Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (24 page)

“Zillah Watling,” he said.

He was very attractive, tall and thin and fair, with a hooky nose and a nice wide mouth, and dressed in what Zillah thought the most flattering uniform a man could wear, blue jeans and a plain white shirt. The neck was open halfway down his chest and his sleeves were rolled up. She’d seen him somewhere before, long ago, but where she couldn’t remember. “I’m sure I know you but I can’t think . . .”

He reminded her. “Mark Fryer.” They’d been students together, he said. Then he’d left and Jerry had come . . . “Is this your boy? I’m here to pick up my daughter.”

“I’m here to pick up mine.”

They exchanged news. Mark Fryer didn’t appear to be a newspaper or magazine reader, for he knew nothing about her marriage to Jims. And he didn’t mention a wife, partner, girlfriend, or anyone that might be the mother of this child who, by a happy coincidence, came down the school steps with her arm round Eugenie.

“Look, we’ve got so much to say to each other, can’t we meet up again? How about tomorrow? Lunch tomorrow?”

Zillah shook her head and silently indicated Jordan.

“Then say Friday morning. We could have coffee somewhere.”

She’d love to. He pointed across the street. How about that place? Zillah thought it rather too near the school for comfort and he named another in Horseferry Road. He waved as she drove off, calling, “I’m so glad we ran into each other.”

Eugenie, in the passenger seat, was staring censoriously at her. “What does he mean, ran into each other? Did he hit our car?”

“It’s just an expression. It means ‘met by chance.’ ”

“He’s my friend Matilda’s father. Did you know that? She says he’s a womanizer and when I said, What does that mean, she said he chases after ladies. Did he chase you?”

“Of course not. You’re not to talk like that, Eugenie, do you hear me?”

But Zillah was already feeling better. It was wonderful what a little male admiration could do. As to the other thing that was always coming back to haunt her,
No one can do anything to me,
she said to herself,
because
I’m a widow.

Police officers were back again, talking to Fiona. Although they never came out and said so, she was sure they thought she couldn’t have been deeply affected by Jeff’s death because they hadn’t known each other for very long. It didn’t stop them expecting her to know all about his past, his family, his friends, and everywhere he’d lived since he left art school nine years before.

She’d told them everything she could think of but great gaps existed in her knowledge. His marriage, as she told them, was a closed book to her. She didn’t know where he’d lived with his wife, whether or not she’d ever been in Harvist Road, or the ages of the children. She thought it very hard on her that she couldn’t be left in peace to mourn quietly and by herself—or maybe with Michelle. As for the ex-wife, “I don’t even know where she lives.”

“That’s okay, Miss Harrington, we do. We’ll see to that.”

Did she imagine the flicker that crossed the man’s face at the word “ex-wife”? Perhaps. She didn’t know. She could never banish from her mind what they’d told her about Jeff not booking that hotel for their wedding on the appointed day or any other day. Why had he lied to her? Was it that he’d never meant to marry her? She’d tried to talk about it with Michelle, but her neighbor, usually so warm and affectionate, grew remote and impenetrable when expected to reassure her about Jeff’s shortcomings. Fiona wanted excuses made for him, not suggestions, however gently put, that she should try to look to the future instead of dwelling on a man who was—well, she’d never even hinted at this but Fiona knew the missing words were “after her money.”

“You’ve told us about friends and family, insofar as you can. Now, how about enemies? Did Jeff have any enemies?”

She didn’t like the way they referred to her as Miss Harrington but to him as Jeff, as if he were too much of a villain to be accorded the dignity of a surname. What do they say to each other about me when they get out of here, she often asked herself. “I don’t know that he had any,” she said wearily. “Do ordinary people have enemies?”

“They have people who don’t like them.”

“Yes, but that’s different. I mean, my neighbors, the Jarveys, didn’t like Jeff. Mrs. Jarvey admitted it. They both disliked him.”

“Why was that, Miss Harrington?”

