White Lines

by Mel Stein

Jenny Cooper had decided on an early night. She’d told her ‘just in case’ that she had to wash her hair and it was true. She always thought of him as her ‘just in case’ and when she was with her girlfriends she called him that as well. Phil was there just in case nobody better came along. There was no set or appointed time for Mr Right to come riding by on his white steed, but she felt she’d know for sure when he was not coming and then she’d tell Phil to name the day.

  She was pleased to have put the Colombian game behind her, although all the ramifications of Barry Reed’s positive drug test and arrest were yet to be felt. The Colombians had gone over the top with the youngster. He’d tested positive but, given their own drugs record, you’d have thought they’d have chucked him out on the plane and been glad to see the back of him, rather than making a federal case of it all. And then she’d been shoved into the front line when the Press had launched their main attack on the team’s return. She’d not been around when the England side had been accused of wrecking the Cathay Pacific plane but she couldn’t believe that the pressure could have been much worse.

  Every hack pulled out his soapbox from beneath his desk, placed his laptop on its high moral pedestal and let fly his spleen on the unfortunate young Geordie. Unfortunately, from Jenny Cooper’s point of view, they’d virtually ignored Patti Delaney’s problems. But then she was one of them and they were always going to look after one of their own. That annoyed Jenny. She would have liked that snooty cow to have got her come-uppance. She was quite sure that if she’d not been hovering in the background that Mark would have capitulated to her that afternoon. She was not convinced that Mark Rossetti was Mr Right but she would have liked the opportunity of finding out.

  Jenny lived in a new development in what would once have been called Bermondsey or the East End, but which was now described as a City-fringe, exclusive waterfront area.

  She liked it all neat and tidy, nothing out of place, and often when she got home from work early she’d have a demonic thirty minutes of clearing up. When Phil was here he sat in amazement, watching her behaving like a human tornado, unable to sustain a conversation until she had everything in its proper place. Only then would she offer him a drink, sit beside him on the settee, allow him to put an arm around her or maybe if she was in the mood to let him take her to bed. The flat was an obsession, she realised that, but it was her home, her call and she could do whatever she liked. Perhaps that was why the other men in her life apart from Phil stood no chance whatsoever. Even those few who stayed overnight were made to feel as if they were in a hotel where there was no room service, where the guests were obliged to clear up after themselves. One stockbroker who’d been the privileged recipient of a one-night-stand had been overheard in a bar saying that he thought Jenny Cooper had expected him to make the bed before he left.

  Tonight she’d brought home a stack of work. Memos, mail, documents she never seemed to have time to deal with in the office. She looked at her watch. It was well past nine o’clock already. Idly she flicked through the evening paper to see what was on TV, looking for an excuse not to start the work. She settled for the end of the news, put the kettle on to make herself a coffee and, instead of sitting at the table with her papers, stretched herself out on the couch until the kettle boiled. She used an old-fashioned steam kettle because she liked the whistle. It didn’t bother her it would take a good few minutes to boil on the ancient gas cooker that had travelled with her through a succession of bedsits and which she’d not had the heart to dispose of when she’d finally decided to buy.

  It was a fairly small item on the news that caught her attention. Jet Productions had won the exclusive rights in Zurich to televise live ESL matches. A picture of its chairman, Nathan Carr, flashed up on the screen. She knew him. Nobody who had anything to do with the media could have failed to have come across him, but she couldn’t remember ever having seen a photo before. He was not the sort of man who pushed his own profile into the foreground like, say, Richard Branson. He preferred to let his company capture the headlines rather than his own image. Yet, there was something familiar, something nagging away at the back of her mind.

  Whether or not she started the work, she promised herself she’d be in bed by ten. She was not getting enough sleep, which was another good reason not to go out, another excuse for an early night, as if she needed one. Too much on her mind, too many mistakes, unforced errors as the football commentators might say. She didn’t like mistakes any more than she liked mess. But she was in the midst of the ultimate mess. She could wash up dirty coffee cups, make rumpled beds, hoover the floor, but she couldn’t sort out the mess that was her life.

