My eyes were drawn irretrievably to her neck: a chain of gold in heavy loops now hung around it. It was definitely a chain – there was even a padlock fastened to its side. My eyes fell to her wrists, where again the same chains of gold were fastened. I could see that they weighed her down, slightly deformed the grace of her movements, as she lifted her hand to turn a page of her hook. The chains were of heavy old gold, the gold of blood. The links pressed into her flesh, leaving their imprint. Only when she sat completely still could she maintain the illusion of being free.
I picked up the phone and tried calling Juliette. There was no reply. I looked at my watch – it was nine o’clock – still not too late. I decided to go round to Juliette’s flat.
It had stopped raining and the August evening was humid and still. There was a light on, in her flat above the pet shop and I rang the doorbell. No one came down. I pushed against the door, and to my surprise it opened easily – it had not been shut properly. I walked through the gloomy, strangely lighted, pet shop, past the sleeping animals. In the distance I could hear the record, ‘These Foolish Things’, being played. As I walked up the steep steps to Juliette’s flat I began to be able to make out the words: …and candlelight on little corner tables. The music was coming from her apartment, the melody winding its way down the stairs towards me.
I knocked on the half-open door but there was no reply and I entered her flat. I walked to the end of the corridor and opened the door. The light was on. The room had been completely cleared out. It was empty except for the duck egg blue carpet that the removal of all the junk had revealed. An empty orange juice carton stood in the corner.
I ran to her bedroom. Empty, even the bed had gone. Only a record player stood in the corner. I watched as the song came to an end, the arm of the record-player swung back to the beginning of the record and began to play the tune all over again.
I lay down on the wooden floor of her bedroom, my head next to the record player, letting the song interminably repeat itself, close to my ears until I finally fell asleep.
The next morning I woke up with a bad headache. The record had stuck in the groove of lipstick traces, playing the phrase over and over again. I switched it off. The ensuing silence returned a sense of peace to the flat. Morning sunlight was shining through the rooms. I had given up finding any clues to what had happened to Juliette. I decided that I needed some air and went to the window to open it. Jammed in the window frame was a pamphlet for Kew Gardens. I eased the folded paper out and put it in my pocket.
Closing the door to Juliette’s flat behind me I went downstairs. Inside the pet shop was the musty smell of animal scent and sawdust. I stood for a moment in the shadowy light of the hypnotic blue gleam of the fish tanks. The owner was at the far end of the shop, at the front, his back to me, feeding a tank of fish. The black skin of his bared arm looked blue in the light. The Angel Fish floated slowly up towards the half-moons of his nails.
‘Excuse me,’ I said.
He looked round.
‘I wonder if you could tell me what has happened to the girl that lives in the flat above you?’
He continued to look at me.
‘To Juliette. The girl who lives above you.’
‘No one lives there,’ he said.
I heard a clicking sound start up. I turned round to see a hamster going round and round in its tiny red plastic wheel.
‘No, I know no one lives there now,’ I said impatiently. ‘But the girl who used to live there. As far as I know until a week or so ago.’
‘No one used to live there, neither,’ he said. ‘Those rooms aren’t even used for storage. They’re kept empty except for a couple of cardboard boxes. That’s how it is. This girl you’re looking for – Juliette. She’s been having you on.’ He smiled at me, a big smile.
I remembered her flat when I had first visited it, full of objects which had looked like the accumulation of years of habitation: the clothes, the furniture, the manuscripts. And I looked at this man’s implacable face. I turned and walked out of the shop. As the door swung shut behind me, the parrot let out a piercing peal of laughter.
THIRTY-NINE
As I walked back into the centre of town that morning, various questions kept on going round and round in my head. Why had Juliette disappeared? Where had she gone? Was she, after all, in some way responsible for her sister’s abduction? I remembered how she had looked when she had spoken of how she had been betrayed by Justine and Jack. The look in her eye had spiralled in on itself. Had that only been an act, to draw me in, as she had later led me to believe? What about the explicit photographs? The knives drawn through them?
Now that Juliette had gone, the only remaining character left on the plot’s square was Jack. The only thing that I knew about him was that he was an artist. I also had an approximate image of his face from the photographs I had seen in Juliette’s scrapbook. As I was walking, my mind hopelessly churning, my hand felt in my pocket a piece of hard card that I didn’t recognize. Curious, I pulled it out – it was the Kew Gardens pamphlet that I had found in Juliette’s flat. Absentmindedly, I began to flick through the pages.
Inside, was a brief history of the gardens and a list of the famous botanists who had been involved in their creation. I closed the pamphlet and was about to throw it away when the cover caught my eye. A bright colour photograph of one of the large conservatories was featured on the front, just above the times and admission prices of the gardens. A figure of a man was standing to the right, in front of the conservatory, just inside the right-hand corner of the square of the photograph. He looked as if he had wandered into the photograph by accident and was looking questioningly at whoever was taking the photograph. He did not look like a man who wanted to be trapped in Technicolour.
His face looked blunt in the outside light, the cheek bones sharp, the mouth wide and cheeky. His expression was one of making perpetual mischief. His curly hair seemed too soft and feminine for the masculine impertinence of his face. His eyes were slightly slanting in a bemused expression under the tendrils. I kept on looking at the face, beguiled by it. It was as if I had to stare at the shape of the face for a long time, in order that I might recognize it as Jack’s. His body looked as if it had been draped around him for his own pleasure.
I hailed a taxi to Kew. Having paid my entrance fee, I walked through the gates, surrounded on both sides by high stone walls, into the gardens. Just inside, a long queue of adults and children were waiting for entry to the maze. I wondered why people were willing to pay to get lost, when they already were, for free. Perhaps they just wanted to confirm something that they already knew. It was noon and the sun was high up in the sky.
A uniformed warden was walking towards me. ‘Excuse me.’