Tigerlily's Orchids (24 page)

With the single spark of defiance that remained to him, Wally said, ‘I don't have to tell you that.'

‘We shall draw our own conclusions if you don't, Walter.'

It was when they used his first name that Wally knew it was all up. ‘Barbie,' he said.

‘Pardon me?'

‘That's my password, Barbie – well, Barbie 1.'

No comment was made. Wally got up and went into the bedroom. He couldn't bear to stay in the living room any longer. He lay down on the unmade bed and buried his face in the pillows as if he could find oblivion that way. Richenda was talking to Blakelock. Wally heard the word ‘recycling' and then he heard her say it had been put out the night before but the council collectors wouldn't be here for hours yet.

The front door opened and closed. Richenda came into the bedroom and pulled at him roughly by the shoulder.

‘Get up. I want to make the bed.'

Wally didn't move.

‘What are they looking for?'

‘Nothing. I don't know.'

‘If it's what I think it is, they'll take your computer away
and then they'll take you. When you come back – if you do – I won't be here. Just so you know.'

A
n hour later, Rose and Marius were still in bed in Marius's flat. It was the drip-drip-drip of falling water which awoke Rose. Could he or she have left a tap running in the bathroom or kitchen the night before? She was always very careful about things like that and she was sure he would be too. She got up and the movement woke him. Marius was never drowsy in the mornings. He was alert as soon as his eyes opened and he knew immediately what was happening.

‘That's water coming through the ceiling.'

They both got up. Marius went first into the living room. Water was coming in but in a spreading stream trickling under the door while the dripping went on. It was Rose who opened the door to the kitchen. A shallow lake covered the tiled floor, its level slowly increased by the drips which fell not into Marius's sink but on to the overflowing draining board and splashed into the lake itself.

‘It's coming from Olwen's,' said Rose. ‘I know I'm a bit silly sometimes, Marius. I do know that. I asked Michael at Stuart's party if women had more ribs than men because of Adam and Eve and I could see he thought I was an idiot –'

‘I'll kill him.'

‘Yes, well, I am sometimes. What I was going to say was, you know what happens to that old man in
Bleak House
, he's drunk so much he sort of explodes – what's it called?'

‘Spontaneous combustion,' said Marius, already laughing.

‘And he sort of liquefies – well, you don't think Olwen …?'

‘No, darling Rose, I don't. This is water. She's left a tap running. I'll phone Scurlock and then we'll go up there, try to get in.'

Richenda answered. She sounded triumphant. ‘He's not here. The police have taken him away
and
his computer
and
an envelope full of bits of dirty pictures come out of the recycling. You want him, you get on to them. I'll see you later.' She slammed down the phone.

Rose and Marius got dressed and went up to the top floor. They expected to see water coming under the front door but there was nothing. Marius rang Olwen's bell and when there was no answer rang it again. Rose took off one of her shoes and hammered on the door with it.

‘We're going to have to break it down.'

‘Oh, darling, can you do that? It looks so easy in those detective serials but I'm sure it isn't, in real life.'

‘I'm sure it isn't too, but I can try.'

Marius tried. He took a running jump at the door, giving it a kick which did more harm to him than the door. As he retreated, clutching hold of the small of his back, a door slammed on the floor below and Michael Constantine came bounding up the stairs.

‘Has something happened to her?'

‘God knows,' said Marius. ‘All I know is she's flooding my flat and she doesn't answer the door.'

‘Let me have a go.'

Marius and Rose both knew (they told each other afterwards) that Michael would succeed at first try and so he did. The door flew open. Olwen was sitting on the sofa. She tried to get up but failed and sank back on to the dirty red cushions, staring at them with clouded eyes, her mouth half open. Marius opened the door to the kitchen. He released a flood and quickly closed it again. Taking off his shoes and socks, he rolled up his trousers, plunged once more into the kitchen and turned off the cold tap from which water had been pouring into the already overflowing sink.

