“Jeff told me not to give her anything, but I did sometimes. I tried not to do it near here. I’d give her money if I came upon her somewhere else-near a flower shop, I mean. She told me a lot about herself. Her children had died in a fire. They got her out but hadn’t been able to save the children. That turned her brain, I think. She’d been strange ever since.”
She could tell by their faces that these facts were already known to them. They asked her if she could account for her movements on Saturday night but she could only say she’d been in bed asleep. With Jeff’s death, she said, staying up late, going out in the evenings, had come to an end for her. They told her to phone the bank and say she wouldn’t be in, and they asked her to accompany them to the police station. She was too horrified to argue, too aghast even to ask for an explanation. There she sat on a hard chair in an interview room for several hours, answering a string of questions but turning over in her mind how she could prove she’d been at home on Saturday night.
Then the answer-or an answer-came to her. She hadn’t slept well. She never had since Jeff died and her dependency on sleeping pills troubled her. Night after night she tried to sleep without taking one and almost always she succumbed. So it had been on Saturday. Sometime after midnight, nearly an hour after, she thought, she had got up and gone to the window, hearing as she crossed the floor a door closed in the house next door. That was all you ever heard, the shutting of a door or a light being turned on or off. And when she drew back a curtain she saw the light from Michelle’s and Matthew’s bedroom window go out. It had shed a bright rectangle onto their front lawn, a light that was abruptly withdrawn, she told Violent Crimes.
And she saw at once that they doubted her. “We’ll see if we can get some other neighbor to corroborate that.” It would let you and those Jarveys off the hook, she could tell they were thinking. She clasped her hands together, almost praying. If she could undo the harm she’d done to Michelle and Matthew she’d be as happy as if she’d exonerated herself.
Calling next door when they’d let her go brought fresh unjustified guilt. She felt the police must be watching her. Who, for instance, was that boy on the other side of the street? He looked no more than eighteen but he was probably twenty-five. He was sitting on a garden wall, apparently reading the Standard. Fiona thought he could be a policeman who had been sent to follow her home and see what she did. She was looking over her shoulder at him when Michelle opened the door. He’d think she and the Jarveys were in some sort of conspiracy together.
When Michelle heard Fiona’s story of her day, she couldn’t help feeling a flash of exultation that her neighbor, who had brought all this trouble on Matthew and her, was now in the same jeopardy as themselves. And even as she thought this she reproached herself for her mean-spiritedness. It was such a far cry from the way she’d felt about Fiona a month ago. Michelle took Fiona’s hand and kissed her cheek to make things better but still they weren’t better. Matthew opened a bottle of wine and Fiona drank hers greedily.
“I’m sure he’s a policeman on surveillance.”
Michelle went to the window, noticing as she did so how easy it was now for her to get up out of soft cushions and how lightly she walked. “It’s not a policeman,” she said. “He’s the nephew of the woman who lives there. He hasn’t a key and he’s waiting for her to come home.”
“You don’t think I’d have harmed Jeff or Eileen, do you?”
Michelle didn’t answer. It was Matthew, always brave and always one to speak his mind, who said, “You thought we had.”
Fiona said nothing. She walked to the window, stood by Michelle, and gazed out into the street. Suddenly she wheeled round and said, “I’ve had a begging letter. From a woman Jeff-got money out of.” Michelle laid a hand softly on her shoulder. “Oh, I know what he was. I’ve learned a lot since he died. She wants a thousand pounds.”
“You’re not going to give it to her, I hope,” said Matthew. “She’s hardly your responsibility.”
“I am going to. I’ve just decided, just this minute. I can afford it. I won’t even notice the difference.”
Chapter 31
MILL LANE WAS a very different place in July from what it had been in December. Or perhaps it was that Zillah was a different woman, for the weather was cold for the time of year and this was the kind of day when an anticyclone would as likely create a misty chill as it would warm sunshine. She was coming back from the Old Mill House, where she’d left Eugenie and Jordan playing on Titus’s new climbing frame while she went to the supermarket. Jordan was due to go into the hospital for his operation in four days’ time but these days cried only when he fell over. Zillah was dressed in the new natural-colored linen trouser suit she’d bought in a boutique in Toneborough and, though she wasn’t quite warm enough, she knew you had to suffer to be beautiful.
Treading carefully, watching her feet on the flat stones of the ford so as not to wet her narrow-strap sandals, she looked up to see Ronnie Grasmere approaching down the lane, accompanied by an enormous dog like an animated black hearthrug. For a moment she thought the dog was going to leap on her and, more to the point, on her suit. Ronnie, who was carrying a gun, said a quiet but commanding “Sit,” and the animal immediately did so, its forepaws straight, head held high. Zillah was impressed and said so.
“No point in having a dog if he’s your master.”
Zillah nodded. Never before had she known a voice to be so plummy and old Etonian. “And where are you off to, my pretty maid?”
Resisting an impulse to say she was going a-milking, Zillah told him.
“I say, d’you have to do your own shopping? What a shame.”
“Most people do, don’t they?”
His answer was hearty laughter. “Shoot, do you?”
She was more than ever aware of the gun sort of folded over his arm. Broken, did they call it? “I never have.” Sensing it was the kind of thing he’d like a woman to say, she added, “I’d be scared.”
“Not you. I’ll teach you.”
“Would you really?”
“Look, I have to take this great beast walkies, so alas I must leave you. But why don’t you have dinner with me one night? Tonight?”
“I couldn’t tonight.” She could have but playing hard to get was never wrong.
“Tomorrow, then?”
“That would be nice.” It would be her birthday.
Ronnie said he’d pick her up at seven. They’d go to a pleasant little unpretentious place outside Southerton called Peverel Grange. Zillah knew its reputation as the best restaurant in South Wessex. She walked back to Willow Cottage feeling better than she had for months. Annie would probably babysit for her or she’d know someone who would.
None of the neighbors in Holmdale Road had been able to confirm Fiona’s story. They were Londoners and took very little notice of what the people next door or the people opposite did. Their requirement in the neighbors was that they should keep from playing music at night, control their children, and keep their dogs in. Only one couple had even known the Jarveys’ name. All of them knew more about Fiona, whose notoriety came from her having been the murdered man’s partner. But where she had been that Saturday night, home or away, no one could tell. On the subject of cars they were more vociferous. Violent Crimes and Miss Demeanor had nothing to do with motor vehicles, except the ones they drove themselves, and were uninterested in the conduct of users of the two train stations who clogged West Hampstead streets with their parked cars. When would Camden Council introduce residents’ parking was the question four out of five householders asked. Violent Crimes neither knew nor cared. They were no nearer having a clue where the Jarveys and Fiona Harrington had been that night than when they started.