Starlight Peninsula by Charlotte Grimshaw Page A

followed her closely, making sure she took only clothes and some kitchen items that belonged to her. She remembered the air was still, musty, dead, Arthur’s presence sucked out of it, as if the place where they had lived happily had been inundated, and she had dived down and was peering from room to room in the blurry, silent space. She viewed light switches silvered with fingerprint powder, Arthur’s desk with a yellow arrow taped to items on it, a pair of surgical gloves on the kitchen bench, a man standing on the back deck talking on a cell phone; he was the woman detective’s taciturn partner, whose eyes followed Eloise as she passed the open door. In the silence she opened a drawer, took out clothes and put them in her gym bag. Why this anger?
    When someone dies an unexplained death, the world enters every private space. Everything sacred is trampled on, everything you loved is covered in footprints, and the explanation you make of a life, all its subtle and delicate detail, is turned crass, ugly and inadequate. Sudden resentment at the presence of the woman detective turned, when the woman’s phone beeped and she stepped onto the back deck with her partner, into a determination to find something of Arthur’s and keep itfor herself. Her eyes fell on the cardboard file in a shelf under the desk, where Arthur kept his current projects. She put it in her bag just before the detectives came back into the room.
    Arthur could be secretive. He guarded his writing; no one was allowed to read a piece of work until it was finished. He was a perfectionist. After he died, the police had questions. They asked, Did Arthur have enemies? Had he annoyed anyone? Once the woman detective asked Eloise, Had she ever wondered about any of Arthur’s male contacts? Was he bisexual or gay? Like many of the questions the detective asked, it gave Eloise the impression she had something specific in mind.
    She asked them, Are you thinking of someone in particular? They hadn’t told her anything. Arthur was one hundred per cent heterosexual. So what had they meant?
    The male detective had offered to carry the bag down the steps to the car. She zipped it up and handed it over with a show of carelessness, feeling trapped and furtive and cunning. She remembered passing the back door, Da Silva on her cell phone, twirling one golden strand of her wiry hair between her fingers, one corner of her mouth turned up in a sarky grin, and Eloise heard her pronounce a word, as though repeating the punchline of a joke: ‘Gynaecologist!’
    Their eyes met and the detective lowered her voice and turned away. It was one of many fragmented memories, of random words, and questions and phrases overheard, odd details that she had stored in her mind but neither processed nor pursued. Arthur, with his usual daring and originality and boldness, had gone too far this time; he’d been caught in a forbidden and terrible place, and this pair of cops, with their tough faces and sharp eyes, knew that Eloise had crossed over, too; she was implicated, always would be, in Arthur’s transgression. It was a strange discovery: that calamity brought with it this burden of fear and shame.
    Shame had made her fail Arthur. She should have paid attention to details, tried to find out what had happened. Shame had made her defiant. She took Arthur’s file back to her flat and hid it in the ceiling, frightened that the police would come looking for it. Later she’d given it to Carina. She imagined herself denying to those two dour, good-looking cops, Da Silva and — what was his name? O’Kelly? — that she had any idea how it had come into her possession. In all the years since, she had never looked at what the file contained.

EIGHT
    ‘How was your weekend? You and Sean get up to much?’
    Eloise looked, she hoped, blandly non-committal. ‘Oh, you know. Nothing special.’
    Scott was wearing a bright blue three-piece suit, with turquoise lining. His hair, thick and glistening