They Buried an Empty Coffin and My Best Friend Took My Husband · Mira Lang

Chapter 3: The Blue Box File

I did not sign it.

I knew before I opened the box, and I knew with absolute certainty when I saw it: my signature has a loop on the R that I have never been able to train out of it, and the loop was there, and it was on the wrong side.

Somebody had traced my name from something and traced it in a mirror-tidy way that nobody who actually writes it would produce.

It was a good forgery. It was good enough for a broker.

There were four things in that box and I sat on the study floor at one in the morning and read all of them.

One. The insurance amendment, dated the twenty-fourth of June, three years ago, raising the policy from four hundred thousand to two point one million. My forged signature. Countersigned by the broker.

Two. The declaration application, fourteen months later, with the Portuguese death certificate attached.

Three. The lawyer's covering letter, which contained one sentence that made me put my hand over my mouth: We enclose the certificate obtained by Mrs. Kell on her recent visit to Faro.

Mrs. Kell.

Nadia Kell.

Four. An itinerary, printed and folded, that had been in the box for three years because Daniel Vance is a man who never throws away a piece of paper: Lisbon–Faro, return, 2 nights. Booked on the ninth of November. Two weeks after the certificate was signed. One passenger.

* * *

I got the last piece at half past nine the next morning, in a café two streets away, from a woman who had flown from Lisbon at her own expense because she said on the phone, Rachel, I have been waiting three years for somebody to ask me a question.

Sofia sat down, put her bag on the floor, and said: "I bring the visitor book."

"The what?"

"The clinic. The unit for long stay. Every visitor writes the name and the hour, it is the rule, it is a paper book and it is kept in a cupboard for seven years." She put a photocopy on the café table, and her hand was not steady. "I take pictures of every page from that year. Three months I look at them. Rachel — I am so sorry. I look at the wrong thing for three months. I look for somebody who comes and does not come back."

"And?"

"Somebody comes," Sofia said, "and comes back. Four times."

She turned the copies round.

November, year one. February, year two. September, year two. March, year three.

Four entries in a Portuguese visitors' book, in English handwriting I have known since I was thirteen years old.

N. Kell.

And in the column headed Doente — patient — the same two characters, four times.

D4.

* * *

I did not go home and scream. I'm not proud of what I did instead; I'm just accurate about it.

I went home, and I made Ivy's lunch, because Nadia was at her sister's and Daniel was at the office and there was a four-year-old in that house who thought I was a visitor called Rachel.

"Do you like fish fingers?"

"Yes." She considered me across the table with my own eyes. "Are you Daddy's friend?"

"I knew your daddy a long time ago." I sat down. "Ivy, can I ask you something? Do you know the lady in the photograph on the stairs? The one in the blue dress?"

She nodded, chewing.

"Who is she?"

"That's my first mummy," Ivy said. "She lives in the sea."

I had to put my hands under the table.

"Who told you that, sweetheart?"

"Mummy," she said. "She says my first mummy went in the sea, and she's not sad, and she watches me." Ivy pointed the fish finger at me. "But it's a story for babies, because I'm four. Mummy says when I'm big she'll tell me the real one."

* * *

Nadia came back at four.

She came into the kitchen and saw the photocopies on the table and stopped in the doorway with her keys still in her hand, and neither of us said anything for a long time.

"Ivy's at Beth's," she said at last. "I asked Beth to have her till six."

"That was sensible."

Nadia sat down. She put her keys on the table, very precisely, and looked at the visitors' book copies, and did not touch them.

"Ask me," she said.

"When did you know?"

"The eleventh of November, year one." No pause at all; she had the date the way I have my daughter's birthday. "I went out to get the paperwork sorted because Dan couldn't get on a plane, he couldn't even leave the house, and a nurse on the second floor — not Sofia, an older one — said something to me in the corridor about the English lady from the accident. And I said, what English lady. And she took me upstairs."

The kitchen clock ticked.

"You were in a bed by a window," Nadia said. "Your whole face was— they'd taken the swelling down by then, and there was a chart at the end of the bed that said D4, and I stood in the door for about ten minutes and then I went out and was sick in a stairwell."

"And then?"

"And then I went to a doctor's office," she said, "and I said, this woman has a family in England, and he said, this woman has been unidentified for eight weeks and has no papers, and there is a process, and it takes a very long time, and she may not survive it. And I said, how long. And he said, months. Perhaps a year."

"And then you asked him for a death certificate."

Nadia's chin came up.

"No," she said. "He offered it."

I stared at her.

"Antonio Camões had a woman with no papers occupying a long-stay bed that his unit was not funded for," she said, "and a family in another country who could not claim her because she had no name. He told me that a certificate would let the family close things — he used that phrase, close things — and that if she recovered, the paperwork could be reversed, and that this had been done twice before in that unit." Her voice did not shake at all. "He wrote it out in front of me in eleven minutes. I did not pay him a euro, Rachel, and you can look for that money for the rest of your life."

"And when you got home," I said, "did you tell my husband?"

And there it was. The first crack; a hesitation of maybe a second and a half.

"No," Nadia said.

"Why not?"

"Because I got as far as the hallway." She was looking at her own hands. "He was sitting on the bottom stair with Ivy on his knee, and she was crying, and he had not eaten in two days, and I stood there with a death certificate in my bag and a woman in a hospital in Portugal who could not say her own name — and I made a decision in about four seconds that I have thought about every day since."

"Say what the decision was."

"That I would go back," Nadia said. "That I would go back, and go back, and if you ever surfaced I would bring you home myself, and if you didn't, he would never spend three years hoping." She looked up, and her eyes were dry, and something in her face was the face of a woman who has rehearsed a defence for three years and has never once believed it. "That is the truth. Every word of it. And I know exactly how it sounds."

"It sounds," I said, "like a woman who got to keep everything."

"Yes," she said. "That's the part I don't have an answer for."

I picked up the fourth photocopy — the last visit, March of year three — and turned it round.

"Then answer this one," I said. "You came in March. Sofia says I had language by the previous autumn. I could speak, Nadia. I was sitting up and talking to nurses in bad Portuguese and asking every single person who came through that door whether they knew who I was." I put my finger on the entry. "You stood in that room in March. So which is it? Did you look at me and decide I still wasn't coming back — or did you look at me and see that I was?"

Nadia Kell looked at the table for a long moment.

"There's a third thing," she said, "and you're not going to like it, and it's the reason I'm sitting here instead of running." She reached into her bag. "In March I didn't come alone."