Fearful Symmetry (15 page)

‘Other people are. Why shouldn’t we be?’ Sara said.

‘I suppose because other people somewhere will always, always be hurt if we are,’ Andrew said hopelessly, thinking of Natalie, Benji and Dan and picturing, for some reason, not them but their silly pyjamas with cartoons and daft writing on them. How could he leave them? But how could he not be with Sara?

The doorbell rang. Sara started to move away from him to a safe public distance, but he detained her for a moment. ‘Poppy. She’s early. Stay. This won’t take long, and there’s more to talk about. Right now’—he heaved himself into a sitting position—‘we have to put up with being stuck a little longer. Literally, in my case.’

As Sara made for the door to let Poppy in, Andrew suddenly said, ‘Oh, listen, Sara, I’ve just thought of something. A police officer having acupuncture?
A stuck pig
. I think that’s rather good.’ He felt like weeping, but he loved it when she laughed.

Poppy laughed too, before embarking on a laborious explanation of the efficacy of acupuncture and taking notes on the location and severity of Andrew’s pain. She declared the sitting room an unsuitable place for Andrew to lie for the treatment, but the dining room would be fine. And although it was a little unorthodox, she did not mind Sara being present (since Sara explained that she had always been fascinated by acupuncture) as long as she said nothing and did not draw in her breath sharply at the sight of the needles going in. She bustled into the dining room to set up her folding table and unpack her bag, and a few minutes later bustled back in to check that Andrew’s clothes were loose enough to give access to the relevant points on his body. Between them they helped Andrew to ‘pop’ himself up onto the table. Poppy was suddenly immensely likeable, Sara thought, like a nurse who knows what she is doing and was proud and happy in her skill.

Lucky Poppy. Sara had to curl silently into a chair in one corner and keep her hands to herself while Poppy was allowed to hover close, so close to Andrew that Sara wondered how on earth she resisted the temptation to climb up on the table beside him. She was almost jealous, but at the same time Andrew’s pain was making him so unhappily fragile that she longed to see his strength return, even if it had to be under the healing hands of someone else.

An hour later Poppy tidied away her travelling acupuncture kit in a daze of happiness. Her patient was lying back now on the sofa, his eyes closed and on his face was the peaceful, exhausted expression of one hauled in from a boiling sea of pain and landed safely on a dry shore. But she could move gently around the room without having to quell inwardly the jubilation she felt. Her power warmed her as it impressed others. Sara was looking at her now with a look of intrigued admiration. Hail, Poppy, Deliverer from Pain. But she would be gracious in her majesty, bashful but delighted to be of use.

‘Oh, well, they say you’ve either got the touch for it or you haven’t. I’m just lucky. My tutor says I’ve got very good hands,’ she whispered happily to Sara. ‘Of course, he’ll need more than just one session. But he’ll sleep for hours now. I must get off. I’ve got things to do at the library and I’m on duty tonight.’ She gathered her things and gave a comfortable parting smile, like a little mother’s, in the direction of the oblivious Andrew.

Sara followed her to the hall. ‘You do work hard, Poppy. All the things you do. You should have a day off now and then.’

‘Oh, I like to keep busy. Bye!’

Andrew opened his eyes when Sara returned.

‘I’ve no intention of sleeping for hours, with you here,’ he began, as his eyelids drooped heavily. ‘Come here.’

Sara came and sat at the far end of the sofa. ‘Oh, yes, you will. You look exhausted.’

Andrew reached out and took her hand, pulling her towards him. ‘Come here.’ Sara allowed herself to be drawn closer. His fingers gently traced a line across her face and came to rest on her ear. He pulled off her jet and silver earring and his fingers returned to the naked lobe and squeezed it gently, sending warm shivers all through her. ‘You’re all velvety there,’ he murmured.

Sara raised her head slightly from his chest. ‘Andrew, you remember Dorothy Price?’

