by Ruth Rendell
“Oh, right.” Laf was embarrassed.
“D’you think you could?”
“I’ll see,” he said. “It might not be possible.” He was moved by pity for her. “Minty, wouldn’t it be a good idea to-well-put the past behind you? Try and forget him? You’re young, you’ve got your whole future before you. Can’t you forget the past?”
She shook her head. “I can’t,” she said and, in a burst of frankness, “I keep hearing his voice talking to me.”
Saying he’d see what he could do, Laf went home. Daniel was there. He’d been visiting a bed-bound patient in First Avenue and had called in for tea.
“I suppose it’s time someone told her the truth,” Sonovia said.
“I don’t think so, Mum. I wouldn’t.”
“She could go right over the edge.” Laf cut himself a slice of a very sticky banoffee pie. “I mean, what’s best? To believe your boyfriend loved you and met his death in a train crash? Or that he deceived you rotten and is still alive and kicking somewhere, living off some other woman?”
“You checked up, did you, Dad?”
“I was always more or less certain. That letter she had was an obvious con. Then I checked when the inquiry into the crash was on back in May. Thirty-one people died. They thought at first it was hundreds but it was only thirty-one. I say ‘only,’ that was bad enough, my goodness.”
“And there was no Jock Lewis among them?”
“You should think of your heart before you eat that stuff, Lafcadio Wilson.”
“Who put it on the table, I’d like to know?”
“It was meant for me, Dad. No Jock Lewis?”
“No Jock or John Lewis. And what’s more, no man not accounted for. Every man on that list had a name and an address and age and dependents or whatever, and not one of them could have fitted him. And now she wants me to find his grave.”
“Just say you can’t, Laf. Pass it off. She’ll soon forget about it.”
“What does she want his grave for?”
“What d’you think, Dan? To put flowers on like she does on her auntie’s faithfully every week.”
Mrs. Lewis had only sent her half what she owed her. Or Jock’s brother had. If she’d had his address she’d have written to him and asked for the rest. Still, she’d got enough for what she really wanted, the only thing she wanted when you came to think of it. The man hadn’t come yet but Laf said she’d easily have it done for a thousand pounds and he’d picked up some brochures for her from a builder’s merchant in Ladbroke Grove. Looking at the pictures, she could see she’d never afford a separate shower cabinet, the kind you walked into. Laf had been wrong there. Still, having one put in over the bath and a glass wall with hinges built to keep the water off the floor, that would be just as good. Better, really, because a cabinet meant one more thing to clean every day. So long as there wasn’t a messy shower curtain that would get splashes of dried soap all over it.
The voices crowded in on her while she was studying the one she’d have installed. Jock and Mrs. Lewis and another that must be Jock’s dad. It couldn’t be his brother. His brother was still alive. He must have been to send her the money. Maybe the ex-wife was dead too and the brother’s wife. Were they all there because she’d never visited Jock’s grave?
They never answered but she asked just the same. “Where’s he buried? Where have they put Jock?”
Silence. It wasn’t a reply, more a piece of knowledge that suddenly appeared inside her head. No one said it, for the voices had once more gone away. The thought, the fact, came in and she knew absolutely that it was true. He’s in the one by Chelsea football ground. As if she hadn’t understood, it came again. The one by Chelsea football ground.
Edna had lived down there. When she was a little girl and Edna was still alive, had another ten years to live, Auntie used to take her over there to Edna’s for tea. She had a little gray house, one of a long, flat-fronted row, with a door opening on to the pavement.
Minty went over there in the evening after work, and she took a knife with her, one of the smaller ones from the drawer. She went by bus, or rather a series of buses, ending up on the 11, which took her to Fulham Broadway.
