A Place Of Safety (24 page)

She had four hours before the police came. Although her resolve to tell them everything had not faltered she did not want to spend the intervening time dwelling on how the interview might go. Or on what might happen to her when it was over.

There was plenty to do. First she would go to the bank and pay back the five thousand pounds. (She had already rung Mr Ainsley to say she would be doing this and asking him to cancel their loan agreement.) Then she would do the rounds of estate agents. There were several in Causton and she hoped to cover them all. Or at least as many as it took to take her up to half past four.

In her bedroom, having changed into a flowered dress and jacket, Ann was drawn by the beauty of the day to her window. She noticed that the gravel drive, barely a week since Charlie Leathers raked it over, was already sprouting weeds. And the wonderful thing was she would not have to go and tug them all out. No one would. As Ann relished this satisfactory observation, the sun vanished behind a cloud. A nice sense of timing, for it was then that Ann saw Jax. That is, she saw the lower section of him. The rest was hidden beneath the bonnet of the Humber which was half in and half out of the garage. She needed the car to drive into Causton.

At the thought of walking up to the man, looking into those cold, radiant eyes, being exposed to that suggestive leering voice, her courage, so steadfast until then, faltered. And what if Lionel had already told him of her demands that he should leave. What might he say then?

What a pity Mrs Leathers wasn’t still here. She would have stridden across, told him the car was wanted right away and he’d better look sharp about it. Perhaps, Ann thought, I could just open the window and call.

Then, upset and agitated, she remembered the telephone. There was an extension from the main house to his flat. If she rehearsed what she had to say, there would be no need to get involved in any sort of conversation. Keep it short, she instructed herself, picking up the telephone and pressing the connecting button. She watched him stop what he was doing, wipe his hands on a cloth and disappear through the painted blue door. And the instruction worked. After all that queasy anxiety, the exchange was simplicity itself.

Ann said, ‘This is Mrs Lawrence. I shall need the car in five minutes. Will it be ready then?’

And he said, ‘No problem, Mrs Lawrence.’

A ridiculously overwhelming rush of relief (after all, what could he actually
do
?) receded and Ann began to feel calmer. She washed her face and hands, brushed her hair and tied it away from her face with a black silk ribbon then collected her handbag, checking that the money was still inside. She hesitated whether to take a coat - the sun had come out again - and decided against it.

She left the house and walked in what she hoped was an unflustered way towards the garage. There was no sign of Jax. The interior of the car was heavy with the smell of polish, the chestnut leather gleamed. Telling herself she had been watching too many movies, Ann still couldn’t help checking out the back of the car. She even turned over a travelling rug on the carpeted floor to make sure the interior was empty.

As she drove out of the gates and turned left towards the road to Causton, everything about her suddenly seemed transformed. The whole world seemed light and airy and free from care. That was the world - carefree.

‘I am carefree,’ said Ann aloud. And she started to sing.

‘Penny Lane’, the song her mother had loved, the song she half remembered from her childhood.

‘ “Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes . . . there beneath the blue suburban skies . . .” ’

And, as the distance between herself and the Old Rectory increased, so did the dizzy feeling of exhilaration. She was cutting herself loose. Floating away from the self-centred, querulous man around whom she had organized her life for so many years and from the huge, crumbling millstone of a house. A source of financial worry for as long as she could remember. To paraphrase a title from Lionel’s huge collection on his counselling bookshelf, this was the first day of the rest of her life.

She covered the last few miles to the outskirts of Causton anticipating her meeting with the estate agents. And wondered how soon they would be able to come and give a valuation. That they would jump at the chance she was sure. A house the same size as hers, though admittedly in much better repair, had been sold at Martyr Bunting the previous week for three hundred thousand pounds.