‘Shh. Shh. Don’t want to talk about Dorothy Price. Want to talk about you. Want to stroke your earlobe.’

‘Dorothy Price was at Imogen Bevan’s flat. She had the floorboards up, she said she was looking for an earring. Andrew, I don’t think she was.’

‘She should . . .’ Andrew’s voice was drifting. He yawned. ‘She should report it to the Missing Earrings Bureau.’

‘Andrew, I’m serious. There was something odd about her. Suppose it’s something to do with the case? Shouldn’t you ask her?’

Andrew smiled. His eyes closed again. ‘Ask her what? All right, I’ll look at it again. Sara?’

‘Hmmm?’ She rested her head lightly on his chest once more. He lifted a thick strand of her hair and brought it to his lips, kissing it, loving its scent. They lay quite still. After a few moments Sara could feel, from the regular rising and falling of his chest beneath her cheek, that Andrew was, indeed, asleep.

CHAPTER
18

T
HE NEXT DAY
Adele put on her red T-shirt and struggled into the white jeans that she always wore with it. She went down to the kitchen, not for breakfast because she really did not want any, but to pick up her lunch
SANDWICH BANANA BISCUITS
in the Thomas the Tank Engine lunchbox
PERCY AND THE FAT CONTROLLER
and to fetch her keys from the tin on the dresser. Adele’s own keys. Adele had a key for her own front door (
KEY LABELLED NUMBER ONE
) and a key for the side door into the workshop passage (
KEY LABELLED NUMBER TWO
) and a key for the workshop door at the end of the passage (
KEY LABELLED NUMBER THREE
). They were her own keys. When she had first been given them, her very own keys, she had carried them around with her for days, jangling them on the key chain. Then she had busily sought out three more key chains and linked them all together so that she had a really good long jangling key chain that caught the light and that she could clank around with, until her mother had stopped her.
DON
’
T JANGLE THE KEYS
,
ADELE
.
New Rule
:
ONE KEY CHAIN ONLY
,
AND KEYS TO BE KEPT IN THE TIN ON THE DRESSER WHEN NOT IN USE
. That was two. Two new rules, not one. Did they think she was stupid?

The keys were there. So was Helene, sitting in her bracelets and dressing-gown, looking that spongy way she did in the mornings and not talking so much. But she was doing her ‘No breakfast again? Got your keys? Goodbye, darling!’ And she was lifting one hand from the rim of her coffee mug but Adele had already turned and gone, so that her tinkling finger wave was given more to the swinging door than Adele’s purposeful, departing back.

Turn left.
Rule
:
DO NOT WALK IN THE CRACKS
. Adele has keys and goes to work.
Rule
:
GO STRAIGHT TO JIM
’
S
. Sixty-eight steps to Jim’s railings, through the gate down the basement steps. Jim’s out today. Unlock (
KEY LABELLED NUMBER TWO
), open the door, go in, close the door. Down the passage. The door at the end, always locked, precious things inside. Use
KEY LABELLED NUMBER THREE
,
ADELE
. Jim’s workshop. Jim leaves Adele’s work out on the table. Sparkly crystals. Adele will fix the crystals. Apron. Rags for cleaning with. Jim leaves cigarettes and matches out on the table.
Rule
:
DO NOT PLAY WITH MATCHES
,
ADELE
. Big bottle of washing-up liquid. Funny slippery stuff.
Rule
:
THIS IS NOT FOR DRINKING
,
ADELE
. It is for cleaning the crystals.
MAKE YOURSELF SOME COFFEE
,
ADELE
. Adele’s coffee. Wash mug, dry mug, put in coffee, dry milk. Adele white no sugar.
HELP YOURSELF TO A CIGARETTE
,
ADELE
. Fill kettle. In a minute. First get cigarette. Light cigarette, first put in mouth, get match out, strike.

