(1998) Denial

by Peter James

  This place was a treasure trove! So much to look at.

  In one corner of the room was a writing desk on which an answering-machine winked furiously. As he went over to it, he saw a note, weighted down by a Lalique deco mermaid, written in blue ink, in a shaky hand. It said: ‘I can no longer look at myself in the mirror.’ There was no signature.

  Glenn read the words several times, and now, suddenly, it wasn’t nausea he was struggling against: it was tears. The crackle of his radio brought him back into the real world.

  ‘Charlie Hotel One-Four-Four?’

  He pressed his microphone switch. ‘Charlie Hotel One-Four-Four.’

  It was his own section sergeant. ‘Glenn, could you attend a container that’s been tampered with at Aldrington Wharf at the harbour?’

  ‘I’m at Cora Burstridge’s flat. I think I could be here a while.’

  ‘She going to show you some of her movies?’ his sergeant bantered.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Glenn replied, grimly.

  He went back into the hallway and walked along a narrow passage. The stench was getting stronger and the sound of flies more intense. The smell seemed to alter the density of the air itself, to weigh it down. Don’t breathe in, you are breathing death itself.

  He slowed his pace as he approached a door that was ajar at the end.

  He stopped outside it. The room was in darkness, but he knew she must be in there. Sliding his hand past the door frame, he found the light switch, pressed it and pushed the door wide open.

  The room filled with light from a large art-deco chandelier and matching wall sconces. Flock wallpaper. Fluffy slippers on the white carpeted floor. A solitary figure was lying in the massive bed, face turned away from him, something shiny covering her hair that he thought might be a shower cap. Flies hovered above the bed, and there were more on the curtains. Her arms lay outstretched in front of her, above the bedclothes, her hands sticking out of the sleeves of her pink satin dressing gown. Even from over here, by the door, he could see the tips of her fingers had turned mauve.

  Taking a breath, despite the appalling stench, he walked past the dressing table, with a mirror completely bordered in light bulbs, around to the other side of the bed to see her face.

  And that was when he lost it.

  It wasn’t a shower cap over her hair, it was a Waitrose grocery bag over her entire head, clamped tightly around her neck by her dressing gown sash tied, clumsily, in a bow.

  With his gloved hands he undid it and pulled up the bag to expose her face. As he did so, a cloud of bluebottles exploded around him. He stared down in numbed shock. Her mouth was open, as if in a frozen scream of agony. Most of her face was bluish black. Maggots crawled over what remained of her lips and in what was left of her eyes.

  He turned away in shock, gagging. No, Cora, no, no, no. Why did you do this? Oh, sweet Jesus, why did you have to do this?

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Later she would tell her friend, Sandy, that she had been wrong about him all these weeks, this man who always came to her checkout counter and stared at her so strangely. He wasn’t Liam Neeson at all!

  Well, it wasn’t totally improbable that he might have been. She’d had Patsy Kensit in only a fortnight ago. And Liz Hurley a few months back. And she wasn’t sure but she thought it had been Billy Connolly just before Easter. Loads of stars came in here, to Safeways in the King’s Road, but for some reason they always seemed to go to other checkouts, not to hers.

  But now she looked up and there he was, this man she was convinced was Liam Neeson (but he always paid cash so she couldn’t get his name from his credit card) was smiling at her. He was wearing a yellow polo shirt buttoned to the neck, and a brown Armani jacket.

  ‘Hello, Tracey!’ he said, as usual.

  And, as usual, she blushed. People did sometimes say her name, it was easy enough to read it off her lapel badge, but this man’s voice was something else, it was a dreamy English voice and he said Tracey in a very special way. And suddenly she couldn’t remember whether Liam Neeson was English or American.

  ‘I’m making Bahian crab soup,’ he said, and gestured to the incredibly neat line of foodstuffs that waited on the far side of the NEXT CUSTOMER PLEASE! sign. It looked like he had laid everything out using a ruler or something. ‘I’m making it for my girlfriend.’

  He liked the way she nodded at him in acknowledgement that he had a girlfriend, that he wasn’t a sad loner trying to chat her up. It felt good saying that he had a girlfriend. Suddenly he felt like a normal human being.

