The Glass Ceiling

by Anabel Donald

  ‘She’s really kind. Unbelievable. Tad and Fred and me, and a painter in the basement but I didn’t catch his name, an artist painter not a builder like Tad and Fred, and then there’s her daughter but I didn’t like her much, all in the same house. And a big dog that’s going to be a guide dog for the blind when he’s old enough. Grace is keeping him for a while so he gets used to people.’

  ‘I can’t guess, Peter,’ I said. ‘Gosh, Nick.’

  ‘KT,’ said Peter. ‘Isn’t that something?’ He laughed. Teasing me: he knew my reaction to affected spellings.

  ‘I hope she’s got long legs,’ I said. ‘All the way up to her head. To fill the space more usually occupied by a brain.’

  ‘And she’s a professor at Oxford as well, and she’s got cupboards full of awards for all the books she’s written, and she gets fan letters every day, and she’s got a great computer she lets me use, I never have enough computer-time, that’s the only thing that gets me about being homeless—’ said Nick.

  ‘And I’m going to make a telephone call,’ I said, and shut the door behind me.

  ‘Eddy? This is Alex.’ ‘Good morning, girlie. I was just going to call with your info. One, forget Leona Power as a murder victim. It was an accident, straight up. D’you want the details?’

  ‘Not now. Could you fax them to me?’

  He sucked in his breath sharply. ‘That’d be dodgy. Official information? You’d owe me.’

  ‘OK, I’ll owe you.’

  ‘And the other thing, the alleged break-in at those premises in Kensington. Not reported.’

  Not reported. Well, well. I’d have thought Melanie Slater would ring the local cop-shop at the slightest provocation, to boost the crime figures and get full value for her taxes.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say thank you nicely?’ said Eddie huffily.

  ‘Thank you nicely,’ I said. ‘Hey, Eddie. Tell me something. What do you think women want?’

  ‘Ah. Well. Women. You’ve come to the right place.’

  ‘Give me the benefit of your years of experience.’

  ‘Go easy on the years . . . I’m happier with depth. Depth of experience.’ He gave a salacious chuckle. ‘All right, I’ll tell you what women want. Plenty of TLC, a good seeing-to and a fitted kitchen. In that order. I try to make my excuses and leave after the knickers come off and before the brochures arrive. Get me?’

  ‘I get you, but I think you’re way off beam. That’s not what I want,’ I said tetchily. I usually butter Eddy up and swallow his opinions without argument – he’s more like a sit-com character than a real person, and he’s dead useful – but lack of sleep and lack of Barty was getting to me.

  He whistled loudly, and I jerked the receiver from my ear too late. ‘Ouch!’

  ‘Serves you right. Don’t get uppity with me, sweetheart. Remember who’s doing the favours for who, right? All right?’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘But it’s still not what I want.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  I thought. Then I heard the voices from the kitchen, though I couldn’t hear the words. ‘I want to be alone,’ I said.

  ‘That’s all very well when you’re the right side of thirty and enough people don’t want you to be. But remember what happened to Greta Whosit. She died alone.’

  ‘So does everybody. And at least she was used to it.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Teddy arrived half an hour early, which threw all my arrangements out: I’d arranged for Peter and Nick to be ready to get out of the flat and leave me to speak to him in peace between eleven-thirty and twelve. He was apologetic, eager and compliant, though, which was just as well since when he turned up the flat was hardly convincing as the headquarters of a well-run private investigation agency.

  We were in the living-room. Peter was sawing and hammering and singing along to Meatloaf about twelve feet away, admittedly behind a closed door, but a door built to rock-bottom specifications; Nick was in the kitchen behind another cheap door lying through her teeth over the phone to the receptionists of assorted medical practitioners who carried on their business from the Harley Street address Arabella Trigg had visited the night before; outside in the street, clearly audible through my open windows, the dustbin-men were arguing with one of my neighbours over the size of the bribe that would induce them to take away his bags of what was clearly garden rubbish, which isn’t household waste, any way you cut it, so we’d be doing you a favour, know what I mean?

