one-hit wonder Read online

  “Who is he?” Ana asked urgently.

  Flint leaned in toward Lol and took another look at the picture before Lol snatched it away again. He rubbed his stubbled chin. “I’ve got no fucking idea,” he sighed. “I’ve never seen that man before in my life. Maybe it was just some bloke she met on holiday. Maybe she got chatting to him at that restaurant and she took his picture. He’s not in any of the others.”

  “Yes,” said Lol impatiently, “but who took the others? Bee must have been with someone. . . .”

  “Not necessarily. Bee wasn’t shy of strangers. She might just have gotten other people to take those pictures for her.”

  Ana shook her head. “No,” she said, “no. She looks too . . . relaxed, too aware of the person taking her picture. Look‌—you can see it in her eyes. . . .”

  “What?”

  “Excitement. Or something. Understanding. Love.”

  Flint grunted cynically. “That was just Bee,” he said, “a born flirt. And boy, did she love the camera.”

  “Look!” said Ana suddenly, tapping at a photo of Bee patting a mangy old street dog.

  “What?”

  “The ring. This ring.” She pointed at the diamond band she was wearing on her own finger. “She’s wearing it in these pictures. On her engagement finger.”

  “And where did you find it?”

  “In her linen closet. In the inside pocket of an evening jacket. She’s wearing an engagement ring.”

  Flint shook his head again. “She was in India‌—on her own. She probably just put it on as a precaution, so people would think she was married.”

  “Maybe it’s Zander!” said Ana.

  “Who the hell is Zander?” said Flint.

  “We don’t know,” said Lol, “but she wrote a song for him, apparently. A love song. Ana found it in her flat.”

  All three of them fell silent for a moment, until Lol spoke. “Chop-chop,” she said, slapping her thighs. “Enough talking, let’s get going. I can’t stand this suspense for another fucking second.”

  Ana climbed into the back of the car and they pulled away and started the drive out toward the coast.

  fourteen

  October 1997

  Bee pulled the helmet from her head and ran her fingers through her hair.

  “Mrs. Wills.” A small man who looked somewhat like an overgrown baby bounced out of his Ford Puma and headed toward her with his hand outstretched. “Tony Pritchard. Did you find it all right?”

  Bee rested the helmet on the seat of her bike and shook his hand. “No problem at all. I’ve had a lovely ride down actually.”

  “Good, good.” He began looking around him, over her shoulder. “Are we expecting your husband, Mrs. Wills?”

  “No,” smiled Bee, unzipping the top portion of her leathers, “no‌—he wasn’t feeling too well. We decided it would be better if he stayed at home.”

  “Of course, of course. I perfectly understand. Well, if you’re ready?”

  She followed him toward the house.

  “Wheelchair ramp,” he said, pointing out the wheelchair ramp. “Handrails, as you can see, from the gate all the way through the house. Does your husband have any, er, mobility, in his legs?”

  Bee shook her head.

  “I see. I see. Well‌—I think you’ll find everything he needs has been installed. This cottage was adapted for the needs of a paraplegic lady.”

  “Yes,” said Bee, “I know.”

  “But the particularly nice thing about this paraplegic lady is that she was also an interior designer.” He swung open the front door and for the first time since Bee had reached her decision, she felt completely convinced she was doing the right thing. It was even nicer inside than the photographs from the real estate agent had suggested. Far from the institutional linoleumed and stainproofed atmosphere she’d half expected, the cottage was stylish and snug, with higgledy-piggledy ceilings and cream carpets.

  “No expense was spared in adapting this property, and everything has been thought of. Everything is low-level, every room has an emergency contact button, the security system is state of the art. Come and look at the kitchen. I think you’ll find it very impressive.”

  Bee followed him in.

  “The previous owner was a very keen cook‌—but so was her husband‌—so they had this installed. Look.” He ran a Formica work surface up and down on parallel tracks screwed into the wall. “And look. Even the hob is adjustable. There are two sinks, at different levels‌—so there’s no excuse for your husband not to do his share of the washing-up.” He laughed. “Now do come and see the garden. I think you’ll find it particularly delightful.”