  ‘Have you ever had Bahian crab soup?’ he asked.

  She wrinkled her face in distaste, hitting the button to start the conveyor moving. ‘Don’t like crab very much – don’t like the way they look.’

  ‘My mother didn’t like crab either,’ he said. ‘She hated crab. She would never allow a crab in the house. Not even tinned crab.’

  ‘I don’t mind crab paste,’ Tracey said. ‘In sandwiches.’

  A large bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice arrived first at the till. She slid it past the bar-code reader, reached down and gave Thomas Lamark a fistful of plastic bags. Then she slid four avocados through, followed by a pack of English tomatoes.

  ‘English are the best,’ he said. ‘Some of the imported tomatoes get irradiated to kill the bacteria. Did you know that?’

  Tracey shook her head.

  ‘You have to be careful with radiation, Tracey. It can mess up your genes. Are you concerned about radiation?’

  She glanced upwards warily as if checking she wasn’t being irradiated by some unseen machine. ‘I like English tomatoes too,’ she said.

  Then the crabs arrived, but they were in a white plastic bag and she couldn’t see the creatures inside it. All the same, she still shuddered as she held the wet fish department’s coded label up to the bar-code scanner.

  Thomas watched the checkout girl. He felt sorry for her. And she reminded him, in her looks and perky demeanour, of his girlfriend at medical school, a nursing student. Liz. And he remembered how he had squirmed when he had brought Liz home to meet his mother, and his mother had made him realise all the things that were wrong with her.

  There was so much wrong with this poor girl. She was such a thin little thing with fluffy blonde hair and a face that was pretty but vacant, and her teeth weren’t that great, crooked and not well kept. Last week he’d noticed she’d had a ladder in her tights. The week before, the collar of her blouse had been badly frayed. ‘Did you read that Cora Burstridge died?’ he asked her.

  ‘Cora who?’

  ‘The actress. Cora Burstridge. It was in the papers this morning.’

  She shook her head blankly, and passed a carton of free-range eggs through the scanner, then she tilted her head and opened her mouth. ‘She the one who won an award, Monday?’

  ‘The BAFTA award.’

  ‘Oh, right, her. She died? Poor thing.’ She gave a little nervous laugh. ‘Not fair is it, to get an award and then die?’

  Four mangoes trundled along to the end of the conveyor.

  ‘Did you like Gloria Lamark’s films?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Gloria Lamark,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Never heard of her,’ she said.

  She continued logging the groceries in silence, then helped him to bag them. Then, to her surprise, he handed her a credit card to pay for the groceries. On it was the name Dr Terence Goel.

  While she was waiting for the slip to print out, Thomas took his coin out of his pocket and tossed it.

  ‘Heads or tails?’ he asked her.

  She looked at him in surprise, then shrugged and said, ‘Tails.’

  He palmed the coin, then checked it. It was tails. He put the coin back into his pocket. ‘You are lucky, Tracey. This is your lucky day!’

  He pulled a slim white envelope from his pocket and handed it to her. ‘I want you to have this. Put it away, open it later.’

  Surprised and embarrassed,
she took it clumsily and thrust it onto the shelf beneath the cash register. ‘Wh-what is it?’

  ‘Open it later!’

  He signed the credit-card slip, loaded his groceries back into his trolley and wheeled it along to the exit doors.

  She watched him go. No one else appeared at her checkout, so she was able to continue watching him. Terence Goel. Not Liam Neeson. What was in the envelope? He stood on the kerb with his plastic bags and hailed a taxi.

  Liam Neeson would probably have had a chauffeur, she thought.

  She glanced over her shoulder. No one was approaching or paying her any attention. As the taxi drove off, she looked at the envelope. Her name, Tracey, was handwritten on the outside.

