I could see now. I could raise my head and look over at the armchair and the body slumped in it, bound and gagged as I was.
It was Angel.
Shockingly weak, barely able to open her eyes, but she was still alive. I could see that now.
Chris ignored us. He went straight to the row of kerosene cans, picked one up and began to pour the contents over everything in the lockup. Soon the smell of rotting vegetables was replaced with the stomach-turning reek of paraffin oil and bile rose in my throat.
“Shame,” he said, pulling a matchbook from his pocket, “probably won’t find another lockup this close to the market. Still, the insurance money’ll come in handy.” He struck the match, tossed it inside, and ducked quickly into the street before the door rumbled down again.
I wasn’t in darkness anymore. The fire enabled me to see. As the flames rippled along the floor on their kerosene trail toward Angel and me, devouring crates of fruit and vegetables as they went, I flashed on Astrid McKenzie waking up to a wall of fire around her bed, and poor Fred trapped in my summerhouse. And the more recent image of Buzz’s seared flesh.
And I realized that in all my nightly fantasizing on the kinds of violent deaths I might encounter, I had never come up with something as horrendous as this.
CHAPTER 22
I AWOKE TO FIND TOMMY LEANING OVER AND PEERING AT me as if I were a caged animal at the zoo.
I was in a hospital bed and Max Austin was sitting in a chair in the corner.
“She’s opened her eyes. She’s looking right at me. She’s going to be fine. What did I tell you? I said she’d be fine.”
“Tommy,” I said in a feeble whisper, and then I remembered the final moments in the lockup.
“Now, now, now, take it easy,” said Tommy when he saw my expression change, “you’re okay and I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. Give me your paw, that’s it, hold on tight then you’ll feel safe. I’ve brought your stuff in. Didn’t know which nightie to bring so I’ve got the blue one with the ribbon as well as the shortie pajamas you look so cute in.”
“In the middle of winter?”
Tommy laughed. “Hear that, Max? She’s about to give me a bollocking for bringing in the wrong stuff. Nothing wrong with her.”
He was right. It seemed I’d had an extremely lucky escape and there was nothing fundamentally wrong with me other than a little smoke inhalation. Poor Angel, it turned out, was not in such a good state. The flames had reached her as she sat trapped in the armchair. Her feet had sustained second-degree burns and she wouldn’t be walking very far for the next few weeks.
“We got you out just in time,” said Max. “You were lying right at the front of the lockup but she was farther back and the rope binding her feet had already caught fire. Sorry,” he said as he saw me grimace, “I’ll spare you the details.”
“But how did you find me? How on earth did you know to come to Chris’s lockup?”
“Okay, one thing at a time. First of all, how did I figure out it was Chris who’d been starting the fires?” Max pulled his chair up to my bed. After Tommy had done his fair share of fussing about over me, Max had persuaded him to go to work, assuring him that I’d be fine.
“Have you got him?” I sat up suddenly. What if he came into the hospital in the middle of the night and sloshed kerosene all over the ward?
“We’ve got him,” Max assured me. “He’s not going anywhere, don’t worry.”
“So how—?”
“You remember I was going to go back and search for the man with the limp on the CCTV, the one Chris said he saw going into your alleyway?”
I nodded.
“I kept going over and over it and I couldn’t find anybody with a limp. So then I thought I’d look for Chris and see if I could see him looking at anybody in particular near your house. I went back and found the moment he came into Blenheim Crescent from Portobello Road. That was about an hour earlier. He was coming and going on a pretty regular basis, going back to the stall to pick up more stuff, reappearing with a fresh crate. Don’t forget we can only see him at the end of the street, there’s no CCTV actually in Blenheim Crescent. The last time the camera picked him up before the fire started was at the corner of Portobello and Blenheim and I saw him put his crate down on the pavement and reach into it for something. I could see his face clearly, then he turned around and headed off toward your house and all I could see was his back view—a small figure in a hooded anorak. It was just a fleeting glimpse before the camera switched to something else.”
“The anorak, the hood—” I stared at Max.
“Exactly!” he said. “But wait—I had them blow up the footage as big as it would go and guess what he got out of his crate?”
I shook my head in exasperation. Haven’t a clue. Get on with it.
“A pair of gloves. So my next stop was Mrs. O’Malley. For someone who seemed to spend her days peeking through her net curtains, I’d come to realize she had a surprising capacity to forget the essential details. She forgot to tell us she went into the alleyway herself to call Kevin in for his dinner and—”
“She saw Chris and never told you?”
“She saw Chris and never told me. Oh, he was just going round the back to make a delivery. I didn’t think nothing of it. I remembered you said he didn’t deliver to you. She called Kevin in from your garden and left Chris there—”
“So it was Chris your witness saw running down the garden in a coat with the hood up. He described him as a small adult, not a child.”
“But the other witness who said he saw a child was right too because Kevin had been running about there a few minutes earlier—in his anorak with the hood up.”
“And the gloves?”
“Chris put the gloves on to hide his fingerprints. He was carrying what looked like a crate of veg but in fact he had a can of kerosene hidden under some cabbages. He had time to drench a rag in it and throw it in the summerhouse and run.”