A roundabout was coming up. Ann started to concentrate on the road ahead. She negotiated her way round the war memorial in the main market square and down Causton High Street past Boots and Woolworths and Minnie’s Pantry. She decided to go there for tea around four o’clock, then there would be no need to have anything at home. She could stay out until almost the minute the police were due to arrive. She hoped it would be the big, burly detective who came after Charlie was killed. She had liked him and not only because he had shown impatience with Lionel’s affectations. Ann had guessed at a man unclouded by sentiment but not without kindness. Solid, self-contained and passionately interested in whatever was going on around him.

She turned left at the town hall, behind which stood the new three-storey car park. This had been built only after two years of the most ferocious opposition. Causton, population twenty-seven thousand and eighty-three souls at the last electoral listing, reckoned it did not want or need a public car park. When it was mooted, Middle England took to the streets with banners and besieged the
Causton Echo
with abusive or heavily ironical why oh why? correspondence. Sit-ins took place at the municipal offices and when the town planning department bravely organised a public meeting, it ended in a riot. Several people lay down when the diggers came in. It was built anyway, of course, and the moment it was open the council painted double yellow lines all over the town centre and outlying streets so people had no choice but to use it.

At three o’clock on a weekday afternoon, the car park was almost full. Ann drove slowly round the first and second tier but there was not a single empty space. At the third she found one between a Land Rover and a Robin Reliant, miles away from the exit.

Ann didn’t really like using the place except at ground level which had plenty of natural light and people passing just a few feet away. Artificial lights were installed in the rest of the building but often didn’t work. Sometimes this was due to slack maintenance but more often to vandalism

Like any public space with ease of access, lack of supervision and an opportunity for concealment, the car park had attracted those with something to conceal. Only the week before, several men had been caught after holding their very own car boot sale, swapping small bags of dream dust for large bags of used currency. They did not realise a pair of lovers were practically on the floor of a car just a few feet away. The ardent couple, passion spent, memorised the dealer’s number plate before wisely putting, and keeping, their heads down.

Ann had read about this in the paper. As she got out and locked all four doors, recalling the drug handlers’ capture made her feel slightly more confident in the way air passengers will when travelling immediately after a major disaster, aware not only that the odds against a second disaster happening so soon were astronomical but also feeling everyone on the flight deck would be concentrating one thousand and one per cent.

The long space between her and the lift was crammed with cars but apparently empty of human beings. Ann started to walk, looking around as she did so. How ugly concrete was. The bleak grey walls were already stained with running dark seams, like black tear tracks.

She found herself counting the vehicles. Two, three, four . . . On seven - lucky seven - there was a sound behind her. A creak as if someone was opening a door. Ann wheeled round. Nothing. Had someone got out of one of the seemingly empty cars? Were they even now creeping along behind her, keeping pace with her movements? Or drawing level and catching up?

She shook her head with irritation at her own timidity. Where was all the courage that had filled her heart and mind when she had sung those words a mere half-hour ago? She took a deep breath, lifted her chin and lengthened her stride. Eleven, twelve, thirteen - nearly halfway there.

He must have been wearing soft shoes, or no shoes. She didn’t hear a thing but glimpsed a sudden great pouncing out of the corner of her eye. Then he was on her. She felt the weight of him, the grunting curse of his breath. His arm was clamped so fiercely round her throat that, even in her terror, she could not cry out.

She was dragged over to the nearest car. Then, before she understood what was happening, he seized her hair, gathering it tightly in his fist, and yanked her head right back then swung it forward with tremendous force hard down against the edge of the bonnet.

 

Valentine Fainlight was working. That is, he was going through the motions. The proofs for
Barley Roscoe and the Hopscotch Kid
had finally arrived and Val was vaguely turning over the pages, thinking they looked all right to him. Once upon a time, in another life it sometimes seemed, he would have noticed that the margins on more than one page were not quite even and that Barley’s magic cap was too dark a shade in the scene where he transformed hopscotch squares into blocks of honey fudge. (The cap, a pale, delicate blue when Barley was simply going about his day-to-day affairs, deepened according to the degree of catastrophe his transformations wrought.)