  She opened the envelope. Inside she was shocked to find four £50 banknotes; they were folded inside an unsigned handwritten note on plain paper, which said:

  Thank you for always smiling at me so nicely, it is a great act of kindness. This is for you to buy some new things for yourself. There is not enough kindness in the world.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  From the street, number 14 Provost Avenue was nothing special – a modest detached 1930s house, with a suburban mock-Tudor façade, looking much like all the others in the quiet, suburban backwater of Barnes in south-west London, just a few hundred yards from the Thames, and only a couple of miles from Michael’s consulting room at the Sheen Park Hospital. But the conventional interior had been ripped away, and replaced with split-level flooring dividing the living area into three spaces. One, where Amanda sat now, while Michael was busy in the kitchen, had chairs arranged for talking, another had a sprawling semi-circular sofa for watching television, and the third, a steel Philippe Starck dining suite. The divide between the spaces was dominated by a mutant Swiss cheese plant that looked like it ate triffids for breakfast.

  A wonderful smell was coming from the kitchen.

  Prominently displayed on shelves was a wide range of three-dimensional puzzles. The clinically white walls were hung with modern paintings on small canvases. Intricately painted, complex abstracts, some with a nightmarish quality about them, others in brilliant blues, one in particular that reminded her of the calm beauty of a Hockney swimming-pool painting. She wondered which of the objects in this house reflected Michael’s taste and which that of his late wife.

  The puzzles were his, he had told her, but whose were the paintings? In a way, she quite liked them, they were intriguing, a mixture of contrasts, like Michael himself.

  Part of her was desperately curious to know more about Katy, yet another part sensed it was a subject best left alone. In any event, on their previous dates he had seemed reluctant to talk about her. There was some terrible sadness or guilt there, with which he still did not seem to have come to terms. A photograph of her, on the mantelpiece above a beautiful, modern open fireplace, dominated the room.

  She stood up, carried her glass of Californian Mondavi Fumé over towards it, and stared at it, a colour photograph in a silver frame, showing an attractive woman, with shoulder-length blonde hair, Ray-ban sunglasses pushed up on her forehead, sitting astride a powerful-looking red motorcycle.

  Amanda peered closely at her face. She was beautiful, but there was a coldness in that beauty, self-consciousness – almost, she thought, hardness.

  She wondered, suddenly, whether people who were doomed to die young knew it.

  Michael had had a shower only an hour ago, but already he was hot and sticky again. The kitchen, which had been spotless this morning, was now in chaos.

  HEAVEN IN A SHELL!

  The caption rose up at him from the recipe page. Beneath was printed: SKEWERED SCALLOPS WITH WARM BASIL DRESSING. The photograph of what the finished dish was supposed to look like was marred by a large stain from the balsamic vinegar Michael had spilled on the page. He had torn the sheet from the Saturday Times a few weeks back, and now it was spread in front of him on the kitchen table. Alongside, he had the ingredients. He read through them again, one final check before he committed the dish to the oven.

  He was in a minor state of panic.

  Four large fresh scallops. Olive oil. Basil leaves. Four slices of prosciutto. One garlic clove. One small tomato. Balsamic vinegar. An assortment of mixed leaves and fresh herbs. White and pink rose petals. Two wooden skewers.

  The photograph that had looked so tempting was going to be impossible to re-create. It wasn’t food, it was the Chelsea Flower Show on a plate. Not even his wooden skewers looked as good as the ones in the photograph.

  And, as ever, the most important bit from the recipe was absent. Did you cook the scallops already wrapped in the prosciutto, or did you add the prosciutto afterwards?

  He gave his mother, who was a brilliant cook, a quick, surreptitious call, keeping his voice low so Amanda couldn’t hear. She didn’t know the recipe, but suggested grilling the scallops first, then changed her mind, then changed her mind again. He wished he hadn’t decided to experiment tonight. Delia Smith’s old stalwart, grilled peppers with anchovies, would have been wiser, or gazpacho with prawns.

  Since his medical-student days, Michael had been tearing out recipes, buying the ingredients and experimenting. In the past three years he had done little cooking for himself; he had lost his enthusiasm; there had been no one else to cook for. On Saturday nights with Katy, when they hadn’t been going out, he had taken charge of the evening meal. The love of food had been something they had shared together.

  Since her death, he’d survived on canteen lunches at work, and microwaved supermarket meals at home.