“Jeff was—you have to understand he’d got an enormous lot of vitality. He was so full of life and energy . . .” Fiona couldn’t keep back a little sob when she said this.

“Don’t upset yourself, Miss Harrington.”

How could you help upsetting yourself when you were forced to talk about things you’d have liked to keep locked up inside you forever? She wiped her eyes carefully. “What I was going to say was, Jeff came out with things that—well, that sounded unkind, but he didn’t mean them, they just sort of brimmed over.”

“What kind of things?”

“He made digs, sort of jokes, at Michelle—Mrs. Jarvey. About her size. I mean, he called her husband and her Little and Large, things like that. She didn’t like it and her husband
hated
it. If it had been left to her I don’t think she’d ever have had anything more to do with Jeff.” Fiona realized what she was saying and tried to make a better impression. “I don’t mean they did anything about it, they didn’t even say anything. Michelle’s been an angel to me. It was just that they didn’t understand Jeff.” She made herself think from Michelle’s point of view, though she’d never faced up to it before. The lie Jeff had told about the hotel booking returned to her mind. “I suppose the truth is Michelle didn’t want me to marry Jeff, she thought he was bad for me. And—well, Michelle thinks of me as a daughter really, she told me so. My happiness is very important to her.”

“Thank you very much, Miss Harrington,” said the inspector. “I don’t think we’ll have to trouble you again. You won’t be needed at the inquest. Be sure to give us a call if you think of anything you haven’t told us.”

In the car he said to his sergeant, “The poor cow’s having a rude awakening.”

“D’you want me to keep on searching for that divorce decree?”

“There are some things you can search for, Malcolm, that you’re never going to find. Because they don’t exist, right?”

“So do we do her for bigamy?”

“I reckon we leave it to the DPP to sort out. We’ve got enough on our plate without that.”

“I shall be going down to the constituency this afternoon,” said Jims, “but I’ll delay it till after four so that you have time to fetch Eugenie from school first.”

Zillah gave him an aggrieved look. “Don’t bother. I’m not coming.” How could she? She was meeting Mark Fryer for coffee in Starbuck’s at eleven on Friday. “What made you think I’d be coming?”

Jims had forgotten that dream of himself as prime minister with Zillah as his consort. “I’ll tell you what made me think it,
darling.
We made a bargain, remember? So far you’ve got everything out of this marriage and I’ve got fuck-all. You’re my wife, at least you’re the ornament I chose to impress my constituents, and if I choose that you accompany me to Dorset, you do it. In case, as is more than likely, you never read a newspaper or watch anything on television above the level of a hospital soap, there’s a by-election in North Wessex next week and I intend to be there on Saturday to support our candidate. With you. Dressed in your best and looking lovely and gracious and
devoted.
With the kiddiwinks, trusting that little devil doesn’t bawl the place down.”

“You bastard.”

“The children are yours, not mine, but you’d be wiser not to use language like that in front of them.”

“What about you saying ‘fuck-all’ then?”

Jordan had taken the new pacifier out of his mouth and flung it across the room. “Fuck-all,” he said thoughtfully. It seemed a better panacea to stop him crying than the pacifier. “You bastard.”

“Anyway, I’m not coming. I never want to see Dorset again. I saw all I wanted to while I was living there. Take that Leonardo. I bet you were going to.”

“I hope I know something about discretion, Zillah, which is more than you do. By the by, have you remembered to inquire after your father?”

The next morning neither of them saw Natalie Reckman’s article, Jims because he woke up late and had to rush to get to his office in Toneborough on time, Zillah because she went off straight from dropping the children to have a facial and makeup done at the Army and Navy Stores. At just after eleven, a vision of loveliness in Mark Fryer’s words, which didn’t sound as if he meant to be sarcastic, she was drinking cappuccino with him in Horseferry Road, where he told her all about his broken marriage, recent divorce—a sensitive word to Zillah at the moment—and was disbelieving when she said she had to go and pick up Jordan.

“Let me come with you.”