  She went into the bedroom and changed into her nightshirt. It was her favourite, with a huge teddy bear on the front, baggy and misshapen, not just from its endless washes, but also from her habit of pulling it down beneath her knees as she slept. By the time she’d returned, the news had finished and a programme about mountain goats in the Andes had begun. It was not a subject that was close to her heart and she began to surf the channels finding little or nothing that appealed to her.

  She felt remarkably awake all of a sudden and cursed the coffee she’d just drunk after the packet of crisps and glass of wine that had passed for her supper. She couldn’t cook, or rather wouldn’t cook, and tended to eat whatever junk food came easily to hand from her cupboards. She shopped at random, nothing she bought quite making a whole meal, nearly everything dramatically unhealthy. She knew what she did need and struggled to resist the temptation. There had been too much of that lately, and the pressure had given her a ready-made excuse.

  She refilled the kettle and relit the ring on the cooker. If she was going to be awake then she might as well be properly awake and concentrate on the work although there were other ways to get her through the night. She got out her laptop, plugged it into the mains and began to work steadily through the papers she’d extracted from her briefcase. Apart from dealing with the Press her remit extended to replying to the post that came in from the general public. Pointing out that she was Deputy Press Officer and not in the public relations department had cut little ice with her bosses and she was still landed with mounds of post that for the life of her she could not see fitted into her domain. She’d given up arguing. If you wanted promotion then it was better to say yes than no and, basically, all she had to do was draft a bog-standard reply and adapt it as the circumstances required. The telephone rang and she jumped. The phone did not seem to bring her any glad tidings, but she was still rational enough to realise that was of her own making. Still, there was no point in turning back the clock. What was done was done.

  She allowed the phone to ring again and again, annoyed with herself that she’d not put on the answerphone, which at least gave her the option as to whether or not she wanted to speak to the caller. It was supposed to cut in after ten rings anyway, but it had been playing up lately and the phone rang on incessantly. She finally surrendered and lifted the receiver. If it was that important to the caller to persist it seemed only fair to answer. There was nobody there, or whoever had been there cut the connection as soon as she answered. She didn’t like that. She’d been burgled a couple of months earlier and had only just adjusted to sleeping with the lights off. Right now she was down to a light in the hall burning throughout the night, but these sort of calls were disturbing.

  She dialled 1471 hoping it would disclose who had made the call, and that it would prove to be a girlfriend who’d simply assumed nobody was at home.

  ‘You were called at 9.34. The number has been withheld.’ She liked that even less. It meant that somebody had deliberately keyed in 141 before making the call to preserve anonymity. Somebody didn’t want her to know their identity, but that same somebody wanted to ensure she was at home.

  She checked the door to make sure it was securely locked, then went quickly round to satisfy herself that all the windows were also closed. She tugged with some satisfaction at the sturdy bars her insurers had ins
isted she fit after the last break-in. At times it was a bit like living in Fort Knox, but at least she felt relatively safe. Everything was in order. Unless someone arrived by tank they were not going to get in tonight. She shivered a little and tossed up in her mind between another glass of wine and another coffee, pushing a third option to the back of her mind. She settled for the wine as being more likely to make her relax and ultimately to ensure she slept.

  She began to read the letters, trying to distract herself from the phone call. Normally she loved the view from the window, looking straight out on to the river, but tonight the creaking barges assumed more sinister shapes. When she was a child she’d loved to read Dickens, loved the idea of living in one of the decrepit warehouses he’d described so well. She’d not hesitated when she’d had the chance to buy this flat, even though the monthly mortgage repayments sometimes stretched her pay packet beyond its limits. It was a duplex, rather than a flat. An entrance hall, a flight of stairs to the lounge and the kitchen-diner, then the bedroom and bathroom up another flight of stairs.

