“Where is she?” Eleanor asked. “I mean, is she dead?”
Both policemen and Robert turned to look at her, as if she were stupid. “Yes,” the speaking policeman said finally. “I’m sorry, I thought you understood…” He blushed a deep crimson. “She’s in a mortuary now.”
“Where was she found?” Robert asked.
“By the river, near Hammersmith. I’m sorry to ask, but have you got a recent photo of your wife?”
Robert didn’t seem like he was going to move, so Eleanor stood and fetched a photo from the mantelpiece. She picked a recent one of Nancy with her arm around Zara. Bad photos of Nancy didn’t exist, but this one was particularly luminous. The sun was behind her, accentuating her perfection with an outline that almost made her glow. She handed it to the policeman, and he nodded when he looked at it.
“We’re going to have to ask you to come and identify the body, Mr. Hennessy. Or if there’s someone who can do it for you…”
Robert groaned, a low, bearlike sound.
“I can do it,” Eleanor said.
“No,” Robert said. “It should be me.”
Their eyes met as he spoke, and Eleanor felt a jolt of terror pass through her as she realized that everything about Nancy’s death was worse than any other death anywhere. They would all suffer, and nothing would ever be the same again.
* * *
As she waited for Robert on the cold plastic chairs outside the viewing room, Eleanor couldn’t remember how they’d arrived at the mortuary. She tried to reassemble the journey in her mind, to give it some cohesion, but nothing came. Robert reappeared relatively quickly, but his eyes were unfocused and his body appeared to be trembling.
“Do you mind if I go in?” Eleanor surprised herself by saying, but he waved her in, so then she felt like she should.
The room was artificially dark, or at least subdued, with fake flowers dusty in vases and a navy velvet chair in one corner. The outline of a body, which Eleanor supposed to be Nancy, lay on the bed, covered by a sheet. A woman was standing next to the shape and she nodded, so Eleanor nodded back. The woman leaned forward and folded the white sheet back, so Eleanor only realized what she was doing once it was too late and she didn’t have any time to prepare herself for what she was going to see. And then there was nothing more to do than step closer and look at her friend. She momentarily felt a pang of relief because they’d clearly got it wrong, it wasn’t really her. It was just a facsimile of Nancy, a waxwork, a cardboard cutout. Eleanor wanted to reach out and feel her skin, which already looked devoid of anything meaningful. Her beauty, which had been so present in life, had vanished, as if it knew what was to come, as if it couldn’t bear to let itself mush and decay and be eaten by worms. Eleanor gasped at her own thoughts, but the woman holding the sheet averted her gaze, and besides, she must have seen everything in this terrible room. What a job. It seemed impossible that anyone would want a job like this.
Eleanor stepped closer. There was something wrong, or missing perhaps, that she couldn’t work out. Nancy’s left cheekbone was swollen, and a yellow bruise had crept up under the strange, turbanlike thing she was wearing. Her jaw looked strange as well, almost as if she’d been to the dentist and hadn’t removed the wad of cotton wool they used. She wanted to turn away because it all spoke of something very ugly that had happened to her friend, and she couldn’t bear to think of the violence that must have produced those marks. Nancy’s last moments had been painful, that much was blindingly clear.
But the strangest thing was that Nancy didn’t have any hair, or at least that her hair had been completely covered by this odd turban. Nancy was always surrounded by her golden hair, long and straight at university, rising up, curling, now a flouncy bob that stopped just above her shoulders. This was as far as her hair would go, Eleanor realized with a jolt. Nancy would never have another haircut.
But mixed in with all of that was the knowledge that Eleanor had known Nancy had been going to meet her lover, and what if he was the person who had done this? What if Eleanor could have said the right words to stop her going and didn’t? She hadn’t even tried, she realized. Sickness rose through her and her anger at this woman she had shared so much of her life with pooled in a mess by her feet, so she was just left with shame at herself. Eleanor had loved this woman and had let this happen to her.
“Why has she got that round her head?” Eleanor pointed at the turban, as if it mattered.
“The wound on the back of head was quite substantial. This is how we contain it,” the woman answered.
“Will there be a postmortem?”
“I would imagine so.”
“So they’ll cut her up? She won’t ever look like this again?” Eleanor couldn’t understand why any of this mattered, but it was fueling a building desperation inside her. She wanted very much to lean down and kiss Nancy’s alabaster cheek, but she didn’t dare—not just because she was being watched but because of what it might make her feel.
“They’re very good at their job. And it really is essential in cases like this. It helps us recover all the evidence.”
Eleanor nodded, because what else was there to do. She heard the woman replacing the sheet as she left.
A policeman drove them home, or at least to Nancy’s home, which already felt vacuous without her in it, or the knowledge of her return. It was filled with other police, inside and out, the rooms busy and crowded. There were also a few people loitering outside, a couple with cameras slung about their necks, one of whom rushed up to them and asked Robert if he wanted to make any comment, before being pushed aside. Once inside, a policewoman asked Robert if he wanted them to inform Zara; she said a family liaison officer could be sent to her university halls and she would be taken care of. But Robert said no, he had to do it, which was not something he looked capable of. He considered driving up to tell her in person, but Eleanor persuaded him against that, and they compromised by dispatching the family liaison to be there after Zara had taken the phone call. Eleanor left him alone and went down to the kitchen with a different policeman. She started to make tea, aware that there was nothing really useful she could do and that from now on all tasks might seem pointless.
It was absurd that nothing was different: you still had to get a tea bag from its box in the cupboard, drop it into a mug, fill the kettle and flick the switch, listen to the sing of the boil, pour the water, fish out the bag, add milk. She watched herself perform these tasks, but they were as unconnected to her as the used brown bag that she dropped into the bin.
Eleanor and the policeman sat and had their tea in the kitchen and Eleanor thought it was just another moment, that was all. And she’d had plenty of terrible moments in her life. Probably none quite as terrible or unreal as this, but nonetheless, another moment to be lived through, like all the others. What was important was for her to remember this wasn’t about her, it was about Nancy, Robert, and Zara. She mustn’t think about her dinner with Nancy the night before, or what had been said—or not said. She couldn’t fall apart, not yet.
“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions,” the policeman said, breaking into her thoughts. The sky had lightened to a dead gray outside, and when she looked up through the window, she could see the trees on the street stripped and bare, tiny specks of rain pattering the glass. “My name is Detective Sergeant Daniels, and we find if we get these cases started quickly, we have much better outcomes.”