"If we are, isn't it better that way?"

Edmund turned around and looked at her. A deep red flush colored her forehead and cheeks. He had never seen her look like this before and he now realized he was witnessing some powerful emotion which somehow changed her face, but he was unable

to say what that emotion might be. Fear? Shame? Pity? No, it was anger.

"What is it?"

"Nothing," she said and her voice was low-pitched and slow. "Nothing really."

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"She won't give him up? No, of course not. Did you ever seriously think she would?"

"I hoped." Heather gave a cry of rage, of fury, and clenched

her hands. He had never seen her lose control before and he stared. "I hoped she'd do a—well, a good action. She's not in love with him. She's more or less said." She grew calmer and took a deep breath. "You said we sounded friendly. She talks to me now like I was a friend of hers. She calls me by my name. But she won't budge. She wants to keep hold of him."

"I'm not surprised."

She turned on him and he expected something he had never

had from her, shouting, reproach, anger, perhaps insults. But she

put her parted lips together, touched her hot cheeks with her fingertips, and came up to him to kiss him.

"I shall try again, Ed. I can't give up." "I can see that."

"I forgot to tell you. Issy's had her handbag stolen, her Marc Jacobs bag."

"Who's Marc Jacobs?"

"You sound like some old judge. They never know who anyone

is. He's a designer. Luckily, she always carries her keys separately but the thief took everything else, her wallet with quite a lot

of money in it and three credit cards, her mobile, her diary. It happened when she was getting into the tube."

"Coping with all that may at least take her mind off Andrew." "It won't," said Heather, thinking, though fondly, that that was just like a man, a man's judgment.

Eva hadn't told Andrew and she hadn't told Daddy. When Andrew came around to take her out to dinner she had asked him if a

176

socialite was the same thing as being in the Labour Government, and he had laughed so much that his face had turned unbecomingly red. She had shouted at him not to be so mean and beastly

and his laughing some more had put an end to her speaking to

him at all for the next hour. As for Daddy, he'd probably advise her to tell the police. Daddy loved the police almost as much as he loved the army and was thrilled to see so many of them carrying guns these days.

Besides, telling Andrew would require bringing her own feelings about him out into the open. Young as she was, Eva was the

kind of girl who believes it is best never to show a man how you feel about him and lethal to let him believe you will hang on to him at all costs. And anyway, she wouldn't and she didn't really know how she felt about him. The truth was that if this Heather persisted she probably would give him up, simply to avoid trouble. If she persisted, and it had begun to look as if she would.

She had phoned again two days after their meeting. It was

early in the morning and Eva was still in bed, it being Thursday, her day for going to the swimming pool and her yoga lesson. Heather said her name and asked if Eva had thought any more about what she had said in the park.

"No, I haven't. I told you. It's not your business. Anyway, he wouldn't go back to your sister."

"Is he there now?"

"He's just gone." It wasn't true. Eva knew it was weakness on

her part to answer Heather Litton's questions, but Eva didn't want the woman thinking theirs wasn't a full sexual relationship. "D'you know what he told me?" She was driven to be spiteful. "He told me he doesn't know now how he let himself be seen about with your sister for so long."

"I don't believe that," Heather said. 177

"Believe what you like. It's true." Eva sat up in bed, wishing

there were someone to bring her coffee and orange juice and half a piece of crispbread as there was at home with Mummy and Daddy.

"Look, what's in this for you, for God's sake? Andrew wasn't your boyfriend."

"My sister means a lot to me. I don't like seeing her suffer." "Well, I'm sorry if she's suffering. I didn't mean to cause her pain. I couldn't help Andrew falling in love with me."

Eva was dimly aware that she was starting to be—wellalmost on good terms with Heather. She couldn't help it. Though not much older than she, Heather had a motherly manner, a way of talking reasonably and patiently that Eva wasn't used to in her contemporaries, still less her own mother. "She'll get over it, Heather," she said rather desperately. Using that Christian name made it worse. "People always do. She'll meet someone else."

"I used to think that but now I don't know. I don't think so." "People always do," Eva said again. "I have to go."

"St. James's Park again?"

"No, it's not. And I don't want you following me anywhere. Is that clear, Heather? I don't want it. It's harassment." "Okay, I'll phone you tomorrow."

Eva didn't answer that. She said good-bye and put the phone down.

Avice lifted her eyes from the paperback she was reading and told Marion Mr. Karkashvili would be coming to lunch on Thursday. "That's an interesting name," said Marion as if she had never come across it before.

"Yes, it's Georgian, dear." Avice explained rather condescendingly that she referred to Georgia in Asia and not Georgia in the

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United States. "His grandfather came here from Tiflis or whatever they call it these days."

Marion waited expectantly. She had been waiting for over a week now. But Avice was still occupied with nomenclature. "If it had been me I'd have changed it to something more English. Carter, perhaps, or Carville."

"Will you go out for lunch or have it here?"

Avice hesitated for so long that Marion wondered if she

meant to answer at all. Finally she said, "I don't know, dear. He'll have to come here even if we eat elsewhere. The trouble is Figaro doesn't like him."

"I hope he's never done anything unkind to him," said

Marion in a suitably indignant tone. "Rabbits are like elephants. They never forget."

"He's never had the chance," said Avice in the sort of tone that implied there was no knowing what outrages her solicitor would perpetrate if left to his own devices.

"I could take Figaro into the dining room while he was here.

I mean I'd have some of that cow parsley he likes all ready for him and then he'd come in very happily."

"That's an idea. But I think we best eat out."

Her tone was neutral and unenthusiastic. Marion waited and then, suddenly, she understood. Avice was thinking. Avice put the

piece of red ribbon which had come off a box of chocolates

between the pages to mark her place, and pondered on her suggestion. Not the one about taking Figaro out of harm's way but the

other one, made after she received the news of Deirdre's death. Marion could understand her hesitation. A large sum would have to be involved and she hadn't known Marion long. But who else could she ask? And how much should the large sum be? Asking Mr. Karkashvili would be unwise, especially as he seemed to be 179

an animal hater. Should she give Avice a prod? Not yet. If

Mr. Karkashvili was coming on Thursday she must make up her mind soon.

The restaurant in Pinner village Avice suggested was Italian

and called La Mandritta. It didn't seem very upmarket to Marion, who had phoned the place and made the reservation. The man who answered the phone sounded as if he wasn't used to people ringing up and booking tables. Especially for lunch, he said. "Most just come and take potluck."

Marion didn't like the sound of that, but what was it to her?

She wasn't going to be eating there. She was going to be at home with those rabbits and meeting Mr. Karkashvili when he came back with Avice to redraft her will. After Avice had gone off to meet him at La Mandritta, Marion did one of her little dances. She tripped around the living room in a kind of flamenco style, wishing she had some music. Her dancing frightened the rabbits, who plunged through the flap into their hutch as soon as she waved her arms about.

The previous night she had gone off to bed despondently. It

was more than a week since she had been back to Lithos Road, sticking close to Avice being the wisest thing to do. Avice had passed

almost the entire evening immersed in what she called "the new

Julie Myerson" while Marion watched television, necessarily turned very low so as not to disturb Avice. They had both had some hot chocolate at ten, and that was when Avice first mentioned the events scheduled for the following day. Marion, to use her own words, perked up a bit at that. But all Avice said was that she thought she and Mr. Karkashvili would be back at the house by three at the latest and would Marion like to make tea when he came?

Half an hour later she was sitting up in bed, massaging her

face with antiaging night serum, when Avice knocked at the door 180

and came in. Marion eyed her warily. She had just come to a decision. She'd go home tomorrow and maybe not come back. Avice,

who was holding the photographs of Figaro and Susanna that Marion had fetched from the pharmacy that day, asked if she might sit down.

"It's your house," Marion said not very graciously. "Yes, but your room, dear."

"Was there something you wanted?"

"Well, yes. Oh, dear, I find this quite embarrassing. I'm so afraid you'll say no. That's why I've been putting off asking for days—well, weeks."

Marion knew now. "No need to be embarrassed with me." "Well, you may not say that when you hear what I've got to ask."

Oh, get on with it, Marion thought. Spit it out.

"You must just say outright if you can't take it on." A deep

breath and Avice spat it out. "Do you remember when I heard about Deirdre's dying you said she ought to have left money in her will to someone who'd look after her cat?"

"Did I?" said Marion.

"Oh, yes, you certainly did, dear. Well, would you?" Say how much, Marion prayed. How much? "Would I what, Avice?"

"Take care of Figaro and Susanna when I—when I pass on? I thought fifty thousand. Would that be enough?"

Marion would have liked twice that but dared not ask for

more. The whole scheme might come to grief if she did. "I think that's very generous, Avice," she said in a humble submissive voice, and then—this took more self-discipline than Marion had ever summoned up before—"May I give you my answer in the morning?" She couldn't resist adding, "Very first thing in the morning."

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Avice said in a tone anyone else would have found pathetic, "Rabbits seldom live beyond six years old, you know, and mine are nearly two now."

Tea was ready when they came back from the restaurant. Marion poured it out and handed biscuits like a servant. Mr. Karkashvili

was a slender, not very tall man and, with his small pale face, resembled President Putin. He kept giving Marion the sort of looks that

imply, "Go, go, leave us, get out." He never once smiled or said thank you. With great dignity, Marion passed him the last biscuit, said to Avice, "I'll be in the dining room with Figaro if you need me," scooped up the struggling rabbit and departed, leaving those

two to make the arrangements that would enrich her, for at seventhirty that morning she had said yes. "Yes, I will. Of course I will."

And enrich her soon, Marion thought, remembering the morphine.

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Chapter Fifteen

It was the excitement of Mr. Karkashvili's visit, Marion said, that and eating La Mandritta's spaghetti alle vongole, which had made Avice ill. The doctor, who came quickly because he was private, disagreed. Avice, he said, madly in Marions opinion, wasn't as young as she used to be. As if he or anyone else was. Miss Conroy had been doing too much and her heart—he only slightly varied this favored cliche of his—wasn't what it used to be. The pain Avice said she had felt predominantly on her left side, caused him

alarm. He wanted her to have an ECG even though she assured him the pain was gone now.

"I can't go into a hospital," Avice said. "I was in hospital

once. I had my appendix out. The nurses were horrible, they called me by my Christian name. Besides, I have to think of Figaro

and Susanna."

"I'm sure your cleaning lady will look after them," said the doctor.

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Marion hadn't been so incensed for years. To be taken for the cleaner! And Avice didn't correct him. She didn't say, this is my friend or this is my personal assistant. All she did was carry on refusing to go into, or even to, the hospital and the doctor finally gave up attempting persuasion and told her she must rest and take things easy. Once she got over his insult, Marion was pleased with the way things were going. It would make her task with the morphine easier if Avice had suffered a prior malaise. Of course, it also

meant she, Marion, was virtually a prisoner in Pinner. Someone

had to give Avice what she called her "heart medicine," see she rested, and feed the rabbits, and who else but Marion?

After a week of this, Joyce and Duncan Crosbie arrived.

Apparently, they and Avice had a long-standing engagement to go together to the Chelsea Flower Show. Avice had completely forgotten this date, though Marion got the blame for forgetting it

from all of them.

"You could have told me she was ill," Joyce said, going out into the kitchen where Marion was making coffee for everyone. "I'd have been straight over."

Marion said nothing. She was thinking it might be a good

idea to send for Joyce as soon as Avice succumbed to the morphine, but not too soon in case she summoned help. When, after the coffee had been drunk and the biscuits eaten, Duncan said that they wouldn't go to the flower show now but stay with Avice, Marion said, "In that case I'll just nip out to see my poor old father. I haven't been near him for a week and he does so rely on my visits." No one attempted to hinder her. She skipped down the road

to the tube station, the first time she had been able to give vent to her feelings since the making of Avice's will. She ran and danced and, on the corner of the street, executed a kind of pas de deux. People stared but there weren't many of them about.

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In spite of her resolve never to go near him again, she rang

Mr. Hussein's doorbell. The door was answered by Khwaja, the tallest and largest of the Hussein sons, dressed this time in a very expensive-looking dark-gray silk suit. He recognized her at once and before she could speak, said with a twitching of his lips, "Ah, it's the lady who gave my dad the unclean meat."

He had a habit Marion particularly disliked, that of seeming

to suppress, not altogether successfully, laughter at his own words

and those of the person he was talking to. Ignoring his estimation of her while blushing at it, Marion asked, "How's your father?" feeling foolish when she did so as must anyone who utters this phrase with serious intent.

"Gone on holiday to Marrakesh with Mrs. Iqbal," said

Khwaja, heaving a little with inward giggles. "I had a nice postcard of a camel."

He shut the front door before Marion was halfway down the

path. She got on the bus that goes to Swiss Cottage and ran the rest of the way to Chudleigh Hill. Irene had been in the living

room making a necklace of carnelian and yellow amber beads and her first words were, "Oh, dear, I do so hate having to get up when I'm in the midst of stringing beads. I always feel I can see afterward exactly where I reached. The next knot is never quite right."

One must take the rough with the smooth, Marion told herself, and if today was particularly rough, well, too bad. "Avice

Conroy is very ill," she said when Irene had made it clear she didn't intend them to kiss. "Her heart has gone back on her."

"Goodness, what a ridiculous expression. Gone where, I should like to know. Is she in the hospital?"

"I've been nursing her at home," said Marion.

"Avice always was a valetudinarian." Uncertain of the meaning of this word, Marion smiled vaguely. "People like me," Irene 185

went on, "who suffer from chronic poor health, we can't help resenting the Avices of this world. I mean, their way of inventing illness is insulting to us, don't you think? We who would give anything to enjoy good health don't have much patience with imaginary ailments."