  The burglary had put a few doubts into her mind and tonight, on her own, the place seemed terribly remote. She did not even know who her neighbours were because she was never around to see or speak to them, and that added to the feeling of isolation. She would normally have called Phil but when she’d bumped him off for the evening he’d told her he was going to the cinema with some of his mates to see some awful film of gore and violence that she’d told him was simply not on their agenda.

  She rose and walked over to the window again. A cloud shuffled across the moon and the water was darkened. As if to hide herself away she drew down the blinds on the picture window that led on to the small balcony. To fill a few moments she put the kettle back on for the third time that evening, although this time with the intention of making a herbal tea. She turned again to the mail as a further distraction. Amidst all the junk mail she was surprised to find one marked for her personal attention. She had no recollection of having seen it before and could only assume that her secretary had added it to her pile when she’d known that she was taking it home. The envelope said, ‘strictly private and confidential’ and she wondered when it had arrived in the office and how she had missed it. She looked at the postmark to see where and when it had been sent, but both pieces of information were too blurred. Intrigued she opened it, read it once, then read it again. There was an enclosure as well and she began shaking as she held it in her hand. She reached into her bag for her address book, failed to find it immediately and then tipped the contents out on to the floor. She rapidly thumbed through the pages. If there was one person who needed to know about this then it was him. He was the only person who would understand, the only one she could trust.

  Three rings and then an answerphone message, one that worked. She disconnected before speaking. She needed to think this out, work it through before she spoke to a machine. Speaking to him would have been different. Another glass of wine. It was going to her head. She’d always held herself out as a hard drinker, one of the boys right from her university days. Only she wasn’t. A couple of glasses of wine and although she might not be anybody’s she’d certainly belonged to more than she could remember. And there were some she couldn’t remember. After the sexy stage she moved into aggression. Quite a few of her relationships had ended when she’d said things that not only did she not mean but of which she had no recollection whatsoever the following morning. It had ended with Rob that way. She’d really liked him, he’d travelled a lot, called her from wherever he was whatever the distance or the time differences. She always looked forward to his calls, more than she cared or dared to admit. One night he’d rung from an airport in the States, Washington, she thought. She’d been too drunk to know, one glass of wine after work had turned into another and then a bottle and then another. She could never stop after just one glass and that frustrated her. Something her drinking companion had said must have triggered off a series of irrational thoughts because by the time Rob phoned after midnight to say he was on his way back to her loaded with presents, ready for her bed, she gave it to him with both barrels loaded. Then he told her the next day in a call from his office that he’d had enough, that it was time to call it a day, that he’d not called at great expense to be advised during the course of the conversation that he was crap in bed, that she was only using him and then in the same breath that he was a coward for not asking her to marry him … which she’d never do anyway. She began to fumble in her bag, but regained her self-control and looked for another way.

  She lifted the phone again and pressed the redial button. But even before the anticipated answerphone cut in there was a ring at her door. Gone ten. Too late for door-to-door salesmen, wrong day for Jehovah’s Witnesses. She rose unsteadily and looked through the security peephole.

  ‘Oh, it’s you. Thank goodness for that. I was getting really spooked out.’

  She undid the chain, slid the bolt and turned the key. The door crashed into her face, sending her sprawling against the wall. The first blow landed before she could get to her feet, just as the door slammed shut.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘please,’ and a word she’d not had an enormous amount of time for in her lifetime was the last she spoke on earth. As the door closed behind her killer, the kettle began to boil again, a long incessant whistle.

  CHAPTER 30

  Inspector Rob Davies was not the most welcome of breakfast guests. It wasn’t that Mark didn’t like the man. He’d actually grown quite fond of him, particularly so since he’d married Helen Archer, formerly the club secretary at Hertsmere and now its chief executive. It was just that he preferred him off duty to on.

