by Judy Astley
‘What? You weren’t supposed . . .’ Cherry, who was dealing with the kettle and had her back to the creature, turned, looking flustered.
‘Ssh! You’ll scare it out!’ Mel whispered. The squirrel hadn’t moved, literally frightened rigid, she assumed.
‘Er . . . you weren’t supposed to come in here.’ Cherry banged the kettle down on the worktop (the precious pale green granite one that had taken six weeks to deliver).
The squirrel still hadn’t moved. Mel crept nearer. On the drawing pad in front of the creature its portrait was half-completed, every minute variation in fur colour and texture faithfully copied, the tiny curved claws immaculately duplicated on the page. ‘Hell’s teeth, Cherry, it’s a stuffed one!’ she shrieked, having put out a tentative finger and touched its cold stiff paw.
‘Mmm. Not exactly.’ Cherry was looking furtive. ‘It’s not quite stuffed, not unless you count the coat hanger. I didn’t want you to know about this – no-one’s supposed to see.’
‘See what? That you’ve got a dead squirrel in to paint? What’s wrong with that?’ Mel assumed she’d found it in a junk shop. There was something else she’d seen, though. ‘Er, what’s the thing with the coat hanger?’
‘Well, it wouldn’t sit up, even though it’s crammed with formaldehyde – there’s hardly an inch I haven’t injected. So it’s got a wire hanger up its bum.’ Cherry clattered around with the coffee equipment, refusing to meet Melanie’s eyes.
Mel laughed, sounding slightly manic. This all sounded like the sort of ghastly torture that she’d invent for one of Tina Keen’s more gruesome dead victims.
‘Injected?’ she queried. ‘You injected it?’
‘I bought a big bottle of the stuff a couple of years back, and I get diabetic syringes. I get through a lot of needles, coming up against bones.’
‘Yeah, well you would . . . But where did you get the squirrel?’ Mel asked, imagining a bizarre Bloomsbury shop that supplied artists’ models of any species on demand.
‘It was by the A3, quite close to the Asda at Roehampton,’ Cherry admitted shamefacedly. ‘And don’t you dare tell anyone, especially Sarah. I’d never hear the last.’
‘Roadkill. Hmm.’ Mel accepted the mug of coffee Cherry handed her, but wondered about its chemical content. Wasn’t formaldehyde hugely poisonous? Cherry’s hands were still all painty. And she might have handled the squirrel, bending it and shoving it into position. She decided she could do without the cake.
‘How else do you think I draw these creatures so accurately?’ Cherry was defensive now. ‘Did you think I copied them from a book?’
‘I suppose that was exactly what I did think, if I thought at all,’ Mel admitted. ‘What else have you got?’
Cherry looked a bit shifty. ‘Actually, I’ve got a lovely badger, in perfect nick, not a mark on it. I put it in a bag in the freezer but a fuse went while I was out and I’m going to have to chuck him out. Unless . . .’
‘In the freezer? Next to your prawns and peas and pizzas?’
‘Look, when you live by yourself you can do exactly what you like! I haven’t got anyone here who gives a flying toss whether I’ve got a freezer full of caviare or carrion, so what does it matter? Anyway he’s in a bag.’
‘Oh.’ Mel looked at Cherry, who was smiling at her in a horribly hopeful sort of way. ‘Cherry, what did you mean by “unless”?’
‘Well, I just wondered, seeing as no-one’s going to be poking about in your freezer either, if you might just take him home and find a bit of room for him in yours. Please? Just till I’ve defrosted and got mine going again?’
Mel pulled a face. ‘Ugh, Chezza, but it’s a dead animal!’
‘So’s a leg of lamb.’
‘A leg of lamb doesn’t come with fur and eyes and teeth.’
‘You don’t have to look at him, oh please, Mel, I’ll never get another one as good as this.’
Mel wavered. Cherry looked almost mad with eagerness. She could swear even the rather cloudy eyes of the squirrel on the table were staring at her, willing her to say yes.
‘And no-one need ever know,’ Cherry went on.
‘OK, but only for a couple of days, right?’ Mel reluctantly agreed. The thing would have to come home in the car with her. She hoped it had been thoroughly disinfected. Suppose it had fleas?