Afterward Zillah could never imagine how she’d come to get out of the car with Jordan and Mark Fryer and, instead of going up to the flat in the lift, walked round to the front of the block. Could it have been because the building was beautiful from the front and a dingy concrete nightmare in the basement? Had she wanted to impress him? Perhaps. But there it was. They all walked along Millbank and turned the corner into Great College Street.

A crowd had gathered outside Abbey Gardens Mansions, made up mostly of press photographers and young women with notepads. They turned as one when they saw Zillah approaching and closed in upon her, strident voices bombarding her with questions and bulbs flashing. She tried to cover her face with her hands, then, she hoped, with Mark’s jacket which he’d been carrying over his shoulder.

He snatched it back, said hastily, “This is no place for me. See you,” and disappeared. Jordan began to scream.

Chapter 20

IT WAS LAF’S day off. At eleven in the morning the Wilsons were sitting outside their French doors, drinking coffee and reading the
Mail
and the
Express.
Sonovia kept her small garden as she often said a garden should be, “a riot of color,” in contrast to next door where everything was neat, sterile, and flower-free. Tubs held shocking-pink azaleas, scarlet and pastel-pink geraniums were coming into bloom, while trailing plants in Oxford and Cambridge boat-race colors spilled out of hanging baskets and over the rims of stone troughs. A bright yellow climber no one knew the name of blazed against the far fence.

Laf laid down his paper and said appreciatively to his wife that the garden was a treat to look at. “Those blue things are a lovely sight. I don’t think you’ve had those before.”

“Lobelias,” said Sonovia. “They make a nice contrast to the red. I got them through mail order but to tell you the truth, I never thought they’d turn out like the picture. Have you seen about this woman who used to be married to that man that was murdered in the Odeon marrying someone else without being divorced? It says here she thought she was divorced. I don’t see how she could have, do you?”

“Don’t know. There’s people about as will do anything, as I have good reason to know. Maybe he showed her some false papers.”

He wasn’t going to let on to Sonovia that this latest bit of news in the Cinema Slayer case hadn’t yet reached Notting Hill police station. The knife was different, he knew all about that, how it was found in a recycling bin and someone said it looked as if it had been boiled and the lab couldn’t tell if it was the murder weapon or not. Who’d boil a knife? That was what the DI had said and Laf had thought, Minty would. He’d had to laugh at the idea of little Minty harming anyone.

“D’you reckon this Zillah Melcombe-Smith’d done wrong,” he asked his wife, “marrying again when she wasn’t divorced? I mean, if she thought she was divorced and she married that MP in good faith?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Laf. Maybe she ought to have checked up before she actually stood at the altar.”

“Well, d’you reckon anyone does wrong if they don’t know it’s wrong?” These matters sometimes troubled Laf as a responsible policeman. “I mean like, if you attacked someone, killed them, because you thought they were a demon or Hitler or something, really believed it? If you thought you were ridding the world of an evil—an evil entity? Would that be wrong?”

“You’d have to be nuts.”

“Okay, more people are nuts, as you call it, than you’d think. Would it be wrong?”

“That’s too deep for me, Laf. You’d better ask the pastor. D’you want another coffee?”

But Laf didn’t. He sat in the sun, thinking that if what he’d outlined to Sonovia was wrong for the person who got killed and all their friends and family, it would be just as wrong if the killer had meant it. But it wouldn’t be wrong for the person who did the killing, they wouldn’t have committed murder like the Commandment said thou shalt not, they’d be innocent as a lamb; they’d have nothing on their conscience and perhaps they’d be proud to have been Hitler’s or the devil’s assassin.

Laf, who was a deeply religious man and an Evangelical, asked himself if they’d go to heaven. He
would
ask the pastor. And he was pretty sure he’d say that since it was God who had made them mad He ought to let them inside the gates of paradise. He looked back at the garden. Those pale pink geraniums were a lovely color. It was a great thing to be a happy man, to sit under his vine and his fig tree, as the Bible said, under his may tree and his lilac really, with a good wife and his quiverful of children.