  ‘I take it that this isn’t a social call,’ Mark said as he ushered him in.

  ‘Bit early for social calling. I normally do that sort of thing in the pub at the end of the day.’

  ‘You mean when Helen lets you,’ Mark said comfortably, knowing the policeman couldn’t take offence because he had only met his wife because of Rossetti himself.

  ‘She lets me. She’s as busy as I am. That’s about the only time we see each other nowadays, when she comes along to the local to collect me. Nothing like a pint to round off the day,’ he added, the Welsh accent becoming more pronounced as he spoke fondly about beer.

  ‘Yeah, I used to …’ Mark began to say with a nervous smile. He didn’t like the strange expression on Davies’s face. He’d dealt with him professionally before and felt he knew him well enough to recognise danger signs.

  ‘Sorry, I forgot.’

  ‘As long as one of us remembers, it doesn’t matter. How is the beautiful Helen of Hertsmere?’

  ‘She’s fine. She’d be better if the club had got off to a better start to the season. You know what she’s like. Takes every defeat as a personal insult.’

  ‘A bit like you, I guess, Rob.’

  ‘Suppose so. Patti well?’ He seemed reluctant to get to the point of his call, almost embarrassed.

  ‘Ups and downs. It wasn’t the most pleasant experience in Bogota, as you can imagine. But she’s fine at the moment. It’s not her you’ve come about, is it?’

  ‘No, it’s not her.’

  Again Mark saw a cloud pass across the policeman’s face.

  ‘So what is it then? From the way you look you’re about to give me a formal caution.’

  Davies hesitated, like a diver about to leap from the highest board.

  ‘Look, Mark, do you think you could make me a nice cup of tea?’

  Mark laughed aloud.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to do that when I’m shocked and shattered?’

  ‘Yes, but this whole situation is a bit arse about face.’

  Davies threw his jacket over a chair and sat down on another at the kitchen table and looked around the room. There was nothing in it to reflect Mark’s character. Pine cupboards and shelves, half a dozen plain mugs, empty work surfaces and one empty flower vase. A cooker, a fridge, and that was about it. He
rubbed his shoes idly on the tiled floor and gratefully accepted the mug of steaming tea.

  ‘What, for a girl, do a fellow and kitchen tiles have in common?’ he finally asked. Mark shrugged his ignorance.

  ‘If she lays them right the first time she’ll have both of them under her feet for ever.’

  Mark smiled politely.

  ‘Come on, Rob, I don’t think you came all the way here to tell me bad jokes.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ He took another sip of tea, refusing to be rushed into whatever it was he was going to say. ‘I’d have thought you and Patti would have moved in together by now.’

  ‘We would have if I had any say in the matter. But it would take a nuclear explosion to get her out of the Burrow. She’s virtually built a moat and drawbridge there. Every time I think I’m getting near to permanent occupancy she fills the one with water and pulls the other up. How’s the tea?’

  ‘Not bad, considering you’re not Welsh.’

  ‘I didn’t know the Welsh had cornered the tea-market.’

  ‘Ah, we’ve cornered the market in a lot of things.’

  ‘Not football.’

  ‘No, not football, but then my idea of football has always been a bit different from yours and Helen’s.’

  ‘Yeah, you think throwing a leather-cased melon around, in between lots of overweight men leaping on top of each other with a view to causing permanent injury, is some kind of sporting entertainment. My dictionary defines a ball as round. I reckon the paying customer could get all you rugby nuts under the Trade Descriptions Act.’

  Suddenly, Mark ran out of small talk.

  ‘Why have you come, Rob? It’s not about my health, it’s not to tell me jokes and it’s certainly not for my tea-making reputation.’

  ‘You’re right. How well did you know Jenny Cooper?’

  ‘Ah,’ Mark replied, twirling his spoon around in the mug even though he took no sugar.

  ‘Wrong reaction, Mark. It means you have to tell me the truth.’