Pleasure and a Calling (22 page)

Folly, dread, victory – all might sharpen the appetite. Abigail was a career first. I ate, drank, dreamed and breathed her. She was that newest drug, that highest ledge, the rarest butterfly, all in one. The full immersion of my most ardent imaginings. It lasted five days – I could not risk more before the discovery of Sharp’s body – but what days they were! During the day, I visited her at the library. I loved to watch her graceful movement along the aisles, her quick-moving hands as she worked at the desk. When circumstances allowed, I closed in and caught the trail of her perfume. She never looked at me once. It was perfect.

I turned up as normal at the office, though it’s possible Katya or Zoe or Wendy might later have recalled (if asked, as they probably were) a greater sense of vigour about me in recent days and weeks. Zoe and I drove out to the retirement bungalows again with a contract to sign and Katya brought down the hammer on two properties that same day (a bottle of bubbly was duly cracked open at close of play, Zoe – revitalized, it seemed, after our misunderstanding – showing Josh how to ease out the cork without ‘prematurely spurting’, as she called it, making Josh grin and turn pink). It was Katya too – who knew nothing of the Sharps’ differences of opinion the previous Friday – who returned to
speak to Mrs Sharp, value the house and prepare the documents, sending Josh in afterwards to take photographs.

But meanwhile I barely thought of Sharp, staring up at the sun and the moon for those five days and nights in the Cooksons’ back garden. At the time, what happened to him seemed the obvious outcome of a larger necessity. If I thought about him, it was only to hate him for involving me in his death. At other moments I clearly saw it was his character that had been his undoing; that he had crossed a road that hadn’t asked to be crossed. I thought too (when I thought about him at all) about what had shaped his mood on the day we had first met. Perhaps he had already quarrelled with his wife about the dog, or with Abigail about his wife. Perhaps he had walked the dog to Abigail’s house only to be refused entry. Imagine his fury when he returned to find Barney’s shit on the rug! In such a confluence of events – even accepting my role in hastening the opportunity to vent Sharp’s rage – Barney’s death was inevitable. The only surprise, I thought, was that the poor creature had lasted so long. The pity was that Abigail would never know what I had saved her from. And most of all, that’s what I was thinking when I thought about Sharp.

Sometimes, as I remember it now, those five days were over in a moment. At other times they seem like the endless school holidays of childhood, or the innocent summers one imagines before the onslaught of war. My senses held themselves out to her, swaying and falling like tides under the magnet of the great moon goddess. And then in the drowsy, breathing darkness, I tumbled through memory into my mother’s bed. Here was her bathtime fragrance but also a rising sourness as she held my face to her belly. Can you hear? A brother or sister was inside her, where once I was. In the soft nest between the unyielding bed-clothes
and my mother’s bare skin I heard and wondered at the nearness of this life and longed to be closer. But here it ended, an ear to the slow, pumping warmth. Here was love, eternal and pure. All I needed to do was listen and it was there.

And then, standing behind the curtains with my piece of bread, or behind the wicker chair in the garden room, hearing their voices, sometimes urgent or shrill, I would take her words as treasures and in my sleep amplify them into giant-size, like the ones in my book of rhymes, the black letters ornate, seriffed and towering. I would worm between the letters themselves – crawl beneath the enclosing roof and walls of an A or an H – and have her close to me in my dreams. What became of the baby boy after mother was taken from us? That was one of the secrets kept from me by Aunt Lillian and my father, who stared ahead and said nothing.

But love was here again, in a delicate balance, the unimpeachable Abigail, pure as a thought to hold safe in my head and never let go. Her pureness was in nearness, not in an embrace or a glance or in fond words. Here – even for five days – was something true and lasting. To expect more, to touch the prize and ask to be touched in return – to engage in full (and I knew this) – was an insidious sweet poison.

Eventually I descended into her private things, her Morocco notebook – she wrote poems in lilac ink; here was her fountain pen – and her social network secrets, left open one morning on her laptop. Here were some of the photographs I had already seen. Her girls’ night out, I now saw with a jolt of recognition, was actually her book group, an arrangement of like minds round a table with bottles of wine, one of the women peeping coyly over the top of a paperback, her eyes flirtatious, showing off. Sharp
was out of shot but present, his elegant fingers resting on the base of a wineglass, his chunky bracelet watch absorbing the light. In her Morocco notebook, Abigail had written:

Poetry, I admit, is the locked room to which my mind cannot quite be relied upon to find the key, but I read and reread with awe, and spoke the words as if sheer will and devotion would free the message within.

