The Keys to the Street (43 page)

“Just as a matter of interest—” Mary knew she was no good at the ironic tone, she found it hard to be scathing, but she tried “—just as a matter of interest, why didn’t Leo meet me himself, or isn’t there anything amusing about being honest?”

“Oh, Mary, he was just a boy, undersized, not educated, never quite well. I loved him and perhaps you’d have come to love him if you’d known him, but not like that, not in that way. You’d never have said you’d marry the real Leo.”

Suddenly, as they came down the path and reached the lake, she stopped thinking about herself and reluctantly, almost fearfully, began to think about him. The anger had evaporated. It had never been thriving. She put her hand on his arm and looked into his face.

“You must be very unhappy.”

“Thank you for that,” he said.

“Oh, Carl. It was like losing your own child.”

“I suppose so. But it was worse. I killed him, you see.”

“
What?
”

“Oh, I don’t mean that. Not actually. Not like that Impaler kills people. I mean I killed him by taking away his only chance of getting well.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You would have given another donation, wouldn’t you? If it had been asked for you’d have done it?”

“Yes, but …”

“You said so. When we’d been to your grandmother’s house, the day I asked you to marry me. You’d have given it to me, to your husband, but it wasn’t I that wanted it, it was the real Leo Nash.

“Leo was dying by then. Perhaps you could have saved him, but I couldn’t ask, could I? I couldn’t let the Harvest Trust ask. I thought maybe if once we were married and I said I had to have money, I had to have, say, fifty thousand, you’d have given it to me and I’d have gone to India and bought the right sort of bone marrow for Leo. But Leo died.”

She thought about it. She had withdrawn her hand from his arm when he spoke of killing his brother, but now she replaced it and let it lie there lightly. They had come out of the park at the York Gate and the clock on Marylebone Church ahead of them began to chime the hour. Perhaps because of the VJ Day commemorations the traffic was dense and swift.

“It was a monstrous irony,” he said. “That I, who loved Leo, who would have done anything for Leo, who did do anything, spoiled his chances of life by what I did. By choosing this way to make a fortune for Leo, I blew it. So I killed him. If by killing someone we mean that but for us he’d be alive. But for me, Leo would be alive.”

They had come to the pavement edge and begun to walk toward the lights at Harley Street. The traffic noise was so loud that he had to shout.

“The old dog man,” he began.

“Bean,” she said. “Bean—what about him?”

“He tried to blackmail me. He was going to tell you—things about me.” He smiled. “Not the things I’ve told you. Other things you’d have liked even less. I couldn’t allow that.”

“I can’t hear you,” she said. “I can’t hear you for the traffic.”

“Just as well,” Carl said, softly now and half to himself. “I know you won’t forgive me, anyway, but you’d never have overlooked paying someone to—deal with Bean.” He turned to look at her, seized her by the shoulders. “Mary!” It was very nearly a shout. “Can you hear me now? I’ve blown it with you too, I know that. Just for the record, how did you get the Harvest Trust’s letter?”

She also had to raise her voice. “Alistair sent it to me. As a wedding present.”

“The bastard.”

•   •   •

She never once looked behind her. Roman saw her put her hand on her brother’s arm and for a moment he thought things were all right, and then he knew they were far from that. He knew too that it wasn’t her brother. A sense of foreboding filled him. He had been about to turn back, but now he wouldn’t, he would stick with it.

The charge of emotion between them was so powerful it tensed their bodies. He marveled at it, walking a dozen yards behind them. She withdrew her hand, recoiled, spoke a name, “Carl …,” loud enough for him to hear. So it was Carl. But what was her name? Strange that after so long, so many brief chance encounters, he still didn’t know.

“What?” he heard her cry.

Carl was explaining something. She shook her head vehemently, but after a moment or two the hand was back, resting on Carl’s arm but distantly somehow as if placed there out of pity rather than affection. You are imagining too much, Roman told himself, and you are
spying too much, they can take care of themselves. It’s no more than a lovers’ quarrel being made up.

But he followed them down York Gate. The clock on St. Marylebone was chiming seven. The pavement of the Marylebone Road was choked with crowds, the traffic pouring fast down toward the Euston underpass. He was very close behind them now, so close that if she turned round and saw him he would have had to make an excuse for his presence and he had no explanation. But she didn’t turn round. She was looking into Carl’s face, not with love, not with passion, but still as if no one else in the world existed.

Her voice she kept low, drowned by the traffic’s roar, but the man called Carl shouted above it. He shouted as if he didn’t care who heard him.

“I don’t want to live without him, you see. I can’t face life without him.”

For a brief while Roman had been so near her that by putting out his hand he could have touched her; then, as happens in crowds, two people pushed in front of him, squeezing between him and her and forcing him to step back. They were part of the group at the pavement edge, waiting to cross when the lights changed. You could wait ages here for the lights to change, they were red almost too short a time to allow for crossing. Seven or eight people stood poised to cross and she and Carl were at the head of them, waiting while the traffic pounded down its three lanes.

Things happened very quickly then. Roman, craning his neck, but taller than those in front of him, saw Carl give her a little push back from the curb. A little saving, protecting push into those waiting behind. He put his head down and plunged into the road, threw out his arms, and ran into the traffic, in front of a car, a taxi, into the path of a container, running at bonnets, under wheels.

A woman was screaming from the moment he leapt from the curb. Roman heard his own rough gasp as he clenched his hands.
Brakes screamed and horns brayed. Carl was flung into the air, his body describing an arc in the blue air against the setting sun, splintered by flashes of light from sun-glinting chrome, the sudden full beam of a headlight blazing on him as he fell under wheels and was ground between tangling metal.

