Blind Date (14 page)

On Saturday night she had gone to bed with a nice-looking builder youth who had been doing up the flats where she lived. She couldn't help herself, and he had got aggressive when she told him to go on Sunday morning. The idiot thought he had found a billet, but men like that were only for fun. Cliché though it was to recite, the real thing needed brain as well as brawn, or business acumen at least. Inside her handbag, Hazel had this letter. Buttermilk paper: soft to the touch, so thick and fat she could have soaked and eaten it. The woman from the agency worked fast, although Hazel flattered herself that she was an easier candidate to match than most: plainer, simpler, less romantic, perhaps. A pragmatic woman. She stopped halfway across the bridge and read the letter again.

“Profile: Robert Bircham is thirty-ish, extremely fit, six feet tall.
He is divorced, without children, and he runs his own business. His hobbies are motorsports, fine food, theatre, books and music, and he lives in his own house in Greater London …”

Right, Hazel had thought on second reading, and thought again on the third, I know what this character could be. A berk, who likes messing around with car engines and writes down the sort of gormless interests a civilized man is supposed to have when he fills in his curriculum vitae. Quotes that he likes books to prove he can read, likes music of course, as one does, but may mean all the usual fucking waltzes. His “own company” might be run, downhill, from his garage and he could be contemplating the sale of his ten-year-old Ford Escort to pay the next instalment of a massive mortage on a disgusting semi. Or, he might not. Might be … She shivered. Might be a self-made man to her self-made woman, who would recognize a rising star when he saw one, despite a lack of polish. She had been specific with the woman in the agency about what she had wanted and the woman did not think her requirements odd. He could be any old age, any old shape, but he must have his own house. Everyone else had a house, or at least, a flat of their own, as she had had, once. She had bought on a tide of enthusiasm when property had seemed a more solid investment than gold only to have it repossessed two years later after prices had fallen and the income, about which she had lied, failed to make ends meet. She had shrugged it away at the time, paid the debts, painfully, but ever since, she had suffered a sickness for that elusive sense of security. She wanted her name on a set of deeds, somewhere. She would sell her soul for that, let alone the body. Hazel put the letter back into the envelope and down into the depths of her pocket. It could wait for a while, kept secret. She glanced at the river, and then looked at the back of a man who overtook her with a bouncy stride, a nice, firm bum, displayed in tight jeans.

No,
she had to find men in suits: and not any old house would do. Perhaps a house resembling Angela's, without all Angela's frills. Even dimwit Angela had a house. On account of the kind of parents who had never spent money but saved it all to give to her, so that she would be tied to them forever, poor cow.

So where was Angela? They were not unduly worried by her non-appearance at work that morning. Especially after a spy told them that she had been in a high old state of nerves on Friday afternoon, like the timid girl she was, going out later on some red-hot date. Secretive little minx, Hazel had said to Patsy. She's done a runner with some man. She's met someone behind our backs; no wonder she didn't want to go to the agency. She's languishing at home with a bloke she met on the bus. It was possible, but she'd never missed a day's work in two years.

A faint worry then, but only faint. Until the mother phoned in the late afternoon and accused them of kidnapping her daughter, because her darling had failed to pitch up for Sunday lunch. Hazel giggled; it was about time little Angela learned to play truant from that kind of chore. She wanted to tell the old bat to go round and check herself, but Patsy was shaking her head. If it was a case of Angela holed up with a man, the last thing she would want was a visit from mother. That would be the kiss of death, that would.

“We'll go,” she said. “We'll go, after work.”

Summer London, lazy and crowded out of doors, and there they were again on some errand of mercy. Hazel was annoyed by it, but they'd have a drink or two after. And she still had the letter in her pocket. She could think of nothing else.

Angela's
tiny house was in a modern cul-de-sac, sheltering from the big, bad world of suburbia. This was not the sort of place Hazel wanted her house, because it took a train and a bus to reach, and there didn't seem to be a neighbour under the age of eighty. There were grilles at the windows, every piece of glass proofed against burglary. Peering through the kitchen window with the light in her eyes, all Hazel could see was the chintz of the curtains and her own reflection, then a narrow vision of a room with more grilles at the back. This was a miniature cage. She wanted an open house.

