Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

Chapter 16

ARRIVING IN HIS parliamentary constituency late on Friday afternoon, Jims had first had a meeting with his agent, Colonel Nigel Travers-Jenkins, and then, accompanied by him, gone as guest of honor and principal speaker to the annual gala dinner of the South Wessex Young Conservatives at the Lord Quantock Arms in Markton. Contrary to Zillah’s belief, Leonardo wasn’t with him. While he was speaking, on the subject of the Party’s future hope and inspiration being in the hands of its youth, whose idealism and fervor had already been manifested to him that evening, Zillah was sitting in the Abbey Gardens flat watching a Rugrats video with the children, Jordan grizzling on her lap.

Jims, who had been casually fond of her for years, had always used her rather as a screen for his natural activities than as a friend. She was the kind of woman whose appearance led the South Wessex Conservatives to put her down as a female of loose morals. Any Fredingtonian seeing him call at Willow Cottage, particularly in the evenings, believed-again in their phrase-the worst. But they were the sort of people who held to a double standard, condemning the woman in this situation but attaching no blame to the man. Rather the reverse, as Jims well knew, for someone had reported back to him that Colonel Travers-Jenkins had been overheard calling him “a bit of a lad with the birds.” For this reason, though he used her, he had always felt grateful to Zillah and persuaded himself this was affection.

Now he was married to her he felt quite differently. She was a nuisance and, if not kept under surveillance, might damage his career. Jims thought about these things as he drove back to his house in Fredington Crucis. What a pity it was that once you’d been through a marriage ceremony, you had to live under the same roof as your bride! What a misfortune you couldn’t give her a lump sum and a little house somewhere, and never see her again! Still, he knew this was impossible. He must be married and manifestly be seen to be married. And his wife must be Caesar’s wife. There was no other way. When he got home on Monday morning he would set about educating Zillah in her duties as helpmeet to the Member for South Wessex. He would teach her about the boards and committees she must chair, the garden parties she must attend, the baby shows judge, Conservative Women’s gatherings address, the canvassing she must do, and the suitable clothes she must wear. No skirts above the knee, nothing low-cut, no sexy shoes, tight trousers-maybe no trousers at all-but afternoon dresses and big hats. A supposed mistress may look like a loose woman but not an MP’s wife.

Jims had phoned Leonardo and then gone to bed. In the morning he held his appointments at nine sharp in Casterbridge Shire Hall, where he made earnest promises to his constituents that he would personally improve the education of their children, the National Health Service, transport, and the environment, while undertaking to retain at all costs hunting with dogs. Jims didn’t say “dogs,” though that was the term that appeared in the title of the new bill proposed on the subject. To please the people in the Shire Hall he referred always to “hounds.” Talk of the hunt, a constant subject of conversation and discussion in South Wessex, reminded him that on Saturday evening he would be addressing the local branch of the Countryside Alliance at Fredington Episcopi village hall. The meeting would be so well attended that the largest hall in the neighborhood had been chosen as its venue.

His speech he had brought with him. It was still in his briefcase, which he hadn’t even opened while at Fredington Crucis House. In calling it a speech, Jims was rather underrating himself, for of course he had no intention of reading to the assembled members. But there were all sorts of details of a previous private member’s bill that he had noted down on paper, along with statistics, reports on research into cruelty to stags and stress levels in foxes, and, most important, assessments of the hardship which would be suffered by locals should hunting be banned in what Jims was careful to call “England” and occasionally “this blessed plot,” but never “the United Kingdom.” Also with his notes was the Burns Report in its dark blue cover, the findings of Lord Burns’s investigation into hunting. When he was leaving his office and was once more in his car, he opened his briefcase to check that he had it and his notes with him.

Jims intended to have lunch at the Golden Hind in Casterbridge with a close friend, the predecessor, in fact, of Leonardo. The decision to end their relationship had been mutual and there were no hard feelings. Moreover, Ivo Carew was chairman of a charity called Conservatives Target Cancer, so being seen with him could only win approval. But he couldn’t find his Countryside Alliance notes. He emptied everything out of the briefcase onto the passenger seat. He knew they weren’t there and he also knew very well where they were. Inside a transparent blue plastic folder that matched the cover of the Burns Report, and he would have spotted them at once. He knew they weren’t there and he knew where they were: in Leonardo’s house.

