“D’you want me to keep on searching for that divorce decree?”
“There are some things you can search for, Malcolm, that you’re never going to find. Because they don’t exist, right?”
“So do we do her for bigamy?”
“I reckon we leave it to the DPP to sort out. We’ve got enough on our plate without that.”
“I shall be going down to the constituency this afternoon,” said Jims, “but I’ll delay it till after four so that you have time to fetch Eugenie from school first.”
Zillah gave him an aggrieved look. “Don’t bother. I’m not coming.” How could she? She was meeting Mark Fryer for coffee in Starbuck’s at eleven on Friday. “What made you think I’d be coming?”
Jims had forgotten that dream of himself as prime minister with Zillah as his consort. “I’ll tell you what made me think it, darling. We made a bargain, remember? So far you’ve got everything out of this marriage and I’ve got fuck-all. You’re my wife, at least you’re the ornament I chose to impress my constituents, and if I choose that you accompany me to Dorset, you do it. In case, as is more than likely, you never read a newspaper or watch anything on television above the level of a hospital soap, there’s a by-election in North Wessex next week and I intend to be there on Saturday to support our candidate. With you. Dressed in your best and looking lovely and gracious and devoted. With the kiddiwinks, trusting that little devil doesn’t bawl the place down.”
“You bastard.”
“The children are yours, not mine, but you’d be wiser not to use language like that in front of them.”
“What about you saying ‘fuck-all’ then?”
Jordan had taken the new pacifier out of his mouth and flung it across the room. “Fuck-all,” he said thoughtfully. It seemed a better panacea to stop him crying than the pacifier. “You bastard.”
“Anyway, I’m not coming. I never want to see Dorset again. I saw all I wanted to while I was living there. Take that Leonardo. I bet you were going to.”
“I hope I know something about discretion, Zillah, which is more than you do. By the by, have you remembered to inquire after your father?”
The next morning neither of them saw Natalie Reckman’s article, Jims because he woke up late and had to rush to get to his office in Toneborough on time, Zillah because she went off straight from dropping the children to have a facial and makeup done at the Army and Navy Stores. At just after eleven, a vision of loveliness in Mark Fryer’s words, which didn’t sound as if he meant to be sarcastic, she was drinking cappuccino with him in Horseferry Road, where he told her all about his broken marriage, recent divorce-a sensitive word to Zillah at the moment-and was disbelieving when she said she had to go and pick up Jordan.
“Let me come with you.”
Afterward Zillah could never imagine how she’d come to get out of the car with Jordan and Mark Fryer and, instead of going up to the flat in the lift, walked round to the front of the block. Could it have been because the building was beautiful from the front and a dingy concrete nightmare in the basement? Had she wanted to impress him? Perhaps. But there it was. They all walked along Millbank and turned the corner into Great College Street.
A crowd had gathered outside Abbey Gardens Mansions, made up mostly of press photographers and young women with notepads. They turned as one when they saw Zillah approaching and closed in upon her, strident voices bombarding her with questions and bulbs flashing. She tried to cover her face with her hands, then, she hoped, with Mark’s jacket which he’d been carrying over his shoulder.
He snatched it back, said hastily, “This is no place for me. See you,” and disappeared. Jordan began to scream.
Chapter 20
IT WAS LAF’S day off. At eleven in the morning the Wilsons were sitting outside their French doors, drinking coffee and reading the Mail and the Express. Sonovia kept her small garden as she often said a garden should be, “a riot of color,” in contrast to next door where everything was neat, sterile, and flower-free. Tubs held shocking-pink azaleas, scarlet and pastel-pink geraniums were coming into bloom, while trailing plants in Oxford and Cambridge boat-race colors spilled out of hanging baskets and over the rims of stone troughs. A bright yellow climber no one knew the name of blazed against the far fence.
Laf laid down his paper and said appreciatively to his wife that the garden was a treat to look at. “Those blue things are a lovely sight. I don’t think you’ve had those before.”
“Lobelias,” said Sonovia. “They make a nice contrast to the red. I got them through mail order but to tell you the truth, I never thought they’d turn out like the picture. Have you seen about this woman who used to be married to that man that was murdered in the Odeon marrying someone else without being divorced? It says here she thought she was divorced. I don’t see how she could have, do you?”
“Don’t know. There’s people about as will do anything, as I have good reason to know. Maybe he showed her some false papers.”
He wasn’t going to let on to Sonovia that this latest bit of news in the Cinema Slayer case hadn’t yet reached Notting Hill police station. The knife was different, he knew all about that, how it was found in a recycling bin and someone said it looked as if it had been boiled and the lab couldn’t tell if it was the murder weapon or not. Who’d boil a knife? That was what the DI had said and Laf had thought, Minty would. He’d had to laugh at the idea of little Minty harming anyone.
“D’you reckon this Zillah Melcombe-Smith’d done wrong,” he asked his wife, “marrying again when she wasn’t divorced? I mean, if she thought she was divorced and she married that MP in good faith?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Laf. Maybe she ought to have checked up before she actually stood at the altar.”
“Well, d’you reckon anyone does wrong if they don’t know it’s wrong?” These matters sometimes troubled Laf as a responsible policeman. “I mean like, if you attacked someone, killed them, because you thought they were a demon or Hitler or something, really believed it? If you thought you were ridding the world of an evil-an evil entity? Would that be wrong?”
“You’d have to be nuts.”
“Okay, more people are nuts, as you call it, than you’d think. Would it be wrong?”
“That’s too deep for me, Laf. You’d better ask the pastor. D’you want another coffee?”
But Laf didn’t. He sat in the sun, thinking that if what he’d outlined to Sonovia was wrong for the person who got killed and all their friends and family, it would be just as wrong if the killer had meant it. But it wouldn’t be wrong for the person who did the killing, they wouldn’t have committed murder like the Commandment said thou shalt not, they’d be innocent as a lamb; they’d have nothing on their conscience and perhaps they’d be proud to have been Hitler’s or the devil’s assassin.
Laf, who was a deeply religious man and an Evangelical, asked himself if they’d go to heaven. He would ask the pastor. And he was pretty sure he’d say that since it was God who had made them mad He ought to let them inside the gates of paradise. He looked back at the garden. Those pale pink geraniums were a lovely color. It was a great thing to be a happy man, to sit under his vine and his fig tree, as the Bible said, under his may tree and his lilac really, with a good wife and his quiverful of children.
Sonovia had gone into the house to phone Corinne. In the afternoon they were going to the Dome, taking their granddaughter with them. He’d wait until a quarter past one, by that time they’d have had their lunch, and then he’d take the papers in to Minty. Maybe she’d like to come with them. Mending the rift between Minty and Sonovia had been the most worthwhile thing he’d done for a long time, Laf thought. His wife was a good woman, if a shade quick-tempered. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.