“You said yesterday that Mr. Hennessy knew Nancy was having an affair?”
“Well, I didn’t exactly.” She stammered over her words for reasons she couldn’t place. “I said he said that he’d suspected.”
“Had he ever discussed those suspicions with you before?”
“No.”
The policeman wrote something in his book. “You also said that Mrs. Hennessy was scared of her husband finding out about the affair. I wondered what you meant by that.”
Eleanor looked between the two men, but neither met her eye. “I just meant that Nancy didn’t want her marriage to end, so she didn’t want Robert to find out. I suppose in case he couldn’t forgive her.”
Detective Sergeant Daniels hesitated a moment. “But you used the word scared. Would you say Mr. Hennessy is a jealous man?”
The room blurred around the edges. It didn’t seem possible that they could be thinking this, yet it was also obvious that they would. She remembered some statistic she’d read ages ago about how something like 90 percent of murders are committed by people close to us. “No. I mean, I wouldn’t have thought so.”
The detective looked up again, and the atmosphere shifted. “And finally, Ms. Meakins, can you confirm the information you gave us about the man Mrs. Hennessy was having an affair with?”
She nodded.
“He was called David? She met him at a work party, and he was married with children?”
“Yes.” They seemed like such flimsy pieces of information, and she wished she had more to give them, especially Robert and Zara, locked in their grief in the room beneath her feet.
“You’re absolutely sure that she didn’t go into any more details? Like what his job was, or where he lives, or something about his family? Anything she said, however insignificant it might seem.”
Eleanor felt totally washed out. “I’m sorry. Really there was nothing else.”
“Thank you, Ms. Meakins.” The detective shut his book as a signal that the interview was at an end, but Eleanor stayed sitting, weighted in place by the things she needed to know. “You’ve been very helpful,” he said, clearly in the hope she’d leave.
Eleanor felt her face flush, but held her ground and willed herself to speak because she felt lost in what was happening. There were so many possibilities and variables surrounding Nancy’s death, and she couldn’t get a handle on it, couldn’t work out what they were even dealing with. “I was wondering if you could tell me—I mean, what happened to Nancy, exactly?”
“Do you mean her injuries—how she died?” Detective Sergeant Daniels glanced over at the silent man, who nodded.
“Yes.” Eleanor felt like there was a wedge of bread stuck in her throat. She also wanted to clamp her hands against her ears and not hear.
She heard the dry click of his mouth as he opened it to speak. “Mrs. Hennessy died from a large wound to the back of her head. At the moment we can’t say if this was a blow inflicted by a weapon or if it happened as she fell. But it caused internal bleeding in her brain, which she would have been unable to recover from.”
“Did she die instantly?”
“She would have been unconscious in minutes.”
It was rare, Eleanor thought, to ever get a direct answer to any question. “I saw marks on her face.”
Daniels stuttered when he spoke. “There was evidence of a fight. She did have a couple of injuries to her face, as if she’d been hit. They weren’t injuries that would have killed her on their own, but they do obviously indicate that this was not an accident.”
Eleanor wound her fingers together. “And was she—I mean, was she raped, or anything like that?”
“No. I can assure you, nothing like that.” He smiled, as if at least that was something, which, she supposed, it was.
* * *
The days became clichés. If anyone had asked Eleanor how she felt, she would have said that she was existing in a bubble, that her world was falling apart, that she couldn’t catch her breath, that time had lost all meaning. But no one did ask how she was; instead they asked her constantly about how Robert and Zara were doing, which was almost impossible to answer. She didn’t even know how she’d become their designated carer, how she’d somehow moved into the house, how she was the person shielding them from the reporters outside their front door. She longed for her small flat, with its crisp white walls and mismatched pottery and the checkered counterpane on her bed, which had once belonged to her grandmother. She longed to go back to the office and deal with those faraway emergencies that had always seemed more real to her than anything else. She longed to read the Doris Lessing she was halfway through, to lie in her wonderful deep bath, which had cost almost as much to install as to buy, to fall asleep at night in her soft bed, listening to radio 4, with a cup of chamomile tea next to her.
She also longed for a time when Nancy hadn’t occupied the national consciousness. It was strange, because in a way Nancy had been such a perfect candidate for celebrity. Maybe life had simply conspired to make it happen, maybe fate had decreed that her beautiful face should be plastered across newspapers and television screens and that commentators should endlessly discuss her life. Eleanor remembered watching Nancy at the debating society at university, and how her whole presence seemed to fill the room. She remembered how she stabbed at the air with her hands as she spoke, how her eyes had sparkled, how her body had vibrated with belief. The room had felt suspended somehow, as if they were all holding their collective breath so they could hear every syllable, so they could agree with her emphatically. Eleanor felt so proud to be her friend that day; in fact, she’d often felt proud to be Nancy’s friend.
Robert was already vaguely well known in rarified highbrow circles, and Eleanor thought she detected a certain glee in the press coverage at something so sordid happening to people who seemed so unassailable. It was also such a good story, what with the affair and the scraping away of a perfect life.
Nancy Hennessy, she read in endless variations, had been “brutally murdered in a frenzied attack on a dark towpath.” Her clothes had been ripped, and she had been beaten around the face in an attack police described as “one of the most violent they had seen in years,” a description that did not tally with the Nancy Eleanor had seen in the morgue. An insider said, “It bears all the hallmarks of a crime of passion.” Women on midday chat shows discussed in detail the dangers of having affairs and segued into discussions about internet dating and sites on which you could meet people for casual sex, as if Nancy had done those things. They wondered aloud if the lover had killed her when she’d tried to finish things, or if perhaps the husband had wanted to take revenge. It all felt like white noise, like a screech Eleanor couldn’t stop hearing.
But they all had to keep listening because nothing could move on until the funeral had taken place, and it took a while for the body to be released. Once it had been, Eleanor planned the details with Zara, who had lost weight and now looked strikingly, sickeningly like Nancy. Zara had lots of opinions about what her mother would like, but Robert waved all her suggestions away and told her it didn’t matter, whatever she chose would be great. She found Nancy’s address book in a drawer in her desk and rang everyone in it, asking them to the funeral, thankful that, because of the publicity, they all knew about her death.