  Bee nodded and swallowed a smile. Real estate agents. Honestly. What were they like? “Particularly delightful.” Did he honestly expect Bee to believe that he used that sort of language in the normal course of things? That after his wife served him his dinner he said, “Thank you, darling‌—that was particularly delightful”? Or while he was watching football in the pub with his mates: “Well‌—that header into goal really was particularly delightful.” Bee had seen enough real estate agents over the last few weeks to know them quite well. The way they tidied up the loose ends of their accents, the not-quite-cool grammar-school air about them, the pastel-colored shirts, discreet gold jewelry, unisex hairdresser hair, Lynx deodorant. Paul. Dave. Phil. Steve. Tony. Mark. Lots of Marks. Mainly Marks, in fact. This Tony‌—he wasn’t as bad as some. He wasn’t wide. He wasn’t slick. He was wearing a wedding band and was probably a very good husband, probably had a couple of little ones and probably crawled to his mother-in-law, who even now, after all this time, still thought her daughter could have done much better than him.

  “Do you have children, Mrs. Wills?” he asked, leading her out to the garden.

  Bee shook her head. “We’ve got a cat, though.”

  “Oh. Lovely. This is a cat’s paradise out here.”

  Bee looked around her and decided. Immediately. This was the house she wanted. A ramp extended from the back door out along a graveled path that ran through a hilly green lawn. To the east was a small cluster of apple trees, a few swollen, stubborn fruit still clinging to their branches. Surrounding the lawn was a horseshoe of dahlias, geraniums, pansies, and violets. Gaudy flowers. Her mother would have hated them. To the west was a billowing vista of patchwork fields and in the far, far distance, the bruised outline of the sea, frothy under a darkening sky.

  She spun around to face the house again. Fondant pink and chunky, striped with white, like a gigantic French pastry. And then she turned to face Tony. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she sighed, pulling a strand of hair off her face.

  “Stunning,” he agreed. “Possibly one of the nicest out-of-town properties of this age we’ve ever had on our books. And all the adjustments are so unobtrusive. And as for this view . . .”

  They both turned to look at it again, casting their eyes upward as a few fat droplets fell from the sky. “Shall we go indoors?”

  Tony took Bee upstairs, showed her the stair lift, the easy-access bath, the special toilet, and the spectacular view from the bedroom windows, now rain-splattered and obscured. It was almost dark outside now as the cloud thickened overhead, and Tony switched on a few lights. Bee paced around on her own for a while, letting the coziness overwhelm her. He’d love it here. This was no compromise. This was no sad, secret, sordid place. They wouldn’t have to pretend here, pretend to be happy. They actually could be happy. Imagine Christmas Day in front of that wonderful open fireplace with lights draped all over the place and Bing Crosby on the CD. Imagine summer afternoons in that garden, puttering around, sunbathing, playing Frisbee. Well‌—maybe not playing Frisbee. But just imagine, thought Bee, imagine the times they were going to have here. Together. Just the two of them.

  “I want it,” she said to Tony as she descended the stairs. “I want to buy it. I want to offer the full asking price. And I want to pay cash.”

  Tony did his best not
to look overexcited and got to his feet. “Fine,” he said, “fine. That’s great. And I’ve got to say‌—an excellent decision. Absolutely excellent. Well‌—we’d better get back to the office, then. Get things going.”

  He wandered around, switching off lights, and saw Bee to her bike under his umbrella. As she straddled it and perched her helmet on her head, he looked at her, and a small smile began to play on his plump lips. “Has anybody ever told you that you look like Bee Bearhorn?” he said.

  Bee smiled. “Bee who?” she said.

  “You know‌—Bee Bearhorn. That singer from the eighties. With the bob and the red lipstick. ‘I’m groooooving, for Lon-don, for Lon-don, all night.’ ” He smirked as he finished his painful rendition of her one and only hit.

  Bee grimaced and laughed. “Never heard of her,” she said. “She sounds awful, though.”

  “Yeah,” laughed Tony, heading back toward his car in the rain, “yeah. She was.”

  fifteen

  It only took about half an hour to find Bee’s cottage once they got to Broadstairs. The real estate agent’s particulars described it as being “in a secluded location about half a mile from the charming Dickensian seafront.” They stopped a few times and shoved the particulars under people’s noses until finally someone said, “Oh yes, I recognize the place,” and pointed them in the right direction. And they knew for sure they’d found the right place when they pulled up outside the cottage and saw Bee’s huge Honda sitting in the driveway, wearing its canvas overcoat.

