Dark Corners: A Novel (24 page)

‘I’ve got two more people coming, one at four and one at six, so don’t be too long about it.’ Carl had never felt so powerful, monarch of all he surveyed, as Dermot might have said.

The next possible tenant came at ten past four. He was old enough to be the Crowhursts’ father, tall, grey-haired, wearing a suit. His name was Andrew Page, and whether he was married didn’t come into it. He agreed to the rent, didn’t ask about the use of the garden but said he would like to move in as soon as possible. There was something about him that reminded Carl of Dermot. He said he had one more applicant to see, and Mr Page was to call later.

When the phone rang at five, Carl thought it must be Andrew Page, but it was a man called Harry who said he was a friend of Nicola’s and would like to come round in his jalopy and pick up her stuff. Now, if poss. Carl said the following day would be more convenient, but that didn’t suit Harry.

‘It must be now or never,’ said Harry.

Harry seemed unlike any possible friend of Nicola’s. He wore a paint-stained tracksuit and had a big bushy beard as well as shoulder-length hair. It was as well, Carl thought, that Nicola wasn’t clothes-conscious, for Harry had brought only two large whitish pillow cases to put everything in. This was a task he accomplished in about five minutes, before hurling the pillow cases into the back of the van and driving off much faster, Carl thought, than anyone had ever before sped along the cobbles. He had tried to persuade Harry to take Nicola’s green goose with him, but Harry had looked at it and shook his head. So there it sat on the hall table, a silent and reproachful reminder of everything that had happened to Carl over the past few months.

Immediately after the van departed, a small woman who introduced herself as Mrs Hamilton drove up in a silver Lexus. Before she had even entered the house she was back in the car and driving away, once Carl had told her there was no off-street parking available at 11 Falcon Mews.

Andrew Page returned in a taxi just before eight. ‘Turned up like a bad penny,’ he said, which was so like Dermot that it made Carl shudder.

‘Changed your mind, have you?’ Carl said, almost hoping that he had. But Andrew Page hadn’t. He simply wanted to know that nothing had happened to keep him from the tenancy. Nothing had, Carl said rather reluctantly.

‘I’d like to come back tomorrow with my solicitor to sign the contract. Oh, and pay the deposit. Best to have things all open and above board, don’t you think?’

Carl had never heard of anyone having a solicitor present for such a transaction, but he didn’t know much about letting property. He had certainly made a mess of it last time. It seemed amazing to him too that this man wanted to give him a deposit without even being asked for it. While the taxi waited, they arranged for him to return at six p.m. the following day with Mr Lucas Partridge, LLB.

Throughout the rest of the evening, Carl repeated to himself the two clichés Andrew Page had uttered, Dermot-like. What did it matter? He intended to avoid speaking to him as much as possible during his tenancy. The money was good and would keep on coming – without hindrance, without blackmail.

‘What would you do,’ said Adam, ‘if you recognised someone you’d seen doing something weird and you thought he might have committed a crime?’

He and Lizzie were walking along the canal towpath between Cunningham Place and Lisson Green. It was a fine, clear evening. ‘What d’you mean by weird?’ said Lizzie.

‘Sit down a minute.’

They sat on a seat on the bank. ‘The guy who used to do your job at the pet place – what was he called?’

‘Dermot McKinnon. He was murdered.’

‘I know he was,’ said Adam. ‘It happened in a street called Jerome something. Jerome Crescent, I think. They never found who did it.’ He paused. ‘At approximately that time, I’m not exactly sure of the date, I was on my way to drinks with a friend at a pub in Camden, and was cycling along the path where we are now and under the bridge on Park Road until I was on the edge of the park, and this guy was on the opposite bank with a big backpack. It was getting dark and he didn’t see me.’

‘What guy, Adam?’

‘The man whose house you took McKinnon’s stuff to. He was standing at the door when I met you in the street that day. He’s the man I saw with the backpack. I watched him from the bank through the trees. I know he didn’t see me. I was fascinated. He squatted down, undid the bag and took a big heavy thing out of it. Then I saw him throw the bag into the canal, but not the heavy object, which he sort of cradled in his arms. It was all very odd.’

‘Oh my God,’ said Lizzie.

