Dark Corners: A Novel (9 page)

He decided to walk to Nicola’s flat in Ashmill Street, telling himself he’d nothing to lose if no one let him in. Things couldn’t be any worse than they already were. It occurred to him that he had no one to talk to, no one to confide in. There was only Nicola, and perhaps even she wouldn’t speak to him.

He walked through Church Street market, where the traders were dismantling the stalls. Further up on Lisson Grove, the man with the antique shop was removing his chairs and tables from the pavement and closing up for the night.

By now it was early evening, and once off the main streets, few people were about. Carl turned down the street by the fish and chip shop. Nicola knew, he said to himself. She was the only one other than Dermot who knew; she had heard his account of what had happened, she
knew
. Surely now she would be over her initial shock and horror and would be able to give him some sympathy, tell him what to do.

The Victorian terraced house where she lived was one of a long row, and must have been ugly and shabby even when it was first built. It looked empty, as if all the girls were out somewhere; with friends, maybe, or boyfriends, having coffee or a drink or at the cinema. Nicola wouldn’t be there, he accepted this, but one of the others might know where she was. He rang the bell, the top bell for the top floor, then rang it again.

The window above him opened and Nicola put her head out.

‘Let me in, Nic. Please.’

She smiled her beautiful Nicola smile. ‘I’m coming down.’

It wasn’t all right, it couldn’t be that, but it was better. He knew it was better when, as soon as she had let him in and closed the front door, she took him in her arms and hugged him tightly. He felt like a small child whose mother had been cross with him for some misdemeanour, but had now forgiven him and loved him again as she used to.

They went to bed. It was Judy’s bedroom, which Nicola was sharing as a temporary measure. It had one tiny window offering what Nicola described rather sardonically as ‘a magnificent view of the Marylebone Road’. The bed was a single, with a camp bed beside it. They slept, and when they woke up, Nicola produced a bottle of port she had bought at a fete in the village where she had spent the previous weekend.

‘It’s not me giving Stacey the stuff, is it?’ Carl said. ‘It’s selling it. That’s the problem you’ve got with it.’

Nicola agreed. ‘It wouldn’t be so bad if you hadn’t sold it. What’s Dermot going to do? Or what do you think he’s going to do?’

He told her about the rent. The newspapers, maybe the police, Stacey’s relatives. ‘He calls them “her loved ones”.’

They heard the front door close and a set of footsteps on the stairs.

‘We’d better get up and go,’ Nicola said.

So she was coming home with him. For a moment Carl was almost happy. Out in the street, she asked him again what he thought Dermot was going to do.

‘Would it be so bad if he did go to Stacey’s relatives, or even the newspapers? You keep saying that giving her the pills wasn’t against the law.’

‘Having sex with your friend’s wife isn’t against the law, but you still don’t want it known.’

‘But let’s say you tell Dermot you want the rent and he says OK, you can have it, and the consequence is that he starts telling people – newspapers, police, whatever. Can’t you face up to it? The police caution you – isn’t that the worst that can happen? You just tell everyone it’s not against the law, and in time it’ll blow over.’

Carl was silent. Then he said very slowly, ‘I know it’s not against the law, but the national press – the print media, don’t they call it that? – will get hold of it from the
Ham and High
and the
Paddington Express
and they will say exactly what they like about me. I guess the broadsheets like the
Guardian
and the
Independent
may not be that interested – or they may be, but not in a loud screaming headline way. That’ll be for the
Sun
and the
Mail
. And they’ll run great big headlines in – oh, I don’t know, seventy- or eighty-point typeface, and they can do it because all their readers will want to know about an author selling
what the paper will call poison to a poor desperate actress who’s so overweight people laugh at her.’

‘You’ve really thought about this, haven’t you?’ said Nicola. ‘You’ve sort of constructed it. Look, let’s go and eat somewhere, and forget about this for an evening and a night.’

Very out of character, he threw his arms round her and said loudly so that people stared, ‘Oh, Nic, it’s so good, it’s so lovely to have you back.’

WALKING SYBIL SOAMES
home from church on Sunday morning was possibly (or ‘arguably’, as journalists wrote every day in newspapers) the most fateful thing Dermot had ever done in his life. He didn’t know this, of course. He didn’t arrange it. It happened, that was all.

