Dark Corners: A Novel (19 page)

Susanna apologised for the smallness of the sum, but it felt like a fortune to Carl. Income from his writing, recognition of his talent! A happy start to the day, it seemed, not to be spoilt by the sound of Sybil’s feet in heavy shoes marching about on the top floor. So she hadn’t gone. She had spent two nights up there. It was time to tell her to leave, and take her pots and jars with her. He went upstairs and knocked on the door.

She looked at him, unsmiling, as if she had never seen him before. He noticed that it wasn’t shoes she was wearing, but heavy brown leather boots.

‘What was it you wanted?’

Not to be left on the doorstep, he thought. ‘Can I come in?’

‘If you want.’

He stepped over the threshold. She left the door open. She was still in the mourning clothes that were perhaps to become a permanency.

‘I’d like you to take your things out of the bathroom,’ he said. ‘When you go home.’

‘I’m going out now. I’ve got to go to work.’

‘Yes, of course. But later on you must come back here and take your stuff.’

She nodded, a meaningless gesture. ‘Dermot told me when we first started courting that we would live here together.’

Courting: it was the word that shocked him rather than the content of what she said. He had never before heard anyone actually use it.

‘Yes, it’s very sad what happened. I’ll see you later,’ he said.

From his front window he watched her go. There was in her walk a familiarity with her surroundings that made her look as if she had lived here all her life. He realised he didn’t know where she worked or what she did: why should he know or care? She would be gone by the end of today and he would never have to see her again.

Sybil returned from work before Nicola did. Carl wouldn’t have known this if he hadn’t been watching for her. He went out into the hall just as she had her heavily booted right foot on the lowest stair.

‘Sybil?’ Had he ever before called her by what she would no doubt refer to as her Christian name? ‘You’ll be going home this evening, I assume. Don’t forget to take your stuff from the bathroom.’

In a calm, straightforward tone she said, ‘This is my home. This is where I live.’

‘No, no.’ Nervous as he was, he had to treat her as if she were simple. That was a word his father had used, and one that pre-dated political correctness. ‘You live with your parents in Jerome Crescent. Now give me my key. You won’t need it again.’

‘I live here,’ she said. ‘I must go up now. I’ve things to see to.’

‘No, Sybil. I’m very sorry about Dermot, but I shall have a new tenant coming in. That’s why you need to go. That’s why I need the key.’

‘I’m the new tenant,’ she said. ‘I told you Dermot said I was to live here.’ Suddenly her voice took on the tone of an ordinary, determined woman who knew exactly what she was doing and saying. ‘I have to hold on to the key. I’m taking over my fiancé’s tenancy.’

He said nothing. To think that he had believed her naïve, an ignorant fool. He went into the bathroom and threw up. Because he had eaten nothing all day, he vomited only yellow liquid.

He was still in the bathroom when Nicola came home. He had reached a stage where he had to remind himself that she didn’t know he had killed Dermot. Sometimes, when he thought about it, he seemed to remember telling her, and her forgiving him or overlooking it or something.

She doesn’t know. Hold on to that, he told himself. But I can tell her about Sybil, what Sybil said. I must ask her what to do. ‘Sybil is here,’ he said. ‘She says she’s the new tenant. She won’t give me the key.’

‘She must. Tell her you’ll get the police to put her out.’

‘I couldn’t do that.’

‘Then I will.’

‘No.’ The idea of the police coming meant only one thing to him: Dermot’s murder. They would be in the house and they would know what had happened to the previous tenant. They would become suspicious. ‘No, Nic. We can’t do that. Would it be too bad to have her as the new tenant? I mean, she’d be steady and quiet and regular in her habits – I know I sound like an old-time landlady – and she wouldn’t make trouble.’

‘I’m not hearing this,’ Nicola said.

‘Yes, you are, you are. I’m saying let’s have Sybil as the new tenant. It would make things easy. There’d be money coming in. She’d be on her own. She wouldn’t bring men home.’

‘What’s happened to you, Carl? You’re young. You don’t talk and think like that.’ In a scathing tone she said, ‘
She wouldn’t bring men home. She wouldn’t make trouble, she’d be quiet and steady.
’ She didn’t wait for his defence. ‘What’s got into you? You have to turn her out, and do it now. She can go back to her parents. I don’t want her here. We’ll find someone else.’