‘I hadn’t given it much thought until recently. At the time, I didn’t know who he was, certainly didn’t know there was any connection between him and the man who was murdered. So it gave me quite a shock to recognise him.’

‘Carl Martin?’

‘Yes. And he and Dermot McKinnon lived in the same house. It’s an odd coincidence, don’t you think?’

THE DEPOSIT, REFUNDABLE
on the termination of the tenancy, was so welcome to Carl, and so unexpected, he could scarcely believe it even when the cheque for two thousand pounds was put into his hand. Mr Partridge, the solicitor, seemed to find nothing strange in this transaction. That Carl had prepared no contract between landlord and tenant caused some shaking of his head, but no great harm was done as on Page’s instructions he had created one himself. All of it looked very favourable to Carl, another cause of wonderment, so that he felt he must be living in a happy dream. He half expected to wake up and find himself back in the real world without money, food or any sort of security.

The contract was signed and witnessed. If it was agreeable to Mr Martin, as his new tenant insisted on calling him, Andrew Page would move in the next day. He would bring some small items of furniture, if that was all right with Mr Martin. Carl, still dazed from the windfall and promises of further cash, said it was fine. When the two men had gone, he looked hard at the cheque. It really was for two thousand pounds. It was funny that he now had all this money but not a single note or coin, and wouldn’t have until he cashed the cheque in the morning.

He would have liked to celebrate by going to the Summerhouse restaurant nearby, or the newly opened Crocker’s Folly, and treating himself to oysters and steak and a bottle of champagne. Then he remembered his credit card, which hadn’t been used for months – he hadn’t dared to use it; he now couldn’t recall where he had put it. It took him half an hour before he located it in the pocket of a jacket he never wore.

It was dinner time, precisely seven thirty. He strolled along Sutherland Avenue and across the Edgware Road into Aberdeen Place. Crocker’s Folly was grand outside, and its greatly refurbished interior very pretty and elegant. They had no oysters, but steak and champagne were no problem. It was so long since Carl had drunk champagne that he had forgotten what it tasted like. He wasn’t going to gobble his food, but ate it in a leisurely fashion, sipping the champagne and savouring the sautéed potatoes. He had moved from this delicious first course on to a confection of three kinds of chocolate and Cornish ice cream before allowing himself to think about his life and what was happening to it.

Maybe Nicola would come back now that he had a new tenant and money, though money had never attracted her. He could see his friends again, phone them, visit them and ask them over. He would resume the abandoned novel; he would find that writing afforded him the pleasure it once had, he would find inspiration. His worries were all past and he must take care not to create new ones by getting on overly friendly terms with Andrew Page. Perhaps ‘Mr Martin’ and ‘Mr Page’ was the best policy, so there would be no need for invitations to drinks or even cups of tea.

He had begun the walk back to Falcon Mews when thoughts of Dermot McKinnon came into his mind. Surely now that his new life was taking shape, the memory of Dermot would fade. There could be no pity, no regret. What he had done had been very close to an accident, in that he had hardly known what was happening until it was all over. In a year’s time, after a year of enjoying the new tenant, with his formal ways and cold correctness, he would have ceased altogether to remember Dermot, and certainly wouldn’t blame himself in any way for his death.

‘Are you going to do anything about it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Adam said. He and Lizzie were alone in the reception area of the Sutherland Pet Clinic. The clinic was closed, but one patient, a King Charles spaniel, and its owner remained. They were in Caroline’s examination room, where the dog, Louis Quatorze, was receiving immunisation. ‘I could go to the police, I know that. I would tell them what I’ve told you: that at what I think was roughly the time of the murder, I believe I saw Carl Martin holding the instrument he’d used to kill Dermot McKinnon.’

‘Are you going to go to the police?’

Adam sighed. ‘I saw a man drop something into the canal where it goes into Regent’s Park. I didn’t come forward earlier because I didn’t think any more of it till I went to pick you up in Falcon Mews and that same man – no doubt about that – came out of the house on to the front steps. You told me that Dermot McKinnon had also lived there, in the top flat. It doesn’t amount to much, does it?’