Sybil shook hands with the vicar and he was the next to do so. They walked down the path from St Mary’s, Paddington Green, one after the other and came out together in Venice Walk.

‘Are you going my way?’ he said.

Because she didn’t know what to say, a situation Sybil often found herself in, she blushed and said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘Jerome Crescent. It’s sort of Rossmore Road.’

He said no more. He didn’t find her attractive. To be attractive, a woman had to look like Angelina Jolie or Caroline the vet: tall, thin as a reed, long-necked, with full lips, dark red hair piled on top of her head. If Dermot had met Sybil Soames anywhere but in church, she might never have become his girlfriend. Sitting next to her by chance in the third pew from the front at St Mary’s made speaking to her, and at their fourth meeting asking her out, respectable.

Dermot had very little experience of going out with women, and most of that was with his mother in Skegness, or one of his aunts, who lived next door to his mother. But somehow he could tell that Sybil would not be particular or exacting. She was not good-looking, nor, from the conversation they had had (mostly about the hymns they had sung that morning), particularly intelligent. Perhaps the most attractive thing about her was the admiration she clearly had for him. They talked about the vicar, whose gender Sybil approved of, and Dermot told her he thought women in the clergy was a mistake, while making them bishops was the beginning of the end of Anglicanism in this country.

‘Don’t you like women, then?’ said Sybil.

‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘In their place.’

He could educate her, he thought. He told her where he worked, making his position at the pet clinic rather more elevated than it was. She seemed to think he must be a vet and he said nothing to correct her. Would she meet him next day for coffee in the Café Rouge in Clifton Road? he wondered. A lot of girls would have asked why not a drink or dinner, but he knew she wouldn’t. She was innocent enough to ask him if he was sure he wanted her to meet him.

‘I asked you, didn’t I?’ he said.

‘I just wanted to check.’

‘One p.m. OK?’

No, she couldn’t do that. She’d be at work. She looked almost triumphant, as if she’d known he hadn’t meant it.

‘OK, make it the evening.’

He didn’t care what her work was; she would tell him this when they met. And she was bound to be early, probably ten to seven rather than seven.

He was right. When he arrived at Café Rouge the next evening at five past seven, she was sitting at one of their outside tables. He talked to her about the animal patients at the clinic, describing dog diseases and dog surgery. It turned out that her parents, with whom she lived, had two dogs and she didn’t much like them. Animals smelt, she said, and made a mess. She preferred a clean house, and would like one of her own but she’d never afford it. She said this with some passion. He realised he had no need to make another date, but only said he would see her in church on Sunday. Things could go on from there.

‘Why don’t you grow your hair?’ he said. ‘It would look a lot better.’

He knew she would. He’d get to work on her clothes next. Maybe persuade her to lose a bit of weight. After all, people were going to see her with him.

Lizzie was going to visit Dermot at the Sutherland Pet Clinic. She remembered Stacey once telling her that her Aunt Yvonne took her cat there for its injections. She’d also worked out that Gervaise, who’d taken her number but not yet called her, might still be living at home, if he hadn’t already gone travelling.

When she had handed over to its parent the last of what the head teacher called ‘the kiddiwinks’, she got on her bus in the middle bit, which you were not supposed to do because if you were lucky the driver wouldn’t see you and you could get away without having a ticket or a pass. This worked very well if you were going no more than two stops. But Lizzie was going a lot further, and the driver was leaning out of his window shaking his fist at her as she tripped lightly down Sutherland Avenue.

Dermot was happy to talk to her when he learned that she knew Carl and had been one of Stacey’s closest friends. He told her about Stacey’s aunt, Mrs Weatherspoon, whose son and daughter both lived with her in her mansion at Swiss Cottage.

‘Poor Stacey left her apartment in Primrose Hill to her aunt, as I expect you know. I shouldn’t say it, but it doesn’t seem quite fair, does it? “To him that hath shall be given and from him that hath not everything shall be taken away, even that which he hath.”’

‘Is that right?’ Lizzie had no idea what he meant, and didn’t care. ‘You know, Stacey once gave me her aunt’s phone number, but I’ve mislaid it. Would you let me have it?’

