Tree of Hands (20 page)

She had a monotonous zombie-like voice which Terence found rather attractive. ‘I'd like my husband to see it.'

‘Fine. Any time.'

‘I'll fix it through Steiner's'.

Terence's nerves needed calming, in spite of the Valium. He got out the vacuum cleaner and did a bit more to the spaniel-fur carpets so that he wouldn't have to worry when Goldschmidt came. After that he put in an hour's practice on John Howard's signature. His hand was steady, he breathed deeply. He went through the desk again and found two old books of cheque stubs, one with a single unused cheque remaining in it. John Howard had died suddenly of an unforeseen heart attack. Funny to think he couldn't have had a clue that cheque no. 655399 would never be used or that 655398 (to North Thames Gas for £95.43) would be the last he would ever draw. Six days later he had an appointment at Golders Green . . .

Such fatalistic musings were not really Terence's style and he soon dismissed them. Freda's husband's bank account had been with Barclay's in Hampstead High Street which was what he wanted to know. He wanted to know which branch of which bank to avoid.

Goldschmidt himself came along next day and again on the following day. He was fat and dark and bald with thick-lensed, thick-rimmed glasses. His wife was in a black leather suit with a kind of scarf thing made of mink wound round her.

‘It's my dream house,' she said in the voice of one coming out of a coma.

‘Would you be open to an offer?'

Terence said what Sawyer had instructed him to say. ‘You'll have to do anything like that through Steiner & Wildwood.'

Within the hour Sawyer was on the phone. Terence found himself nearly voiceless, a common enough symptom of nerves with him.

‘Still got that cold of yours, Mr Phipps?'

Terence croaked out some sort of assent.

‘Mr Goldschmidt would like to make you an offer of one hundred and thirty thousand pounds.'

That would have been acceptable. He wouldn't have argued. It was Sawyer who suggested haggling. Twenty-four hours went by during which Terence was afraid to go out in case Sawyer phoned. Besides he felt continually nauseous and he had an idea that the cold – it had turned bitterly cold – would attack him and make him actually throw up. He was in Freda's
en suite
bath when the phone went and he jumped out and rushed for it, not even waiting to grab a towel. The receiver slithered in his wet hand.

‘That seems to be a compromise satisfactory to both parties, don't you think, Mr Phipps?'

Terence nodded. Realizing Sawyer couldn't see him, he translated the nod into a staccato fusillade of ‘Yes. Sure. Fine. Right. Yes.'

It looked as if he had sold, or was well on the way to selling, Freda Phipps's house for one hundred and thirty-two thousand, nine hundred and fifty pounds.

IT WAS RAIN
falling, though it was cold enough for snow. An icy wind blowing down the side street caught you at the corners. Barry, doing the Saturday shopping, saw Maureen coming down the steps of the public library with a thin flat book under her arm. Maureen had black wellies on and her long mud-coloured mac. She stopped on the steps to put up a big black umbrella that was probably Ivan's.

He had wanted to catch her alone. He followed her into the International. She had laid her umbrella and the library book (
Advanced DIY for the Home Expert
) in her shopping trolley. Her face showed no more reaction at the sight of Barry than it did when confronted by a pyramid of dog food in cans.

‘I heard about you helping the police with their inquiries,' she said, and in the same tone, ‘Pass me one of them packets of Flash. I can't reach.'

‘Have you got time for a coffee, Maureen, or a drink?'

She scratched the side of her nose. ‘What for?'

‘I want to ask you something. I mean I thought if we were sitting down somewhere . . .'

‘I'm washing the paint in our lounge. I only came out for a sponge.'

‘It doesn't matter,' said Barry.

They walked side by side towards the check-out. Like a couple with prams going to the baby clinic, thought Barry. He remembered what Carol had said about Maureen not being human. In a way that made it easier to talk to her of things that were only too human. He brought it out quickly.

‘Maureen, do you know who Jason's father is?'

‘Is what?'

He said it again, he explained, and had to stop because the check-out girl could hear. Maureen trudged along the pavement reading the print on the Flash packet. She let him hold the umbrella over both of them. He tried again.

