On the Edge [= Dead Gorgeous]

30

Antonia called out breezily that the body was ready to move.

Rose felt the gooseflesh rise again. Resolved to master her nerves, she reached for the wine bottle, poured herself some more and swallowed it at a gulp. ‘Coming.’

She joined Antonia in the drawing room. This time she didn’t flinch at the sight of the body. She did what Antonia had urged, faced up to reality and forced herself to take in the scene as if it were a waxwork tableau. More colour remained in Hector’s features than she would have expected. Perhaps the chloroform had roughened his cheeks. Antonia had already removed some money from the pockets and placed it on a table nearby, together with a wallet, a handkerchief and a set of keys. No one could possibly identify Hector now, she claimed confidently.

‘Ready, then?’ Rose said. They were acting on her initiative now. She was taking charge.

Antonia nodded. It was almost as if she welcomed the secondary role.

They bent over the body and took a grip. The muscles were noticeably less rigid now. There was some movement at the knees and hips.

Antonia took most of the weight, slotting her hands under the armpits. They stumbled to the door and across the hall, pausing outside the kitchen. In two more stages they lifted him out to the garage. The torso was difficult to get into the car boot, so Rose lifted the legs in first and then supported the small of the back as they heaved him inside.

She shut down the lid and leaned on it.

‘How’s the time?’

‘It must be after midnight. Rose, how long will it take to get there?’

‘Getting on for three-quarters of an hour. And then we’ve got to scout around for a place to leave him.’

‘Let’s fetch our coats, then.’

At the door on the way out, Antonia gave a girlish shriek of laughter. ‘What on earth are you bringing your handbag for?’

‘It’s got everything in it. My ration book. My identity card.’

‘Rosie, you’ll be the death of me. We’re not going shopping and we don’t want to be identified. Leave it behind. All we need is the key of the car.’

‘I forgot.’ Rose turned and threw the bag on to the kitchen table, annoyed at her own stupidity. To reassert herself she announced that she would do the driving. Antonia didn’t object.

Great Portland Street was almost deserted. Only when they approached the Oxford Circus end did they start seeing people in evening clothes standing far out in the road to try and hail one of the few taxis operating at that hour. Some waved at anything on four wheels and shouted their fury at being ignored. A fine drizzle was adding to their discomfort.

Rose switched on the wipers and glanced at the petrol gauge. They had ample. The Bentley fairly purred compared with the RAF staff cars she was used to handling. She took the route through Piccadilly Circus and the Haymarket towards Charing Cross, then followed the river as far as Vauxhall Bridge. At the lights she said she wouldn’t mind a cigarette.

Antonia didn’t respond.

‘I said have you got a fag?’

‘What, darling?’

‘A cigarette. My handbag is back at the house. Remember?’

Antonia found a packet of her wicked-smelling Abdullahs in the glove compartment.

‘Thanks. You were miles away.’

‘Mm.’

‘Thinking about America?’

‘What?’

‘America. Princeton, isn’t it?’

Antonia tensed beside her. The voice shed its mateyness. ‘How do you know about that?’

The lights changed. Rose eased from second into third and they started to cross the bridge. ‘Hector told me. Wasn’t I supposed to know?’

Antonia started justifying herself rapidly. ‘It doesn’t matter a damn. I can’t go now. I can’t get married again, not while Hec is officially missing. It takes years and years before the law will admit that a missing person is dead. I can’t marry again, and Vic won’t even talk about living together. I thought this country was the last word in prudishness, but it seems they’re just as narrow-minded in New Jersey.’

Rose drove on without comment.

Antonia only pressed her case more vigorously. ‘Didn’t I tell you about this? Believe me, there wasn’t any question of trying to keep it from you. I mean, why should I, darling? I introduced you to Vic. God, after what you and I have been through together, we don’t need to hide anything from each other.’

Rose had stopped listening. Something bloody underhanded was going on. She’d touched a raw nerve when she mentioned America. Antonia’s pacifying gush was more of a threat than outright hostility. All this reassurance couldn’t paper over the fact that Vic and his job in Princeton were still paramount in Antonia’s plans. It was screamingly obvious that she hadn’t given up the idea. She was resolved to go to America with him. How could she, without marrying him?

Stockwell came up, then Brixton. They swung into the Brixton Road. Not much was moving in either direction. It was tempting to take the Bentley up to higher speeds along the wide highway, but she dared not risk it. This was the time of night when police cars lay in wait in side roads.

Heavier rain than they had been through had saturated the road. Each streetlamp stood over its own reflection and each oncoming car appeared to have four headlamps. The wet tyres rustled and clicked. Don’t let it lull you into quiescence, Rose told herself. This is the most dangerous hour of your life.

The first sign for Croydon came up.

Antonia rubbed at the window with her hand. ‘Journey’s end, my flower.’

