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.

“I don’t want to see her,” she said aloud. “I don’t want to see her and I don’t want to see Auntie. They don’t need me, they’ve got each other.”

No one answered her.

Clean and in clean clothes, light grey Dockers from the charity shop and a white T-shirt with Auntie’s silver cross on the chain round her neck, Minty sat in the window reading the papers and from time to time looking up at the street outside. It was after five and the Wilsons hadn’t come back. Gertrude Pierce came out of Mr. Kroot’s with a letter in her hand. Her orange hair was quite white at the roots. She had a purple coat on with a fake fur collar, a winter coat on a warm summer afternoon. Minty watched her cross the street and walk down to the postbox on the corner of Laburnam. Now, returning, she was facing this way and Minty saw that she’d covered her face with makeup, coats of it, and scarlet lipstick and black stuff on her eyebrows. It made you shudder to think of wearing all that muck on your skin, and she must have been seventy-five if she was a day.

The ghost voices didn’t comment. They hadn’t spoken for the past couple of hours. Minty made herself a cup of tea in a nice clean white mug and had a Danish pastry with it that she’d personally watched the man, wearing gloves, pick up with stainless-steel tongs from under a cover, on a white plate with a white doily on it. Then, when she’d washed up the mug and the plate and dried them, she put on a clean white cardigan and went across Harrow Road to the cemetery. On the way she passed Laf and Sonovia and the little girl and Daniel’s wife, Lauren, coming home in Laf’s car. They waved to her out of the open windows. Lauren had her long black hair done in what they called corn rows and pictures of flowers on her fingernails, which wasn’t right in a doctor’s wife.

The cemetery was very green and lush, buttercups and daisies growing among the grass and fresh gleaming moss climbing over the old stones. The full gasometer loomed on the far side of the canal. Sometimes, when it was nearly empty, it was just the bones of itself, like the skeletons that lay everywhere here in moldering boxes under the ground. She went along the path between the ilexes and conifers where ivy clambered over mossy fallen angels and lichened mausoleums. Some of the gravestones had stone ivy carved on them with real ivy climbing over it. No one was about. It was just here, where the two paths intersected, that she had seen Jock coming toward her in his black leather jacket. She was sure she’d never see him again. She’d never pray to Auntie again, not after the way she’d been treated, and there’d be no more flowers on the grave.

It was hard because Auntie had been all she’d got, really, until Jock came along. Sonovia had once said Auntie was like God to her, and Laf, who’d been there, was shocked and said not to talk like that, Minty didn’t worship Auntie, she didn’t pray to her. The truth was she did but she couldn’t say so, though when she went home she got down on her knees and prayed. She was muddled, she didn’t know what to do, to thank Auntie for dying and leaving her the house and the bathroom, or to wish her alive again. Well, in a way, that second wish had come true.

The carnations and gypsophila she’d put on the grave a couple of weeks ago were dead now and brown. The water in the vase was brown too and only about an inch of it was left. She pulled out the dead flowers, threw the water on the ground, and put the vase back where she’d found it, on the slab in front of some old man’s tomb. The sun warmed her and she lifted up her face to its gentle evening light. She’d expected Auntie and maybe Mrs. Lewis to say something. Auntie must know by now that she’d meant it when she’d said there’d be no more flowers. Removing the vase would have told her that. The dead knew everything, saw all. But no voices came, they’d gone away somewhere, back to where they’d come from.

That done, she’d go to the pictures. On her own. Walk it, it wasn’t that far to Whiteley’s. If she was going to see them anywhere, she thought, it would be in the underpass by Royal Oak station, though she’d no special reason to associate either of them with tunnels under roads. And they weren’t there, not even their muttering voices. Something called The Insider and something else called The Beach were the choices before her. She chose the latter and had to sit through a story about a bunch of teenagers in some foreign place.

A man came and sat beside her and offered her a Polo mint. She shook her head and said no, but of course it reminded her of Jock, and when the man put his hand on her knee she remembered how she’d told Jock she was his and would be forever. There’d never be anyone else. It made no difference that Jock had stolen all her money. She picked up the man’s hand, digging her nails into the back of it until he cried out. Then she moved three seats along the row and after a minute or two he left.

When she came out of the cinema it was dark and no longer very warm. She walked up toward Edgware Road and waited for a 36 bus. It was while she was standing there, quite alone, in a dreary, isolated place near Paddington Basin, that she saw Auntie sitting on the seat under the bus shelter. She wasn’t as clear as Jock had been but a shape that you could see through, a semitransparent entity that was nevertheless unmistakably Auntie from her iron gray hair in a coil on the back of her head and her rimless glasses to her sensible black lace-up shoes.

Minty wasn’t going to speak to her, she wouldn’t give her the satisfaction, but she did wonder if taking the vase away and throwing out the dead flowers was what had brought her back in visible form. Of Mrs. Lewis there was no sign. Minty stared at Auntie, and Auntie purposely looked away toward the bridge over the canal. Within a few minutes the double-decker came. I’m not getting on it if she does, Minty said to herself. But when the bus stopped Auntie got up and went away toward the underpass.

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Minty said as she passed her money to the driver.

“You what?”

A lot of people were staring at her.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” she said to the driver, and to the rest of them, “or any of you.”

She went upstairs to the top, to escape them.