  ‘I don’t mind us talking here. This is fine, really, absolutely fine,’ said Teddy. He looked smarter today: his hair was washed, and he wasn’t wearing the tatty school uniform. He was wearing clean jeans, a dark grey polo-neck, an expensive, Italian-looking dark jacket, and a positive gale of aftershave. He’d taken a lot of trouble for me.‘I’m very grateful you agreed to see me at such short notice,’ he went on. ‘Alex? Are you listening?’

  Peter’d asked me that, earlier, and I hadn’t been, which didn’t matter. But this did. OK, Teddy was only a boy, but he was paying, and the intensity of his crush was so evident it was almost painful. So I looked straight at him and tried to block out a dustbin-man’s protest, ‘A fiver? You’ve got to be joking!’

  ‘Because this is important to me,’ said Teddy. ‘I want to hire you to find my father.’ Then I stopped pretending and really listened, because this was probably important to him, and also because I wanted to know about his father: it might give me an angle on his mother. ‘How do you mean, find?’ I said.

  ‘He disappeared. Nine years ago. When I was eight. He just went, and my mother didn’t know where. Or she didn’t want to tell me. I don’t know what I thought, then. I missed him, of course, but I just, sort of – accepted it. Then a few years ago I was curious and I asked her and she wouldn’t talk about it, and she’s always refused to since.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to find him?’

  ‘Yes, sure.’

  ‘Even if he doesn’t want to be found?’

  He shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. I might not even want to see him, if he’s still alive. He obviously doesn’t want to see me. But I just want to know.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I prefer to know,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  I approved of the sentiment, in principle. But I was also concerned that he might not like what I found. ‘Why now?’ I said.

  ‘Because I saw him. On television.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘On the news, during the Notting Hill Carnival. I just saw his face, on a balcony near here, watching the floats go past. A few yards away, actually, on one of those big falling-down houses on the Grove.’

  ‘Those houses are very valuable,’ I said, rather miffed.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure they are,’ he said hastily. ‘And lots of places round here are very cool. Much better than where I live. And your flat is . . . great. Terrific. But anyway, it was definitely my father I think. Much older, of course, than I remember him. But he has a memorable face. Big. Lots of bone. Rather . . . ugly, I suppose. A bit like mine.’

  ‘You’re not ugly,’ I said, because in those circumstances it’s impossible not to, not because I wanted to encourage him. Besides, he wasn’t ugly. Odd-looking. His face, still unset, would one day be distinctive, and attractive if you liked men craggy with long jaws and noses. Rather like Barty, in fact.

  ‘Really not?’ he said. ‘Not too . . . bony? What do you think?’ He leant forward eagerly.

  Ouch. Thank God I’d never have to be fourteen again. It happened much younger to girls. Be kind, but not too kind, Alex. ‘I think you have a very attractive face, Teddy.’

  The smile he gave turned my sop into truth. ‘So do you,’ he said. ‘And’ – pause – ‘so do you.’

  At least he hadn’t said it. Whatever it was.

  We smiled at each other For too long. He must have felt it, because he wiggled his hands and said, ‘I’ve brought you a photograph.’ He handed it over.

  A family
album snap. Written on the back. Dressing the Tree – Xmas 1983. In the colour photograph, Melanie Slater in jeans and a red sweater posing with an ornament and laughing at the camera, young Teddy in pyjamas grinning through the lower branches of a big tree, and an older, bespectacled edition of present Teddy in grey flannel trousers and a dark blue woollen shirt sitting glumly on a lowish sofa, large hands clasped around his knees, staring away from the tree and the camera, perhaps planning escape. ‘He left ten days later,’ said Teddy. ‘Edward didn’t like Christmas. That’s his name, Edward. Edward Webb, same as mine, except I’ve always been Teddy.’

  ‘Was he married to your mother?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. She’s never been Mrs Webb, anyway. She was always Melanie Slater and she still is professionally, though when she married Nigel she took his name, of course, so she’s Mrs Meades too, and my sister’s Bella Meades and when she marries she’ll be Bella something else. It must be peculiar, being a woman and changing your name all the time.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Don’t have to what?’