He spoke to her in a tone he had never thought possible. ‘This is my house. I decide about tenants, not you.’

She didn’t argue. Her face went white. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Let her stay. I just hope you won’t regret it.’

She had said ‘you’, not ‘we’. Whatever happens now, Carl thought, this is the beginning of the end for us.

MOST OF THE
pet-owners at the clinic accepted Lizzie without question. One of the few exceptions was Yvonne Weatherspoon, who had known her when she’d been a friend of Stacey. Yvonne hadn’t much liked Lizzie then, and she didn’t seem to like her now.

‘Where’s Dermot?’ she asked.

Lizzie didn’t know what to say. Surely Yvonne knew? It had been all over the papers and even on the London regional news. ‘Didn’t you see it on TV?’

‘What do you mean, on TV?’

‘Well, he was murdered. It was on TV and in all the papers. They still haven’t got anyone for it.’

‘I saw about
that
Dermot,’ said Yvonne, ‘but I didn’t connect it with
our
Dermot. My God, what a dreadful thing. I’m really shocked.’ She pointed to the occupant of the cat box. ‘Sophie knows. You can tell, can’t you? It’s been a shock to her as well, poor angel.’ She mouthed kisses to the cat through the bars of the carrier. ‘A nasty animal from down the hill has scratched her and I think it’s got infected. I do hope Caroline can see her. I think she’s got a temperature.’

Caroline could see her this time and would keep her in to operate on the abscess. Perhaps Mrs Weatherspoon would like to leave her here and come back for her at four? ‘Like’ was not the word, but Yvonne had to agree.

They closed the clinic for an hour at lunchtime and Lizzie went across the street to the Sutherland Café for a sandwich and a Diet Coke. She still found it hard to sit quietly on her own. Her mind played nasty tricks, returning to the horrific days she so much wanted to forget.

When she’d first got home, she had thought about phoning Swithin Campbell and confronting him with her suspicions that he’d been in cahoots with Scotty and Redhead. But what would happen if he turned out to be dangerous? It might be better to leave things as they were, with Scotty and Redhead as far away from her as possible.

If only she had someone clever to advise her.

Back at the pet clinic, nothing much happened until four o’clock. In the operating theatre, a small room in the back, Caroline lanced Sophie’s abscess and laid her comfortably in her cat carrier to sleep until Yvonne Weatherspoon came for her. But at five past four it was Yvonne’s son who called at the clinic.

‘Hi, Gervaise,’ said Lizzie. She was surprised and pleased to see him. He must have cancelled his trip to Cambodia or wherever it was. Or perhaps he just hadn’t left yet.

‘Well, if it isn’t little Lizzie,’ said Gervaise Weatherspoon. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I work here.’

‘Do you really? My mother didn’t say.’ Caroline came out with the cat, still asleep in her carrier. ‘Can I pay with a credit card?’

‘Sure you can. That’ll be a hundred and eighty pounds.’

‘I’ll have to get that back from my mum,’ he said, and looked at Lizzie again. ‘Lizzie, I owe you an apology.’

‘Do you? Whatever for?’

He slipped his card into the machine. ‘Last time I saw you, I said you could stay in Stacey’s flat while I was away. But then my sister wanted to live there, and you must have had to move out.’

‘I did,’ said Lizzie. ‘But that’s all in the past now.’ What he’d said had given her an idea. ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Sure you can.’

‘I need some advice.’

Gervaise looked interested, as Lizzie had thought he might. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Shall we meet in the café opposite after you finish here? Let me get this animal home first.’

Next morning Carl watched Sybil in the garden before she went to work, pulling up the few weeds she had allowed to take root there, cutting off the dead heads from flowers he didn’t know the names of.

She probably worked as someone’s cleaner, he thought. That was what she looked like. Perhaps she would clean for him. Maybe she could do decorating as well as gardening. It began to appear as if he had done rather well in not getting rid of her.

He must get her a rent book, something he had never done for Dermot. It would be more businesslike. He’d draw up another contract and have Nicola witness it. He had hoped to raise the rent this time, but now he realised he could hardly do that. Sybil wouldn’t earn that much; maybe ten pounds an hour was what he had heard cleaners’ wages amounted to. No, keep the rent to what Dermot had paid – or hadn’t paid in recent months.

