Blind Date (30 page)

“I see. Is there
anything else you would want from a partner that I should know about?”

He put his feet up on her desk, leant back so far on his spindly little chair, it creaked on the verge of self-destruction. Scratched the crotch of his jeans: thought about it.

“Well, as long as she comes across, big tits and blonde hair would be nice.”

She rose, unfazed, but outraged.

“There's the door, Joe. I'm not a service to vulgar predators. Get out.”

“I've got cash, honest. Don't you want the story of my life, mam?”

“No.”

Get out. That was the story of his life. He could not remember if he had ever heard it said with greater conviction.

O
wl was wandering round the office in the late afternoon, chewing indigestion sweeties after three hours of chewing almost anything else which was sweet and sticky as an antidote to beer without food in the middle of the day. He was looking for Michael. What a fucking mistake to explain what was not, after all, his problem to fucking Joe, even if Joe had bought the beer.
Not his problem
. Michael was a non-participating listener, brilliant in meetings, for keeping quiet and only giving a reserved opinion, later. Like some kind of mathematician who needs time to do his sums. Owl was also looking for his mobile phone. Open-plan office, monitored phone calls, people kept pinching his phone and standing in the corridor.
I didn't lie about that, Joe
. Perhaps he had, because it was there, on his desk, making a bleep, bleep, bleep like someone in pain. He picked it up, listened.

“Michael,
is that you?” The woman's voice was distorted. Reception varied. Everyone sounded like a goldfish.

“Yes,” he said, furious. “Can't you tell?”

“Go and get her, Michael. Don't wait.”

He dropped it. Bastard. Off. The sound stopped. It bleeped again. He snatched it.

“Lo.”

“Rob?”

“No!” he yelled. The sound of his voice was unnaturally loud over the hum of other, telephonic activity. Owl looked at his state-of-the-art machine as if it were a snake. Then he put it on the floor and stamped on its head.

There was nothing he wanted which he could call his own.

M
atthew now understood
the importance of light and why people talked about it. Dark nights drawing in, they'd say, and he could never see why it was worth mentioning, because there was always something to do, dark or light, and food appeared at the same times. Now, he could see how the quality of light mattered so much and how it changed between noon and three, and how by five in the afternoon it was perceptibly duller because of the longer shadows. And also how he was a little duller himself, tired by the fiddly bits of soft wire, and the reflection and the interruptions in the shop. Customers saying “What is he doing?” as if it were not perfectly obvious and Audrey saying, “Enough, enough,” but he was mesmerized. As well as proud.

“If you use your eyes for different purposes,” Donald told him, “it gives them a break. They come back into focus, good as new, but they like a change.” His eyes had been fine the night before, when Matthew was looking in the book Audrey had given him. A new book, nice to the touch, with little enough to read and plenty of pictures of
Some Famous Gems
. The Ko-i-Noor diamond, just a hunk of sparkling rock; the Timur ruby, big and red; the Dresden green diamond which was lost in its setting and, his favourite, a dagger from the Topkapi palace, which made him smile. The hilt was set with three enormous, very, very green emeralds the colour of a sticky liquer, and on the top of the hilt there was an emerald lid which flipped back on a hinge to reveal a small, jewelled watch. Well, he didn't know much, but he knew that no-one but a sultan was going to rush about getting blood or mud on this, and what did it have the watch
for?
Was the sultan going to take the knife out of its sheath, flip up the lid and check the time before he stabbed someone with it? Oh yes, quick draw. Matt had stood in his bedroom at granny's, swinging his right arm and plunging an imaginary dagger into his pillow, remembering to check the time first, and then putting the dagger back into its gold sheath. Feeling the thing in his hand, guessing the weight of it with the emeralds cold and uncomfortable and the diamonds sharp.

Piecing together the
chandelier gave him enormous pleasure, although after so many slow hours of it over two days, there were times when he wanted to smash it and scream. Parts of it were intact, so you could see the way it should be and none of the branches were broken. Each branch was designed to hold a little glass dish, with a holder for a candle, and beneath each dish was a large crystal pear drop, attached by twisted wire. Connecting each branch was a rope of multifaceted crystals, the size of small marbles, with one bigger droplet in the middle of each row. Dozens of rows, six branches at the top, twelve on the next tier, twenty-four on the third. It was a repetitive, jigsaw-puzzle kind of game to find the right kind of piece and connect it to the piece before, and his fingers ached. But what puzzled him, when he thought about it, was the fact that some of the drops, only a few of the small and a couple of the large, were colder to the touch than the others, and they were not all the same colour.

He could not explain
it to himself or to Audrey, because he needed to work it out. All the stones were white, but once some of the filth had come off on his hands, he could see different varieties of white and different kinds of light. He was not to clean the thing until it was as finished as it could be. There was no point, Audrey said, ‘cos you muck it up as you go along, but, clean or dirty, he could still see the differences. Mostly they were the same: not uniform, but the same. There was other stuff in the book he had been reading, too. About what all these kings and queens and tsars and merchants did with their jewels to hide them. Sewed them into clothes. Scratched the surfaces to make them look cheaper. Made marks with a laundry pen on the lower facets to create the appearance of flaws. Jewellers boiled them with laundry blue, heated them to disguise and change colour, put wax on the bottom of a ruby to make it look “sleepy.” Anything to hide the fire inside. He was sleepy. He loved the thought of sleepy stones.