Valentine saw none of these things. He saw only Jax’s face: cruel, beautiful, enigmatic. He had found himself wondering briefly yesterday evening how a person not all that intelligent could actually manage to look enigmatic then felt ashamed. Val had had thoughts like this once before and had immediately berated himself for being snobbish and unfair. And in any case, they were irrelevant. For who was ever cured of a fever by dispassionate analysis?

He felt bad about Louise. He loved his sister and knew that his apparent rejection was hurting her. The only thing to be said in his defence was that if she continued to live with him, she would be hurt much, much more.

Sometimes, at moments like this when Val acknowledged that the word relationship was meaningless and what he had really been infected by was a fatal disease, he remembered Bruno. Val had had the good fortune to live for seven years with a complex, gifted, difficult, funny, kind and completely loyal man. The sex had been great, the fights never vicious. When Bruno died, Valentine felt he had fallen into a bottomless chasm of despair.

His partner’s parents, one or two very close friends, his work but, most of all, Louise had pulled him back to life. Now, when she was struggling to recover from her own smash-up, he was turning her out. A month ago he would not have thought himself capable. This morning, when she had cried in the kitchen, he felt so terrible he almost changed his mind. But then a wonderful idea occurred to him. A week ago, when Louise had gone to London for the day, he had asked Jax over to see the house. It had been warm and they had had wine and sandwiches in the garden. Jax had loved Fainlights and could hardly tear himself away. With Louise gone, Jax could not just visit, he could actually come and stay.

The telephone rang. Val snatched it up and cried, ‘Yes, yes?’

‘Hello, Val.’

‘Jax! What do you—’ He stopped, gulped in some air. ‘I mean, how are things? How are
you
?’

‘I’m just going to have a shower, actually.’

Oh God, if this is a tease I’ll go over there and kill him.

‘You one of them green people?’

‘What?’

‘You know, save water, shower with a friend.’

‘Do you mean you’d like . . .’

‘Only if you want.’

Louise saw him go. She had heard the phone ring, once. Now she watched her brother, her lovable, intelligent brother, capering in his excitement, fumbling with the front gates and racing into the road. Dancing at the end of this odious man’s leash like some sad performing bear.

As Valentine hurried through the blue door and up the stairs, he realised he had not brought any money. But he could put that right. He could explain.

The door of the flat was slightly open. He could hear the shower running. Was Jax already in there? Or maybe he was moving silently behind him on the cream carpet, creeping up to jump. To grab Val hard round the throat as he had once before. Already excited, Val deliberately didn’t turn his head.

But then Jax walked out of his bedroom wearing a loosely tied towelling robe. Came straight up to Val and put the end of the belt in his hand. Then, using both his own hands, ripped open Val’s shirt, sending the buttons flying.

 

Hetty Leathers, having now confirmed the time and date of her husband’s funeral, invited Evadne both to the church and afterwards for a light lunch at the bungalow.

And so Evadne was laying out her black. It was not a colour she enjoyed wearing, consequently there was very little to choose from. However, having been brought up to observe the traditional formalities, she felt unable to attend such a function in any other colour.

A lot depended on the weather. A late August day could be extremely warm or unexpectedly nippy. Evadne removed a fine wool coat and skirt from her wardrobe and gave the outfit a good shake. The coat smelt of moth balls and the lingering fragrance of Coco, her favourite scent. Then she picked out a long-sleeved anthracite velvet tunic and matching trousers and studied them thoughtfully. They were certainly dark enough to be acceptable and extremely elegant but her mother would have fainted with horror at the idea of a woman wearing trousers in church. Aware that her parent’s benign but strict attention could beam down unannounced at any time, Evadne put the ensemble back.

The hat was not a problem. Well, it was and it wasn’t. That is, she had a hat and it was the proper colour but it was not what you would call funereal. She had bought the organza confection for a favourite niece’s wedding a year ago. It had a high crown, a wide, down-curving brim and was trimmed with dark floppy peonies made of shiny silk. However, as one could no more enter church without a hat than one could wearing masculine attire, it would have to do.