There was blood somewhere. Roman thought he saw a long splash of it fly against white enamel. He was struggling to reach her, catch her as she fell, but the crowd made a wall around her, leaning over her, kneeling beside her. He stepped aside, let it go, and stood holding his bowed head in his hands in the suddenly emptied street.

Sirens were already wailing.

30

F
or quite a long time Marnock or his sergeant sat by Harvey Owen Bennett’s bed, hoping for a name, hoping he would come round sufficiently to tell them who had paid him to kill Bean. One or another member of his large extended family was usually there, a half-brother or sister, a stepsister, his mother; stepfathers and men who said they were his uncles. Some of them touched his lifeless hand.

He never moved. He was fed intravenously and a machine kept his heart beating and his lungs breathing. Sweat occasionally broke out on his large forehead and slablike cheeks.

Three weeks after he had been brought in, the doctor in charge of his case told Marnock that Harvey Bennett would never speak again. His eyes were open and he would never close them. It was unlikely he could think or remember or speculate or even suffer. Large areas of his brain had been destroyed.

•   •   •

James Barker-Pryce sued the tabloid newspaper and was awarded substantial damages. These were not on account of their allegations that he had been consorting with a known prostitute; he had admitted that and there was some question whether his constituency party would readopt him at the next General Election. He had brought the action because the journalist alleged he had been involved in a conspiracy to murder.

The school-leaver went back to school, or rather to a sixth form
college to take some A Levels, and all Bean’s dogs except for Gushi were walked by Amelia Walker, who seemed to find no difficulty in handling seventeen animals at once.

Mary Jago had always meant to sell her grandmother’s house and buy another, but having gone there to live after Carl Nash’s death, there she remained. She had builders in to convert the upper floors into self-contained flats and her friend Anne Symonds had moved into one of them. The Harvest Trust asked her if she would be willing to remain on their books and in December she gave another bone marrow donation, this time to a girl of sixteen she knew as “Susan” and who knew her as “Barbara.”

Roman Ashton rented two rooms in a house in Princess Road, Primrose Hill, where he was not particularly comfortable. All the money derived from the sale of his house he had sunk into a precarious venture with Tom Outram, the Talisman Press having been taken over and absorbed into a massive conglomerate. With some American backing they had started a publishing house that produced only historical novels in paperback originals. So far it had been startlingly successful, but how long would such success last?

Their headquarters were in the Marylebone Road and when it wasn’t raining Roman walked to work through the park. He never saw the fair-haired girl. She no longer walked through the Gloucester Gate and south of the zoo to the Charlbert Bridge. She no longer crossed Chester Road or ran through the rose garden.

And then one day he saw her. He was going to work, crossing the Outer Circle, and she and her little dog were getting out of a car she had just parked by the Monkey Gate.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello.”

“Do you know, I’ve often looked for you in here, but I’ve never seen you. I thought you must have—well, moved away.”

“I’ve looked for you too,” he said.

They passed through the gateway into the Broad Walk and across
onto the grass. She unclipped the lead from the dog’s collar, let him go, stood up, and held out her hand.

“Mary Jago,” she said.

“Roman Ashton.”

“I was house-sitting for some people when I last saw you. They gave me their dog. They didn’t like him much, you see, and I did. I live in Belsize Park now and I’ve got a car so I can still bring him into the park, but I’m rather late today.”

“That’s why we’ve never met,” he said.

“You stopped being a street person?”

“Last August.” He saw her wince at those words and said quickly, “I did it to get over something. It’s something I’ll never get over and I don’t really want to, but I’m glad of the two years I spent sleeping rough. It gave me—something else to think about. I’ve got a job now and I’m looking for a place to live.”

“When we last met,” she said, “you advised me to be angry.”

“Did I? I don’t remember that. And were you?”

“There was no one to be angry with,” she said, and she looked down at her shoes. “Except myself. I think I’ve got a bit stronger. I don’t placate people so much. I’m not so trusting. Oh, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. You can’t want to know.” She started calling the dog. “Gushi, Gushi, where are you?”

“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “When you lived in Park Village I appointed myself your guardian. I thought I could watch over you. I told myself you needed protecting. Once when there was a man running after you I sent him the other way.”

She was looking at him, incredulously at first, then with a smile dawning.

“But I didn’t do much, did I? I didn’t do a thing. I couldn’t save you from whatever it was.”

Her face suddenly grave again, she said, “You couldn’t save me from that. I fell into something because I was lonely, something awful. It’s over now.”

I know, he thought. I saw. The shih tzu came running up, sat at her feet quivering, looking up into her face.

“He always wants to be carried. He’s such a baby.” She picked up the dog. “You said—you said something about looking for a place to live. Only—well, I’ve got this big house and I’ve had some conversions done, and I thought if it was a flat you were—but perhaps …” She hesitated, as if putting a restraint upon herself, reminding herself of past indiscretion. “Perhaps we ought to get to know each other a bit better first.”

“That seems a very good idea,” Roman said.

•   •   •

The man on the canal bank had been there for weeks, months, ever since high summer. Not all the time, he had his occupation, but by night, three nights a week at least, watching and waiting. He had been there since before the body of David George Kneller, whom they called Nello, had been found on the railings outside the zoo.

He blamed himself for that. If he had been more vigilant, done what he had started doing in August two months before, Nello would be alive now. No use asking whether the life he lived had been worth living, the life he now lived, for that wasn’t the point.

The first evening he had come down here the man with the beard they called Rome had also come down, looking for a place to kip. But he had got him to leave with a shake of his fist and a scowl on his ugly face. It
was
ugly—so what? There were things they could do for acne now, drugs and whatever, medication was a
cleaner
word, but there hadn’t been when he was fourteen. The scars hadn’t stopped him getting a wife and promotion or the right to do what he was doing.