Fearful Symmetry

by Morag Joss

  At the dead girl’s house, number 31, a constable ushered him down to the basement kitchen. The two tenants were sitting unkempt, almost as if they had slept rough, rather fearfully drinking coffee. Not tenants but houseguests, they corrected him. The man, Cosmo Lamb, had been asleep. He usually did not rise until around half past ten, because he was in the habit of working long into the night. He had not heard the explosion. Poppy Thwaites had come in from her night shift at the Circus Nursing Home at seven thirty and got into bed beside him. She too had been fast asleep, but she was a lighter sleeper than Cosmo; the noise had woken her up. She had not gone to investigate because their bedroom was at the back, on the first floor. Helene’s—Mrs Giraldi’s—bedroom was at the front of the house overlooking the Circus, so she would have had to go in there to see what the noise was about, and so disturb Helene. Thinking it was probably nothing anyway, perhaps a car backfiring, she had drifted back off to sleep until screams from the street had woken them. They had got dressed quickly and rushed down. Helene had been in front of them, running towards Jim’s flat. The gas people and the police had kept them all away, so they had brought Helene back here, and the policewoman had taken over. Poppy was so worried. Helene would need her. Poppy was here. If DS Bridger was going up to see her now, could he give Mrs Giraldi that reassurance? They would not dream of deserting her at a time like this.

  The mother, Mrs Giraldi, was sitting passively with the WPO as if in a waiting room, as if she thought that if she just waited long enough someone would come and tell her what to do. Meanwhile, perhaps if she were patient and waited quietly, and even answered questions, eventually all this would turn out to be not really happening. She appeared to be concentrating hard on the task of just breathing in and out.

  Bridger decided to get it over with, for both their sakes. She was lucid. Yes, she had been startled by the explosion, but being in her dressing-gown and this being the Circus, she had not ventured straight out to investigate. Her first thought was that Adele, who had just left, would have heard it too and be frightened and come straight back home. Adele was not able to tolerate unexpected things; she could react violently. Bridger was impressed at the way she managed to say her daughter’s name almost without faltering. That was where a lot of them would have started to crack up. The noise, she went on, must have been an engine backfiring or something of that sort, she had assumed. So she had come up from the basement kitchen, expecting at any moment to greet Adele in the hall, who would have come straight back rather than continuing on her way to work. She had gone into the drawing room to look out for her and had seen several people running past her window. Then she had gone upstairs and thrown on some clothes—not quite enough, Bridger had been unable to stop himself thinking, taking in her bare legs in court shoes, the wobbling flesh under the jumper and skirt—and rushed down to the pavement, seeing only then that whatever had happened had happened at Jim’s. She thought perhaps that it was then she had screamed.

  ‘Excuse me, Mrs Giraldi,’ Bridger interrupted. ‘Please excuse me. Did I hear you say that you expected your daughter to come straight home instead of going on to work?’

  Mrs Giraldi nodded, a little surprised. ‘Yes. She works three days a week. For Jim in the workshop.’

  Bridger cleared his throat. ‘In that case, Mrs Giraldi, we shall want to speak to Mr Roscoe as a matter of urgency. Of course we’ll need to see him in any case, but you see, if we’re dealing here with a workplace accident, then that puts quite a different complexion on it. Quite a different matter, you see, in law.’

  He might have been speaking in tongues for all this seemed to mean to Mrs Giraldi. She had already told the WPO that Jim had told her that he would be leaving the night before to go to an auction in Salisbury. He had done it before. He simply left two days’ work out for Adele and it made no difference to Adele; she didn’t much bother with people anyway. It had not been difficult to identify the auction house and local officers were apparently being sent round to find Mr Roscoe and break it to him that he no longer had either the workshop or the assistant he had had when he left home the day before. So Jim Roscoe would in any case be on his way back now.

  Helene was struggling with the sense of what she had been told. ‘Well, I’m not sure. Whatever it is, look, I’m not really following, I’m afraid. Jim wasn’t even there when it happened. But you’ll be able to talk to him when he gets here.’ She looked at the WPO, suddenly tremulous and old. ‘Jim . . . Jim will . . . he is sure to be here soon, isn’t he? He is one of those people . . . since he came here, I mean . . . one feels one has always . . . Jim . . . he—he’ll be so . . . he is sure to be here soon, isn’t he?’