Marion couldn't have that. Her plan depended on Avice's heart trouble being taken seriously. On the other hand, she had no wish to alienate Irene. "The doctor seemed quite concerned," she said.

"Oh, well, she pays him. What do you expect?" The string of beads complete, Irene let it fall into her lap and pressed her right hand into her lumbar region. "I think my back is worse than it's ever been. I'd get you a drink of something only I honestly don't think I could get up."

"Can I get it?"

"Oh, don't bother. Not unless you absolutely can't do without the stimulus of wine." Irene had begun accusing almost everyone she knew of alcoholism, Marion noted. "If my son and that

wife of his hadn't rushed off to the other side of London at the first opportunity, I'd have someone here to see to my needs. But, no, that wasn't to madam's taste. Luckily, my friend Barry Fenix will be here in a minute."

Irene's tone had softened when she spoke of this man and she sounded rather like someone half her age talking of her lover. Deciding that staying here any longer was profitless, Marion told Irene to take care of herself—"No one else will," was Irene's reply—and left. She was looking forward to a few hours at home

on her own. As she tripped down the front garden path she spotted through the privet the man next door strolling down his. Marion had caught a glimpse of him in the distance before, but they

had never spoken. She was surprised to see someone so handsome, if you made allowances for age and liked mustaches.

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They met on the pavement between his house and Irenes. "You must be Mr. Fenix," said Marion, holding out her hand. "Marion Melville."

It was taken in a crushing grip. "Call me Barry. You've been seeing to the old lady, have you?"

If anything could have changed Marion's rough day into a smooth one, Barry Fenix's words would have done so. The old

lady! "She really needs a full-time carer, Barry. And a housekeeper." Marion cast a glance in the direction of the front door he

had come out of. "Her home is very big. I suppose yours is the same sort of size."

"A wee bit bigger, I think."

"Ah, but you have a devoted wife, no doubt."

Barry looked down. "Once I did. I'm a widower," he said. "I'm so sorry. How awful of me. The minute I open my mouth I put my foot in it."

"A dainty little foot, if I may say so," said Barry gallantly. "Well, I'd best get on and see what's to do next door."

"I'm not sure—actually, she's asleep. It might be a good idea

to leave it an hour or two. I hope you don't think I'm being pushy, but I do think your house is lovely. And the garden is beautiful." "Since I'm not needed next door for a bit, would you like

to come in and have a look around? Have a coffee or a drink or whatever."

"I'd love to," said Marion, her quiet time at home forgotten.

Eva got another phone call from the woman with the nice hair and the short fingernails. "I can't just let this go, Eva. I want to say something quite important to you."

"I suppose you think all this is important, don't you?" 187

Heather didn't answer. "This is about you more than about Andrew and Ismay. You're very young and I don't think you know what Andrew's like. Not yet. I hope you never will. You see, Ismay knows him. She knows how to be with him, how to make him happy and how to—well, survive while she's with him. You don't. He could destroy you."

"You know something, Heather. Andrew's like my dad. A lot like him. And Mummy's survived with him. She's still with him after twenty-five years. I'd be the same."

"Couldn't we meet and talk face-to-face?" Heather asked her. "I don't feel I'm getting anywhere on the phone."

"We did that already. It doesn't make any difference. I'm not giving Andrew up. Why should I?"

"I've told you why you should, Eva. It's because Ismay loves him and you don't. You just like him or you're attracted to him." "Look, Heather, if you could sort of prove to me that Andrew would go back to your sister if I split with him—well, then I might think seriously about it. But you can't. Personally, I think he'd just go off and find some other girl. Isn't that a lot more likely?"

"Can't we meet and talk this through?" "I don't see the point."

A listener who didn't know these girls would by now have believed them friends. Both had an inkling of this, but still Eva said, "I'm going to put the phone down now, Heather," and Heather said, "Okay, but we'll talk again."

They did so two days later. Heather went to be with her

mother while Pamela was out and met Ismay there. Beatrix was calm, dosed up with chlorpromazine, chewing gum and silent, apart from once or twice telling Heather she would give her the key to the bottomless pit. Making tea for her mother and coffee for her sister 188

and herself, Ismay turned dull eyes in a blank face to Heather and said in response to her inquiry that she was all right, she was just the same, she supposed she would get through it one day at a time.

"If he came back now would you have him?" "Oh, yes. That doesn't change."

"Even though you know—forgive me, Issy, I have to say this—even though you know he'd be unfaithful to you again. He'd take up with another Eva when he felt like it. Even though you know he's completely self-absorbed and you'll always love him more than he loves you."

"Even though," said Ismay and her face was twisted with

pain. "I'm the one who kisses and he's the one who lets himself be kissed. That's the way it is."

So Heather said to Eva the next time she phoned her, "She'd

take him back. She told me so. It wouldn't matter what he'd done." Eva said hotly, "Well, he hasn't done anything so very

terrible, Heather. He's only split up with his girlfriend and taken up with someone else. People do it all the time."

"Can we meet?"

"I honestly don't see what for. You haven't proved anything.

You've just told me what you say she's said. I've thought a lot about all this. Actually, our families, I mean Andrew's and mine, they're very keen on our relationship. I mean, if it led to marriage

Mummy and Daddy would be—well, actually delighted. His people would be. I'm not giving him up. I just couldn't. I mean, I wouldn't be able to say the words."

1 see.

"I may as well tell you, Heather, I don't intend to go running

in St. James's Park anymore, so don't think you can find me there, will you?"

"I won't think that. Good-bye, Eva."

189

Walking along the King's Road made Pamela feel uncomfortable. Out of place. The expression "a duck out of water" came into her head, and when she was here she knew fully what it meant. She said so to Ivan Roiter and, when he only shrugged, explained. Everyone else was so young and they looked so free, as if they hadn't a care in the world.

"I don't suppose they have," he said. "They're all living on the benefit. And that means my taxes, your taxes."

"They can't all be, Ivan. Some of them must have jobs. Anyway, that's not really what I meant."

She was always having to explain to Ivan what she meant. It wasn't so much that he didn't understand her—who could really understand somebody else?—or that he saw nothing from her point of view, though both were true, but that most of the time they seemed to be speaking different languages. Though they both worked with money, she wasn't obsessed with it, while he appeared to see everything in terms of finance. The young people they passed in this ever-lively, ever-youthful street were free, she thought, free in spirit, not constrained by time or duty or moral pressures or convention. She was always having to explain to Ivan, but this time she didn't explain—what would be the use?

They went into a pub. Often morose but never silent for

long, Ivan soon began to speak scathingly of the cost of drinks. He had never paid so much for a pint of lager, he said, and had she any idea what he had paid for her glass of wine? Nothing makes you feel so awkward as your host complaining about the cost of the food or drink he has bestowed on you, and Pamela immediately said that she would, of course, buy their second drink.

"If we have one in this rip-off place. Anyway, I don't like 190

a woman paying for her own drinks. Especially when it's my partner."

Pamela was startled. His partner when she had only known

him a few weeks? Again the language barrier rose up. What did he mean? He had kissed her once or twice, the sort of kisses you

might get from a brother. She had been to his home, a nice but hardly palatial flat just off Albert Bridge Road. She had eaten half a dozen meals with him and would eat another tonight. She had

never slept with him. In asking her back there again after they had eaten, was that what he had in mind?

The pub they were in provided food, but one glance at

the blackboard on which the dishes were written up in chalk

told Ivan that the prices were "astronomical." "A tenner for plaice and chips!" he said. "Amazing. You couldn't make it up." Ivan often said of some quite ordinary thing that you couldn't make

it up and when someone had failed to organize something or other—another ongoing contention of his—that they couldn't run a whelk stall. When Pamela said that she thought it might

take a lot of skill and experience to run a whelk stall, Ivan stared at her and said quite roughly, "Oh, come on. You know what I mean."

She admitted to herself that she found him attractive to look

at. Ismay often talked about people having "types" and Ivan belonged in her favored category. That is, he was tall and wellbuilt, darkish and bearded. He had blue eyes, which she also liked,

and he always smelled beautifully clean and faintly cologned. His long-fingered hands were also among his attractions. She often thought of when they had first met at the romance walking

and how she had been immediately drawn to him. She kept it in

mind for reassurance when he said things like "The cost of everything in here is a scandal" or "My belief is we should have some

191

say in how the government spends our tax money. It's called hypothecation."

When she said, very gently, "I know that, Ivan. I'm an

accountant," he grew huffy and told her not to pull rank.

Not staying for a second drink, they set off on one of his

quests for a suitable place to eat. "Suitable" meaning cheap,

Pamela reminded herself with no pleasure. After five restaurants' outside menus had been perused and their prices adversely commented on, she suggested rather diffidently that if they were going

back to his flat she would cook something for them there. This put him in a better mood than she had believed possible. There was plenty of food at his place. There was nothing he liked better than some home cooking in his own home. With his own partner, he added, putting his arm around her.

He had parked his car with great difficulty on a meter in one

of the squares. Pamela was always rather nervous going back to find it bcause they had once done so and found a parking ticket on the windscreen. Ivan had gone mad, swearing that he had parked

the car after six-thirty when the restriction was lifted, and threatening all kinds of vengeance on the Royal Borough of Kensington

and Chelsea. Although she meant to make things better, Pamela made things worse by saying to him that he ought to be glad he hadn't been clamped. He swore at her then. But this time the only adornment to the windscreen was a flyer from a fitness spa, and Ivan set off for Battersea in a jocund mood.

There must be some term in psychology for these fluctuating

moods of his, Pamela thought. It wasn't manic-depression or bipolarityshe had cause to know something about madness—it

wasn't extreme enough for that. She could ask Edmund but the trouble with that was that she didn't want the family thinking there was anything odd about Ivan. As he drove he talked about 192

the mother of a Greek colleague of his who had never lived in this country but who came here solely to get a hip replacement for free on the National Health Service.

In the flat she found that his boast that there was plenty of

food in the house was a wild exaggeration. Certainly there were a lot of eggs and several packs of bacon. That made her suspect that he cooked himself breakfast every morning but nothing else. She found some withered mushrooms too, some slices of white bread in waxed paper and an unopened pack of butter. The terrible need for a drink, once almost unknown, strong now when she was with Ivan, almost drove her to ask for one, but just as she was getting her nerve up he walked into the kitchen with two whiskeys on

a tray.

She made them bacon and mushroom omelettes, which he

pronounced wonderful. Pleased that he was pleased, Pamela nevertheless wondered if anything made him so happy as economy,

the saving of a few pounds here and a few more there. He put his arm around her and told her how well they got on together.

It was only eight o'clock, and Heather and Edmund, who

were with Beatrix that evening had promised to stay till eleven. She relaxed, expecting him to turn on the television to a money program, which was his favorite. He often said as he did so, that they had so much in common, but tonight, without more preamble, his arm holding rather tightly on to her shoulder, he led her

into his bedroom and said, "This is what we've really come for, isnt it?

Marion got back late, long after Joyce and Duncan had gone. She had meant to be hours earlier, but she had spent far longer with Barry Fenix than had seemed likely at first. He had given her and 193

himself a dry martini, the first she had ever tasted. It was deliciously ice-cold and came out of a silver bottle thing he told her

was a cocktail shaker. "I'm a bit of a throwback, my dear," he said. "The first half of the twentieth century is my spiritual home. Preferably in the Far East." He had never lived there, he went on rather sadly, what with pressures of work and a demanding career, and had visited only on a package tour to Hong Kong. Besides,

his wife preferred the Isle of Wight. "The memsahib would never go." He winked as he said, "And she held the purse strings,

you know."

Marion didn't know. She hadn't the faintest idea what he was talking about but she loved his rich, fruity voice and his old-world courtesy. It was a long time since a man had opened a door for her and stood aside to let her pass through ahead of him. Edmund had done so but without Barry Fenix's grace. He took her upstairs, showed her the five bedrooms, and took her back down again to display the spacious dining room, kitchen, and breakfast room

and his "snug," a kind of study with walls lined with group photographs of men in uniform and, facing the desk, a portrait of himself

wearing a lot of what she thought were called "decorations." They returned to the "lounge," where Benares brass abounded, along with carved teak furniture, embroidered Kashmiri cushions and processions of ebony elephants. It made Marion wonder why

Mr. Hussein didn't have this kind of stuff.

"It's lovely," she said. "You wouldn't think your house and

next door were the same sort of—well, next door to each other." She had got muddled over that sentence and she amended it as best she could. "I mean, this is so unique."

"I like to think so," said Barry Fenix, pouring her another dry martini. "It's one o'clock," he said, glancing at his watch, and poor 194

Marion, accustomed to such treatment, thought he was going to turn her out. She was getting reluctantly to her feet when he said, "Not going, I hope. I thought we could have a spot of tiffin if you can stand an old soldiers cooking."

The word was new to her. "Is tiffin something to eat?" "It's lunch," said Barry.

By the time she left it was nearly five and if not drunk she

was, in Barry's own words, "three sheets to the wind." The trouble with him was you needed a dictionary of Asian expressions to know what he was on about. But it was the only trouble. Marion thought he was very nice, a real gentleman, the likes of which you saw few these days. She had given him her mobile number on what she thought was a clever pretext.

"I'd appreciate it so much, Barry, if you'd give me a ring if

Mrs. Litton seems a bit under the weather. If you could keep a bit of an eye on her. I know it's a lot to ask."

"I'll do that small thing, my dear."

Marion danced and ran speedily all the way to Lithos Road. Anyone watching would have thought she was doing high-impact aerobics. Her home appeared untouched, just as she had left it. No signs of, or scars made by, Fowler were to be seen. He wouldn't dare break another window, not after she'd told him the cost of having the last one mended. She drank some black coffee, cleaned her teeth, and set off for Pinner.

