As she looked to the right and left of her for his grave, for a new grave, perhaps only a mound with as yet no memorial stone, she tried to comfort herself with the thought of the new shower that was coming, that Jock’s brother or sister-in-law had been considerate enough to pay for. But the distraction barely worked. She knew by this time that there were no recent burials in this dark, forlorn cemetery, which had an atmosphere about it of having been forgotten and abandoned. For the first time she noticed there were no people about, no visitors apart from herself. This made it seem as if the place were not really there at all but belonged in another world, empty of anything, men and women, animals, even ghosts. And somehow this was more frightening than the ghosts themselves, for she might be trapped in it, caught up in a timeless deserted waste forever. She looked at the ground, at blades of grass, at the gray, still air, and saw not even a bird, not even an insect. Then she started to run, away from the colonnades, the immovable, eternal gray stone pillars, down, down, down to the gate and the street and houses and people…
Chapter 33
IN THE COURSE of her work Natalie had often thought of how she would handle the press should a journalist contact her. The advice she gave herself was much the same as that offered by a lawyer to his or her client in confrontations with the police. Say nothing, or, if you must speak, use monosyllables. Like most reporters and most policemen, she seldom encountered members of the public who took this advice. Nell Johnson-Fleet was the exception.
Opening the door of her Kentish Town flat, she looked straight into Natalie’s face but said nothing. Natalie, who was looking straight into hers, said who she was and might she have a word.
“No,” said Nell Johnson-Fleet.
Like all Jeff’s women-Zillah had been the odd one out-she was a tallish, thin blonde and dressed as he liked them to be, in trousers and a sweater. Natalie well remembered his preferences. “I was one of his girlfriends too. Victims, if you like. It might be a help to talk about it, don’t you think?”
“No.”
“Perhaps you prefer to put it all behind you? Try to do the impossible and forget it ever happened.”
Gently, Nell Johnson-Fleet closed the door. Natalie wasn’t one to give up as easily as that. She rang the bell again and, getting no answer, went round the corner of the street, where she sat down on a wall and dialed the woman’s number on her mobile. The call was answered with a curt, “Yes?”
This, at least, was different. “It’s Natalie Reckman, Nell. I hope you’re going to let me in for just five minutes.”
“No,” and the phone went down.
You had to admire it, Natalie thought, returning to her car just as the traffic warden was approaching. It was a wonderful technique. A good thing most of the public weren’t like that. On the other hand, people went through moods, they had good days and bad days, and this might be a bad one. Nell Johnson-Fleet might have had a row with her boyfriend or seen him with another woman; the way she happened to be this evening was no guide to her normal behavior. She’d try again tomorrow, give her a chance to regret passing up her opportunity. Now for Kensal Green.
The police had left them alone for nearly two weeks. They had threatened to come back but they never had. Michelle had begun eating again, not much and sensible food, but she no longer felt as if every mouthful would choke her. Her weight had gone down to what it had been ten years earlier. And while she was quite content with a salad and single slice of bread for lunch, Matthew was regularly eating a two-egg omelette. He’d begun to drive the car again, uncertainly at first, like someone who has just passed his test, but with increasing confidence. When they hadn’t seen or heard from the police for long enough to feel safe, they did something they hadn’t done since they were first married. They went away together for the weekend.
For the first time since she’d known her, Michelle fancied she saw envy of her in Fiona’s eyes. This didn’t please her, it was the last thing she wanted to excite in anyone, but she noted it because it was so unusual.
Fiona envied her for having a husband who loved her and wanted to be alone with her in a hotel in the countryside. “I hope you’ll have a lovely time,” she said. “You deserve it.”
They did. But the lovely time was very different from what Fiona (and anyone else who saw them and thought about it) envisaged, imagining gentle walks, quiet drinks in little pubs, a visit to a beauty spot, and perhaps some candlelit dining. It was much more like a honeymoon. In Matthew’s arms, having a late lie-in, Michelle went back in time to their early days and felt no older than she had seventeen years before in the first bliss of their passion.
The Kentish Town block of flats had been grim in Natalie’s estimation but had nothing on Syringa Road, Kensal Green. That, she decided, parking her car without difficulty in this nonrestricted zone, must be the seat on which Eileen Dring had been killed. Or a replacement seat, surely. It looked new. The flower bed behind it had been dug up and now showed a healthy growth of young weeds. Something of a coincidence, she thought, that one of the murder victims had died within a stone’s throw of where the other victim’s girlfriend-or one of them-lived.
Two rows of squat Victorian houses, with mostly neglected and very small front gardens, some of them packed full of bicycles, pushchairs, the occasional motorbike, rolls of wire netting, and pieces of broken furniture. Disproportionately large bay windows jutted out downstairs, and dusty plaques under their eaves were engraved with names such as Theobald Villa and Salisbury Terrace. One house only had been smartened up and to an extent that offended Natalie’s taste. This was number 37, whose front had been refaced with blocks of (probably fake) gray granite, whose paintwork was white and front door a deep rose pink. Multicolored dahlias and dark blue Michaelmas daisies filled the garden. Next door, Natalie’s goal, was neat but dowdy, the garden paved over, the paintwork worn though clean. Jeff must have been on his uppers to come looking for succor down here, she thought. And then she recalled the leaps-and-bounds increases in London house prices, that this place was not so very far from fashionable Notting Hill and a tube stop on the Bakerloo Line was just a little way down Harrow Road. If he could have got his hands on a house here…
She rang the bell. A woman came to the door and stared at her. It wasn’t a stare like Nell Johnson-Fleet’s and she wasn’t at all like Nell Johnson-Fleet, not Jeff’s type except insofar as she was fair and thin. A little wispy woman, very white-skinned with pale, no-color eyes, thin lips, hair like a baby’s. But what startled Natalie, what almost frightened her, was that she looked mad. Natalie would never have used this politically incorrect word except to herself, in her own thoughts. No other really described Araminta Knox’s wide stare, her large pupils, the tiny smile that came and went.
“Ms. Knox?”
A nod and the smile flickering.
“I’m called Natalie Reckman and I’m a freelance journalist. I wonder if I might talk to you about Jeff Leach.”
“Who?”
She plainly didn’t know what Natalie meant. There had been not the faintest flicker of alarm or memory or pain or anger in those glassy eyes. And there would have been, for this was the sort of woman unable to conceal what she felt, unaware, showing every nuance of emotion in her expression. She’d either come to the wrong place, got the wrong woman, or Jeff had used one of his not very subtle aliases. “Jerry perhaps? Jed? Jake?”