The Girl Next Door (20 page)

Rosemary remembered noticing it long before she reached in her bag for the knife, and now she remembered thinking Daphne was well protected against any attack. No ordinary and rather blunt kitchen knife could penetrate that. She had tried it just the same, but
had she tried it because she knew it wouldn’t succeed?
Perhaps. Not
perhaps; certainly. Of course she couldn’t kill or even hurt someone with a knife. These teenagers in London could, they did it all the time, but they were young and their lives had been anything but sheltered. This time would be different. They called poison the woman’s method of murder—call it
killing
instead, it didn’t sound so bad. Morphine wasn’t poison, but a pain-killing, not person-killing, remedy.

Again she looked at her watch and was surprised to see how much time had passed. She might even be a few minutes late. In an estate agent’s window she caught sight of her reflection and stopped to look at herself in the new dress, worn for the first time. It fitted well, it made her look younger. No one would take her for a day over sixty. As she turned away towards the traffic lights where she would cross Maida Vale, she thought in a rare moment of honest self-revelation, When I was thirty, how I would have laughed at someone’s being pleased to be taken for
sixty.

Alan opened the door to her. They had probably arranged it that way, Daphne telling him it would be better if he was the first person Rosemary saw, not her supplanter. He asked her how she was, then hesitated, and she knew he was wondering whether he should kiss her. On the cheek only, of course. They went into the lounge that Daphne called a drawing-room. The way her own grandmother might have, thought Rosemary. Daphne was there, standing up, looking out of the window that gave onto the street. She must have watched for me to come. Are we going to shake hands? No, do nothing but say hallo, awkwardly on both their parts. She thinks I tried to kill her but I didn’t.

Alan began. She had thought he would. “This isn’t going to be easy. I’d better say first of all that last time is forgotten. I know you didn’t mean it. Daphne knows that. But that’s over and, as I say, forgotten.” Rosemary said nothing. She wanted him to have a hard time. “These things happen in many marriages, only the people are usually younger than us. It’s hard for us all. I’d like to make it easier,
especially for you, Rosemary, but there’s no easy way. It’s a tragedy that can’t be avoided.”

He was waiting for her to speak and she did, though not in the way he expected. “You pompous ass.”

Daphne started. She jumped so hard Rosemary could see her move. Alan said, “I’m sorry you take that attitude.”

“What did you expect me to say? Be happy, my children, is that what?” Rosemary touched her handbag, the bag that was not big enough to hold a knife, but was the right size for a small bottle. She felt its outlines.

“I think it might help if we all had a drink,” said Daphne. “I know it’s a bit early but these are special circumstances.”

Rosemary nodded. “The sun is over the yardarm, as my father used to say. I never knew what it meant.”

Neither of the others enlightened her. Alan said, “Good idea,” and left the room. Daphne said, “Sorry to leave you alone. I won’t be a minute.”

The sauvignon was evidently to be poured elsewhere and into rather tall glasses. A memory came to Rosemary of one of the rare occasions she had been to the opera, to see
Lucrezia Borgia
. She had never heard of it before Alan was given the tickets by a client arranging a musical party. Lucrezia was administering poison much as she planned to do to Daphne, but at a dinner where her son was a guest and her lover who was to drink the poisoned wine. The glasses got switched somehow, and to her grief and agony her son drank the poison and not the intended victim. This wouldn’t happen now.

The three full glasses were set down on the coffee table in front of the three chairs, Daphne’s nearest the window. The opera came back into Rosemary’s mind, and as Alan brought in a bowl of nuts, she thought, What if the glasses get changed round and he gets the one with the morphine? But, no, she would stop that even if at the last moment. The glasses were only half-filled, the way Rosemary had read was the fashionable trend. That would help her. She felt
the bottle through the thin suede of the bag and undid the clasp. Holding the bag upright but leaving the bottle where it was, she loosened its top. Maybe she wouldn’t get the chance to do it, maybe they wouldn’t be out of the room together. It seemed that that was what would happen. When she had set a dish of olives on the table, Daphne sat down in the chair that had its back towards the window and turned to Rosemary with a polite smile.