Avice, in her dressing gown, was lying on the sofa, the

rabbits dimly visible in their hutch, munching away at a pile of dandelions.

"How have you been?" Marion asked tenderly.

"Not too good. Those Crosbies wore me out. In future they'll blame me for stopping them going to the flower show, you'll see. 195

And I've been worrying about these two"—she waved a hand in the direction of the hutch—"when something happens to me. I mean it may happen any minute."

"But I'm going to take care of them," said Marion. "You know that. It's all arranged."

"That's true. I keep forgetting. I really think I could eat some supper now."

196

Chapter Sixteen

Whenever possible, Edmund and Heather had lunch together in the hospice canteen. The food was the same as the patients had and cooked by Heather and Michelle. Today was curried lamb with rice and dhal or spaghetti bolognese, and Edmund chose the curry because it was his favorite. "I'd have married you for your cooking even if I hadn't been madly in love with you," he said. "Not 'madly,' Ed. There was never anything mad about us. We've always been rational and practical."

"Speak for yourself. I saw that girl this morning. I was on top of the bus going along Ken High Street. It was just before eight and I saw her going into Kensington Gardens."

"What girl? What are you talking about?"

"That girl you're always phoning. Eva something. Eva Simber." "I'm not always phoning her. I've phoned her three times. I suppose she goes running there now she's given up on St. James's Park. It's miles from where she lives."

197

"You know what these fitness fanatics are."

Heather went to the counter, fetched herself the fruit salad and Edmund the tartufo.

"Talking of fitness fanatics, it's fat-free," she said. "What a liar you are, Heather Litton."

"Issy's coming over this evening. Remind me to get a bottle of wine."

"I won't remind you," said Edmund. "I'll get it. I'll get two." Tartufo was also supper dessert in Avice's house, though she, to Marion's mystification, called the meal dinner and the second course "pudding." Marion hadn't made these but bought them

ready prepared in plastic cups from a supermarket fridge. Carefully, she turned them out, each into an individual glass dish, and

topped them with defrosted whipped cream, first dousing the one on the left (A comes before M in the alphabet) with morphine. "It doesn't taste very nice," Avice said, leaving more than half of it.

"You must eat." What a waste, Marion was thinking, of what

was probably a very expensive medicine, not to mention the work put in by all those poor poppy farmers in Afghanistan. "You have to get your strength back. Have just one more spoonful."

Avice wouldn't. Marion still hoped, though, and after Avice

had gone to bed walked around the house looking at all the bits and pieces she would help herself to between Avice's death and the arrival on the scene of the doctor, undertakers, and Joyce and Duncan Crosbie. In the Chinese slippers similar to ballet shoes she was wearing, she skipped up the stairs and down again, marking a picture here, a glass bowl and a porcelain vase there, rather in the manner of a bailiff except that she stuck on no labels.

198

Avice slept very soundly that night. That meant little as she

was a good sleeper. On her way to the shops, Marion reflected on

her choice of tartufo. She should have got something sweeter and with less strong a flavor. A pear and almond tart might be a better idea. She bought one and a piece of fish called a tilapia which she had never previously heard of.

Taking a week of the holiday due to her, Ismay stayed at home. In the past she had gone on holiday three times with Andrew, once to Venice, once to San Sebastian, and once to Barcelona. His desertion had spoiled those cities for her. She could never go to them

again, perhaps not even to Italy or Spain again. She wouldn't be able to bear seeing on her own palaces and paintings, seaside and panoramas, she had seen with him. Come to that, she wouldn't be able to see places she hadn't seen with him. The idea of traveling somewhere without him made her feel ill. Imagine the long solitary nights, the sight of other couples together, of lovers walking in the warm dusk, their arms around each other. It would kill her. So she stayed at home. She was unhappy at home too but not likely to burst into tears out in the street or lie down and beat her head on the ground as she would feel like doing in some beach resort. Rather like a medieval lady who has led a racy life and been forced to give it all up and retire to a convent, she turned her attention to good works. She committed herself to sending twenty pounds a month to the Royal National Institute for the Blind,

never passed a beggar without bestowing a coin, and offered frequent service to Pamela as a Beatrix-sitter. The day after she had

been to Heather and Edmund's for supper, she went around to her mothers house at six, having told Pamela to stay out till eleven if she liked, or even midnight.

199

It was June, a month that had started off unseasonably cold

but was now warm, sunny, and windless. Ismay sat by the living room window, opposite her somnolent mother, who chewed her gum as slowly as a cow chewing the cud. She watched the people going by and the cars passing, not many people and a lot of cars, and thought how everyone but her seemed to have someone. Everyone out there who went by was with someone else. Pamela, by now, would be with her Ivan. Heather had Edmund. Ismay thought bitterly that she wouldn't be surprised if she turned up here one evening and found an elderly man sitting with Beatrix and holding her hand. The previous evening, for the first time, she had seen her sister and her sister's husband in their own home and had tried—desperately hard—to be happy for them that they were obviously so happy. All she had been was envious. No, that wasn't quite true. She loved Heather. She wanted love and peace and contentment for Heather if all those things were possible, but she wanted them for herself first.

The fairly heavy drinking she had indulged in was past. Or

past unless great temptation came in her way. Edmund kept refilling her glass. He and Heather drank very little, but it seemed to her that less than an hour had passed before he was opening a second bottle. The great thing was, perhaps the sad thing, that

drinking made her feel better. Not good but better. When she had

had two or three glasses of wine she could think how glad she was she had never said a word to Edmund about Guy's death or tried

to warn him about Heather. It almost made her smile—and at the same time threatened to bring tears to her eyes—to see how obviously Heather and Edmund wanted to touch each other, to sit

squeezed close together, but resisted out of kindness to her. Not to remind her—as if she needed reminding!

200

No one mentioned Andrew. Neither Heather nor Edmund

asked her why she hadn't gone away, what future plans she had, or if she was going to try to find a flatmate. Edmund told her they were a little nearer to acquiring their flat. The people they called Mr. and Mrs. Finchley, two links down the chain, had signed the contract on the sale of their house. Heather told her they now hoped to move in in September, but they wouldn't have a holiday because they couldn't afford it.

"Not if we're going to have a honeymoon in Japan." "Are you?"

"Somewhere over there," said Heather vaguely.

Ismay went home in a taxi because she couldn't bear the thought of the tube full of noisy drunk people and herself on her own among them. Letting herself into her flat wasn't so bad because, in the past, Andrew had seldom been there before she came in. She poured herself another glass of wine and thought

about the question Heather and Edmund hadn't asked. A new flatmate was what she needed but dared not take on. Now Heather

had paid up the last of her rent she was having to bear the whole of it on her own. At least I'm not spending money on a holiday, she told herself bitterly. And it's not really worth thinking about. I'm not going to look around for someone else. Because I can't have someone else here if Andrew comes back.

He may come back. People do. They split up and then they

get together again. You see it all the time. He must think of me sometimes, she thought. He must remember what he loved about me, for he did love me. God knows, he said so often enough. It couldn't all go like that, in a flash, just because he's met this Eva Simber. The tears were running down her face now but she went on thinking of it. Gulping a bit, taking a big swig of the wine, she 201

imagined being here alone and the place looking beautiful, newly cleaned by someone, even by her, perhaps even newly decorated. She'd be wearing one of those diaphanous skimpy dresses he loved on her or perhaps only on Eva—don't think of that—and she'd be lying on the sofa reading a book and she'd hear his key in the lock. He still had a key, he must have kept it, and he'd take her in his

arms and say leaving her was the biggest mistake of his life....

Somewhere in all this Ismay was also thinking that Andrew

was a hard-hearted cheat, a liar and deceiver. If he came back he

would be good to her, a charming lover, attentive and possessive, but after a time he would go again. Some other pretty little fairhaired waif would be waiting for him. And once more he would

tell her there was no one. When he finally admitted he was leaving, it would be her fault for doing this or that to drive him away,

for being selfish, for putting others before him.

She knew all this, but her enduring love for him overcame it

and thrust it down deep into her mind, while she still imagined him coming in and kissing her, telling her he'd made a mistake and she was his only love.

In Ivan's kitchen Pamela was preparing their evening meal. She had brought the ingredients with her, pasta and salmon and salad and a summer pudding, still in its bowl, she had made the night before. At home she hardly ever cooked anything. She and Beatrix lived on takeaway and ready meals. She asked herself why she hadn't brought something of that sort with her, as Ivan, who had been in the other room watching television, came out into the kitchen and eyed the pretty salad with disdain.

"I don't eat green things," he said. "I hope you eat fish."

202

"Provided it's fried with chips. I'm a chips with everything man."

"I've noticed," said Pamela. "I thought tonight you'd like

something different. If you don't want it we could go out to eat." "Eating out is expensive. And don't say you'll pay because you

know I won't allow that." He looked at the tagliolini, the pesto, the cream, and the salmon with the expression on his face of a man considering if food items were past their sell-by date. "I've got potatoes. Can't you make some chips and fry an egg or something?"

She was already learning that crossing him led to an outburst of bad temper. To her surprise he peeled and cut up the potatoes himself. She fried his share of the salmon, and they finally sat down, not at the table, which looked as if it was never used, but side by side on the sofa in front of the television. There was no wine. Pamela didn't mind too much because she had secretly

brought a flask of vodka with her, from which she had taken surreptitious sips while cooking.

It wouldn't do, she kept telling herself. There was no point in going on with it. Well, there was a point, just one, but she shied away from facing it. In spite of those preliminary words of his last time, that it was sex they had really come there for, "that side of things," as her mother used to put it, had been surprisingly good. Or was it just that so much time had passed since the last time? Years, she thought, three or four years. Ivan, who seemed to her grossly insensitive in some areas, stingy and mean-spirited, was tender and gentle and controlled in his lovemaking. She had half expected him to boast about it afterward, that seemed in character, but he hadn't. Nor had he said, "Was that all right for you?" He knew it had been.

What did it matter if he didn't take her out for meals, if he wanted to eat chips, if he moaned a bit about taxes being spent on 203

the unemployed? He looked so good. It was nice to lie in his arms and know he really desired her. After all, she wasn't going to marry him. She wasn't even going to be his partner, for that surely meant living under the same roof.

They went to bed. And it was just as good as the first time. It

was better. He remembered that she had said she should be home soon after eleven and at ten he said he would order a cab for her. They could go to the pub at the end of his street and ask the cab to call for her there. Pamela didn't much want a drink as she had almost emptied her flask, but she agreed so as not to antagonize him. Did that mean she was afraid of Ivan? Women are afraid of men, she said to herself. Men are afraid of women's minds and tongues, and women are afraid of men's violence. It seemed to her that she had hit on a great if unhelpful truth.

They walked down the street, Ivan with his arm around her.

He asked if he could see her the next day, and Pamela had to say she couldn't, not the next day. She had to stay with her sister. She couldn't ask one of her nieces again so soon.

"Why not? She's their mother, isn't she?"

"They both go out to work, Ivan. And Heather's married.

They do their bit, more than their bit actually, but they can't be there every evening."

"I'd have thought you could have left your sister on her own. She's not violent, is she? She won't break the place up?"

"I do leave her alone sometimes. When I can be sure she's taken her tranquilizer. But I can't always be sure."

Out there in the street, outside the pub, he flew into a rage, shouted at her, "You put your crazy sister before your partner? Is that it? You put your selfish nieces before your partner. Can't you understand how I feel about you? Does your sister feel about you like I do? Do those selfish girls?"

204

He took hold of her by the shoulders but not to hurt her. He

held her like that for a moment or two while she trembled. Then he said in a quite different tone, a weary tone, "Oh, what's the use? I need a drink."

She refused a glass of wine, but he became angry again, so she agreed. It made her head swim. It made her afraid to talk in case her speech came out slurred. After about ten minutes, in which Ivan talked about teenage mothers living on benefit, the taxi came. It wasn't a black cab but a minicab. Pamela wasn't happy about it as she had heard too many stories about minicab drivers stealing from their fares or even raping them. Out on the pavement Ivan kissed her passionately in front of the driver and a group of young black men, who cheered and clapped their hands. She had taken it for granted that the cab would have been paid for, but it

hadn't, and when they got to Clapham the driver demanded fourteen pounds.

The first ten minutes of the BBC's early evening news was all about the United Kingdom's bid to get the Olympic Games in London in 2012. Avice was indifferent to the outcome and Marion was bored. She was disappointed but not really surprised that Avice had woken up fit and well after the tartufo dessert. After all, she had eaten a very small amount of it. Tonight was to be the night, the pear and almond tart being the poison vehicle. Not that Marion referred to it like that even to herself. The word "painkiller" appealed to her far more, though Avice hadn't had a recurrence of that ache in her chest and left arm.

A horrible story came next about a lot of dogs and horses left

to starve to death in a stable. Avice was upset and wanted to turn it off—thank God no rabbits were involved, Marion thought—but 205

it was quickly over and the following bit wasn't nearly as disquieting. Avice was one of those people who prefer animals to human

beings, so the news that the man a newspaper had called the West End Werewolf had attacked another girl disturbed her less.

"I don't know why they make such a fuss," she said. "What

do they mean, 'attacked'? He only puts his hands around their

necks and gives them a bit of a push. Turn it off, Marion, will you? I shan't sleep tonight when I think of those poor creatures."