  Time to go. She was losing it now, and having delayed her proper reaction since the accident happened, over two hours now, her collapse would be total and prolonged. Bridger, supposing he was getting soft in his old age, felt a reluctance to leave with his sympathy unsaid. He stood up, pausing after the WPO had reached the door. An exchange of looks confirmed that she knew her next task was to go back to the basement and get the tenant to call a doctor. This one would need sedation. He turned back to Mrs Giraldi. If he was quick, he could get it in before she lost control completely, although he still was not sure why he was feeling he had to.

  ‘Death was almost certainly instantaneous,’ he told her. It was one of the phrases he knew how to use. She nodded.

  ‘It would have been very quick.’ He cast a hopeless look round the room. He had to say these things, hadn’t he? He remembered the last time he had done so. The near naked body of a chronic alcoholic had been found in her burned-out bedroom. It had turned out not to be arson. She’d started the fire herself by dropping a cigarette on the duvet and then passing out. Presumably the sensation of her own skin burning had woken her up. But the body had been found curled up half in and half out of the wardrobe. The PM showed that she had a sufficient quantity of whisky in her to mistake the wardrobe for the bedroom door, but too much to work out why it might be leading her into a cave hung with suffocating cloth instead of out onto the landing and into air she could breathe. It would have been very quick, he had reassured the family, keeping to himself not only the precise location of the body but also the fact that under her torn fingernails they had found splinters clawed from the inside of the wardrobe. She wouldn’t have known a thing about it. He had to say these things.

  Mrs Giraldi was looking at him. ‘She wouldn’t have known a thing about it,’ he told her. As he left, he had the sensation of leaving behind something so frail that it would collapse into fragments in the draught of the closing door.

  CHAPTER 20

  ANDREW’S GP TURNED out not to believe in miracle cures.

  ‘But look, I’m practically mobile. And pain-free, well, almost. It’s two days since the acupuncture. I’ve had acupuncture for it.’

  ‘Yes, I know, you said,’ the doctor replied.

  ‘But I’ve got to get back to work. You just have to declare me physically fit. Please. I promise I’ll be careful.’

  ‘Physically fit? Sorry, no can do. Could you chase a suspect? Make a difficult arrest?’

  ‘Well, no, but I hardly ever have to.’ Andrew knew the argument was lost.

  ‘Give it until next week. There’s been substantial tissue damage and it needs time. Be as active as you can without being silly. All right?’

  Actually he was getting on quite fast at home, even managing to keep up the momentum, such as it was, in the Bevan enquiry. But they were so desperate for a lead now that they were chasing up and interviewing people with the most tenuous of connections to the dead woman. One of the last things he had done before his back went was to interview the deputy editor of a national newspaper who had a weekend flat in Camden Crescent. Yes, he had admitted, he brought his aged cat with him from London for the weekend although the lease forbade it. ‘He’s an old cat. He can’t be left in London all on his own.’ How had he felt, Andrew asked, when Miss Bevan had written to the Residents’ Assoc
iation about it? The silver-haired man had turned on him a look of such friendly intelligence that he had hardly needed to go on to say that he wished he did have the time to get worked up about a petty complaint from a provincial harridan whom he had never, to his knowledge, actually met. ‘But next time I bring Andreas, I’ll be sure to take his collar off before I let him out. Thanks for the tip-off,’ he said, winking. As he left he had given Andrew a pitying look, which conveyed that he understood that Andrew was scraping the bottom of the barrel in the hope of progress.

  Part of him was in no hurry to get back to work and confront the Giraldi case, about which he was being kept informed. He had already extricated himself from the front line of the investigation on the grounds that he was too close to those involved, but it was still painful to know that Jim might find himself up on a manslaughter charge. The enquiry was only just starting and it would be some months down the line, if he knew anything about the speed of progress within the CPS, but it was bad enough. Adele’s death was in one sense a tragic accident, but if a case could be made that Jim as an employer had failed to maintain a safe workplace then that case would have to be answered.

