On the Edge [= Dead Gorgeous]

31

A long silence.

Rose was incapable of telling how long she remained on her knees with her hands over her eyes. Eventually she sensed that the shaking of her body wasn’t so much from a sense of shock as from cold. Her coat was saturated. Fine rain still lashed down. She stood up stiffly and looked down at what she had done.

And felt more relieved than regretful.

I am safe from her. Whatever I am guilty of, I am safe from her. She can’t hurt me now.

And nor can anyone else if I cover the bodies, bury them under the rubble. Somehow I must raise the strength.

She picked up the torch and trudged up the steps and looked about her. The circle of light travelled over the ground, searching. It stopped at a black area that the weeds had failed to colonize. She went closer and found a folded piece of tarpaulin attached to a length of timber, all that was left of somebody’s coalshed. As she bent to take a grip, a large frog hopped out from under the fold, but she didn’t recoil. She lifted a corner and disturbed other things that would normally have repelled her, woodlice, beetles and centipedes. She was unmoved. She had a new scale of horrors now. With the aid of a rusty old tyre lever that came to hand, she prised and tore the tarpaulin away from the wood. Then she dragged it across the site to the shelter and down the steps.

Before covering the bodies she knelt and used her sleeve to wipe some smudges from Hector’s forehead. His eyes were closed and the pale lashes were damp from the rain. He still had the look of an overgrown cherub. She thought for a moment of that remark Antonia had made about mothering him. But you really fancied me, didn’t you, Hec, she thought. Then she drew the tarpaulin gently over his face and tucked it under his shoulder, separating him from the face-down corpse of Antonia with its skullcap of blood.

She got up and set about collecting rubble to bury them with, heaping whatever she could lift into the void and hearing it slap against the tarpaulin. The bulky things that she and Antonia had pulled out, the coal bucket, the pushchair and the dustbin lid, helped fill the space. Some chunks of masonry were too heavy, so she rolled them to the steps and toppled them in. Her hands felt sore and her fingernails were in shreds. Her back ached. Still she toiled, going increasingly far from the shelter in search of debris she could handle.

It began to look less like a shelter entrance as she filled it in. She buried the bottom step and then the next. The broken wheelbarrow went in, and part of a wooden fence. More broken bricks and chunks of plaster followed.

As the level of debris in the shelter rose, so did her spirits. Bone-weary she may have been, but she had outsmarted and destroyed the most dangerous woman she was ever likely to meet.

Antonia is lying under three feet of rubble. This is what would have happened to me, she told herself. Instead, I was brave enough to defy her. I met the challenge. I didn’t flinch when it was necessary to kill. She tried to destroy me and got destroyed herself. She tried to steal my life, my name, and make it hers. I didn’t let her.

I deserve to get away with this.

She picked up the torch and switched it on again to survey the result of her efforts. After an hour or more of heavy work the surface was level. The shelter entrance was practically indistinguishable from the rest of the site. She found the old door that had been lying over the steps and pushed it back into position.

Dead and gone.

She took a long, sustaining breath and stepped wearily across the garden towards the Bentley. She would drive back to Park Crescent and park the car in its garage in the mews and collect her things. It would be bliss to put on her own clothes again. She’d pick up her handbag and make a parcel of the muddy clothes and drop them somewhere on the way home. She’d be home in Pimlico before dawn.

The car gleamed damply in the torchlight. I wouldn’t mind a sleep on the back seat for twenty minutes, she thought. No, that’s the sort of stupid thing the old Rose Bell would have done. Can’t do that. Antonia wouldn’t do that. She’d conquer the fatigue and drive straight back to London, and that’s what I shall do. You can only expect to get away with murder if you keep your nerve and master your weaknesses. I was downtrodden and pathetic until a few weeks ago. Not now.

I got rid of Barry and saved myself from Antonia. I came out the winner. The survivor. The merry widow.

I’m stronger, more confident and better off than I have been in the whole of my life. Widow be damned. I’ll get a good man, a real catch. See if I don’t. What was it Antonia said? With legs like mine I should have heels three inches high.

She had her hand on the car door when a man called out to her.

‘Just a minute, miss.’

She turned and looked across the site to the gap in the fence. He was standing there under a streetlamp holding the handlebars of his cycle — a policeman in uniform.

Her heart-rate doubled, but she refused to panic. He doesn’t know a thing, she told herself.

His words confirmed it when he wheeled the bike across to her. ‘You’re out late, miss, or is it early?’

He was under twenty-five, clean-shaven, blue-eyed. Quite a dish, in fact. And the way he was looking at her he might have just asked for a dance.

She laughed.

He took the lamp off the front of his bike and took stock of the Bentley. ‘Handsome car. Yours, is it?’