Oh, yes, you will, thought Marion, imagining with a shudder

the feel of strange hands touching her neck. She skipped out into

the kitchen. Lately she'd been remembering the ballet lessons she'd had when she was a child and Fowler not much more than a baby, and she executed a couple of pas de deux and an entrechat on her way to picking the morphine bottle out of her bag. Two slices were cut from the pie and Marion poured morphine liberally over the plate on the left (M comes after A in the alphabet). For the first course she had grilled a piece of fillet steak for Avice and a piece for herself with new potatoes and peas. It was to be a particularly nice meal. After all, it was the last Avice would ever have.

Fifty thousand pounds was a serious sum of money. It should

be spent wisely. With the knowledge she had gained from her employment as an estate agent's receptionist, Marion calculated that she would get two hundred and fifty thousand for her flat or maybe even three hundred. Add another fifty thousand to that and she could buy something quite charming. Not in a basement, for instance. She pirouetted about, humming a Coldplay song, and then she carried the tray into the living room where Avice waited. It was rather unfortunate, she thought, that the principal

story line in Avice's favorite hospital sitcom happened to deal with the subject of poisoning. And, to be precise, poisoning in a cake for the sake of monetary gain on the part of a nurse. It didn't,

206

however, put Avice off starting on her slice of pear and almond

tart. Starting but not continuing.

She brought a forkful to her mouth and it seemed to Marion

that her hand hovered there for far longer than usual, trembled an inch or two from her lips while she made some comment on the homicidal nurse's appearance. Marion muttered something in reply. Sighing a little, Avice opened her mouth, received the forkful of tart—and if she didn't quite spit it out, she contorted her

face into an expression of nausea, pushed the plate toward Marion, and said, "Taste that!"

"Mine is all right," Marion murmured. "I can't help that. Taste mine."

One forkful wouldn't kill her, Marion thought. A crumb or two wouldn't kill her. Cautiously, gingerly, she tasted a small fragment from Avice's plate.

"It tastes as if it has been soaked in cough mixture," said Avice.

It had. Marion went out into the kitchen, poured the dregs from the bottle into a teaspoon, and drank it. Cough linctus, no doubt about it. Someone had emptied out the morphine and substituted Benylin.

Fowler, she thought, always Fowler. 207

Chapter Seventeen

It was so green. Like the country but not quite like. Eva had never been in Kensington Gardens before, or if she had it was because Daddy had brought her when she was little. They had lived quite near. She tried to remember where but even the name of the street eluded her. She didn't really know London, only lived in it. You had to. It was either London or a big house in Gloucestershire. Anywhere else was unthinkable.

She had driven up to Notting Hill and left the car that had

been Daddy's birthday present on a meter in somewhere called Linden Gardens. It was funny a park being called Gardens and a street too. You didn't have to put money in the meter until eightthirty, which was just as well as she'd brought none with her. This

morning she was wearing one of her white T-shirts, the one with lace around the neckline, and mid-calf-length pink pants, and she kept stealing glances at her reflection in the windows of parked cars.

208

The unfamiliar green space was full of trees she didn't know

the names of. Mummy said she didn't know the names of anything. It was a disgrace, seeing what her schooling had cost. Some

of the trees looked like Christmas trees and some had their branches sweeping the ground but their leaves were too big to be weeping willows. Eva ran along an avenue of trees, passing other joggers and race walkers, and meeting men running in pairs.

These gave her admiring glances. But most people she saw were walking dogs. Eva liked dogs. She especially liked True, a Labrador

named after one of John Peel's hounds, and would have had him with her but Mummy said keeping a dog in London was cruel.

It was a fine sunny day, early enough for the trees to cast elongated shadows across the sleek turf. Eva turned right and took a

ride that cut through these shadows, heading for a tall tower block on the edge of the park. She passed a statue of a man on a horse and a fountain, a little house with its own garden and a fence around it, and more trees and tall bushes with flowers on them. All the other runners were left behind. At one point she had seen a great glassy lake to her left, but that was far behind her now. Almost her last words to herself before she got lost were, "I mustn't get lost." Then she was.

Eva had no idea about noting landmarks when you were out

in a strange place. A strange-shaped tree, for instance, an unusual building, a glimpse of something known through the branches. If there had been such signs to look out for on her return she hadn't noticed them. She could still see the tower block, which didn't seem to fit in with the rest of the scenery, and directly ahead of her a peculiar tall kind of spire, a bit like a church but huge, with steps around it and gold all over it and statues clustered on it. She seemed to remember seeing it once before when she'd been to visit her friend in Queen's Gate years ago while they were both still at 209

school, but she didn't know what it was and something about it, its size, its strange colors, the gilding on it, unnerved her.

Veering sharply away from it, she crossed the turf between the tallest trees she had yet encountered and at a place where four paths met at a kind of crossroads, came upon a signpost with four arms. The trouble was that she didn't know where any of the places were that the arms pointed to. Kensington Palace, for instance, the Royal Albert Hall, Exhibition Road. Knightsbridge was familiar because of Harrods and Harvey Nicks but she didn't want to go there now. The path she took led her past a big shallow pond that

looked as if it ought to have boats on it and children playing but didn't. The early sun had gone in and a wind sprung up. Now to the left of her was something that looked like a formal garden,

the kind of thing friends of Daddy's had where they lived near Cheltenham. The Campbell-Sedges, of course. It was at their place that she'd met Andrew last year. Apparently, they had known each other since they were kids, but she could never remember things like that. Maybe she'd marry Andrew if he asked her. She liked the idea of a baby. Everyone knew a baby was the best accessory you could have. Look at Britney and Kate Moss. If she had a baby, newspapers might treat her more seriously. Of course she'd have a cesarean so there wouldn't be any pain.

Beyond the garden and the big house she could see a towering church spire and what might be the back of a street. She had

no idea where she was or where she was heading for. For some reason she had left her bottle of water in the car and she was growing thirsty. That reminded her of where she had parked the car and

when. She never wore a watch when she was running. What time had it been when she started? Hours and hours ago—well,

an hour. Traffic wardens wouldn't be about yet, not before nine surely.

210

The path led her through trees that formed another avenue. Ahead of her a spaniel was running, just one solitary dog in the whole park, its owner, a young black man in vest and jeans, strolling behind it. Eva could hear footsteps but they weren't his. They were behind her.

It wasn't really like being in the country anymore, for the

path was neat and weed-free, and the trees more like Kew Gardens than the Cotswolds. A person could go around and around this place and never find a way out or never find the way she came in. If she didn't find the way she came in how would she ever find her car? She had forgotten the name of the street where she put it, remembered only that it was somewhere in Wl 1.

The man and the spaniel had disappeared, though she hadn't

seen them go. They must have turned off at this little path on the right. The footsteps behind her were still pattering steadily along and somehow, without looking back, she knew that whoever it was had no dog with him. Or her. Dogs made you feel safe. If she had had True with her she wouldn't be in a state now, wondering if she'd ever get out, find the car, find her car key, which she'd meant to tie to her shoelace but hadn't.

The only way the man and the spaniel could have gone was

to take this little path which turned off to the right. There seemed to be no other turning. Eva didn't ask herself why she felt unsafe or why an unknown man and his dog made her feel safer, but it was so, and she had begun to dislike those footsteps behind. At the entrance to the path, where a tall bush with dark leathery leaves stood on either side like guardians of the place, she stopped and looked back. There was no one. The path she had followed, wide, sandy, straight, stretched behind her between a wall of trees.

At this point or after this time, in St. James's Park, she would have drunk half the contents of her water bottle, but she had left it 211

in the car. Her mouth was very dry and she was aware that it was dry because of anxiety as much as thirst. Fear dried your mouth, Daddy had once told her, though she couldn't remember why. She took the path the man and the dog had taken, that they must have taken, unless the earth had swallowed them up. Above her, between leafy branches, ran another narrow path, a lane of sky, gray, cloudy, but lit by a pale sun.

Stopping at that junction of ride with path had put an end to

her running. She would walk the rest of it, walk now until she came to a street, a pavement, gates perhaps, until she saw a bus, heard a fire engine, a car horn. All she could hear now was those footsteps. Patter-patter. Then they stopped. Whoever it was must

have left the path and taken to the turf, the grass that was always out there, beyond shrubs and trees and hedges.

The path was petering out and becoming the brown dusty

floor of something like a wood, a thin sparse wood, and beyond it she saw what she'd almost lost hope of seeing. Between the trunks of trees, a long way behind them, a red double-decker bus passed. There must be a road. It could even be the Bayswater Road. She remembered the name now and would have run toward it, but she could see that ahead of her was no way out of the park. She would have to return to that hated path and walk on to where she thought the gate must be. Still keeping her eyes on the spot where the bus had been, she took a step backward, then another. A second bus passed, going the other way. As she peered, trying to locate the gate, she heard the faintest sound, a whisper or rusde behind her, and slowly turning her head, felt a cold finger touch her neck.

Eva screamed. She felt her legs buckle and sink as the finger became a hand, became two hard strong hands, and closed together, digit tips meeting.

212

A traffic warden found her car at eight forty-one. Spotting it, doing the paperwork, and summoning the clampers would add another one to his tally and enable him to reach his target. As he filled in the forms and began attaching them to windscreen and driver's door, he felt, as well as satisfaction, relief that the driver hadn't come back to abuse him, assault him, or spit in his face. 213

Chapter Eighteen

"That poor girl," said Edmund, handing Heather the Evening Standard.

"I've seen it," Heather said. "I wonder if Ismay knows. She

never reads a paper these days. Eva really was lovely, but not like a woman. Like a child of twelve."

"Andrew Campbell-Sedge fancies twelve-year-olds. Haven't you noticed?"

She could live for ten years, thought Marion. At least ten. There

had been a man of a 109 having a birthday party on breakfast television that morning. Was she going to stay with Avice in spite of

this setback? Perhaps for a while. She remembered the will. That still stood and would endure. But she wouldn't allow herself to be a slave, tied to the place. It was time for her poor old father to have a serious illness which required her frequent presence. She was 214

thinking along these lines, wondering whether to give him cancer or coronary heart disease, when her mobile rang. The sound it made was the first few bars of "The Entry of the Queen of Sheba," and Avice asked her rather crossly if she'd left the wireless on. Her caller was Barry Fenix. "Do you remember me?"

"Of course I do, Barry. Once seen, never forgotten is what I always say. How are you?"

"Fighting fit as ever. I was just wondering if you'd pop over

and have a look at the old lady. I saw her in the garden this morning and I thought she was looking a bit frail."

"I could do," said Marion. "Just let me consult the diary." "The" diary sounded so much more official and important than

"my." She did a little dance on the spot, the cough linctus temporarily forgotten, before picking up the phone again. "Say five

o'clock this afternoon?"

"You couldn't manage anything before that?"

Not if she was wise. Not if she gave an hour to Irene, then went in next door at drinks time. If she hung about a bit, dinner

was likely to be suggested...."Five it must be, I'm afraid, Barry.

I've a very full day."

It might, in any case, be wise to turn her attention back to

Irene, never mind the insults. They were incidental to the job.

Avice, after all, could change her will at any time. Will changing was almost an occupation with her. Irene disliked her daughter-inlaw, was sure to fall out with her son. Marion told Avice that the

call on her mobile was from a paramedic who had found her poor old father unconscious on the floor. She must go to him at once and couldn't say when she'd be back.

The tube journey from Pinner to Finchley Road was a long

one and Marion never cared for the enforced sedentary position it demanded but she had bought the Evening Standard to help her 215

pass the time. There she saw that a man was helping the police in their enquiries into the murder of a blond girl called Eva Simber. The West End Werewolf, possibly.

In the big Sainsbury's around the corner from Lithos Road

she bought herself a packet of hair dye in a shade called Poinsettia and a pair of rubber gloves. Barry had remarked on her hair and its lovely natural shade. Last time the tinting and cutting had been

done by Kevin at Have a Nice Hair Day, but she was far too short of funds to go in for that again. While she waited for the evilsmelling pink paste to take effect, her mind dwelled once again on

Fowler and the cough linctus and the awful waste of all that morphine going down his throat. That label she'd put on the bottle

would have had little effect on someone whose specialty was using substances most people wouldn't dream of taking internally. Marion put on a very tight green top, a boho chic skirt, and

the slippers that looked like ballet shoes. It was youthful attire which suited her girlish figure. No coat would be needed this fine afternoon. Of course she would be a little late, it was always best with men, and she decided to walk, or rather to skip, all the way to Chudleigh Hill through the pretty backstreets, all their trees in full leaf and some with reddening berries. Marion had never been interviewed for a newspaper or magazine, but if she had she would have said when asked what her secret was, "I'm an optimist, you

see. I always look on the bright side." She imagined how lovely her hair must look, ruby red and gleaming in the sunshine. Anyone else would have brooded on that morphine business, but she wasn't one for rancor. You had to move on. You had to think of yourself, a useful maxim.

"I've a confession to make," Barry said when he answered the

door to her. "There's nothing wrong with the old lady. I made it up." "Mr. Fenix!"

216

"Barry," said Barry. "I wanted to see you again and I didn't feel quite up to saying that on the blower."

"Well, I don't know what to say. You are awful. I think I'll just pop next door all the same. Just for half an hour."

"Not a minute more, mind."

Nothing like this had happened to Marion for years. She wanted to dance and sing and shout, but she had to walk decorously up to Irene's front door, ring the bell, and put on a concerned face. Irene was in a fairly good mood. The Crosbies had asked her to go with them to Crete for a fortnight in September.

"Well, 'asked' isn't the word. Begged me is really what it was.

I said I'd think about it. I don't really know if my back would stand it." Irene opened her workbox and took out a half-finished string of blue beads. What does she do with all that rubbish, Marion asked herself. "I've been suffering from a lot of flatulence lately. That wouldn't be very convenient in a hotel, would it?"

