Play Dead (19 page)

‘Go down to the kitchen and get two tea-cloths,' she panted. ‘Wet them well and bring them back.'

Her voice was urgent, but steady. She strode up the steps and into a room beside the hall. As Poppy scurried for the stairs she heard the bip of telephone keys. The stairway was decorated as she remembered from her previous visit, with businessmen, horned and tailed, on a down escalator, but the kitchen had changed and was now an underwater scene, with everything in it shades of greeny blue. Sophie was drawing at the blue table, absorbed, her nose close against the paper. From somewhere in the far corner, behind the blue-green laundry basket, rose Nick's quiet sobs. A litter of toys covered that corner of the floor. Poppy found two seaweed-patterned cloths, soaked them under the taps and wrung them out. As she came up the stairs she heard Ms Pitalski's voice, emphatic but controlled.

‘… Barnsley Square. Right. Be quick—she may be alive.'

She came at a brisk, competent stride into the hall. Poppy followed her down the steps. A taxi was driving away and a woman coming through the garden gate.

‘You're from the agency?' said Ms Pitalski. ‘The kids are downstairs. Sophie and Nick. Do what you can. We've had an accident.'

She paused at the garage door to tie one of the wet cloths across her face, speaking as she did so.

‘Don't come in with me,' she said. ‘Stand clear. I'll get the car out if I can. As soon as it's out, open the doors your side.'

She drew a deep breath and walked into the hazed cave. Poppy heard the thunk of a car door and the blast of a horn, and then the car shot backwards up the ramp and stopped in the open. Its interior was full of fog. Poppy ran forward and pulled the doors wide. Ms Pitalski was out of the driver's seat, gasping, holding the top of the door to steady herself. Poppy ran round behind and opened the far passenger door. A vacuum cleaner hose was wedged into the window, its length running down to the exhaust pipe. Now she could see Laura, in her day clothes, lying on the broad back seat with her knees drawn up. Her cheeks were blotched with the same unnatural scarlet as Simon's had been.

Ms Pitalski came and looked too.

‘I know how to do mouth to mouth,' said Poppy.

Ms Pitalski reached in and laid her twenty-ringed fingers against Laura's cheek.

‘No good,' she said. ‘The ambulance will be here in a minute. Holy St Agatha!'

The invocation was like a spell to reinvest her with her wilder personality, laid aside in the urgency of serious need. She flung her arms to heaven and rushed into the house. Poppy moved clear of the car and waited on the steps. From inside she could hear Ms Pitalski on the telephone, a virtuoso aria of self-dramatisation which lasted until the ambulance came heeling into the square, followed almost at once by a police car, which set down a single uniformed constable and whisked away. Ms Pitalski flung herself on the men, posturing and cackling like some great, gaudy forest bird flopping around in a fig-tree. Laura was dead. If there had been any chance of saving her Ms Pitalski would have been steady, quick and brave—as indeed she had been. She was like the Parkinsonian patients in a book Poppy had been reading, who, confronted with certain urgencies, completely lost their flailings and shudderings but with those needs gone reverted into the grip of their ailment. Poppy took the chance to go into the house and telephone Nell.

‘Sure you're all right?' she finished. ‘He'll be wanting his rest any moment now. The apple juice is in the fridge and he has it out of the yellow mug. Put him on your lap and read him a story while he's drinking it and he'll zonk out … Yes, absolutely dreadful … I don't know—I'll be back as soon as they'll let me … You're marvellous.'

Ms Pitalski was still in full torrent so she found the number in the telephone book, rang the police station and asked to speak to Inspector Firth. His line was busy, so she asked for Sergeant Caesar. While she waited to be connected she looked round the room. She'd seen photographs of it in magazines, but hadn't believed them. They were true. It was a room in a Pall Mall club, gone infinite. On all four walls diners and waiters and bishops dozing in leather armchairs and uniformed pages and card-players receded down pillared perspectives, and the real furniture in the room was in keeping …

‘Sergeant Caesar.'

‘Oh, this is Poppy Tasker. I'm at 17 Barnsley Square. The police are here, but I thought Inspector Firth ought to know as soon as possible that one of the play-centre nannies has gassed herself with car exhaust. I'm almost certain from things she said that she knew the young man who was found at the play centre.'