  “What the fuck is that doing here?” said Flint, climbing from the driver’s seat and walking toward the bike.

  The canvas was covered in grime and dead insects. Flint brushed them off and started pulling the cover away from the bike. Ana watched him with interest. It was the first time she’d seen him standing up, and Lol hadn’t been exaggerating. He was absolutely enormous. He was wearing knee-length khaki combat shorts, a gray V-neck T-shirt, and a pair of Velcro-fastened sandals. His calves were the size of cantaloupes and his shoulders reminded Ana of those old Kenny Everett sketches with the U.S. military man in the tank. She felt a sudden overwhelming urge to go and stand next to him so she could feel for the first time what it might be like to be petite. His face was handsome but craggy, the face of a fine-featured young man who’d lived a little too much. His eyes were the murky blue of a newborn baby’s and he had a small scar near the corner of his mouth that pulled his cheek into an unintentional puckered dimple.

  He was incredibly good-looking.

  If you liked that sort of thing.

  “Have you got the keys, Ana?” he said, turning to her and making her blush. Again. Damn. She dipped her head quickly into her knapsack to conceal her embarrassment and rifled around clumsily for the clink of keys. “Here.” She waved them at him and started grinning inanely. This man really was obscenely sexual. He oozed it. He stank of it. He may as well have been walking around with a twenty-inch erection growing out of his forehead.

  “OK, let’s go.”

  “Look,” Lol was saying from where she stood near the front door, “what the bloody hell’s this‌—isn’t it a wheelchair ramp?”

  They all looked down at it. “Hmm. Dunno.”

  “Looks like one.”

  “Could be.”

  Ana slid the key into the lock and they all breathed a sigh of relief when the door slipped open without an alarm going off.

  The three of them started wandering around the cottage. “Wow,” said Lol, “this is so lovely.” And it was. About a million times nicer than the grim old flat on Baker Street. The walls were painted in warm shades of cranberry and plum, the floors were cream-carpeted, the furniture was cartoonish‌—fat lipstick-pink sofas and a distressed mahogany dining table laden with three-foot gothic candlesticks. The ceiling had been painted with a trompe l’œil sky and clouds, and a Tuscan sunset glimpsed through straggling vines was painted onto a rough-hewn wall on the far side, decorated with bunches of bloomy plastic grapes. Enormous paintings depicting just a single, lushly painted piece of fruit hung on the walls‌—a three-foot pomegranate, a huge misshapen apple with mottled red and green skin, the lime-green, pip-speckled insides of a hairy kiwi. One wall was draped with a real tiger skin, decapitated and spread-eagled across the wall. Candelabras sprouted from plaster. Junk-shop chandeliers hung from the ceiling.

  “This is Gregor’s furniture,” muttered Flint.

  “What?”

  “All this stuff‌—these sofas, the paintings, chandeliers‌—all Gregor’s old stuff, from his place in Kensington. Old stage props and bits of scenery, most of it‌—look”‌—he picked up an enormous gothic candlestick and waved it around airily‌—“tin.”

  “Shit. You’re right,” said Lol, glancing around, “I thought she’d left all this behind on her travels or put it in storage or something. Good grief,” she said, pointing at a metal contraption by the stairs, “will you look at this‌—a bloody lift. Bee had a bloody lift in her house. What d’you reckon she used that for, then? When she’d had a few too many? God‌—that’s so Bee to have a lift. I can just imagine her, looking at the stairs and thinking, ‘I don’t wish to walk, I shall glide . . .’ ”

  Ana was in the kitchen now, looking at all the strange fixtures, the adjustable work surfaces and the two sinks at differing levels. A pile of glossy cookbooks sat on a big wooden table. The cupboards were full of condiments. Soy. Pepper. Olive oil. Lime juice. Pine nuts. Ground cumin. Sun-dried tomatoes. And breakfast cereals‌—tons of it. Variety packs and Frosties and Golden Nuggets. The fridge was empty save for a packet of eggs and a squeezed tube of tomato puree. And there wasn’t a cocktail shaker or a bottle of tequila anywhere in sight. Everything about this house was diametrically different in every possible way from the flat on Baker Street.