Recklessly she went on, because somehow she couldn’t stop herself, ‘And you don’t tell people that last night in the old school sickroom I had sex with my old geography teacher on top of a lot of abandoned school reports, OK?’
‘Oh Mel, you didn’t!’ It was Cherry’s turn to look satisfyingly horrified.
‘I did. Because that’s another of those things that we single folks can get away with. I really wanted to try free-range sex as opposed to the battery variety that coupley-types have.’
‘You don’t mean that, Mel, you’re not really that hard.’
‘I do and I am – well, I thought I was. Actually it was a bit of an experiment, to tell the truth, and I don’t think it’s something I’ll be going in for. But at least now I know that, rather than wondering. Don’t mention it to Sarah if you happen to run into her, OK? Or my mother. Now I’m divorced I think she considers I’ve been granted my virginity back again.’
‘But why? I mean why did you do it?’
Melanie shrugged. ‘Well, we just sort of started off and kind of carried on because it was all going pretty fine and before we knew it, we . . . er . . . He had a funny look on his face.’
‘God, Mel, do I need to know this?’
‘Probably not. It was as if he couldn’t quite believe what was happening and half-expected me to call a halt any second. I must have looked exactly the same. There were people just the other side of the door – that gave it an edge.’
Cherry was, as predicted, looking disappointed. ‘So you’ll be seeing him again?’
‘Possibly. I don’t know. Only as a friend if I do. He’s got my number but I’m not going into a state of teenage heartbreak waiting for a call. I’m not looking for a relationship.’
Cherry shuddered. ‘No. Absolutely not. We’re far better off without all that. You and I must go out together somewhere soon, just the two of us. I’ve had a couple of private view invitations that look interesting.’
‘OK, that’ll be great. Call me, let me know when.’ Mel sensed that Cherry was hauling her back into line, pointing her towards a far more suitable occupation for the untethered woman than a crazed session of spontaneous sex. Obviously there was a set of behaviour rules for Cherry’s type of man-free singledom that she hadn’t yet read. She was pretty sure she didn’t want to.
Melanie drove home with Cherry’s badger in the car boot, all wrapped up for decency’s sake in a large Harrods bag. She prayed as she drove that it wouldn’t turn out to be the day there’d been a massive bank robbery in the area and the police had set up road blocks to search every car for ill-gotten loot. On the other hand, it could be quite fun . . .
Seven
Gwen Thomas packed just enough for three or four days. That should be long enough to give Howard the fright of his life and make him realize she meant business. She wasn’t going to share her husband with a bunch of lewd and naked women, even if they did only exist between the glossy pages of a magazine. It was them or her – and frankly it shouldn’t be much of a contest. Howard would come to his senses fast enough: these paper women weren’t going to pop round and cook him a proper shepherd’s pie.
He hadn’t even had the grace to look embarrassed. Not so much as a hint of an apology or a stumbling explanation or excuse. He’d just brazened it out and had a go at her for snooping under the mattress. How exactly, she’d like to know, could going about your usual household duties be snooping?
‘Can’t a man have a bit of privacy?’ he’d demanded, grabbing the magazine from her hands and storming out to the garden shed. He probably had a huge collection of the filthy things out there. They could be stacked high, the pages going cl
ammy in the damp air, hidden under last year’s growbags. She’d have to tell Melanie the entire shaming truth now, because Melanie would never believe Gwen would walk out over Howard drinking a couple of pints on a daily basis. She didn’t want Vanessa to know though, definitely not. Melanie had a lot more experience of the real world and she did write very peculiar books, so her imagined world experience was much broader than most people’s, too.
Vanessa lived a dolls’ house existence, every day the same, all her family neat, good and perfectly behaved. She had a proper, tidy husband (though hadn’t Howard been like that for most of his life? Hadn’t her own life been a dolls’ house one?), with unquestioning regular habits, who took himself off out of the way, as men should, at eight each morning and didn’t come home till after six. And the children gave no trouble at all. They had excellent school reports, shown to her dutifully at the end of each July. Though she had noticed you never got a peep out of Theresa and William, not unless you asked them something direct like how’s school, and even then they’d just smile as if it almost hurt and say ‘Fine, Gran,’ nothing extra volunteered. Blood from stones. You didn’t know what they liked or who their friends were; they didn’t babble on about some unseen Gracie or Holly the way Rosa always had. It would be quiet at Melanie’s without Rosa, but it would give her a chance to think.