But Alan was on his feet and looking into the garden as if he could see something interesting. “Come here a minute.”

Daphne turned, got up when he said, “The fox is here again. The first time I’ve seen him for weeks.”

Now they both had their backs to Rosemary and were peering through the glass. She reached across the table and poured half the contents of the full bottle into Daphne’s glass.

“You want to see this, Rosemary,” he said. “A big dog fox. We never saw any in Loughton.”

His use of the past tense enraged her, as if when he left, her life was over. “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re here to talk about our future, not the bloody wildlife.”

Wondering if she had ever used the word
bloody
aloud before, she could see he wondered too. She should have said
fucking
, but that would have been too much for her. Even now. Daphne sat down again. Reluctantly, Alan came to join them, his eyes still on the garden. Rosemary thought, I have done it, this is it, I have killed someone. I have killed Daphne Jones. As she said it to herself, something seemed to clutch at her chest, making her heart beat with heavy thuds like a piece of machinery about to go wrong. Alan lifted his glass, hesitated, about to say “Cheers” or “Your health,” but stopping himself because it was so inappropriate. He said nothing, took a sip. I can’t kill her, Rosemary thought. Not me, not murder, not kill anyone.

Saying aloud, “I can’t. No, I can’t,” she reached across the table and half fell across the dish of olives, sweeping with an outstretched arm Daphne’s untouched wineglass to the floor.

Wine flew across Daphne’s legs and skirt. She jumped to her feet. “Please don’t worry. White wine doesn’t stain. I’ll get a cloth.”

She went off to the kitchen, the wine and morphine mixture dripping off her skirt hem. Alan was perfectly still, silent, staring at Rosemary. He knew. She could tell he knew. She could tell by his face, tell because she had lived with him for half a century, read his face the way Daphne never would. Daphne came back, mopped up the floor, picked up the fragments of glass, and dropped them into a large envelope. Rosemary, ostentatiously, lifted her own glass to her lips, drank the contents, and said to Alan, “I’d like a refill, please.”

He left it to Daphne, the innocent one, who knew nothing. Rosemary immediately drank half of what she had been given, thought, The shock of what I have done and not done will come later, and I don’t know what form it will take. The wine would go to her head, but it hadn’t yet. She swallowed the rest of what Daphne had brought her, got to her feet, still steady, and said, still lucid, “I might as well go. I don’t care what you do. Suit yourselves.”

Daphne started to say she was “sorry about all this,” but Rosemary’s face silenced her.

“I’ll walk you to the station,” said Alan, “or would you like me to call you a cab?”

“Neither. I don’t want anything from you.”

Alan opened the front door, took a step outside behind her. “What did you put in her drink?”

“Hatred. I will never speak to you again.”

He went back into the house, leaving her on the front path. He had already made up his mind to say nothing to Daphne. Poisons came into his mind: arsenic, strychnine, curare, all gathered from detective stories. Which of them had she brought with her and used?

“Let’s go away somewhere,” he said to Daphne. “Let’s go to Italy. I’ve never been there. Let’s go to Florence or Rome.”

“Why not? I’d love to.”

22

T
HE DRINK HIT HER
or it might have been pain, passion, rage, and shame, all combined. She found a seat near the junction of Hamilton Terrace with the St. John’s Wood Road—there were a lot of seats round here—and sank onto it. I am too old for this, she said to herself, this is for a young woman who still has all her physical strength. I should never have gone. Why did I think that I, who have never done a violent act, who never gave one of my children a tiny slap, never smacked a pet dog, who rescued a trapped wasp rather than squash it, why did I think I could kill a woman? No, much as I hated her, I should have known killing was impossible for me. She put her head against the wooden bars of the seat back, felt her eyes close and her mouth fall open. That jerked her awake and she struggled to get up but made it. Freya lived near here, in a block of flats opposite Lord’s.