‘It made me think, you see. I mean she might still be fond of Jason's father. She might have a sort of special feeling for him on account of that.'

Maureen didn't lift her eyes from the green print. ‘There was a lot of fellas. There was a fella that drove about in a beach buggy and that garage fella three or four doors down from me and there was a black bloke. Me and Ivan were disgusted. There was a fella called something Wand, Terry Wand. Mum used to know his mum down Brownswood Common.' She looked at Barry for the first time since they had left the shop. Talking about herself aroused a small spark of interest in her. ‘I've never been with any fella except Ivan,' she said. ‘I wouldn't. I don't see what people want to for. It just goes to show the difference between sisters. Can I have that bag you've got your butter in? If this stuff gets wet, it'll be a right old mess.'

He left her at the bridge. It struck him that she was very happy. She had got what she wanted. She and Ivan hardly ever spoke to each other. All the time he wasn't at work or she wasn't doing things to the house they sat in front of the TV holding hands. They would never have children, split up, move, go away on holiday, make a friend, feel jealousy, suffer. One day they'd wake up and find they were sixty and things were just the same. He could almost envy them.

Terence Wand's name had been the only one Maureen could remember. It sounded from what she said as if he and Carol had been friends since childhood. The other men – well, Maureen hadn't any
proof
, she and Ivan had just been guessing. No doubt they had been after Carol. Men would always be after Carol. Terence Wand was different – somehow Barry intuited he was Jason's father. Being a father gave you a sort of dignity, a sort of
weight
. It made
you memorable. It was Jason's father's name that Maureen had remembered.

Carol had started working Saturdays. All across the lunchtime and throughout the evening. She had never done that before, but as soon as she went back, Kostas had asked her if she would work Saturdays and she had agreed. The house smelt of the perfume she had taken to wearing, a musky French cologne Barry knew – because he had priced it in the chemist's – cost twelve pounds a bottle. It was her money, she worked for it, she had a right to spend it as she liked. Barry wouldn't even have thought about it if only he could have been sure it was Carol herself who had bought that perfume.

Unpacking the shopping, putting things in the fridge, he began to think along lines he often did when he was alone in the house. He would fancy then that Jason was still there, that the events of the past weeks had never happened, and that he would turn round and see him standing in the doorway. The little boy's face he could easily conjure up, he had no difficulty in remembering what he looked like. Jason had an
unusual
face, not babyish at all, not in the least like Carol's. It was a funny thing, an ironical thing, that Carol who had a baby face at twenty-eight had produced a boy who at two had, if not a grown-up's face, at least a mature one for his age.

That meant he must look like his father. He bore no resemblance to any Knapwell Barry knew, nor was he like his half-brother and sister. Barry was suddenly absolutely sure he would recognize Jason's father if he saw him, just from having known Jason. This wouldn't be a case for blood tests but something you could see at a glance. Barry imagined a tall biggish man, fair haired and sharp featured with white skin that got sunburned red, and eyes darker than Carol's and with more green in them.

He wandered into the living room, wondering what he was going to do with himself for the rest of the day. He could go down to Kostas's himself for the evening of course. An evening spent with Dennis Gordon who had
two topics of conversation, money and his own aggressive exploits, wasn't an attractive prospect. Dennis Gordon treated Barry as if he really believed he was Carol's lodger or a boy she let stay with her in exchange for doing odd jobs. He was crazy about Carol, you could see that, but he wasn't jealous of Barry. He didn't take him seriously enough for that, Barry thought.

A police car had stopped outside. The Spicers were coming in with two bags of washing from the laundrette just as Leatham got out of the car. Barry closed his eyes momentarily. He realized he need not have wondered about how he was going to pass the rest of the day.

They had found Jason's body. They told him that as if it were true, positive, beyond a doubt. But all the same they wanted him to identify the thing that had been dug up in a garden in Finchley.

