The Girl Next Door (21 page)

23

T
HE HANDS IN
the box had from the first been a plague to Colin Quell. “A pain in the neck,” he referred to it. To use his detective skills on investigating the possible provenance of ancient body parts that may have lain where they were found for six or seven decades was beneath his dignity. Such an investigation had no urgency. The hands had been there for sixty years or more and wouldn’t go away. Moreover, the owners, if that was the word, might not even have been dead, still less murdered, the hands removed from living bodies. True, no half-hearted enquiries on his part had uncovered any evidence that local hospitals were missing amputated hands at the relevant time. His own solution to the mystery was that the hands had been taken from bodies found on bomb sites in the East End of London. Taken by perverts, of which there was no shortage in his experience. Whoever they might be they were long dead by now.

Because the police boast that they never give up on an investigation and Detective Inspector Quell feared this one would be with him for life, he was overjoyed when his chief superintendent told him the case would be handed over to Caroline Inshaw.

“I’ve no objection,” Lewis said. “You can have my DNA if you want. But why?”

“I believe you had an uncle who went missing in 1944 and was never found. A Mr. James Rayment?”

“That’s so. But a lot of people went missing in 1944. The war was on.”

“You never found what happened to your uncle?”

“I was a child. Children aren’t much concerned about things like that. The ways of adults are strange to them, why they behave the way they do, why they care. My parents were worried, I remember that. They made enquiries, I believe, but the police wouldn’t look for a missing young man.”

“No, perhaps not. Do you know if your uncle knew Mrs. Winwood? Anita Winwood?”

“Michael’s mother? I don’t know. Possibly. Uncle James stayed with us, you know. He stayed with us on and off during that summer and he used to go out in the evenings till very late. My mother gave up the search in the end. She decided he’d been called up and joined the forces, though the army had never heard of him.”

“And you? You didn’t think about it?”

“I told you. I was a child. Maybe I wondered why he’d never said good-bye to me, told me he was going away. But that’s all.”

P
AYING A VISIT
to Rosemary Norris was a way of passing the time and perhaps a duty. He was in Loughton and had woken early as people often do when in unfamiliar surroundings. The sun was shining, though the day had a cold look to it. Michael decided he would walk down to Traps Hill before he went to Clara’s. He could tell Rosemary about Clara and perhaps even enlist her help to visit her. He had never been to her flat but he knew the address. Was it too early for a call? Half past nine seemed all right. A man who was retired might have a lie-in but not a woman, he thought. Women always had household tasks that they liked to get through early. But though he rang the bell and clattered the letterbox, there was no answer. Away
somewhere or ill? He tried again and then he left it, encountering on his way out a woman with a large, stripy cat in her arms.

“Mrs. Norris is staying with her granddaughter. She phoned to tell me. Very considerate, I thought, but she always is thoughtful.” The woman paused, looked doubtfully at him. “Imagine that man leaving her. At his age. You can’t understand it, can you?”

Michael said nothing but managed a wry smile. He walked down to Forest Road. Samantha was in Clara’s front garden, putting a rubbish bag into a bin.

“Lilian’s with her.” That would be Mrs. Beecham from next door. “She’ll be glad to see you. She’s a bit brighter this morning.” The front door was pushed open for him. “Which is funny really considering they’re coming to take her to the hospice any minute.”

“She wanted to stay at home,” Michael said.

“Not allowed. Shame, isn’t it? It’s not as if she’d no carers.”

Clara was in bed but fully dressed, her hair brushed, her shoes placed side by side on the floor next to the chair where Lilian sat. The wedding ring was on the thin third finger of her thin left hand. Michael went up to the bed and, meeting Clara’s eyes, evoking a small smile, bent over and kissed her.

“I’ll lay down now, Lil. Take my pillows away, would you. Let me lay down. They’re taking me away, Michael.”

“Sam told me. I believe it’s a nice place.” He had no knowledge of it, had only heard that hospices usually were nice.

Her voice was faint now but at least there was a voice. “The pain’s all gone, Michael. Is it all right calling you Michael? I did when you was little.”

“Of course it is, of course.”

