On the Edge [= Dead Gorgeous]

25

Antonia had left the Bentley round the corner in Charlwood Street. She didn’t speak until they were travelling in slow convoy up Vauxhall Bridge Road with the early morning traffic from south of the river.

‘Rose.’

‘Yes?’

‘Why are you doing this?’

‘Doing what?’

‘Coming back to the house with me. It’s only for Hector’s sake, isn’t it?’

‘Does it matter?’ Rose stared ahead at the adverts on the back of a bus. She felt weary, but more in control. Before leaving the house she had fitted in a wash and forced herself to eat a slice of bread and Marmite. She was wearing stockings and shoes again and a jumper and skirt. She had also dug out her grey demob overcoat that buttoned at the neck.

Antonia persisted with her point about Hector. ‘The fact is, you want to find out for yourself if he’s really dead. You don’t know whether to believe me.’

‘Can you blame me?’

Antonia smirked. ‘He cared bugger all about you. You know that, don’t you? Women were always making fools of themselves over bloody Hector, wanting to mother him.’

‘Who said I wanted to mother him?’

She gave a single, high-pitched laugh. ‘If it was sex you wanted, he just wasn’t up to it, sweetie, believe me.’

‘It takes two.’

‘Go to hell,’ Antonia snapped back, no longer amused. ‘That’s bloody good coming from you. It takes two! How was it with Barry, then? Did you satisfy him? You and who else? Was it two or two hundred?’

Rose didn’t answer. Her other compelling reason for agreeing to come was that she needed to keep tabs on this murderous woman after two nasty shocks in twenty-four hours. She meant to stick with her now until it was safe to be alone again.

Antonia steered the car through the mews entrance behind Park Crescent and into a garage.

‘Come on, then. Come and see for yourself.’

She opened a gate and let them into the yard at the back of the house where the two dustbins stood. Then she unlocked the kitchen door and led the way in. Yesterday’s shopping still lay unused on the table.

Rose followed, her skin suddenly so sensitive that she was acutely conscious of every movement of her clothes. Pulses throbbed in her face and neck. She said a silent, desperate prayer that Hector might still be alive.

Antonia crossed the room and hesitated at the door that led to the hall. Rose tensed, sensing that she ought to be ready to defend herself against another sudden attack. Then Antonia spoke over her shoulder. ‘Take a long, deep breath, my poppet.’

They stepped into the hall.

Rose took the breath, and held it. And held it longer.

Just inside the front door, where Antonia had said it would be, lay a corpse in a camelhair overcoat like the one Hector had worn to Reggiori’s. Dark trousers and brown shoes. Hands still in leather gloves. An ear partly covered by a black woollen scarf. Curly red-gold hair.

‘Want to look at the face?’ Antonia was standing beside the body preparing to give the shoulder a prod with her foot.

‘There’s no need.’ Rose heard herself say in a flat voice that sounded like someone reading lines without understanding them. She picked up a green porkpie hat that was lying against the skirting board. ‘It can’t be anyone else.’

Outwardly controlled, she ached from her throat to the pit of her stomach. It wasn’t the piercing pain of shock; she had felt increasingly certain from the way Antonia had been behaving that this time she had spoken the truth. No, it was grief that she felt, a bitter, grinding grief for Hector and for the loss of a life that she had known was threatened and she would have saved.

‘Feeling strong?’ Antonia took off her coat and threw it over a chair. ‘Do you need a snifter first or shall we get started?’

‘Do you want to move him?’

‘I didn’t bring you here for tea and biscuits.’

‘All right. Let’s do it now.’ Rose steeled herself. Numb as she felt, she was determined not to give way to panic in front of Antonia. She placed Hector’s hat respectfully on a chair and stepped closer.

She wasn’t new to the sight of death. She had seen air-raid victims brought out on stretchers from bombed buildings and she had gone through the ordeal of identifying Barry at the mortuary. But this was the first time she had been called upon to touch a corpse.

‘You take the legs, then. We’d better get him straight first.’

The body was lying on its side in a bowed attitude with the left leg bent into a near right angle and the other almost straight. His left arm lay along the length of the body and the right was trapped under the head.