He sat down at the laptop and contrived a sort of contract for Sybil Soames to pay Carl Martin one thousand, two hundred pounds per calendar month – a good touch that, calendar month – for a one-bedroom apartment at 11 Falcon Mews, London W9. He’d arrange the signing down here in his living room. When Nicola came home from work, she usually went straight upstairs to their bedroom to change into jeans and a T-shirt, and it was after that that he and Sybil would sign the document.

He asked himself why he was treating the process with such weight and formality. Dermot’s contract had never been handled like this. His mother had told him he could now get much more than twelve hundred a month, but he had said no, and she had supposed he was being generous, that asking more would be greedy. No one could know – no one would ever know – that he shuddered whenever he thought of profiting from the death of a man he had murdered.

Sybil came back at five. Her shoes made a flapping sound as she walked upstairs. A bit less than an hour later Nicola arrived, carrying a basket of strawberries, a carton of cream and a bunch of pink and purple flowers she said were zinnias. Carl showed her the contract.

She nodded. ‘You’re still going through with this, then?’

‘You agreed it was a good idea.’

‘I don’t think so, Carl. As you said, it wasn’t for me to agree or disagree. It’s your house.’

‘Well, will you witness Sybil and me signing this contract?’

‘If that’s what you want.’

She went up to their bedroom to change. The beginning of the end for them, he had thought their argument was. But it had passed and perhaps the end wouldn’t happen. He hoped not. He picked up the phone and called Dermot’s number. He couldn’t yet think of it as Sybil’s.

‘Can’t you come up here?’ she said.

‘I suppose so. If you like.’

Passing his bedroom door on the way, he called out to Nicola that he would want her up in Sybil’s flat in a few minutes and would shout for her. It was a hot day, and a thick, humid warmth had risen to the landing. Sweat broke out on his face, on his upper lip, as he climbed the stairs. He had a strong, quite unreasonable feeling of impending doom.

Sybil opened the door before he got there and was standing just inside. She was wearing a pale pink dress with blue and green geometric shapes all over it, which left her arms and shoulders bare.

‘It’s very hot up here,’ he said when he was in the even more stifling atmosphere of the living room. ‘Don’t you want to open the windows?’

‘I never open windows,’ she said. ‘It lets insects in.’

By now, he was bathed in sweat. ‘May I sit down?’

‘Be my guest,’ she said.

Ridiculous, he thought. I
am
her guest. He unfolded the sheet of paper on which he had typed the contract and laid it on the round table. She remained standing. ‘I have the rent contract. Would you like to read it?’

She didn’t sit down, but just glanced at the contract. ‘I don’t need to read it. I told you I’m living here. Dermot said I should.’

‘Yes, perhaps. But you still have to pay me rent.’

She shook her head vigorously. ‘I don’t pay rent. Why should I? I already said I’m living here.’

The perspiration was dripping down his face like tears. ‘I don’t think you understand. If you have rooms in someone else’s property, you have to pay for it. You have to pay by the week or month. That’s what this paper is about. I’ll call Nicola in to witness it, if you know what that means, and then you sign and I sign and she sees us do that and she signs. OK?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s not OK. I haven’t got the money. I work in Lidl on the checkout.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, but that means you’ll have to go. You can’t stay here without paying rent.’

That awful shaking of the head began again. ‘I’m staying here like Dermot did. He never paid rent, not a penny, and I’m not either. This is my home now.’

‘No, it’s not, Sybil. If you don’t go, I shall have to fetch the police to put you out.’

She took a step towards him and a cunning look spread across her face. There was deceit in it, and a half-smile. ‘I saw you hit Dermot with that bag you carry,’ she said. ‘It must have had something heavy in it. I was in my bedroom and I saw you from the window. He just lay there. I went to bed. He was still there in the morning. I went out there at five and saw him. You killed him like a killer on TV.’

Carl stared at her.

‘I’ll tell the police if you make me leave. I didn’t go to them before as I’ve always wanted somewhere to live that’s not with my parents, but couldn’t afford it. Now I have this place, and I don’t have to pay any rent at all.’

An analogy people made when something bad had happened was to say it was a nightmare. Carl was somewhere worse than a nightmare, a conjuring of horror only bearable if he knew he would wake up. He lacked the strength to speak and she saw this. She was watching him closely, not quite with a smile but with a calm, satisfied look.