Before she could reply, Caroline emerged with Louis Quatorze and his owner. Lizzie presented the owner with her bill and patted Louis on the head. She and Adam left at the same time as the dog and his owner, leaving Caroline to lock up.

‘Do you really think he might have killed Dermot?’ Lizzie said. She remembered the callous way Carl had behaved when Sybil had been so ill upstairs. But still, could he have committed murder?

‘I don’t know, Lizzie. Let’s go to the Prince Alfred pub and have a drink. It’s too cold to be outside.’

In the pub, Lizzie sat at one of the little tables and Adam fetched two glasses of white wine. ‘What I’d like would be to talk to Carl about it,’ he said. ‘Find out how he reacts. I’d like to know his state of mind.’

‘Well, you are training to be a psychologist,’ said Lizzie.

Adam laughed. ‘I’ve got a psychology degree, but that’s about it. You know, I’d just like to see him. I think I’d tell him I don’t intend to go to the police, but when I’ve heard him out – if he consents to speak to me – I’ll tell him he should go to them himself.’

‘What – and confess?’

‘That would be the general idea.’

‘But people don’t do that, Adam. Not voluntarily. And what happens if he gets violent? If you’re right and he did kill Dermot, what’s to stop him killing again?’

THE PREVIOUS WINTER
had not been cold. It had been wet instead, and if you lived near the Thames or in the Somerset Levels you stood a serious chance of being flooded. This year the warm weather had gone on and on, but as autumn turned into winter, sharp cold began. London was always the mildest part of the United Kingdom, and the cold started in Maida Vale rather later than elsewhere. But by the end of November in Falcon Mews, frost was glittering on the bushes that lined the cobbled street, and silvering the bare branches of the trees.

In number 11, the central heating, which hadn’t been put to the test the previous year, was soon needed and found wanting. At least in Carl’s opinion. At the top of the house, in the tenant’s domain, there were no complaints, but one evening Carl happened to be in the hall when Andrew Page came in with two large electric heaters he fetched from the back of a taxi.

‘I’m a bit of a chilly mortal,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘I’m sure the heating’s adequate.’

The heaters were taken upstairs and, as always, Andrew Page’s front door was closed silently. Carl’s only way of knowing if his tenant was in was to go out into the street or the back garden and look up to see if a light was on behind the top windows. Even that was hardly a sure guide, as people all too often went out leaving lights on, and Andrew Page might be one of them. But Carl had no desire to know. Everyone had television, so presumably Andrew had. Most had a radio or music player or both, so no doubt he had one of those too. But if he did, no sound was ever heard from the top-floor rooms. No running water, nothing dropped on the floor, no click of a switch, no phone ringing, no computer coming on. Andrew Page seemed to live in utter silence. In that respect, in
all
respects, he was the ideal tenant. The rent was received without fail in Carl’s bank account on the last day of every month. Carl sometimes thought Andrew Page was too good to be true, but he told himself that he felt that way because until very recently the people he had come across had been – not to put too fine a point on it – degenerate bastards.

All was well in Carl’s life, except for the loss of Nicola. He’d discovered that she no longer lived in Ashmill Street, which meant that she had got herself other accommodation, and he could only find out where this was by calling her office at the Department of Health. In other words by calling her, and he shied away from doing that. He had to face it. If she wanted to see him, to be with him again, she would phone him. He remembered their parting, and that man coming round in his ‘jalopy’ to collect her things. Walking past a mirror, the only one in the house outside the bathroom, he stopped and made himself smile into it. As he feared, his smile had become a facial distortion, like a mask or a gargoyle, with no warmth or friendliness in it.

In the mornings and sometimes in the evenings he worked on his novel, mechanically, almost automatically, typing words that all meant something, describing events or people or actions. Remembering Raymond Chandler’s advice to authors that, when at a loss, they should have a man come into a room with a gun, Carl introduced scenes of violence in order to liven up his story. Then, when he had almost decided to abandon the novel and accept that he was to be a one-book author, Andrew Page came down the stairs and, instead of leaving the house, tapped on his living room door.

Carl had been sitting at the laptop, his hands idle, staring at the blank screen with its green hill far away. He called out to come in, and Andrew entered the room holding a copy of
Death’s Door
.