CHAPTER
19

O
H, FAB.
F
UCKING
fabulous. Another? Is that what you’re telling me? What is this: Bath, the World Heritage City, renowned for its exploding basements? Is that it? Oh, yes, yes of course. Yes, all right, right away.’

Detective Sergeant Bridger replaced the receiver and tried to stir in himself some sense of urgency. Of late he had found it more and more difficult to do, and it had been a while since he had actually bothered to do his impersonation of a committed detective for anyone other than his superiors. The call from DC Heaton was not worth that effort; he would save it for DCI Poole. But he would have to get over to the Circus where, he had just learned from Heaton, it appeared that there had been another explosion. Animal righters again?

It took Bridger less than an hour at the scene to establish, to his relief, that there was no connection between the two unfortunate cases. What had happened here was an accident. After the fire had been dealt with, the gas people had shown up and made a preliminary inspection. The only gas appliance in the room, the cooker, was an old model, about twenty years old. The explosion and fire had been caused by a build-up of gas in an unventilated room, ignited by a flame, possibly an electrical spark, possibly a match. It appeared that the gas had been left on by mistake. The householder was not registered as a service customer, they were able to verify. They had shut off the supply and no gas was present now. The fire crew confirmed that the premises appeared to be structurally safe, although a proper survey would be necessary. An elderly couple on the scene, residents of the Circus, had given them the name of the girl they had seen going into the building, but the next of kin would have to identify her formally. The police surgeon had been at it, coming up with theories as to the cause of death instead of just certifying her dead and leaving the pathologist, whose job it was, to answer the question of how. They all did it, couldn’t help themselves, but in this case the guy was actually right. The girl goes in, shuts the door and goes to light a cigarette or switch on the kettle. Combination of blast injuries and inhalation of fire gases kills her. Looks like someone left the cooker on. Incredible she didn’t smell it, but then people do do such silly things. Tragic.

At the dead girl’s house, number 31, a constable ushered him down to the basement kitchen. The two tenants were sitting unkempt, almost as if they had slept rough, rather fearfully drinking coffee. Not tenants but houseguests, they corrected him. The man, Cosmo Lamb, had been asleep. He usually did not rise until around half past ten, because he was in the habit of working long into the night. He had not heard the explosion. Poppy Thwaites had come in from her night shift at the Circus Nursing Home at seven thirty and got into bed beside him. She too had been fast asleep, but she was a lighter sleeper than Cosmo; the noise had woken her up. She had not gone to investigate because their bedroom was at the back, on the first floor. Helene’s—Mrs Giraldi’s—bedroom was at the front of the house overlooking the Circus, so she would have had to go in there to see what the noise was about, and so disturb Helene. Thinking it was probably nothing anyway, perhaps a car backfiring, she had drifted back off to sleep until screams from the street had woken them. They had got dressed quickly and rushed down. Helene had been in front of them, running towards Jim’s flat. The gas people and the police had kept them all away, so they had brought Helene back here, and the policewoman had taken over. Poppy was so worried. Helene would need her. Poppy was here. If DS Bridger was going up to see her now, could he give Mrs Giraldi that reassurance? They would not dream of deserting her at a time like this.

The mother, Mrs Giraldi, was sitting passively with the WPO as if in a waiting room, as if she thought that if she just waited long enough someone would come and tell her what to do. Meanwhile, perhaps if she were patient and waited quietly, and even answered questions, eventually all this would turn out to be not really happening. She appeared to be concentrating hard on the task of just breathing in and out.

