CHAPTER TWENTY
Keeping an eye on Elizabeth Cherry's house, Susan Cox let herself in on Thursday morning and went dutifully from room to room. But her mind wasn't on what she was doing. She was thinking about the Notting Hill Carnival, due to begin on the coming Saturday and continue until the Monday evening. Its route this year was down Great Western Road from Westbourne Park Station, along Westbourne Grove and up Ladbroke Grove, a U-shape which would take in the Portobello Road but not enter it. The nearest it would pass to Pembridge Villas was when it sang and danced and rocked and rapped down Chepstow Road, but stragglers from it often strayed into these quiet sequestered streets and Susan feared for the small pieces of statuary in her front garden and the flowers in Elizabeth's. At one previous carnival a dancer in white satin with feathered angel's wings and a man dressed like Captain Hook had picked all the dahlias, and sat on the wall and rapped some lines of a current hit. Susan felt it incumbent upon her to stop that happening again, especially while Elizabeth was away.
It was a cool, pale-grey day, dry and windless. Because there was no wind and the curtains hung straight in their regular pleats, she failed to see that there was no glass in one of the dining-room windows. Lance had been an apt pupil of Dwayne's and had cut cleanly. She saw the buddleia and bamboo in Elizabeth's garden, as she always did, without noticing the lack of an intervening pane. The kitchen seemed just as she had found it two days before apart from an odour of not very fresh tomato. It was unlike Elizabeth to have thrown into the bin a soup can without first rinsing it but perhaps she had been in a hurry. After more than a week it would, of course, smell unpleasant. Wrinkling her nose, Susan removed it, still inside its bin liner, and took it home with her to be washed and put conscientiously in the recycling.
Making his preparations for the end, Joel now lived in as near to total darkness as is possible in a flat in the middle of London. No longer did light come through the glass pane in his front door. He had covered it up with a sheet of cardboard fixed to the frame with drawing pins. But there were lamps outside in the street that never went out. After the wettest, dullest, cloudiest summer since records began, the sun had begun to shine by day and the moon by night. Absolute darkness was impossible. Besides, his eyes had grown accustomed to the dark. Like a cat, he could find his way from room to room almost as easily as if the place had been brightly lit.
Noreen too had grown used to the way he lived. She came only three nights a week now and, to please him, brought with her a padded draught excluder in the shape of a snake, green and yellow with a forked tongue, which she laid along the bottom of her bedroom door. As well as draughts, it excluded the light from her bedside lamp. Linda no longer came. He couldn't understand why she was afraid of him and his home but she was. He had said nothing about her absence to Ella or his mother or Miss Crane. As for his father, no doubt he paid the bills without noticing or caring.
He had accumulated a quantity of sleeping pills. The hospital dispensary had provided him with a supply, some of which he had never taken. Linda had told him she needed pills if she was to get any sleep under his roof and on her last visit she had been so nervous that she had left hers behind. When she came round for them next day he said he knew nothing about her Mogadon and that she had to accept. The best sleeping pills, the strongest and most numerous, came from his mother. Her doctor gave her as many sedatives as she wanted and she had just asked for double her usual prescription on the grounds that worry about her son kept her awake. Joel investigated her handbag under cover of the habitual darkness and added these to his cache.
Noreen shopped for him on her way to Ludlow Mansions. The list he gave her always included meat and eggs and ready meals, and sometimes a bottle of wine. She wasn't surprised when he added gin and whisky to the list and she took it as a sign he was getting better. Cunningly, he wrote down mixed nuts as well and rice crackers. Starting to enjoy life, she told herself. Inviting friends round. Soon he'd be switching on lights and pulling up the blinds.
But he wasn't enjoying life. Nor was he doing or planning to do what Ella or Miss Crane might have suspected had they known about the pills and the spirits. Ella hadn't come lately. His fault. He could have called her, sent for her, but that he was postponing until the right time came, the absolutely precise right time. He had given up walking. Miss Crane he continued to visit once a week, wearing sunglasses, going to her consulting room in a taxi and returning home in one. He talked to her about Mithras, making up most of what he said, quite enjoying his inventions. Perhaps the psychotherapist knew this but if she did she gave no sign.
'He's started telling me to kill people with red hair,' he said. Miss Crane had red hair. 'When demons are incarnated their hair turns red.' She made no answer, not even nodding. 'I don't want to obey him because then he'll know he controls me.'
