The City of Strangers (23 page)

They had cleaned the heroin out of her a long time ago now, and though she thought about it occasionally, she didn’t want it the same way any more; it was a desire for comfort now not a craving that ate at her stomach and her mind. And they had stopped the drugs. They still gave her sleeping tablets, but as she was behaving, as she was calm, they didn’t always watch to see she took them. She had been flushing them down the toilet as Kate had told her. Sometimes she still took them; sometimes it was worse to be awake than to be asleep.

There was a knock on the door. A middle-aged woman in a crisp, pale green nurse’s uniform pushed it open and looked in at the two women.

‘I’m going in a minute, Mrs Carroll, is there anything you need?’

‘I’m grand thank you.’

‘Goodnight then,’ smiled the nurse. ‘Goodnight, Miss O’Donnell.’

As she left, Kate turned back to Niamh.

‘They’ll be changing shifts in half an hour. You have to go before they do. It won’t be hard, it really won’t. Come on, you need to get ready.’

Niamh closed her eyes and shook her head.

Kate ignored her. She got up and walked to the bed and opened a small travelling bag she had brought with her. She took out the clothes that were in it. A grey polo neck sweater, a straight brown skirt, a long tweed jacket, a pair of black, low-heeled court shoes, a dark-green hat with a narrow brim; there was also a wig that was the colour of the hair she had deliberately left longer and unstyled for over a month now, and a pair of heavy-rimmed glasses, identical to the ones she was wearing today, though she only needed them for reading. Everything she had taken out of the bag was identical to what she was wearing herself. The two sisters were about the same height and build. Although there was a family resemblance it wasn’t particularly strong, but Kate was wearing make-up in quantities she would never normally have used; she had to believe it would be enough.

‘Come on. It’s a long time since you played dressing up with me!’

Niamh laughed; it was a rare laugh that really did let Kate see the big sister she remembered in that anxious, always tired face. She took the bundle of clothes and pulled Niamh up out of the chair and into the bathroom. It had to happen very quickly; it had to happen faster than Niamh could think.

Ten minutes later a woman walked out of Niamh Carroll’s room. Almost anyone who had seen Kate O’Donnell enter the room forty-five minutes earlier would have seen Kate O’Donnell leaving it. But it was her sister who took a deep breath and walked tentatively along the corridor to the locked door that closed off the secure wing from the rest of the Bayville Convalescent Home. The door to her own room wasn’t locked, though it had been until a month ago. Good behaviour had earned her certain privileges. She could use the sitting room now and talk to other patients who had also demonstrated their good behaviour, though she never went in there; she could use the kitchen to make herself coffee or tea; she had the freedom to walk up and down the main corridor and to look out of a different barred window to the one she looked out from in her room.

As she turned the corner into the corridor that led to the security door a black woman, mopping the floor, smiled at her. She knew the woman, Sally; sometimes she cleaned her room. She smiled back, keeping her head slightly down, but feeling a kind of exhilaration; she was feeling stronger, just a little stronger.

When she reached the security door she hesitated, but she took a breath again. Jimmy was outside. It was still almost impossible to believe it, but he was there, waiting for her. She pressed the buzzer. A woman’s face appeared at the meshed-glass panel. Niamh didn’t know her. She was very young, twenty-two or twenty-three. She wore a nurse’s uniform, but she was a receptionist; the only business she had with the security door was who went in and who came out. She had opened the door for Kate O’Donnell an hour earlier and now she was opening it again. It happened every Saturday. In so far as the receptionist had any opinion about Kate, she didn’t much like her. For a woman who had a nut job for a sister she seemed to think a lot of herself; not that she had ever exchanged more than a few words with her.

‘OK?’ were the only words the receptionist had to say tonight.

Niamh nodded, too afraid to answer the clear, confident ‘Thank you, goodnight!’ that Kate had told her to. ‘She doesn’t know you, and all she’ll hear is an Irish accent. So lay it on thick!’ It didn’t matter anyway. As Niamh walked through the door the receptionist was already on her way back to her desk. She sat down and picked up the telephone; she had been interrupted in mid-conversation.