‘Barnsley Square? Which of the lassies would that be … ?'

‘Laura. I don't know her surname. Older than the others.'

‘Oh, her … Right, I'll tell the boss. Thanks for calling in.'

He made no attempt to disguise the shift from definite interest to routine tedium. As Poppy put the phone down, frowning, a renewed burst of wailing, urgent, painful, came from below. Thinking she might be able to reassure Nick with a known face she made her way downstairs and found the agency nanny crouched by the laundry basket, talking into the dark slot between that and a dresser whose shelves, festooned with imitation corals, held brightly lit plates and dishes patterned with exotic fish. Sophie was still drawing, oblivious, shutting the world out.

‘He won't let me touch him,' said the nanny. ‘It's like there's something in the room.'

‘He knows me. I'll see what I can do. Perhaps if you went outside for a moment.'

Poppy sat on the floor. The moment she began to shift the laundry-­basket so that Nick could see her his screams redoubled, so she moved it only a few inches until she could see him cowering in the corner. She could smell that he'd filled his nappy. Not looking at him she started to tidy the toys into their Davy Jones sea-chest, waiting­ for the frenzy to fade to whining sobs.

‘Hello, Nick. What's the matter? Come and tell Poppy.'

At once the wail rose, but faltered. She could feel his need to declare his terror fighting with his yearning for comfort. Any move towards him and he'd scream again.

‘Poor Nick. But it's all right. It's all right now.'

For some minutes he took no notice, but she continued to coax him, murmuring the old, worn spells of home and love, edging occasionally closer and closer until she was right against the basket, and at last, still shuddering with sobs, he rose and tumbled into her embrace. The pose was awkward, but as soon as she tried to move his body went rigid, so she stayed where she was, rocking him gently to and fro, making gradual adjustments to her posture and discovering as she did so that what she had to do was use her body to shield him from the rest of the room. Now he seemed to grasp that she had understood his need and allowed her slowly to rise on to her knees and then her feet and then, still shielding him with her body from the unseen terror, to edge round the kitchen towards the door. Over her shoulder she tried to see what might have so alarmed him, but there was nothing obvious—in fact that side of the room was much more everyday than the rest, as there is not a lot a designer can do to make work surfaces, hobs and outsize electric ovens look anything except what they are.

‘That's better,' said Sophie in a bell-like voice behind her. ‘Now I can really draw.'

The nanny was sitting at the foot of the stairs. Nick refused to look, hiding his head in Poppy's shoulder as the adults introduced themselves. The nanny was called Tessa.

‘I'll take him up and change him, if he'll let me,' said Poppy. ‘He's soaked himself through. Why don't you make a pot of tea, and see if Sophie's ready for lunch?'

The front door was open, with sounds of activity outside. From the living-room came the murmur of a man's questions and the swoops and crescendi of Ms Pitalski's replies. Nick must have heard, but he gave no sign of believing his mother could supply the comfort he needed. He had stopped crying as they climbed the stairs and now began to look cautiously around through his tear-blubbered eyes, as if checking that his known and daylight world was still in place, gazing with a sense of acceptance and relief at the frieze on the stairway wall where whimsically erotic angels beckoned a variety of citizens—portraits of friends, Poppy had read, and indeed she recognised a couple of actors—up the heavenward escalator. Doors opened around a central landing, lit by a large skylight. Poppy headed towards the rear of the house, chose a door at random and found herself in what must be the nursery bathroom, a tropical lake scene with crazy-coloured animals along the shore. The bath was a yellow hippo with purple spots, the loo a green baboon. Next door was Sophie's room. Here bird-headed human figures took apes for walks across a pink, fantastic landscape, Bosch without the horrors … Then Nick's room, with a cot and ordinary Early Learning Centre toys in a cool forest where weird but friendly-looking beasts dozed in the glades.