“He wanted to set fire to Angel?”
“She spurned him. He chatted her up outside Tesco but she didn’t want anything to do with him. He really resented her. You have no idea how chatty he’s been with us. He’s given us the whole story. All you have to do is show him a bit of attention, make him feel he’s got an audience, and you can’t shut him up.”
I shuddered. It all seemed to fit. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Chris had needed very little encouragement to latch on to someone.
“When he learned it was Fred who had been in the summerhouse,” Max continued, “he picked his moment to go after Angel again and take her to his lockup.”
“But he asked me if I knew what had happened to her after she left my house. He was the one who told me she hadn’t been turning up to work at Tesco, told me her mother was worried sick.”
“And all the time he had her locked up. That was how he got his kicks,” said Max, “brazenly talking about the crimes he’d committed to deflect the attention away from him.”
“But what about Astrid McKenzie?”
“Same thing. He delivered to her. He told me that when I first interviewed him. His prints were all over her kitchen and front door and when he explained about the deliveries, it gave him a legitimate reason for being there. Several people confirmed she’d started having him deliver and her cleaning lady testified that he was always hanging around in her kitchen and she’d heard him asking Astrid out. Said he didn’t take it too well when she turned him down and she had to spend a little time reassuring him it wasn’t personal, that it was because she already had a boyfriend.”
“Just like I did.”
“Part of the problem was Buzz Kempinski. Chris knew about Astrid and Buzz, you and Buzz, and then Angel and Buzz. When we interviewed him it was quite clear that was what drove him over the edge. He just couldn’t stand it that you’d all give Buzz what you wouldn’t give him.”
“But where did you pick him up?”
“At his stall. After he left you a
nd Angel locked up he went to work, business as normal. Like I just said, that bravado is part of his makeup. Right after he set fire to Astrid’s mews house he told us he was hanging about in the street the next morning and he didn’t exactly make himself scarce after he set the summerhouse alight. He helped us with our inquiries, didn’t he? Told us about the man with the bad leg—”
I turned to him. “So who was that?”
“A figment of his imagination, someone he made up to put us on the wrong track—and he almost succeeded. And you know, you did have a point with Bianca. We’ve talked to her too. She went round to Astrid’s and left her fingerprints in the pink paint on the letterbox—and she went round to confront Angel in the summerhouse on New Year’s Eve. But Angel wasn’t there.”
“Why did she want to see Astrid and Angel?”
“We’re not entirely sure but she was out to destroy Buzz in some way. She set him up. She had to find some way to get to him. She put the ad for a cleaner in the newsagent’s and then waited around until he came and saw it. Bit of a long shot but it worked. He hired her having no idea she was Maria Morales’s sister. She might have wanted to warn Astrid and Angel about him, she might have hoped to enlist their help in bringing him down in some way. She did talk to Astrid but we’ll never know what about. She’s a sick woman. Selma’s going to see she gets some help.”
“But how did you know to come to the lockup? You still haven’t told me that.”
“You have Cath to thank for that. She bumped into Chris at your place recently and when she saw him with you it triggered something she hadn’t thought about in a long while. A long time ago, fifteen years maybe, when Chris was still a teenager, she saw him set fire to a warehouse.”
“She saw him! What did she do? Did she report him?”
“She did—but his mother covered up for him. Swore blind he was with her all night. And there was another problem.”
“What was that?”
“Cath was drunk that night. When she went round to the police station and reported what she’d seen she was legless. They didn’t believe her and when Mrs. Petaki gave him an alibi, the whole thing was dropped. But when she saw Chris in your kitchen something started stirring in the back of her mind. She finally put it all together in the middle of the night and she called you but of course you weren’t picking up—so she called me.”
“Oh my God!” I lay back on the pillows and shut my eyes.
“I was on to him by then in any case. The minute Mrs. O’Malley told us she’d seen him I went round to pick him up at his mother’s, which is where he still lives. He wasn’t there, of course, because he was hanging around Blenheim Crescent, waiting for the right moment to stuff another of his kerosene-soaked torches through your letterbox. So his mother directed us to go all the way out to Hounslow near the airport. She told us Chris got up at about two every morning to go out there to his wholesaler’s to buy the produce to sell at the stall. One of the joys of a produce merchant’s life. She said if we didn’t pick him up before then that’s where we’d find him. But of course we didn’t and then, as we’re racing back to London, I get the call from Cath and she—”
“Directs you to the lockup.”
“So we got back to Mrs. Petaki and demanded that she gives us the key. Just—in—time. We drove her over to the mews and she identified the lockup immediately. We opened up the door—”
“As I was about to become a roast with two veg.”
“Twenty-two veg,” he said with a faint smile, “at least.”
“If Cath hadn’t called you I’d be dead by now?”
“We’ll never know,” he said.
I knew it was going to be a long time before I stopped thinking about that.
“How’s Richie?” I asked to get my mind off the subject of how I was almost barbecued.
“Richie’s absolutely fine. He’s coming out of hospital tomorrow.”
“You don’t look too happy about it,” I remarked.
“I’m delighted about it but there’s a slight problem. Since she called me that night Cath’s gone AWOL.”