Mithras – the real Mithras – was visible more often to him now. In every beam of light that managed to infiltrate its way into the flat, he saw him. He told Miss Crane he never saw Mithras, only heard his voice. He told her Mithras said Ella and his mother and Noreen were demons, and he would have to kill them if he wanted peace of mind and happiness. They weren't red-headed but they were women and that was enough. Miss Crane said nothing. A thin, birdlike woman, her hair a mass of tight curls, she sat quite still, sometimes writing words on a sheet of paper. Joel only said those things because he had read that this is how schizophrenics behave. They hear voices and the voices tell them to commit crimes. It would be quite interesting to act the part of a schizophrenic, like a kind of hobby. Joel had never had a hobby of any sort. All Miss Crane said was that he should continue with his medication and she'd see him next week. On his way home, his hood up and wearing his strongest sunglasses, Joel went into a bookshop and bought a book about schizophrenia.
Noreen admitted a brief flood of light when she let herself out in the morning. Even after she had closed the door behind her, he saw Mithras across the hall. He had grown very beautiful, like the Michelangelo statue of David he had once seen in Florence and many times since in pictures. But now Joel longed to be rid of him. Later in the day Mithras talked, never telling Joel to harm people, but speaking mostly about the place he came from, that glorious city where angels walked on the glowing battlements. Sometimes he said he wanted to be back there, in that light, that sunshine which shone on the walls and roofs and minarets. He wanted to be back there but he didn't know how to find his way.
'I will find you a way,' Joel said to him. 'I know how to get you there and I'll do it soon.'
When he made this promise, and he was starting to make it every day, Mithras was silent and Joel knew he was grateful. Once he had been wary of addressing Mithras in Noreen's presence but now he spoke to him loudly in front of her so that she would think him schizophrenic.
Lance appeared in the magistrates' court and was once more released on police bail. Not many years before, in Uncle Gib's day for instance, they would have remanded him in custody. But there was no vacant cell in the police station and no room in the prisons, so Lance came home and made his way to his parents' flat in Acton, for he knew the well-tried dictum that home is all that is left for you to go to and where they have to take you in.
They weren't pleased. Another rule in these homecomings is that Dad is hard-hearted and will do his best to show you the door while Mum remembers how she carried you for nine months and what a lovely baby you were, only son et cetera, and dissuades him. They had a spare room, which had once been Lance's room and was now full of defunct kitchen equipment, old motorcycling magazines, a broken bicycle and a stack of car tyres of unknown provenance. But a space was cleared for Lance to sleep there.
More than anything, he missed Gemma. He lay awake in that horrible bedroom trying to think of ways to reach her. Traffic thundered past the block where his parents lived. There was a pothole in the roadway just outside and every time a heavy lorry passed over it the place shook as if an earthquake were happening, and Lance was afraid the broken bike and the stacked tyres would topple over on top of him. One of the neighbours had written to the council that it was time they mended the road but nothing was done. He tried to phone Gemma when he calculated Fize would be at work but he never got a reply.
The police were determined to victimise him. The 'perpetrator' they called him, a word Lance hadn't previously heard. 'Alleged' was another word he didn't understand. Of course he could have told them he couldn't have set fire to Uncle Gib's house because he was breaking into Elizabeth Cherry's at the time but he dismissed that solution out of hand. The chances were they'd never be able to prove arson, and therefore murder, and he'd get off scot-free while being found guilty of burglary, which would land him in prison. Uncle Gib always used to say that the British never cared much about what you did to other people, it was property they thought more of. Lance hadn't taken much notice at the time but those words came back to him while he was in a police cell and now in his parents' flat.
Lying in his uncomfortable bed at night, shaken and buffeted by the lorries going past, he thought of Gemma and he repeated that word 'perpetrator' to himself, trying to decide whether it sounded worse than 'burglar' or better.
The Notting Hill Carnival starts on Saturday but Sunday and Monday (a Bank Holiday) are always the big days. Its route this year, much the same as last year, eventually wound its way up Ladbroke Road and it was there that Uncle Gib stationed himself. In years gone by, when he hadn't been inside, he regularly attended the Notting Hill Carnival and he didn't see why he should miss this year just because his house had burnt down. He was a thief, or rather had been a thief, so he knew that pickpockets and bag snatchers infested the Carnival route, mingling with the crowd. For this reason he took no money with him. If he had possessed credit cards, a watch and jewellery, he wouldn't have taken those things with him either. He was unaccommodated man but for his second-hand trousers bought off a stall in the Portobello Road and one of Reuben's collarless shirts. If anyone had stolen from his person he would, as a former thief himself, have been deeply ashamed, so he gave them no opportunity.
Among the crowds watching the floats, the bands and the dancers, the blazing colours under a freak sunny sky, he spotted first Lance and later Fize with a black guy and a white one. To some extent Uncle Gib had what the average person (but not psychiatrists) call a split personality. A born-again religious man, he of course deplored stealing as in direct defiance of a Commandment but, as a reformed thief, he watched with enjoyment the antics of such as Ian Pollitt, the black one and the white one as they sized up the hundreds who lined the route and calculated which pocket or handbag might be rifled with impunity. He actually saw the white one remove what looked like a credit card from a woman's jacket pocket and Pollitt attempt, but fail, to extract a purse from a handbag.
