Old Flames (53 page)

A hand appeared on the parapet, followed by a foot, and in a moment Foxx had pulled herself over the edge. She lay a few seconds at his feet, breathing heavily, then she stood, dusted herself
down and said a simple, ‘Well?’

‘Was that worth it?’

‘Oh yes,’ she gasped. ‘Every time.’

She walked to the very end, gazed out across the valley, where the mill chimney still dominated everything in sight, breathed deeply and came back to him.

‘You’ve news,’ she said. ‘You’ve news, or you wouldn’t be here with your posh car and a packed case.’

Troy pulled the translated letter from his pocket.

‘This was in your sister’s safety deposit box. It was in code, but it was a simple code, and it’s addressed to you.’

She sat on the edge, her legs dangling over the twenty-five-foot-drop, silently reading the letter. He saw her fold it once more. She paused, and was perfectly still for the best part of a
minute, then she patted the stone next to her, indicating that he should sit. He did not look down.

She handed the letter back to him, pale and tense, but without a trace of tears.

‘I think I knew all that. Not the money. And not the Russians. But I knew the rest. She was living pretty high on the hog.’

‘Do you believe her?’

‘Yes. And so do you. Or else you wouldn’t have come here. I think it’s time you told me why you came.’

‘I want you to come to Paris and open the safety deposit box for me. Perhaps another after that if we don’t find what we want. London was the old pals’ act. I know the
bank’s director. It wouldn’t work anywhere else. But if you cut your hair, change your make-up—”

‘And put on one of those posh frocks you brought.’

‘I brought suits. Two-piece jobs. Very discreet. If you do this you’ll pass for your sister. In theory all you need to open a box is the key. Possession is everything. In practice no
one’s that green. They’ll know their clients. This way we do what has to be done without arousing any suspicion.’

‘Aha.’

‘You’ll do it?’

‘We’re not after the money?’

‘It’s incidental. I need to know what else there is. It’s the only way we’ll catch her killer.’

‘She says the other stuff is dangerous.’

‘She’s right.’

‘Then the money’s not incidental. I don’t see how forty thousand quid can be incidental to anyone. If there’s a risk there’s got to be some reward.’

‘You’ll do it?’

Again she did not answer. She stood up, turned to face the town, across the river.

‘Look over there. Tell me what you see.’

He regarded the question with some suspicion, but took her hand as she pulled him to his feet, and looked out over the valley. What was he meant to be looking for? It might well be an entirely
innocent question. There was, he saw for the first time, more than one mill chimney—perhaps the town had sprung up on cotton and stopped, frozen in time fifty years later—a host of
church towers and spires—and street upon street of houses climbing the sides of a small valley at right angles to the Derwent Valley, in which, school geography told him, there was almost
certainly a tributary stream. The houses looked to him like a precise illustration of a Grimms’ tale. The lonely giant climbing his mountain with a sackful of custom-made houses for his model
village, finds too late that there is a hole in his sack, and the houses tumble in their own order, which is no order, down the hillside. And there he leaves them, clinging scattered to the
contours.

Nothing encroached on the river but the mill; the town stopped two hundred yards short in a well-defined flood plain. Up the hill towards them crept fields of every shape, the irregular
rhomboids and trapezoids of the English quilt, dotted with sheep and oaks, ragged ribbons of hawthorn hedging, tangles of dog-rose gone to hip, the dried-blood red of ripening blackberries. Just
below them an orderly row of hornbeam cut a line down to a cart track, and the track in turn led to a couple of farmhouses, carved in stone and seemingly half-buried in the landscape. It was a good
time for hardwoods. Just past their peak, in the full glory of deep greens, that in a week or two would surely begin to brown with the onset of autumn.

He was, he realised, being forced to reappraise the place. The Orwellian sense he had had of narrow, cobbled streets and shabby northern houses gave way to this wider view. The town was like
many northern towns, industry all but in a field. But it was unlike anything he had seen in Yorkshire. The town was smaller, neater, the countryside so much lusher, so verdant in its greens. It was,
he admitted only to himself, a better-looking slice of the sad shires than his own home county.

‘It’s nice,’ he said blandly.

‘Nice?’

‘All right—beautiful.’