“She’s missing. Have you called the police?”
It just came out. Did he have to look at me as if I were a complete idiot? It’s what anyone would have said.
“She’s not exactly missing. She’s going to work during the day. It’s the evenings she’s not around. She’s not at home, she doesn’t answer her mobile, and the truth is I just don’t have the time to go to every bar in Notting Hill looking for her.”
“Oh,” I said, “you think that’s what’s happened?”
“I should imagine.”
“And Sonny?”
“Blazing the trail, I shouldn’t be at all surprised. According to Richie it wouldn’t be the first time.”
“But she’s pregnant!”
“Exactly. You’d think she’d be more responsible.”
“But she’s the responsible one. I’m the one who always ran wild.”
“No, you’re not,” he said simply. “Look at you. You’ve had to put up with your house being destroyed, someone getting killed in your back garden, Selma Walker and your mother turning to you for shelter, Buzz Kempinski rampaging through your house, not to mention a visit from a certain rather unpleasant market merchant. Most people would have fallen at the first fence. I’ve been keeping a watch on you and I have to tell you, I’m impressed. You were even beginning to come up with a few mildly helpful comments on the detection front. Just as well Richie’s on his way back to join the world. Few more weeks and he might have found he’d been replaced in his job.”
I thought mildly helpful was a bit patronizing but I let it go.
“And I had to help you with your laundry.”
He actually blushed.
“So you did. And thank you. Anyway, now you know the whole story. You’re going to be out of here in no time. I’ll look out for your book when it comes out. Maybe you’ll even decide I deserve an early copy—a what do you call them? A proof?”
He was saying good-bye. He was signing off. As he stood up, I realized with a jolt that this would probably be the last time I would see him. He had no reason to keep in contact with me now.
“You know,” he said as he went to the door, “about the washing. I’ve got a handy tip for you. When I do the ironing, I find one of those plant mister things are perfect for spraying the clothes for when you want to steam them.”
“Why don’t you just get a steam iron?” I asked him.
“I have. I’ve got one.”
“Well then, you don’t need a spray. Just fill the iron up with water, press the button with a little picture of steam on it, and Bob’s your uncle.”
“Really?” He sounded amazed. “Well thanks,” he said perfectly seriously, “thank you for that.” And he was gone before I could say anything else.
A piece of paper had fallen out of one of his pockets and I leaned out of bed to pick it up.
1 lb. mince for shepherd’s pie. Lamb best.
Half pound carrots
Small frozen peas
Half pint milk
Harpic
It was a sad little list, the pathetic sign of someone shopping for one. Not so long ago, I reflected, that had been me but was I going to go back to that? That was what I had to decide.
I didn’t have to make any immediate decisions for myself, it seemed, because my mother had all the answers. She came rushing in to see me about half an hour after Max had left and within ten minutes of arriving she was pulling the curtain around my bed and breaking down into loud howling sobs.
“You have got to be okay,” she said, grasping my hand lying on the bed. “I need you, Lee.”
This didn’t make any sense. I was the one recovering in hospital but she needed me?
“Is it something to do with Dad?” I asked nervously. “Has he upset you again?”
“Oh, God, no,” she said dismissively. “The minute I saw him I knew I was—what do you say these days? Over
him? The irony was that he wanted me to go back to him. That was what the lunch was supposed to be all about. Seems like Josiane is proving to be rather too demanding already and he doesn’t think he’s going to be able to cope. Well, tough!” She squeezed my hand for emphasis and I yelped in pain. “No, darling,” she carried on, “I need you to come home soon because I’ve come to depend on you. I find the thought of you not being around completely terrifying. I need you to hold my hand.”
She gave one of her inane giggles that was meant to signify Oh, look at me, what a silly billy I’m being.
“Oh, Mum,” I said, suddenly feeling more weary than ever, “what about Dad? Where’s he going to go?” I felt bad for my father. I’d been so preoccupied with having my mother living with me that I’d barely given him a thought. Nor did I want to dwell on what my mother’s reaction would be when I eventually made contact with him.
“Where’s he going to go?” She seemed bewildered by my question. “Where he’s already gone,” she said very matter-of-factly, “back to France. And while I remember, he wants you to call him. He’s hoping you’ll go over there and stay with him soon.”
I expected her to scoff at the idea but she surprised me.
“You know, you should go, Lee. Take Tommy. Ed may not be part of my life anymore but he is your father. Go and see him, will you? Promise me that.”
I nodded. I was touched by her apparent lack of animosity toward my father.
“But what about you? Where will you live?” Even as I asked her the question, I had a sinking feeling I knew what the answer would be.
“Well, I’ll stay here with you, of course. I’ve seen Selma and she says we can stay with her in Elgin Crescent until we can get back into the house. I’m not going to move in there until you’re out of hospital, I wouldn’t feel comfortable, but you have to admit, it’s the perfect solution. She needs someone with her and we’ll be right around the corner from Blenheim Crescent. I’ll be able to oversee the building work but believe me, it’s going to take some time to make the place habitable again. It’s great, isn’t it?”
How to Seduce a Ghost Page 35