But precisely where? That he couldn’t remember. He did remember, though, that Leonardo had told him on the phone the evening before that he was taking Friday off and would be going to see his mother in Cheltenham. These visits were frequent and enjoyable, for Giulietta Norton, born in Rome just after the Second World War and a hippie and groupie in the sixties, was a fascinating woman and about as unlike a mother as could be. Leonardo might even decide to stay the night. Of course Jims had a key to the flat, that was no problem. Even if he could remember exactly where the blue folder was and could persuade one of Leonardo’s neighbors to let his messenger in, whom could he trust? Was there anyone he could rely on to go to Glebe Terrace, find the notes, and fax them to him, without thinking it funny, without thinking it suspicious that James Melcombe-Smith MP left important papers in the home of a young and very good-looking stock jobber? In, very probably, that young man’s bedroom? Zillah, perhaps. He called his home number on his mobile. No answer. In fact, Zillah, deeply asleep, heard the phone ringing in a dream about Jims changing his sexual orientation and falling in love with her. She thought the ringing was her mother and she ignored it.

How useless she was! An encumbrance, not even a helpful companion. Jims called Ivo Carew and canceled their date.

“Thanks a bunch,” said Ivo. “Did you have to wait till five to one?”

“It’s unavoidable. D’you honestly think I wouldn’t rather see you than drive back to bloody London?”

He stopped en route at a Merry Cookhouse where, shuddering, he tried to eat chicken in a basket and chips. With plenty of time to spare, he could have lunched with Ivo and set off a couple of hours later, but he was becoming nervous about the whereabouts of that folder. His mind must be set at rest as soon as possible. But not before he’d complained about the soggy chips and the chicken, which he was sure was spoiled. The manager was a man with a temper easily roused and the two of them engaged for a minute or two in a slanging match.

The traffic was heavy and grew heavier as Jims approached London. A pile-up near a motorway and a road junction caused a nose-to-tail queue extending for several miles, while roadworks near Heathrow airport reduced cars to a single lane. It was close to eight o’clock before he parked the car in Glebe Terrace. His mind must be going, he thought. Having mislaid his notes, he was now unable to find the key to Leonardo’s house. He looked on his Abbey Gardens Mansions key ring and his car keys ring, then went through his pockets. It wasn’t there. The woman next door, Amber Something, had one. He prayed she’d be at home and she was. She gave him a funny look in which there was a lot of snide amusement but she gave him the key, saying to be sure to let her have it back in the morning. He let himself into Leonardo’s house.

Mounting the little staircase to the bedroom, he thought how ghastly it would be if he opened the door and found Leonardo in bed with someone, maybe that guy in the Department of Education and Employment he said was attractive. A lot of men wouldn’t mind, though he wasn’t one of them. But the room was empty.

Jims searched for the folder. It was nowhere to be found. Seriously worried, he went back downstairs and after hunting-hunting!-for ten minutes, found it and Burns at the back of a rather elegant rosewood filing cabinet. Put there, no doubt, by Leonardo’s obsessively tidy busybody of a cleaner.

He’d go out to dinner, then come back here to sleep. There was a chance Giulietta had a date, in which case Leonardo might come back. Anyway, he couldn’t face his own home, not with Zillah there and those kids.

While Jims was searching for his notes and Zillah was watching television in Abbey Gardens Mansions with Jordan on her lap, two policemen, a sergeant and a constable, were calling at Willow Cottage, Long Fredington.

After she had left, Zillah’s landlord, who during her tenancy had been afraid she’d never go but stay forever and eventually establish children’s rights for her girl and boy, had decided to sell the place. Accordingly, he was having it redecorated and a new kitchen and bathroom fitted. Although the builders had started soon after Christmas, their task was still incomplete. Scaffolding covered the front of the house, the windows were boarded up, and a builders’ sign proclaiming the workmen as construction designers stuck up in the garden. The police could see no one lived there. They tried the neighbors and were told Mrs. Leach had left in December and got married again. The woman next door could even tell them whom she’d married: the local MP, Mr. Melcombe-Smith.