One lunchtime I followed her to the small supermarket on the high street. At the library, she kept up appearances, but here she was defeated, sad and beautiful. She bought a tub of seafood, noodles, fruit and milk. In the evening, mingled with the spiralling sounds of eastern instruments, the smell wafted up to me like a feast in itself. In the morning I ate grapes and strawberries from her fridge. How I loved her.

A
S
I
SAID, IT WAS
Z
OE
who broke the news, scandalized and amazed, her eyes wide with the duty of scandalizing and amazing the rest of us. The details were sketchy, based on gossip that had reached one of Zoe’s friends, who worked at the solicitors’ office in Sloughgate, and amounted to the fact that the unidentified body of a man had been found by a couple coming back from their holidays. ‘You’ll never guess who,’ she said, turning towards Katya with almost unseemly excitement.

Katya stared back at her. ‘Oh my God, the Cooksons …’

Zoe bit her lip, her eyes shining with incredulity.

Katya turned to me. ‘Should we call them?’

‘I think not. Though this might get your sale moving.’

The midday news on Two Counties added nothing, other than to report on the nervous state of Mrs Cookson, forty-six, a pharmacist, who had discovered the decomposing body on the patio of their luxury home on the couple’s return from ten days in the Seychelles. The police would not say if they were treating the death as suspicious or how the man had died.

‘Surely it must be a burglar,’ said Wendy. ‘What else would a strange man be doing in their garden?’

‘Well, I can’t just sit here,’ said Katya, standing up instead, and looking out on to the street with her arms folded. ‘You know what’s going to happen? They’re going to blame us for putting our sign up and inviting burglars into their house while they’re on holiday. Though, surely, it has to be someone who knew they were away.’

The regional early-evening TV news had a reporter on the scene, or at least on the spot where the police had taped off the lane. They had found out that the house was for sale and had our Heming’s sign clearly in shot, with parked police vehicles just visible on the bend, their lights flashing unnecessarily. Eventually a police officer came on and reiterated the bald facts and appealed to anyone who might have seen anything unusual to come forward.

By the next morning it seemed they were looking for the driver of a white 4×4 seen leaving the area the previous week. At the office Josh came rushing in to say that it was his driving instructor who had called in about the white car, and that he had now been interviewed on TV showing the exact spot where he had seen it.

‘Who Is Mystery Intruder?’ asked the
Sentinel
when it finally caught up with the news on Thursday. Nothing was said about the keys, though their reporter went into some detail about the face of the dead man having been half eaten away by foxes and crows, leading to speculation that in the absence of other information – no anxious friends or relatives had called to report a missing person – he might have to be identified by his dental records. By the time the
Sentinel
came out again a week later, the story had moved on somewhat. ‘Intruder Was Owner’s Patient’ blared
the headline. And sure enough, in a twist that I might have expected (because how many top cosmetic dentists are there in a small town?), it turned out that Mr Cookson was himself able to identify Sharp’s teeth, having whitened them with laser treatment only a few months previously at a cost estimated by the paper at between £800 and £1,200. ‘Plot Thickens’ ran a subsidiary headline above a gaudy picture of Sharp taken at one of the events at Warninck’s. The caption described him as a local married man and part-time Cambridge professor.

And now, of course, everything changed.

B
Y NOW OUR
F
OR
S
ALE SIGN
was standing outside the Sharps’ house as well as the Cooksons’ so I could hardly be surprised when a pair of plainclothes policemen turned up at the office with their routine questions. I was able to confirm that I was the owner of the firm and, yes, I had indeed visited the Sharps’ property recently (Wendy’s note was in the diary) and spoken to Mrs Sharp herself. Mr Sharp had not been present.

‘And how did Mrs Sharp seem, sir?’

‘Distressed,’ I said. ‘She had injured her hand.’

‘And did she say how she had injured it?’