28

Walking down from St. Barbara’s House in Camden High Street, the women’s hostel where she sometimes slept, Effie turned her eyes to the window of the Oxfam shop. She looked at it as another woman might look at the windows of Selfridges or D. H. Evans. Oxfam prices were usually beyond Effie but they were a possibility, they weren’t ludicrous, they weren’t that other woman’s Harrod’s. She needed a T-shirt, it was so bloody hot. The only one in the window had elephants on it, a married couple of elephants they were supposed to be with a couple of babies. Vanity had gone out of Effie’s life ages ago—but her with a family of elephants on her front?

Do me a favor. Anyway, it was about sixteen sizes too small.

A baseball cap she could live without. A pimple on an egg that would be on her Humpty-Dumpty face. Maybe she’d try the Sue Ryder place for her T-shirt if she could remember where it was. She wandered on, shifting the heavier bundles she carried from her left to her right hand, heading for the Gloucester Gate.

Dill went up there later to cash his giro, but he didn’t look in the Oxfam window because he never bought clothes. The nuns who had a soup and bun stall in Eversholt Street five nights a week handed out cast-off clothing for free. He was more interested in food for the beagle, which he’d run out of, so he tied the dog up to a parking meter and went into the Indian mini-market where he bought five cans of Cesar, gourmet stuff but light to carry in those little foil cans. The beagle would wolf it down.

Roman passed that by on his way from the Hawley Hotel to Lisson Grove where the Benefit Office and Job Center is, a long walk but nothing much to one who had walked miles every day for the best part of two years. A slight embarrassment stopped him looking at the Oxfam shop as he passed it. He consciously kept his eyes averted. The previous day he had handed over to them all the clothes—those that had survived and were in a reasonably decent condition—he had worn while on the street, having washed them first and worked on them with the hotel’s ancient iron. They would very likely be in the window. He had taken no money for them, but it troubled him vaguely that there were people out there prepared to pay for and wear his castoffs. So he didn’t look.

Nor did Nello, also on his way to cash his giro and spend half of it in the Red Lion. The school-leaver who had inherited most of Bean’s dogs dragged all his charges past the window, heading for the pharmacy where his mother’s repeat prescription for barbs was regularly dispensed. As often as not, the dogs never saw the grass of the park these days; the school-leaver was too busy shopping or playing the fruit machines.

It had taken him only two days to time the early walk for two hours later. Outside the pharmacy he tied the dogs up so tightly that Ruby couldn’t get her leg over or Spots catch a sniff of Charlie’s chuff. Another hundred chlorme-something or others, please, and this prescription for his baby brother who never gave any of them a wink of sleep. It was for pediatric Valium in syrup form. The school-leaver was going to divide it up and sell it in forty-milliliter phials, there was a good market among the buffs for coming down from a speed hangup. Cough mixture would go into the Vallergon bottle and his brother no doubt would keep on screaming half the night.

It had to be one of Bean’s regulars who spotted the T-shirt and the baseball cap, but few of them ever looked in charity shop windows, let alone went inside. In any case, Camden High Street was too down-market or just bohemian for the Barker-Pryces, Erna Morosini, Mrs. Sellers, and Edwina Goldsworthy, and not sufficiently recherché for Lisl Pring. Just as well for the school-leaver or they might have seen their dogs lashed to lampposts outside the pinball arcade. The one who looked but saw no need to go inside was Valerie Conway.

She was living with her boyfriend just off Camden High Street and was walking down to her new job as receptionist in the Peugeot showrooms. The neighbors in Jamestown Road had been all agog when they found out she’d known Bean quite well, seen him every day and talked to him. It was a wonder it wasn’t she the police had hauled in to identify his body.

“I was like Bo-Peep’s sheep,” Valerie said. “They didn’t know where to find me.”

But she wasn’t without public spirit. And she wasn’t too posh for Oxfam shops. Her sister had bought a really nice boob tube from one of them and worn it on her honeymoon in Bodrum. Valerie was on the lookout for a halter top. A red one was in the very center of the window and the idea apparently was that you wore it with the red baseball cap they’d stuck on the plaster model’s head. Valerie went inside, her heart thudding uncomfortably.

“D’you know where you got that from?”

“If you mean who brought it in,” said the sour-faced middle-aged volunteer, “I do remember the the man, but we’re not in the habit of divulging the names of donors.”