It was, of course, imperative that the late Jeffrey Leach’s wife be told as soon as possible of his violent death. But it now appeared she was his wife no longer. She had remarried, and into a social class far above what the investigators had calculated was Jeffrey Leach’s.

Zillah had just got up on Saturday morning when the policeman rang the bell at Abbey Gardens Mansions. It was only half past eight, an early hour for her, but she’d been unable to lie in, for Eugenie’s prediction-that having slept most of the day she wouldn’t be able to sleep at night-proved true. The children were already up and watching cartoons on television. Zillah came out in her dressing gown and began making toast and pouring cornflakes into bowls. She caught sight of herself in a mirror and backed away from it, she looked so terrible, her hair in rats’ tails and dark smudges under her eyes. A spot, the likes of which she hadn’t had for fifteen years, was erupting in the middle of her chin.

“Who on earth’s that?” she asked when the bell rang.

“You’ll know if you open the door,” said Eugenie. “What a stupid question.”

“How dare you be so rude!”

Jordan, who was always upset by shouting, began to snivel. The doorbell rang again and Zillah went to answer it.

“Mrs. Melcombe-Smith?”

“That’s right.”

“May I come in? I have some distressing news for you.”

There was no one in the world not in the flat at that moment whom Zillah cared enough for to mind whether they were fit or injured, alive or dead. But she couldn’t hide her shocked response when the caller told her of the death of Jeffrey Leach. “I don’t believe it.”

“I’m afraid it’s true.”

“What did he die of? Some sort of accident?”

This may have given the man the impetus to come straight out with it. “He was murdered yesterday afternoon. I’m sorry.”

“Murdered? Who murdered him?”

There was no reply to that. The policeman wanted to know where she’d been between three and four-thirty and Zillah, still amazed at the news, said she’d been here.

“Alone?”

“Yes, quite alone. My children were out with their-er, nanny.”

“And Mr. Melcombe-Smith?”

Zillah couldn’t exactly say she didn’t know. It would look very odd in a bride of two months. “In his constituency. That’s South Wessex, you know. He’s been there since Thursday afternoon. I can’t believe Jerry’s been murdered. Are you sure it was Jerry?”

“Certainly it was Mr. Jeffrey Leach. Is this him?”

Zillah looked for the first time in nearly seven years on the photograph she herself had taken in those happier times-though she hadn’t thought them so then-of Jerry with the three-week-old Eugenie in his arms. “My God, yes. Where did you find it?”

“That’s not important. You identify it as Jeffrey Leach?”

She nodded. “I’m amazed he kept it.”

Then came the question of questions, the one that brought the blood to her face and made it recede again as rapidly: “When exactly were you divorced, Mrs. Melcombe-Smith?”

She knew it would be a mistake to lie but she had to. Still, she hesitated. “Er-it must have been last spring. About a year ago.”

“I see. And when did you last see Mr. Leach?”

It had been two weeks before, here, in this flat. She remembered how he’d called her a bigamist. The time before that had been six months ago, in October, in Long Fredington, when he’d come for the weekend. And driven away in the boneshaker, ten minutes before the express and the local train crashed. “October,” she said. “It was while I was living in Dorset with my children.” For the sake of verisimilitude, she felt the need to insert some circumstantial detail. “He drove down on Friday evening and stayed the weekend. The first weekend in October. He left again on Tuesday morning.”

He held something out to her. It was a Visa card. “Is this yours?”

“Yes, no, I don’t know.”

“The name on it is Z. H. Leach and those are not common initials.”

“Yes, it must be mine.”

