'I know you think I meant to kill myself but I didn't.'
'All right. If you didn't I'm very glad.'
'I want to tell you what I was really doing.'
'That's fine but here's your mother coming back. Do you want to tell her?'
'No!' If he had been stronger it would have been a shout. As things were, it came out as a strangled gasp.
His mother had been told he ought not to be left alone in his flat. Not even during the day. Ella went to speak to the doctor. Discreetly, he refused to say what he evidently thought, that this was a failed suicide attempt, and when she told him about the midday phone call, that rescuing Joel hadn't been due to any great intuition or acuity on her part, he agreed with obvious relief that his brush with death had probably been an accident.
'I think he wants to tell me about it but it must be in his own time.'
'Oh, I fully agree.'
Wendy Stemmer had slipped off her punishing sandals and they lay on their sides under the bed. 'He seems very fond of you,' she said accusingly at Joel's bedside but with her back turned to him. 'Tell me something. Are you his girlfriend?'
'Of course not. I'm his doctor.'
'I asked because I've never known him so keen on a woman before. I always thought he must be gay, though he didn't give any signs of that either.'
Ella was so angry she took a few seconds before she could trust herself to speak. 'Mrs Stemmer, don't you think you could persuade your husband to be reconciled with Joel? If you tell him how lonely Joel is, how he lives in the dark and now he's – accidentally, of course – taken an overdose of – well, pills that weren't prescribed for him?'
She watched the woman's face as a deep flush spread over it under the thick make-up. Saying that she knew some of the sedatives came from his mother, would do neither Joel nor her any good. It was useless. 'Couldn't you try, Mrs Stemmer?'
'It won't be any good.' Wendy Stemmer bent over, perhaps to hide her face, and eased her sandals on again. She looked up and Ella thought she spoke for the first time with sincerity and maybe from her heart. 'I've tried. I'm always trying. Last time I told him he ought to see Joel he hit me.' She drew in her breath. 'Right across my face.'
Ella had nothing to say.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Lance thought he had heard the last of Lupescu's death and the destruction of Uncle Gib's house. If the police were serious they would have done something about it by now. The only condition of his bail was that he stay a certain distance away from witnesses' houses, like Uncle Gib's new place and the people next door. He didn't want to go near them so that wasn't a problem. It wasn't enough to keep him awake at night, not even in that uncomfortable bed in close proximity to the car tyres and the broken bike. Last night a defunct electric mixer had fallen off a shelf on to his head. Besides, he had the prospect of an influx of money when Dave sold the rings, the bracelet and the gold chain. He spent a lot of his waking hours thinking what he would do with the money, spending most of it on Gemma but some on new clothes for himself as well as an iPod, and a really good mobile that would play radio, show TV and take photos.
Like callous landlords who require their paying guests to vacate their rooms and indeed the whole building in daylight hours, Lance's parents wanted him out of the flat for most of the day. If they had had jobs themselves it might have been different but they were always at home, watching television and exploring the Internet. Their son wasn't welcome.
His father put it to him very plainly: 'If you had work it'd be another story. But you don't and no prospect so far as I can see.'
Lance thought this a bit OTT considering neither of them had jobs but when he said so his mother ignored the jibe and said, 'I don't know how that poor old Gilbert put up with you under his feet all day.'
The one advantage of being there was that there was plenty to eat before he left in the morning and when he got home at night. His mother had grown up in a family where there was a tradition that if you missed a meal or failed to finish everything on your plate and or ask for seconds, you were likely to collapse from inanition. A story told by her grandmother and religiously passed down the generations was of one of their relatives, known as Cousin Lil, who had missed breakfast, as a result fainted in a train going to Ramsgate and never fully recovered. So Lance was stuffed with eggs and bacon and sausages in the morning, and plied with burgers or Indian takeaway in the evening, while his mother made lunch for him to sustain him in the intervening time. She might taunt him with having no paid employment, though jobless herself, for in her estimation there was no disgrace in a woman being without a job, but to Lance, carrying a thick package of ham and cheese sandwiches and half a dozen Jaffa cakes in his backpack, then forcing himself to walk the streets and sit on park benches, staring at passers-by and dozing, was what having work must be like.
He was leaving the flats at nine in the morning, the witching hour at which he was banished, his backpack laden with food, when two men got out of the police car parked outside and invited him to accompany them to the station. One of them he recognised. It was the detective sergeant who had asked most of the questions last time. Lance said OK because it was useless to argue and, besides that, it would be a change sitting at a table in an interview room instead of trudging up and down Ladbroke Grove and hanging about in Holland Park.
The young lady lawyer came back again and cups of tea were brought. They asked him all the same questions all over again and the other one, the one he hadn't seen before, said the DNA sample they'd taken matched the DNA on various objects that had survived the fire.
'Mr Platt lived in the house for six months,' the solicitor said. 'Naturally, he touched things. What did you expect?'
Some guy in a petrol station told them that Lance had paid for fifteen litres of premium unleaded several weeks before. At first he didn't know what they meant, then he remembered paying for Dwayne's petrol when he fetched Gemma's stuff over to Blagrove Road in his van.
'I never put it in no bottle, I never touched it,' he said. 'My mate put it straight in his tank.'
They looked as if they didn't believe him. They asked more questions. Then the one he recognised started asking him about Dorian Lupescu. Wasn't it a fact that he was jealous of Lupescu? His girlfriend had said she fancied Lupescu – was that true?
'She's not my girlfriend,' Lance said sadly.
A shaft of pain threatened to bend him double when it occurred to him that it might be Gemma who had told them this. But no, she wouldn't. Not his Gemma, his love, his sweetheart. Fize would. Fize's pal what's-his-name would. Uncle Gib certainly would. Some bastard had betrayed him. He was sorely in need of comfort.
'Can I eat my sandwiches now?'
'I don't see why not,' said the detective sergeant. 'We'll take a break.' He looked at his watch and muttered something into the machine recording all this. 'Back in half an hour.'
It went on for a few more hours but they let him go on bail again without a charge and without any explanation, only to tell him he must attend court when required and not interfere with the process of justice. He could easily guarantee that; he didn't know how to.
Ella had accepted an offer for her flat. It wasn't the first but it was the best she had yet had and she was satisfied. Eugene had kept telling her that it was of no great importance whether she sold it now or in a year's time. They were not in need of the money that would be derived from the sale. But, without saying a word of this to him, she wanted to have a substantial sum of her own to bring with her to the marriage and that she would have. The flat had been hers for fifteen years and had been free of mortgage for two. It brought her some gratification to know that she would sign the contract for the sale well before her wedding.
Next day she had arranged to visit Joel but first, on her afternoon off, she was going to drive over to the flat – she hadn't been near it for the past fortnight – and bring away various items that might as well be moved before the removers fetched the rest on completion day. That would be after she returned from her honeymoon. The place looked rather drab and dusty. But someone had liked it enough to pay a considerable sum for it and after the furniture had been taken out she would employ a team to clean it up for the incoming residents. First she packed into cardboard crates all the remaining books and, into suitcases, all her clothes. In the bathroom cabinet were a lot of toiletries she would probably never use but there was no point in leaving them where they were. She loaded them into plastic carriers and, making several journeys, put the lot into the boot and back of the car.