She leaned on the open door with a possessive air. ‘Right down to the last rivet, darling. And now you want to know what I’m doing here on a bomb site looking like this. Am I right?’

He grinned.

She had his measure. He was putty. Soon deal with him.

‘I let my wretched doggie off the lead and he ran in here and that was the last I saw of him. I’ve been scrambling in and out of dangerous places calling his name for hours. I hope he’s all right.’

‘He’ll probably find his own way home. They usually do. Do you live nearby, miss?’

‘No, in London. That’s why I’m so worried.’ The lies rolled easily off her tongue.

‘It’s a long way to bring a dog for a walk.’

‘Oh, we only stopped for a wee.’ She gave him a smile. ‘You know what I mean. I’ve been to Brighton for the evening and I’m on the way home.’

‘You’ve got your clothes in a state, miss.’

‘I know, darling. Isn’t it a bore? I can’t wait to get out of them and into a nice, hot bath. Imagine it!’

He tilted his head to one side. She watched his eyes. He was young. He gave a half-smile — the sap.

‘What’s the dog’s name?’

Quick — a name for a dog. ‘Lucky.’ She was away now. ‘A cross between a bull terrier and a Bedlington, if you can imagine that. Pink eyes and white woolly hair. If ever a dog was misnamed, it’s this one.’

‘Well, if I hear anything ...’

‘You’ll make a certain lady very grateful indeed.’

‘What’s your name, miss?’

A name for a woman this time. ‘Um — Princeton. Vicky Princeton. What’s yours?’

He slid his finger under the strap of his helmet.

She said, ‘Well, you’re flesh and blood, sweetie. You must have a name.’

‘We use numbers in the police, Miss Princeton.’

She peered at his collar. ‘109 is it? I’d rather call you Bobby.’

He said ponderously, ‘I’d better make a note of your address, in case someone brings in the dog.’

She laughed and said as if she was being propositioned, ‘Oh, yes?’

This wasn’t all fun and games. He’d taken out his notebook and pencil.

‘Well, I’m staying with friends at the moment. It’s a pub. The Prince Regent in Lambeth.’

‘That’s not your own address, then?’

‘It’s not my own dog.’ She was pleased with that witty riposte. ‘It belongs to the landlord. If I’m still there, I’ll buy you a drink, Bobby.’

‘PC 109, if you don’t mind.’

She smiled. ‘I don’t, if you don’t.’ And if I’d met you anywhere else, you pushover, it wouldn’t have to end with me driving off alone into the night, she thought.

He kept rigidly to his official manner. ‘I must ask you to move the vehicle, miss. Strictly speaking, you shouldn’t have driven it in here.’

‘I was on the point of leaving anyway... officer.’

She swung back the door and got in. Closed it. Smiled.

Felt in her coat pocket for the keys.

Her pocket was empty. So was the other one. But she had driven the car here.

He tapped on the window. ‘Something the matter, miss?’

‘My keys — I can’t find them.’

As she said it, she remembered Antonia asking for the keys to open the boot when the two of them had gone to fetch Hector’s body. Once the lid was up, Antonia must have pocketed them.

The bloody keys were buried with Antonia.

PC 109 opened the door. ‘Let me have a look. They’ve fallen on the floor, I expect. Step out a minute, would you?’

Rose got out. This was dreadful. Maddening. She considered making a run for it while he got on his knees to search. No, she had to brazen this out.

The beam of his lamp probed the interior. ‘Could they be in the back, do you think?’

‘It’s possible, I suppose.’

As she opened the rear door a ball of paper fell out of the car. She knew what it was at once — the disposal form Antonia had filled in with Hector’s name and screwed up in disgust when she saw the part that had to be returned to the registrar.

Bloody Antonia!

She stooped to snatch it up.

Too quickly. Too nervously. Antonia would never have moved so fast.

Reacting to her sudden movement, the policeman reached out and grabbed it first.

‘What have we got here, then?’

‘Give it to me.’ Suddenly the old fears flapped and swooped like vultures. This was dreadful, ruinous. She wasn’t going to get away with murder. She was only Rose Bell, the luckless Rose.

‘I said what have we got here?’

He flashed the lamp at her, dazzling her. The white light had a strange, disorientating effect. It bleached out the bomb site, the Bentley, the policeman, in fact everything that had happened since she had last been blinded by torchlight. She had a horrid conviction that Antonia was still there, pointing the torch, mocking her.

She screamed. A full-throated, terrified scream.

The policeman lowered the lamp and said quite calmly, ‘I think I’d better see what all the fuss is about, don’t you, miss?’

He started to unfold the ball of paper.