It was the card Jims had arranged for her to have last December when she’d accepted his proposal. She saw that its starting date was December and expiration date November 2003. After she was married and Jims gave her two new cards in the name of Mrs. Z. H. Melcombe-Smith, she’d forgotten all about the existence of this one. How had Jerry got hold of it? That day in the flat he’d wandered about when he was supposed to be going to the loo, she’d heard his stealthy footsteps, thought she heard him go into her bedroom, but attached no importance to it. After all, she was used to visitors prying into her things, Malina Daz, Mrs. Peacock…

“Did you give it to Mr. Leach?”

“No, yes. I don’t know. He must have taken it. Stolen it.”

“That’s an interesting conclusion to come to, especially since this card wasn’t issued until December and the last time you saw Mr. Leach was in October. Are you sure you haven’t seen him since?”

Then Zillah uttered the time-honored phrase so often on the lips of old lags up in court yet again. “I may have done.”

The policeman nodded. He said that that would be all for now but he’d be in touch. When did she expect Mr. Melcombe-Smith’s return? Zillah didn’t but said Sunday evening. Eugenie came into the room, holding her brother’s hand, both fully dressed and looking clean and neat. The policeman said in the kind of voice childless men use when talking to children they’ve never met before, bluff, interrogatory, embarrassed, “Hello. How are you?”

“Extremely well, thank you. What have you been saying to my mummy?”

“It was just a routine inquiry.” The policeman suddenly realized the late Jeffrey Leach must have been their father. “I’ll see myself out,” he said to Zillah.

A famous Italian novelist and professor had just published a new book to great acclaim and Natalie Reckman was off to Rome to interview him. Her flight left from Heathrow in the late morning. She bought the novelist’s first book in paperback and three newspapers at an airport bookstall, but they told her only that a man had been murdered in a London cinema and this didn’t much interest her.

While in the aircraft she read her paperback. The Evening Standard was brought round but Natalie shook her head, she’d seen enough newspapers for one day. She thought she might stay in Rome till Monday, have a look at a new theater that was being built, maybe see what all this fuss was about someone desecrating the graves in the English Cemetery. With luck she’d get three stories for the price of one.

When it got to midday on Saturday and Jeff still hadn’t come back, Fiona feared he had left her. She searched the house for a note, looked under tables and behind cabinets in case it had fallen on the floor from where he’d left it. There was nothing. To go without a word was to add insult to injury, but gone he had.

Michelle helped with the search. She pointed out that if Jeff had really left, he’d taken nothing with him. All the clothes but those he’d gone out in were in the cupboard, including the black leather jacket he was so fond of. His four pairs of shoes, apart from those he was wearing, were in Fiona’s shoe rack, his underpants and socks in the drawer. Would he have gone without his electric shaver? Without his toothbrush?

“I’m afraid he must have met with some sort of accident,” Michelle said, her arm round Fiona. “Now, Fiona darling, was he carrying anything to identify him?”

Fiona tried to remember. “I don’t know. You wouldn’t go through Matthew’s pockets, would you?”

“I never have.”

“No, and nor do I. I trust Jeff. D’you think I should now? I mean, look in the pockets of the leather jacket?”

“Yes, I do.”

There was nothing helpful, only a pound coin, a supermarket bill for groceries, and a ballpoint pen. Fiona tried the pockets of Jeff’s raincoat. A tube train ticket, a button, a twenty-pence piece. “Where’s his driving license?”

“Where did he usually keep it?”

“I suppose it might be in the car.”

The two women went out to Fiona’s dark blue BMW, which she was obliged to leave parked in the street. Michelle, who was finding it less difficult these days to climb into a car than it had been, got into the back and searched the pockets, while Fiona, in the driver’s seat, examined the glove compartment. A road map, a pair of sunglasses, a comb, all belonging to her. No gloves, of course, there never are. Michelle found another road map, a half-empty box of tissues, a chocolate paper, and a single Polo mint. This might have been a valuable clue for the police if they’d known of it and known how to read it. Fiona dropped it down the drain in the gutter.

