Leila turned the key and pushed the door wide open. She stood for a moment on the threshold, listening, then advanced cautiously into the short hall. The air in the apartment whispered with its quietness. With growing reassurance she looked into the living-room, noting that none of her possessions was missing or disarranged, then quickly checked out the other rooms. The flat was empty, which probably meant that one of her friends—it could have been any of half-a-dozen people—had made an impromptu visit and had left without remembering to return the key to its hiding place.
She went back out to the landing, retrieved the bag of provisions and brought them into the kitchen. Next, as a preliminary to undressing, she went around all the windows and adjusted the slats on the Venetian blinds to an angle at which they still admitted light while obscuring the view from outside. The window in the living-room was last. She turned away from it, already removing her cardigan, and rocked to a standstill as she glanced down at the settee. One of the cushions had been cut to shreds by a carving knife which was still projecting from it and, to lend a final touch of grisliness, the gut-like protrusions of cotton were blotched with the redness of blood.
Fingers moving uncertainly towards her mouth, Leila backed away from the settee and circled the perimeter of the room until she was standing at the kitchen door. Her perceptions were heightened and altered now, and when she looked into the kitchen she at once saw traces of blood at the sink and on the roll of absorbent tissue mounted on the wall. She went through the kitchen, choosing a central course as though to touch anything would be to risk contamination, and stopped at the telephone in the hall. Her mathematician’s memory for numbers came to her aid and she was able to put a call through to Calbridge police station without using the directory.
“I’d like to speak to Detective Sergeant Pardey,” she said when the call was answered, keeping her voice firm. There was a lengthy, sputtering delay during which it occurred to her that the inspection she had made of the apartment had been fairly perfunctory. She had not, for example, looked under the bed in her room, nor had she opened any wardrobe or closet doors. The thought, having gained entry to her mind, refused to be dismissed. She pressed her back to the wall, hemmed in by surroundings that suddenly seemed alien, and waited until she heard Pardey’s familiar voice on the line.
“Frank? This is…” She swallowed, regaining the precious steadiness of tone. “This is Leila Mostyn. Can you help me, please?”
Pardey gave an exaggerated sigh. “Leila, if I’ve told you this once I’ve told you it a thousand times—once a parking ticket has been written there’s nobody, not even God Almighty, who can do anything about it.”
“It isn’t about parking, and you know it,” Leila replied, half-smiling, comforted by Pardey’s habit of repeating the same ponderous witticism year in and year out.
“Well, if it’s a leaky tap or a…”
“Frank, I’ve just got home from work and somebody has been in the flat.”
“Oh?” Pardey’s voice changed. “Anything missing?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then how did you…? Has the place been turned over?”
“Not really.” Leila described what she had found, beginning with the discovery of the key in the door and mentioning the strong possibility that the intruder was known to her.
“Do you think it was some kind of a sick joke?”
“I choose my friends more carefully than that,” Leila said impatiently.
“All right. Don’t touch anything—I’ll get a patrol car there in a couple of minutes.”
“Frank, I was hoping we could do this without any…fuss. I didn’t want to make it official at this stage.”
“You mean you don’t want uniformed bobbies tramping all over the place and starting the neighbours off.”
“Well, I…”
“And you’d like me to stop work on more important matters and give you personal VIP treatment?”
Leila made her voice small. “I suppose that’s what I did want. I’m sorry.”
“Think nothing of it, my little Rostkartoffel—that’s what friends are for,” Pardey said with a joviality which might have been designed to put Leila at ease. “As I said before, don’t touch anything. I’ll be there in a few minutes. See you.”
She replaced the phone’s handset and looked about her, trying to decide what should be done next. This would be a good time to check inside those wardrobes and closets, but—something for which she was grateful—Frank had told her not to touch anything. She went to the outer end of the hall and stepped out on to the small concrete landing, leaving the apartment door open behind her. From the lonely vantage point the suburb of Calbridge was predominantly green, in shades which had already begun to grow deeper with the approach of evening, looking less like a typical Midlands town and more like the environment of her parents’ house near Reading. For a moment she felt a rare yearning to be at home, where her mother and father would undoubtedly be tending their lawns and flower beds. The vision of domestic security was sundered by an incursive memory of John Redpath, who claimed he hated gardening, making one of his pseudo-Wildean comments about the cultivation of lawns. There is something ineffably sad in the spectacle of the planet’s highest animal form devoting all its time and energy to the welfare of the planet’s lowest vegetable form. For an instant she could almost see him, with his spare figure and foxy coloration, declaiming, going on to belabour the point. It makes you wonder who’s the smartest.
That was John trying to be flip and unorthodox, but underneath it all he was desperately conventional and, although he had never put his feelings into words, would have been very content to marry her and settle down to raise a crop of children and fescue grasses. And that was a fate which she, having escaped one close-mown plot of suburbia, was determined to avoid. If marriage became inevitable she was going to seek maximum recompense in terms of money, world travel, and homes that were either in the city or in the country and not somewhere in between and thus forcing her to be a circumscribed, in-between person…
It occurred to Leila that, in spite of her resolution, she was again devoting too much thought to John Redpath. It was a habit which should be overcome. She leaned on the window sill and stared down at the gateway of the house, waiting for Frank Pardey’s car to appear and gradually becoming aware that he was taking longer to show up than she had expected. More than twenty minutes had elapsed before his unremarkable grey saloon halted on the road outside. Pardey got out and came towards the house. He was a big fair-haired man in his late thirties, with heavy shoulders and a trick of walking with a very short, knee-lifting stride as if marking time to an unseen military band.
“Sorry about the delay,” he said, reaching the landing. “How are you, Leila? Not letting this throw you, I hope.” He kissed her lightly on the cheek and stood back smiling, which was as close as he ever came to trying to introduce a physical element into their relationship. Leila knew he was a divorcee who disported himself to a fair extent on the local party circuit, but he was also intuitive enough to know that she saw him purely as a friend.
“I’ll be all right—it’s just that…” She pulled her cardigan tighter around her and shivered slightly. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.”