Bridger decided to get it over with, for both their sakes. She was lucid. Yes, she had been startled by the explosion, but being in her dressing-gown and this being the Circus, she had not ventured straight out to investigate. Her first thought was that Adele, who had just left, would have heard it too and be frightened and come straight back home. Adele was not able to tolerate unexpected things; she could react violently. Bridger was impressed at the way she managed to say her daughter’s name almost without faltering. That was where a lot of them would have started to crack up. The noise, she went on, must have been an engine backfiring or something of that sort, she had assumed. So she had come up from the basement kitchen, expecting at any moment to greet Adele in the hall, who would have come straight back rather than continuing on her way to work. She had gone into the drawing room to look out for her and had seen several people running past her window. Then she had gone upstairs and thrown on some clothes—not quite enough, Bridger had been unable to stop himself thinking, taking in her bare legs in court shoes, the wobbling flesh under the jumper and skirt—and rushed down to the pavement, seeing only then that whatever had happened had happened at Jim’s. She thought perhaps that it was then she had screamed.

‘Excuse me, Mrs Giraldi,’ Bridger interrupted. ‘Please excuse me. Did I hear you say that you expected your daughter to come straight home instead of going on to
work
?’

Mrs Giraldi nodded, a little surprised. ‘Yes. She works three days a week. For Jim in the workshop.’

Bridger cleared his throat. ‘In that case, Mrs Giraldi, we shall want to speak to Mr Roscoe as a matter of urgency. Of course we’ll need to see him in any case, but you see, if we’re dealing here with a workplace accident, then that puts quite a different complexion on it. Quite a different matter, you see, in law.’

He might have been speaking in tongues for all this seemed to mean to Mrs Giraldi. She had already told the WPO that Jim had told her that he would be leaving the night before to go to an auction in Salisbury. He had done it before. He simply left two days’ work out for Adele and it made no difference to Adele; she didn’t much bother with people anyway. It had not been difficult to identify the auction house and local officers were apparently being sent round to find Mr Roscoe and break it to him that he no longer had either the workshop or the assistant he had had when he left home the day before. So Jim Roscoe would in any case be on his way back now.

Helene was struggling with the sense of what she had been told. ‘Well, I’m not sure. Whatever it is, look, I’m not really following, I’m afraid. Jim wasn’t even there when it happened. But you’ll be able to talk to him when he gets here.’ She looked at the WPO, suddenly tremulous and old. ‘Jim . . . Jim will . . . he is sure to be here soon, isn’t he? He is one of those people . . . since he came here, I mean . . . one feels one has always . . . Jim . . . he—he’ll be so . . . he is sure to be here soon, isn’t he?’

Time to go. She was losing it now, and having delayed her proper reaction since the accident happened, over two hours now, her collapse would be total and prolonged. Bridger, supposing he was getting soft in his old age, felt a reluctance to leave with his sympathy unsaid. He stood up, pausing after the WPO had reached the door. An exchange of looks confirmed that she knew her next task was to go back to the basement and get the tenant to call a doctor. This one would need sedation. He turned back to Mrs Giraldi. If he was quick, he could get it in before she lost control completely, although he still was not sure why he was feeling he had to.

‘Death was almost certainly instantaneous,’ he told her. It was one of the phrases he knew how to use. She nodded.

‘It would have been very quick.’ He cast a hopeless look round the room. He had to say these things, hadn’t he? He remembered the last time he had done so. The near naked body of a chronic alcoholic had been found in her burned-out bedroom. It had turned out not to be arson. She’d started the fire herself by dropping a cigarette on the duvet and then passing out. Presumably the sensation of her own skin burning had woken her up. But the body had been found curled up half in and half out of the wardrobe. The PM showed that she had a sufficient quantity of whisky in her to mistake the wardrobe for the bedroom door, but too much to work out why it might be leading her into a cave hung with suffocating cloth instead of out onto the landing and into air she could breathe.
It would have been very quick
, he had reassured the family, keeping to himself not only the precise location of the body but also the fact that under her torn fingernails they had found splinters clawed from the inside of the wardrobe.
She wouldn’t have known a thing about it
. He had to say these things.

Mrs Giraldi was looking at him. ‘She wouldn’t have known a thing about it,’ he told her. As he left, he had the sensation of leaving behind something so frail that it would collapse into fragments in the draught of the closing door.