Michelle stayed with her, made lunch-salad and cheese and crispbread. Neither felt like eating. At midafternoon Matthew joined them. Michelle had left his lunch on a tray and to please her and divert Fiona, he told her he’d eaten it all, three slices of kiwi fruit, a dozen salted almonds, half a bread roll, and a sprig of watercress. By this time Fiona’s mood had changed. They’d been unable to find Jeff’s driving license, so he must have it on him and if he’d met with an accident could have been identified by it. The anger which had been suspended when she realized all his clothes were in the house, to be replaced by the anxiety of the night before, returned. He’d left her. No doubt he intended to come back one day for his possessions, or he’d even have the nerve to ask her to send them on.

The Evening Standard was delivered to the house in the late afternoon. Matthew heard it drop on to the doormat and went into the hall to fetch it. Fiona was on the sofa with her feet up, Michelle in the kitchen making tea. The newspaper had a big headline: MOVIE MURDER and under that: Man Stabbed in Cinema. A large photograph showed the interior of the theater where the body had been found, though nothing of the body itself, and there was no picture of the dead man. His name wasn’t disclosed. Matthew took the newspaper back into the living room but Fiona was asleep. He showed it to Michelle.

“There’s no possible reason to think it’s Jeff, darling.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Matthew. “He likes the cinema and Fiona doesn’t. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s gone in the afternoon on his own.”

“What shall we do?”

“I think I’ll call the police, darling, and see what I can get out of them.”

“Oh, Matthew, what are we going to do if it is Jeff? How terrible for poor Fiona. And why would anyone want to murder him?”

“You can think of a few reasons and so can I.”

Leonardo had returned from his mother’s just as Jims was going out to get his dinner. The two men went to a new and fashionable Tunisian restaurant together, came home again at ten-thirty, and spent the night together in Glebe Terrace. Both were far too discreet to suggest Leonardo accompany Jims to Dorset, so he set off alone at about ten in the morning.

Once it was possible, when driving to the West Country, to stop in some little town of great antiquity and beauty, and there eat lunch in the White Hart or the Black Lion or whatever ancient hostelry graced the place. But since the coming of arterial roads that bypassed every urban habitat this pleasant custom had disappeared, unless you made a twenty-mile detour, and all that now existed to provide refreshment to the traveler were motorway cafés and huge complexes of restaurant, shops, and lavatories. Into one of these Jims was obliged to go, having parked his car among several hundred others, to eat a limp salad, two samosas, and a banana. One good thing: he’d avoided the Merry Cookhouse. By three he was back in Fredington Crucis, where he had a bath and dressed in his country go-to-meetings suit, a well-cut tweed outfit with waistcoat, a tan-colored shirt, and knitted tie. A crowd of antihunt protesters were assembled outside Fredington Episcopi village hall, all carrying banners with words like “barbarians” and “animal tormentors” on them. Dreadful photographs of tortured foxes in their death throes and stags escaping hunters by plunging into the Bristol Channel were set up along the short driveway. A horrible baying sound, not unlike that of hounds in full cry, went up from the protesters as Jims walked in, but inside he was greeted by sustained applause. The place was packed, with chairs in the aisles and people standing at the back.

The chairman of the local branch introduced him and congratulated him on his recent marriage. The audience cheered. Jims addressed them as “Ladies and Gentlemen, friends, Englishmen and Englishwomen, you who uphold our Dorset way of life, you the backbone of our land, this land of such dear souls, this earth, this realm, this England.”

They clapped and cheered. He told them at length what they already knew; what a glorious sport hunting with hounds was, how it had been part of English rural life since time immemorial, that it was a hallowed tradition which preserved the countryside and sustained thousands in employment. Though in fact he rather disliked riding, he went on to say what a pleasure it was for him, toiling all week in the murk and bustle of London, to go out with the South Wessex on a fine Saturday morning. The fresh air, the wonderful countryside, the sight and sound, surely the finest of all rural experiences, of the hounds on the scent. Foxes, he said, suffered very little in the chase. Lamping by night and shooting by the unskilled with a gun was far more cruel. In fact, he corrected himself, hunting wasn’t cruel at all, considering that only six percent of hunted animals were actually killed. The real pain would be suffered by those employed in various ways by the hunt-he quoted the alarming statistics in the notes he’d gone back to London to find-and who stood to lose their livelihoods if this pernicious bill became law.

