Old Flames (46 page)

She rubbed at her hair in a desultory way.

‘Madeleine told you about me?’

‘She never mentioned you.’

He knelt by the fire, turned on the gas and put a match to it. It popped into life. Pink and human and friendly.

‘Sit here and get yourself dry. I’ll make tea.’

His hands shook as he reached down the tea caddy, rattled the tin kettle against the tap as he filled it. But that was, he had always thought, the purpose of the English Tea Ceremony. It bought
time for nervous hands and hollow minds.

When the tea was ready and his hands were steady, he carried the tray into the sitting room. The woman was crouched on the hearth-rug, wrapping herself in the huge bath towel and pulling off her
clothes. Her jeans and T-shirt steamed on the back of a chair. She reached under the towel, eased her weight off her backside and dropped her knickers onto the chair. An awkward motion—for
any woman faced with a total stranger. But she just smiled sweetly at him, without a trace of coyness. He set down the tray and sat on the edge of the fireside chair. She moved closer to the fire,
sitting on her haunches, pulled the towel off herself in a momentary flash of hands and breasts and held it in front of her as a curtain, while she dried her face on its top edge. The towel rolled
about her once more, she pulled the slide from the knot at the back of her head and eighteen inches of wet, blonde hair cascaded down her back.

‘I’m her sister,’ she said.

‘I know.’

‘Shirley. Shirley Foxx. With two exxes.’

‘Troy,’ he said. ‘With one of each letter.’

She smiled. Reached for the tea cup.

‘Madeleine’s real name was Stella. She made up the Madeleine Kerr name. Two of her favourite actresses rolled into one. Madeleine Carroll and Deborah Kerr. She loved Deborah
Kerr.’

She paused, sipped at the tea.

‘I suppose it must have made it a bit awkward for the police, trying to trace someone and not knowing her proper name. But they found me. I went down to identify her.’

He could hear the northern vowels in her voice. That was the trace of accent, he realised, that he had heard in Madeleine Kerr’s voice. Derbyshire. God, how the woman had lied to him.

She reached for her handbag. Dug around inside it and produced a small, ivory-coloured compact. The same one he had seen Madeleine Kerr use on the train from Brighton.

‘When it was all over, that young copper from Scotland Yard, the good-looking one …’

‘Inspector Wildeve,’ Troy said.

‘Yes, him. He said I could take away Stella’s effects—I think that’s what he called them—her effects, and this was with them.’

She flipped open the compact. Looked into the mirror at herself and then up at Troy.

‘When we were kids. Eleven or twelve. At the end of the war. We were each given one of these by an aunt. Rationing made them so precious. Even though our Mam said we were nowhere near old
enough to be putting powder on our faces, and Dad hit the roof at the thought of his girls wearing make-up. So we kept them for years. Unused. They became our secret place. Because—you
see—if you …’

She pressed the side of the compact and the mirror shot forward on a spring. She turned the compact around for him to see. In the space behind the mirror was his card, the one Madeleine Kerr had
taken. And beneath that, Sellotaped to the stainless steel, was a small flat key.

‘It was our hiding place. We kept our secrets there. It was a place we put things for ourselves and for each other. That’s how I knew. She put your card there for me to find. She put
the key there for me to give to you.’

Troy pulled the key free from its sticky tape. An elaborate K was on one side, an equally elaborate M on the other, in something like a Kelmscott
typeface, and under the K was a stamped number so small one would need a magnifying glass to read it. Jack had said the killer had taken her handbag, tipped it out in the woods and abandoned it.
The compact he had seen Madeleine slip into her jacket pocket. It must have been there when the local plod searched the body. The killer could not have found it.

‘Did you,’ he said, ‘did you show this to the Inspector, Mr Wildeve?’

She shook her head. Not the faintest shred of guilt or doubt.

‘For your eyes only,’ she said.

