Tigerlily's Orchids (4 page)

They kissed, lasciviously rather than with affection. She wore a tight black suit with a very short skirt and a jacket cut away in a U-shape to show a lot of cleavage. Her heels made her taller than him which he didn't much like.

‘The taxi I came in is waiting,' she said. ‘No need to hurry.'

There was every need since he would be paying.

‘We'll ask him to pick us up after lunch, shall we?'

T
he taxi passed Wicked Wine and Stuart saw Olwen emerging with her few days' supplies in two carrier bags. The pavements were dry today so she wore her bedroom slippers. These were mules with pink fluffy tops and their wedge heels flapped up and down, clattering as she walked. Standing at the gate of his house next door to where the Cambodians lived, Duncan Yeardon watched her make her slow way up the path to Lichfield House. He liked to speculate about the lives of strangers. He was a people-watcher and he had an active imagination. This woman carried heavy bags from the shops several times a week. She seemed too old to have children to feed but she might have an invalid husband or even two people – sisters, say? – who needed supplies. Of course, there was nothing to say one of the bags didn't contain washing from the launderette. Not everyone had a washing machine. Duncan watched her climb the steps up to the double doors and saw those doors open for her.

His own house was too large for him, Victorian, semidetached, on three floors. He had bought it because never in his life before had he owned a house like this, though he had always wanted to. Now he had it, he didn't know what to do with it. Keep it clean, of course, and that he did. Keep it
immaculately tidy. Rearrange the furniture. Often, during the day, he wandered from room to room, looking out of the windows. All his working life he had worked so hard and for such long hours that he had never cultivated any occupations for his leisure hours. He watched people and made up romances for them while drinking a lot of weak watery coffee.

I
nside Lichfield House, in the hallway, Michael and Katie Constantine were talking to Rose Preston-Jones. It was rather less cold today so McPhee had discarded his pink woolly coat and wore only his natural fur as a newspaper article had told Rose dogs in coats could overheat and be ill.

‘If you believe one newspaper article,' said Michael, ‘why don't you believe others? I mean, you believe that about dog fur but you don't believe detoxing is rubbish. Both stories come from expert sources, both are the result of serious research.'

‘Oh, Michael dear, I
know
detoxing works,' Rose said, growing pink. ‘I can prove it. My clients who go on my course show an amazing improvement in their health once all those impurities that clog their systems are out.'

‘Their livers do that for them. Their livers detox them every day.' Michael turned to say hello to Olwen. ‘Are you well?'

‘Not really,' said Olwen, lumbering up to the lift.

‘You can't say her liver has done anything for her,' Rose said with quiet triumph.

‘Only because there won't be much of it left.'

‘She told Marius she's drinking herself to death. She says she's been wanting to drink unlimited amounts all her life and now she can.'

Katie spoke for the first time. ‘But she never says anything except “Not really”.'

‘People talk to Marius,' Rose said fondly.

‘The trouble,' said Michael, ‘with drinking yourself to death or smoking yourself to death is that you don't just die. It would be OK if you carried on with these excesses and felt fine till one day you lay down peacefully and died. But you don't. You get diabetes or have a stroke or a heart attack and then the long slow painful route to death begins.'

Rose picked up McPhee and hugged him as if he were in imminent danger of one or other of the fates Michael had mentioned. Laughing in rather a grim way, Michael took Katie's arm and the two of them went out to the pizza place. Instead of going back to her own flat, Rose got into the lift with McPhee and went up to ask Marius Potter for a
sortes
reading. She hadn't liked ‘the long slow painful route to death' at all.

B
y night, the place was very quiet. Aurelia Grove was far enough away from Upper Street for no more than a soft sighing from its traffic to reach these houses, embowered as they were in hedges and leafy bushes and conifers. Each was detached or semi-detached. If neighbours were noisy, their music or laughter or slamming doors affected no one but themselves. The silence was even deeper when the weather was cold. Those street marauders who wandered mysteriously, occasionally giving vent to meaningless yells or animal whoops, stayed at home or remained inside pubs and clubs when the temperature dropped.