"Any sign of Edmund moving into his new flat yet?" asked Marion, stirring it.

"You don't suppose they ever tell me anything, do you?"

Three quarters of an hour later she was back ringing Barry's doorbell. She rightly thought that what he liked her for was her vivacity and this evening she felt more vivacious than she had for weeks. She smiled, she laughed at his jokes, she admired all his possessions. Gin and tonic helped. He said his favorite type of woman was "your natural redhead." She was a little vixen and he was ready to bet she had a hot temper. At seven he suggested he take her out to dinner in Hampstead. It was a good dinner and neither tartufo nor pear and almond tart was on the menu.

He drove her home to Lithos Road. Marion was praying all the way that Fowler wouldn't be there, sitting on the doorstep 217

waiting for her, and her prayer was answered. Barry kissed her wetly before opening the door for her to get out of the car. She hadn't liked it but, waving gaily to him, reminded herself that there was no gain without pain.

Ismay found out from Pamela.

"It's just been on the news that they're questioning another man in the Eva Simber murder," she said.

Ismay held herself very still. It felt as if the color had gone

from her face. "Who did you say?"

"You know, Eva Simber, the girl who was murdered in Kensington Gardens—oh, it must be at least a week by now. Don't

you ever see a newspaper, Issy? Don't you watch television?" "Not much if I can help it. You say Eva Simber was killed last week?"

"That's right. You didn't know her, did you? The name sounds familiar."

"I met her once," said Ismay distantly.

She got herself something to eat, found a half-full bottle of

wine in the fridge, and went to sit with her mother. The shock of hearing of the death of an enemy can be as great as when the victim is your friend.

Beatrix said dreamily, "The earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea."

"The waters are the sea, Mum."

Ismay wondered why she bothered, for Beatrix took no

notice but, removing a lump of chewing gum from her mouth and squeezing it in her fingertips like plasticine, abandoned hymns for the Book of Revelation. "Blood came out of the winepress," she 218

remarked in quite a cheerful tone, "even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs."

Eva Simber was dead. Ismay repeated these words over to herself.

She later felt it was to her credit that instead of rejoicing, she

thought, how terrible, how awful. A woman walking her dog had found the body. The paper said police had DNA from Eva's fingernails where she had scratched her attacker, but it would take some

time to try to match it with any possible suspects. A second man was helping with inquiries. There was no mention of Andrew. The police must also have been questioning him, Ismay

thought. They'd be bound to talk to the boyfriend, and Andrew had been Eva's boyfriend. There was no good deceiving herself over that. She picked up the phone and dialed Heather's mobile. She

and Edmund were in a wine bar on their way home from work. "Did you know?"

"Of course we knew, Issy. I knew you wouldn't—well, not at first. You never read the papers or see the news."

"Why didn't you tell me?" "I didn't want to upset you." "Upset me?"

Heather said nothing.

"Why did you think you'd upset me? Didn't you think I'd be glad? Oh, I know I'm awful. I'm terrible being glad someone's dead. But didn't you know I'd be glad? Now she's gone Andrew will come back to me."

"I doubt it," said Edmund after she had rung off.

They finished their drinks and went out. Under a shady overhanging tree Heather lifted up her face and smiled at him. He felt overwhelmed with love for her, a feeling so strong that it made

him breathless. She came into his arms with a sigh of pleasure and 219

he kissed her as passionately as if they were in their own home, away from all eyes. "I love you so much."

"Not more than I love you," said Heather.

The street in Battersea where Ivan lived was some way from Kensington Gardens, but still Pamela felt nervous walking to his house from a distant bus stop. Women are always on edge after the murder of a woman in the city where they live, even if it didn't take place on the doorstep.

Ivan had suggested the last time they met that she hire a permanent live-in carer for her sister so they "could get a real relationship going." She had asked him what he meant and he said, "Well, move in together."

"I'm not ready for that yet, Ivan."

"Why aren't you?" he said. "At our age we can't afford to hang about. We know how we feel about each other."

Did they? Did she? "I couldn't leave Beatrix with a carer. For one thing, I couldn't afford it."

"Wouldn't those selfish nieces of yours help with that? I'd be prepared to help."

She was amazed. After the business with the minicab and his unwillingness to eat out, she had put him down as cheap. His cheapness had been the main thing she saw as a stumbling block to a permanent relationship. Yet here he was offering to pay toward the care of her sister.

"It's good of you to think of it." As she said it she seemed to

see Beatrix's poor blank face, the pale eyes that recognized no one for more than a few minutes at a time, and to hear that voice uttering the ancient pronouncements of a fanatic. "It's very good of you," she said, and then, weakly, "I'll think about it."

220

She had thought about it. She had thought of little else. He

must love her if he, a man careful with money, could make an offer like that. Why did it matter so much to her that while he'd take

her to pubs, he was so reluctant to go to any restaurant superior to a workman's cafe? For years she had eaten every meal at home with Beatrix. Restaurants were hardly essential in her life. It was true that his constant harping on what he called "gravy train passengers," those whose sole income was derived from state-funded

benefits, grated on her. But it was a small matter to set against his attractions, his fondness and need for her, and his recent generous offer. Why then was she going to say no?

"I want to go on seeing you, Ivan," she said when she was

inside his flat and, to her surprise, he had produced a bottle of wine and a packet of crisps that looked as if it had been around for a long while. "It's just that I think it's early days to move in together. Organizing something satisfactory for my sister would take time. It might not even be possible."

He raised his glass, said, "Cheers," then, "You know, I'm not altogether sure I believe in this sister of yours. I wonder if you haven't invented her."

"Oh, Ivan, why would I?"

"How about to create a distance between us? To make it impossible for us to be really close?"

"Of course I haven't invented her."

"I'm not convinced. I think I'll come and see her. See if she

really exists. I could take you home tonight, couldn't I? As a matter of fact, I ought xo take you home. It's a bit remiss of me not to." She had resolved not to bring the food this evening. It was a

habit she shouldn't get into. He surprised her again by producing two fillet steaks, frozen peas and carrots, and two panna cottas from a supermarket.

221

"Not fish and chips, then?" She smiled as she said it but he didn't return her smile.

The idea of his taking her home was very unwelcome. Meeting Beatrix didn't matter. She would stare at him or not stare at

him, closing her eyes. But Ismay would be there. Pamela had never before shied away from introducing any friend to her nieces, but now the fear of what he might say to Ismay, what effect his manner and way of speaking might have on Ismay, made her wince. Heather would be even worse. She was less tolerant. When she realized she expected those close to her to tolerate Ivan, Pamela felt very miserable.

She cooked the food and they ate it. Ivan talked about his job and the various disagreements, not to say vendettas, he had with colleagues. People were envious of him and therefore had it in for him. Pamela had always believed that when a man claims to have many enemies the fault must to some extent lie with him, but she couldn't let herself adhere to that when it was Ivan. If she was going to think like that she might as well go home now and never come back.

They went to bed. Eating supper, going to bed, had become routine. She thought it very early in their relationship to get into a routine, but she could tell he was a man who liked an orderly life, geared to the clock, and she couldn't really fault that. The pleasures of lovemaking were overshadowed for her by the knowledge

that he was coming home with her, that Ismay would meet him, and she shouldn't be thinking like this.

It didn't happen. He broke with his timetable and fell asleep.

She got up, wrote him a note that said, I'll phone. See you soon. Love, Pam, and went out into the street to begin the frightening walk to the bus stop. A few people about would have made it less sinister than this emptiness. There were always cars. At night, she 222

thought, it was easy to have the illusion that the cars, the streams of them, were driverless automatons, moving of their own volition.

One single person appearing ahead of her, walking toward

her, or behind and following her, would be the terrifying thing, just one. This wasn't the West End, of course, it was too far south, but now she remembered that one of the Werewolf's victims had been walking on Wimbledon Common when she had felt his hands on her throat.

Surely Ivan shouldn't have condemned her to this? She remembered that it was she who had left him. He had been asleep. He hadn't sent her out into the night alone. And hadn't she spent the whole evening hoping he wouldn't come with her?

The bus came and she got on to it.

More prudently than her aunt, Ismay hailed a taxi the short distance to home. It was twenty past eleven. She was wondering

if Andrew still lived in Fulham or if he had moved in with Eva Simber. Suppose she were to phone him on his old number? Or on his mobile? She could phone like an old friend, just say she was sorry about Eva. No, she couldn't. Her voice wasn't capable of that. For the first time for a long while she went to bed without

having a preliminary drink. She slept more soundly than she had for weeks.

223

Chapter Nineteen

It occurred to Edmund that the police might come to see his wife. After all, even though she wasn't a friend of Eva Simber's, she had set out to meet and talk to her in St. James's Park, and had made at least three phone calls to her. A woman phoning another woman asking her to give up her boyfriend for the sake of her sister was hardly a normal way of making contact with someone. He said so to Heather.

"Do you think so?" Heather said.

"They may want to ask you if Eva ever mentioned to you a man who'd threatened her or stalked her. Something like that. They'll ask everyone who knew her that sort of thing."

"I didn't really know her."

"I'm just warning you, darling, so you won't be alarmed if the police come."

"I don't think I'm the alarmed sort," said Heather.

Ismay phoned later in the day to ask Heather if she thought 224

Andrew should somehow be told she was waiting for him, had never given up on him.

"No, I don't. That would do more harm than good. You'll just have to be patient."

"So you do think he'll come back to me?"

"Just be patient, Issy. Wait for him to come back or not come back. You haven't much choice, have you?"

The police never came.

Working the area of the West End he called his "manor," Fowler left Oxford Street behind him—useless for really good stuff—and

made his way down South Molton Street. He was having a bad morning and suspected that the bins had been recently emptied by Westminster City Council. It was the wrong time of day for them but that meant little. They could have changed their time or taken on temporary staff ignorant of the rules. He crossed Bond Street and Regent Street, and made a foray into Soho, far from his usual haunts. A bin in Old Compton Street, surrounded by a detritus of chicken bones and call girl cards, yielded a broken flowerpot and a cigarette packet labeled SMOKING KILLS and containing eight

dog ends.

Fowler trailed southward. Months, even years, had passed

since he had investigated the bins of Leicester Square, but there was a chance one of those binge drinkers who infested the place by night might have left behind a half-empty lager can or even dregs

in a wine bottle. Glad that he had made it last, he had a little morphine left in the cologne bottle and, on the steps of St. Martin in

the Fields, he sat down and sipped it. Not for the first time he wondered why Marion had kept morphine sulfate. Not for his use, certainly. She might be a secret addict. If that were so, there 225

would be more in the flat, concealed in hiding places he knew nothing of.

It wasn't long before the visions started. Troops of whiterobed pilgrims walking along the kind of paved streets Fowler's imagination placed in Babylon or Nineveh, headed for a vast stone palace from some obscure period of prehistory. Skull-faced figures sat about on broken rocks and read from parchment scrolls. He was unaware of falling asleep but very aware of a foot prodding his ribs and moving him on. Only half awake, he muttered to himself, "Buck up, Fowler, wakey-wakey," drifted up St. Martin's Lane, wove across the street between cars with unsympathetic drivers, was nearly run over in Little Newport Street, where Marion had once told him their grandfather had been born, and finally came to rest, leaning against the wall of one of the great cinemas of Leicester Square.

His hallucinations had subsided into a vague grayish fog, populated by moving shapes, so that London looked as it must have

done in the days of pea-soupers. It was inadequate to obscure the

waste bin that stood two yards from him, a bin full almost to overflowing. Fowler was usually methodical about his emptying procedure,

but this time he picked out object after object, plastic and

paper, bottle and packet, much of it coated in grease or tomato ketchup, and strewed them across the pavement. Halfway down was an unexpected find, a large stone-colored handbag. Fowler pulled it out and wiped off its thick dappled surface traces of what seemed an effusion from the leather itself but which smelled like salad cream. He allowed himself briefly to hope that whoever had discarded it had forgotten to empty it of cash, cards, and saleable items, but he was a realist and he quickly undid the zip.

A label inside said MARC JACOBS. Maybe that was the owner

who had thrown it away. No cash, no credit cards, not much at all. 226

The fog was beginning to clear. Fowler sat down on the pavement with his feet in the street and examined the bag's contents. A woman passerby stopped beside him and began lecturing him on dropping litter.

"All of us are standing in the gutter," Fowler remarked to her, "but some of us are looking at the stars."

Although Ismay knew Eva Simber was dead, it took her a while to absorb it into her mind as a fact. It was a long time since she had read a newspaper, but now she read two every day, a morning

paper and an evening, not so much to discover the latest police moves as to see yet another photograph of Eva. It was as if these pictures and the sensational captions underneath them made her death real. This was the work surely of one of those strange halfcrazy men whose description and faces seldom appeared in the

newspapers until they came up for trial, itinerant men who had no occupation, no permanent relationships, were probably illiterate, had been in and out of prison. The West End Werewolf who had put his hands around women's throats and run off laughing had now killed.

Of course she thought of Andrew. How was he? What did he feel? Nothing much, she hoped. Conventional feelings of pity only, pity and a certain amount of horror, but no grief. Later she began asking herself what he would do now. She meant, will he come back to me, but it was a while longer before she let herself answer with a strong affirmative.

Gradually, she began to hope he would return. If only for

her shoulder to cry on. She told herself she was a fool to believe simultaneously that he would care very little about Eva's dying and that his grief would be such as to need comfort. Both could hardly 227

be true. Very soon she found herself back in the situation she had been in when he left her, believing it was Andrew every time the phone rang. She had a new mobile number now, replacing that of the one which had been stolen. Suppose he was trying to call her on her mobile and couldn't get through. Suppose he was trying to text her. He might be trying now, at this moment.