  It was Friday now; by this afternoon it would be forty-eight hours since he had seen Sara. Yesterday she had not answered his call. He had wanted to tell her himself about Adele, but more than that he had simply wanted, since he could not see her, to hear her voice.

  PLAYING CELLO to Herve’s percussion had begun to feel to Sara like a habitual row between two people who, having abandoned long ago any thought of winning the argument, carry on squabbling all the same. Only occasionally did she catch glimpses of the Herve she had first found attractive and it was only those slight smiles or the sight of his face in repose that kept her faith. Where the music itself was concerned she was braver about expressing her opinions. This seemed to be having no effect whatsoever on how the work was shaping up, she was beginning to realise, as she persevered to manifest meaning out of the new sketches and notions that Herve continued to deliver.

  After bunking off on Wednesday she had intended to work especially hard on Thursday, partly to convince herself that her enthusiasm had been renewed after her little break, but mainly to dislodge thoughts of Andrew. It had not helped that she had had to confess to losing two sheets of music, but Herve had been surprisingly sanguine about it and had simply written the notes out for her again and handed the sheets to her at the end of their rehearsal. For the rest of the day back at Medlar Cottage she sulked over the music, defying it to say something to her. She switched off her answering machine, let the phone ring and went to bed early and depressed.

  By Friday morning she woke up acknowledging two things: failure—nothing in Herve’s music could renew enthusiasm that had never been there in the first place, and a craven need for Andrew—the sound of his voice, the sight and the feel of him. She got through the morning’s rehearsal by focusing on the coming afternoon when the first of her agonies, Herve and his music, would be over for another week. For the Andrew problem she had no solution and felt the bleakness of the coming weekend, the forlornest time of all for women in love with married men. At one o’clock she drew her bow for the last time over the bottom string with the depressing creaking noise that Herve wanted. It would have been the moment, working with any other partner, to suggest a friendly bite of lunch together somewhere, but from Herve she had no desire for anything but escape. Leaving him brooding over the prospect of solitary tinned soup, she walked down Lansdown into town. At the crossroads where Lansdown and Broad Street met the Paragon and George Street, her miserable self-absorption was suddenly obliterated by the street vendor’s board carrying the Bath Chronicle headline.

  ‘I’M AFRAID it is true. I tried to ring you yesterday. How did you hear?’

  ‘I saw it on a billboard. I had to find out from the bloody paper, Andrew! You should’ve told me.’

  Andrew was taking Sara’s distraught call from his small music room, where the desk opposite the piano had been cleared temporarily of its usual covering of cello music to make way for police files.

  ‘You should’ve answered your phone. I did try. Look, Sara, I’d like to tell you more. And I’ve got to see you. You go back home now and I’ll come straight over.’

  SARA OPENED the door to Andrew and was immediately enveloped in his arms.

  ‘Accident. Horrible, I know, but what else could it be?’ he said.

  Sara shook her head. She couldn’t see what, but the arbitrary pointlessness of it was just unacceptable. She led him to the kitchen and began to put an unwanted lunch together, attempting to disguise the odd combination of grief and half-crazed lust under a veneer of domestic competence. She remembered a time, months ago, when she and Andrew had sat here and watched each other’s mouths pulling and nibbling on the translucent shells and soft pink flesh of langoustines, and she wanted to scream. Instead, she took several deep breaths and tried to concentrate on slicing the bread straight, wishing that Andrew would stop looking at her as if he were thinking about the langoustines, too.

  ‘Leaking gas, followed by a match,’ he was saying. ‘After the blast, a fire started. Looks like she was lighting a cigarette. Do you really want to hear all this?’

  Her eyes were filling with tears. She didn’t want to hear it. Nor would her mind accept the hideous coincidence, as the Bath Chronicle had reported it, of Jim’s being away on the very day of a fatal gas leak. Usually he got Adele started on her work in the workshop himself before going to the shop. Ordinarily he would have been there and it would never have happened. She shook her head again.

  ‘Sorry. It’s messy, horrible,’ Andrew said. He guided her to a stool at the kitchen table and sat down opposite.