Rose drove on. Most of the bombing had been further in, and she had a particular site in mind. A street close to West Croydon Station had been devastated by one of the giant V2 rockets in 1944. The entire area had since been evacuated and fenced round with corrugated iron, but children had ripped down a section of the fence to make their own cycle speedway track where there had been private gardens. Shells of houses stood about waiting for demolition, long since looted of anything worth owning. Clumps of willowherb and yellow ragwort had sprouted where pavements had been.

The turn came up on the left. For a short stretch they drove on the regular road past houses where people slept. The street lighting was sparse. Then the Bentley’s headlamps picked out the gap she had remembered in the fence at the far end. There was space enough for the car to pass through, out of sight of the houses. It swayed and rocked across a pitted surface on to the remains of a road until they were forced to stop where a wall had collapsed.

Antonia flung open the door and got out. ‘Wonderful, darling!’ She stood in the rain with her arms folded, relishing the scene as if it were Epsom Downs on Derby Day. ‘Let’s go prospecting, shall we? There’s a torch on the back seat.’

Rose couldn’t understand this boisterousness. Nerves affected people in unexpected ways, but was this a case of nerves? Was the Benzedrine responsible? She switched off the headlamps and shone the torch across the site. Two years’ growth of weeds had covered the rubble and made the footing awkward. Antonia was already striding indomitably towards the nearest ruined houses, which were — or had been — semi-detached, the sort that aspiring middle-class people owned. Probably they had once been allotted numbers that the owners had replaced with names like Mon Repos. They stood roofless and derelict. Rose shone the torch upwards. Where bits of wall jutted out of the debris were traces of floral wallpaper.

The first two houses were impenetrable. Presumably to keep children out, boards had been hammered across the doorways and window spaces and crisscrossed with taut barbed wire. They picked their way around them with the torch until even Antonia’s optimism faltered.

‘We’re wasting our time if they’re all like this.’

Rose refused to be beaten. This was her show now. She was no longer passive. She had forced her personality out of its straitjacket and she had a liking for liberty. She pointed the torch behind them, across what had once been the garden. ‘What’s that, then?’

The small circle of light had stopped on a dark, raised mass.

‘Just rubbish.’

Certainly when Rose stepped closer she found a collection of rusting and broken objects that must have been heaped there during the salvage operation. A garden roller without its wooden handle, several dented saucepans, a piece of saturated, threadbare carpet, a wheelbarrow, the frame of a deckchair. She stooped to examine something that gleamed. It was a chromium-plated key-plate.

Antonia came over. ‘What have you found?’

‘Somebody’s front door by the look of it. Help me slide it to one side.’

‘What for? Is there something underneath?’

‘I don’t know. There might be.’ Rose had noticed a patch of concrete and a curved piece of corrugated steel that suggested a possibility.

Together they gripped the edge of the door and tried to move it.

‘There’s too much heavy stuff on top.’

They scrabbled among the rubbish and lifted off a few bricks and a coalbucket filled with china fragments. At the second attempt they succeeded in pulling the door about a yard to one side.

Antonia whistled. ‘Nice work, darling!’

They had uncovered three or four steps leading underground to a cavity blocked by more rubbish, the frame of a pushchair and a dustbin lid.

‘Who would have known it?’ said Antonia.

They had found an Anderson shelter, the fortified hole in the ground that millions of families had installed in their gardens in the first years of the war, consisting of a curved arch of corrugated steel sunk three feet and covered with earth. This one had partially collapsed and was so overgrown as to be barely recognizable.

Together they hauled out the objects that were blocking the entrance. Then they used the torch again. The steel walls had become unclamped at the top and now sagged. The space inside was much reduced.

‘It doesn’t look very safe.’

‘Doesn’t need to be,’ said Rose.

She picked up a stone and tossed it in. They heard it bounce across the concrete floor. Antonia grabbed the torch and crouched to peer inside. Her voice had a promising echo. ‘Darling, it’s ideal. His own tomb. We can cover him with rubble and put back the rubbish and no one will ever find him. When they clear the site they’ll just bulldoze this. Let’s fetch him, shall we? Have you got the keys?’

Rose handed them over as if to a servant. She felt elated at having solved the problem of where to deposit the body. She was entitled to some self-congratulation. She alone had thought of this place and found the shelter. Without her, Antonia wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting away with murder. As it was, Hector’s body was most unlikely to be found. He would just be listed as a missing person, one of thousands. And the credit for that belonged to her.

Mustn’t get over complacent, she thought immediately. The night isn’t over yet. She followed Antonia to the car.

Antonia had already turned the key and lifted the boot lid. They reached into the dark interior and hauled out the body and staggered towards the garden containing the shelter. The distance they had to cover was about seventy yards, and the footing was treacherous. Either of them could easily have turned an ankle. As it was, they managed it without a rest, pausing only when they stood by the steps of the shelter. They set the body down with the head and shoulders resting on the door.

‘Get some breath back first.’ Rose took a seat on the steps.