First he was taken to the police station. Chief Superintendent Treddick was there, talking in knowing tones as if to say Barry was being very clever and he understood all about that and even rather admired it, only Barry must realize the police were cleverer still. He talked as if Barry were a murderer beyond a doubt and insinuated that if he would only admit everything – take his time and admit every single thing – the police would be very kind and lenient with him. Leatham was more brusque and offhand. His beefy red face and hooked nose and corrugated yellow hair brought to Barry's mind what he had been thinking of earlier. Leatham was the Jason's father type, though not handsome enough.

The Finchley householder had been digging a hole to plant a tree. Two to three feet down he had unearthed a rotting bundle. He had been living in the house just a week, which before that had been empty for six months. The house and garden were about a hundred yards – a stone's throw, Treddick said – from where Barry and Ken Thompson were panelling the office.

‘We've only been working there a week,' Barry said.

‘It was six weeks ago you went over there to have a look at the place for an estimate,' said Treddick.

But Barry hadn't been there. It was always Ken who did the estimates. He tried to explain this but it seemed to have no effect on them. The fact that he had some little hearsay knowledge of the area was enough for them.

‘I'd never been there,' he protested. ‘I never talked about it with Ken. You might as well say because I've got a street plan I might have looked it up.'

‘Maybe you did,' said Leatham.

They were illogical, they didn't reason things out. This made him much more uneasy than any evidence they might fancy they had against him. They asked him about the street in which the dead child had been found, about where he and Ken went for their lunches, about how he got to Finchley, by what method of transport, and then they took him to the mortuary.

Until then he hadn't known this building was the mortuary. He had known it all his life as a red brick wall with windows high up through which you could see white tiles. They took him in through a door that had a very highly polished brass handle. The image of that shiny brass sphere remained in Barry's mind, making him flinch whenever he saw well-polished brass. There was a very powerful smell – not of death or decay but of disinfectant, yet ever afterwards when Barry smelt it or had a whiff of something like it, he associated it at once with death.

In the mortuary he behaved, he thought, as he might have done if he had really murdered Jason. They uncovered the face. Barry's throat rose up, closed, strangled him. He covered his face and staggered back. Someone must have caught him. He didn't remember any more till he was sitting in a chair with his head down on his knees.

If they had tried to get Carol there to identify the awful thing under the cover, he thought he would have fought them all, killed them all. That would have made a murderer of him. But they didn't attempt that. They got Maureen. He saw her brought in, blank-faced, head tied up in a
scarf, and come out again, no less steady and calm. They drove him back to Summerskill Road where two reporters were with Carol who had been fetched from the wine bar. But before that, they put him through the gruelling process again. How well did he know that part of Finchley? How many times had he been there? For several months an estate agent's board had stood in the front garden of the house where the child's body had been found. The side gate had been off its hinges and had stood propped against a fence. On the day of Jason's disappearance Barry had been working in Wood Green, hadn't he? It was easy to get by bus from Wood Green to Finchley. He could have picked up Jason in Rudyard Gardens, taken him to Finchley, killed him and buried his body and still been in Highgate by five . . .

He and Carol slept that night because they were both drunk. They didn't bother with wine. They had a bottle of gin between them. He woke up with a cracking headache and a mouth that felt as if it were filled with dry fur. Carol's face on the pillow was young, china pink and white, beaded with sweat. He left her sleeping and went off to buy the Sunday papers. He wanted to see what they said about him and if they had yet established who the dead child was.

Mr Mahmud at the paper shop was always a bit distant and his daughter off somewhere in a world of her own, so Barry hardly noticed that he didn't get a thank-you for producing the right money for the
Sunday Mirror
and the
Express
. This Pakistani family were known for conducting a lot of their business in silence. But as he came out of the shop and into Bevan Square, he encountered two girls who hadn't that reputation at all. Stephanie Isadoro and a girl Barry thought was called Diane Fowler, Blue Hair's sister, were coming across the square, mackintoshed, wearing high-heeled sandals, arm-in-arm. He had been reading headlines, so relieved that there was nothing new that he could even distract his mind enough to admire the big beautiful photograph of Carol on the
Mirror
's front page, but now he looked up to say hallo to them.