She could hear a car on the gravel outside – her minicab had arrived. She checked her purse – she wasn’t used to being a taxi passenger and didn’t want to fumble around in search of the right amount. As she heard the driver’s steps approaching the front door she took a final look around her kitchen. The pink rubber gloves were on the draining board, lying folded together like a pair of sad empty hands. She hoped Howard would notice and think them poignant. Somehow she doubted it.
Mel was making Tina Keen feel queasy in the mortuary. It was the smell that got to the hard-bitten detective every time – the formaldehyde, the disinfectant, all the chemical aromas that didn’t quite cover the creeping process of slow decomposition. It didn’t matter how perfectly chilled the staff kept the corpses, Tina’s nose, that could expertly identify Calvin Klein’s Escape in a party-full of scented women, always picked up the tiniest underlying hint of rot. Mel’s visit to Cherry’s kitchen had been a useful reminder of the way the acrid scent permeated the air and made your eyes watery. It caught in the back of your throat in a way that made you long for fresh clean air to choke out the stench. It couldn’t be doing Cherry’s lungs any good.
Melanie stopped typing and went to look out of the window. Writing this section of the book, she was even making herself feel a bit sick. The mutilated young prostitute who had been discovered beneath the café stairs had over twenty stab wounds. Blood would have spurted all over the killer, so she had to find some way of getting him (or her?) off the street and well away without being seen. The killer had planned this, it wasn’t a random act, so he’d have been wearing something over his clothes, something that could be taken off quickly, rolled up and shoved into a bag to be burned or dropped into a bin later; a boiler suit, maybe, or some kind of overalls – possibly even the kind of apron a mortuary attendant might wear. Now that was a thought . . .
Down in the garden she could see Max looking bad-tempered. The York stone slabs were bigger and heavier than he’d expected – he’d ordered an old imperial size that no longer existed and the nursery had delivered the closest metric equivalent. He and his reluctant work-experience teenage assistant were arranging the slabs in a rectangular path, trying to keep an even distance from the boundary fence and doing it by guesswork. From the window, Mel could see that the front and back sections weren’t parallel. She’d have to go down and say something, or every time she looked at the finished garden from her study window the asymmetry would irritate her. Why hadn’t they set out stakes with string guidelines and why did she have to be the one who thought of that? Still, Max was a useful and friendly man to have around the place – he’d seen off Roger, for one thing. It had made her smile, Max’s description of Roger’s proprietorial rage at the devastation of the garden. ‘I thought he was going to hit me,’ Max had told her over a mug of tea. ‘I couldn’t tell which he thought was the worst thing: the idea that I’d ravished his garden or that I might also have ravished his ex-wife.’
‘Either way, it was none of his business,’ Mel had laughed.
‘Quite right. I think he realized that was exactly my opinion when I congratulated him on his nice new marriage-and-baby package.’
The doorbell rang when Mel was halfway down the stairs. She waited for a few moments, hoping it wouldn’t be Roger back again. What had he wanted the other day? Surely he hadn’t brought round his honeymoon photos to show her? The blurry outline of the head through the door’s frosted window was someone smaller than Roger. It was someone fidgety, she could see, someone female. She hoped whoever it was wouldn’t want to stay long – Tina Keen needed to be rescued from her nausea and moved back into her office where she could start shouting at one of her inefficient underlings, the one who’d stupidly rinsed the murder weapon under the café’s hot water tap.
‘Mum! Nice to see you, come in. Were you shopping?’ Melanie indicated the bag her mother was hauling along behind her.
‘This isn’t shopping. It’s a suitcase,’ Gwen declared glumly, marching in past her daughter, quite effortlessly tugging the case over the step as if she was leading in an obedient dog.
It still didn’t occur to Mel that anything was wrong. She simply assumed the case was empty – her mother often brought capacious bags round to the house in search of jumble for the Townswomen’s Guild’s fundraising efforts at the Scout Hut.
