Dark Corners: A Novel (23 page)

‘What’s your name?’

‘Sybil.’ It came out as a choked whisper.

‘I can hear the ambulance now.’

I’ve learned from what happened with Scotty and Redhead, Lizzie thought. Once I’d have been in a real panic, but not now. I’m stronger now.

‘Don’t leave me,’ sobbed Sybil.

‘I have to let them in, but I’ll be right back.’

Running down the stairs, Lizzie flung open the front door as the ambulance came howling round the mews. A man and a woman jumped out, and ran across the cobbles carrying what looked like a stretcher.

‘Upstairs!’ cried Lizzie.

She went into the living room, where Carl lay face-downwards on a sofa. In the kitchen she poured a glass of water and drank it down. ‘What did you do to her, you bastard?’ she said as she passed him on her way back. Upstairs, the paramedics had laid Sybil on the stretcher and were covering her with a white blanket.

‘You’ll be OK now,’ Lizzie said. ‘You’re safe.’

She went back downstairs, and out through the front door. Carl needed to stop her, explain. But Adam was coming along the mews, and when he saw her, he put out his arms. Lizzie went into them and he hugged her tightly.

‘Can we get away from here?’ she said. ‘I really don’t want to stay here a moment longer. It brings back too many memories of something bad that happened to me. I’ll explain. It’s time I explained.’

They held hands down Castellain Road. ‘Oh dear,’ she said after a while, ‘I haven’t a clue what I did with Dermot’s stuff. I must have dropped it.’

‘I’m sure it doesn’t matter at all,’ said Adam. ‘It’s just so great to be walking down the street with you.’

THE BATTERY OF
Carl’s mobile phone appeared to have gone flat. Nicola tried the landline, but no one answered. Leaving a message when all you wanted to say was that you hadn’t liked the film and left early was pointless. The ambulance that passed her bus on the way home she didn’t connect with Falcon Mews. Why should she? By now it was growing dark, but there were no lights on in number 11. On the front path someone had dropped a crumpled tissue, and further along a ballpoint pen. The front door had been left on the latch. Balancing her shopping, she pushed it open, went in and called, ‘Carl?’

No answer. He wasn’t in the living room or the kitchen or upstairs, and the front door of Sybil’s flat stood wide open. Indoors it seemed stuffy and close, oppressive. Feeling deeply uneasy, Nicola put the hallway light on, opened the front door and stood on the step. Light poured out, filling the little front garden. Mr Kaleejah and Elinor Jackson from next door came out simultaneously to ask if anything was wrong.

‘I see the ambulance,’ said Mr Kaleejah, ‘and I think someone is taken ill, someone has an accident.’

Elinor’s partner came out to join her. They suggested Nicola come into their house, offered a drink. Had she called the police? Nicola said no to everything, thanks but no. She had to be indoors, she said, in case the phone rang. Mr Kaleejah’s dog threw back its head and started howling, not a bark but a wolf-like howl.

Back inside, Nicola put a light on in the living room and saw something move in a dark corner. She nearly screamed but controlled herself by clasping her hand over her mouth. She sat down on ‘Dad’s sofa’, got up again, said, ‘What are you doing?’ and then, when there was no answer, ‘What’s going on?’

‘Why have you come here?’ he said.

‘Carl? Tell me what’s going on. There was an ambulance. What’s happened?’

He was silent for so long she thought he wasn’t going to speak to her. Then at last he said in a voice she barely recognised, ‘Sybil. They took her away.’

‘What’s happened to her?’

She was looking at a man she wouldn’t have recognised but for his voice. She thought of people she’d read about whose hair turned white overnight from shock. That could happen to Carl; it looked as if it would, though she had never really believed it possible.

‘You must sit down,’ he said. ‘And I will tell you. She took poison. Someone came to the house and found her and called an ambulance.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve been in her flat. There’s sick all over the place. She nearly died; she probably is dead now.’

‘What poison?’ said Nicola in a voice that didn’t sound like her own.

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.’

‘I am going to look.’

‘No, don’t. Don’t. It’s not your business.’

But she was on the stairs. He followed her, clambering up, too weak to do anything but crawl. The big room where Sybil had sweated and struggled stank of vomit. Carl crept across the floor on all fours, making whimpering sounds. It was clear to him that the paramedics must have taken away with them the sachets that had contained the DNP.

