A man who called himself Jims’s agent (he seemed to have so many) came in and labeled every piece of furniture in the flat either FOR STORE or FOR LONG FREDINGTON. Even Zillah had to admit Jims had treated her handsomely. By now she was resigned to the end of those dreams of TV stardom or fashionable life, Buckingham Palace garden parties, the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, and cruises on a peer’s yacht. It was over and the crunch had come. But this time things would be very different. Her native optimism reasserted itself. She had the car. She had a vast wardrobe of new clothes. Willow Cottage was no longer rented from the wicked squire, it was hers.
Letting herself and the children in, she found the place even better than she’d been led to believe. The whole house carpeted and curtained, everything new in the bathroom and kitchen, gold taps and marble counter tops, built-in cupboards in all the rooms, a huge television and video. Almost with enthusiasm she arranged the furniture and made up the beds. She picked up the new phone and called her mother.
Eugenie surveyed the place without fervor. “I liked it better the way it was.”
“Well, I didn’t,” said Zillah.
“Want to see Titus.” On painkillers, Jordan was bemused but he’d stopped crying. “Want Titus and Rosalba and Daddy.”
Zillah’s eyes and Eugenie’s met, as if they were the same age. “Perhaps Annie will bring Titus and Rosalba round later.”
Annie didn’t come round later but someone else did. He tapped on the back door at eight o’clock, just after Zillah had put Jordan to bed. Zillah had no idea who this very tall, rather good-looking man in his fifties might be and she stared at him, smiling uneasily.
“Ronald Grasmere. I live up at the big house, pal of old Jims.”
Zillah introduced herself by her Christian name alone. She was vague about what her surname might actually be these days. “Sir Ronald, please come in.”
“Call me Ronnie. Everyone does. I’ve brought you a few strawberries from the kitchen garden and the last of the asparagus. It’s not what it was a month ago but I think it’s still worth eating.”
So this was her bogeyman, the slum landlord, the grinder of the faces of the poor, the fascist beast, as Jerry used to call people of his kind in their student days. The strawberries he’d brought were crimson, glowing, dewy, and firm, rather different from what was on sale in Westminster shops. Eugenie appeared in her dressing gown.
“There’s nothing to drink,” Zillah said. “You could have a cup of tea.”
Sir Ronald laughed. “I think you’re wrong there, my dear. Just take a look inside that cupboard.”
Gin, whisky, vodka, sherry, several bottles of wine. Zillah gasped.
“Don’t look at me. Nothing to do with me. That chap of old Jims saw to it when he came in the other day. Now what do you think of this little place? Not bad, is it, though I say it myself.”
The begging letter that came through Fiona’s letter box, along with a flyer for a restaurant in West End Lane and her American Express monthly account, was from a woman she’d never heard of, someone called Linda Davies. As soon as she realized what it was she recoiled from it, screwed it up, and was on the point of throwing it away. Then she remembered a resolve she’d made when first she’d read in the newspaper about Jeff’s past. Slowly and with a certain amount of distaste, she retrieved it, smoothed out the creases in it, and read to the end.
Linda was one of the women Jeff had lived with and used. “Preyed on” was the expression she employed. She wrote that she had taken out a mortgage on her Muswell Hill flat so that he and she could start a business together. Soon after she handed him the money he’d disappeared. Then followed a tale of disaster piled on disaster: Linda Davies’s loss of her job, her struggles to pay her now huge mortgage, her succumbing to chronic fatigue syndrome. She’d read about Fiona in the newspaper, that she’d been living with Jeff when he died, was well-off and successful. All she was asking was for a thousand pounds to pay off her debts and enable her to make a new start.
Fiona felt physically ill when she read it. There seemed no end to Jeff’s perfidy. How many other women had he wronged? Did the police know? One of them might be guilty of his murder. Throughout the investigation she had never really thought about who might have killed Jeff. She had given the police the names of a few possible enemies but not with much conviction. It didn’t matter to her. If she had considered it at all it was some semi-underworld character that she’d vaguely settled on. Now she thought it might have been one of these women.
But when there was a second death, an old woman murdered by the same means, she revised her view. The perpetrator must be someone who knew both victims. And who fitted that description better than a woman from his past? Who better than herself? She phoned Violent Crimes as soon as she thought of this and before they had a chance to fasten on to her. But she didn’t mention Linda Davies.
By now the police had dismissed the idea of Kieran Goodall and Dillon Bennett as Eileen Dring’s killers. But they were useful witnesses. If their fantasies of how they disposed of the knife had varied and changed from hour to hour, their separate stories of the time they arrived at the murder site and what they saw when they got there tallied in every detail. They had arrived on the scene at one-thirty on Sunday morning, a fact both knew because Dillon was wearing his new watch. This watch was another cause of speculation, dismissed for the time being on the grounds of there being more important things to attend to. It was stolen, that went without saying, though Dillon’s stepmother swore she’d given it to him for his birthday the previous month. Wherever it came from, it showed exactly one-thirty. Both boys had looked at it. Watching videos had taught them the significance of noting the time at crime scenes, for they knew this was a crime, though they weren’t frightened. Another interesting-and appalling-factor was that neither saw anything out of the way in being out in the streets in the middle of the night. Nocturnal wanderings were what they did. They slept half the day and mostly missed school.
Kieran and Dillon had lifted Eileen Dring’s head, remarking that it had felt warm to the touch and not stiff, pulled out the bag, emptied it onto the pavement, and helped themselves to its contents. The money was an unexpected windfall. They took everything but Eileen’s cardigan for which they had no use, and carried off their haul to the abandoned shop where they had a sanctuary they called their camp. If they’d seen anyone on the streets in those small hours they hadn’t noticed or weren’t telling. The police were done with them. It was now a case for the Social Services.
The two police officers sat in Fiona’s living room, listening to the history of her encounters with Eileen Dring through the years. Too late, Fiona understood what she’d done in volunteering information that might have remained undiscovered. Gradually it seemed to dawn on these two officers that here was a prime suspect, a woman who’d been living with one victim and been friend and benefactor to the other.
“You mean she sometimes slept in your garden?”
“No, but I offered her the use of my shed. Only I felt awful about it. I thought I should have said to come inside and sleep in the house and I said that to her. But she told me she’d got a room of her own if that was what she wanted. Sleeping indoors didn’t suit her and she wouldn’t have my shed either.”
“Why did you make these offers, Miss Harrington?”
“I suppose I was sorry for her.”
“Did you ever give her money?”
“She wasn’t a beggar.”
“Maybe not, but did she ever try to get money from you?”
Were they implying Eileen had blackmailed her? Fiona felt herself trapped in a snare of her own devising. She remembered various occasions of quixotry, a handful of change here, a five-pound note there, and Jeff’s indignation.