Gwen didn’t stop till she’d dragged her burden into the kitchen and deposited it securely beneath the table, as if, left anywhere closer to the front door, it would somehow escape back to home and Howard.
‘I’ve left him!’ she announced loudly, removing her coat, flinging it over the back of the woven chair with the chipped pink paint and sitting down firmly.
‘What, Dad? Left him where?’ Mel assumed he was somewhere in the area, possibly in the bank at the end of the road – or in the pub indulging in his new pastime.
‘I’ve left him, Melanie,’ her mother went on. ‘I can’t live with him any more.’
She burrowed into the case. ‘I found this.’ The magazine was wrapped in a Sainsbury’s bag, but even this Gwen held at arm’s length, as if in fear of contamination. ‘It was under the mattress on his side of the bed.’
Mel flicked through the copy of Mayfair while her mother averted her gaze and caught sight of the pillaged garden.
‘What have you gone and done out there? It looks like a bombsite. Your dad will be . . . Oh, what do I care what he’ll be?’ Gwen sniffed and turned away from the window, waiting for a reaction from her daughter.
‘I really don’t know what to say,’ Mel admitted. ‘Are you sure it’s . . .’
‘Who else’s would it be?’ Gwen scoffed. ‘There’s only him and me slept in that bed for the past forty-eight years. I was quite looking forward to our golden wedding. I’d been planning. It was between a function-room buffet at the Watermill or lunch at the Grange Hotel. They’ve a lovely conservatory. Oh well.’
She was slumped in her chair now, looking more defeated than Mel had ever seen her.
‘I expect he was just feeling . . .’ What could he be feeling? The word ‘himself’ came to mind, but would not be appreciated. Mel searched her mental thesaurus for something more appropriate. ‘His age,’ she came up with, lamely.
‘We’re all feeling our age,’ Gwen snapped. ‘We don’t all want to hark back and make fools of ourselves in the process.’
Mel shoved the magazine into the bin and sat down next to her mother. ‘You could have just ignored it,’ she suggested. ‘I mean, what he reads doesn’t really matter that much, does it?’
‘I don’t think reading comes into it. It’s just so disgusting, so degrading,’ Gwen insist
ed. ‘I’m not having it in the house.’
In spite of trying to be soothing and sensible, Mel was actually close to feeling as shocked as her mother. Her own father? Getting off on soft porn? There was so much about people that you simply couldn’t know. She hoped her father would never know that Gwen had come running to her with all this. He might be able to brazen out his new (if it was new) hobby with his wife, but having your daughter knowing your sexual secrets was something else.
‘You’ll have to go and talk to him, Mel. Tell him . . .’
‘No!’ Mel’s hands went up in instinctive defence. ‘No really, Mum, this is definitely just between the two of you. Perhaps you should go home, not yet but later this afternoon, and try and talk to him. Calmly, with a little sympathy if you possibly can. He’s probably just trying to recapture a bit of what he felt like when he was younger. I’m sure there’s no real harm in it. There must be millions of men . . . well there are, aren’t there, or there’d be no market for the magazines. I bet you finding this one has really shaken him.’
Gwen sat tight, her pale lips thin and rigid. ‘I’m not going anywhere. If he wants me home again, he can come looking for me. I’m not crawling back, not till I’ve sorted out what I think. He won’t even have noticed I’ve gone yet, not till his lunch isn’t on the table.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Just gone half past ten. He’ll be on his way down to the pub by now, getting him and the dog sozzled, as per.’ She stood up, heaving herself out of the chair as if the effort had become almost too much. ‘I’ll go up and unpack. I don’t suppose your spare bed’s made up, so just tell me which sheets and I’ll do it myself. You get on with whatever you were doing, I won’t be in your way. You won’t notice I’m here.’
So that would be all right then.
Rosa wasn’t sure if Desi was the best one from the flat to have taken with her to Sainsbury’s, but all the others were out. Two of them had even gone to lectures. On the plus side, Desi was the only one in the flat with a car that could be relied on to get them both there and back, but on the downside, it seemed that a visit to Sainsbury’s was as thrillingly novel to him as a seven-year-old’s first-time trip to Disneyworld. He would be worse than useless and would be no good for anything but steering the trolley into old ladies’ legs.