“You was just a kid, and they was at the kitchen table holding hands like you wasn’t there and like I wasn’t there, his hand holding hers across the table, and your dad walked in.” Clara sighed, closed her eyes, and her hands moved across the coverlet, plucking and picking, reversing the action and then repeating the move
ments. “Walked in,” she whispered, “and saw. He never said a word. I remember it like it was yesterday.”

Michael felt sick. He would never hold anyone’s hand again. Never, never. He couldn’t bring himself to ask her if the man was James Rayment, though he knew it must have been. The room had become quiet. Clara breathed silently. Lilian Beecham said to him, “Get you a cup of tea, shall I?”

He shrugged, moved his hands from side to side in a gesture that might have meant anything. The tea came, and to his surprise he was glad of it. A vehicle had drawn up outside with
AMBULANCE
printed on its side. He half rose and turned to check that this was what it was. The moving hands that wandered across the coverlet were still now. He had only ever seen death happen once, and that was when Vivien had slipped, silent and still, from life to insensibility to death.

He knew it when he saw it. “Tell them they won’t be needed,” he said to Sam. “She’s gone.”

R
OSEMARY TOO LAY IN BED
. She did nothing. Although Freya’s spare room had a small television, Rosemary didn’t watch it. Nor did she read or listen to radio programmes. Usually considerate, as her neighbour put it, she forgot all that and in the flat in St. John’s Wood Road behaved as if she were in a hotel. Freya or David, home on paternity leave, brought her breakfast, and Judith, who called in every day, told her it would do her good to get up and move around, maybe go out for a walk. Only Fenella, arriving with Sybilla, had the nerve to tell Rosemary she wasn’t ill and should pull herself together. Sybilla bounced up and down on the sofa until her great-grandmother shouted at her to stop and threatened her—the ultimate in child abuse—with a “good hard smack.”

Rosemary sat at the dining table, silent and patient. “Like a dog,” said David, “waiting for its dinner.”

“Well, she is waiting for her dinner or her lunch,” said poor Freya, back in the kitchen. “What are we going to do?”

“She’ll go when the baby’s born. You’ll see.”

“I won’t be here to see.”

Unlike Norman Batchelor’s mother and Princess Andrew of Greece, Freya wasn’t preparing to give birth on a table. Her due date was past and the hospital had started making ominous noises. That afternoon, after Rosemary had been given her tea, a scone, and a piece of carrot cake, Freya doubled up and winced. “I’m having a pain.”

“Shall I drive you to the hospital?”

“Not yet. Much too soon.”

While refusing to watch television in her bedroom, Rosemary enjoyed it on her host’s much larger set. Everything they watched she deemed immoral or called a disgrace and asked for the channel to be changed or changed it herself. She preferred programmes about birdlife or handicrafts in Cumbria or clothes for the elderly. Freya sat down and watched TV with her, getting up from time to time to walk about the flat, secretly timing her pains. At 6:00 p.m. she said to her grandmother, “We’re leaving for the hospital now, Gran. Will you be all right on your own?”

“Why the hospital? Are you ill?”

“I’m in labour. I’m about to have a baby.”

“Are you?” Rosemary looked at her, mystified. “Nobody tells me anything.”

“Will you be all right on your own? Or shall I fetch Mum?”

Rosemary didn’t reply. She went into her bedroom, heard Freya and David call out, “Bye, Gran. See you later,” and sat on the bed, thinking. She had of course brought nothing with her, had borrowed a nightdress from Judith and a blouse and skirt. These she left in a neat pile on the bedside table. Next she stripped the bed. She dressed in the clothes she had come in, checked she had her front-door key, and returned to the living-room, where the phone
was ringing. Like two earlier calls, she ignored this one too. It would be Judith, whom Freya must have called in the car on one of those mobiles people had.

Out in the street, Rosemary would have taken a cab home but doubted the driver would take her all the way to Loughton. She had taken the tube here, so why not take it back again? I have changed, she thought, I am a different person from the woman who came here ten days ago. I no longer care. Caring has departed. All my life I have cared for other people, husband, children, grandchildren, friends, relatives, neighbours. Now I don’t, I only care for me. She walked along Hamilton Terrace and crossed Maida Vale, rather pleased with herself for not having a heavy bag to carry. Since her marriage, and rarely before that, she had never been into a café or restaurant on her own, not even for a cup of coffee or a sandwich. Alan had always been with her or one of her children or a friend. Outside the Café Laville she hesitated, then pushed open the door and went in.