The temptation was to drop everything else and concentrate on her new relationship. Plainly, Barry was falling in love with her

and his love must be encouraged in subtle ways. It wasn't in Marion's nature to confess, even to herself in the long watches of the

night, that she might be a less than attractive woman, that she was aging, that the prospects of romantic happiness for her were receding daily. In her own expressed estimation she was exceptionally good-looking, clever, hardworking, accomplished at everything

she turned her hand to, and possessed of a charming personality. Sometimes, complacently, she told herself she suffered from high self-esteem. Still, she recognized that a prize like Barry Fenix had

to be worked for, studied for. Irene Litton might hardly seem to be in the running, but that was a shallow person's assessment. Years older than herself, fat—well, fattish—ridiculous with her beads and her imaginary illnesses, she was nevertheless well-off, the owner of a fine house and on the spot.

But she mustn't neglect her other commitments. In spite of having been let down (as Marion saw it) over that business with the morphine that never was, she was still in Avice's employment. More to the point, she was still in Avice's will. Unlikely as it now was that Avice would die of poisoning, die she would. Eventually. She was eighty-four. Marion would go back to Pinner that night, make sloppy overtures to those rabbits, make Avice's supper and 228

do her shopping tomorrow. Then there was Fowler. Unusually for her, she had let him in when he rang her front-door bell. She needed someone to talk to, boast to, really. She might even let him stay the night.

Where anyone else would have remarked to her brother "I've

got a boyfriend" or, even, cryptically, "I'm seeing someone," Marion said to Fowler, "I'm thinking of getting engaged." In a way, it was true. She was thinking of it all the time.

"It's not the thing to say congratulations to the lady," said

Fowler. "You have to wish her well." He came over and kissed her,

a wet, bristly kiss that was just tolerable. The smell of him, compounded of sweat, cannabis, and cheeseburger, was not. "I haven't

done that since we were children. I often kissed you then. I expect you've forgotten."

"You were more fragrant then."

Fowler ignored this. "When is the happy day?"

Marion saw that she had gone too far. "I didn't say I was engaged. I said I'm thinking of it. He is considerably older than I am. Incidentally, he's an expert on Oriental matters."

"Has he got any money?"

"Lots and lots," said Marion, "and a very nice big house in Hampstead. Well, West Hampstead."

"Pity. Still, beggars can't be choosers."

"Speak for yourself. And talking of beggars, how dare you break in here and steal my morphine?"

"It was the bottle. It looked like cough mixture and that reminded me I'd got some cough linctus out of a bin and thenwell, the rest is history."

They argued for a while, not acrimoniously. Fowler put an

end to it by asking for a drink. Anything alcoholic. He wasn't fussy. If he wanted a drink he'd have to have a shower first, Marion 229

said. She'd wait here till he had cleaned himself up and then she'd give him a small whisky but not the single malt she had appropriated from Avice's stock. He could stay the night if he liked. Just

one night, mind.

She heard the shower running and top-volume sounds from

her CD and disc player he'd taken into the bathroom with him. She tapped on the door to tell him the neighbors would complain. He came out wearing her bathrobe. "What'll you do with this flat when you're married to your old bloke?"

"He's not old. He's sixty-two." Keep it for a bolt-hole, she didn't say aloud, while she was waiting for the divorce (and the alimony) to be settled. In case he turns out to be a pervert or snores or something.

"I could take care of it for you." Clean, sweet-smelling Fowler gave her one of his winning little-boy looks. Marion held out her hand. "I'll have my player, thanks very much. I hope you haven't let steam get in it."

"If you have a baby, could I borrow it? Just for the morning?" Marion screamed.

She would have preferred to tell him somewhere other than on his home ground. A restaurant or even a pub would have been better. When she had suggested it, he had said he supposed this was because it was such a long way to come. He'd come to her, only her crazy sister would be there and he had a feeling she didn't want them to meet.

Pamela hadn't liked hearing Beatrix called crazy, though she was. She hadn't pursued the subject either. What was the point? What was the point in trying to reconcile the things he said with her own standards? She wouldn't need to, for this was the last 230

meeting they would have. It was September now and she'd been seeing him since the beginning of July. But enough was enough. She had tried to make it work but had failed. Maybe he had tried too—in his way. She would tell him at once, not put it off. His lovemaking she'd miss, though not his going to sleep afterward and his leaving her to get to the bus stop in the dark and being rude about her family. And a host of other things.

Since she had come to this decision she had worked out carefully what she would say to him. She had done her best to imagine

his replies. He would argue, of course. He'd probably accuse her of ingratitude. And he'd constantly say he didn't understand. What

had he done? What had he omitted to do? He'd probably ask if

there was someone else. People did ask that in this sort of situation. But ultimately he would have to accept. Pamela just hoped the ultimate, the inevitable, wouldn't be too far off. You can always just

leave, she told herself. All you have to do is say good-bye and go. It was ever the way. Things never work out how you've

planned them. People are different in reality from the way you've seen them while making scenarios in your mind. For one thing, they're less consistent. They surprise you all the time. He had laid the table, made a salad, ordered Indian takeaway, opened a bottle of red wine. "You see, I'm learning," he said.

She nodded, took the glass of wine he gave her. How much

easier it would be to sit down at the table with him, make conversation,

listen to yet another story about some family he'd heard of, living on the benefit and buying a car and going on holiday to Lanzarote. She nearly yielded to temptation. She drank some wine, set the glass down, said, "It isn't working, is it, Ivan?" He was putting dressing he'd evidemly made himself on

the salad and he didn't look up to answer her. "What isn't working?"

231

"Us," she said. "Our relationship. It doesn't work, it won't. We're too different. We've nothing in common. We don't see things in the same way. Is there any point in going on with it?" He sat down opposite her. "Of course we've things in common. We both work with figures, don't we? We're the same sort of

age. I don't know what you mean, 'We don't see things in the same way.' I'm a man and you're a woman. We're bound to be different. The bed part's all right, isn't it? I don't notice you complaining about that."

"I'm not complaining, Ivan. I'm not complaining about

anything. I'm simply telling you I don't think this thing, relationship, affair, whatever it is, will ever work for us. Don't you feel

that yourself?"

"I'll tell you what I feel," he said. "I feel you're doing this for a

bit of excitement. Liven things up. It's too dull for you. It's too static. Sitting down at a table with me, eating, having a drink, having a conversation, all that's too boring for you. Time we had a row, that's what you're thinking, aren't you? Or d'you want the bedroom first and the food later, is that it?" He was standing over her now. "You can have it, only why go to the bedroom? What's wrong with the sofa? What's wrong with the floor?"

He was a big man. She felt she'd never fully realized that before.

A big man with big hands and strong muscles. He took hold of her by the shoulders and pulled her to her feet. His face was close to hers now, their bodies pressed together. He made an iron hoop of his arms, locking his hands behind her back and tightening them. She struggled and he dug his fingers into her flesh.

"Ivan, let me go," she said. "You haven't understood me. I shouldn't have expected you to understand."

"I understand all right." 232

He picked her up. She might have been a child, he lifted her

so easily. Only a monster would have flung a child down as hard as he flung her. She banged her head on the sofa arm and bounced up and down, the springs jangling. On the third coming down he grabbed her shoulders and pressed her into the cushions. She

knew then. She knew what he meant to do. Lying on her, smothering her with his beard and his hot breath, he tugged at her

underclothes, tearing silk and when he met resistance, pinned her down with his left hand, groped with his right.

"No, Ivan." It came out as a strangled groan. "No, Ivan,

don't. Stop, please, stop."

"Please don't stop," he shouted at her. "I won't, I won't, don't you worry."

So this is what rape is, she thought. I will give in now. I will

relax and let him go on so that he doesn't injure me. I won't struggle. Afterward he'll say I agreed, but it doesn't matter. How can sex you want be so different from sex you don't want, yet with the same person? It hurts a bit but not much. It's not that it hurts but that it's such a violation. As if one were a house, used to being cherished and cared for, made as beautiful as can be, and then a burglar breaks in and plunders, destroys everything and shits on the carpet. A hysterical laugh bubbled from her mouth. She couldn't stop and it maddened him. The things that happened maybe would never have happened if she hadn't laughed.

He tugged out of her and, pulling himself to his feet, struck

her hard across the mouth. "Shut up, shut up. Stop that laughing. I'll stop you if I have to kill you."

He dragged her out of the room, across the hall floor to the front door. Her hurt head hurt more as it thudded against the floorboards. He's going to put me out of that door and let me go, 233

she thought. Her jaw throbbed where he had hit her. I wonder if I can open my mouth, if I can speak. My bag is inside there, I've no money to get home with. A sudden shaft of pain stopped thought and made her whimper. He had to let her go to open the door. She got to her knees, then, holding her face, tried to stand but fell. He pulled her upright, pushed her out of the door. She swayed but kept on her feet until his hand, pushed hard into the small of her back, knocked her over to stumble and fall. It would have been better to have stayed like that, on all fours, and crawling weakly across the floor. But she struggled to get to her feet, to cling to the banister rail and scramble down the stairs. She felt his foot in the small of her back and she screamed. The scream was loud but not loud enough to fetch someone from the floor below. Pamela teetered on the edge of the staircase, lost her balance, and fell. She failed to grab the rail in time and she fell down, down, down the dark well, bouncing on the treads, plunging to the bottom.

It happened very fast. The awful helplessness she felt, her inability to hang on to carpet or banister, was driven away by the pain, the stab of pain renewed on every tread of the stairs. Not an ache but a fiery burning that made her scream aloud when she hit the hall floor, her leg twisted and caught under her.

The Indian takeaway man ringing the doorbell brought a

new pain, the shrillness assaulting her ears, but it galvanized her into desperate sound and she shouted to him, "Help me, help me. Call an ambulance. Please help me."

Upstairs Ivan went into his flat and closed the door. 234

Chapter Twenty

The contents of that bag, and perhaps the bag itself, would make a nice engagement present for Marion. As soon as she was out of sight, passing through the ticket barrier at Finchley Road tube station, he had nipped back into the flat and taken the bag out of his backpack. There wasn't much in it. Once he had made sure of no money or means of getting money and no mobile to sell, he had rather lost interest. That was before he knew of Marion's matrimonial plans. Until he had taken that shower he hadn't really known

that she possessed a tape and CD player. This chap of hers liked Eastern stuff so he might appreciate the tape of Indian music called Rainy Season Ragas, which had been inside the inner pocket of the bag, along with the quite expensive-looking ballpoint pen and the stick of concealer, whatever that might be. Neither he nor she would have any use for the photograph of a dark man hugging a fair-haired girl, and this he had thrown away.

235

Fowler wrapped his gifts in a picture of tigers in a rain

forest, which was a page of the Sunday Times magazine, wrote With love from Fowler on the back of a heating engineer's calling card, and helped himself generously to the single malt Marion hadn't seen fit to give him. Settling down with his drink, he flicked through his sister's address book. What a lot of wealthy friends she had! A Mr. Hussein in Perrin's Grove, Hampstead;

a Mrs. Litton in Chudleigh Hill a mile or two south of that; a Mr. and Mrs. Crosbie in Ealing. Surely there must be something there for him.

"I haven't told the police," Pamela said. "I told the ambulance people I fell downstairs. They brought me here and I told everyone I'd been in a friend's flat and I missed my footing at the top of the stairs. I think they wanted to know where the friend was in all this, but I just didn't say any more."

"But why?" Ismay looked at her in bewilderment. "You've got

a broken jaw, a compound fracture of your left leg, and three broken ribs, and you won't say he did it? He ought to go to prison. I

don't understand you."

"I don't suppose you do. He raped me, too. I didn't tell you

that. How could I tell them? A woman of my age meets a man through a crazy thing called romance walking. She can't wait to get into bed with him and then she's got the face to say he's raped her.

You think I could go into court and say all that? I could be crossexamined and asked about my sex life?"

"When you put it like that, yes—well, I do sort of see. But I can't bear to think of him getting away with it."

With difficulty, Pamela turned away her face. It was still 236

swollen and purplish-blue with bruising. "How's Bea? How are you managing without me?"

Ismay shook her head. "All right, change the subject. Heather said she's told you we're fine. After all, I do live in the house.

Sharon next door's been coming in while I'm at work. Heather and Ed take it in turns to stay overnight. And now they've said they'll give up that flat of theirs—they've only taken it for two monthsand move in with Mum. I think that's marvelous of them. And you mustn't worry about anything."

The orthopedic ward was full. On one side of Pamela was a very old woman who had had a hip replacement and on the other someone nearer her own age who was the victim of a hit-and-run driver. The television was on all day.

"I don't want to watch it, but there's nothing else to do. Isn't

it odd the way when someone gets murdered like that girl Eva Something it's all over the TV for days and in all the papers with a photo of the victim every day, and then it suddenly stops? If they don't find someone for it, it sort of fades away and you never hear any more. Then, one day years later, someone refers to it as an unsolved crime."

"I thought they'd arrested that man they call the West End Werewolf," said Ismay.

"They let him go. He wasn't the right one. I mean, he wasn't

the Werewolf and he wasn't the killer either. Just ask me. I see every news and every police program. This is my supper coming. No, don't go. I shan't eat much. It's just as awful as they say. Have you noticed in those hospital sitcoms on telly you never actually see any of the patients eating?"

A tray was set down in front of Pamela on a folding table. On it was a small salad of bruised avocado, withered lettuce, and a 237

piece of raw carrot with a small round pie and boiled potatoes to follow. Pamela asked Ismay to pour her some water from the jug and pass the glass.