  ‘Get married. Or change your name if you do . . . Teddy, who took this photograph?’

  ‘Grace. Grace Macarthy. She’d come round for a drink and to drop off our presents. She gives terrific presents.’

  ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘Oh, no particular kind of thing, and not always expensive. All different, depending on who she’s giving them to. Never what she thinks you should have, but always the thing you want but didn’t know you did until you unwrap it.’

  ‘What did she give you last Christmas?’

  He paused, and cleared his throat and said, ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Just interested.’

  ‘Well – OK. She gave me driving lessons, a course of twenty driving lessons.’

  ‘And that was what you wanted?’

  ‘Absolutely, because I was seventeen in January and then I could get a provisional driving licence, but—’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘But I knew my mother wouldn’t let me. She has strong opinions about young people learning to drive. She thinks it’s dangerous.’ I’d have thought it more dangerous if they didn’t learn properly, young. Maybe Melanie just didn’t want an independent Teddy.

  ‘So did your mother let you have the driving lessons?’

  ‘That was the point of the present, not just the money. Grace can usually handle my mother. She out-argues her and . . . kind of bewitches her. So I had the lessons, but I don’t really see what that has to do with it.’

  Neither did I, yet. I looked at my notes and thought about what he’d told me. ‘Teddy, the Notting Hill Carnival was about a month ago. Why haven’t you hired a detective before?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure exactly how to go about looking for Dad. I came up this way a lot, I found what I thought was the house he’d been in, and I rang a few bells in the house, talked to a few guys. But no one knew who I was talking about, or said they didn’t. None of them seemed likely to have known him. One of the flats was a crack house. It’s a squat, I think.’

  ‘Maybe you got the wrong house. Lots of them look the same.’

  ‘Could be,’ he said. ‘That’s your job, anyway, and I bet you’re good at it.’

  So I got down to my job. I made notes on what he could give me. He knew the broadcast he’d seen his father on had been the Sunday night of the Carnival, on the BBC news. (‘My mother always makes me watch the BBC news. She thinks it’s better than ITV.’) He gave me the date his father had left/disappeared (Teddy remembered it because it was the day after his eighth birthday), and what he could remember about what his father did. He’d been a lecturer in maths, at one of the colleges of London University, Teddy thought.

  ‘Did he go to Oxford? Is that where he met your mother?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Teddy. ‘That’s not the kind of thing you know when you’re very young, and afterwards my mother wouldn’t talk about him at all. So I don’t know much about him, except he worked alone a lot, sometimes on the computer, mostly just with pencil and paper. And he got into moods, and then they’d fight and I think he’d hit my mother. She sometimes had a sore face. I mean, that’s what I called it then. They were actually black eyes, I suppose.’

  ‘How did you feel about him?’

  ‘I loved him,’ he said. ‘I loved him very much. He was easy to be with, when he was in a good mood, and when he wasn’t my mother kept me away from him. And he didn’t nag me like she did. She was always there, all over me. She never left me alone. He’d show me things on the computer if I asked him but otherwise we’d sit in silence. He’d work and I’d – play, it was really – on the computer. Or else we’d play chess. He was very good at chess, I think.’

  I was beginning to feel guilty about taking Teddy’s money (brought, in cash, as promised) and it struck me that he’d have no real difficulty in handling the enquiry himself. He could press his mother for answers, or he could ask relatives or friends. There must be people still around who knew the story, and they’d surely feel that he had the right to know.

  I suggested this to him but he shook his head emphatically. ‘I don’t want to do it myself. That’s why I’m hiring you. I don’t want to upset my mother, and any mention of him always does. Plus I don’t know anybody who’d talk to me without reporting to her afterwards.’

  ‘What about Grace Macarthy?’ I said. ‘It sounds as if she takes your side.’

  He was taken aback for a moment, then said, ‘Grace is terrific but she can’t keep a secret. She’s a very open person; she thinks problems should be faced and talked through. I couldn’t count on her not talking to my mother about it, if she thought that was the right thing. She goes her own way.’