It was years since she’d been there, twenty-five years. Even then, the football hooligans used to break the place up if their team got beaten by Chelsea. Auntie had pointed out smashed shop fronts to her and turned the demonstration into a lesson on the wickedness of destroying property. No smashed windows now, none of the old shops. The place had been smartened up. She went to look at Edna’s house. It was as bright and fresh now as the Wilsons’, with a red front door and carriage lamps, frilly curtains inside the windows, and boxes full of flowers outside them. All the houses were like that, only the flowers were of different kinds and the doors blue or yellow. Edna always wore a crossover overall and slippers, and a turban like she had on the production line during the war. Most of the time Uncle Wilfred was in his darkroom developing his photographs. He wanted Minty to go in there with him but usually Auntie wouldn’t let her, not unless the door was left open, which it obviously couldn’t be in a darkroom. She didn’t know why it was forbidden, hadn’t then and didn’t now, though she could still remember the meaningful glances Auntie and Edna exchanged when Uncle Wilfred shrugged and turned away.
She entered the cemetery from the Old Brompton Road end. Although she had often gazed at it from Edna’s windows-there was little else to do-she’d never been in before. And she found it frightening in a way Kensal Green never was. This had something to do with the eight-sided chapel and curving colonnades you had to pass by or between, something perhaps with the gloom of the evening, a typical London summer evening of heavy cloud and excluded sun and windless, thick air, though it was still a long way off twilight. There was a tomb with a lion on it like the lions in Trafalgar Square and another piled with black cannonballs. As she walked she was sure she would meet her ghosts, or some of them, or one. Jock himself frightened her more than the others. With old women, even with their shades, she could cope. But she sensed in Jock a violence she had never known from him in life. It was as if, in death, he was slowly realizing his full potential of savagery and malice.
As she looked to the right and left of her for his grave, for a new grave, perhaps only a mound with as yet no memorial stone, she tried to comfort herself with the thought of the new shower that was coming, that Jock’s brother or sister-in-law had been considerate enough to pay for. But the distraction barely worked. She knew by this time that there were no recent burials in this dark, forlorn cemetery, which had an atmosphere about it of having been forgotten and abandoned. For the first time she noticed there were no people about, no visitors apart from herself. This made it seem as if the place were not really there at all but belonged in another world, empty of anything, men and women, animals, even ghosts. And somehow this was more frightening than the ghosts themselves, for she might be trapped in it, caught up in a timeless deserted waste forever. She looked at the ground, at blades of grass, at the gray, still air, and saw not even a bird, not even an insect. Then she started to run, away from the colonnades, the immovable, eternal gray stone pillars, down, down, down to the gate and the street and houses and people…
Chapter 33
IN THE COURSE of her work Natalie had often thought of how she would handle the press should a journalist contact her. The advice she gave herself was much the same as that offered by a lawyer to his or her client in confrontations with the police. Say nothing, or, if you must speak, use monosyllables. Like most reporters and most policemen, she seldom encountered members of the public who took this advice. Nell Johnson-Fleet was the exception.
Opening the door of her Kentish Town flat, she looked straight into Natalie’s face but said nothing. Natalie, who was looking straight into hers, said who she was and might she have a word.
“No,” said Nell Johnson-Fleet.
Like all Jeff’s women-Zillah had been the odd one out-she was a tallish, thin blonde and dressed as he lik
ed them to be, in trousers and a sweater. Natalie well remembered his preferences. “I was one of his girlfriends too. Victims, if you like. It might be a help to talk about it, don’t you think?”
“No.”
“Perhaps you prefer to put it all behind you? Try to do the impossible and forget it ever happened.”
Gently, Nell Johnson-Fleet closed the door. Natalie wasn’t one to give up as easily as that. She rang the bell again and, getting no answer, went round the corner of the street, where she sat down on a wall and dialed the woman’s number on her mobile. The call was answered with a curt, “Yes?”
This, at least, was different. “It’s Natalie Reckman, Nell. I hope you’re going to let me in for just five minutes.”
“No,” and the phone went down.
You had to admire it, Natalie thought, returning to her car just as the traffic warden was approaching. It was a wonderful technique. A good thing most of the public weren’t like that. On the other hand, people went through moods, they had good days and bad days, and this might be a bad one. Nell Johnson-Fleet might have had a row with her boyfriend or seen him with another woman; the way she happened to be this evening was no guide to her normal behavior. She’d try again tomorrow, give her a chance to regret passing up her opportunity. Now for Kensal Green.