  ‘Poor, poor Adele. All because of a cigarette. I wonder she didn’t smell the gas.’

  ‘I gather it might not have made any difference. I’m getting the picture that autism might involve difficulty in processing sensory information. Even if the autistic person is aware of something like a smell, they may not process it as information that implies something else: danger from a naked flame, in this case. The significance of the smell wouldn’t be understood, so it wouldn’t affect Adele’s behaviour. She went through the same routine every morning at the workshop, according to Jim. Shut the door, checked the work on the table, then washed the coffee mug, put the coffee in, lit the ciggie, filled the kettle, switched it on, when it boiled made the coffee. Only yesterday, we know what happened when she lit the match. I don’t know whether it’s hard to understand, or horribly easy.’

  ‘What about the gas leak? How could the workshop suddenly become so dangerous? She was working there the day before, wasn’t she?’

  ‘That’s the truly awful part. There was no leak, nothing faulty. It was some old gas cooker Jim’s got down there. You know how Adele fiddles with switches and dials? Jim said she’d never shown the slightest interest in the cooker, so he’d never thought of it as a danger. She’d obviously turned one of the dials on the afternoon before, the very afternoon Jim wasn’t there. Gas leaked into the room all night.’

  ‘Obviously?’

  ‘Nobody else was in the workshop that day, only Adele. Jim was in his shop until five and he went straight on from there to Salisbury for an auction the next day. And what’s even unluckier is that if Adele had left more than one dial switched on, there wouldn’t have been an explosion.’

  Seeing Sara’s mystified face, he went on, ‘The cooker was taken away for examination. It wasn’t faulty, so that’s in Jim’s favour at least. They discovered that just one tap had been left open. The dials were so damaged it was impossible to tell from the front. Gas only explodes when it’s mixed in a proportion with air of between five and nine percent. Less than that and there isn’t enough gas, any more and there isn’t enough oxygen for combustion. The gas burners were standard, that’s to say they emitted gas at a rate of 11.6 cubic feet of gas per hour.’

  ‘So the volume of the room has to be—I suppose
you know that?’

  ‘Of course. It’s—wait, I’ve got it written down.’ Andrew pulled from an inside pocket a much scribbled-on piece of paper and unfolded it onto the table.

  ‘Twelve by fifteen by seven. Feet, that is. That makes a total volume of 1,260 cubic feet, so there had to be between 63 and 113 cubic feet of gas. Given that, she could only have left the burner half on, emitting, say, about 5.75 cubic feet of gas per hour. It would take between about eleven and twenty hours to produce the quantity that would explode. So the dial could have been left on as early as half past one on the Wednesday afternoon. Or any time after that, before she left at four o’clock.’

  ‘You mean if it had been full on, the room would have been too full of gas to explode?’

  Andrew nodded. ‘I’ve checked all the arithmetic myself.’

  Sara put down the sandwich from which she had taken one bite. ‘That’s the day I went to Helene to find my music. To think, while we were chatting away, a few doors away Adele was fiddling with the cooker and gas was starting to fill the room. And we didn’t know. Oh, no! Do you think—do you think if I hadn’t been there, Helene would have popped along to see her? Or would Adele have come back for lunch? If I hadn’t been there, do you think—’

  ‘No,’ Andrew said firmly. He took her hand and brought it down from her face, gently stroking the wrist. ‘Adele always did a full day uninterrupted. She took her lunch with her. She liked it, it was simpler and gave her less locking up and getting herself back and forth. And it freed up Helene’s day too, of course. Wednesday was a perfectly normal day.’

  Sara accepted this silently. About Adele there seemed to be no more to say, since there was no redeeming shred of consolation in the awful facts that either could offer the other. In the silence of the kitchen Sara cleared their plates away. Andrew watched her. The quiet of the house and the long afternoon stretched out, offering them their forbidden, longed-for possibilities. Sara wondered whether she should turn from the sink and say something but she couldn’t bear to. And what, anyway? Anything would sound banal. Andrew was behind her now, his hands round her waist. She turned to face him, saw that his face was serious, intent, in a hurry. They were both breathing too fast for speech and in any case, everything had been said. Everything was clear and beautifully simple. Wasn’t it?