'Out,' said Lance, his mouth drying and his throat constricting.
'Pardon? Would you repeat that?'
'I was out.'
'Out where?'
'I was walking around.' He said it slowly and carefully.
'Around where?' said the detective sergeant.
Lance said he couldn't remember. He'd been into a pub. When they asked which pub he said he couldn't remember that either. Pressed to remember, he said he thought it might have been in Westbourne Park Road. He still couldn't guess what they were getting at and the most important thing to him was to keep them from finding out that he'd been breaking into a house in Pembridge Villas. Suppose they searched his nan's place and found that jewellery? Any minute now he expected them to say they'd like to search, they'd get a warrant and all that stuff you heard on the telly. But they didn't. They asked him why he had said Uncle Gib's house wanted destroying.
'It's a shithole, innit?' he said. 'It's a tip.'
'So you did say it? You wanted to destroy it?'
'I never said that.' Lance was getting seriously alarmed.
'Maybe you didn't say you resented Mr Lupescu having the top flat.'
'Well, it wasn't fair, was it? Him coming over here from some foreign place and getting the best bit of the house.'
His nan was looking more and more uneasy. 'I don't reckon you want to say any more off your own bat, Lance.' An inveterate viewer of The Bill and Kavanagh QC, 'You want to ask for a lawyer,' she said.
'Good idea,' said the detective sergeant nastily. 'He can do that when we get him down the station. Which is like now.'
Lance was so relieved that they didn't mention the old woman in Pembridge Villas or ask his nan to show them the package of jewellery, which he had been convinced they must suspect her of having, that he settled quite happily into the back of the car in which he was driven to Notting Hill police station. The lawyer they found for him was a very nice young lady who didn't look old enough to be a qualified solicitor.
The questioning began again. It went on for hours and Lance expected to hear those fateful words, so often light-heartedly listened to on TV, about anything he said being repeated in court. But in the middle of the night they released him on police bail.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Keeping an eye on Elizabeth Cherry's house, Susan Cox let herself in on Thursday morning and went dutifully from room to room. But her mind wasn't on what she was doing. She was thinking about the Notting Hill Carnival, due to begin on the coming Saturday and continue until the Monday evening. Its route this year was down Great Western Road from Westbourne Park Station, along Westbourne Grove and up Ladbroke Grove, a U-shape which would take in the Portobello Road but not enter it. The nearest it would pass to Pembridge Villas was when it sang and danced and rocked and rapped down Chepstow Road, but stragglers from it often strayed into these quiet sequestered streets and Susan feared for the small pieces of statuary in her front garden and the flowers in Elizabeth's. At one previous carnival a dancer in white satin with feathered angel's wings and a man dressed like Captain Hook had picked all the dahlias, and sat on the wall and rapped some lines of a current hit. Susan felt it incumbent upon her to stop that happening again, especially while Elizabeth was away.
It was a cool, pale-grey day, dry and windless. Because there was no wind and the curtains hung straight in their regular pleats, she failed to see that there was no glass in one of the dining-room windows. Lance had been an apt pupil of Dwayne's and had cut cleanly. She saw the buddleia and bamboo in Elizabeth's garden, as she always did, without noticing the lack of an intervening pane. The kitchen seemed just as she had found it two days before apart from an odour of not very fresh tomato. It was unlike Elizabeth to have thrown into the bin a soup can without first rinsing it but perhaps she had been in a hurry. After more than a week it would, of course, smell unpleasant. Wrinkling her nose, Susan removed it, still inside its bin liner, and took it home with her to be washed and put conscientiously in the recycling.
Making his preparations for the end, Joel now lived in as near to total darkness as is possible in a flat in the middle of London. No longer did light come through the glass pane in his front door. He had covered it up with a sheet of cardboard fixed to the frame with drawing pins. But there were lamps outside in the street that never went out. After the wettest, dullest, cloudiest summer since records began, the sun had begun to shine by day and the moon by night. Absolute darkness was impossible. Besides, his eyes had grown accustomed to the dark. Like a cat, he could find his way from room to room almost as easily as if the place had been brightly lit.
Noreen too had grown used to the way he lived. She came only three nights a week now and, to please him, brought with her a padded draught excluder in the shape of a snake, green and yellow with a forked tongue, which she laid along the bottom of her bedroom door. As well as draughts, it excluded the light from her bedside lamp. Linda no longer came. He couldn't understand why she was afraid of him and his home but she was. He had said nothing about her absence to Ella or his mother or Miss Crane. As for his father, no doubt he paid the bills without noticing or caring.
He had accumulated a quantity of sleeping pills. The hospital dispensary had provided him with a supply, some of which he had never taken. Linda had told him she needed pills if she was to get any sleep under his roof and on her last visit she had been so nervous that she had left hers behind. When she came round for them next day he said he knew nothing about her Mogadon and that she had to accept. The best sleeping pills, the strongest and most numerous, came from his mother. Her doctor gave her as many sedatives as she wanted and she had just asked for double her usual prescription on the grounds that worry about her son kept her awake. Joel investigated her handbag under cover of the habitual darkness and added these to his cache.
Noreen shopped for him on her way to Ludlow Mansions. The list he gave her always included meat and eggs and ready meals, and sometimes a bottle of wine. She wasn't surprised when he added gin and whisky to the list and she took it as a sign he was getting better. Cunningly, he wrote down mixed nuts as well and rice crackers. Starting to enjoy life, she told herself. Inviting friends round. Soon he'd be switching on lights and pulling up the blinds.
But he wasn't enjoying life. Nor was he doing or planning to do what Ella or Miss Crane might have suspected had they known about the pills and the spirits. Ella hadn't come lately. His fault. He could have called her, sent for her, but that he was postponing until the right time came, the absolutely precise right time. He had given up walking. Miss Crane he continued to visit once a week, wearing sunglasses, going to her consulting room in a taxi and returning home in one. He talked to her about Mithras, making up most of what he said, quite enjoying his inventions. Perhaps the psychotherapist knew this but if she did she gave no sign.
'He's started telling me to kill people with red hair,' he said. Miss Crane had red hair. 'When demons are incarnated their hair turns red.' She made no answer, not even nodding. 'I don't want to obey him because then he'll know he controls me.'
Mithras – the real Mithras – was visible more often to him now. In every beam of light that managed to infiltrate its way into the flat, he saw him. He told Miss Crane he never saw Mithras, only heard his voice. He told her Mithras said Ella and his mother and Noreen were demons, and he would have to kill them if he wanted peace of mind and happiness. They weren't red-headed but they were women and that was enough. Miss Crane said nothing. A thin, birdlike woman, her hair a mass of tight curls, she sat quite still, sometimes writing words on a sheet of paper. Joel only said those things because he had read that this is how schizophrenics behave. They hear voices and the voices tell them to commit crimes. It would be quite interesting to act the part of a schizophrenic, like a kind of hobby. Joel had never had a hobby of any sort. All Miss Crane said was that he should continue with his medication and she'd see him next week. On his way home, his hood up and wearing his strongest sunglasses, Joel went into a bookshop and bought a book about schizophrenia.