  She tried another one of the keys on her bunch in the back door and pushed her way out into the garden. It was beautiful. Very compact and mature and well tended. In a shed at the farthest end Ana found a lawn mower and rows of tiny pots and trowels and quilty gardening gloves, pruning shears, twine, and compost. The garden shed of an active and enthusiastic gardener‌—it looked just like Gay’s garden shed at home.

  “Jesus Christ!” Ana heard Lol’s ear-shattering tones behind her. “Could this girl be any more fucking mysterious. I mean‌—what is this?” She held aloft a pair of boxer shorts, graying, flimsy, and somewhat small. “There’s a whole fucking drawer of these upstairs. And you should see the bathroom.”

  “What?”

  “Just come and have a look, will you?” Lol grabbed Ana’s hand and dragged her up the stairs. “Look. There’s a fucking door in the bathtub, Ana. What’s that all about, then? A door. In the bathtub. And look at the size of the flush on that toilet. And these railings, look. Here. And here. And all these fucking buttons everywhere. And have a look at this.” Lol pulled Ana into a small bedroom at the other end of the corridor. “Look!” The room was painted bright blue. Posters of Radiohead and Teenage Fanclub, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the X-Files decorated the walls. There was a TV and a sound system and an enormous chest of pine drawers with fat handles. And a large white and distinctly surgical-looking bed tucked into a bay window.

  “I mean‌—what the fuck is this, Ana? Was Bee shacked up with Christopher Reeve or summat?”

  Flint walked in, looking more animated than Ana had seen him looking all day. “This is totally fucking weird. Look what I just found in Bee’s wardrobe.”

  “No way,” gasped Lol.

  Flint was holding aloft a pair of trainers. Trainers. “Uh-huh,” he said, “and look at this.” With his other hand he held out a sweatshirt. A grubby sweatshirt with mud on the front.

  “OK,” said Lol, collapsing onto an armchair, “now I’m seriously spooked. We’ve entered the Twilight Zone, d’you realize that? We’re in Tales of the fucking Unexpected. My head hurts.”

  The three of them fell silent.

  “This is Bee’s house, in’t
it?” said Lol.

  Flint and Ana nodded.

  “Right,” said Flint eventually, slapping his large-hock-of-Norfolk-ham thighs with his five-Cumberland-sausages-on-a-dinner-plate hands. “I think we should take a couple of rooms each and search them for anything out of the ordinary. Then in an hour or so we’ll meet downstairs and take a look at what we’ve found. OK?”

  “OK.”

  Ana took the bedrooms, Flint took the living room and the garage, and Lol took the bathroom, kitchen, and garden shed. For an hour no one spoke. Instead, the cottage was filled with the sounds of floorboards creaking, the toilet being flushed every now and then, and general industriousness. It was a strange hour or so as Ana once again found herself sifting through Bee’s underwear, picking through her books and CDs, feeling her clothes, and examining her toiletries. But this was so different from clearing out the flat on Baker Street. On Thursday her sister had been a stranger. Apart from the moment when she’d stood and stared at Bee’s pubes in the bath, there’d been an unsettling numbness to her activities. But things had changed already, just three days later. Ana herself felt unburdened, particularly after her tears at Bee’s grave, and now every object, every item, felt imbued with some kind of magical, desperate poignancy. And Bee was growing in her head moment by moment, turning from a two-dimensional cartoon character into a real human being. She opened a bedside drawer and passed her hand over the contents. Barrettes, one with a black hair still attached, elastic hairbands, sleeping pills, crumpled-up tissues, toenail clippers, a photo of Gregor. In Bee’s wardrobe were more clothes, but simple clothes here‌—jeans, sweaters, a long denim skirt, walking boots, even some thermal underwear.

  A thorough search of Bee’s bedroom revealed nothing, so Ana moved along the corridor toward the blue bedroom. There was a smell in here‌—a sort of stale smell. Nothing gut churning, just the whiff of bedclothes a couple of weeks past their wash date. It smelled like the bedroom of a teenage boy. It was the bedroom of a teenage boy. There were socks on the floor, trainers under the bed, CDs out of their cases, dirty mugs on the TV. Ana pulled open drawers and found several more pairs of unsophisticated underpants plus various items of male clothing of the casual and unfashionable variety‌—old T-shirts, unbranded jeans, shapeless jumpers.