“Pretty, isn't it?” Patsy ventured, unable to think of anything else to say. They knocked and shuffled their feet, aware of their own conspicuousness. Such a quiet cul-de-sac. No children playing, no dogs sniffing, as if everyone had forgotten how to go outdoors or lived their lives in the little gardens at the back, each the size of a handkerchief. How bloody boring, Hazel thought, to want to be as private as this, as locked away as this. What was the point of having a house if you had to spend ten minutes getting in and out? To say nothing of the grilles. When she had her house again, the windows would be large and public, so that envious eyes could stare straight through and look at the goodies within, without squinting and peering as she did now, ready to say to Patsy, she's gone; leave it alone, it's up to her when she comes back. There seemed to be a buzzing in her ear, faint and from a far distance, like listening to a swarm of bees. She could only imagine the sound of a swarm, but her eyes were focusing on a bluebottle crawling up the other side of the window. In this house? Angela would have murdered a spider, let alone a fly, which invaded her space: the sight of an insect made Angela her most aggressive. Which was not saying a lot.

Hazel had a dim memory of going away for a couple of days, leaving the remnants of a nice fatty piece of lamb out in her hot kitchen with the window open. Coming back on a stuffy evening to find it covered in angry, blue-hazed flies, vying for space on a shrunken fragment of carcase. Silly Angela, to do something similar. Leave the windows so streaked. As if a hand had clawed them, drawn patterns in steam, before she closed the grilles for the night. Patsy was peering through the door. Counting the flies at the far end of the room, where against all odds, the grille over the glazed doors appeared to be crooked.

“Let's
go,” said Hazel, full of distaste.

“No.”

The old man next door took some rousing from his TV. He accompanied them back with some suspicion, watched Patsy fiddle with the key he kept, standing back in disapproval at all this dramatic nonsense. He insisted on going in first. Then he barged past them and out again so suddenly they were bemused.

The flies buzzed at the small amounts of blood, widely spread. As if she had moved erratically, waving a sprinkler in some strange and savage rite, before someone had stopped her. Brown blood pooled on the blue carpet, stained with a pattern of white beneath her hands, again, not so much blood, as if she had little to spare. Angela lay in a foetal curl, her back resting against the security grilles installed for her own protection. White metal, wrought into a pattern to diminish its predominance, a failed gesture towards design. The grille looked like a set of prison bars: the figure looked as if she had flown towards them, a moth fluttering madly, beating blindly at a source of light, and then died with broken wings. The blood was dry. She seemed to have hidden her own head inside a large bath sheet of olive green for shame, as if she wanted no-one to see her, beating her skull against the grille which she gripped with one, curled fist. Her feet were bare. There were white marks on the floor. The place stank of dead meat and terror. The weekend had been hot.

Patsy remembered,
irrelevantly, a page from the practical tips section of a magazine. “Bloodstains: Soak as soon as possible in cold, salty water … keep changing the water … if the stain is old, sponge it with a solution of ammonia … leave for two to three minutes …” That was surely all they had to do. Throw water at her; soak her, then tell her to get up. They retreated to the door, hands over mouths. The old man was keening.

While they waited for the police, Hazel went back inside. Gagging, she made herself go upstairs. Everything spotless. Only the walk through living room, with two used glasses on a mantelpiece, an empty wine bottle on the floor among the carnage of the chase, and that naked, ringless, hand.