Few people were about. She thought she could get to Freya’s, and she remembered that her granddaughter had given up work prior to the birth of her baby. She would probably be at home. Rosemary remembered too that when Judith had told her the date the child was due, she had remarked censoriously that it must have been conceived long before Freya’s marriage. Attempted murder was morally worse than sex outside marriage, even contemplated murder must be worse.
Her guilt was greater than poor Freya’s. She was standing up, holding on to a wall on the corner of the major road, and now, still reaching for the wall at every step, she made her way, hesitating and stumbling, to cross the road carefully, on a pedestrian crossing, to scramble into the lift and just manage to ring her granddaughter’s bell.

R
OSEMARY FELL INTO
Freya’s arms. Freya could smell the wine on her breath. Gran was certainly drunk, but this wasn’t just drunkenness, this was worse than that. She took her into the spare room, a second bedroom which as yet had had no guest, and helped her to lie down on the bed. Having fetched her a jug of water, a glass, and a packet of paracetamol, she phoned her mother and sister.

“She must have been at Daphne’s,” said Judith.

“Something horrible has happened and she’s come to you straight from Daphne’s. I’m on my way.”

Fenella also arrived, bringing Sybilla, having picked up Callum from school. Not herself a resident, she had left the car parked on residents’ parking and stood staring down into the street watching for a traffic warden, while her children made mayhem.

“They were trying to break into the fridge,” said Freya. “Can’t you control them?”

“You wait till you’ve got one of your own, and it won’t be long.”

Rosemary slept. Just as Judith was getting worried, fearing stroke or heart attack, her mother woke up, sat up, and asked her daughter to pour her a glass of water.

When she had drunk it and drunk a second one, she said, “I have done something terrible. I nearly killed someone.”

“Mother, you haven’t been driving a car!”

This, then, was the conclusion anyone would jump to. “Never mind what it was. I didn’t do it.” Rosemary got up, pulling down and smoothing her crumpled dress. “Do you know where my handbag is?”

Freya came in with it. Rosemary retrieved the half-empty bottle, made her way into the bathroom, and poured the contents into the basin. “They call it a sink now,” she said to Judith, who had followed her. “In my day a sink was something you only had in the kitchen.” Then, returning to the bed, she handed the empty bottle to Freya. “Would you put that into your bin, dear? And, Freya, could I stay here? I need to sleep. I need a long sleep. I don’t think I can go home, so would you let me stay here?”

Freya, who didn’t want her, who had a lot to do before the birth of her baby and was herself feeling tired, said, “Of course, Gran. You must stay as long as you like.”

“Shall I find a doctor for her?” Judith whispered.

“I don’t know.”

Rosemary went back to bed, fully clothed, and fell immediately asleep. When she had been asleep for five hours, Fenella had had two parking tickets, and Judith wanted to go home, she phoned her father.

She got his voicemail: “We are on our way to Italy. Possibly back on the fifteenth.”

A
LSO TRYING TO
get in touch with Alan was Michael Winwood, and he too got the Italy message. Rosemary simply wasn’t at home, he concluded, but it was hard to tell as she apparently had no mobile phone and no email address. Stanley Batchelor was another possibility. But the voice that answered his call he would never have recognised, it was so feeble and high-pitched.

“Not at my best, Mike,” Stanley whispered. “Had a bad turn. Still in bed actually, though I’ll get up later. I’ve got Spot with me and he’s a great comfort, I can tell you.”

That kind of voice made you want to clear your throat because the speaker needed to do so. Poor Stanley was ill. He couldn’t remember Lewis Newman’s number. He couldn’t even remember
where he had written it down. Helen was fetched and she quickly found it in Stanley’s directory, the proper place. But now Michael had it, he wondered if he even needed to call Lewis on this rather delicate matter. Going directly to Colin Quell might be best.