Niamh was walking across the hallway to the front door now, and suddenly she was standing in front of it, right in front of it. She was trembling, trying hard to do what Kate had told her so many times. ‘Open the door and walk out. That’s all. That’s all you have to do.’ She could feel her hand shaking as she reached out to the handle. She was afraid to touch it. She couldn’t move. She stood there completely still.

‘It’s open, all right!’ The receptionist’s tone was irritable.

Niamh grasped the handle and opened the door.

‘Thank you, goodnight!’

As she walked out into the night and the door slammed shut behind her, the receptionist returned to her telephone call, shaking her head.

‘Some of them, I tell you! They got so many people chasing after them, they stand at the door waiting, like they don’t know how to open it!’

The cab was waiting in the shadows, under a tree, out of the floodlights that lit up the front of the building. Niamh walked to the car, forcing one foot in front of the other, waiting for the sound of a voice telling her to stop, and the hands that would drag her back inside; they had to come. No one would let her leave. Wasn’t she still too sick? That’s what Dominic had told her; she might never be well enough to leave. But suddenly, moving out of the light, she was looking at the face of Jimmy Palmer, grinning at her through the open window of the car, a barely glowing cigarette end between his lips.

She stood looking at him, waiting for the moment she would wake up in the pink-washed room. A lot of the time dreams were most of what happened in her days in that room; she slept and dreamt because it was all there was to do. And Jimmy was often there, painfully there, in those dreams.

They hadn’t seen each other in almost two years. There was nothing to say. For a long moment they stared. He was still smiling; she was frightened he would suddenly be snatched away. He got out of the cab, dropping the cigarette butt and stubbing it out. She moved towards him, needing him to hold her; that was all she wanted now, not words; his arms holding her.

‘Don’t touch me, baby. Just get in.’ He looked around. There was no one there, no one to see. ‘You get in the back and you crouch right down between the seats.’

He pulled the rear door open. She did what he’d told her to do.

‘Right down. OK? As small as you can, Niamh.’

She crawled into the gap between the front and back seats.

Jimmy leant in and pulled a blanket across the seat and draped it over her. As he tucked it round her he let his hand stay still for a moment against her shoulder. Then he slammed the door shut and got back in himself. He started the car. He pulled round in front of the colonnaded porch and down the driveway to the gates. The guard saw him coming and stepped out of the lodge. He unlocked the gates and pulled one of them back; one was enough.

Jimmy slowed down as he pulled past; his window was still open.

‘She’s still in there. I’m going into town to get some gas before they close. Maybe get a cup of coffee too. I’ll be right back for her though.’

The Queens cab drove out towards the road. The lights of another car were coming round the bend from Horse Hollow Road. It was a taxi from Locust Valley. Jimmy Palmer pulled over to let the other cab pass.

As the Queens cab moved on towards the house the gatekeeper waited; it would be coming back out in a couple of minutes. He stood by the open gate, watching Jimmy Palmer’s tail lights disappearing, filling his pipe and chuckling to himself. Miss O’Donnell’s driver might be just about all right for some gas now, if he put his foot down, but if Susie Maitland was still serving coffee at this time of night, she surely enough wouldn’t be serving it to no Negro cab driver.

Thirty minutes later Kate O’Donnell walked out of her sister’s room. She left the radio and the nightlight on and she had stuffed pillows and clothes into the bed so that anyone looking in through the window would see something; a shape in the bed would do; there was hardly any light. As she walked along the corridor towards the security door the two nurses who had taken over the night shift were sitting in the kitchen smoking and drinking coffee, which was mostly all they needed to do; any patients who weren’t behaving had been dosed up with their drugs. They called goodnight as she passed and she called back, trying to sound as nonchalant as she could, despite a racing heart.

She pressed the buzzer on the security door and the night porter came to open it; the receptionist had left. He was barely twenty, working his way through college, doing this at weekends to make some money. He had got used to Kate leaving later Saturdays. He liked her in the way that made him redden when she smiled and left him wishing he could have thought of something funnier to say when she’d walked out through the door. He had been on the end of some of Kate’s best smiles in recent weeks.

