by Clare Curzon
Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Copyright Page
Chapter One
Sunday, February 3rd, 7.33 p.m.
The small man stepped from the lift, rang the apartment’s doorbell and waited, his head close against the panels to catch any sounds of movement within.
Utter silence. No one came. Was no one left to come?
So it was real, what he saw from the road? Thought he’d seen?
It could still be illusion, his recurrent echo of childhood trauma. But that only happened when he balanced on the edge of sleep: the memory of torture, of being forced to watch while …
No. This time he’d been awake, stepping on to the kerb and looking up at the tall building he was bound for.
Who else had seen what happened? There had been no sudden panic around him, no screaming, no crowd gathering to point upwards to the penthouse window. With home-seeking traffic intent on beating the lights, and the sparse pedestrians burrowing against a sleety wind, was he the only witness?
Or was it – as he’d feared after the first transfixed instant – a re-enactment inside his own head, a half-emergence of something demonic his mind refused full memory of? And now the recurring nightmare was visiting him awake. A superstitious man, he half-believed Hell could be black-magicked on him from the other side of the world and more than half a lifetime away.
He knew again the same heart-clutching horror: gazing up at a height. And a body dropping out of the sky, turning over and over as it fell, this time silent all the way, disappearing finally from sight. Like frames of film in slow motion, while his body raced with terror. The same, but quite wrong, because this wasn’t Sulu. No craggy mountains; just urban English streets, and for tropical heat a slicing wind carrying chips of ice to sting your face.
He leaned his forehead against the door frame, compelling sanity to re-establish itself, wipe out the past.
He drew in a deep, soughing breath, counting the heartbeats loud in his throat. Sort it. Act. Control the moment. And the door he leant on clicked open.
He rang again, received no answer, then exerted soft pressure on the panels and went in. ‘Anyone here?’ he called, standing in the hall, ready, if challenged, to explain that he’d found the door ajar.
Still silence, except for the central heating clicking into action, and behind it the low humming of a fridge. Even so slight a sound set his nerves aquiver. Tensed, he moved cautiously forward.
The hall lights were on. Every door of the apartment stood open. He was free to walk through. It was the sleet-laden wind driving in from the darkened lounge that sent him in that direction. He knew then he hadn’t been deceived. Because a panel of the glass wall gaped open.
As he’d stepped off the pedestrian crossing, looking up, he had seen the old woman fall from her seventh-floor window. (But not into the street. The body would have landed somewhere behind the hangar-like building of the stationery warehouse.)
Now, all senses alerted, learnt skills took over. He ran, crouched double, into the room, again the boy insurgent trained to kill. And, instantly ice-keen, he felt the old feral passion, once second nature, sliding back over him tight as an outer skin. But today no knife in his hand.
And the room was empty.
This was wrong. The woman couldn’t, unaided, have climbed over the guard rail and balanced there ready to jump. Couldn’t, for that matter, have got out of bed alone, walked this far. Certainly her bent little claws would be useless, fumbling with the complicated lock that secured the sliding panel.
So if someone else had been here, where was he now? The other lift hadn’t passed his, going down as he came up. Which left the staircase.
He ran back and craned over the rail, scanning the perspective of six double flights dropping to the marble-tiled lobby. Nothing moved anywhere down there. No sound came but his own taut breathing.
It was impossible. Someone must still be in the apartment, if only her personal carer. Someone who’d just killed the old woman, or had helped her to kill herself.
Silently he moved back into the apartment. In the hall he reached across the table for the ebony carving of three monkeys, curling his fingers round the smoother base. Steeled for action he slid into the passage, hesitated a bare instant to draw breath, and dived through the doorway of the first bedroom.
The air burst from his lungs in an aggressive roar and he stood there, his upraised arm an empty gesture.
Again this couldn’t be. He let the carving drop as he sank on the bed’s rumpled covers to take in the scene. Long moments passed while nothing happened. There was no sound. Nobody came. No doorbell rang. It was as though, entering the building, he had stepped outside present reality.
The tension slowly easing, his whole frame began to tremble, sweat drying on his skin. He recognized, and condemned, fear as possession by a demon. Forced himself to face it down, swore explosively and then instantly was ashamed.
There was no cause for fear. He was alone, and therefore safe. Nobody knew what had happened. There was no reason for anyone to rush in and find him there. All the same, he must protect himself.
He stood, smoothed out the rumpled bedding, returned the carving to the table in the hall, then went slowly back to the opened panel in the huge observation window He leaned right out, peered all the way down; and by the inadequate lighting of the parking area could barely make out the body as a bundle of rags discarded among piled junk in the unused corner of the warehouse yard.