He continued in this vein, though he was preaching to the converted and had no doubters to persuade. Just before he came to the end he recalled that he hadn’t responded to the chairman’s congratulations on his nuptials, so he finished by thanking him and saying how much he looked forward to setting his two charming stepchildren on horseback and introducing them to the joy of the chase.

The tremendous applause went on for nearly two minutes, with foot-stamping and shouts of approval. People queued up to shake his hand. A woman said she’d nearly not voted for him at the general election but now she thanked God nightly in her prayers that she had. The local branch of the alliance took Jims out to dinner in a horrible little restaurant called the Warming Pan, but he managed to escape at ten and drove himself home to Fredington Crucis House, fearful all the way that due to the amount of a rather disgusting Armenian red he’d drunk he might be over the limit.

Zillah had spent the sort of afternoon that wasn’t at all to her taste, first taking the children to a playground on the south side of Westminster Bridge, then walking them along the South Bank past the London Eye and the National Theatre and the bookstalls, as far as Tate Modern and Shakespeare’s Globe. It was sunny and warm, and it seemed to her as if everyone in London was down there on the traffic-free embankment. Strange, then, that this walk reminded her of life in Long Fredington. The loneliness of it, perhaps, with no one else to talk to but two people under eight, no man in her life, not even Jerry. She hadn’t brought his pushchair, so after a while she had to carry Jordan. She bought ice cream and Jordan’s dripped down onto her Anne Demeulemeister jacket. “Sometimes I think I’ll still be carrying you when you’re eighteen.”

Her cross tone set him off sniveling. Neither child had made any comment on the policeman’s visit, for which Zillah supposed she should be thankful. She was praying she’d heard the last of him and of Jerry. Perhaps, on the next visit he’d threatened, he’d only want to talk to Jims. Bigamy, she thought, when she was home again getting the children’s tea, bigamy. Why had that policeman asked her for the date of her divorce? But even though Jerry had been alive when she married Jims, she reminded herself, he was dead now. He’d died within two months of the wedding. Hold on to that, she said to herself, hold on to that, you haven’t got two husbands, you had two for only a few weeks. You can’t be a bigamist when you’ve only one husband.

At nine-thirty that night the police phoned. They wanted her to identify the dead man and would send a car to fetch her. Tomorrow morning at nine? Too frightened to protest, she phoned Mrs. Peacock. Could she come in the morning and look after the children while she went out?

“On a Sunday?” said Mrs. Peacock in an icy tone.

“It’s business. Very important business.” Zillah didn’t want to tell her she was off to identify a corpse in a mortuary. “I’ll pay you double.”

“Yes, I’m afraid you’ll have to.”

Eugenie, who had come out from her bedroom in her nightdress and overheard this, said in nearly as cold a voice, “Don’t you ever want to stay at home and look after us?”

The police officer was a woman, plain-clothed. She looked about Zillah’s own age and rather like one of those women detectives in TV dramas, tall, thin, with long blond hair and a classical profile, but her voice was an unpleasant near-cockney, high-pitched and brisk. She sat in the back of the car with Zillah, who had dressed herself soberly for this solemn occasion in a black suit and white blouse. On the way to the mortuary there was no conversation between them.

Zillah had never seen a dead body before. Feeling queasy, she saw that Jerry looked more like a waxwork of himself than a real person no longer alive.

“Is that your former husband, Jeffrey Leach?”

“Yes, that’s Jerry.”

The woman, who was a detective inspector, asked Zillah, in her strident, uncompromising tone as they left the mortuary and walked across a yard to the police station, why she called the dead man that.

“He was usually known as Jerry. Some people called him Jeff and his mother called him Jock. On account of his second name being John, you know.”

The detective inspector looked as if she didn’t know. She took Zillah into an office, functionally furnished, and asked her to sit down on the opposite side of the desk from her own. Her dislike was palpable, seeming to beam out of her in waves. “Did you write this, Mrs. Melcombe-Smith?”