Poppy found dry clothes and a nappy, but as soon as she tried to lay him down to change Nick's whimpers rose into sobs and his limbs went tense for fresh struggles. To calm him with his own known world she carried him out and explored the rest of the rooms. In the master bedroom masked but otherwise naked men, more than life size, pranced along a flame-coloured wall. A silver bathroom, its light fittings crystal stalactites, its bath a swan. A man's dressing-room, done as an old-fashioned ironmonger's shop, but with real chisels and saws on the painted racks. A night-blue spare room, its ceiling filled with a flying owl whose pitiless yellow eyes stared down on the bed. Then a perfectly ordinary bathroom, white and cream, untouched by any fantasy, and completing the circuit a plain bed-sitting-room with TV and electric kettle, fawn carpet, cream walls, chintz chair and curtains—Laura's room, presumably, but so impersonal it might have been a hotel bedroom.

Here at last Nick pushed himself up on to Poppy's arm and gazed around. He stared for a while at the mantelpiece, and then at the table beside the easy chair, and then at the chest of drawers. He drew his breath for what Poppy thought was going to be another burst of sobbing, but instead loosed it into a thin and fading wail. With a final shudder he plunged into sleep. Poppy carried him back next door to his own room, gently undressed him, cleaned and changed him and eased him down into his cot, surrounding him with soft toys. The baby alarm was the same model as Janet's; she switched it on and went downstairs.

Voices came from outside but the house was silent. Hoping to ring Nell again, Poppy put her head into the living-room and saw Ms Pitalski standing stock still in the middle of her subfusc masculine elysium, with her ringed hands covering her face.

‘I've got him to sleep,' she whispered.

‘Thank heavens. Oh, poor kid. Why did she have to do it? I got back this morning and … Oh, God, children are not my scene. I do my best, I really do.'

‘I enjoyed their rooms.'

‘That's something I can do. I thought she loved him. Why … ?'

‘Listen, I really must go and look after my grandson. I'll give you my number and if Tessa can't cope with him I'll bring Toby up here this afternoon.'

‘Oh, thank you, thank you. You're an angel …'

‘Perhaps you'd better see that Tessa's got the doctor's number. Nick may need a sedative.'

‘Yes, yes. And I must take Sophie to school. I must … Holy St Agatha …'

Like an addict to a fix she stumbled to the telephone and jabbed at the keys. Poppy wrote her own name and Janet's number on a pad and took a note of the Barnsley Square number. As she stole away she was aware of Ms Pitalski miming continued thanks with hands and arms while she cradled the telephone into her shoulder poised for another explosion of woe as soon as her call was answered.

Inspector Firth was at the bottom of the steps talking to another man while they watched the activity round the car.

‘I've got to go,' said Poppy. ‘I didn't see much. I got here just before Ms Pitalski opened the garage door.'

‘This is Sergeant Levison from the Ormiston Division,' said Mr Firth. ‘Mrs Tasker is a witness in the case I was telling you about, Sergeant.'

He spoke with none of the warmth she had felt when she'd seen him in his office. The men's body signals showed wariness and restraint between them. Poppy remembered something she'd seen in the
Echo
, a formal denial by a police spokesman of a previous story which she'd missed but which must at least have hinted at bad blood between the Ethelden and Ormiston police. The men ignored her after the nods of introduction, continuing their conversation.

‘Right, I'll keep in touch,' said Mr Firth.

‘Very good, sir,' said Sergeant Levison, and turned to Poppy as Mr Firth left. She explained about Toby and told him briefly what she'd seen. He made a note of her address and likely movements and said he would send somebody along later to take a full statement, then let her go. As she rounded the corner out of the square, making for the main road, a car horn bipped softly beside her.

‘Give you a lift home?' said Mr Firth.

‘Oh, that would be marvellous. I had to take a taxi to get here.'

She settled thankfully into the passenger seat and the car eased away.

‘A taxi?' he said. ‘That urgent, was it?'

Instantly the simplicities of need and action lost their hold and confusion engulfed her. In the horror of Laura's death and the urgency of Nick's nightmare she had effectively forgotten her reason for coming to Barnsley Square. Her defences, not on her own behalf but on John's and Nell's, were completely down.

‘Well, yes … but …' she said. ‘Oh dear … you see, I suddenly realised … Did you hear what happened at my daughter-in-law's adoption meeting last night?'

‘You've not seen the papers?'

‘No … not yet … Anyway, that young man—Simon Venable, they said, but it wasn't his real name …'