Pleasure and a Calling (26 page)

Z
OE WAS THE DIREST WARNING
, and yet she made me hungry for the sweetness of Abigail. I had not envisaged a sexual entanglement with Abigail, or pursued that outcome, or dreamed of it. And yet, soon enough, here it was. Here
she
was, in my office with an inventory of fixtures and fittings that she might more conveniently have emailed. ‘It’s mainly carpets and curtains,’ she was saying, ‘but I want to leave the cooker and dishwasher, which are both quite new, plus one or two other items. There’re a few gardening tools in the lock-up. I’ve suggested some prices.’ She seemed breathless, as if she’d run here and had only seconds before she had to run again.

‘Great,’ I said. ‘We’ll press on with that. And how are things otherwise? The house must seem a lot emptier for—’

‘Let me buy you dinner,’ she said.

I opened my mouth. ‘That would be …’ I began.

‘Tonight,’ she said.

‘… marvellous.’

We did go out that night, and again at the weekend. And again in the days following. The deed was duly done. Perhaps there are still those who find it hard to reconcile my unconventional lifestyle to my success with women. It may be explained by a lack of obvious intent on my part. You wouldn’t describe me as a predator, not in that way, at least. In Abigail’s case it may simply have been a hankering for human warmth in the wake of Sharp’s death; and, who is to say that she wouldn’t eventually have taken me into her confidence about Sharp, given a little sympathetic coaxing? There was a sense too that I wanted to savour a final frisson of triumph over Sharp – that Sharp was not quite beaten without this phallic coup de grâce. Who knows, perhaps that’s what excited me most.

But it had to end. Because for all Abigail’s physical beauty, her natural clarity of mind and spoken voice, the intensity of that other
real
intimacy – that breathtaking presence and nearness in which I had invested as an observer and devotee and clandestine attic lodger – began to ebb in the raw moment of our first kiss. I won’t say I was simply going through the motions. As I have pleaded earlier, I am only flesh and blood. But I freely confess (without burdening you with excessive detail) that those primal urges were driven as much by thoughts of being secreted aloft in that dim mustard quiet beneath the skylight with an ear to the floor, listening to our muffled tender couplings, as her actual yielding naked presence beneath me. I might further invite you to picture the moment of withdrawal (and I promise this is the last excessive detail), as I jerked out almost rudely at the frantic height of things – not the first time it happened, or the second, but on the third occasion, when the pattern had suggested itself, and when it seemed to Abigail that we knew each other well enough to mention it – when she whispered in the soft lighting
of her room, as Zoe had more than once before her, ‘You don’t have to do that,’ and I gave her the same wearied reply I gave Zoe: ‘Actually, I do.’

Make of that what you can, if you must. As I said, Zoe was the warning, a perfect illustration of one truth, or at least a truth true for me: that born with the new kicking life of a physical relationship was its grinning death. The foreboding had started. And with it a gnawing sense of waste. Without question, it would come to pass, what I had endeavoured to save myself from, avowed my faith against. Loss of love.

W
AS IT AROUND THIS TIME
that my cousin Isobel turned up? Certainly it was between police visits. Before they asked me to accompany them to the station. I remember walking into the office to find Zoe already chatting away to her. I didn’t recognize her at first, not having seen her since Aunt Lillian’s funeral. I took her and her daughter, Elizabeth, to a café. I was in a low mood, though polite. Our conversation, as I remember it, was cordial, banal even, the old animosity smoothed to nothing by the passing years. Who would have guessed how much she used to despise me? But this was almost like a social call, as if she had been passing and decided to pop in, though in fact the two of them had travelled in from furthest Norfolk (Elizabeth, sucking pink milkshake through a straw, said they’d come on two trains, and volunteered the names of her primary school and teacher). Isobel had seen the Heming’s sign come up on the TV news and had been shocked by the mystery dead man found in someone’s garden, though she said no more about him.

She appeared surprised that old Mr Mower had retired (though he would be well into his seventies now) and seemed
elated to find me still here and having done so well in business. She watched me intently as I spoke, nodding a great deal as I told her about the town. I am, of course, practised at small talk, and at selling our leafy, bourgeois virtues to outsiders. Her own recent fortunes had been less happy. Her husband had left her – had fled to the Far East with barely a goodbye – and she’d had to sell her mother’s house. Now that money was gone. There was a pause in which I offered her money to tide her over, and drew £500 from the bank there and then.

A day or two later she sent me a note saying how lovely it was to see me again and thanking me for the money. Unfortunately, things had taken a turn for the worse. Her beloved old car, it seemed, had come to the end of its life, which was causing all sorts of immediate logistical problems (she listed them), and now it turned out that the roof of her cottage also required urgent attention. And this on the eve of new thoughts about Elizabeth’s future. Obviously the village school was fine for now, but could the sleepy local comprehensive match her potential? There was a reputable girls’ academy offering a highly manageable fee-paying structure not too far away. Perhaps I could help? She had taken the liberty of enclosing her bank details, and promised to call in a few days.