“Suit yourself,” said Valerie. “I’ll have the red halter. I just wanted to know about the baseball cap because the last time I saw it it was on the head of one of those blokes that got themselves impaled on railings.”

•   •   •

The day came and went. The wedding day. He hadn’t come, so Mary understood that he must somehow know he was discovered. The scam was over. If he was close to the real Leo Nash, and he must have been, perhaps the Harvest Trust had let him know they had informed her. After all, she would have received that letter much sooner if Alistair hadn’t delayed sending it on.

His failure to come was at the same time a relief and a disappointment. A relief because of her shame at the things she had said, her confidings in him, her confessions of love, the relative speed with which she had let him make love to her and later, her reveling in that lovemaking. The disappointment was because she was angry. Although she had appeared indifferent to it at the time, she had taken to heart Nikolai’s advice. You could try anger. She had tried, perhaps for the first time in her life.

Anger had come and begun to grow and as it grew brought with it a kind of liberation. Why hadn’t she previously let herself be angry? With Alistair, for instance? But the anger she now nourished needed expression and it could only express itself to him. And he didn’t come, would never come.

The police came instead.

They wanted more identification, this time to tell them if a red baseball cap and T-shirt with elephants on it had belonged to Bean. Had she ever seen Bean wearing them?

“Many times,” she said. “He wore the hat every day in hot weather. I only saw the T-shirt once, but it was his.”

There must have been a new firmness about her, a decisiveness, which she fancied made Marnock give her one or two surprised glances. Had she ever seen Bean with anyone? Had he, for instance, ever been accompanied when he came to fetch or return Gushi? She answered no without hesitation to both questions and the policemen thanked her and left.

Dorothea was coming round in the evening. Mary had phoned her the night before to tell her the wedding was off but giving no further explanation. She had phoned her cousin in Guildford. After all, if she didn’t understand herself, how could she explain? She found a bottle of wine, the Chardonnay Leo had been so fond of, and dialed Express Tikka and Pizza for chicken korma with pilau rice and Bombay potatoes for eight o’clock.

One of the qualities for which she liked Dorothea was her willingness to accept a refusal to explain, her submission without protest to silence on a particular subject. She was discreet, could keep a secret, and understood about other people having private places they wanted to keep inviolate.

“Don’t ask,” Mary said. “I say that because I don’t really know why myself. Perhaps I’ll have an explanation one day and then I’ll tell you. And then maybe you won’t want to know, you won’t care.”

Dorothea had brought a basket of peaches and a carton of clotted cream. “Better put this in your fridge till it’s time to eat it.” In the same tone she said, “Are you very unhappy?”

“I don’t know. That’s a peculiar answer, but I really don’t know. I’m angry. I’ve never been so angry with anyone and it feels so strange and new. But I can’t be angry with him because I don’t know where he is.”

They sat on the terrace and drank Campari with ice and orange juice and lime slices. Gushi lay half under the lilac bush and half on the grass, snapping at any moth that came his way. The sky was very pale blue, as if long exposure to the fierce sun had faded it. There was a smell of smoke. Not illegal smoke from an illicit bonfire, Mary thought, but a fire somewhere, perhaps on the embankment of the railway line coming out of Euston. Fires kept breaking out from cigarette ends tossed onto tinder-dry grass. “I brought you a paper,” Dorothea said, “for distraction. Well, a rag, a tabloid. Have you ever heard of an MP called Barker-Pryce?”

“I don’t think so.”

“That man Bean that was murdered used to take his dog out. The dog must have gone out with Gushi. A golden retriever called Charlie.”

“I remember the dog.”

Dorothea passed her the front page. There was not much text. It was mostly photographs and headline: THE MP AND HIS TOY, with beneath it, WHAT WAS THE LINK WITH MURDERED MAN? One photograph was of a choleric-looking elderly man with bristly whiskers and badly cut hair, sitting at a table in what looked like a drinking club but might have been in a private house, next to a young heavily made-up girl with waist-length hair. A cigar with a pendulous head of ash pulled down one corner of his mouth. Fingers fat as sausages could be seen gripping the girl’s shoulder from behind. Her head rested on his shoulder. The caption read, A Toy is only a toy but a good cigar is a smoke. James Barker-Pryce, Conservative Member for Somers Town and South Hampstead, parties with a friend. The other photograph, snapped on a beach somewhere, was of Bean.

It was hard for Mary to take much in. Distraction does not always distract. She seemed to have no concentration. The lines of print danced.

“Here, you read it to me.”

