‘She got her shag to send stuff to Angel, yes I know that. But what about the stuff she sent to you? What about the stuff you sent to her? Where’s my camera, where’s my notes, where’s my photos, where’s my Angel, where’s my fucking LIFE?’
Silence. The screaming voice seemed muffled by the presence of all the clothes. Ann shrank further back.
‘My fucking life, you bitch. You took it away. What did you do with what you took? Is it here? Shall I get Frank to look? Shall I get him to tear this place apart?’
The voice was rising, going out of control, returning to a whisper. Someone beat the table with a fist. Ann could feel the vibrations of small and large objects scattering and falling to the floor. A reel of cotton rolled away beneath the long garments and came to rest touching her foot. The tiny contact made her want to scream. There was a brief pause while the other man mumbled.
‘Tear it apart, Rick? Why should I do that? What am I doing here, Rick? If it isn’t her, what am I doing here?’
‘Shuttit. You wanted a woman, didn’t you? You can have her when we’ve finished.’
‘Why, Rick? What’s this got to do with me?’
‘Oh, look what I’ve found. A big pair of scissors. Shall I start with these, sweetheart, snip, snip, snip, or let Frank have a go with his big, bare hands?’
‘There’s nothing here,’ Hen said quietly. ‘I sent everything to Marianne Shearer. I wanted her to know. I thought she would need it for her memoirs. Did you kill her too?’
‘I’ve never killed anybody. Not my style. If they choose to jump or take the pills, or move when they should stay where I tell them, that’s up to them.’
He was back in control, as if she had said something flattering, a suggestion of his own prowess that mollified him. Then he sighed.
‘Better get on with it then. Hold her still, Frank.’
There was the decisive clip of scissor blades, clop, clop, clop. The big scissors, used for the proper cloth, not the small scissors for clipping silk threads; those had their own, small sound. The massive scissors went clop, clop when you practised with them, not clip, clip, like the Chinese scissors she used for silk. There was a single, sharp scream. The feet moved, busily. Then they sat, one of them tapping his feet.
‘All right,’ Hen said. ‘I know where it is.’
‘At last,’ Rick said. ‘I thought you’d never say. It’s all in Daddy’s little attic. Like I thought. Daddy hates clutter.’
‘You won’t be able to get it out,’ Hen said. ‘But I could. Shall we go? They close soon. I want to help, Rick, I do. Always fancied you.’
The scissors fell to the floor. A large hand scooped them up, and they all went away. The draught from the door they slammed behind them sent eddies of curly auburn hair drifting across the floor towards Ann’s hiding place. She clutched a handful of Hen’s hair and whimpered. It was all like noises in your head that had nothing to do with you. It was long after all the footsteps had died away along with the voice of the other man, whining, and the downstairs door slammed, that she uncurled and crawled out from behind the dresses and coats. She went on her hands and knees across the objects strewn on the floor, pulled herself up over an overturned chair and leaned against the table. The bodice on the dummy was ripped to pieces; there were small spots of shining blood on the table. The only other things left were the sewing machine and the heavy old phone. There were hats littered on the floor.
The phone rang. She fumbled for her own mobile in confusion and only when she couldn’t find it picked up the receiver.
‘Hen? Is that you?’
‘No,’ she said, beginning to cry. ‘It isn’t Hen. It’s me.’
Thomas Noble hated to work on a Saturday, but it had been an extraordinary week. Nothing had been achieved except the complete and utter wreckage of his peace of mind. He was still no further forward in the matter of the sorting out of the estate of Ms Marianne Shearer, QC and he seemed to have done nothing but disservice to his client. Nor could he do anything to explain matters to him, since Frank Shearer was not at work. It would have been the perfect morning for an informative discussion with Peter Friel about his own frolics and what, if anything, they had revealed apart from somehow resulting in the death of an old lawyer, for which he, Thomas Noble, could not be held accountable, but Peter Friel was booked in with the police. Nothing for it but to tinker round the edges of the problem, spring clean his own room and restore order again.
He had detoured into the museum on the way, simply to calm himself and prove that there were some things that had not changed and surely never would. The blood-red of the walls in one of the rooms, the way the building was designed to let light into its own darkness and show the facets of all the fragments of Greco-Roman sculpture the man had collected. The room where the Hogarth paintings were artfully displayed on panels which swung from the wall to reveal another sequence behind, the sheer ingenuity of it, the whole place a monument to the rare and beautiful, gathered into a very private, comfortable house. It might also have represented a vivid kind of kleptomania, a devotion to the grand and the obscure, and it always gave him the feeling of being let into a secret.
Sir John Soane, architect and collector, probably manic. The oasis these rooms created put into perspective the horrors of burglary, homicide and suicide, because after however many hundreds of years, it was all still there. Thomas had never entirely believed in death, because in this place that he visited at least once a week, it was irrelevant. Collectors like Sir John Soane and himself would last for ever. Someone would remember Thomas Noble for his fine collection of porcelain that covered every inch of his home.
Marianne was a collector. He had seen it in her. She had disliked his eighteenth-century porcelain, but admired him for collecting it, the way one collector respected another without questioning why they did it.
Restored by the kindred spirit of Soane, he went into the office with a lesser amount of dread, using the new code for the lock on the door and breathing easier as soon as he got the smell of Saturday morning emptiness in the absence of the few weekday personnel. The post was in the box behind the door: it made him feel vaguely important to act as delivery boy between the floors, and be, for the moment, in charge of something apart from his own china. There was still something to celebrate, and still his personal view of the Fields.
Marianne, collector. Hence the frightful skirt. He felt that the least he owed her was to make sure she was buried in something decent, although preferably not the skirt in which she had jumped, however much restored. A decent, elegant shroud was what was required. Thomas reminded himself that the arrangements for the funeral were his responsibility and already well in hand for whatever date available after the body was released. Toxicology reports, all that. There was no one but himself to agitate for the speeding of the process. Dear Frank couldn’t care, and Frank was way off beam anyway. Not at work, not anywhere. Except lurking in the Fields, the other evening. Thomas put that out of his mind.
Ever dutiful to his client. If it had been Frank who had mugged Henrietta Joyce, it was not for him to say.
He was ripping open an envelope addressed to himself in what he diagnosed as a foreign hand. Sloping too far to the right, big loopy letters, not used to writing in English. There was an invoice inside, written out in the same hand in the same uncertain letters, using the sort of printed invoice form you could still just about buy from small stationers. The sort of communication he privately preferred, since you could read it at leisure and argue a discount before the immediate command to reply.
To Miss Shearer