The police had left them alone for nearly two weeks. They had threatened to come back but they never had. Michelle had begun eating again, not much and sensible food, but she no longer felt as if every mouthful would choke her. Her weight had gone down to what it had been ten years earlier. And while she was quite content with a salad and single slice of bread for lunch, Matthew was regularly eating a two-egg omelette. He’d begun to drive the car again, uncertainly at first, like someone who has just passed his test, but with increasing confidence. When they hadn’t seen or heard from the police for long enough to feel safe, they did something they hadn’t done since they were first married. They went away together for the weekend.
For the first time since she’d known her, Michelle fancied she saw envy of her in Fiona’s eyes. This didn’t please her, it was the last thing she wanted to excite in anyone, but she noted it because it was so unusual.
Fiona envied her for having a husband who loved her and wanted to be alone with her in a hotel in the countryside. “I hope you’ll have a lovely time,” she said. “You deserve it.”
They did. But the lovely time was very different from what Fiona (and anyone else who saw them and thought about it) envisaged, imagining gentle walks, quiet drinks in little pubs, a visit to a beauty spot, and perhaps some candlelit dining. It was much more like a honeymoon. In Matthew’s arms, having a late lie-in, Michelle went back in time to their early days and felt no older than she had seventeen years before in the first bliss of their passion.
The Kentish Town block of flats had been grim in Natalie’s estimation but had nothing on Syringa Road, Kensal Green. That, she decided, parking her car without difficulty in this nonrestricted zone, must be the seat on which Eileen Dring had been killed. Or a replacement seat, surely. It looked new. The flower bed behind it had been dug up and now showed a healthy growth of young weeds. Something of a coincidence, she thought, that one of the murder victims had died within a stone’s throw of where the other victim’s girlfriend-or one of them-lived.
Two rows of squat Victorian houses, with mostly neglected and very small front gardens, some of them packed full of bicycles, pushchairs, the occasional motorbike, rolls of wire netting, and pieces of broken furniture. Disproportionately large bay windows jutted out downstairs, and dusty plaques under their eaves were engraved with names such as Theobald Villa and Salisbury Terrace. One house only had been smartened up and to an extent that offended Natalie’s taste. This was number 37, whose front had been refaced with blocks of (probably fake) gray granite, whose paintwork was white and front door a deep rose pink. Multicolored dahlias and dark blue Michaelmas daisies filled the garden. Next door, Natalie’s goal, was neat but dowdy, the garden paved over, the paintwork worn though clean. Jeff must have been on his uppers to come looking for succor down here, she thought. And then she recalled the leaps-and-bounds increases in London house prices, that this place was not so very far from fashionable Notting Hill and a tube stop on the Bakerloo Line was just a little way down Harrow Road. If he could have got his hands on a house here…
She rang the bell. A woman came to the door and stared at her. It wasn’t a stare like Nell Johnson-Fleet’s and she wasn’t at all like Nell Johnson-Fleet, not Jeff’s type except insofar as she was fair and thin. A little wispy woman, very white-skinned with pale, no-color eyes, thin lips, hair like a baby’s. But what startled Natalie, what almost frightened her, was that she looked mad. Natalie would never have used this politically incorrect word except to herself, in her own thoughts. No other really described Araminta Knox’s wide stare, her large pupils, the tiny smile that came and went.
“Ms. Knox?”
A nod and the smile flickering.
“I’m called Natalie Reckman and I’m a freelance journalist. I wonder if I might talk to you about Jeff Leach.”
“Who?”
She plainly didn’t know what Natalie meant. There had been not the faintest flicker of alarm or memory or pain or anger in those glassy eyes. And there would have been, for this was the sort of woman unable to conceal what she felt, unaware, showing every nuance of emotion in her expression. She’d either come to the wrong place, got the wrong woman, or Jeff had used one of his not very subtle aliases. “Jerry perhaps? Jed? Jake?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You didn’t have a boyfriend who was murdered in a cinema?” Natalie never minded what she said to anyone. She couldn’t, not in her job. “Jeff Leach or Leigh?”