But when he tried it, a young woman who said she was Quell’s PA answered. It was a revelation to Michael that police officers, even senior police officers, had PAs. Calling him Michael, she told him that Detective Inspector Quell was no longer on the case. Would he like the extension number for Inspector Inshaw? Noticing that she didn’t use this Inshaw’s given name, he said he would like to speak to Mr. Inshaw and was told, in rather an admonitory tone, that it was Ms. Inshaw. At the extension was a pleasant-sounding, friendly woman. Yes, the “hands in the buried box” case was now in her hands. The pun wasn’t remarked on, and Michael’s wincing was invisible.

Would he come to her or would he like her to come to him? He chose the second option. Caroline Inshaw, as she introduced herself, was quite unlike how he had pictured her. Not that he had pictured her much, it wasn’t something he did, but he had expected a tall, thickset woman with cropped hair, in her late thirties and dressed in a dark suit. Instead, she was tiny, slender, and though her hair was black, very long. If anyone had told him she was a ballerina, he would have had no difficulty in accepting it. She arrived at six in the evening, and sure she would say she didn’t drink on duty, he nevertheless asked if she would like a glass of wine. Somehow her saying yes endeared her to him.

With their glasses of Chablis on the table before them, he told her about Clara Moss and what she had said to him about a man called “Raiment,” and because she was old with a Sunday-school childhood and was probably a churchgoer, aligned the word with “clothing.” Caroline Inshaw—she had asked him to call her Caroline—had never heard the term before. She frankly told him so.

He talked about his parents. “It wasn’t a happy marriage. I never
heard them speak a fond word to each other or even a polite word, come to that. At a later date they would have separated or got divorced, but not then, not in the 1940s. My mother had a lot of friends—I mean men friends.” He was hesitating now. Perhaps she could see how much it cost him to talk like this about his mother. She hadn’t wanted him; if she had never been cruel to him, she had been indifferent. But she was his mother. To speak of her sexual life, of her possible adultery, seized hold of his chest and bowed him over. He made himself straighten up. “There were several men she saw and went out with. I don’t know if my father cared, perhaps he did. According to Clara Moss—she cleaned for us, was often in the house—one of them was James Rayment. He was the uncle of a man—well, a boy then, of course—called Lewis Newman. You do know about the tunnels?”

Caroline Inshaw said she didn’t, which made Michael wonder how much of the case Quell had been interested in, let alone cared about, and how much he had passed on to her. Michael described the tunnels as briefly as he could and told her about the children who had been there. She showed more interest than Quell ever had. “I must tell you that even after so long I find it pretty hard—worse than that really—to talk about my mother like that.” Michael bit his lip, stared down at the hands in his lap—the hands!—and made himself go on. “She was very lovely to look at, my mother. I expect the temptations were great—all those men in uniform, you see.” He saw as he finished speaking the lady with the little dog who hadn’t been lovely to look at except to a lonely child. She was talking to him again in the railway carriage and he was stroking the dog. Again he pulled himself away from the familiar dream. “It’s not for me to tell you how to do your job. I don’t mean to do that, but if you were to do a DNA test on me and on Lewis Newman, wouldn’t that show if the hands belonged to James Rayment and . . . and . . .” It astounded him that he couldn’t go on, that the two words that in the past, on the rare occasions
when he’d uttered them, had left him unaffected now refused to be spoken.

“And your mother?” Caroline Inshaw spoke so gently and kindly that he was touched by an enormous gratitude.

He nodded, silent because all his effort at control was going into preventing the tears from coming.

“I think we could do that. You and I could go together to speak to Mr. Newman and do a test on him. I can do one on you today. It’s only a matter of testing saliva.”

“It’s Dr. Newman. I don’t mean to correct you. It’s just that he’ll know more about this sort of stuff than I do.”

