The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [91]
Just after four o’clock he poured himself a third glass of wine and smoked a cigarette on the sofa. Holly’s handbag was on the floor at his feet. It was open and some of the contents had spilled out on to the carpet, perhaps when she had retrieved her toothbrush. He was sure that she was asleep; if she woke up wondering what had happened to him, he would be able to hear her footfalls on the staircase. He just wanted to be certain that she was who she said she was. He just wanted to put his mind at rest.
So he reached for the bag.
In the main section he found a well-thumbed copy of A Doll’s House, another of The Time Traveller’s Wife and an issue of the NME. He put all three on the sofa beside him and rummaged deeper. He was amazed by how much noise he was making. He found a broken seashell, an unopened packet of Kleenex, a tangle of headphones, a packet of the contraceptive pill – up-to-date, thank God – and the browned core of a half-eaten apple. He laid these out on the floor. He then found what were surely keepsakes: a small amethyst stone; a length of silk wrapped up into a tight bundle and tied with a piece of string; and a postcard of the Eiffel Tower from Katya Levette, addressed to Holly, postmarked 1999.
What he wanted was her diary. He found it in a separate, zipped-up section of the bag and checked the entries for August and September, looking for anything unusual, for evidence of a double life. But there were just times of auditions, dates of parties, shorthand reminders to buy milk or to pay a bill. His own book launch was marked with the simple note: ‘Gaddis event / Daunt Holland Park’ and their subsequent meetings were also touchingly mundane: ‘Dinner S 830’; ‘S movie Kensington?’; ‘Lunch S Café Anglais’. On the morning of Charlotte’s funeral, Holly had written, in block capitals: ‘SAM FUNERAL CALL HIM!’ and he remembered that she had rung him at the house in Hampstead to make sure that he was all right. He felt wretched for not trusting her.
But still he was not done. Feeling around in the lint and the crumbs at the bottom of the handbag, he found Holly’s wallet and proceeded to unload its contents, item by item, on to the sofa. The credit cards were all in her name. There were frayed photographs of giggling friends in passport booths, loyalty cards to Sainsbury and Tesco, a dry cleaning receipt from a shop on King’s Road and a mini statement from an ATM in Hammersmith. He did not know what he was expecting to find. A number for Sir John Brennan? A business card belonging to Tanya Acocella? On the basis of what he had seen, there was no suggestion that Holly was anything other than an outof-work actress with an overdraft and an erratic social life.
Eventually, he gave up the search and replaced the wallet, more or less as he had found it, in the bag. In a second side pocket he found two sets of keys, a packet of Rizlas, a small tube of lip salve and an electricity bill, in Holly’s name, which was registered to the address in Tite Street. There was also an email from a woman in Australia which Holly had printed on to A4 paper. It was a letter between friends, full of news and gossip, and Gaddis felt ashamed to have read it.
He lit a second cigarette. He replaced the bag on the floor and looked around for Holly’s mobile. It was charging up on a plug beside the kettle. Without removing the flex, he checked her incoming and outgoing calls, her text messages, even the cookies on her Internet browser, but there was nothing at all to arouse his suspicion, only a man called ‘Dan C’ to whom Holly had sent a dismayingly flirtatious