Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

Chapter 30

IT SEEMED TO Michelle in vain that she told Violent Crimes she and Matthew scarcely knew where the site of the murder was. This part of London was unknown territory. Like all Londoners, they had heard of the cemetery, but that was all.

“ ‘Before we go to paradise,’ ” quoted Matthew, “ ‘by way of Kensal Green.’ ”

They gave him uneasy smiles but Michelle thought they didn’t believe her. An alibi? They no more had one for this killing than for the one in the cinema. As always, they could only alibi each other and what was the use of that? They’d been in bed, asleep.

When they’d arrived this time, Matthew had just come back from the studios where he’d been making the first in the next series of his program and she’d been in the kitchen chopping mint for sauce. Matthew had progressed with such leaps and bounds that though he wouldn’t, of course, eat lamb, which mint sauce naturally accompanied, he was growing quite fond of having it on potatoes and last week had even eaten a miniature Yorkshire pudding. Violent Crimes fixed his eyes on the knife in her hand, a big thing like a butcher’s cleaver that could only be used to kill someone if you chopped their head off. But she had put it down and covered it and the mint with a sheet of kitchen roll as if she were guilty of the crime they seemed to suspect her of committing.

As usual these days she’d only been able to pick at the meal she’d prepared. But Matthew, by his standards, had eaten heartily of the potatoes and mint sauce, several slices of chicken, with caramel custard to follow. Six months ago he’d have thrown up at the sight of caramel custard. He talked about the program, that this first one concentrated on how taking on a new interest in life, earning money, and meeting new people could have a beneficent effect on the anorexic and citing himself as an example. Michelle always saw him with the eyes she’d seen the thin young man she’d fallen in love with, but even she, once she’d struggled to look at him as a stranger might, could make herself aware that he was very different in appearance from what he’d been the year before. This question of the images a woman might create of others and of herself interested her. She knew now that she’d always seen herself as fat, as a child, as a teenager, all through the years when she was normal-sized, and she did so now after all the weight she had lost. Did Matthew always see himself as emaciated?

She went upstairs and mounted the scales. They registered a weight loss so dramatic that it would have been frightening in anyone who didn’t know the reason for it. Stepping off, she looked at herself in the mirror and tried to apply that “stranger’s eyes” test. Up to a point she succeeded and for a moment or two the woman of twenty years ago looked back at her, a woman with just one chin, with a waist and a stomach which, though hardly flat, no longer made her appear in the seventh month of pregnancy. Once she’d turned away the fat lady was back. But what did it matter? What did any of it matter compared with their situation as suspects in two murder cases?

Matthew was washing the dishes. Or, rather, he had reached the stage of drying them. The mirrored woman, though not truly believed in when her reflection was gone, had just the same given Michelle the kind of self-esteem she hadn’t known for a long time. She trembled when she realized what it was: sexual confidence. She put her arms round Matthew from behind and laid her cheek against his back. He turned round, smiling. It was years since she’d seen that particular look on his face. He put his arms round her and kissed her the way he’d kissed her the second time they’d met, and with a tremor of joy and pain she understood that after the years of terror he was courting her all over again.

Jims had arranged everything, from his solicitor’s letter requesting Zillah to quit Abbey Gardens Mansions by the end of the week to the moving van that arrived at eight sharp on Friday morning. Another letter, this time from Jims himself and couched in the coolest terms, informed her she could keep her car. He would pay for Jordan’s operation to be carried out privately in a Shaston nursing home. Sir Ronald Grasmere, for old friendship’s sake, would permit her to move into Willow Cottage before completion of the purchase. He had already signed the contract.

A man who called himself Jims’s agent (he seemed to have so many) came in and labeled every piece of furniture in the flat either FOR STORE or FOR LONG FREDINGTON. Even Zillah had to admit Jims had treated her handsomely. By now she was resigned to the end of those dreams of TV stardom or fashionable life, Buckingham Palace garden parties, the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, and cruises on a peer’s yacht. It was over and the crunch had come. But this time things would be very different. Her native optimism reasserted itself. She had the car. She had a vast wardrobe of new clothes. Willow Cottage was no longer rented from the wicked squire, it was hers.

Letting herself and the children in, she found the place even better than she’d been led to believe. The whole house carpeted and curtained, everything new in the bathroom and kitchen, gold taps and marble counter tops, built-in cupboards in all the rooms, a huge television and video. Almost with enthusiasm she arranged the furniture and made up the beds. She picked up the new phone and called her mother.

Eugenie surveyed the place without fervor. “I liked it better the way it was.”

“Well, I didn’t,” said Zillah.

“Want to see Titus.” On painkillers, Jordan was bemused but he’d stopped crying. “Want Titus and Rosalba and Daddy.”