It seemed to Troy that she was placing an awful lot of trust in him on the basis of a single gesture. But, then, he was the youngest child of four, stranded at the far side of a large family
like a poorly used preposition at the end of a sentence. He had no experience of the shared intimacies, the common ground of siblings. He doubted that Rod did either; they were middle-aged men now,
striving for the semblance of trust they had not shared as children, teetering constantly on the edge of each other’s misgivings and Troy’s evasions—but his sisters in the privacy
of their twindom had a common language, a private language that was gobbledegook to anyone else, a mutual trust, a great
contra mundum—
it should never have surprised him that they
conspired at the manipulation of gullible husbands to conceal each other’s adultery—perhaps the trust this young woman had in him was only the transference of the trust she had placed
in her sister. Troy had better be careful. He knew he had led Madeleine Kerr to her death, knew full well that whoever killed her had only found her because he had led him there. It was one of the
most stupid things he had ever done. He could not tell Jack, although Jack would doubtless work it out for himself, and he must certainly never let this woman realise how misplaced her trust in him
was.

‘Do you know what the key’s for?’ she said.

‘Yes. It’s a safety deposit box key for a bank in Hanover Square.’

‘What, like the District or the National Provincial?’

‘Not quite—a private bank called Mullins Kelleher.’

She seemed impressed by the readiness with which he recited this.

‘I suppose it’s your job to know things like that?’

‘No, just so happens I bank with them too.’

‘I know it’s important, but I don’t know why.’

Troy did. It was without doubt the reason Madeleine had insisted on the trip to London before she talked any further to him. Whatever was in that box was, in some unknown way, vitally important
as a precondition to whatever she had meant to tell him. He put it on the mantelpiece with all the force of casualness he could muster. The tiny rattle of metal on wood cut through his nonchalance
like a whisper in St Paul’s.

‘Are you hungry?’ he said. ‘I’m a fair cook.’

‘And I’m a fair eater.’

He went back to the kitchen. But the cupboard was bare. There was a large tin of Heinz beans on the shelf, the hard, stale end of a white loaf in the bread bin and a jar of sticky peanut butter
in the fridge—Tosca’s legacy. Ransacking the drawers he also found a Mars Bar of indeterminate age. He had not shopped in days, he had not eaten in days, merely grazed until he was down
to the bachelor’s bottom line, the last tin of beans on the shelf.

It was nursery food, served in the best possible light. Beans on toast with peanut butter, best china and family silver, with an accompaniment of every proprietary pickle known to man: Pan Yan,
piccalilli, Major Grey’s and Branston, crowned by the
pièce de résistance,
his sister’s home-made green tomato chutney—followed by half a Mars Bar each and a
choice of Lapsang or Darjeeling.

‘Don’t laugh,’ he said.

And if he hadn’t said that she probably would not have—good manners more powerful than her sense of the absurd. And when she had stopped, she ate heartily and said, ‘I
haven’t shared a Mars Bar since sweet rationing ended.’

‘You must have got used to sharing.’

‘Twins, you mean? Of course, we shared everything. Until …’

The sentence petered out. But it was obvious. The missing word was Cockerell.

‘When did they meet?’

She took the cue. Pushed away her plate, screwed the Mars wrapper into a ball, shook her hair, inched a little nearer the fire and stared into it.

‘Hard to say. I can’t much remember a time when Arnold wasn’t a town busybody. He seems to have been the big fish in the little pond from the time he got there, and I suppose
that’s ten years or more. My parents bought their three-piece suite from him. On the HP, Utility-made. That’d be 1947 or 1948. Stella and I were there when he delivered it. We’d
be thirteen or fourteen I suppose. Even Arnold Cockerell wouldn’t flirt with a fourteen-year-old. Not in front of our Dad, he wouldn’t.’

‘A hard man?’

‘That would be putting it mildly. An Ulsterman. Presbyterian. None of the faith left, just the rigours. We were bright girls. We both of us got scholarships to the grammar school. If Dad
had had his way we’d have left at fifteen and got jobs, brought in a wage and paid our way till some man took us off his hands. But Mam was different. Derbyshire through and
through—old-fashioned Labour. Education was everything; the only way out was up. So we took eight O-Levels apiece, and passed them all. After that we went to commercial college in
Nottingham—shorthand, typing, French and German. That’s as far as the vision went.’

She looked from the fire to Troy. Seeking the reaction in his face.

‘Not much, was it? How to be one notch better off than your own parents is a lot like knowing your station in life. It means you don’t think you can
do
anything you want or
be
anyone you want, you can just … well … do a little bit better.’