Nicola covered her nose with a handful of tissues from her bag. ‘It was that same stuff you sold to Stacey, wasn’t it?’

‘She got it herself online,’ he muttered.

‘No. No, Carl. You gave it to her. I saw it in our bathroom, a powder in sachets it was. I don’t suppose you sold it this time. Let’s go downstairs. I can’t stand this smell.’ At the foot, she sat on the bottom stair. ‘Whatever she held over you, whatever Dermot did, I don’t want to know. I’m frightened of you, Carl.’

He went past her and stood holding on to the table. He noticed how she flinched. ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of. I’ll tell you everything. I won’t keep anything back.’

‘You’ve killed her, haven’t you? I never thought I would say that to anyone. It’s the most terrible thing anyone can say.’ Nicola got up and pulled her coat round her as if she was cold. Her face was white and her hands shook. ‘I can’t stay here with you.’

‘Don’t leave me,’ he said. ‘Please don’t leave me.’

He took hold of her by the shoulders and pulled her to him. Any other girl, he thought later, would have kicked out at him, fought him. Nicola let herself go limp in his arms, then gently slipped out of them, putting out her hand to open the front door. He stepped back in a kind of shame.

‘Let me go, Carl,’ she said in her clear, resounding voice. ‘Let me go.’

She stepped out into the dark. It had rained since she came back, and the darkness was shiny with yellow light on wet cobbles and silvery slates.

He ran after her, calling to her to come back. But when she turned the corner into Castellain Road, he gave up. Moaning softly, whimpering, he sat down on a front step and put his head in his hands.

HE LAY AWAKE
for hours, aware that things always appeared so much worse at night. The knowledge that these fears and horrors would surely shrink away in the morning, assuming their natural size, did nothing to calm him. He tossed and turned, thinking of Sybil dead in a mortuary somewhere and, uselessly, pointlessly, of the mess and filth upstairs, the room that smelt so bad that Nicola had had to leave it behind and run away. At about three, before it began to get light, he fell asleep, and went on sleeping until sunshine streaming in woke him up.

It was only then that the horrid sequence of events came back to him, gradually, one at a time, until he was overwhelmed by fear and a physical pain that squeezed his stomach like a griping indigestion and doubled him up. He was frightened to lie there, twisted up, and forced himself out on to the floor, a severely painful cramp in both legs. The sound he heard he couldn’t identify; it seemed to him the strangest sound he had ever heard, until at last he recognised it as the phone, the landline. He let it ring until it seemed to get tired and stopped. The ensuing silence was so beautiful – he told himself it was beautiful – that he thought if losing his hearing would bring this blissful nothingness, he would welcome deafness.

In the sweet quiet he got on to all fours, then hoisted himself to his feet. It took a little while. He made his way very slowly into the kitchen. The first thing he saw was the shopping bag Nicola had brought in with her the previous evening. Inside were apples, a cut loaf, sliced cheese, a half-litre of milk, two tins of sardines and six large eggs. He pulled out the crust end of the loaf, laid a slice of Cheddar on it and sat on a stool to eat. He ripped the top off the milk container and took a deep swig, the first milk, he thought, he had drunk since he was a child. It was ten past eleven. Now that he was fully awake, he felt much better and stronger. The woman was dead. She had killed herself just as Stacey had killed herself, from vanity, from a willingness to do anything fast and easy to achieve weight loss, even if that anything was suicidal. Of course she hadn’t known that, the poor foolish creature; she hadn’t been the sort of woman who read labels with cautionary advice on them.

He knew he must, at any rate superficially, clean up that top flat, and went upstairs carrying a bucket with him. The smell in the room wasn’t nearly as bad as Nicola had said. A slightly sour whiff, that was all. He filled the bucket with hot soapy water from the kitchen, and scraped the vomit off the rugs and cushions before deciding to put the cushions in a plastic bag and then in the rubbish bin by the back gate. The stains left behind on the various textiles he scrubbed with a brush he found under the sink. It wasn’t all that long a job once he got down to it, and by midday the task was completed. It was only then, when evidence of what had happened had been removed, that he realised what Sybil’s death meant: that the life of the second unwelcome occupant of the top flat at 11 Falcon Mews was over.

