On the Edge [= Dead Gorgeous]

20

Frost-patterns had formed on the inside of the bedroom windows. She scraped away a section to see if it was foggy outside and saw the words ‘Carelessness Kills’.

A superfluous warning. She had already decided to buy fresh ingredients for the curry, regardless that the lamb alone would use up all her meat ration for that week. She couldn’t believe it was possible for Antonia to have introduced poison into the vegetables, but just to be certain she would buy them fresh. Plus curry powder, which certainly couldn’t be left to chance.

She was first in the queue for the butcher’s when he opened at 8.30.

‘Yes, for you, as it happens, I do have some prime lamb, Mrs Bell. People coming to stay?’

‘Not to stay. Just a meal for a ... for some friends. People have been very kind to me.’

‘Glad to hear it. Does you no harm to have company. Takes your mind off things.’

‘I hope so.’

‘That’s the spirit, my love. Never say die.’

After the grocer’s and the greengrocer’s she took a bus to Regent’s Park and let herself into the house in Park Crescent. It wasn’t ten o’clock yet.

She took her shopping into the kitchen and unloaded it on the table. She’d managed to get a brick of Wall’s ice cream for the peach melba, so she stacked that with the ice trays in the fridge. The meat also went into the fridge. She took out what was left of the lamb Antonia had supplied, wrapped it in newspaper and stowed it in her shopping basket. The suspect curry powder joined it.

Her reason for coming so early wasn’t to do with cooking.

She’d woken about six in a changed mood from the near-panic of the night before. She’d reached a decision. She would search for evidence that Antonia had poisoned Hector’s food.

She needed to be certain. Sex with Hector was an alarming prospect but she was prepared to face it if she could find proof that his life was under imminent threat.

She would look for evidence of poison. A good detective would have known what to do. He would have had the food analysed by a toxicologist.

She had to search for the poison itself, or the container it came in.

And (because she really ought to keep an open mind) she would also look for that letter from Antonia’s mother. The letter that supposedly summoned Antonia to Manchester to put Lucky the luckless dog out of his misery. She would be surprised if the letter existed. She was pretty certain that these few days of absence had more to do with putting Hector down than Lucky. But she was here to find out the truth.

Might as well start with the obvious and the most unpleasant, she thought. The dustbin. After sifting through muck and rubbish for twenty minutes everything else will be like picking daisies. She opened the back door.

Two dustbins, one empty and the other only half full, thanks to Antonia’s dislike of cooking. The smell wasn’t as suffocating as it might have been because the contents were mostly dry. She moved them piece by piece into the empty dustbin. The wrapped vegetable parings she had placed in there herself the day before, a pile of newspapers and magazines, a cornflakes carton, a couple of tea packets, several salmon tins (for that pampered cat?), a whisky bottle, a wine bottle, a laddered stocking, cigarette butts and packets, a matchbox, some razor blades, combings of blonde hair, a lipstick holder and some packets of ash and cinders that she unwrapped and sifted with a stick.

She defied the freezing air long enough to check everything again and stack it in the original dustbin.

She came in and ran the hot tap for a wash, glad that the dirtiest job was over and untroubled that it had yielded nothing.

Next on her list was Antonia’s dressing room. In a house this size it was inconceivable that Antonia didn’t have a room of her own.

The act of going upstairs didn’t need to be charged with tension just because it was unexplored territory. She’d made up her mind to treat it casually. On the wall up the staircase there was a collection of framed photographs of allied fighter planes, so she paused to brush up on her aircraft recognition. Nobody likes being alone in a strange house, she told herself, unless like me they’re making a search for something.

One of the stairs creaked under her weight and there was an immediate thump from the floor above. She wasn’t alarmed for long. The cat came down to meet her at the turn before the next flight. She scratched the top of its head.

‘Later. I wouldn’t forget you, would I, Raffles?’

She reached the first floor and started opening doors. A study, evidently Hector’s, with design drawings on the walls, a rolltop desk and leather furniture. Next to it a library stuffed to the ceiling with technical books in several languages. Then, stale from disuse, a spare room that Antonia would probably have called the glory-hole. Anyone wanting to hide something had unlimited scope in this house. The dressing room was still the likeliest place. She went up to the next floor.

The nearest door was open and she glimpsed two brass bedsteads with a polar bear rug between them, so she went in. The walls were papered in a startling geometric design of overlapping pink arcs and blue triangles, neither restful nor romantic — which summed up Antonia, Rose thought. Hector’s pyjamas lay across the black eiderdown on the bed to the right. They were conspicuous, to put it mildly — bright red with white spots that played tricks on the eyes and moved about like the lights in Piccadilly Circus. She refused to believe they were Hector’s choice. She put the blame on Antonia again until it occurred to her that they must have come from America, where Hector had lived some years. On second thoughts she decided polka dot pyjamas were like modern paintings. You might very well grow to like them as they became more familiar.

Through the door on the opposite side and into Antonia’s dressing room. She got a shock as she met her own reflection in a wall mirror.

White wardrobes with glass handles were built along two walls. She opened a door and gave a long low murmur of envy. She was no authority on furs, but she recognized mink, ocelot, silver fox and chinchilla and plenty she couldn’t name but would have gone through fire to wear. A lustrous black coat with raised shoulders and no collar that must have been straight from Paris, it was so fashionable; three or four sensational capes for evening wear; and a heap of tempting hats and collars and things on the shelf above.