She passed across the desk a sheet of paper with writing on it. If Zillah hadn’t been sitting down, she thought she’d have fainted. It was the letter she’d written to Jerry begging him not to reappear and, above all, not to brand her a bigamist. Her head was swimming too much for her to read it. Had she used the word “bigamist”? Had she? She couldn’t remember. She closed her eyes, opened them again, and made the sort of effort of will she was seldom called upon to attempt. A deep breath, and she managed to read the letter. Dear Jerry, she had written,

I am writing to you to beg you not to come back, to really go away and disappear out of my life. You did write that letter telling me you were dead, and though I didn’t believe that, I thought you meant me to act as if you were. Please do that. Please. I thought you were not fond of the children because you did not want to see them for months and months. If you want to see them sometimes we could arrange that. I could bring them somewhere to you. Jerry, I will do anything if you will only not try to see me or come here and please, please, don’t use that word about me. It frightens me, it really does. You must believe I don’t wish you any harm but rather the reverse. I just want to get on with my life, so please, if you have any pity for me, stay away.

Yours, Z

“Did you write it?” the detective inspector repeated.

“I may have.”

“Well, Mrs. Melcombe-Smith, there aren’t many women with first names that begin with Z, are there? A few Zoes maybe. I can’t say I’ve ever met a Zuleika but I believe there are some about.”

“Bigamist” wasn’t in the letter and nor was “bigamy.” It didn’t exactly reveal anything, it was quite discreet. “I wrote it,” Zillah said.

“To what address? The envelope is not in our possession.”

“I don’t remember. Yes, maybe-it was somewhere in NW6.” She might as well tell her the rest. “He’s been living with a woman called Fiona. She works in a bank.”

“You were very anxious never to see Mr. Leach again. What did you mean, ‘to act as if’ he was dead?”

“I don’t know,” Zillah said in a small voice. “I don’t remember.”

“You write that you were frightened. Had he ever abused you?”

Zillah shook her head. She supposed she must look frightened now. “If you mean did he hit me, no, he never did.”

“What was the word you didn’t like him using? Some insult, was it? Some term of abuse? Bitch or cow, something of that kind?”

“Oh, yes, that was what it was.”

“Which one.”

“He called me a cow.”

“Ah. A frightening word, cow. That will be all for now, Mrs. Melcombe-Smith. We’ll call in the morning and see your husband.”

Much as he disliked Jerry Leach on the few occasions he’d spoken to him, he’d rather fancied him and thought he’d detected an answering gleam in Jerry’s eye, for Jims was one of those gay men who believe that all men are secretly gay at heart. This, then, as he said to himself when Zillah told him, was a turn-up for the books. But he couldn’t see how it would affect him and Zillah, Jerry being a thing of the past in his life and hers. That the dead man had also been the father of Eugenie and Jordan didn’t at the time cross his mind. Family relationships meant very little to him. But when he’d walked into the flat in Abbey Gardens Mansions just after one, he was quite shocked by Zillah’s haggard face and shaking hands.

“The police are coming back tomorrow morning. They want to talk to you.”

“Me? Why me?”

“He wanted to know where I was on Friday afternoon when Jerry was killed. He’ll want to know where you were.”

Michelle identified the photograph in the Sunday paper as that of Jeff Leigh. Hatred, or something approaching it, confers much the same powers of acute observation as love. When she saw that face, younger, the features smudged and cloudy, she nevertheless knew who it belonged to and heard again that voice saying, “Little and Large, Michelle, Little and Large. Stoking the boilers, Michelle?” He was holding a baby in his arms and for some reason that made her shiver.

To tell Fiona? Matthew phoned the police first. He said he thought Jeffrey John Leach, so-called, was really Jeffrey Leigh, the man who’d been the partner of his neighbor. His wife had identified him from a newspaper photograph. Where did he live, they wanted to know. When Matthew said West Hampstead they were interested. They’d come. Would 4 P.M. suit him?

Then Michelle went next door to tell Fiona what they feared, what they more than feared, and that the police were coming.