"When Edmund came in he told me he'd been afraid the

police might want to talk to Heather because apparently she knew this Eva. You know how they want to talk to the victim's friends. Not that Heather was a friend, but she did know her."

"Heather knew Eva Simber? I don't believe it."

"That's what he said." Pamela hesitated. "I suppose you know—I'm sorry, Issy, but I'm sure you do know—Eva was seeing Andrew? I didn't know, but he was on telly."

"Andrew was on television?" Saying the name brought the blood to her face.

"Only for a minute or two. He was with her parents, appealing for the person who killed her to come forward."

"I didn't know." All Ismay could think of was, if she had been murdered would he have gone on the television to appeal to her killer?

"Edmund didn't say it had anything to do with that, but I'm

sure it must have," Pamela said. "I mean, Andrew having been your boyfriend. I wondered if she'd—well, told Eva about you and how Andrew had treated you. It's a possibility, isn't it?"

Ismay sat very still. She had been looking at Pamela, but now

she turned her eyes away and down into her lap. "What, asked her to give him up, d'you mean?"

"I don't know, Issy. It did cross my mind. It would sort of be like Heather."

Ismay had been going to resume her urging of Pamela to go

to the police and tell them what Ivan had done, but now she had lost heart. She kissed Pamela and told her she would come again in a day or two.

238

"Maybe I shouldn't have told you," Pamela said. "I could be wrong, anyway. I do wonder sometimes if you know how much Heather cares for you."

It hadn't escaped Marion's notice that whereas, once upon a time, fifty or so years ago, tradition had it that if you slept with a man he wouldn't want to marry you, the reverse was now true: He

wouldn't marry you unless you'd slept with him. Barry Fenix, however, was getting on a bit. Marion didn't know how much he was

getting on. In telling Fowler he was sixty-two she had merely uttered the first likely number that came into her head. He might be older, though hardly younger.

Did that mean he clung to the prejudice and bigotry of half a century ago or had he moved with the times? She would have to find out first. Perhaps she could steer the conversation around to modern morals. The trouble with that was that there never was much conversation, only Barry talking about India and she saying how wonderful he was and what a lot he knew.

Marion's sexual experience was very limited. Over the

decades there had been two affairs, entered into more for status and kudos than love, and neither had lasted more than a few months. The lovers said she was frigid, and though she hotly denied the charge, attributing the coldness of her response to their clumsiness and lack of attraction, privately she told herself it was true and she was glad of it. A lot of trouble was saved. It was a dirty, untidy business at best. As far as she was concerned, sex was to be used for manipulation and possibly blackmail, though it would hardly come to that with Barry. If she did sleep with him, would he know she wasn't a virgin? Would he expect her to be? 239

Would he care? Again, that depended on what he thought of contemporary morals.

She was going out with him again that evening. She kept a

tally and this was the seventh time, which possibly meant something. First to call in at Avice's and explain why she had scarcely

been near Pinner for the past week. Sitting in the tube train, she thought about the ultimate reason she must give for failing to turn up six days ago. Her poor old father had passed on. But this was so rash and final. If she told Avice that, she would have nothing left to supply her with an excuse for future absences. Surely she must save up Dad's death for when Barry's engagement ring was on her

finger or even when her wedding had been fixed.

She found Avice, with Figaro at her feet, sitting in front of

the coffee table on which lay a fresh batch of paperback novels.

She looked cross. Marion reminded herself that Avice was a frequent will changer and the arrangement she had come to with

Mr. Karkashvili might be altered at any time. Also, she needed the miserable wage Avice paid her.

"I'm so sorry, Avice," she said. "My poor dad's gone into a coma. I've been sitting at his bedside hoping against hope he'd

come to and recognize me. I've been holding his hand. It's seventytwo hours since I've had my clothes off."

"Well, of course I'm sorry about your father," Avice said, stroking Figaro's head, "but there is such a thing as a telephone." "They don't allow mobiles in the ward where he is. Now I'm here, let me see what I can do. If you'll just jot down a few things I'll run up to the shops, shall I?"

In the pet shop in Pinner Village she bought a packet of rabbit treats. Gifts for her pets were a surer way to Avice's heart than giving her chocolates. She changed the peat which covered the 240

concrete flooring in the hutch bedding and made Avice's lunch. She would return tomorrow, she said, but now she must go back to her comatose father.

On superficial examination, Fowler appeared not to have

been back to Lithos Road, though Marion was sure he once again had a key to the flat. She had been too preoccupied to ask him. Besides, he would have denied having it or else asked her in that lugubrious way of his if she'd prefer him to break in. She couldn't afford getting someone in to mend more broken windows. But the big dread of her life remained: Suppose she brought Barry back here and they found Fowler in the flat. However besotted with her Barry might be, she was sure he'd retreat at the sight and smell of her brother.

He liked to watch for her from his window and see her hopping and skipping (his words) down Chudleigh Hill. Marion

always did it as fast as she could and popped in through Barry's side gate in the hopes Irene wouldn't see her. Of course, once she had Barry's ring on her finger, Irene could see her all the time, the oftener the better, but spotting her now might lead to attempts to put a spoke in her wheel.

Barry was cooking for her at home that evening. She sat on

the sofa beside him, her shoes off, her feet tucked under her and her head on his shoulder while he played strange music he told her was made by sitars, tablas, and tambouras.

"It's what they play in India, little one," he whispered into her crimson hair. "Didn't know that, did you?"

"I'm very ignorant, Barry," she said humbly, "but I'm learning. You're such a good teacher."

The curry was particularly spicy and Marion made the mistake of helping herself to lime pickle. Even a tiny spot of that on

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her tongue burnt like fire. It was the hottest thing she had ever tasted. She choked and cursed under her breath and had to be plied with iced water, tears streaming down her face. But she hardly need have worried. Barry loved ministering to her, dried her tears, said she was a poor little kitten, and gave her a kiss on her forehead.

After dinner there was more tabla music and cuddles on the

sofa. Barry told her how he had seen the Indian rope trick done by a man in Brick Lane while he was pursuing his inquiries there (whatever that meant) and Marion told him about her friend Mr. Hussein

who came from Ladakh and his son Zafar who had, she said, been madly in love with her. "And did you reciprocate?" Barry asked this in quite a different tone from his usual facetious banter.

"Pardon?" said Marion.

"Did you respond to his—er, ardor?"

"Oh, no, Barry. Of course not! What an idea! I've never been like that, never."

"Not that sort of girl, eh? That's what I like to hear."

The altar before bed then, thought Marion, relieved. As she

had half believed, he was living in the middle of the previous century. Perhaps even before Indian independence came about, some

time, she vaguely believed, in the nineteen forties. She must remember to ask him for the precise date. He'd like that.

He drove her home, attempting quite a passionate kiss before she got out of the car. But Marion, remembering her icy chastity, pushed him gently away and flitted up the path to her front door, waving as she went.

Ismay came away from the hospital angry with Heather, determined to go straight to Victoria and have it out with her, but

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Pamela's final words came back to her. "I do wonder sometimes if you know how much Heather cares for you." Of course she knew. Hadn't Heather killed Guy to save her? Heather would do anything for her. The question seemed to come out of the air and present itself to her: Is it possible she has done something else for you, something enormous and terrible? Is it possible she has killed Eva?

Ismay was on a bus going to Victoria. She was upstairs in the front seat. The question was such a shock that although the bus was coming up to where she wanted to get off, she sat quite still without moving and let it rumble past the stop. Could this be

what she had feared for twelve years? That Heather, who had done it once, would do it again? The situation wasn't quite a parallel with the drowning of Guy but was close enough. Eva hadn't set out to injure her, but without Eva, Andrew wouldn't have left her. Removing Eva wasn't a guarantee that Andrew would return to her but it was the only step anyone could take to make it a possibility.

I can't have it out with her now, thought Ismay as she got off

the bus. I cant mention it to her. Is it possible she could have done it? Would she have known Eva went running in Kensington Gardens? Come to that, how well had she known Eva? So much of this

was new that Ismay felt her head reeling. That girl with her skimpy transparent clothes, her socialite's lifestyle, her country familymuch of this had appeared in the newspapers—and her lack of a job or an aim in life, was so nearly the antithesis of Heather that it was hard to believe they could even have spoken to each other. Ismay no longer felt the resentment she had in the hospital over what had seemed like interference on Heather's part. It no longer angered her to think of Heather asking this girl to send Andrew back to her. It hadn't worked anyway, had it?

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But she wouldn't go to Heather and Edmund. She needed

time alone to review what she had discovered. If she had discovered anything. Sleep was very slow in coming that night. She lay in

the dark and, because that was hopeless, put the light on again.

Her grief over the loss of Andrew—like a bereavement it had been and still was—had almost emptied her mind of all other concerns. Her long-held worry over Heather and what Heather had done (or possibly not done) had been pushed out of the way. If her mind

was a cupboard, Heather and Guy had gone to the back of the top shelf, hidden and almost out of reach. Now the things Pamela had said had brought it to the front, into the light of day, and with the sight of it came a cold, sick feeling of dread. It was terrible enough knowing that Heather, as a child, had killed a man. Ismay understood now that there had been some element of fantasy in her fears

that she might kill again. It had been a possibility but a remote one. There was nothing remote about Pamela's reasoning and what she had inferred from it.

I will listen to the tape again, she thought. I will listen carefully to what I recorded for Edmund but which I never gave him. Could I give it to Heather now? Could I do what I should have done years ago? Could I sit down with her and be gentle with her and ask her? "Did you drown Guy for me and did you kill Eva Simber to send Andrew back to me?"

She got up and began to look for the tape. At one point she

had put it in a plant pot but she remembered taking it out again. Where had she put it? She looked in all the obvious places—what were the obvious places? Were there any?—and ended by ransacking the flat, turning out cupboards and emptying drawers, all of it

in vain.

Just before morning, when the dawn was coming and gray

light filled the room, she dreamed of climbing the stairs, a much 244

steeper and longer staircase than in reality, up and up to where Heather, in her wet dress, stood at the top. But the farther she climbed the more the stairs lengthened ahead of her, and though

she stretched out her arms, Heather turned away and retreated, disappeared, leaving pools and trails of water behind her.

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Chapter Twenty-one

A little early in getting to Chudleigh Hill—she had been rabbitminding while Avice went to a matinee of The Woman in Black

with Joyce and Duncan—Marion was about to slip into Barry's house by way of the side gate when Irene came out of her front door with a pair of pruning shears in her hand. "You must be getting absent-minded, my dear," she said in rather a cheerful tone

for her. "This is where I live."

"Goodness, I'll forget my own name next," said Marion with great presence of mind. She didn't like pruning shears. Fowler had nearly chopped off one of her fingers with a pair just like Irene's when she was ten. She still had the scar. Fowler had intended no harm. She wasn't so sure about Irene. "I can't stop long, I'll just pop in and out."

Bristol Cream sherry was produced, the pruning shears were

laid down on the table, and Irene was off on a long diatribe about her next-door neighbor. He was sulking, she said. Just because she 246

had made it plain she wasn't interested in "anything like that." It was very silly of him to hide himself away just because romance was out of the question. Why couldn't men realize they weren't all God's gift to women? Even worse was Edmund's behavior. To be fair, it wasn't his fault but that wife of his who had undue influence over him. "They've given up their flat and moved in with her mother in Clapham. She's mad, you know. The mother, I mean. Mrs. Rolland, she's called. I suppose Edmund's wife thought she'd get free attention from him, though what he can do I don't know. It's not as if he

were a doctor or even a psychiatrist." "Mad?" said Marion. "My goodness."

"There's a sister living downstairs. Esme or something. Her boyfriend walked out on her and she's having a nervous breakdown. That means nothing these days. She's probably mad too.

These things are hereditary, you know."

Marion made her escape after about ten minutes. Irene came

out with her, remembered after they had said good-bye that she needed to dead-head the dahlias and had left the pruning shears inside. While she was gone Marion rushed into Barry's garden and had just got inside the side gate when she heard Irene returning and the snip-snip of her decapitations.

"How's my kitten?" asked Barry above the soft keening of a raga. Marion thought he looked very strange in an embroidered silk coat over his flannels, a kind of turban on his head with a feather and a jewel on it. She lifted up her face for a dutiful kiss. "I'm in my best bib and tucker for your birthday, my dear." He was the only one who had remembered it. "I hope you don't think it too much like fancy dress."

"Not on you, Barry. You look gorgeous." "The old lady caught you, I see."

Marion had heard or read somewhere that men like women 247

who are kind and generous toward other women. "Poor thing. She's so lonely. I had to go in for five minutes."

"Ten," said possessive Barry. "I was counting. Would you like your birthday present now or in the restaurant? I've fixed it up that they're bringing your cake after the main course and one of the waiter-wallahs is going to sing 'Happy Birthday to You.' So shall we save the present till then?"

"Anything you say," said Marion, hooking her little hand

over his arm and pretending to be enraptured by the music. It was always an Asian restaurant, but she was getting used to it.

"I don't suppose you're going to tell old Barry which birthday it is?"

"Oh, just somewhere between thirty and death," said Marion with a giggle.

Pamela was sitting in a wheelchair and she wasn't alone. A man was with her, someone Ismay thought she vaguely recognized, associating him with Guy, though she couldn't place him. Pamela held out her hand and Ismay bent down and kissed her.

"Do you remember Michael, Issy?"

Then she did, of course. This was the man who had been engaged to Pamela at the time Beatrix married Guy. This was the man who had left her a week before they were due to be married. "How are you?" she said.

"You were a little girl when I last saw you." "I was fifteen."