She couldn’t resist running her fingers through the chinchilla. If I had just one of these I’d be in my seventh heaven, she mused, but all of them. Small wonder Antonia refuses to be parted from them.

She wrenched herself away and crossed the room to the walnut dressing table, a long, low arrangement of drawers in a curve with three tall mirrors embellished with Art Deco rosebuds and ribbons. Resisting the temptation to try the spray scents on top, she opened and closed each of the drawers quickly to get an impression of the contents, lingering a moment at the one containing jewellery.

You’re here to look for poison, she told herself.

Any time she had reason to hide an article — usually nothing more sinister than a birthday present for Barry — she tucked it among the smalls at the back of her underwear drawer where nobody but herself had any business to look. Here in Antonia’s bedroom it seemed as sensible a place as any to begin the search.

She ran her hand through the layers of satin and crêpe de Chine and felt sick with envy as she thought of her day running up her parachute-silk undies.

No bottles, phials or pill-boxes. Antonia kept plenty in there to make a man’s heart race, but nothing to make it stop.

The second drawer was deeper and had something more promising pushed to the back behind a nightdress — an antique rosewood box with mother-of-pearl inlay. Rose lifted it out. By the size and weight it probably contained letters or photographs. Frustratingly it was locked and there was no sign of a key. She cleared a space for it on top of the dressing table, opened the next drawer and almost at once found a tin containing curlers, safety-pins and other odds and ends including hairgrips. The lock on the box looked a simple fastening, so she tried poking the end of a hairgrip upwards through the keyhole. After a few attempts something clicked inside.

She opened the box.

On top was a photo of Vic, the lover, in cap and gown at some university ceremony. There were several old letters postmarked in the war years. A picture of an aircrew beside a Blenheim bomber. Printed dance invitations, pressed flowers, some twenty-first birthday cards. The sort of collection most women keep somewhere. No phials of poison. No letter from Manchester. She clicked her tongue impatiently. She was about to close the box when she noticed that the padded underside of the lid was hinged and had a small hook and hasp where it could unfasten. She eased it open. Out fell a folded document.

She’d seen it before. It was the death certificate Antonia had stolen from the Registry Office. The certificate intended for Hector. Nothing had yet been written on it. She held it a moment. The paper was shaking in her hand. Her impulse was to rip it to pieces, yet she hesitated.

Tear it up, the inner voice prompted her. And another immediately countered: don’t — unless you want Antonia to know that you came up here and went through her things.

She folded the certificate and replaced it where she had found it and fiddled with the lock until it clicked back into place. She replaced the box in the drawer and told herself she was there to look for other things.

Where else?

She decided to try the top shelf in each of the wardrobes. They were too high for a proper inspection, so she carried across the stool from the dressing table and stood on it. She reached in among a collection of belts and hats.

And froze.

A sound had come from downstairs. She was certain it was the front door being opened.

She held her breath and listened.

The front door clicked shut, beyond any question. She strained to hear. It was doubtful whether someone’s tread on the hall carpet would carry up to her. A pulse was beating so loudly in her head that she could easily have taken it for footsteps.

Seconds passed. She let out a tremulous breath, like a swimmer just out of the water, and drew in more air.

A board gave a sharp creak. Then another. Whoever had entered the house was coming upstairs.

It can only be Hector, Rose told herself to stave off panic. Who else could have let themselves in? He must have come back from work to fetch something. He’s going to that room on the first floor that he uses as his office. He won’t have any reason to come up here.

The steps were perfectly audible now. They reached the turn after the first flight and continued upwards to the first floor. They didn’t after all enter Hector’s office. They continued up the next flight.

He was coming up to the bedroom.

She had to overcome the paralysis she felt in her limbs. She couldn’t be found delving into Antonia’s wardrobe. She twisted her head to right and left, looking for somewhere to hide. Common sense told her she’d make a noise disturbing the hangers if she tried climbing in with the clothes. Better, surely, to accept that she’d be found in the room and think up some plausible reason for being there. But she didn’t want to be caught standing on a stool with her arms in the wardrobe. She gripped the front of the shelf with both hands and made a stronger effort to use her legs. She staggered off the stool.

The footsteps reached the top stair and crossed the landing at the moment she pulled the stool away and closed the wardrobe. She backed against the wall, mentally rehearsing. ‘Hello, Hector. I thought I heard you coming up. I happened to be passing so I brought a few groceries in and then I heard this noise upstairs so I came up to investigate. I’d quite forgotten about the cat being in the house. Am I very brave or very silly? Can I get you a cup of tea or anything?’

She heard him enter the bedroom and cross the room. He appeared to go towards one of the beds because there was a chink as if he’d picked up a piece of china or something on the bedside table and put it back. There followed the softer sound of the sheet on the bed being drawn back. Why was he touching the bedclothes? Surely he wasn’t going to bed! Perhaps he had come home feeling ill. In that case, she’d have to wait for him to fall asleep. There was no way out except through the bedroom.

He didn’t climb into the bed. He moved around the side of it and approached the open door of the dressing room.

Rose waited, flat to the wall, biting her underlip. He’d need to come right in to see her.

She saw the reflection first. It appeared in one of the side mirrors of the dressing table. And it wasn’t Hector she saw.