‘I won’t plan to go to Oxford, then,’ she said, laughing.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I won’t be back there until Sunday night.’
‘Sunday night!’ she said. ‘Don’t I get to see you before then?’
‘You could always come to London,’ I said.
‘I’m on call again,’ she said.
‘Isn’t anyone else ever on call?’ I asked.
‘It’s only for tonight,’ she said. ‘I could come tomorrow.’
‘I have plans for during the day tomorrow,’ I said. ‘And then I thought I’d come down to you for the night, if that’s OK.’
‘Great by me,’ she said.
The state of my home was worse than I had remembered. The stuff from the fridge that Trent had poured all over the kitchen had started to smell badly. It had been a warm May week with plenty of sunshine having streamed through the large windows into the airless space. The whole place reeked of rotting food.
I was sorry for my downstairs neighbours for having to live beneath it all for the past week, and I hoped for their sake that smells rose upwards like hot air.
I opened all the windows and let some fresh air in, which was a major improvement. Next I found an industrial cleaning company in the Yellow Pages and promised them a huge bonus if they would come round instantly to do an emergency clear-up job. No problem, they said, for a price, a very high price.
While I waited for them I used a whole can of air freshener that I found, undisturbed, beneath the kitchen sink. The lavender scent did its best to camouflage the stink of decomposing fish and rancid milk, but it was fighting a losing battle.
A team of four arrived from the cleaning company. They didn’t seem to be fazed one bit by the mess that, to my eyes, was still appalling.
‘Had a teenager’s party?’ one of them asked in all seriousness.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It was malicious vandalism.’
‘Same thing,’ he said, laughing. ‘Now, is there anything you want to keep from this lot?’ He waved a hand around.
‘Don’t throw out anything that looks unbroken,’ I said. ‘And keep all the paperwork, whatever condition it’s in.’
‘Right,’ he said. He gave directions to his team and they set to work.
I was amazed at how quickly things began to improve. Two of them set to work with mops, cloths and brooms, while the other two removed the torn and broken furniture and stacked it on the back of their vehicle outside.
Within just a few hours the place was unrecognizable from the disgusting state that I had returned to. Most of the furniture was out, and the carpets and rugs had been pulled up. The kitchen had been transformed from a major health hazard into gleaming chrome and a sparkling floor. Maybe they couldn’t mend the cracks in the marble worktops, but they did almost everything else.
‘Right, then,’ said the team leader finally. ‘That wasn’t too bad. No rats or anything. And no human remains.’
‘Human remains?’ I said, surprised.
‘Nasty stuff,’ he said. ‘All too often these jobs involve cleaning places where old people have died and no one notices until the smell gets so bad.’
I shivered. ‘What a job,’ I said.
‘Pays well,’ he said.
‘Ah, yes,’ I said. ‘Didn’t find my chequebook did you?’
‘All your paperwork’s over there,’ he said, pointing at a couple of large cardboard boxes sitting alone on the floor. Amazingly, my chequebook had survived, and was only slightly stained by the red wine.
I wrote him out a cheque for the agreed exorbitant amount and then they departed, taking with them most of my worldly goods to be delivered to the council dump.
I wandered aimlessly around my house, examining what remained. There was remarkably little. The cleaners had put cardboard boxes in each of the rooms, into which they had placed anything left unbroken. In my bedroom, the box merely contained a few trinkets and some old perfume bottles that had stood on Angela’s dressing table. Other than the fitted wardrobe, the dressing table was the only piece of furniture remaining in the room, and that was only because I couldn’t bear to see it go. I had asked the men to return it to the bedroom when I had caught sight of them loading it onto their truck.
Angela had sat for hours in front of its now-broken triple mirror every morning, drying her hair and fixing her make-up. She had loved its simplicity and, I discovered, it was too much of a wrench to see it taken away, in spite of the broken mirror on top and the snapped-off leg below.
My bed had gone, Julian Trent’s knife having cut not only the mattress to ribbons, but the divan base beneath as well. In the sitting room everything had been swept away to the tip. Only a couple of dining chairs and the chrome kitchen stool had survived intact, although I had also kept back the antique dining-room table in the hope that a French polisher could do something about the myriad of Stanley-knife grooves that had been cut into its polished surface. I had also saved my desk from the dump to see if a furniture restorer could do anything about the green embossed panel that had once been inlaid into its surface but which now was twisted and cut through, the sliced edges of the leather curled upwards like waves in a rough sea.
The trip back to Barnes had been necessary and worthwhile. Not only had I managed to bring some semblance of order to my remaining belongings, but my hatred and contempt for Julian Trent had been rekindled. There was fire in my belly and I aimed to consume him with it.
I decided not to spend the night at Ranelagh Avenue as there was nothing left for me to sleep on, other than the floor, and I didn’t fancy that. At about six o’clock I ordered a taxi and booked myself into the West London Novotel, overlooking Hammersmith flyover.
I lay on the bed in the room for a while idly watching the continuous stream of aircraft on their approach into London’s Heathrow airport. One every minute or so, non-stop, like a conveyor belt, each aluminium tube in turn full of people with lives to lead, places to go, each of them with families and friends, wives and husbands, lovers and admirers.
I thought about other eyes that might also have been watching the same aircraft. Some of my past clients, plus a few that I had prosecuted, were housed at Her Majesty’s expense in Wormwood Scrubs Prison, just up the road from the hotel.
At least I was able, if I wished, to join the throng in the air, coming or going on holiday to anywhere in the world I liked. Depriving someone of their liberty by sending them to prison may rob them of their self-respect, but, mostly, it deprives them of choice. The choice to go where and when they please, and the choice to do what they want when they get there. To lose that is the price one pays for wrongdoing, and for getting caught.
As I watched those aircraft, and their apparent freedom from the bounds of earth, I resolved once more to release Steve Mitchell from the threat of a lifetime spent watching the world pass him by through the bars of a prison window.
Bob collected me in the silver Mercedes at eight-thirty on Friday morning, and we set off northwards from Hammersmith to Golders Green.
Josef Hughes was waiting for us when we arrived at 845 Finchley Road. I hadn’t been very confident that he would be there, firstly because I’d had to leave a message for him with someone else in the house using the payphone in the hallway, and secondly because I had real doubts that he would be prepared to help me. But, thankfully, my fears were unfounded as he came quickly across the pavement and climbed into the back seat of the car.
‘Morning, Josef,’ I said to him, turning round as best I could and smiling.
He continued to peer all around him, sweeping his eyes and head from side to side. It was the frightened look that I had come to know so well.
‘Morning,’ he said to me only after we had driven away. He turned to glance a few more times through the rear window and then finally settled into his seat.