Zillah’s eyes and Eugenie’s met, as if they were the same age. “Perhaps Annie will bring Titus and Rosalba round later.”

Annie didn’t come round later but someone else did. He tapped on the back door at eight o’clock, just after Zillah had put Jordan to bed. Zillah had no idea who this very tall, rather good-looking man in his fifties might be and she stared at him, smiling uneasily.

“Ronald Grasmere. I live up at the big house, pal of old Jims.”

Zillah introduced herself by her Christian name alone. She was vague about what her surname might actually be these days. “Sir Ronald, please come in.”

“Call me Ronnie. Everyone does. I’ve brought you a few strawberries from the kitchen garden and the last of the asparagus. It’s not what it was a month ago but I think it’s still worth eating.”

So this was her bogeyman, the slum landlord, the grinder of the faces of the poor, the fascist beast, as Jerry used to call people of his kind in their student days. The strawberries he’d brought were crimson, glowing, dewy, and firm, rather different from what was on sale in Westminster shops. Eugenie appeared in her dressing gown.

“There’s nothing to drink,” Zillah said. “You could have a cup of tea.”

Sir Ronald laughed. “I think you’re wrong there, my dear. Just take a look inside that cupboard.”

Gin, whisky, vodka, sherry, several bottles of wine. Zillah gasped.

“Don’t look at me. Nothing to do with me. That chap of old Jims saw to it when he came in the other day. Now what do you think of this little place? Not bad, is it, though I say it myself.”

The begging letter that came through Fiona’s letter box, along with a flyer for a restaurant in West End Lane and her American Express monthly account, was from a woman she’d never heard of, someone called Linda Davies. As soon as she realized what it was she recoiled from it, screwed it up, and was on the point of throwing it away. Then she remembered a resolve she’d made when first she’d read in the newspaper about Jeff’s past. Slowly and with a certain amount of distaste, she retrieved it, smoothed out the creases in it, and read to the end.

Linda was one of the women Jeff had lived with and used. “Preyed on” was the expression she employed. She wrote that she had taken out a mortgage on her Muswell Hill flat so that he and she could start a business together. Soon after she handed him the money he’d disappeared. Then followed a tale of disaster piled on disaster: Linda Davies’s loss of her job, her struggles to pay her now huge mortgage, her succumbing to chronic fatigue syndrome. She’d read about Fiona in the newspaper, that she’d been living with Jeff when he died, was well-off and successful. All she was asking was for a thousand pounds to pay off her debts and enable her to make a new start.

Fiona felt physically ill when she read it. There seemed no end to Jeff’s perfidy. How many other women had he wronged? Did the police know? One of them might be guilty of his murder. Throughout the investigation she had never really thought about who might have killed Jeff. She had given the police the names of a few possible enemies but not with much conviction. It didn’t matter to her. If she had considered it at all it was some semi-underworld character that she’d vaguely settled on. Now she thought it might have been one of these women.

But when there was a second death, an old woman murdered by the same means, she revised her view. The perpetrator must be someone who knew both victims. And who fitted that description better than a woman from his past? Who better than herself? She phoned Violent Crimes as soon as she thought of this and before they had a chance to fasten on to her. But she didn’t mention Linda Davies.

By now the police had dismissed the idea of Kieran Goodall and Dillon Bennett as Eileen Dring’s killers. But they were useful witnesses. If their fantasies of how they disposed of the knife had varied and changed from hour to hour, their separate stories of the time they arrived at the murder site and what they saw when they got there tallied in every detail. They had arrived on the scene at one-thirty on Sunday morning, a fact both knew because Dillon was wearing his new watch. This watch was another cause of speculation, dismissed for the time being on the grounds of there being more important things to attend to. It was stolen, that went without saying, though Dillon’s stepmother swore she’d given it to him for his birthday the previous month. Wherever it came from, it showed exactly one-thirty. Both boys had looked at it. Watching videos had taught them the significance of noting the time at crime scenes, for they knew this was a crime, though they weren’t frightened. Another interesting-and appalling-factor was that neither saw anything out of the way in being out in the streets in the middle of the night. Nocturnal wanderings were what they did. They slept half the day and mostly missed school.

Kieran and Dillon had lifted Eileen Dring’s head, remarking that it had felt warm to the touch and not stiff, pulled out the bag, emptied it onto the pavement, and helped themselves to its contents. The money was an unexpected windfall. They took everything but Eileen’s cardigan for which they had no use, and carried off their haul to the abandoned shop where they had a sanctuary they called their camp. If they’d seen anyone on the streets in those small hours they hadn’t noticed or weren’t telling. The police were done with them. It was now a case for the Social Services.