It was necessary to bring the legs together to lift them. She moistened her lips and told herself to treat it straightforwardly as a simple, mechanical task. To forget that this had been Hector. Stooping, she took hold of the bent leg above the ankle. She gave a gasp of shock and let go at once. Through the trousers it felt as if the limb were encased in plaster.

Antonia had taken hold of the arm that lay under the head and was trying unsuccessfully to straighten it. ‘God, he’s as stiff as a board.’

‘Is it rigor mortis?’

‘It must be.’

‘I think I do need that drink.’

‘You’re not the only one.’

They moved into one of the sitting rooms and Antonia poured generous brandies into wine glasses. She spilled some and didn’t even notice. She had gone very pale.

Rose made an effort to be practical. ‘It wears off after a time, I believe.’

‘Any idea how long?’

‘No.’

‘There’s no movement at all. It’ll be the devil to get upstairs. It’s the arms and legs. They’re in such awkward positions.’

‘Can we wait for it to wear off?’

‘And leave him lying in the hall? It could be hours and hours. It only wants someone to knock at the door and we’re sunk. Christ Almighty, Rose, why didn’t I think of this?’

Rose was incapable of dealing with anyone else’s state of panic, least of all Antonia’s. The revulsion she’d felt when she handled that hardened limb had taken a grip on her mind.

Antonia stood in the middle of the room with hunched shoulders and folded arms. ‘Even if we managed to get him up to the bedroom how would I get him into pyjamas? I’d have to rip them apart to get the arms and legs in. Blast you, Hector!’

‘Is it important to have him in pyjamas?’

‘Important? He’s supposed to have died in bed, of cardiac failure. I’ve written it on the death certificate.’

To Rose there seemed only one feasible course of action, but she wasn’t going to suggest it herself. She waited for it to come from Antonia, as it eventually did.

‘We’ll have to drag him into one of these rooms for the time being and move him later.’

‘I don’t think I can bear to touch him again.’

‘Bloody hell.’

She despised herself for giving way after she had held herself together so well. ‘You can say it. I’m a coward.’

Antonia curled her lip and said rather more. ‘If you fill your knickers over a little thing like this, I don’t like to think about your date with Mr Pierrepoint.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘The hangman.’

It was a telling threat. Rose had a vivid mental picture of herself in the execution chamber. Even in the black hours after Barry’s death she had never let her thoughts move on so far as that horrid possibility. She stared at Antonia for some seconds. ‘All right. I’ll try.’

They went out into the hall again. Rose took a grip of one of the coat sleeves. Shoulder to shoulder they dragged the body to the back room.

‘On the sofa.’

‘He won’t look natural.’

‘Shut up and pick up the legs.’

Rose obeyed. She avoided looking directly at the face and as soon as the job was done she ran to the toilet and retched repeatedly.

In the kitchen Antonia made black coffee. When she put the cup in front of Rose there were two pills beside it.

Rose turned them over suspiciously. ‘What are these?’

‘Benzedrine. I get them on prescription from my doctor. I’m supposed to be slimming. Try them.’

‘Not likely.’

‘What’s up? It’s going to be another long night. They’ll keep you awake. Give you a marvellous feeling in your head. Didn’t you take them in the war?’

Rose took a sip of the coffee and said nothing.

‘Oh, for pity’s sake!’ Antonia snatched up the pills and swallowed them.

They sat without saying anything to each other. Soon the silence became unendurable. Antonia switched on the wireless. Someone was playing a cinema organ. Finally Antonia went out to see if the state of the body had altered. She shook her head when she came back.

‘Just the same. I was planning to see the undertaker this morning.’

‘You can’t have him here yet.’

‘I could ask him not to come until late.’

‘How do we know when it wears off? It could be hours and hours. Haven’t you got a medical book in the house?’

‘I never bother with books.’

‘You’ve got a room stacked with them upstairs.’ Rose realized as she spoke that she hadn’t mentioned going upstairs before. Antonia shot her a look.

Searching for information in some book was better than doing nothing. They went up and eventually found an Enquire Within Upon Everything that omitted to mention rigor mortis. Most of the books were in foreign languages.

‘Hector could have told us to the minute,’ said Antonia with an oddly belated note of pride in her murdered husband. ‘He was very well informed on things like that.’

Rose thought what stupid comments people come out with in times of stress.