‘As you wish.’ Antonia took the torch from her pocket and started shining it over the rubbish around them.

‘Looking for something?’

‘Nothing in particular.’

Rose didn’t believe her. She was capable of anything.

Antonia said, ‘Feet first, I reckon.’

‘What?’

‘When we lift him in, his feet should go first.’

Rose didn’t comment. Her eyes were following the beam of the torch. It picked out a set of rusty fire irons lying loose beside the wheelbarrow. Tongs, a shovel and a poker. The beam danced on to something else, coaxing her attention that way. Some instinct made her resist. Instead she turned her gaze back, outside the pool of light, and saw Antonia put her foot against the poker and covertly nudge it closer to the shelter entrance.

‘Are you listening, Rose?’

Suddenly the torch was shining full in her face. She stiffened like a rabbit caught in a headlight’s glare, except that the paralysing terror struck her a moment before the light. She managed to whisper, ‘What?’

‘Ready to start?’

Rose put up her arm protectively. ‘Stop it. It’s dazzling me.’

‘Get up, then.’

The beam moved away and the immediate feeling of helplessness passed. Rose had her hand to her eyes and she looked between the fingers to where the poker was lying. She’d expected Antonia to make a grab for it. Not yet, apparently. But she would at the next opportunity. ‘If you want his legs to go into the shelter first, you can lift them. I’m not going right inside.’

‘Why not?’ demanded Antonia. ‘You’re smaller than I am.’

‘I don’t like small spaces.’

Antonia lowered the torch and held it out to her. ‘Look inside. It’s all right. No rats or anything. Get a grip on yourself, you great sissy.’

‘That’s enough!’ Rose sprang up and pushed a warning finger at Antonia’s face. ‘I could easily walk away and leave you now.’

The tone switched abruptly from scorn to protest. ‘But you’ve refused all along to lift him by the shoulders.’

‘Never mind. I’m ready to do it now.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake! Have it your way, ducky, but let’s get on with it.’

Antonia dropped the torch and strutted histrionically past Rose to take a grip on Hector’s legs. But the bluster didn’t succeed as a diversion. Rose kept her eyes on the poker. She watched Antonia locate it with her right foot and glance down and attempt to nudge it out of sight under some thistles. Proof positive that she would launch an attack with it any minute. One or two blows on the skull with that would be death.

Disposing of Hector wasn’t enough. Antonia meant to kill again.

Why?

Rose knew why.

It’s the same plan as before, only this time she’s streamlined it. She means to kill me and take over my identity. She’ll bury me here, with Hector’s corpse. She’s got my handbag at home with my keys, my ration book and my identity card. She can get into my house and find my birth certificate and anything else she needs. She’ll use my name to get married to Vic. And then she’ll go to America with him.

She will not.

Rose forced herself to stand up, step woodenly across the rubble and take up the position she had said she would, facing Antonia, with the length of Hector’s body between them. This was the task that had to be completed, whatever else happened. Neither could manage it alone.

She stooped and slid her hands under the back, between the arms. Then she looked at Antonia, who was dipping to take the weight of the legs. They nodded at each other like two removal men lifting a piece of furniture.

Rose knew that the minute her usefulness was at an end, when Hector’s corpse was safely in the shelter, Antonia would attack. She definitely meant to kill.

And if by some chance the bodies of a man and a woman were discovered here later, the woman with an impacted skull, she would be dressed in clothes that had belonged to Antonia. The cunning that had ordered the events of the past few hours was clear.

Rose shuffled forward bearing the main weight of the body, eyes downcast as if she couldn’t bear the sight of poor Hector’s face. Actually her reason for looking down had more to do with self-interest: she was coming to the place where the poker was lying. She made a performance of stumbling slightly when she reached the thistles. It enabled her to nudge her right foot under the poker and push it at least a couple of feet aside.

Antonia seemed not to have noticed. She was making her way backwards down the three concrete steps, dipping low under the steel roof. She was right inside the shelter as Rose came down the steps. Funny. She obviously felt safe. She’d never considered Rose as a physical threat.

‘All right?’

‘Yes.’

They lowered their burden to the concrete floor.

Neither added a word. The silence wasn’t out of respect for the dead.

Now.

Rose turned and stretched across the concrete to reach for the poker. Her fingertips made contact with the handle. She took a grip, turned back towards the shelter entrance and raised her arm high behind her shoulder.

Antonia was bowing low to come out. There wasn’t much light to see her by, but the pale arch of her hair was discernible, and as she lifted her face the eyes appeared colourless. There was an instant when those eyes sighted Rose, a split second of disbelief.

Rose swung the poker and crashed it into the blonde head with more force than she knew she possessed.

Antonia slumped forward, across Hector’s body. Probably that first blow killed her, but there was too much bitterness, too much resentment to be contained in one blow. Rose battered Antonia repeatedly about the head. She sobbed as she struck and the sobs kept the rhythm of the blows for some time before she exhausted herself, slowed and stopped.