“We were going to be married!”
“Well, hardly, my dear. He was married to Zillah Melcombe-Smith, aka Watling, aka Leach. I’ll tell you frankly that while he was with me I paid all the bills and let him have the use of my car. And gave him pocket money. He called it loans but I was never under any illusions of that sort. I suppose it was the same thing with you. When did you think your wedding was going to be, may I ask?”
“August,” said Fiona, “and no, you may not. I’d like you to go now, please.”
Natalie was quite willing to comply. She’d got a great deaclass="underline" the furnishings of the house, the carpets and paintings, Fiona’s clothes and her general appearance, as well as a lot of admissions as to her feelings for Jeff. “You really ought to be gratified,” she said as a parting shot. “He must have left this Araminta for you, you know.”
“For my money,” said Fiona bitterly and then wished she hadn’t.
Once Natalie had gone, she began to cry. Ever since Jeff’s death, her illusions-as that woman called them-had gradually been stripped away. She would soon be left with nothing but her bare love, bruised and scarred as it was. After a while she dried her eyes, washed her face, and looked for Araminta Knox in the phone book. There she or someone called Knox was, at 39 Syringa Road, NW10. Why are we such inquisitive beings that even in great despair and sorrow curiosity impels us to seek answers that probe into old wounds?
She went next door, passing, of course, the offending gateposts on her way out. The informality of using the back door was gone, she was sure, forever and she was back to ringing the bell. They still kissed, she and Michelle, lips not quite touching cheeks. “I really came to ask you both to come in and have a drink with me. There’s something I have to tell you. Do come.”
They hadn’t done so for a long time. Not since, like a crass fool, she’d said that stupid thing to the police about their disliking Jeff. Michelle hesitated. Perhaps there was something in Fiona’s face, a look of beseeching, of tears hardly dried, that made her say, “All right. Just for half an hour.”
The first thing Michelle noticed when she came into Fiona’s living room was that there was something different about the mantelpiece. An expensive-looking alabaster and silver urn had joined the clock and the candlesticks. She said nothing. Fiona had put champagne on ice. “Is there something to celebrate?” Michelle asked.
“Nothing. When you’re feeling really down, you put out more flags, don’t you?”
Matthew extracted the cork skillfully, without spilling a drop. Raising her glass, Fiona said, “I want to ask your advice.” She told them what she knew of Araminta Knox.
“Have you told the police about her? Have you told them about the one who wrote you the begging letter?”
Fiona looked at Matthew in surprise. “Why would I do that?”
“It’s another suspect, isn’t it? Someone else for them to persecute instead of us.”
“I did what I told you I’d do about Linda Davies. I sent her the money. And it made me feel better, a bit better.”
Looking down at the glass in her hand, watching the bubbles rise, Michelle said, trying to keep her tone equable, “You sent her a thousand pounds? You sent her a check?”
“I thought she might not have a bank account so I sent notes, fifty-pound notes, packed into a padded bag. And I felt I was-well, righting the wrongs Jeff did. I’d begun to do that. I know what he was now, you see. I know he preyed on women”-she used Linda Davies’s expression, her voice rising-“and had no compunction about it. Rich women and poor women, it didn’t much matter to him so long as they kept him and put a roof of their own over his head. His death was a lucky escape for me, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, Fiona, I’m so sorry…”
“Perhaps that was my motive for murdering him. What do you think? A means of escape I hadn’t the courage to take any other way. The trouble is I still love him, just as much as I did when I thought he was honest and decent.”
After they had gone Fiona sat for a long while staring at the urn on the mantelpiece. She had thought of scattering Jeff’s ashes somewhere nearby, perhaps on Fortune Green, but these latest revelations about his life had changed her mind. The urn had cost her a small fortune, which was quite funny, really, if you were in the mood to be amused. She took it off the mantelpiece and, crawling on all fours, put it at the back of the dark cupboard under the stairs.
Chapter 32
WITH JOCK GONE and his mother gone, Minty grew more confident. Coming into the house gradually ceased to be an ordeal. When she went upstairs to bed or to have her bath, she no longer feared seeing Auntie and Mrs. Lewis in a bedroom doorway. Auntie’s absence had by now been of long duration. She hadn’t seen her since June-or was it May?
Like a member of a tribe placating the god, she faithfully put flowers on Auntie’s grave, though since confusing the original one with another, she had become much freer about where her offerings went. Any grave with an angel playing a musical instrument would do. The dead were everywhere, could go anywhere and, now Auntie had left the house, Minty had no doubt she ranged the cemetery from resting place to resting place. She was always careful, though, to choose a woman’s. Auntie, who had so much disliked marriage, would never lay herself down in the neighborhood of a man’s bones.
While she kept up the practice of bringing flowers every week, ranunculus and zinnias, carnations and by now chrysanthemums, she knew Auntie would be pacified. It was with a little shiver that Minty sometimes remembered how indignant she’d been at past failures in this particular regard. Never again. A life free of ghosts would be a life of peace.
The weather had become hot and sultry. Sometimes a thick mist of fumes and emissions hung over Harrow Road. Everything seemed dirtier and smellier than in winter and taking two baths a day was a regular thing for Minty. Fourteen months had passed since first she met Jock and nine since his death. Having barely thought of him for a long time, she was aware that he had re-entered her mind so that she wondered how it would have been if he’d lived. Would she have been happy? Would she have got pregnant like Josephine? It gave her something of a shock when she realized she’d have been Mrs. Lewis too. All the baths she took reminded her how he’d taken her savings and when he died, let his mother inherit them. What had become of that money now? She was as far off getting a shower installed as ever and now she began to wish she’d used the money for that purpose so that there had been nothing to give Jock.
Then, one warm morning that promised another hot day, when she’d had her bath and was dressing to go to work, she heard his voice. She heard him singing at her out of her bedroom wall. Not “Walk On By” this time but “Tea for Two.”
“Tea for two and two for tea…”
She was too frightened to make a sound. Then, as the phrase was repeated, followed by the next line, and he broke off to laugh, she managed to whisper, “Go away, go away.”
He seemed to take notice of what she said, for instead of addressing her again, he began talking to other, equally invisible, people: a group of nameless friends, with voices she’d never heard before and that mingled, indistinguishable from each other and uttering a rattle of meaningless words. Then Jock intervened, offering them a mint or making one of his strange jokes, the like of which Minty had never heard elsewhere. If she were to see him she thought it would be the death of her but she didn’t see him. She saw none of them and what made her more terrified than she’d ever been was a sudden easily identifiable voice replying to him. His mother’s.
Like her son, she’d been banished only for a while. Minty shivered, touching wood, doing more than that, clutching it, holding hard on to the edge of a table, the frame of a door. She ought to have known you can’t get rid of ghosts so easily, you can’t stab them and kill them like those gangs killed real people. It wasn’t the way. Were they with her for life, these men and women she didn’t know? Jock’s family? That ex-wife of his, his relatives?