‘We'll have to bale it out or the lot will come through,' he said, pulling out the sink plug.

The three of them began baling out the water, using whatever utensils came to hand, a fruit bowl, a vase and a small milk saucepan. Olwen was ill-equipped with pans and possessed no buckets. It took a long time and the final inch had to be soaked up with cloths. Michael opened a cupboard and found it full of rags. One of these, something which had once been a skirt, black with coloured flowers, Rose used to complete the drying of the floor.

Marius quoted ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and said that there was water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink, and when they looked about them they noticed the absence of the expected vodka and gin bottles. Olwen was staring at the window. Afterwards Rose said to Marius that the look on her face reminded her of a character in a television sitcom gazing at something out of shot that the viewer can't see but knows, because of her expression, must be terrible. And then Olwen did speak. She spoke the longest sentence any of them had ever heard from her.

‘They're climbing up the window again, a whole gang of them, like they were crawling over the sink when I turned the tap on, more of them now, too many of them to count.'

On the other side of the room Rose said to Michael, ‘What does she mean?' They withdrew into the still damp kitchen. ‘What is it she sees?'

‘God knows. But I know what it is. It's called “delirium tremens”. It happens to alcoholics, they have hallucinations of animals or people or anything. I've never seen it before.'

‘We shall have to do something,' said Marius.

‘I'll call an ambulance.' Michael thought he might write about the DTs for his next article, as a warning to binge-drinking teenagers.

*

R
ichenda had no notion of the nature of the pornography Wally had been watching and no clear idea of what was legal to watch and what illegal. Whatever it might be, it was enough to drive her to leave him, something she had been contemplating for a long time now. She intended not to go far. Working all day and every day except Sunday, cleaning flats in the four blocks, she was making a good income and had decided to rent one of the flats herself, a studio probably, of which there were two in Ludlow House, one presently vacant.

The estate office wouldn't open for another half-hour. She packed the two largest suitcases, stuffing into them, among her clothes, Wally's camera, her hairdryer and their radio. The television she put back into the box it had come in and loaded it on to a shopping trolley she had filched from the Tesco. She considered leaving her front-door key behind but decided to keep it. You never knew what else she might want to come back for.

Getting all this stuff up the stairs was a struggle but after three journeys she had the lot up in the hallway. Standing there, thinking what her next move was to be, she saw the lift open and two paramedics emerge with Olwen on a stretcher. They carried her out and loaded the stretcher into the back of their ambulance. Richenda left her bags where they were but took the trolley and the television set with her.

The letting manager had just opened the office. He knew Richenda well, could almost have called himself a friend, and was happy to offer her a six-month lease of Flat 6, the vacant studio in Ludlow House. Richenda gave him a cheque for a large deposit and by ten o'clock she had moved in. In half an hour she was due at her first job, cleaning Marius Potter's flat.

‘Where's all this water come from, then?'

‘The flat above,' said Marius.

Richenda nodded. ‘There was bound to be a disaster sooner or later but I never would have thought water'd be involved.'

She mopped the kitchen floor, pronounced on the damage and said that Marius would have to get the builders in before he could show the flat to any prospective buyers. ‘You remember that do poor Stuart had?'

‘Well, I was there.'

‘You called the police, didn't you?'

‘I did.'

Richenda said no more but she gave herself up to some serious thinking while plying the vacuum cleaner. Was looking at dirty pictures all they wanted Wally for, or did they have him down as a suspect in Stuart's murder? She would be quite happy never to see Wally again and she intended to divorce him as soon as she could, but murder? That wasn't on. Wally hadn't killed anyone. Hadn't the nerve, Richenda thought spitefully, and she remembered what she had once heard someone say about a timid person: got a serious stomach complaint – no guts. That made her laugh to herself as she dusted Marius's aunt's sideboard.

‘Did you call the police because that chap threatened to kill Stuart?'

Marius had just come back from consulting Rose about local handymen. ‘Probably.'