“All right. I like reading aloud. The missing link. The time has come for the public to be told. What was the connection between James Barker-Pryce MP and Leslie Arthur Bean, the murdered dog-walker?

“It is several days since the police revealed that Bean was not The Impaler’s latest victim but that this was a copycat killing. Leslie Bean was well known to Mr. Barker-Pryce’s friend Miss Toy Townsende, 23, who has told police, ‘I knew Les when he was a butler. That was three or four years ago at my friend Mr. Maurice Clitheroe’s home. Les was employed by my friend James Barker-Pryce to walk his beautiful retriever dog Charlie, but I think there must have been some disagreement between them as the dog-walking ceased, though Les still paid visits to Mr. Barker-Pryce’s Regent’s Park home.…’

“Can you imagine anyone actually talking like that?”

“It sounds libelous to me. How do they hope to get away with it?”

“Perhaps they don’t care. On the phone today Mr. Barker-Pryce, 68, said he had no memory of any photograph of himself and Miss Townsende. It was possible she was the young lady who made a suggestion to him while he was parking his Mercedes in Paddington Street, London W1, two months ago. Mrs. Julia Barker-Pryce, 62, Mr. Barker-Pryce’s wife of 33 years, was not available for comment. She and her husband are … Turn to page two.

“Here’s a shot of the girl in a G-string. She can’t really be called Toy, can she? She and her husband are spending the weekend at their country retreat at Upper Slaughter, Gloucestershire … Upper Slaughter? I don’t believe it.”

“There really is a place called that. Dorrie, did you hear the front doorbell?”

“I don’t think so. Listen. It goes on, Mr. Barker-Pryce later told our reporter—I suppose they’re all barracking him outside his country house—‘There was no quarrel between me and Mr. Bean. That would be impossible. He was a working man and I believe former servant. I dismissed him for incompetence and there is no truth in rumors that he visited my house or that I continued to pay him a remuneration …’ Oh, that must have been the bell!”

The tikka man had come round the side of the house in search of them. He was wearing his red and white T-shirt with red jeans and carrying a tray laden with covered dishes, fastened to his torso with straps like a rucksack.

“I’m so sorry,” Mary said. “We weren’t sure if we heard the bell.”

“Shall I put it in the kitchen for you?”

“Thank you.”

He went indoors. When he came back, he gave Dorothea a doubtful look, then a smile and a, “I’m not mistaken, am I, madam?”

“No, no. You used to drive the dry cleaner’s van, didn’t you? Oh, it must be five years back.”

“That’s right. Spot on. And you live in Charles Lane up in St. John’s Wood.”

They began reminiscing. Mary went indoors, turned the oven on low, and put the korma, rice, and vegetables inside. Leo’s engagement ring that he had bought her in a shop in Camden Passage was still on her finger. She took it off and wondered what would happen to it if she put it down the waste disposal unit and pressed the switch. It might break the unit. Better give it to some poor dosser to sell. She took it off and dropped it inside the cutlery drawer. Then she peeled two peaches, sliced them, and looked for a liqueur to pour over them. The Amaretto Leo had brought the previous week …

Even in her mind she had better stop calling him that. Leo wasn’t his name. He wasn’t Oliver either, he couldn’t even be called by the pseudonym under which she had so long known the recipient of her donation, for he wasn’t that recipient, it wasn’t into his bones that her marrow had been induced, but an unknown dead man’s.

She took the wine out of the refrigerator, found a corkscrew, and put it with two glasses on a tray. Dorothea was lying back in the lounging chair, gazing up at the pale sky, now covered with a network of vapor trails. Gushi had climbed onto her lap. The tikka man had gone.

“That poor man,” Dorothea said, sitting up. “He went to prison for running someone over when he was driving a laundry van. Of course I didn’t mention any of that. But I remembered. I don’t think you ought to go to prison if you didn’t mean to kill someone, do you?”

“Sometimes I think no one ought to go to prison for anything,” said Mary. “But that’s not very practical. Was he on drugs or drunk or what?”

“He’d been drinking,” said Dorothea. “Talking of which, do you want me to open that for you?”

•   •   •

The traffic in the Marylebone Road speeds up at the weekends. There is less of it, less to slow it down or bring it to frequent stops. On the Sundays of mid-August less traffic uses the road than perhaps on any other days of the year and it seems like some highway in the fifties or sixties when driving was pleasurable and the air relatively pure.