‘I couldn’t do that,’ said Dermot in unctuous tones. ‘But I could give her yours and ask her to call you.’

She’s already got it, or her son has, thought Lizzie. It was a piece of luck that at that moment the vet called out to Dermot to come and give her a hand with Dusky. ‘Excuse me,’ said Dermot.

By another piece of luck, he had also left Yvonne Weatherspoon’s details on the computer. Lizzie, popping behind the counter, committed landline and mobile numbers to her excellent memory, then, on the principle of better safe than sorry, exited the file and quickly afterwards the clinic.

Back in Kilburn by six, a good time to phone anyone, Lizzie was soon speaking to Gervaise Weatherspoon, who happened to answer his mother’s phone.

‘I’m so glad to have caught you,’ she said. ‘I was hoping we might have a talk before you go on your trip. About the apartment in Pinetree Court, I mean.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘It’s just an idea I had. I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.’

He sounded strangely hostile. ‘Where did you want to talk about it then?’

‘I thought perhaps in the apartment?’

‘OK. Tomorrow morning? Ten a.m.? I’ll be there.’

The first time Lizzie had seen Gervaise, she had been dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. The idea today would be to create a glamorous image, so she put on the green suit she had worn for that evening visit to her parents. Getting on the bus in Kilburn High Road, she presented her pass this time and settled into her seat, conscious that she was the best-dressed woman there. Not that there was much competition from this bunch, who looked as if they were all off to clean out someone’s drains.

She was five minutes late, but Gervaise wasn’t there. Irritated, she waited outside Stacey’s front door and wondered what she would do if he didn’t come. But he did, arriving just as she was making her contingency plans and letting them both in.

Inside, he looked her up and down. ‘That thing you’re wearing looks exactly like one Stacey had in her slimmer days.’

‘Does it? Well, it isn’t hers. Stacey was never as thin as me.’

He laughed. ‘Don’t you girls ever watch films from the fifties? All the women in them are what you call fat. Marilyn Monroe was a size sixteen.’

Lizzie didn’t say anything. She wondered what he was trying to prove. ‘When are you going to wherever it is? Thailand, was it?’

He seemed to find that funny too. ‘Cambodia and Laos. Next week. Why?’

‘Well, I thought you might want someone to look after the place while you’re away. I mean, live here, keep it clean. I wouldn’t want paying.’

His apparently irrepressible laughter was bubbling up again. ‘I don’t suppose you would,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you’d want to pay me either.’ He made no answer to her offer, but strolled into the bedroom. Lizzie followed him. He opened the wardrobe doors and peered inside. She was conscious once again of how good-looking he was. ‘I wonder what happened to Stacey’s clothes. There’s not much here.’

Apart from the green suit and a few other items, they were all in Lizzie’s cupboards in Kilburn. She had an answer for him. ‘Someone must have taken them to that designer seconds shop in Lauderdale Road.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Of course.’ He looked at his watch. No one else of his age that Lizzie knew had a watch. They all told the time on their mobiles or iPads. ‘I have an appointment in St James’s in half an hour, so I’m afraid we must terminate this interview. It’s been delightful.’

Lizzie had lost all her confidence and now felt very small and inferior, but she had not entirely lost her nerve. ‘Well, can I stay here while you’re away?’

‘Oh, didn’t I say? Of course you can. We’ll keep in touch while I’m in Cambodia.’ There was no invitation to have a drink or even dinner before he left; no laughter this time, only a broad smile. ‘I won’t need to give you a key, I’m sure you’ve got one already.’

She nodded in stupefied silence.

‘I’ll leave you a phone number.’

Would you be able to call a mobile number in Cambodia? Lizzie wondered. Gervaise produced a receipt from his pocket, and wrote in pencil on the back of it what was obviously a landline number. She put it in her handbag.

Once he had gone, and she had helped herself to a long draught of tequila for what her grandmother would have called medicinal purposes, she made a survey of the flat. Since Gervaise hadn’t checked what was in the place apart from the absence of clothes, she would be able to help herself to whatever she wanted. The days of getting into people’s flats or houses and taking some small item away with her seemed long past.