Dark Corners: A Novel (15 page)

Dermot was still thinking about what form the question he planned to ask Sybil should take. Of course he wouldn’t be asking her yet; it was Tuesday, and they only met at the weekends and on Friday evenings. They had discovered quite early in their relationship that they were in perfect agreement on this subject. Both worked hard, went to bed early and got up early. Otherwise, how could they do their jobs properly? That was what weekends were for, relaxing (in his case) or catching up on all the domestic tasks that needed to be done (in hers). Yes, he thought, she would make him a good wife. A good old-fashioned wife, none of your post-impressionist feminist partners, or whatever they called them. Would he have to buy her a ring? That was something to give some thought to. They could live in the flat for the first few years, and then maybe he could buy a house in Winchmore Hill or Oakwood.

Nicola had found a website for the
Paddington Express
. It had offices in Eastbourne Terrace, walking distance from Falcon Mews. With all the contact information in hand, her plan of action seemed real. She would go there and ask to see the editor (or news editor or features editor), and she or he would be very interested, record what Nicola had to say and perhaps take it down in shorthand as well. Did people still use shorthand? They would ask if they could send a photographer round. They would find out that Carl didn’t know she was telling them what he had done. It wasn’t as simple as it had seemed at first. It now appeared almost treacherous. If she did this, she would have lost him. This must be the end.

Perhaps she wouldn’t have to do it herself. Or not do it in person. She could send an anonymous letter. Nicola marvelled that she, who was surely an honest, decent sort of person, should even contemplate such a thing. Perhaps honest, decent people imagined this kind of behaviour, but they didn’t carry it out. Of course they didn’t. When the time came, she would go herself and be straightforward and truthful. There was nothing else for it. The only question was when.

Yvonne Weatherspoon arranged the white-chocolate-coated circular shortbread biscuits she knew she shouldn’t eat, and therefore restricted herself to one a day, on an oval china plate. She put the plate on a tray with the coffee pot and two cups, the jug of semi-skimmed milk and the two sachets of sugar substitute. The thin milk and thinner little packets were to make up for the biscuits.

Yvonne was setting the tray on the table by the open French windows when the landline rang. She picked it up.

A coarse voice, quite a rough male voice, said, ‘Mrs Weatherspoon? Mrs Yvonne Weatherspoon?’

‘Yes?’

‘We’ve got your daughter. She’s OK at present, and you can have her back …’ the man paused to speak to someone, ‘for a lot of money.’

Yvonne laughed. ‘That’s very funny, as my daughter is sitting here beside me. You can speak to her if you like.’

The phone was abruptly cut off.

Yvonne and Elizabeth agreed on few things, but this was one of them. They both laughed, Elizabeth hysterically, Yvonne with more restraint. ‘Do you think we should tell the police?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Let sleeping cops lie.’

‘
ARE YOU GOING
to set me free now?’ Lizzie asked, using a phrase she had learned from a TV drama about royalty in the thirteenth century.

Scotty and Redhead looked a bit rattled, she thought, as though their plan hadn’t gone entirely as they had expected.

‘Why would we do that? That wasn’t your mum, just as you must have known it wouldn’t be.’ Redhead fetched her a mug of water. ‘We’re going to have to move you, so we’re going to give you enough pills to knock you out for twenty-four hours.’ A faint smile crossed his face. ‘Don’t say we don’t look after you.’

‘Would you put the cuffs on my hands in front?’ she asked, feeling alarmed. ‘Please.’

But the handcuffs remained where they were, and soon the two men appeared to be ready to leave, Redhead with a suitcase and a big holdall, and Scotty with a bottle that must contain the sleeping pills. He shook not two but three of them into his hand and signed to her to put her head back and open her mouth.

What’s the maximum safe dose? Lizzie wondered, but she opened her mouth and swallowed the pills, washing them down with the rest of the water in the mug.

They walked her downstairs, both supporting her, talking as they went, grumbling about who they had thought she was, and what they were going to do with her now.

The car was in a side entrance outside a back door. Consciousness was going and Lizzie stumbled down the last few steps, wondering vaguely what time it was, early or late, as blackness and oblivion descended.