But on mid-August Saturdays, with so many people away on holiday and so many tourists car-less pedestrians, the traffic speeds along, three lanes of it, roaring up to Euston and the underpass or tearing down to Chapel Street, the Marylebone Flyover and the M40. Sometimes brakes shriek when a stop is enforced at Baker Street lights or those at Park Crescent. In the week it is a slow lumbering battering ram that plods at fifteen miles an hour, but on a late summer Saturday it becomes a swift juggernaut and therefore far more dangerous.

Mary thought all these things as she came back from buying bread in Marylebone High Street on Saturday morning. Gushi was tucked under her arm. She had brought him with her on a supernumerary walk but he was frightened by the traffic noise and buried his face in the palm of her hand. They crossed quickly and she brought him into the friendly green of the park. He ran down the bank and drank thirstily from the lake. Already a hot vapor hung over the broad expanses of grass, bleached yellow and in places entirely bared by the drought. The water with which the flowerbeds were sprayed first thing each morning had dried by now and some plants hung their heads. She kept to the shady side of the park.

A man on a seat was reading a paperback of The Catcher in the Rye, the woman at the other end of the bench a broadsheet newspaper with the front page headline: MP TO SUE OVER MURDER AND SEX ALLEGATIONS. Mary tried to think about her future, where she would live, what she would do. Leo, Oliver, that man whoever he was, had said, Two days after we’re married my wife will be able to come and live with me.…

She remembered then. Today the Blackburn-Norrises were coming home. He had said that because the Blackburn-Norrises were coming home and she would be free. She looked round for Gushi. He was making friends with a Jack Russell, touching noses, wagging tails. She went back for him, put him on the lead, gently shooed the other dog away.

“They’re coming home today,” she said to him. “Your master and mistress, your people, owners, whatever you call them. Come on, let’s get back fast.”

So that’s what I’ve come to, she thought, talking aloud to a dog in public. Gushi licked her fingers. No, he’s not sorry for you, he doesn’t understand, she said to herself, he’s a nice dog but he’s just a dog.

They went out into Albany Street by the Cumberland Gate and Cumberland Terrace. As they came into Park Village West the Blackburn-Norrises’ taxi was just pulling away from the gates of Charlotte Cottage.

•   •   •

He had slept that Friday night in his own flat for the sake of seeing the horror movie, How to Make a Monster. The boards, of raw beech that gave off a strong resinous smell, encased the broken windows and made of the interior a dusty kiln. There was no way of ventilating the place except by leaving the front door open and no one did that, no one dared. He’d gone through his ritual and used two rocks before the film started, then gone on to vodka, neat but with a spot of Tabasco sauce and a sprinkling of mustard. He didn’t need excuses but if he did he’d have said it was to take his mind off the stink in the flat and the heat. For his health’s sake, he nibbled at a Duchy Original biscuit, the gingered sort, with his drink.

The telly was still on when he woke up. His watch had stopped and he didn’t know what time it was. Dark or light, it was all the same in here, or almost. A strong sun high in the sky penetrated the cracks in the beech boards and laid bright bars across the bit of filthy carpet on the floor. The smell, he realized now, was himself. He smelled like the hamburger stall outside Madame Tussaud’s that the people in the mewses between the waxworks and the park complained filled their places with the reek of onions and fatty beef. He wondered if it mattered or if he should do something about it. In the pitch dark something ran over his foot.

Hob yelled. He jumped up, smashed the light on with the flat of his hand, and saw the mice flee, scurrying for the honeycombed skirting board. It was only mice, that was all it was. They had been feasting on Duchy Original crumbs. He staggered to the bathroom and urinated copiously. His half-brother had told him blow made you pee a lot and he was right. The bath was full of dirty dishes, the washing up of weeks. He had long used up every piece of crockery he had, and it lay piled there, dusty by this time, coated with the little waxy white pellets like seeds that were fly eggs. Hob thought he saw things moving between a plate and a glass and he turned away. That was funny because he’d never hallucinated, he’d never been interested in acid, microdot, shrooms, or any of that stuff.

He decided against a bath. Where would he put the dishes? He went back and turned the telly off. He turned the light off too and lay on the settee. For some reason he started thinking about his brother-in-law that used to be before his sister divorced him. Hob had rather liked him, had felt sorry for him because when he was a teenager he’d done acid, just the once, and he’d been left years later with these visions of rats. They’d come at any time and crawl all over him. Hob’s ex-brother-in-law had been dead scared of rats, had a phobia about them, so it was a miserable existence he led. Shame, Hob thought. But he never thought about anything or anyone for long. Like alcoholics with drink, he thought about, talked to himself about, considered, wondered at, the substances he used. He would have talked to others about them, only there was no one to talk to.