‘It seems to be a fine day,’ he said aloud. ‘I shall make myself some lunch – two eggs, I think, and a piece of toast – and then I’ll go out and walk up to my mother’s. I’ll borrow enough money from her to tide me over until I can get a tenant set up in the top flat. It shouldn’t take long.’

He broke the two eggs into a bowl, beat them with a fork, scrambled the mixture in a saucepan and made the toast. His lunch was almost eaten when the doorbell rang. It made him jump. He told himself not to be stupid, that there was no need to answer it. But when the bell rang again, he went to the door.

Sybil’s father stood outside. He was carrying a suitcase. No doubt he had come to tell Carl what he already knew: that Sybil was dead.

‘You’d better come in,’ Carl said.

‘I won’t stop,’ Cliff Soames said. ‘Sybil’s back with us now. The hospital sent her home this morning. I’ve come for her things.’

Was this how it felt when you knew you were going to faint? Carl clutched hold of the table top. Cliff came in, slamming the door behind him.

‘They got most of that stuff out of her. They said she’ll be OK now, but she’ll not be coming back here. Not ever. Her mum’s looking after her, won’t let her out of her sight. She won’t think of leaving us again. I’ll go up and put her things in the case.’

Carl went into the living room and sat on Dad’s sofa as Cliff Soames’s words sank in. Sybil wasn’t coming back here, Sybil wasn’t dead; they didn’t all die, the people who took DNP, not the ones who were careful. He began to shake, his hands trembling, the muscles in his legs jumping. The suitcase Cliff had brought, now full, bumped down the stairs. He left it in the hall, took a step into the room.

‘Sybil wants to stay alive,’ he said, his tone ominous. ‘You’ll never set eyes on her again. Does she owe you any rent?’

Carl didn’t know what to say. The real sum she owed he was afraid to put into words, but the temptation to say something, to name a small figure, was too great to resist.

‘Eighty pounds,’ he said, and stupidly, ‘If you can see your way …’

Cliff Soames pulled a wad of notes out of his pocket, handed them over and said he’d like a receipt. ‘The rents you people charge. I’ve read about you in the papers, greedy, grasping buggers. I hope it chokes you.’

Carl wrote a receipt for eighty pounds and handed it over in silence. When the front door slammed, he watched Cliff stagger down the street with the heavy bag. His first task, he thought, would be to spend some of the money he was still clutching on a couple of bottles of wine, and perhaps a bottle of something stronger.

It was Saturday, it had to be. Carl’s priority was to look at accommodation wanted online and pick one or two people who seemed likely. But there were hundreds of them – probably thousands – all wanting somewhere to live in central London. Investigating these things really brought it home to you how desperate the housing situation was.

He soon saw that the place he had to offer, a self-contained top floor of a mews house in Maida Vale, was about as desirable as you could get, and the rent he had asked (though scarcely ever succeeded in getting) had been derisory. This would have to be revised. Within ten minutes he had increased it considerably and had arranged for three applicants to come round later: a couple at two, a single man at four and a woman at six. What to do if he really liked the first one he didn’t yet know. He would give it some thought.

After a shot of vodka and a glass of Pinot Grigio, he began looking through his part of the house for Nicola’s property. She must have left a lot of things behind, he thought: clothes, maybe jewellery, though she hadn’t much, make-up and perfume (to which the same applied), books, CDs and DVDs. But she hadn’t; just a bit of underwear, and a grey dress and a red dress for work, and jeans and sweaters or T-shirts for the weekends. The grey dress was still in the wardrobe and so was a pair of jeans and a blue and white patterned top he had always liked. It gave him a pang to look at it; it was as if she had died.

The doorbell rang while he was wondering what to do next. It was Mr and Mrs Crowhurst, right on time. They looked very young, about his own age or younger. The rent he was asking – the new rent – seemed not to put them off. They walked around the rooms, Mrs Crowhurst sniffing the air in the living room rather suspiciously but making no comment. Could they use the garden? Carl remembered last time and said no, he was afraid not. Mr Crowhurst said they were called Jason and Chloe but had said they were Mr and Mrs because married people sounded more respectable.

‘Aren’t you married, then?’

‘Oh yes, we’re married all right.’ They held out their left hands to show their wedding rings. ‘We’ll call you and let you know.’