Sonovia had gone into the house to phone Corinne. In the afternoon they were going to the Dome, taking their granddaughter with them. He’d wait until a quarter past one, by that time they’d have had their lunch, and then he’d take the papers in to Minty. Maybe she’d like to come with them. Mending the rift between Minty and Sonovia had been the most worthwhile thing he’d done for a long time, Laf thought. His wife was a good woman, if a shade quick-tempered. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

Minty wasn’t surprised to be haunted by old Mrs. Lewis, she’d expected it. She couldn’t see her and she hoped she never would, but her voice came as often as the other voices. At any rate it proved she was dead and Jock’s words she’d heard whispered in the night were true. The living didn’t come back and speak to you, they were here already.

She knew the new voice was Mrs. Lewis’s because Auntie told her. Auntie didn’t introduce her, she didn’t bother to, which Minty thought rather rude. She just called her Mrs. Lewis. It was quite a shock. Minty had been ironing at the time, not at Immacue like now, but at home in her own kitchen, when Auntie had started talking to her. She didn’t say a word about the flowers Minty had put on her grave the day before— and they’d cost a lot, over ten pounds—but started criticizing her ironing, saying the washing was too dry, the creases would never come out. And then she’d asked Mrs. Lewis for her opinion. “What do you think, Mrs. Lewis?” she’d said.

The new voice was gruff and deeper than Auntie’s, and it had a funny accent. Must be West Country. “She wants one of them sprays,” it said. “They’ve got a lot of it at the dry cleaners where she works. She could borrow one of them.”

They knew everything, the dead. They could see into everything, which made it funnier, really, that they couldn’t hear what you said to them. Mrs. Lewis had lived in Gloucester, which was hundreds of miles away, while she was alive and she’d never have known about Immacue and Minty working there, but she knew now because she was dead and secrets were revealed to her. The two of them were talking to each other while she went on ironing, chattering away about washing powders and stain removers. Minty tried to ignore them. She couldn’t understand why Mrs. Lewis had come to haunt her. Maybe the old woman had died when she’d heard her son Jock was dead, given way under the shock. She needn’t suppose Minty was going to tend her grave, wherever it was. It was bad enough with Auntie’s, not to mention the expense.

The ironing was done, everything folded and laid in the laundry basket on a clean sheet. Minty picked it up.

“You don’t need to use that basket,” Auntie said. “That’s not a very big pile. You could carry it, it’d be easier.”

“Go away,” said Minty. “It’s nothing to do with you and I’m not putting any more flowers on your grave. I can’t afford it.”

“You can understand her feelings,” said old Mrs. Lewis. “That son of mine got all her money off her. Mind you, he’d have given it back if he hadn’t met his end in that train crash. Every penny he’d have restored to her.”

“If you want to tell me things,” Minty shouted, “you can tell me to my face, not tell
her.
And it’s down to you to give me my money back.”

But Mrs. Lewis never did talk to her. She talked to Auntie. By a miracle Auntie had got her hearing back and Mrs. Lewis had been talking to her this morning while Minty was ironing for Immacue customers. They could get anywhere, these ghosts. Auntie said she was looking pale, been picking at her food no doubt, but Mrs. Lewis intervened then and said her Jock had made Minty eat, he was a trencherman himself and he liked a girl to be a hearty eater.

“Go away, go away,” Minty whispered, but not quietly enough, for Josephine came out, wanting to know if she’d been talking to her.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Oh, I thought you did. Have you seen the papers this morning? There’s a woman was the wife of that murdered bloke who’s gone and married someone else.”

“I never see the papers till I get home. Why shouldn’t she if he’s dead?”

“He wasn’t dead when she did it,” said Josephine. “And what d’you think, her and this MP got married on the same day as me and Ken. Look, I’ve got the
Mirror
here. D’you like her outfit? Jeans can be too tight, I don’t care what anyone says. And her hair’s all over the place. That’s some guy she was with, it doesn’t say who he is, not the husband, and that’s her little boy, sobbing his heart out, poor mite.”