The mice were back. He could hear them scuttering. Someone on the floor below had told him she’d woken up in the night and heard this trundling noise and when she shone her torch under the bed she’d seen this mouse rolling a Smartie she’d dropped toward a hole in the wall, pushing it with its nose. You had to laugh. He saw a thread of light appear on the floor, then another. It must be morning.

Sometime today he was due to work over a bloke up in Agar Grove who’d done something that got up Lew’s nose—though not what he liked up there. Promised to take a bag of smack along with his dope and had reneged (Lew’s word) on the deal. Hob was getting a hundred for putting the shyster out of action for a couple of weeks and four rocks over the odds. His thoughts drifted to those rocks but he’d only got two left in the flat, so when thinking instead of using got too much, he wandered off looking for what he’d brought in the evening before. The red velvet bag, the stuff was with the bag, maybe in the kitchen.

He found it and poured the powder into a foil bag that had once held some adjunct, sensitive to light, of a photocopier. Like much of his paraphernalia, Hob had found it in a wastebin in one of the more prosperous parts. He slit open the bottom of the bag and held it over the powder in one of the saucers from the bath, screwed up the open top, and put his mouth over the resulting aperture. It wasn’t as clever or as satisfying as his watering can rose but it would do for now. Better than one of your ordinary stems, anyway. He lit the powder with a match.

It was angel dust, or phencyclidine, out of fashion and therefore relatively cheap. Hob had seen on telly that it was basically the stuff they shot into rhinos and elephants on darts to put them under when they moved them away from ivory hunters or whatever. PCP was a change and, anyway, he liked it because it made him feel unreal, like he was a person in that How to Make a Monster movie, living inside the telly and watched by millions, or else invisible and not watched at all. Both sensations were pleasant enough.

Sweat began to break out all over him. That was the effect of the dust, as was this floating sensation. He got up and walked about, took a few dancing steps, feeling suddenly like a tall thin man with a small head and a ballet dancer’s feet. Maybe he’d get out of here and go and do the shyster over before the day had really begun.

He could feel his heart beating. The idea that you couldn’t always feel your heart beating amused him and he laughed as he danced about the flat, picking up what he needed. Unthinkable to go out without the red velvet bag, without something to keep him well, without something else to bring him down if the heartbeat got so strong it was painful. All ideas of having a bath or changing his clothes had receded. Who needed that shit?

His heart had stopped. For a moment he was transfixed with terror, for he had forgotten what had just made him laugh, that a beating heart cannot normally be felt. He pranced again, punching the air, and into his ears, squeezing up through his body, came the tick-tick-tick of his heart. Laughing again, he thumped himself on the chest, on the place where, under the skin and ribs, the ticking clock pumped.

With the red velvet bag in his jacket pocket, he left the flat and came out onto the concrete walkway. A cannibalized van stood tireless on what was left of the grass and broken glass littered the empty aisles of the car park, thick as flints on a beach. Around here they used spray paint for the graffiti and the kind they used was red, like blood. For all that, the morning was beautiful, the sky translucent like a blue pearl, the air as yet cool and almost fresh, as if some breath of it had wafted this way from the park in the night. Hob noticed only the emptiness, the absence of anyone. This was only so in the very early hours and his watch told him it was not quite half past six.

He went down the concrete stairs and tried to think about getting to Agar Grove, but for some reason his inner eye could only see the railway line running across the Euston wasteland, the visual part of his mind throwing up bridges and flyovers and cranes with necks like Meccano dinosaurs. He’d have to come down, he needed something to bring him down. Yellow Jackets or V’s—what had he got? He palmed two Nembutal, swallowing them in his own saliva.

The place still had an appearance of emptiness when the police came looking for him half an hour later. It was still only seven. The police car crunched over the broken glass and stopped by the mutilated van. Marnock had a sergeant with him and a man in uniform, the one who was driving. They saw the boarded-up windows, looked at each other and shrugged. There was no doorbell. The sergeant banged on the knocker. He did that twice, then shouted through the letter box, “Police, open up!”

No one did, so they broke the door down, no difficult task. It yielded after two shoulder charges and a thump from the driver’s boot. The smell that came out to meet them was so bad that at first they thought there must be a dead body inside.