Foxx put a hand to the back of her neck, twisted her head slightly and angled the last of the wet hair towards the fire. She reached for her handbag, pulled out a brush and began to brush her
hair in long, measured strokes.

‘Then he died. Knocked off his perch by a heart attack at forty-two. We’d not long left college. The summer of 1951. Sweet seventeen. Stella was working for Cockerell, I was at the
Co-op office.’

The look on Troy’s face must have told her something.

‘That’s not what she told you, is it? None of this is what she told you.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not. In fact it’s quite a way from what she told me.’

‘Daddy was a country vet in Devon? Or was it a parson in Shropshire?’

‘GP in Berkshire, I think.’

‘That’s a new one. I’ve not heard that one before. Stella was quite a liar you know.’

‘So I’m discovering.’

‘I rather admire it. If the fiction is better than the life you’re leading …’

‘Please, go on.’

‘Dad died. That knocked Mam for six. He was a complete bastard, but it seems that he was her life and without him it wasn’t worth living. She became an instant invalid. Took to her
bed. Then in the autunm of the next year Stella announced she was off. She told me the truth, that Cockerell was prepared to set her up in her own place—a love nest the
News of the
World
would call it—she told everyone else she’d got another secretarial job in London. I wasn’t surprised. She’d been letting Cockerell have his way almost from the
first day. They used to do it on the carpet samples with the lights out after work. Or, if he was feeling bold, in the back room during the lunch hour.’

‘Good God,’ said Troy almost involuntarily. ‘Did his wife know?’

‘I doubt it. But, then I’ve never met Mrs Cockerell. I know her by sight. It’d be hard not to in a town that size. But I’ve never spoken to her, and Stella said she never
went near the shop. If Mrs Cockerell suspected anything she could have buttonholed me in the street at least once a week for the last four years. Never did. Never a word or a look. I told Stella
she was a fool, but she didn’t listen. I told her she was dropping me in it, an invalid mother to look after and only one wage coming in. She wept and wailed and said she was sorry, but I
don’t think she really gave a damn. By October she’d moved to Brighton. I threw over the Co-Op and went to the mill. There was more money to be made on a loom than taking dictation, and
we needed it by then.’

‘Did you see her in Brighton?’

‘No. We always met in London.’

‘Did you know what she was up to?’

‘Up to? No, I didn’t know what she was up to. But that’s a leading question, isn’t it? And in answering a leading question I’m admitting I thought she was up to
something, aren’t I?’

She’d rounded on him as swift as a Queen’s Counsel nailing his evidence in the box.

‘Yes, you are rather.’

‘Let me ask you a leading question.’

‘Fire away.’

She took him eye to eye.

‘Did my sister make a play for you?’

‘What makes you think she’d do that?’

‘Well. I know my sister. And you’re her …’ She hesitated, tangled a finger in a long strand of hair, ‘… her type. I don’t think I can put it any
better.’

‘Type?’

‘Well … you do sound a bit like Robert Donat. You know the bloke in
The Thirty-Nine Steps.
The one who spends the night handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll. And you’re a dead
ringer for James Mason. You know—
Odd Man Out, The Wicked Lady.
And she was completely nuts about him.’

‘Odd,’ said Troy. ‘Odd for her to have a type and then to choose so completely against it. If you ask me, Cockerell was much more the Edward Everett Horton type.’

Foxx smiled, laughed softly, but would not follow the tangent he had marked for her.

‘But she did make a play for you, didn’t she?’

‘Yes. She did.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing.’

‘Really? You didn’t fancy my sister?’

‘Of course I fancied your sister. But she was drunk—plastered, in fact.’

‘And you were on duty?’

‘Glad you appreciate it.’

‘But you’re off duty now?’

He said nothing.

‘And I am, believe me, completely sober.’

He said nothing.

Foxx wound both hands in her hair. Toyed with idea of a beehive. She seemed to have either no sense of certainty—the hair, in the course of half an hour, had been up, down, over the left
shoulder, over the right, and at one point gripped between her nose and her top lip like a fake moustache—she played with it constantly—or she lacked self-consciousness in a way Troy
could only envy.