"Tae me?" said Leslie, sensing that something was amiss. "What about?"
"I understand you work at the Place of Safety Shelters?"
Leslie frowned.
"Could I ask you to step outside with me for a minute?"
Leslie looked at Jimmy's blank face. The fat guy led her back through the hall and onto the windy balcony, pulling the door shut behind him. "I'm very sorry," he said, and smiled. "I didn't introduce myself. I'm DI Williams, Arthur Williams, from the Met." He leaned on the balcony ridge and looked out over the traffic, at the big orange buses stopping to pick up passengers and the cars trapped behind them. "Do you know anything about the circumstances under which Mrs. Harris left the shelter?"
"Yeah, I do. I told you guys about it on the phone. She got a letter or something and disappeared a couple of hours later."
The fat guy clicked his fingers and pointed at her as if he had just remembered. "That's right, it came in the post and you couldn't understand how anyone would know the address."
Leslie took out her fags and cupped her hand around the lighter as she lit up. "I think I know what she got in the letter as well."
"What?"
"A photograph. A Polaroid that was left among her things. It's a picture of her kid"-she thumbed back to the house-"the second one. He was with a pretty heavy guy."
"Do you still have the Polaroid?"
Leslie took a draw and exhaled into the wind. "Ah, no, I don't, my friend's got it."
"Can you get it for me?"
"Well, I can't contact her just now."
The fat guy nodded over the street. "I see, I see." He reached into his pocket. "I've got one of you, actually." He pulled out a handful of photos and looked through them, his face lighting up when he found what he was looking for, and he handed it to her. "See?"
Leslie looked at the picture. It was Christmas Day at the shelter. Ann and Senga and the other residents were standing stiffly in front of the plastic tree. Leslie was behind them, growling at the camera, her pupils fiery red. The timer had run out but the camera had failed. She was cursing and just about to come round and see what had gone wrong when it finally went off. "That's right." She smiled. "That's me. Where did you get these?"
"Where do you think I got them?"
"From the office?"
"Nope."
He was smiling quite benignly, seemed quite personable, and Leslie didn't feel a threat. She handed the picture back to him. "Well, you must have got it from the office. We only had eight copies done, one for the office and one for each resident."
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah, I'm sure. I had the copies made. I know there were eight copies."
The fat man stood up straight and licked the back of his teeth. "These," he said, pointedly, "are Ann's."
She snorted a laugh. "Nah," she said. "Ann left hers at the shelter. I've got Ann's copies."
"We found these in Mr. Harris's house."
She was suddenly aware that it was no accident. The fat guy had placed himself between her and the stairs.
"If I was working on the assumption that Mr. Harris killed his wife," he said, his quiet voice barely audible above the traffic, "I'd have to explain how he found her again after she went into hiding, wouldn't I?"
Leslie leaned heavily on the balcony and took a long, deep draw on her fag. "Look, I've been working there for four years, paid and unpaid. D'ye think I'd jeopardize all that to tell him she was there? I just met this joker for the first time last night."
Fat bloke was very surprised. "Last night?"
"Yeah," said Leslie aggressively. "Last night."
"But he's your cousin."
"We lost touch."
"So, an attractive young woman like you would drop everything on a Friday night and come over and babysit for him? Offer to stay the night if necessary? He must have made quite an impression."
She shook her head adamantly. "Listen, I'm not doing it for him. If I don't babysit, my mum'll do it and she's got a heart condition."
But he wasn't listening, he was looking at the bundle of photographs in his hand. "You had the copies made, did ye?"
Chapter 32
Maureen woke up at six o'clock and found the television still on at her feet. She hadn't dreamed of anything but still couldn't get back to sleep. She knew Sarah would be uncomfortable if she wandered around the house on her own so she stayed in her room and had another bath. After watching half an hour of Stock Exchange news on breakfast TV her sense of probity gave way to her desire for a coffee and a fag. She put the dirty dishes from last night's dinner on the tray and crept quietly downstairs to the kitchen.
The Aga had cooled during the night but still gave off a little warmth and Maureen pulled a chair over to it, sitting with her hip against it, hanging over the griddle with her cup of coffee. Sarah had left a bundle of Jesus pamphlets on the table. Each had a catchy title on the cover and mesmerizingly bad drawings of Aryan Jesus telling some black people what to do, Jesus having a laugh with some sheep, baby Jesus chortling in a manger. Sarah had never been into religion, as far as Maureen knew. She vaguely remembered her referring to her family as high Church of England, implying that in some way this was Catholicism by another name.
The windows at the back of the kitchen looked out onto a long, immaculate lawn with deep borders, cloaked in freezing fog. Sarah's life must be an aesthetic delight; she must cast her eye over lovely things every day. Maureen had been so busy keeping her head above water that she had forgotten the significance of having beautiful things around her, things she wanted to touch and look at. She thought of Jimmy and the paucity of charm in his life, the incessant nag of need and want. The child-benefit book had been cashed and she felt sure that Moe, the Giro Magnet, would know something about it. Maureen was still sure Jimmy hadn't done it. He said he'd only been in London for a day and the mattress still bothered her.
She searched all the cupboards and set the table for a formal breakfast. She warmed the teapot and put out thick-cut marmalade and cereal bowls. She brought two small camellia blossoms in from the garden and put them in a glass of water, sitting them on the table as a centerpiece. The red flowers clashed with the blue striped Cornishware, making the table look Christmassy and cheerful.
Carrying her fags and Vik's lighter, she pulled open the back door and stepped out into the restful garden, lit a fag and looked around her. In the very far distance she could hear the distant rumble of a city making its way to work. The milky fog was lifting from the ground, floating above the grass, rising up to meet the morning. Maureen inhaled and felt the nicotine trickle into her system, tickling her fingers, opening her hair follicles, placating the angry rims of her eyes, kicking her into the day. She looked back into the kitchen and saw a three-foot-high pile of old newspapers tucked away into the recess by the back door, awaiting recycling. She finished her fag quickly, rubbing it out on the stone step, and binned the ragged filter.
She lifted out all the Evening Standards for the previous week, Monday to Monday, and took them over to the clear end of the large table. She skimmed through, looking for some mention of the murder. It would have taken the police a few days to identify Ann and trace her back to the shelter. They had phoned the office looking for Leslie on Tuesday so Maureen checked last Thursday's edition but found nothing. She went back and checked the Friday edition again and found nothing. She checked Monday, poring over the smallest story, trying to get a lead. She was reading a tiny story about an art fair when she looked up to rub her eyes and spotted it: "Bike Crash Leads to Gruesome Find." A guy on his way to work had been involved in a motorbike accident and landed on a mattress on the riverbank with a body inside it. The man had no comment but a member of the Thames division said that the body matched the description of a missing woman. The police were treating the woman's death as suspicious. The next day's edition named her as Ann Harris, a woman reported missing by her sister only days before. Maureen tidied away the papers and went back out to the garden for another smoke.