“It’s wicked to murder people,” Minty said. “Look at the trouble it causes.” She finished the last shirt and went home.

She’d only been in five minutes when Laf came round with the papers. He wanted her to go to the Dome with him and Sonovia and Daniel’s little girl, but Minty said no, thanks, not this time, she’d got too much to do at home. She’d have to have a bath, she couldn’t go out again dirty, and they were off in ten minutes. Besides, there were the papers to read and the dusting to do and the floors to vacuum.

“Not in the afternoon,” said Auntie the moment Laf was gone. “A good housewife gets her work done first thing in the morning. The afternoon’s for sitting down and catching up on the sewing.”

Mrs. Lewis had to put her oar in. “She’ll say she’s got her job. You wouldn’t want her cleaning the place on a Sunday, I’m sure. Sundays are a day of rest or should be. There was some in my day as would get up at the crack of dawn and get the dusting and hoovering done before they went to work, but not anymore.”

“Go away,” said Minty. “I hate you.”

For some reason she thought they wouldn’t follow her out of doors and she was right. Maybe it was too bright for them or too hot or something. Ghosts faded away in sunshine, she’d heard that somewhere. She got out the mower and cut the little lawn, then the long-handled shears to do the edges. Mr. Kroot’s sister came out into the garden next door, dropping lumps of bread with green mold on it to feed the birds. Minty wanted to say it wouldn’t be birds that would come but rats, only she didn’t because she and Auntie had sworn never to speak to Mr. Kroot or the sister or anyone to do with them again.

Auntie spoke to her at last, the minute she came into the kitchen. “I’d have had a bone to pick with you if you’d said a word to Gertrude Pierce.”

That was her name. The dead knew everything. Minty remembered it now, though she hadn’t heard it for a good ten years. She didn’t answer Auntie. The two of them went on muttering somewhere in the background. She’d just have to put up with it until they got tired and went back to wherever they came from. They wouldn’t like her vacuuming, the noise would drown out their voices. Let them grumble all they liked. At least she couldn’t see them.

She always did the dusting first. While Auntie was alive she’d had a lot of opposition from her over that. Auntie vacuumed first, but Minty maintained that if you dusted afterward all the dust went on to the clean carpet and if you were thorough you’d have to vacuum it all over again.

Sure enough, Auntie started as soon as Minty took the clean yellow duster out of the kitchen drawer. “I hope you’re not going to use that before you’ve done the floor. I don’t know how many times I’ve told her, Mrs. Lewis. It goes in one ear and out the other.”

“Might as well talk to a brick wall,” said Mrs. Lewis, for by this time Minty had begun moving all the ornaments on the little table and spraying the surface with liquid wax. “That stuff she’s using just swallows up the dirt and leaves a nasty deposit.”

“My very words. I’d like a five-pound note for every time I’ve said that.”

“It’s not true,” Minty shouted, moving on to the sideboard. “Not if you keep the place clean like I do. And it’s five-pound notes you ought to be giving
me.
”

“She’s got a nasty temper, Winifred. You say a word to her and she bites your head off.”

“I’d like to bite yours off! I’d like to get a big police dog to come and bite it off.”

“Don’t you speak to Mrs. Lewis like that,” said Auntie.

So they could hear her. Maybe it was only when she got angry. She’d remember that. She cleaned the whole house. Up in the bathroom she plugged her ears so as not to hear, but she still heard their voices through the cotton wool. Only while she had a bath and washed her hair was there silence. Lying in the water, she tried to picture what Mrs. Lewis looked like. She’d be very old. Somehow Minty had got it into her head that Mrs. Lewis had been knocking fifty when Jock was born. Her hair would be white and wispy, so thin that patches of bald pink scalp showed through, her nose a hook and her chin another hook coming up to meet the nose, with a mouth like a crack in a piece of coarse-grained brown wood in between. She looked like a witch, bent and very small because she’d have shrunk, and when she walked she took little stumbling steps.