‘How’s she doing today?’ He always asked the same question.

‘She’s had a good day, I think.’

‘That’s good. That’s something, isn’t it?’

He always said that too, and she always nodded as if it mattered.

‘I didn’t see your taxi there, Miss O’Donnell. There was a Queens cab going out. So if you want me to get one up from town, there’s one just –’

‘I’m sure he’s gone to get some gas, don’t worry.’

He walked to the front door and opened it for her, as he always did.

‘See you next week. You take care.’

‘You too. Goodnight.’

Kate walked out on to the drive, heading down towards the gate lodge. She knew he was watching her. She heard the heavy door shut behind her.

At the gate the old man saw her coming and stepped out.

‘He’s down at the gas station, that’s what he said.’

‘I thought so. I’ll walk on to the road. He’ll be on his way back.’

‘You can wait in the lodge, Miss.’

‘I’m grand,’ she said breezily. ‘Sure I could do with some air.’

She followed him to the small wicket gate next to the lodge; he opened it and held it back for her. She walked through, trying not to hurry, walking the way she thought she always walked. She could hear an engine; the lights of the cab lit up the bend in the driveway. Jimmy Palmer pulled across the drive and stopped. Kate waved back at the gatekeeper and got into the back of the cab. Jimmy turned the car and headed back towards town.

‘You can get up now,’ said Kate, laughing. She pulled the blanket and the coat off her sister, squeezed down on the floor in the footwell next to her.

Niamh pushed herself up between the seats. She was shaking. She sat next to Kate now, dazed, still frightened, looking in something like wonder at the two people she loved. Kate put her arm round her and pulled her close.

‘We did it, Niamh! I told you we could!’

Jimmy Palmer looked in the rear view mirror.

‘Christ, if you two aren’t one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen!’

The two women looked at one another, dressed as they were in the same clothes, with the same hair, the same make-up, the same glasses. They both started to laugh at once. Kate pulled off Niamh’s wig. Laughing more, Niamh leant forward and put her arms round Jimmy. Kate’s arm was still round Niamh; she buried her head on her sister’s shoulder. Jimmy let out a great whoop of exhilaration; he was still laughing. And Niamh and Kate were both crying, as Jimmy drove past the Long Island Road signal tower that marked the end of the town, across the rail tracks, and out of Locust Valley, heading for Route 25A and Queens.

Two days had passed since Captain John Cavendish’s body had been discovered at the side of the Hampshire House after falling from a terrace thirty-two floors up, close to the top of the building. It was the first time Stefan Gillespie had stood on the terrace, looking down into the narrow chasm between the Hampshire House and the next building on West 59
^th
Street. Most of the terrace looked out on to Central Park, but where it faced the adjacent tower there was a low brick wall, no more than two feet high, between the patio and the drop of more than five hundred feet to the ground. A section of wrought-iron railing, newly painted and intended for that wall, was leaning by the doors out to the terrace; the railings overlooking Central Park were already in place. It wasn’t easy to stand by the low side wall where the railing had not yet been fitted, staring down. Stefan got as close as he could, watched by Sergeant Michael Phelan, a few steps behind, smoking a cigarette and clutching it tightly in the buffeting wind; New Yorker as he was, he showed no desire to get very much closer to the edge.

‘It wouldn’t be difficult, would it?’ said Stefan quietly.

‘If it was dark and you’d had a few,’ agreed the NYPD detective.

Stefan turned back towards the open doors into the apartment and walked in. The high room smelt of fresh paint. Their voices echoed loudly.

‘So what did your forensic people find?’

‘Nothing at all, other than a few cigarette butts. One of them was probably Cavendish’s. The rest were just, well, the builders are still up here finishing the place off. It’s the usual sort of rubbish you’d expect to see.’

Stefan thought there was very little of the usual sort of rubbish. Everything looked remarkably neat. The concrete floor was clean and free of dust. He knelt and ran his finger across it. Maybe they were very tidy builders.

‘Footprints?’

‘Not really, no.’ Phelan shrugged and got out another cigarette.

‘Would there have been lights on?’

‘The electricity was off.’ The detective lit the cigarette.