This window wasn’t frontal to the main road but on the building’s side, specifically designed to provide a view over the town centre towards the rolling Chiltern hills. Never meant for craning out to see what lay directly below. Such mundane commercial objects wouldn’t interest those wealthy enough to buy property commanding such a panorama, although today, veiled in mist and sleet, the Chilterns were no more than a smear of indigo. He drew his head and shoulders back in, shook off cold rain.
He removed a tissue from its box on the coffee table and covered one hand as he reached to slide the panel closed. It snapped firmly locked. The wind ceased shrieking in.
On the glass to one side was a smear of blood, part of it etched in fine lines, like a palm print. The woman had bled before she fell; reached out to save herself. Never an accident.
He wiped off the stain, took a second tissue, spat on it and rubbed at the glass until it gleamed. He stood looking at the window, the glass wall that stood between him and violent murder. He carefully put the tissues away in his pocket.
He was satisfied that nothing showed now. It was as though nothing untoward had happened. He could not be blamed.
Next he must walk away, and no one would know he had been here. Except that he’d been expected. Nurse Orme had arranged it. He must do what he had come to do.
He thought back. At the street door below he had followed a neighbour in, some woman from one of the lower apartments. She would remember if questions were asked. She had keyed in the electronic code to gain entry and held the door for him, taking him for another resident. Later it could be assumed that someone had also let him into this apartment, because he had no key Who would believe the door was left ajar?
But, being here, he must make his story fit the findings. It could be some days before the body was discovered in the walled yard below, and then why should anyone think it happened when he was anywhere near?
If later he was interrogated he had surely faced worse in the past. These people wouldn’t threaten to cut out his tongue.
He went through to the kitchen, made strong coffee and sat to drink it, hunched in thought. The next move must be deliberate choice. He could leave the body to be discovered and deny any connection, or he could remove it by night to a safer distance, leading suspicion away. For that he would need transport. And he knew where cars stood unused overnight. He sat considering his options and what he must do to ensure survival.
He didn’t know why he’d done what he did, covering up. Except from acquired wisdom. For so long he’d been wiping out traces of his own existence, the past being all bad. And what he’d just seen happen was already become a part of that badness.
He wished he had never been drawn in, because in Western society there could be no convenient ignoring of a violent act. The consequences would be a manhunt and punishment. He must be sure he wasn’t caught up in them.
Over native superstition, experience had made him a fatalist. He knew that every move in life must lead to another, links of a chain that locked you in. It had always been so with him. And now, as some earlier action drew him into this present dilemma, he was for all time involved in another man’s evil.
So where had this process started? What, and whose, was the decisive act from which this moment had become the inescapable consequence?
At the start, if he had turned down the woman’s invitation, he wouldn’t have received the nurse’s offer and he wouldn’t have come here, to be touched by this killing. Must he acknowledge that moment as the conception from which he’d been made destiny’s fool?
She had not even been attractive. He had accepted from inertia, because a few weeks without disasters had lulled him into feeling safe. He had thought to learn something from her: how to fit into this alien world.
As though he was not picked out by fate for something worse.
He remembered the little black carving in the hall and how once he’d been told of the fourth monkey. See no Evil; Hear no Evil; Speak no Evil. The last one, invisible, and which the carver never dared to represent, was Do no Evil.
Chapter Two
The previous Tuesday, January 29th, evening.
The huge window spanned the room’s width, facing north. An ideal apartment for an artist, but its owner never painted pictures, only acquired them. No sound penetrated its triple-glazing from the roadways, seven floors down. The market town, with its cobbled alleys and huddled half-timbered houses was shrouded with snow, masking irregularities, cancelling out period differences to leave a post-modernist statement of varying whiteness tinged with the orange of sodium lighting.
Only at the central island and its five mini-roundabouts was any movement discernible from up here. There, like black beetles, cars suddenly appeared, circled, spun off and were lost again in the universal pallor, leaving fine, dark tracks.
A single figure appeared on foot waiting at the nearest crossing, then hurried over. By the building’s double doors she kicked snow off her boots and keyed in the entrance code. Tonight she chose the lift because she’d picked up supplies from Sainsbury’s on her way back.
The penthouse apartment, when she reached that level, was warm and silent, its ceilings glowing faint orange from the outside light. No curtains had been drawn. All doors from the hall stood open except the one to Emily’s bedroom.
Alyson dropped her keys on the octagonal table where they clinked against the little ebony carving. She unzipped and removed her boots, then went through to the kitchen where a blue light softly flickered.
Wearing a headset, Sheena was watching television at the breakfast bench. She looked up and raised a languid hand. Her shift report, written in biro, lay between her sauce-streaked plate and a mug with coffee dregs.
She stood, reaching for her fake fur jacket. ‘I’ll be going then. Still snowing?’
‘It’s just stopped. There’s about four inches.’ Alyson dumped the two plastic carriers, switched on an overhead light and picked up the report. The little that it contained raised no questions.