‘What was his name?'

‘I don't remember,' said Marius and shut himself in the bathroom.

Richenda was due to clean the girls' flat next. Well, Noor's. It was she who paid. The place was always a mess, dirty dishes not only in the sink and on the draining board but in the bath as well, clothes on the floor and on every chair, make-up everywhere. Richenda often helped herself to a lipstick or a jar of moisturiser. They had so much they never noticed.

The others were out but Molly was at home. Since Stuart's
death she had dressed herself entirely in black every day. And she was losing weight.

Largely because she knew Molly wouldn't care to be complimented, Richenda said, ‘You're looking good.'

‘I'm feeling horrendous. My heart is broken. I was totally in love with him – did you know that?' Richenda made no reply. ‘He'd given up that Claudia, you know. He was getting to love me, I know he was, and then some monster killed him.'

‘Claudia – yes, that was the name. What was her husband called?'

‘Freddy something. Some place in Italy. Florence? Positano? I don't know. I don't care. Knowing what he's called won't bring Stuart back.'

‘I'd know it if I heard it,' said Richenda.

T
he only person in the flats likely to have an atlas (as against looking up everything on a computer) was Marius. He was out, so Richenda let herself in and examined with some pleasure and a lot of interest the water damage. Then she spent a few minutes on the map of Italy, and when she had finished her afternoon's work, walked across to the murder room in the Bel Esprit Centre.

Blakelock was there but not Bashir. He was in Flat 5 questioning Molly. Richenda had led him to believe that Molly was another of Stuart's women (as he put it to himself) and might therefore know what enemies he had. She would have liked the police to believe she was having a love affair with Stuart, that she had been a rival to Claudia or even her successor. But Sophie was in the room while Bashir was talking to her and as soon as the suggestion was made and not denied, she chipped in with, ‘Oh, Moll, who are you trying to kid? You never came near having a relationship with him.'

‘I never said I had!'

‘I mean, come on, after that Claudia? Get real.'

Molly decided to forgive Sophie on the grounds that the poor thing hadn't got a boyfriend while she at least had Carl who had reappeared in her life.

‘We were very close,' she said to Bashir, ‘but it wasn't a physical relationship.' And she told him about Martin and Jack and Hilary and the people in Chester House, all friends of Stuart's who might equally have been his enemies.

I
t was strange and perhaps rather unpleasant, Duncan thought, the way a murder in the neighbourhood, a murder of someone everyone knows if only by sight, brings people together. Of course, he had known Jock and Kathy Pember before Stuart's death but not to the extent he knew them now. Moira/Esmeralda and Ken, the woman who wore the patchwork fur or had done in the winter, and the man she lived with – Duncan rather disapproved – had called and asked him if he was going to the funeral and could they go with him. He asked them in for a coffee and Kathy popped in while they were there and it was all very friendly.

The weather had turned warm, quite a heatwave for May. Although his French windows were wide open, as were all the windows in the house, Duncan had to apologise for the place being so hot. He had bought a couple of fans but they made little difference.

‘Those things just move the hot air about,' said Kathy. ‘Our place is freezing summer and winter.'

Out of politeness Duncan asked Moira and Ken about the temperature in their house, and Moira said she hadn't noticed but then she was ‘a cold mortal'. Perhaps Duncan hadn't realised that because the Springmead people cultivated exotic house plants they had to keep the place hot and maybe this also affected Duncan's home.

‘Our house is detached, you see,' she said with conscious superiority. ‘That's why we don't feel it.'

Stuart's funeral was to be in the middle of the following
week. ‘When the forensic people have finished with the body,' said Ken, rather relishing the whole thing, Duncan thought.

He poured more coffee, said that the murder was a tragedy for Stuart's parents. They would be holding a small gathering of Stuart's friends at Flat 1 after the funeral. ‘I expect we shall all go, won't we?'

‘It's the least we can do to show respect,' said Ken, momentarily closing his lineless eyelids.