Just before midnight, Freddy Livorno went outside, though no further than the front step. He often did this to see what the night was like and to look at the sky. Tonight it was very clear, a bright dark blue, and the air had that sharp feel about it as of a crystallisation taking place so that it seemed his breath might freeze into chips of ice. He went inside again and bolted the front door. Claudia had gone to bed early. She had gone up at ten fifteen and Freddy guessed this was so that she could be asleep or feign sleep before he entered their bedroom. Well, let her sleep or pretend sleep, as she chose. Earlier in the day, he dialled the mobile number on the device set among the dried flowers and been startled by the lascivious content of her
conversations with a nameless man she called darling. Now was his chance to read what she typed during the past two days and discover part or all of that man's name. He started up her computer, put in the code which would work the gizmo – and lo and behold, it did.

His wife had sent several emails to the newspaper for whom she worked and an article about the recession affecting shopping as an email attachment. Freddy wasn't concerned with that. Those sent to [email protected] were what interested him. One began ‘Hi, darling S' and ended ‘Can't wait to do you-know-what again, it was awesome. Do I have to wait till Thursday? Your lustful C.' The rest started and finished in much the same way. The middle part was hair-raising. Freddy was amazed by his wife's knowledge and experience. She had certainly demonstrated none of it to him. And that email address contained not only the guy's name but an important clue to his address as well. Claudia also mentioned a key that had been given her. Did this key open Lichfield House or a door in Lichfield House? And was Lichfield House a private house or block of flats or the offices of a company?

He decided to leave the two little gizmos in place for a few days longer. She wasn't planning on going there tomorrow, so she would very likely send more emails and almost certainly have another conversation with this Stuart. More details must be discovered before he acted.

No sound came from upstairs. She was sleeping the sleep of the unjust, he thought. She was in the habit of leaving her handbag overnight on a small table in the hall. The one she was currently using was of black leather, absurdly (in Freddy's view) studded and barred with silver-coloured metal, as was the fashion, fitted with half a dozen useless zip fasteners which opened and closed pointless pockets, and ornamented by an
unnecessary two-inch-wide belt with a large chased silver buckle. Her house keys were in one such pocket and another beside it on its own. By the time she needed a key to that fellow's place he would have had another cut and have replaced the Brasso-cleaned one with the original.

He turned off the lights and went upstairs. Light from the half-open door of their bathroom showed him the sleeping Claudia, her lips slightly parted, one white long-fingered hand resting between the powder-blue pillowcase and her pink cheek. She always slept elegantly. Freddy was not so sophisticated and hard-headed as he had thought. The words and expressions she had used, vocally and in print, had shocked him more than he would have thought possible, not because of what they were – all were of course familiar to him – but because it was his wife who had spoken and written them. He even wondered, as he stood there looking at her, if he wanted her after that. Was her contribution to the household expenses all that important to him? Did her status as trophy wife count with him that much? Perhaps not. Was it revenge that he wanted, then? On Stuart Font at Lichfield House, certainly, and that he would get. But on her? He went back into the bathroom, closed the door and said aloud, ‘I want her to know that I know. I want her to be afraid of me.'

T
he assistant in the electrics shop at Brent Cross told Duncan that they had sold out of room heaters a week ago. Duncan didn't want a room heater, his house was warm enough even in this cold; he had been buying a toaster to replace his which had given up the ghost (as he put it) that morning.

‘We've got plenty of those,' the assistant said. ‘Not that we
would have if you could heat a room with them. There's been an incredible run on heaters.'

‘It's what you'd expect, isn't it, in this weather?' Duncan said.

‘Of course it is. And it's not as if you can buy these things in the summer in case it gets cold. It's incredible but we don't stock them in the summer.'

Duncan bought his toaster and took a bus back to Kenilworth Avenue. All the cars parked along the kerb were still white with frost. Though without a garage, he had a short driveway and every time he passed it he regretted getting rid of his own car. Yet how often would he have used it? Inside the house it was beautifully warm, thanks to the efficient heating system. Never, in all the places he had lived with his parents, alone or later on with Eva, had he known such interior warmth. This was some of the coldest weather for years yet he had been able to turn off several radiators. How different it must be for those poor people trying in vain to buy fan heaters and electric radiators.