‘Fine. Then you can have it. You can keep it. You can stuff it. I don’t want it!’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want,’ she said slowly and carefully, enunciating like an elocution teacher, letting the words burst like bubbles on her lips, ‘you to take me away from all this.’

Her arm swept out across the valley pointing to everything and nothing. Suddenly a pompous phrase from a penny dreadful seemed real and portentous and dangerous.

‘OK,’ he said.

‘I mean it, Troy. We go home. Pack. I post the latchkey back to the council. We get in that absurd car of yours and we never come back.’

‘OK,’ he said again.

‘Great.’

She grinned, widely, beautifully, turned on her heel and dropped to the ground. Instinctively Troy leaned out to grab her and almost fell over the edge. Instead he saw her drop into a crouch,
roll over like a parachutist, and bounce up again onto her feet. The fall should have broken both legs—it seemed to Troy impossible. But there she was off down the track at a run. She turned,
jogged backwards for a few steps and yelled up at him.

‘I’ll need an hour to pack. Don’t get lost!’

Foxx got more than her hour. Troy found a footpath leading back into the town, and trudged his way back up the stone streets to the opposite side of the valley, in search of
Jasmine Dene.

Mrs Cockerell answered the door with a paintbrush between her teeth. She took it out.

‘I always knew if I saw you again it would be bad news.’

She led off, back into the house, towards the rear, without another word. Troy followed. It had not occurred to him that he was the bearer of good or bad news. He had presumed that by now she
simply wanted to know, one way or the other.

He thought she might be leading the way into the garden. Through the open french windows he could see an easel, set up for the southeast, and a large off-white card with a half-finished, almost
abstract image upon it. But she turned into the kitchen, and he heard the pop of a gas ring going on. Tea and sympathy. But what sympathy he could bring he did not know. She stood with her back to
the cooker. Paintbrush in one hand, battery-powered hob lighter in the other, hands crossed over her bosom. The housewife Nefertiti.

‘It’s him, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes.’

She put down the lighter. Wiped magenta paint off the brush onto her Joseph-coated apron and stuck the brush in a jam jar.

‘Don’t worry, Mr Troy. I’m not about to cry.’

He was pleased. He’d had enough of tears. And then she burst like a summer tempest.

Troy chose a small hotel on the Left Bank, between the Boulevard St Germain and the Place de l’Odéon. The opposite tactic of his ventures to Amsterdam and Vienna.
Concealment in the byways of a city. A hotel with none of the prominence—or elegance—of the Europe or the Sacher. If anyone wanted to find him, it would be like looking for a needle in
a haystack. The room was tiny, but Foxx had no mark by which to measure it, and accepted everything without comment. She asked for money to shop. Essential to the deception, as they both knew, that
she should look and sound like her sister. A haircut, some new clothes perhaps?

Troy was surprised at the sense of ritual Foxx brought to the task. She returned from the hairdresser’s clutching another pink suitcase and a large green shopping bag, her hair wrapped in
a headscarf, her figure hidden beneath the blunt lines of a sexless pea jacket and her customary T-shirt and blue jeans.

She unbuttoned the jacket and let it slip from her shoulders to the floor. Pulled the scarf off and shook her hair free. Eighteen inches of wild blonde mane had changed to a neat cut, about chin
length, framing the face anew. Long, her hair had tended to flow backwards, away from the face; short, it fell forward, the razored tips almost curling under at the cheeks, hiding the face and with
it half her expression.

She took one of her sister’s suits from the wardrobe, stripped the wrapping off new underwear and lay them on the bed side by side, one by one, like paper cut-outs, dressing
dolly—the bra, the knickers, the suspender belt and stockings—the double-breasted jacket, the matching burgundy skirt.

‘Do you know what this is?’ she asked Troy.

‘No. I just picked the nearest in the wardrobe.’

‘It’s a Dior. What they called the H line unless I’m very much mistaken. The rage of Paris a couple of years ago. Costs a packet. If it hadn’t been so random I’d
almost have said you had taste.’

She peeled off the T-shirt, popped the steel buttons on her jeans, almost like shelling peas, and stepped out of them; put her thumbs into the elastic of her knickers, shoved them to the ankles
and kicked them off. She stood naked, looking not at Troy, but at her own image in the looking-glass.