  Tonight, though, he had someone to cook for again, and he had been thinking about his menu since Wednesday. He wanted this meal to be perfect. It would have been far easier to have taken Amanda to a restaurant, but he wanted to show her this side of him; he was proud of his culinary skills.

  He had been unprepared for his attack of nerves.

  He had read recently an excerpt from a paper published in the British Journal of Psychiatry on esteem. Women had a higher esteem of men who cooked, and it heightened desire in them. The old hunter-killer thing; the man as provider. Civilisation pulled skimpy camouflage netting over our primal roots.

  He grinned, wondering how Amanda would have reacted if he had greeted her at the door in a loincloth, wielding a wooden club. Then he tugged on his oven gloves and checked the Rosemary Lamb with Redcurrant Sauce. The potato and parsnip cakes, snow peas and spiced carrot purée were already in the warmer.

  Then he dived through into the living room to check on his guest.

  Amanda, standing at the fireplace, was still holding the photograph of Katy in her hand, and did not hear Michael approach. Suddenly she felt a vice-like grip on her arm, and the photograph was torn from her hand.

  ‘Don’t touch her things!’

  His voice was an icy command.

  She turned, startled.

  His face was like thunder and, for a moment, she was frightened of him. His grip was hurting her.

  Then he released her, and carefully set down the picture.

  She watched him in alarm. He turned to face her, as if shielding the photograph from her view, and gave an anguished smile, his flash of anger subsiding as fast as it had risen.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, awkwardly. ‘I –’

  ‘It’s OK.’ She swallowed, watching him uncertainly. But he was calm now, back to normal.

  He lowered his head. ‘Forgive me, I’m sorry, I just have this thing about . . .’

  ‘It’s OK, really,’ she said.

  He stared helplessly at her, and suddenly she felt sorry for him. He looked so incredibly different out of the suits in which she had always seen him before, standing now in his white PVC apron with musical notes all over it, open red shirt and blue chinos. She liked him like this, he seemed much more vulnerable.

  ‘I need to move on,’ he said. ‘But it’s so damned hard.’ He stared at the walls. ‘Sometimes I feel I’m living in a bloody mausoleum.’

  Sh
e watched his eyes dart from painting to painting. ‘I like your paintings.’

  ‘Katy’s. She painted them.’

  ‘All of these?’

  ‘All the ones in this room, yes. She called this lot in here her Brainstate collection. Maybe these were how she saw me.’

  ‘She was very talented,’ Amanda said, feeling inadequate by comparison.

  Michael was still embarrassed by his outburst. ‘Yes,’ he said flatly. ‘But she didn’t believe it. She kept insisting it was just a hobby.’

  Wanting to change the subject, Amanda said, ‘You sure there’s nothing I can do to help in the kitchen?’

  ‘Nope. All set, I’ll be with you in a tick.’ He went over to the open French windows and peered out anxiously. ‘You’re really happy to eat outside? Won’t be too cold?’

  ‘I’d love to eat outside.’

  ‘How’s your drink?’

  Amanda held up her glass, which was half full. ‘Fine, thanks.’

  ‘You know the difference between an optimist and a pessimist?’ he asked.

  ‘No?’

  ‘An optimist says his glass is half full. A pessimist says it’s half empty.’

  ‘My glass is brimming,’ she said.

  The Figaro overture was playing on the CD. Michael listened to it and a surge of emotion lifted him. Why the hell couldn’t he have just let her look at the damned photograph? He hoped to hell he hadn’t blown it. He should have moved away from here, that was the problem. And he should have taken Amanda to a restaurant. Here, there was too much of Katy all around.

  But he hadn’t wanted to sell the house. It would have been the final break with Katy and he hadn’t been ready to let go. Not until now. Not until this moment, with Amanda sitting on the sofa and the overture of The Marriage of Figaro roaring in his ears. And in his heart.

  Amanda’s hair looked freshly washed: it had a deep, silky sheen, prettier than he had ever seen it. Her face was even prettier too and he loved the clothes she was wearing: a white satin jacket over a black halter top, shiny black trousers, and high-heeled shoes that on someone less classy would have looked tarty, but on Amanda were just plain sexy.