A freezing fog was closing in on Kenilworth Avenue. With gardening impossible, a good brisk walk a poor prospect and his shopping done, Duncan stood inside his front window deriving entertainment from the people who passed. Television and his new library book were for later. Since Eva's death and his simultaneous enforced retirement, the hours had passed slowly, but he regularly told himself how lucky he was to have his health, enough to live on and this comfortable warm house. Meanwhile, he looked out of windows.

On the other side of the street a van with ‘Design for Living' printed on its side had drawn up outside Lichfield House. The driver and another man got out of the cab and came round to open the back. Duncan wondered why a van was needed to cover this short distance when a trolley of some
sort would have done, but stopped wondering when he saw the men unload armchairs and tables, mirrors and a very ugly lamp. The young man who needed a shave and looked like one of those models advertising cars came out to supervise the transporting indoors of the furniture. Ah, the problem of why the occupant of Flat 1 had arrived with so little furniture had been solved. Men who looked like him were always homosexual. ‘Gay' was a term he disliked. He saw it as misusing and spoiling a term which used to mean lovely and joyous. That young man would have a friend he called a partner, older than himself, probably the owner and principal furnisher of the flat.

Duncan lost interest and turned his attention to next door, the other half of the semi-detached pair. The occupants had only been there for a few weeks and he had barely seen them. A young woman had come out, carrying a large plastic bag in each hand, and headed to the right through the white mist where, at the top of Kenilworth Avenue past the roundabout, was a Tesco superstore. She looked very young, a girl of no more than fourteen or fifteen, though she was probably older than that, and wore a thin jacket over a T-shirt and jeans. Just to look at her made Duncan shiver in that warm room. A few seconds later a much older man came out of next door's front door and followed the girl. He made no attempt to catch up with her but maintained a distance of about twenty yards between them. I bet they'll come back together, Duncan said to himself, those bags will be loaded with shopping and that man won't even offer to carry one of them. He speculated about them and their lives. Not father and daughter, as he had at first thought, for they didn't look in the least alike. Husband and wife was more likely. Yes, that was what it would be, that man advertising and then buying (for that was what it amounted to) a young girl from some South-East Asian
place. He pitied her but consoled himself by deciding that however hard her life might be here, it would be a lot better than what she had had in Laos or Cambodia or wherever it was.

The Design for Living van moved off and a woman came along the street from the Kenilworth Parade end in a fur coat that looked as if made out of a variety of a furrier's cut-offs. Duncan knew her by sight and watched her go into the house on the other side of the Asians. She didn't look English either. Nobody was any more, he thought despondently. Because he didn't know her name he called her Esmeralda. You could walk from one end of north London to the other, passing hundreds of people, without hearing a word of your own language spoken. He didn't feel like waiting to see if his prediction about the people next door, the girl carrying the shopping for that lazy man, had come true. A way of profitably spending the rest of the day had occurred to him and he went upstairs to begin tidying and reorganising every drawer and cupboard in the house.

He liked order and method and routine. His ambition when in his teens and training as a motor mechanic had been to become a detective, largely because he enjoyed finding solutions to puzzles. Tinkering with vehicles was eventually given up and he joined the police. Pacing the beat wasn't part of his life plan but he had to do it and he bowed to the inevitable. Whether it was a stroke of luck or a blow of fate, he could never quite make up his mind, but when he had been a police constable for a year he found himself and his companion outside a jeweller's at the precise moment that a couple of men had broken in. One of them had the owner at gunpoint while the other ransacked the safe. Duncan didn't know where he got the courage from, he had no memory of what happened immediately before the gun was fired, but he
had flung himself at the gunman while his companion pulled the jeweller to the ground. Of course the gun went off, one bullet passing through Duncan's shoulder and another shattering the glass-topped counter. Reinforcements arrived and an ambulance, and the two men were arrested.