When she came round, to use her father’s phrase, her hands were shackled in front and cable had been tightly tied round her feet.

While captive, she was learning things. When you feel comfortable in your body, most of the time you’re barely aware of having a body. But when part of it is tied up, hands together and feet together, you feel stiff and then you start to ache. You wonder if this is what it will be like when you’re old. Recovering consciousness, you don’t feel wide awake quickly; for a long time you feel weak and feeble and vague and the room swims around you.

To keep her weight down, Lizzie had eaten sparingly for months, years really, so she had got used to small meals and hadn’t often felt hungry. But she had in the past eaten something every day and had never felt like this. Her hunger was a devouring presence. Although she knew it was a stupid thing to do, she couldn’t stop herself imagining her mother’s cooking, so that she actually saw before her eyes her famous lemon meringue pie, the glistening leg of lamb surrounded by potatoes roasted in goose fat, the apple tart with its latticed lid. She had never till now known what it meant to have your mouth water. Now she did.

It amazed her that she could do without a bath or a shower. She was still wearing the same clothes she had worn when Scotty and Redhead took her away, and inside Stacey’s black dress with the white lace panel, filthy now and torn, her body smelled like a sick dog and her hair as if it had been buried in dusty earth. But all this worried her less than she would ever have expected. If she smelt bad, so did Redhead and Scotty.

In this new place, she was left alone, drugged, given water when she woke but no food apart from a piece of white bread from a sliced loaf and a hunk of cheese in the morning and the evening. One of them took her to the bathroom when they brought the bread and slammed the door on her, waiting outside. She had to shuffle along slowly because of the rope tied around her ankles. They no longer spoke to her.

She had no idea of how much time had passed when they took her downstairs again, put her in the car, and drove her through dark, winding streets to a new prison.

The previous year, in late July, when school was finished and the little ones were supervised by volunteer mothers, Lizzie had gone off somewhere on a holiday with a friend or friends. Or she said she had, but you never knew when she was telling the truth and when she was not.

These were Tom’s thoughts, not Dot’s. Tom no longer believed much of what Lizzie said, while Dot always had faith in her daughter. More than this, though, she trusted and believed in what her husband said. If Tom said Lizzie was somewhere on the Mediterranean, or in Cornwall, that was where she was. While it annoyed Tom that his daughter would disappear somewhere with friends and not tell him or her mother where she was, it upset Dorothy.

‘She’s an adult,’ he said. ‘She has her own life.’

‘I knew you’d say that. Of course you’re right, but I think she could ring us. It’s not much to ask.’

‘You’ve never asked her, though, have you? Maybe you should. I doubt it’ll make any difference, but it would set your mind at rest – in the future. To know where she was.’

‘Oh, it is at rest. I’m not worried, I’m cross.’

But she was worried, and so was he. They might have confided in each other, but they never did that. Each pretended that Lizzie must be safe somewhere and fine. Unpleasant things happened to young girls every day, the newspapers said so, but they did their best to dismiss this thought. Nothing nasty could ever happen to their Lizzie.

IT HAD BECOME
an obsession. Carl understood that his behaviour was just as much that of a fanatical lover as of a fixated hater. He followed Dermot with his eyes whenever he had the opportunity, listened for what he could hear of him, outside the door at the top of the stairs: his music, his footsteps, and his words on the phone or when he spoke to Sybil Soames. When Dermot approached the door, Carl ran down the top flight of stairs to hide in his own bedroom.

At first he did this only while Nicola was at work, but gradually he came hardly to care at all. Anyway, she knew. She had told him what he should do, but now she had stopped; telling him, she said, was useless. Probably the time was coming when she would give up on him and leave. He wouldn’t care. Sometimes he thought he wouldn’t even notice.

Once or twice he had followed Dermot to work. If Dermot had turned round and seen him, he wouldn’t have cared, but he didn’t turn round. Carl watched as Dermot went into the pet clinic by a back door. Then the clinic lights came on and he walked away.

He had also begun to follow Dermot to Sybil’s parents’ house when he walked her home in the evenings. Occasionally, if it was raining or chilly, Dermot called a taxi for her. He could easily afford taxis now, Carl thought bitterly. But mostly he set off with Sybil at about nine thirty in the evening. They held hands. Or rather, Dermot held her hand. She wouldn’t have dared take his, Carl thought.