“My fiancé died in the Paddington train crash,” said Minty and shut the door much more sharply than Nell Johnson-Fleet had.
It was possible she was on the wrong track. Natalie remembered that she’d assumed this was the right woman only because Jeff had said she lived near Kensal Green Cemetery and had called her Polo. Polo was a mint and the one person in the whole area with the right kind of name was Araminta Knox. But he might have called her Polo for any number of other reasons. Because she liked those mints he ate, for instance, or even played polo. Just the same, she rang the bell of the gaudy house with the pink front door.
The occupant was a big, handsome woman in a tight black skirt and scarlet shirt, technically black but in fact almond-colored with a Roman nose and full lips. Natalie said who she was and what she wanted.
“Would you mind telling me your name?”
“Sonovia Wilson. You can call me Mrs. Wilson.”
“Have you ever heard of a Jeffrey or Jeff or Jerry Leach or Leigh?”
“No. Who is he?”
“Well, I thought he’d been your neighbor’s boyfriend.”
“She’s only had one and he was called Jock Lewis. Or so he said. He said, or someone did, that he died in that train crash, but he never did and I know that for a fact. What d’you want him for?”
“I don’t want him, Mrs. Wilson. It wouldn’t be much use if I did, seeing he’s most likely the Jeffrey Leach who was murdered in the Marble Arch Odeon. J. L., you see, it was always J-something and L-something with him. May I come in?”
“You’d better talk to my husband. He’s in the force.”
In a quandary, Laf didn’t know what to do next. What to do at all, come to that. He and Sonovia watched Natalie Reckman cross the road and get into her car.
“It’s only what she thinks,” Laf said. “We’ve known since the beginning Jock Lewis wasn’t killed in that train crash. The only evidence she’s got for thinking Minty’s friend was this Jeffrey Leach is that they’ve got the same initials.”
“Well, not really, Laf. She seems to know Leach had a girlfriend who lived round here that he called Polo.”
“Jock Lewis never called Minty Polo, so far as I know.”
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“We could ask her,” said Sonovia. “I mean, I could. I could say something casual, like ‘Didn’t you tell me Jock was fond of Polo mints?’ or get the conversation on to pet names and ask if he had one for her. And then, if she came out with it, I’d tell her. I mean, she ought to know, Laf, you’ve got to admit it.”
Laf turned away from the window, sat down in an armchair, and motioned Sonovia to another, with the masterful gesture and wearing the steady frown he used only on the very rare occasions when he thought his wife had worn the trousers long enough. “No, I’ve not got to admit it, Sonovia.” He called her by her full name only in his severer moments. “You’re not to say a word to Minty. Is that understood? This is one of those times when we’ve got to heed Daniel. You remember what he said? It was the last time you asked if she should be told about Jock. ‘I wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t.’ You told me yourself what he said. Now when our son became a doctor of medicine I made up my mind I’d take his word on medical matters like I take Holy Writ. And you’ve got to do the same, right?”
Meekly, Sonovia said, “Right, Laf.”
Dressing to go out on her fifth date with Ronnie Grasmere, Zillah thought it was the babysitter when the doorbell rang. She zipped up her new black dress-tight but not too tight, low-cut, flattering-slipped her feet into her Jimmy Choo shoes, and ran downstairs. Two men were on the doorstep. Even if one of them hadn’t been in uniform she’d have known they were police officers-she could detect them from a distance now. Immediately, with a lurch in her Lycra-controlled stomach, she concluded that they were here to arrest her for bigamy.
“Mrs. Melcombe-Smith?”
One thing that phony marriage had done for her: everyone assumed it had been genuine. “What is it?”
“South Wessex Police. May we come in?”
They’d found Jerry’s car. The boneshaker. The twenty-year-old Ford Anglia. That was all it was about, his old banger. In Harold Hill.