I felt suddenly fatigued by this intrusion, and helpless to act one way or the other. I found myself wondering if Isobel had actually left town, or whether she was still lurking somewhere. Foolish, I know, but hurrying to see clients or Mrs Sharp (whose house sale had been put on ice during police investigations but who still found compelling reasons to demand my presence), I found myself looking over my shoulder.

As for Mrs Sharp, she was still on leave from work. ‘Can I tempt you, Mr Heming?’ she would now ask, pouring a glass
of white wine, regardless of the time of day. She oughtn’t to really, she said. Not with the medication. She smoked almost incessantly. I don’t mind it myself (curtains impregnated with the odour of tobacco remind me of my mother), but when it came to selling this house I could see it might be an issue.

The police were still on her back, she said, which further set my nerves jangling. She had given them what seemed to her a plausible account of why her husband – by all accounts short of cash – would have left his valuable wedding ring (a sentimental act, surely, for a man who had been kicked out of his home with only the money in his wallet), and had admitted she had been in the house when the repossession men called on the morning in question. But she had been unable to explain how the card they had dropped through the letterbox (scribbled with the date and time) turned up on the front seat of the vehicle not two hours later, when the same repossession men recovered it from the lane approaching the house where her husband was found dead the following weekend. She was exasperated that the police now doubted her repeated insistence that when her husband had left the house – and she could not say whether it was the Friday night after their fight or the morning following – he had taken with him a matching pair of leather holdalls containing clothing and other essentials.

On top of this, Mrs Sharp had now suffered an unpleasant visit from Mr Sharp’s brother Ian. ‘I’d never even met him before,’ she said. ‘He came barging in, telling me the police were harassing him over some phone calls he’d made. Now
he
wanted Douglas’s belongings. I pointed out that there was nothing left and that, in any case, as his wife – and certainly in the case of Douglas having died intestate – his estate would probably come to me. Not that he had anything that I hadn’t already paid for
one way or another.’ She blew her nose and said that the man had eventually left, slamming the door behind him and roaring off on a motorcycle. ‘He’s on the oil rigs in Scotland, he said. But they traced him there and had him in for questioning. He said he hadn’t seen Douglas in years. Why would he want to see him now? That’s what the police were accusing him of – making enquiries at Douglas’s old college in Cambridge trying to trace him, saying his mother was seriously ill.’

‘And was she?’

‘Of course not – she died years ago! So why would he even be trying to find Douglas? Mind you, I wouldn’t put it past him to kill someone. He struck me as the violent type. He was once in the army. Very rough. And the fact that his brother was dead hardly seemed to bother him. No wonder the police suspected him. Anyway, he was hundreds of miles away in the North Sea when it happened, so that was that.’

She left the room and came back with the handkerchief I had lent her that Saturday, laundered and pressed. ‘I keep forgetting,’ she said, and watched as I tucked it into my pocket.

‘When did you lend me that?’ she asked.

I looked at her. The question felt like a trick. Did I need to lie? I couldn’t work it out. There was always a turning point. A crucial oversight. Something that someone, somewhere, would remember afterwards that would lead to the hangman’s noose. I made an excuse and walked back to the office. Again I was exhausted. I couldn’t think. I stopped on the corner and sounded her name. ‘Abigail …’

Once it had been enough to send a shiver of anticipation through my every fibre. Now the sound expired in the air, plunging me into blackness. Across the square, the green-and-white sign that bore my name – two stylized grooves underlining the
H – stirred in the cold wind. Never before had I so keenly felt the weight of error. Gnawing of regret had hollowed me out, promise deserted me, and with it courage. A tear sprang to my eye. I was grieving. Not for something I no longer wanted but for the feeling it had once given me but which had now gone.

W
HAT FOLLOWS WAS ONE
of the most perilous days of my life.

As I may have said before, getting the key to a client’s property is relatively easy. Some prefer to be absent when buyers are looking around. They’d rather hand over the keys and let me get on with it. This is ideal. When I’m done, I can copy the keys and return the originals to the owners. Neither the current owners nor the future owners are any the wiser and I have a new house for my collection. In reality, though, most clients are happier to show the buyer round themselves, confident in their own unforced sales manner, their intimacy with the house and its features (‘I see you’re admiring the cornices – they’re authentic Georgian’), their superior local knowledge, their people skills (‘Will you have a coffee? My wife’s lemon zest medallions are legendary’), and the unique emotional leverage they can bring to a sale, believing that a buyer will be swayed by accounts of how their well-balanced children grew up here (the now unused garden swing providing a poignant reminder of blissful times) before going off to university or drama school. This is no good to me. In cases such as these I will arrange an appointment that is
inconvenient for the client – when I know they are out at work or away for the weekend. ‘Yes, that
is
difficult,’ I hear myself say. ‘But why not let me show them round? No, that’s no problem at all. My pleasure.’ And if there is a shortage of prospective buyers? Well, what is to stop you from just making one up? There’s no better time to show a property to an imaginary prospective buyer than when the client is not around to point it out.