Their walk took about twenty minutes and they always went the same way: down Castellain Road, into Clifton Gardens and across Maida Vale into St John’s Wood Road to Lisson Grove. They kept always to those same wide roads and never took the short cut along the canal path. Although it was lit, it was much darker along there, a lovers’ walk under the trees. Did Dermot avoid it with Sybil for that reason? Because it was somehow intimate, sheltered, a place for kissing?

On the way back though, he did go that way. After he had kissed Sybil’s cheek, watched her go into the flats, waved once, he turned round and took the little path that went over the canal bridge and led along the dark water. He walked very slowly, pausing to look down on to the glassy canal.

Carl watched from the other side of Lisson Grove. When he was at university, he had belonged to the dramatic society, and the high spot of his second year had been their performance of
Measure for Measure
. A line came back to him, a phrase really, ‘the duke of dark corners’. Dermot looked like that, with his round shoulders and long, thin neck; almost a medieval figure, dressed in a dark jacket, black jeans tucked into black boots. Under the bridge at Lisson Grove and under the bridge at Aberdeen Place were dark corners, footpaths melting into blackness.

If Carl wondered about Dermot, why he always walked to Jerome Crescent the way he did and returned along the towpath, he also wondered at himself. What made him follow Dermot? What did he get out of it? He didn’t know. He just had a compulsion to do it.

Nicola had gone back to her old flat and the girls for the night, and he was sitting in his bedroom in the dark when he heard Dermot come in. These days he seldom thought about anything but Dermot, and sometimes Sybil, but pushing his backpack into a corner with his foot, he noticed that Nicola hadn’t taken the goose out to put it on the hall table.

Sunday, and Dermot had come back from church with Sybil and a crowd of other people. Carl, watching from upstairs, saw him unlock the front door and welcome them all in. It was another fine day, clouds across the blue sky but plenty of sunshine too. There were two women among them, apart from Sybil, and all wore bright floral dresses. Sybil’s had a pattern on it of pink cabbage roses on a black background. The door shut with a bang.

Nicola was out, at a brunch with two of her ex-flatmates. He had forgotten to mention the goose. Never mind. It wasn’t important. Nothing was but Dermot and maybe money.

He went into his bedroom and looked out of the window, hoping that Dermot and his guests wouldn’t go into the garden. No one was out there, but as he turned away, he heard a commotion from downstairs as they all burst out among the flowers. Gusts of laughter drifted up. Sybil appeared with the trolley that had been Carl’s father’s, loaded with bottles and cans and plates of food and packets of crisps. Everyone started eating and drinking. Sybil was walking among them holding up her left hand for them to see something. Someone said, ‘I know you’ll be very happy.’ Not ‘I hope’, but ‘I know’.

It was an engagement party. Carl felt sick. He fell back into a chair. ‘Don’t let him see you,’ he said aloud, and then whispered it. ‘Don’t let him see you, he’ll ask you down. He’ll tell you his news and ask you to join them.’

Very quietly, as if they were all listening for him to make a move, he crept into the bathroom and drank from the cold tap above the sink.

Nicola had said nothing about coming back that evening, but he expected her. Even if those people were still in the garden, still eating and drinking, her return would be a comfort. He would ask her about the goose – did she really want it? He didn’t care if there was an ornament on the hall table or not.

He had eaten no lunch, had eaten nothing, and there was no wine in the house. In the kitchen was half a loaf of bread and a piece of cheese left over from last evening’s dinner. He lay on the bed and fell asleep, overcome with despair. At some point in the afternoon or early evening – it was still light – he was awakened by the party guests going home. They weren’t especially noisy, he had to admit that, but the slightest sound would have disturbed him. He got up and watched them go.

The sky had clouded over and a wind got up. The tree branches in Falcon Mews swayed and all the leaves fluttered. A blackbird was singing somewhere and a magpie making its repetitive squawk. He searched for his phone but it had run out of charge. If Nicola didn’t come, bringing food, he would have to go out and buy himself something to eat. Though it was Sunday, all the shops round here stayed open till late.