  He knew her well; I, hardly at all. It had to be his judgement call, though I didn’t think he was right. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll look into it.’

  He grinned delightedly. ‘Good. Soon? Now? I don’t want to wait, you see, now I’ve made up my mind to do it.’

  ‘I’ve got quite a lot on at the moment; I told you on the phone. Maybe you should get someone else.’

  That was mean of me, since as far as I could see Teddy was paying four hundred pounds for the privilege of sitting in my living-room, gawping at me and doing his impression of an adolescent conger eel. He jumped straight in. ‘Oh, no. It’s got to be you. That’s really when I decided to get a private investigator, because as I told you I was up this way and I went into your post office and saw your advertisement and I knew it was you.’

  ‘You remembered me?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I had a bit of a crush on you, actually. Back then. I-thought about you a lot.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m flattered. Hey, Teddy. You could do something for me—’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, interrupting. ‘Anything at all. What can I do?’

  ‘When I was over at your place seeing your mother, you mentioned a break-in. Could you tell me more about that?’

  ‘If you like,’ he said. ‘It happened on Sunday night between about eight and ten. I was the only person in the house. Bella’d gone to stay with one of her whiny friends and my mother and Nigel had gone to a charity do. Someone broke in through the conservatory at the back of the house. I didn’t hear anything.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was in my room. It’s at the top of the house. I was working on my computer and playing heavy metal on the CD and I wouldn’t have heard World War Three. Do you like heavy metal?’

  ‘Very much,’ I lied. It was simpler. I didn’t want him to burn his CDs in ritual sacrifice. ‘When they broke in, what did they do?’

  ‘They went into the family room in the basement and smashed the television up and wrote on the walls in red paint.’

  ‘What did they write?’

  ‘I can’t remember exactly. Lots of things. Melanie Slater you must die was one of them, and then stuff about women and babies. Bad stuff.’

&nbs
p; He looked uncomfortable. ‘Was it obscene?’ I said.

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Can you give me an example?’

  ‘Well, baby-killer, one of them said. My mother washed it all off quickly.’

  ‘She washed off paint?’

  ‘It was washable. It just went into being a pink mess, and then you couldn’t read it, so I can’t remember.’

  He’d clearly decided not to tell me any more. Perhaps he thought I’d be shocked. Perhaps, although he knew the words, he didn’t understand them.

  ‘Was there a signature of any kind? Like “The Masked Avenger” or something?’

  He laughed. ‘That’s kids’ stuff!’

  ‘But was there?’

  ‘Not that I noticed.’

  ‘Was anything taken?’

  ‘No, nothing. It was just vandals.’

  ‘The hamster was taken, of course,’ I prompted. ‘From the conservatory.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah, yeah, it was.’

  ‘When did it die?’

  ‘Bella found it around tea-time. It probably died before then, but she found it when we were clearing up from lunch. We’d had lots of people over, we usually do Sunday lunchtime. My mother does a buffet and people drop in. Mostly invited by Nigel. He’s a head-hunter, and it’s a way of introducing people without seeming to, he says, and he gets it off expenses. And some of my mother’s friends. Media people.’

  ‘How many guests did you have that day?’

  ‘Maybe thirty. I could make you a list, if you like. Why, does it matter?’

  I couldn’t press him any more without offering some explanation, so I didn’t; I did want to know one more thing. ‘No, don’t bother. Teddy, did your mother tell you why I’d come to see her?’

  He shook his head. ‘She didn’t say. It’s to do with the book, isn’t it?’

  ‘The book?’

  ‘Her latest. Coming out next month. Her usual stuff, what’s wrong with contemporary morality, back to the fifties, all that. She’s working on pre-publicity at the moment.’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ I said noncommittally. He sounded . . . contemptuous, I thought, and I wondered how much he liked his mother, despite his claim that he didn’t want to upset her. ‘Teddy, help me out on a project, would you? I’m asking everyone what they think women want. What would your answer be?’