at the reception desk in their rough-hewn, bare-brick warehouse. At three o’clock on these days, she goes to the café next door for an afternoon snack.

I am sitting across from her in that café right now, wearing Jessie’s dead husband’s Cartier watch and scrolling through my phone. Nina orders a green tea and a muffin to take away. She is chatty with the young man behind the counter and has a slightly flat northern tone to her voice, one I recognize as being from the east of the North, not the west, from where I come. Maybe Harrogate? Beverley? I wonder how she ended up down here with a short man from Wanstead. I wonder how they met. I wonder what it was about him that appealed to her.

A bit of rough, maybe? Or maybe Paddy Swann is somehow, in a way that is impossible for me to register, sexy? He wasn’t rich whenthey met, that came later, so he must have been doing something, consciously or not, to make himself appear desirable. I wonder what Nina Swann would make of me. I feel physically at least we would make a better fit. Though possibly not stylistically. I am more traditional than she is. She wouldn’t like my sports jacket. She probably wouldn’t like my immaculate pale green polo shirt either. But would she like me? My height? My presence? My beauty? For a moment, I want her to look at me so that I can see how she reacts, but then I remember that I don’t want her to notice me, not yet. So I move my gaze away from her and back to the screen of my phone, where I google the value of a Cartier watch the same style and model as the one on my wrist and discover that it is worth only £800. When I look up again, Nina Swann has taken her green tea and her muffin and headed into work.

FIFTY-SIX

Jane Trevally is waiting for Ash under the kissing couple statue on the top concourse at St. Pancras station. She is wearing a huge green parka with a fur-trimmed hood and dark sunglasses, even though the sun has yet to come out this year.

She greets Ash with a hug and says, “Happy New Year,” and Ash feels a strange surge of affection toward her, this woman she has known for only a few weeks.

They walk toward the street and cross over to the Standard hotel, where they find three low-slung armchairs in the lounge in front of a large sixties-style open fire. As they watch the door opposite for the woman called Laura to arrive, Ash feels her stomach swirl with anticipation and anxiety—and also a touch of excitement. What will this woman tell them? What will they know about Nick Radcliffe in one hour’s time that they do not know now? And how will this new information reshape the landscape of Ash’s life, which has already been rendered almost untraversable by the senseless death of her father?

Jane is being chatty, but Ash can tell that she is distracted too. She’s telling Ash about her Christmas with her first husband and his new wife and their baby, plus her oldest stepson and stepdaughter, who both hate the new wife and, by extension, the baby, and there are anecdotes about dogs doing unspeakable things and stepchildren doing unspeakablethings and it all sounds like she’s making it up, just to be entertaining, but Ash is pretty sure she isn’t.

And then a woman appears in the entranceway, looking around uncertainly. Jane stands and glances at Ash to check that it’s OK for her to take the lead, then gestures the woman over.

“Hi,” she says, her hand outstretched. “I’m Jane Trevally. And this is Ash. Thank you so, so much for agreeing to meet us. We’re very grateful.”

Jane fusses around the woman for a moment, taking her coat, ordering her a coffee and a sparkling water, making the whole thing a little less weird, but then it is quiet and Laura, who is a pale woman with large eyes, a small nose, and fine blond hair that she constantly tucks behind her ears, looks from Jane to Ash and says, “So. What do you want to know?”

“Well,” says Jane. “We should probably start at the beginning. How did you meet him?”

At this question, a peachy blush hits Laura’s cheeks and her eyes mist over, and she looks like she is revisiting a precious moment. “We met… well, he was my life coach.”

“Oh,” says Ash with a small gasp. “Right. And where did you find him? I mean, was he advertising? Or did someone recommend him?”

“Weirdly enough, he approached me on the street. I thought he was one of those charity collectors at first, but then he said he was offering special rates for his life-coaching consultancy because he’d just moved to the area and needed a new client base. He said my first session would be free and then if I wanted to continue, it would be fifty pounds an hour as opposed to a hundred pounds an hour, and I took his details and did a google on him, saw that he had a few five-star reviews, and thought, Well, I have nothing to lose.”

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