T
his time Joe counted the stairs up to Jenkins' flat, but by the time he was halfway, he had forgotten the count and told himself it would keep for yet another time. Same entrance, same low-key welcome which did not indicate whether he was expected or not, as if the occupant cared; same mild sensation of rot. Joe could not tell exactly what malaise afflicted Jenkins, but something did. When Joe had known him three years before and had been the butt of his teasing, Jenkins had been a different man. Awkward and belligerent, yes, but never small-minded or indecisive. Joe had considered bringing him flowers. The thought had occurred when he passed a park and saw roses in full bloom, looking overtired on their stems, drooping with heat, but it would have been a pale version of his anarchic self to stoop to the theft of flowers. In the old days, he might have called it liberation of captive assets, but those days were gone, with all their innocence. He had abandoned the stray idea of flowers of any kind and brought instead a pack of cigarettes and a carton of beers. It would make it easier if the man smoked and drank, instead of simply smoking. Joe could drink the whole pack and still count the stairs down, if he was allowed to stay that long, but even while they murmured hellos, he knew he had done the wrong thing and the pack of beer should go straight over the balcony, no matter whom it hit. DI Jenkins could not take his eyes off it, even as Joe sat. He might as well have been staring at a gun. Joe went back, opened the door and slung the pack into the landing. Either he would collect it on the way out, or some other bastard would be lucky. He would have been better to liberate the flowers.

“Water or
coffee? That's the choice.”

“Coffee. Yes. No. Maybe later.” Not on an empty stomach, not this man's brew which was real enough to set the nerves dancing and, yet, inside Jenkins shrivelled fatness seemed to sit like liquid cement, never adding or subtracting from the slight but constant tremor.

“I want whisky so I drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, boy. Does that make sense?”

“Life over death, that's all.”

Life was a still life in this room. Joe wished he was here to add to this life, instead of both of them examining one, small episode inside an encyclopedia of experience, getting the man to inspect one of the fattest goldfish in his bowl of memories. It would be cruel to inflict this on someone old, but this man was not quite old enough to be his father, though he seemed older, and, like his father, the distance between them had nothing to do with age. Joe did not quite know what to do with a fifty-six-year-old who had foresworn drink, any more than he had known what to do with the exhortations of his mother and father to get a proper job darling; get a wife or a life, preferably both. It seemed to Joe that middle-aged people had always been in authority over him, holding out on him, expecting the impossible of him, exasperated by him, and he was not quite sure how to treat them as equals. When they reached his grandfather's age, they stopped being condescending about youth. He must stop making comparisons and take this man for what he was. He would like to take a photo of this face and touch it up with the mischief it had once had, now replaced by a grim, jeering humour.

“Can I
bring my camera another time?”

“What for? You working for some glossy magazine?”

“Yup. We need male models.” There was a rumble of laughter. The man waved, gesturing the room in general.

“A picture of elegant ruin against the backdrop of my fine decor. You could call it
fin de si¢cle
. The millennium beckons.” He sipped the coffee. “What do you want? Is she well?”

“Elisabeth's fine, but I'm not. I need to know about the man who murdered Emma.”

“How could I tell you that? We don't know.”

“I want to go over it again. How you found him.”

“I've told you, how many times? You found him, even if you didn't know who you'd found. It was all your fault.”

“No, it wasn't.”

“Oh, all right then. You merely made the observation that there was a resemblance between Emma and another, surviving victim. A casual mention of the rings and the hair. You formed the link. We did the rest. Found your little friend Jack.”

“But there was something else, wasn't there? Something which made you sure?”

“Oh yes.
Jack had the opportunity.” Jenkins was talkative now. “He was devastated by her death: she had been so kind to him, I quote. We saw him in the first neighbourhood roundup. I couldn't bring him in for further questioning: it would blow sky high the only pretence of a lead we had. No way. I didn't even want to get a search warrant, so, as it happens, he was burgled. Such a coincidence. Some person took his videos and his porn movies, had a good look at his love letters, none sent, of course. Poor Jack. Quite an essayist, he was. Fantasies of sexual violence. Odd, he never reported the burglary, but we left his money alone, of course. Had a good look at his documents. He was a regular lonely hearts advertiser. And he had particulars of an introduction agency.”

Joe laughed, awkwardly and a little too loud. “Plenty of people have those. It's difficult to meet people these days.”