The two police officers sat in Fiona’s living room, listening to the history of her encounters with Eileen Dring through the years. Too late, Fiona understood what she’d done in volunteering information that might have remained undiscovered. Gradually it seemed to dawn on these two officers that here was a prime suspect, a woman who’d been living with one victim and been friend and benefactor to the other.

“You mean she sometimes slept in your garden?”

“No, but I offered her the use of my shed. Only I felt awful about it. I thought I should have said to come inside and sleep in the house and I said that to her. But she told me she’d got a room of her own if that was what she wanted. Sleeping indoors didn’t suit her and she wouldn’t have my shed either.”

“Why did you make these offers, Miss Harrington?”

“I suppose I was sorry for her.”

“Did you ever give her money?”

“She wasn’t a beggar.”

“Maybe not, but did she ever try to get money from you?”

Were they implying Eileen had blackmailed her? Fiona felt herself trapped in a snare of her own devising. She remembered various occasions of quixotry, a handful of change here, a five-pound note there, and Jeff’s indignation.

“Jeff told me not to give her anything, but I did sometimes. I tried not to do it near here. I’d give her money if I came upon her somewhere else-near a flower shop, I mean. She told me a lot about herself. Her children had died in a fire. They got her out but hadn’t been able to save the children. That turned her brain, I think. She’d been strange ever since.”

She could tell by their faces that these facts were already known to them. They asked her if she could account for her movements on Saturday night but she could only say she’d been in bed asleep. With Jeff’s death, she said, staying up late, going out in the evenings, had come to an end for her. They told her to phone the bank and say she wouldn’t be in, and they asked her to accompany them to the police station. She was too horrified to argue, too aghast even to ask for an explanation. There she sat on a hard chair in an interview room for several hours, answering a string of questions but turning over in her mind how she could prove she’d been at home on Saturday night.

Then the answer-or an answer-came to her. She hadn’t slept well. She never had since Jeff died and her dependency on sleeping pills troubled her. Night after night she tried to sleep without taking one and almost always she succumbed. So it had been on Saturday. Sometime after midnight, nearly an hour after, she thought, she had got up and gone to the window, hearing as she crossed the floor a door closed in the house next door. That was all you ever heard, the shutting of a door or a light being turned on or off. And when she drew back a curtain she saw the light from Michelle’s and Matthew’s bedroom window go out. It had shed a bright rectangle onto their front lawn, a light that was abruptly withdrawn, she told Violent Crimes.

And she saw at once that they doubted her. “We’ll see if we can get some other neighbor to corroborate that.” It would let you and those Jarveys off the hook, she could tell they were thinking. She clasped her hands together, almost praying. If she could undo the harm she’d done to Michelle and Matthew she’d be as happy as if she’d exonerated herself.

Calling next door when they’d let her go brought fresh unjustified guilt. She felt the police must be watching her. Who, for instance, was that boy on the other side of the street? He looked no more than eighteen but he was probably twenty-five. He was sitting on a garden wall, apparently reading the Standard. Fiona thought he could be a policeman who had been sent to follow her home and see what she did. She was looking over her shoulder at him when Michelle opened the door. He’d think she and the Jarveys were in some sort of conspiracy together.

When Michelle heard Fiona’s story of her day, she couldn’t help feeling a flash of exultation that her neighbor, who had brought all this trouble on Matthew and her, was now in the same jeopardy as themselves. And even as she thought this she reproached herself for her mean-spiritedness. It was such a far cry from the way she’d felt about Fiona a month ago. Michelle took Fiona’s hand and kissed her cheek to make things better but still they weren’t better. Matthew opened a bottle of wine and Fiona drank hers greedily.

“I’m sure he’s a policeman on surveillance.”

Michelle went to the window, noticing as she did so how easy it was now for her to get up out of soft cushions and how lightly she walked. “It’s not a policeman,” she said. “He’s the nephew of the woman who lives there. He hasn’t a key and he’s waiting for her to come home.”

“You don’t think I’d have harmed Jeff or Eileen, do you?”

Michelle didn’t answer. It was Matthew, always brave and always one to speak his mind, who said, “You thought we had.”

Fiona said nothing. She walked to the window, stood by Michelle, and gazed out into the street. Suddenly she wheeled round and said, “I’ve had a begging letter. From a woman Jeff-got money out of.” Michelle laid a hand softly on her shoulder. “Oh, I know what he was. I’ve learned a lot since he died. She wants a thousand pounds.”

“You’re not going to give it to her, I hope,” said Matthew. “She’s hardly your responsibility.”

“I am going to. I’ve just decided, just this minute. I can afford it. I won’t even notice the difference.”