The place would be full later, she guessed, but now only a few people were sitting at tables, all couples of course. A man came up and asked her what she wanted, and she said a cup of black coffee. He asked if she meant an Americano, and not having the faintest idea what that was, she agreed. It was easier that way. In future, she thought, she would always opt for the easy option. The coffee was quite nice. She didn’t want anything to eat. A bill came—ridiculous for a drop of coffee—but she found the precise sum in her purse, laid it on the table, and added a five-pence piece.

The tube took her to Baker Street, where she changed, as she remembered doing in reverse, for Liverpool Street. A lot of people were in the train for Loughton, commuters, and she was rather pleased for using the word appropriately. She had never been one and wouldn’t have cared to have joined their number and made this tedious trip every day. No taxis were waiting outside Loughton station. She didn’t feel like waiting for one to come, so she walked, tired by the time she reached Traps Hill.

The stripy cat was sitting outside her front door. The large, long-haired cat had a pleasant, even kindly expression. She had never before invited it in but did now. There would be no one else to welcome her home.

She was in her teens before her parents had a dog, but a cat was always in the house, never allowed to sit on armchairs or on the settee. Defiant now, even of the long dead, Rosemary lifted up the purring bundle and laid it on the sofa.

She slept better that night than she had ever done at Freya’s. Having forgotten all about Freya and her imminent delivery, in the morning she remembered without much enthusiasm or anxiety. No doubt someone would call and tell her. Someone did, at 9:00 a.m.

“Everyone’s been in a state about you,” said David. “Not me, I knew you’d be all right. Judith’s phoned all the rellies. Fenella wanted to call the police, but I don’t think she did. Incidentally, I’m a dad. Freya had a baby boy at one a.m. Three and a half kilos.”

Apart from knowing it was a measurement of weight, Rosemary hadn’t the faintest idea of what it was in pounds. She sent her love to Freya, thought about phoning Judith and decided against it, decided against phoning anyone. The stripy cat had got out of a window and was sitting on the balcony. Putting him out the front door to find his way home, she told him she had nothing for him but would buy cat food when she was out. There were no bathtubs at Freya’s, so she had a bath, luxuriating in it, then dressed in one of what Fenella had been heard to name as “Gran’s own creations” and got out her winter coat from the mothproof bag it had been in since March.

When she was in her teens and the war was over but clothing coupons were still in use, her mother didn’t take her “up to town” to buy clothes, but to Leytonstone and Bowman’s department store on the tube or to Ilford’s shops on the bus. Instead of clothes, the raw materials were what they went there for, dress lengths as they were called, or remnants, just enough fabric to make a skirt or blouse. No tee-shirts and scarcely any trousers in those days. They bought wool
too, but more often, while the war was on, unpicked old garments to knit up again. Her mother had taught her to sew and, according to the teenage Judith, behaving like a typical teenager, hadn’t been much of a teacher.

Rosemary had been undeterred and was undeterred now. She went into the shop that was run by an Asian family but had once been Penistans—the teenage schoolboys who were her contemporaries had made much of that name—and went on a shopping spree. A length of green silk, the same sort of fabric as the copper-coloured silk she had made into the dress and jacket for Freya’s wedding, was her first purchase; then came a few yards of fine wool; next a few metres of tweed; and lastly some expensive blue velvet. Mumtaz, as the shop was now called, thought it was Christmas and were all smiles. Rosemary had spent a fortune. There was too much stuff, in both senses of the word, for her to carry home, and Mumtaz said they would depart from their rule and bring it to her in the van.

Back at home she was hunting through her large stack of patterns when the van arrived. Another rule was broken when Mr. Ashok carried the baskets of materials into the flat for her. Her phone was ringing and she saw that several messages had been left. Let the phone ring and let the messages sit where they were. She would sit on the floor, pin the pattern she had chosen to the blue velvet, and cut it out. While she was machining, there would be no interruptions from Alan wanting her to go out for a walk or watch TV with him or give up her work and buy a designer frock. The phone rang again. She lifted the receiver and shouted into it, “Go away.”