She produced a tablet in a green leather cover. “I’ve a note here that your father is still alive. Is that so? Sorry to put it like that, but when one is a hundred, or nearly that, it’s a reasonable enquiry to make.”

“He’s still alive.” Michael felt that these were ominous and in some ways terrible words. He said nothing about the cyanide.

I
F
L
EWIS
N
EWMAN
hadn’t entirely forgotten about the hands in the box, the subject had drifted to the back of his mind. It was all so long ago. It wasn’t as long as it would appear to a young or middle-aged person, but still the box of skeletal hands had half hidden itself in that mental compartment where unexplained but not very interesting mysteries of one’s early life lived. Such as what had happened to Uncle James, and what a strange thing it was that Lewis’s mother, who had been what in those days they called an infants’ teacher, was the daughter-in-law of a man who couldn’t read or write. Uncle James was still present in Lewis’s memory and quite active there. He thought how different James’s disappearance would have been today, essentially because he would hardly have been allowed to disappear. James would have had a mobile phone, very possibly an email address, credit cards, be registered with a
doctor like one of Lewis’s own patients. Probably the police would no more have searched for him today than they would have then. Lewis recalled walking across the fields with his young uncle and, though there was a war on, the peace and silence of those fields. At home, although there was radio, there was no television, no music you could choose to accompany you wherever you went, no Internet, no antibiotics in general use though they had been discovered, no DNA.

He was thinking about the discovery of DNA, about the double helix, while he went about his daily chores, washing dishes—he saved them up until he ran out—putting clothes in a plastic bag to take to the launderette, a little basic dusting, thinking about DNA’s use in medicine and police work, when the phone rang. Such an amazing coincidence, almost uncanny, as if this detective inspector woman were reading his thoughts, that for a moment he could hardly speak. DNA? Yes, of course, though he couldn’t imagine why. She told him.

M
ICHAEL HAD ALSO
received an unexpected phone call. That was the reason for his sitting beside Clara Moss’s bed, holding her hand. The call had come from “her next-door,” whose name he learned at last. “It’s Mrs. Beecham as lived next to Mrs. Moss, sir.”

He was taken aback by that “sir.” Perhaps she had discovered from Clara that he was a lawyer. He would have liked to tell Mrs. Beecham not to “sir” him, but he didn’t know how. She might be offended or, worse, upset.

“The social come in,” she said. “They’ve poked their noses in a lot since you was last here, sir.” There it was again! “They want her in one of them hospices, she’s got the Big C, you see, and she’s not got long. Clara wouldn’t budge from here and she’s asking for you. I told the social, sir, that if she stayed here, I’d take care of her, me and Sam, we’ll look after her.”

“I’ll come now,” said Michael, thinking, How good these people are, how endlessly kind. “Tell her I’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

“Thank you, sir, that’s very good of you,” she said, echoing his accolade of herself.

Now his tears fell, those ever-present tears that flowed not so much from grief as from admiration of the goodness of others. Was it because he had seen so little goodness in his early years and because he’d first encountered it with a woman and a dog in a train? He went up to Vivien’s room, lay down beside where she had lain, and cried all the tears he had.

So now in the afternoon he was with Clara Moss. The first thing he did was give her the wedding ring, wondering if she would recognise it after all these years. But she knew it at once. She smiled and nodded. He needed no medical knowledge to tell she was dying. The doctor, Sam said, came in and gave her morphine, that was the only thing to keep the pain away. Proudly, Sam said the doctor trusted her and left liquid morphine with her to give Clara the prescribed dose. Clara gave Michael a small smile and squeezed his hand. He would come back again tomorrow, he said, and he wondered what was wrong with him that he had made such a fuss about visiting her at Maureen Batchelor’s request. It was easy, almost a pleasure. Not too long on the tube and then a short walk. The following day he found a bed-and-breakfast in Lower Park Road and stayed the night, returning to Clara in the morning.