Michelle had lately been rather quiet and thoughtful so that Matthew often asked her if anything was wrong. She smiled and said, “Far from it. Everything is fine,” and with that he had to be satisfied. He wanted to repeat their weekend away, perhaps abroad this time, and Michelle said she’d love to, but could they postpone it for a few weeks? He’d met quite a lot of new people through his television program and they’d done an unheard-of thing and had a dinner party for eight, a number that included Fiona and a personable man in his thirties Michelle thought might do as Jeff’s replacement. Matthew said not to matchmake, it never worked, and Michelle promised she’d do no more.
One evening, when they and their next-door neighbor had met for drinks, Michelle made something very close to a little speech of thanks to Fiona: “It was your food ideas which really started Matthew eating properly. It came out of your inventive mind. And it was poor Jeff”-she could call him that now-“who taught me to lose weight. He didn’t know that’s what he was doing but he was. Those taunts of his didn’t make me do what those stupid police seemed to think I’d done, they changed me from a great, gross, fat woman into a-well, a reasonable size sixteen.”
“You were always beautiful to me,” said Matthew.
She smiled at him and squeezed his hand. “It did make me hate him for a bit. I can admit it now I don’t think anyone will mind.” But although she saw as much of Fiona as she had ever done, though she kissed her affectionately and constantly reassured her, she remembered what she had said to Matthew at the time of the betrayaclass="underline" “I can never feel the same about her again, never.” It was still true, though she hid it and would always hide it, even from him.
She was healthier than she’d been for more than ten years or she looked healthier, so Matthew was concerned when she said at eight in the morning that she was off to their GP’s office. She’d made an appointment and told him she wouldn’t be long.
He felt a sudden surge of terror. “What’s the matter with you, darling?”
“I won’t know till I’ve seen the doctor, will I?”
It was then that he thought he saw bewilderment in her face and some apprehension of misfortune. She decided against telling him her symptoms, said only that she wouldn’t be long and he mustn’t worry.
The story Natalie concocted out of her hopeless encounter with Nell Johnson-Fleet and her second abortive attempt on her the next day, the troubling meeting with Linda Davies, her sad interview with Fiona Harrington, and her incomprehensible confrontation with Araminta Knox were, she had to admit, something of a failure. None of the newspaper editors to whom she offered it was interested. Other stories had replaced the Cinema Slayer and the Old Bag Lady in the public consciousness. It might be another matter if all that talk of clues and leads on the television last night led to an arrest, but otherwise…
Natalie had done her best with it. She had even had one more go at the voters’ list, widening her search, just in case another woman with something that might be construed as “mint” in her name turned up. She even went back to Laf and Sonovia, and tried to dig deep into their memories, but all they said was that they couldn’t describe a man they’d never seen. After that she followed the modern procedure that used to be known as “spiking” the story and kept it on a floppy disk for what she thought of as the unlikely event of the murderer being found.
The Wilsons had been dismayed by this further visit. Laf saw it as an attempt to implicate Minty in something she couldn’t possibly know anything about. It never crossed his mind that she might be the killer, not gentle, quiet Minty with her strong moral sense and horror of violence. How many times, for instance, had he and Sonovia heard her say she was in favor of a return to capital punishment? But it was strange about Jock Lewis. No evidence that he could find had linked him with Jeffrey Leach until the police found the “boneshaker” in Harold Hill. Nothing had been in the newspapers about that, it was hardly a newsworthy item, but Laf, of course, knew it. Without saying a word to Sonovia or his children, without telling any of his fellow officers why, he managed to get a look at the car himself. The trouble was he simply couldn’t remember. Several times he’d seen the “boneshaker” outside Minty’s house but he’d never taken much notice of it beyond remarking to Sonovia that since the fuel emissions test came in you saw far fewer old bangers about on the roads. He couldn’t even remember whether it was dark blue or dark green or black. The Harold Hill car was dark blue but so dirty, so encrusted with dead leaves, smoke deposit, and squashed insects, that it would have been hard to say if it was the car or not, even if he’d remembered more about it.
“I wish I’d seen him from the window,” Sonovia moaned. “I can’t understand why I didn’t persist. It’s not like me.”
It was coincidence that Jeffrey Leach and Jock Lewis both had twenty-year-old cars, shared a pair of initials, had both once lived in Queen’s Park, but no more than coincidence. Jock had disappeared out of Minty’s life almost a year ago while Jeffrey Leach wasn’t killed till April. He wasn’t going to mention it to the DI, who’d only think he was getting above himself. Besides, Minty was a friend.
But she was getting more and more peculiar. It was only the other day Sonovia had said to him that if you didn’t know she was on her own you’d think she was surrounded by crowds of people all the time. Invisible people, that is. You could never hear much through the walls, these old houses were well built, whatever they said about the neighborhood, but she’d heard Minty shouting to go away and leave her alone and only the other day she’d been sitting in the garden when Minty had come out to hang up washing and was talking nineteen to the dozen to some old woman and a man she called Wilfred, and to Winnie Knox, who’d been dead three years. It made Sonovia’s blood run cold to hear her.
The police couldn’t make up their minds whether Leach had dumped the car himself when Fiona told him to use hers or whether his killer had done so. Only his fingerprints were on the inside of it, his and those of an unknown person, probably a woman.
Six weeks had passed since Sonovia first asked the builder for an estimate for Minty’s shower. When he didn’t come she complained and he said he’d been ill with “summer flu.” Sonovia wondered if it was a good idea for him to come at all, if any stranger should be allowed at number 39 when Minty was so odd, talking to people who weren’t there, always looking over her shoulder and shivering.
“She’s harmless,” Laf said, on his way next door with the Sunday paper.
“I know that, my deah. It’s not him I’m thinking about, it’s her. I mean, people getting the wrong impression. It’s enough to give the whole street a bad name.”
“You get that shower done for her. It’ll be a tonic. Lift her out of her depression.”
Laf went next door. Minty still had her latex gloves on, she’d been scrubbing the kitchen floor. On an impulse, Laf asked her if she’d come to the cinema with him and Sonovia the next day. In her characteristic way she said she didn’t mind and could she make him a cup of tea? Not once while he was in there did she seem to hear voices or talk to invisible people or look over her shoulder.
They’d gone. It was because she’d done it. She’d been up to Fortune Green that morning with a bunch of flowers, a nice clean bowl that Auntie’d once used for her Christmas puddings, and water in a fruit juice bottle with a plastic screw top. The bottle had been washed out when she’d drunk the juice and put in Dettol with the hot water to make sure it was really clean. It was easy getting to West Hampstead on the train from Kensal Rise. She’d bought the flowers from outside the cemetery in Fortune Green Road.