Distracted by all this as he was, Lance caught him off-guard. There was no escape. Uncle Gib rounded on him before he could speak. 'If I wasn't against bad language like I am, I wouldn't call you an arsonist but an arsehole.'
'I haven't done nothing,' said Lance.
'Why aren't you banged up? That's what I want to know.'
'I don't know. They never said. I'm on bail. Can I come and live at your place?'
Uncle Gib almost spat. 'I haven't got a place. I'm homeless. Some dear friends took me in out of the goodness of their hearts and there's no room for the likes of you.'
Next day came Dorian Lupescu's funeral, a grand extravagant affair at the Russian Orthodox church in Moscow Road. Uncle Gib was invited. How Dorian's parents and wife and aunts and uncles and cousins knew of his existence and where to find him Uncle Gib didn't know, but they did find him and sent an invitation on beautiful cream-laid paper with a black border and a black silk ribbon bow. His striped suit having perished in the fire, he borrowed one from Reuben along with another shirt and black tie. Poor Dorian's body was transported in a mahogany coffin with brass fittings in a black-and-gold carriage drawn by four black horses with black feathers on their heads. The service was in Russian or Greek or something but Uncle Gib sang along with the hymns in English, though he didn't really know the tunes.
Afterwards, they all stood out in the street smoking strong Russian cigarettes and Dorian's mother thanked Uncle Gib in the best English she could manage for being kind to her son and Gib was so moved that he had tears in his eyes for the first time since he was an infant. Back at home with the Perkinses a piece of good news awaited him. The Children of Zebulun had clubbed together and bought him a new computer. Maybelle was giving him the box room for a study to use for answering his Agony Uncle letters.
August went out like a lion, a very wet and bedraggled lion, and September came in like a lamb, skipping in the sunshine. At the beginning of the first week, in the middle of the afternoon, Elizabeth Cherry came back from her holiday. Almost the first thing she noticed was the glassless window frame. Rain had soaked the curtains, which had dried again with unsightly stains, and left a damp patch on the carpet. She phoned Susan, who knew nothing about it and who began abject apologies for not noticing. You can't castigate your neighbour who has been keeping an eye on your property without payment even though that eye has failed to spot the only thing it was kept there for. Would Elizabeth like Susan to come over? Elizabeth said not now, tomorrow perhaps, and carried her case upstairs. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed. She unpacked her clothes and tipped the contents of the small jewel case she had carried with her – a spare watch in case the battery in hers gave out and a ring to wear for a dress-up evening – into the large jewel box on her dressing table.
In the kitchen, she looked through the freezer for a packet of strawberry ice cream. No sign of it. She supposed she was getting forgetful and had eaten it herself. The toaster was full of crumbs. She was sure she hadn't left it that way. Elizabeth went back upstairs to scrutinise the jewel box. The difficulty was that she couldn't now remember what had been in the box when first she opened it half an hour before and what she had added to it from the contents of her carry-on case. Still, there could be no doubt about what was missing: a diamond ring and and diamond eternity ring, both of which had been her mother's, a gold chain and a gold bracelet. Elizabeth phoned the police.
The policeman who came was sympathetic and pleasant. He was happy to tell her where she could find a glazier to mend the window. There would be no fingerprints, he was sure of that, but an officer would come and check. No doubt the jewellery was insured? Elizabeth nodded. The house was, the contents were and the jewellery. They asked her to describe what was missing. By the time she was halfway through the list, both of them could see that her description fitted thousands of pieces of jewellery.
'I wouldn't be doing you any favours', the policeman said, 'if I told you there was much chance of our finding the villain. In fact, the chances are practically nil.'
It was only after he had gone that she missed the credit card, the euros and the transatlantic dollars.
Lew Crown would be back from his holidays by now, as the old woman in Pembridge Villas must also be. When another day went by and another and no police officers presented themselves at his parents' door, Lance began to feel a little more secure. She was old, her brain would be going and she hadn't noticed anyone had been in there. She must have seen the window, though. Lance refused to let himself worry about that. He'd got enough on his plate. That package must be fetched from his nan's place and taken over to Holloway.
Lance forgot he was out on bail on a charge of murder and arson, and began dreaming of the untold wealth that would accrue to him from the sale of the jewellery. Perhaps he'd get enough, not to buy a place – even he wasn't so naive as that – but to rent somewhere nice enough to make Gemma leave Fize and come to live with him. He tore the old woman's chequebook in two and cut her credit card in half.