He was looking at Pamela as if he had fallen in love with her

all over again. He took her hand, kissed her in a tender way, and left, promising to come back the next day. Ismay said good-bye and looked inquiringly at Pamela.

248

"I know what you're thinking. He apologized for all that." "Bit late in the day, wasn't it?"

Pamela went on as if she hadn't spoken, "He said it was partly

due to Guy's dying like that. He said he felt he couldn't be connected to our family when he'd actually hoped something like that

would happen."

"What on earth do you mean?"

"He said that when Guy had that virus and just seemed to get worse and worse he hoped he—well, he wouldn't get better." "You mean, he'd die?"

Pamela winced. "You're not usually so blunt, Issy. But yes, he hoped he'd die and then Michael would get his job. And then Guy did die. Maybe he killed himself. Michael felt so much guilt about that he thought it would be best if he just—disappeared. After all, he was offered Guy's job but didn't take it."

"I don't think he ought to feel guilt about anyone but you,"

said Ismay, who thought the story sounded like an excuse and not a very clever one. "How did he know you were here?"

"He ran into Heather at the hospice. His mother's in there. She's dying."

"He must spend all his time hospital visiting," said Ismay drily, and then, on an impulse, "When he was with you did he have a key to our house? I mean, did he have access to a key?" "Why on earth do you want to know?"

"Take it that I just do. Did he?" "I suppose he did," said Pamela.

Michael had hated Guy, had wanted his job. He had broken off with Pamela over the guilt he felt for wishing Guy dead. Or because he had killed Guy? Ismay asked herself that question as 249

she went home in a taxi. It was far more likely that he had felt guilt because he had killed Guy than over some tenuous neurotic fear of being associated with the family of a man he had wanted dead. He had a key or access to Pamela's key, which amounted to the same thing. Could she, after all this time, find out where Michael had been on the afternoon Guy died? Could she now take the enormous and frightening step of asking Heather if Michael had come

into the house that afternoon? Or even if he could have come into the house without her knowing?

It was a long time since she had thought about Guy's death.

Her loss of Andrew had driven most of that away. It had returned to her mind because today was the anniversary. Thirteen years ago to the day it had happened and always on the day the memories were stronger. If she didn't dream about it she had a waking dream in which once again she saw Heather on the stairs in her wet dress and heard her say, "You'd better come."

Did her thinking of it now mean she was beginning to get

over Andrew? Hardly, for with that thought and its many possible repercussions, he came back into her consciousness so that she was asking herself, what does it matter now? What can it matter after so long who killed Guy, if anyone did? All I want is Andrew. I don't want answers. I want him. I can wait. If someone said to me that he would come back in five years, in ten, I would be happy. I would wait, I would be patient. I shall never get over him. But if

I knew that one day I would see him again, he would love me again, I would be dizzy with happiness. Sometimes I feel I would die of it.

For all that, when she was back in the flat, had put her head around their door and said hello to Edmund and Heather, she began once more hunting for the tape. She looked in all the places she had looked in before, and then it occurred to her it might be in 250

her clothes cupboard, in the pocket of a coat or jacket. It wasn't. She never carried anything in her pockets but in her handbag.

Pethaps that was where it was, in one of her handbags. Ismay had a lot. She took them out of the cupboard and laid them on the bed, opening each one and removing the contents. This yielded

a lot of receipts and credit card chits from various shops, which

she prudently tore into pieces; several dozen tissues; and a miscellaneous assortment of paper clips, coins of tiny denominations,

ballpoint pens, a floppy disc, and a notepad; but no tape. Of course not—she remembered now. The tape had been in the bag that was stolen.

She felt a little mild relief. It wasn't falling into the hands of anyone she knew. Any thief finding it would have thrown it away as he had thrown away all the other things in the bag except the money, no doubt, and the credit cards.

Her mind returned to Andrew. She sat down and closed her

eyes. I didn't like him smoking, she thought. I had asked him to give it up. Oh, God, now I'd let him smoke all day and all night if he'd come back to me. I love my sister, but I'd turn my back on her for him. I'd never see Heather and Edmund again if it would mean

having Andrew back. I'd give everything to have him back....

Barry had a great many tapes of this Indian music of his and not many CDs. Must be his age, thought Marion, pretending to scrutinize his music library after they had come back from the Maharanee. It was a wonder really he hadn't got it all on LPs, he was so old-fashioned. Her present from Barry she had been given in the restaurant. Not a sari, which she had feared, but a beautiful Indian dress, apricot-colored, embroidered with crystals and sequins. "I want to see you in it," he said.

2H

She gave a little girlish shriek but ran away into his bedroom, rather regretting she couldn't give him his reward now. But it wouldn't do. It would put the kibosh (a favorite Barry word) on all her well-laid plans. The dress was very small but not too small for her. Thank God she was wearing her beige patent shoes with the heels like needles.

He actually gasped when she appeared. "Well, you are a beauty," he said. "That must be saved for a very special occasion and I think I know what that occasion will be."

So did Marion and she went home feeling more elated than

she had for a long time. Before driving off, Barry took advantage of his position as dispenser of largesse and organizer of birthday parties by kissing her more ardently that usual, his tongue lightly brushing her teeth. She'd give him something next time and make him some halva. Or wasn't that Indian?

Barry wasn't the only one who had remembered her birthday

after all. Fowler had been back again and left her a present. She unwrapped it. Quite a nice handbag, surely not one of his bin finds. Marion examined it carefully. Of course it wasn't new, that was too much to expect. There was a scratch on one side near the bottom and the strap was a bit scuffed. But still it was good leather and a lovely color. She opened it and saw the Marc Jacobs label inside.

Although the bag remained unchanged, in her eyes it was immediately enhanced and increased in value by this label. Nothing inside

it, or was there? She rummaged around and brought out a tape. Rainy Season Ragas. Just the thing to take over to Barry when she'd made the halva.

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Chapter Twenty-two

The West End Werewolf had been arrested. There was no murder charge, but as is the way in these cases, everyone knew because the newspapers knew that as soon as enough evidence had been amassed, he would be charged with causing Eva Simber's death as well as numerous assaults on young women in the western

suburbs. His name was Kevin Dominic Preston from Hounslow.

He was twenty-one, an unemployed painter and decorator. Watching television, Ismay saw him brought to court in a

police van, mobbed and threatened as he was hustled into the building with a coat over his head. A woman in the crowd threw something in his direction and a policeman caught her by the

arms. Ismay turned it off. She wondered if Andrew had watched it. If he had loved Eva he would have wanted her killer caught. Perhaps he was very unhappy. She understood something. You want

your lover to be unhappy if he is unhappy over you, not over 253

someone else. The death of your rival should cause him to rejoice, not grieve, even though this makes him into a monster.

The first time Irene saw her sneak through the side entrance into Barry's back garden she thought Marion had gone to the wrong house. The second time she saw her, on this occasion going boldly up to his front door and calling something through the letter box, she had a panic attack. Her heart raced, she moaned and choked, laughed and then wept.

She phoned Edmund, but by the time he arrived it was over and she was lying prostrate, unable to speak above a whisper. "Has something happened, Mother? Have you had a

shock?"

She wasn't going to tell him. "I'm subject to panic attacks. You ought to know that after all this time."

"Can I make you a hot drink? Get you something to eat?"

"If that's the best you can offer. I realize it's not as if you were a doctor."

Edmund went back to Clapham and Beatrix but to Heather

as well and she made everything all right. "Sometimes I think if we could choose our mothers I'd rather have yours than mine." Heather laughed. "Mine's never been so calm and—well,

happy, since you've been looking after her. And she never sticks her pill on her chewing gum anymore."

"She never gets the chance," said Edmund.

In Chudleigh Hill Irene made her weekly evening call to her

sister. "Do you happen to know if Marion Melville still looks after

those animals for Avice?"

"Oh, my dear, she works for her. She gets a wage." 254

"Works?" Irene was in her Lady Bracknell role increasingly these days. "In what capacity?"

"I don't know. Cleans out the rabbits. Does a bit of shopping. Makes her appointments for her, such as they are. She sleeps there. Or she does sometimes. Not so much since her father's been so ill."

"Could you let me have Avice's phone number? I used to have

it, but it seems to have been mislaid." She spoke in a slightly menacing tone as if the mislaying had been done by some servant and retribution would quickly follow. "I've got a pencil. I'll hold on."

As she usually did these days while on the phone, Irene positioned herself in the drawing-room bay window, the better to see comings and goings next door.

Joyce came back with the number. "Here it is. Now, how are you? I'm told that the proper answer to that these days is 'good.' All the young say it."

"I'm not at all good, Joyce. I've just had a panic attack and I've a severe pain in my chest. I think it may be pericarditis." "Oh, dear. If you're meaning to phone Avice now, the chances are Marion will answer."

"No, she won't," said Irene. "I've just seen her going into next door."

Marion was on her way to see Barry but hadn't brought the tape or the halva. She had assembled the ingredients for the halvahoney, sesame seeds, nuts and saffron—and then discovered from a footnote in the cookery book that it was a Turkish sweetmeat. As for the tape, she thought she ought to have a look at it before giving it to Barry. She had taken it out of its Perspex case and

255

examined it. Wasn't it rather peculiar to have a plain black tape cassette in a case with a picture of a man in a turban sailing on a blue lake? Maybe it wasn't Rainy Season Ragas after all. Typical of Fowler! She had no time to test it now, what with all this running between Pinner and West Hampstead.

No time either to plan surreptitious ways of getting into

Barry's house. She would have to trust to luck, and luck was against her. Irene was stationed in her bay window, talking on the phone. When she saw Marion she waved and smiled. It was the kind of smile you gave, Marion thought, when you wanted to reassure people but actually intended betrayal. Perhaps Irene had been bad-mouthing her to Barry.

If she had, there was no sign of it in his behavior. She was in

his arms almost before he had closed the front door and, nestling close to him, she murmured to herself, "Ask me then. Go on. Ask me. Propose."

Avice was sitting on a footstool, grooming Figaro with a comb and

a rubber brush with spikes on its back that looked a bit like a sea urchin. The rabbit sat completely still, showing neither pleasure nor distaste, and reacted not at all when Avice had to get up to answer the phone.

"You are a stranger," she said.

"Is Marion Melville there, Avice?" Irene knew very well she wasn't.

"She's a friend of yours, of course. I'd forgotten. Would you

like me to give you her mobile phone number? These things are a mystery to me, but I understand with one of them you can run someone to earth anywhere."

Inspired, Irene said, "Where does she say she is, Avice?" 2%

"That's a strange tone to use. As a matter of fact, she's visiting her father. He's ill in hospital."

"He's dead," said Irene.

"That must have been very sudden." "He's been dead for twenty years."

"I see." Avice said an abrupt good-bye and absent-mindedly

returned to her grooming. It was Susanna's turn. Unable to concentrate, she pulled out a tuft of fur on the teeth of the comb and

Susanna fled through the rabbit flap. After she had apologized profusely to the absent animal, Avice found a pencil and wrote on the phone pad: Speak to Mr. Karkashvili tomorrow.

Pamela was going into rehab, where she would have daily physiotherapy. After a fortnight, if she improved the way they expected,

she could come home. The rehab center was in Berkshire and it was proposed that Pamela should be taken there in an ambulance, but Michael Fenster insisted on driving her.

"We can stay on for another couple of weeks," Edmund said. "But you've got possession of your flat." Ismay tried to keep dismay out of her tone.

"Not till next Monday," said Heather. "We can move all our stuff in. We can still be here and be with Mum."

Ismay argued. "But I can easily manage. Now Ed's got Mum taking her pills regularly she'll be in the habit of it. She'll be fine. I can come home at lunchtime. It'll only be for a short time."

"Issy, we'll stay. We'll stay as long as it takes. Now tell all about Michael. Has he come back to her? Will he move in here with her? He used to be quite fond of Mum—only she was different then."

Ismay thought of how different she was and of what had 257

made her change. If Edmund left them alone, could she ask Heather now? Take her chance and say to Heather, "You were alone here that afternoon, you were in your bedroom, that room that's Pamela's now. Did anyone come into the house? Did Michael come? Or was no one here but you all the time?" Edmund wouldn't go. He and Heather were about to sit down and eat their

supper. She could say to Heather, "Come downstairs later, will you? There's something I want to ask you." Edmund would come too. It was impossible.

It's always been impossible, she thought. I've had twelve years to do it in, thirteen years now, and I haven't done it. I'm never going to know because the fact is I haven't the nerve to ask her. I never have had. I never shall have.

"I'd better go if I want to see Pam before eight."

"Tell her Ed and I will be in to see her tomorrow," said Heather. She poured herself a glass of wine and started the tape. Whatever she had expected, it wasn't a human female voice. The woman's first words meant nothing to her. "My stepfather was called Guy Rolland. He was thirty-three when he married my mother and she was thirty-eight." Marion stopped the tape. This wasn't what Barry had told her was a traditional Hindu musical form. She felt a sharp pang of disappointment. Romantic Indian songs were just what she needed to bring Barry to the point.

Afterward she didn't know why she hadn't abandoned it. Barry

was coming to dinner ("To see my kitten's little nest"), but there were still two hours to go before his arrival, time to get back into her tracksuit and run down to HMV and pick up a CD. They were bound to have Indian music and she could buy it on her Visa card. 258

It was the idea of getting out of that dress and back into it later that stopped her. Full of anti-Fowler rage, she pressed the "tape on" button. The voice said, "My father and Heather's had been dead for

three years." Heather. Marion's attention was caught by the name. She stopped the tape and rewound it. She knew a Heather. Just one woman called that and she was sure she'd never met another.

She played the tape again, heard "Heather," was given no

clue as to the identity of the speaker; but then came a name that