‘Good programme this evening?’ An effort to find common ground.
‘Loada rubbish.’
Alyson smiled. So why watch? ‘Good,’ she decided, and switched off the screen.
The care assistant removed herself, stomping off in hiking boots. The outer door slammed and a minute later came the whine and swoosh of the lift bearing her down a further six floors to release.
Alyson opened the closed door, satisfied herself that Emily slept and returned to the kitchen. She shrugged off her sheepskin coat and began to restock the fridge and freezer: her routine switch from one life phase to another. Almost the only other. She could relax now and find herself.
She selected a handful of CDs and slid in Gymnopédie, simple and uncluttered like the huge room where she sat by the panoramic window to fork her microwaved chicken pasta. Then an old Cleo Lane blues, with Johnny Dankworth rippling in a mesh of notes like silver lace over her prune-dark wanderings. Two lovely people who belonged.
Staring out, she could see for miles, right up to the top of Winchmore Ridge over which hung cloud like a lump of potter’s unworked clay, its underside tinged with the ubiquitous diffused orange. And immediately below, crudely brighter, the sodium street lamps stared unwinkingly, double ranked, marking twists of invisible terraces of houses or shops. A single dark patch gaping beyond the floodlit college was the river, sluggishly winding down to join the Thames.
She removed her tray to the kitchen, changed the music to Elgar’s Clarinet Concerto, tuned it low, and reopened the one closed door.
‘Hello, Emily,’ she whispered. ‘I’m back.’
She was still asleep, propped on three pillows and wearing her flower face: like a white violet. Later, in deeper sleep, when her jaw dropped, she would be Munch’s The Scream.
Those weren’t her only forms. At other times she could be ethereally beautiful, parchment skin stretched over fine facial bones. Sometimes, but rarely, she would smile, if her dream was a good one. Harsher facets would flash up when she exploded into sharp protest, wailed for someone to get her out of this, called desperately for Molly, Dolly, Martin.
And just occasionally she would actually make contact: a brief pause in her slow, progressive detachment from the present world.
This is what I do, Alyson thought, watching her: I keep people alive.
But today she hadn’t. Old Albert Fennell had beaten her. It left an empty bed in ITU. Tomorrow someone new would be wheeled into his space.
She walked back to the room’s wall of glass, and looked out on the snow, pristine, antiseptic, and blue-shadowed over the distant Chiltern hills. Cars crept silently round the broad traffic island and its five mini-roundabouts. Sheathed in ice, the central trees glistened like crystal candelabra.
She would leave Emily a little longer before the disturbance of bathing, anointing, feeding. For herself, under the window’s compulsion, there was the silent night traffic, the lights, the snow. They were mesmeric beyond any television screen, or even the amazing pictures Emily had hung on her walls.
Only one tower block over-topped this stack of luxury flats above the BMW showrooms. O
n its completion the council had called a halt to cereal-box development, belatedly cherishing what was left of the snug Tudor-Georgian-Victorian town centre after post-war clearances. Beyond the long-fronted, five-storeyed college rose the hospital complex with its central block of eight floors.
Alyson looked across at its upper windows – some dimly curtained, some bright – and pictured the night shift settling to routine in the wards; the final round of thermometers and BP monitors; the volunteers’ trolleys offering last drinks of the day: tea, hot chocolate, Ovaltine, Horlicks.
Her Intensive Therapy Unit was on the far side, ground floor, close to – but discrete from – the Emergency Department. Crème de la crème, the nurses there: all, like herself, lean as whippets, highly qualified, totally dedicated. And often, when they paused to admit it, just as alone.
But she had Emily, Gran’s sister. Sometimes she thought that in Emily’s fine features she caught a glimpse of her own dead mother, known only from an old photograph. For her that likeness had been the decisive factor when the family’s solicitor sought her out to make their request. Demand perhaps, rather than request. (Who was it who said that the rich were different? How true.)
But once she’d seen Emily she knew she would accept. And the others were really no bother, never visited, seldom rang; simply provided the money; left her to manage.
Emily’s family. Her own family, though more distant. They were strangers she’d grown up never knowing.
She wheeled the commode into Emily’s room. ‘Emily,’ she said, stroking the back of one closed claw-hand. The little body was so light it took only one person to lift her, like a child. Emily came awake as she was settled on the porcelain seat. ‘Cold,’she said, and pushed Alyson away.
Sheena Judd stomped across town to the Crown Hotel. The saloon bar was crowded, noisy and brightly cheerful; welcome warmth after the outdoor chill of minus four degrees Celsius. Roseanne, busy serving, gave her a sharp nod from the far end of the counter.
The new Filipino barman turned from a couple of guys and impassively demanded, ‘Miss?’ He was short, square-headed, his dark hair razored severely close; the white tunic with its red epaulettes starched so stiff you could cut your fingers on its creases.