They were sisters. They were twins, but even now Troy could tell the one from the other. The tight muscularity of Foxx mentally juxtaposed with the naked Madeleine who had stepped from her
bathroom to point a gun at him—which gun now sat among the fluff and old bus tickets in his jacket pocket. The Madeleine in his memory was paying the price of the high life, at twenty-two
already slackening under the onslaught of food and fags and booze. Foxx rippled with muscle. Troy figured her biceps to be bigger than his own. Her legs were certainly longer—the thigh muscle
standing out in a single ridge, the muscles of the calf overlapping in taut tendons as she perched on her toes to turn her backside to the glass. The small breasts swung to face him, pectorals
firmed, pink nipples tilting upward in best cliché of worst racy novel.

‘Goodbye Shirley Foxx,’ she said as she pulled on the pants. ‘Call me Maddy, call me mad.’

Troy sprawled on the bed and watched the ensemble assembled. The bra clipped by that disjointing, impossible gesture with arms contorted behind the back, the stockings rolled up each thigh to
the tune of infinity, hand over hand over hand, the skirt hooked up and zipped up, the reverse striptease of a total metamorphosis. Last of all a pair of new shoes emerged from a box, expensive
shoes, good shoes, in red leather. She stepped into them, tugged at the cuffs of her jacket, stranded partway up the forearm.

‘This suit’s made to be worn with gloves, you know that don’t you?’

‘Never crossed my mind,’ he said, still horizontal on the bed.

‘Good job it crossed mine, then. Or I’d look a right twaddle.’

She opened the new suitcase, removed another, smaller, pink case from inside, and from that took out a pair of elbow-length white gloves, as though they were the prize waiting at the end of a
game of pass the parcel.

‘
C’est tout,
’ she said.

‘
Non,
’ he replied. ‘
Ce n’est pas tout.
’

He took a black jewellery case from his coat pocket and flipped the lid. A single strand of pearls lay on a bed of velvet. She turned. He fastened the clasp at the back of her neck and spun her
around to face him.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Now it’s complete.’

‘They’re hers?’

‘I found them on her dressing table,’ he said.

Foxx stared into the looking-glass again. And from the looking-glass to Troy.

‘Are they real?’

‘Probably.’

She fingered the strand of pearls, the traditional neckwear of the uppercrust Englishwoman. Part of the uniform.

‘God. The things she did. Who would ever think she’d want to be a fake Englishwoman? Did you believe her?’

‘Mostly. There was something that didn’t quite ring true, but mostly I believed in this girl from a good home in the shires. I didn’t quite believe in the sophisticate. It
looked like a layer of lacquer. Perhaps the fake Englishwoman was what Cockerell wanted?’

‘No. It was Stella. This was Stella’s game. Arnold put up the money, and did what he did, but this part of it was Stella. It’s got her written all over it.’

Foxx turned back to the looking-glass, scanning her own image.

‘I’m not me any more, am I? I’m her.’

‘Surfaces,’ said Troy. ‘Not even skin deep.’

‘I wonder. I really do. Will I ever find me again?’

‘There’s one way to find out.’

‘Aha.’

‘You could take it all off again.’

‘All?’

‘Everything. Bit by bit.’

‘Sort of a striptease?’

‘If you like. But at the end of it there you’ll be.’

He watched the process reverse itself. The static charge as her skirt slid over her hip to run the length of her stockinged legs and pool at her feet. The Dégas angle of the body, the
balletic tilt, one leg absurdly longer than the other, as she unhooked stocking from suspender, locked the muscle in her thigh and peeled off the nylon. And the stretching of the torso, the
stretching out and up of the ribcage, the flattening of her breasts as her arms went over her head once more and she flung off the bra, poised with her fingertips out to the ceiling, balanced on
her tiptoes. She stood naked again. Troy didn’t care if she never wore clothes again. Just to look at her burnt. Simply to touch drove him wild. She leant over him, wearing only the pearls.
He thought he’d go mad. It had been years since he felt uncontrollable lust. He was accustomed to reasonable lust, lust that allowed itself to be negotiated, the polite sex of the
middle-aged, the wants that wait.

He put out a hand to one small breast, slid the other between her legs. She put her hand over his, held it poised on her mound, his palm cupped to it.