Topaz is yellow, but it need not be yellow: it can be colourless, pale blue, golden-brown and pink. There are five thousand different categories of diamonds. A rock crystal can be found in a stone which looks like a potato. Beryl, the stuff of emerald and aquamarine, need have no colour. Tourmaline shows the greatest colour range … Matthew liked the idea of it best, because it could come in stripes.

There was a stone in
the chandelier he handled now which looked as if it were tinged with pink. He blinked: he was tired and when he looked again, the pink had gone. Not all these larger droplets were cut the same: some had so many more facets than others. Why? He felt a great fear gripping his heart. That and a sense of wonder.

“Enough,” said Audrey again. “You know what? You are a grade A smashing lad and I fucking love you. Am I right or am I right?”

“Right,” he said, faintly.

“When it's all together, it has to be washed. Or there might be a spray. Are you game?”

“Right.”

“And after that, petal, it's all fucking yours.”

“Oh no,” he said. “No, no, no. Where would I put it?”

“C
an we talk about something else?”

“Nope. Impossible.”

“Can we talk at all?”

“Oh yes. You get used to the noise.”

Band practice, again: British Legion junior brigade, going on in the body of the church. The walls hid the shrill sound of young voices and the more sonorous sounds of those who aspired to control them, without disguising the tuneless blast of a tribe of trombones. The cat did not like it, Joe had noticed it spitting and retreating from Father Flynn, who was herding the troops inside, like a benign warder, wearing his jeans and trainers and Mickey Mouse T-shirt which he thought was cool and they thought ridiculous, his jacket pockets clanking with keys. He took the British Legion children to heart as a future congregation. Joe had waved, Flynn had waved; you could get a lot of promise into a wave. The noise was like a series of distant car crashes. Phrumph, prumph, prumph and then in with the cymbals, kids going bumm, bumm bumm on the drums, silence and then a lonely wail of despair from the one with the horn.

“I'm already
used to it.”

“The hell you are. How long have you been squatting here, Joe? You even get post.”

He coughed. The sound beyond the wall slackened into a series of tuneless moans.

“Only a couple of weeks before you came back,” he admitted.

“Ruining my reputation, no doubt.”

“What reputation? Besides, I wasn't here all the time. I do work you know. I've got regular commitments all over the place. I was away for half the time and even when I was here, I was quiet as a mouse. I didn't want to draw Flynn's attention. He likes me, you see.”

There was wine on the table, food in the fridge and a very temporary sensation of all being well with the world. The nights were drawing in, a man in the corner shop had observed with the wisdom of a sage; it was cooler, but Joe was willing to bet it was hot and stuffy in the church, like Mrs. Smythe's rooms. Elisabeth lit the cigarette which was the preliminary to anything.

“We were discussing the lovely Mrs. Smythe.”

“You shouldn't have gone there. Do you know that?”

She ignored him. “It might just have put a different complexion on the whole thing if I had known what Mrs. Smythe did, from the very beginning,” Elisabeth said. “I knew that Jack had gone to an agency, something I didn't quite see a man like that doing. Jack was arrogant after a fashion: even going through a lonely hearts column wounded his pride. He still thought women should come to
him
—that was part of his bitter disappointment—although he was a sucker for those who did. I got the impression, somewhere along the line, that for Jack to write a letter, or to go to an agency and spend the money, well, that would have been someone else's idea. Jack always had to be led. Someone talked him into it, said, why don't you try? The sort of thing my sister would advise. She was a great matchmaker.”

Emma simply sounded secure
and well kept, liked flirting from a position of safety, Joe thought, sourly. She would have had a coterie of people who adored her and she liked to arrange their lives.

“Emma was nice to Caroline Smythe, because, in her understated way, which can be devastating, even without a hint of bad manners, my mother was nasty; so was I. If not to her face, certainly nasty about her. She stayed for two weeks a year and she always seemed to coincide with a crisis and make herself indispensable. I don't know why she kept coming back. I think she was, how can I put it? Slightly in love with us. Whatever my mother says, about my father, that was a private issue.” Elisabeth sipped the wine and let the end of her cigarette ash drop on her mother's letter before brushing it away impatiently. “On the face of it, we were an enviably happy family unit. Buffeted against the world by that beautiful house.”

“I must see that house.”

“You must. It's entirely photogenic. Unlike me.”

“Oh, I don't know about that. Mrs. Smythe didn't dismiss you entirely. She did me. As she should have done. Very right and proper of her.”

Elisabeth chuckled, a lovely sound. Joe wanted to become accustomed to hearing it.

“I think I can thank her son Michael for my misguided ambition to join the police. I took a perverse pleasure in exposing him.”

Joe's heart was doing
a funny pitter-patter.

“For what?”

“For being a thief. He stole jewellery from Mother, jewellery from a shop; they forgave him, I didn't. He was destructive. He was awful and he always smiled. He pinched children and he pinched things. A pincher.”

Joe got up slowly, as if his bones ached. One turn of the big room. Must not get compulsive, like Jenkins. He wanted to see Jenkins, not wanted to, needed.

“Dear Mrs. Smythe told me she didn't have children,” he said. “But she did sport a nice wedding ring. If the wedding ring was a wedding ring. She had so many.”

Elisabeth shook her head. “She wasn't wearing rings,” she said definitely. “I would have noticed. I always notice jewellery.” She held the cigarette aloft, examining otherwise unadorned fingers. “Hardly surprising with my background. You men always get details wrong.”

“She was wearing rings,” Joe roared, banging the table. “Two on each bloody hand. Plus a chain round her neck.”

He regretted shouting. Pale as she was, she had gone the colour of chalk and her blue eyes blazed, brighter than a jewel.

“Yes, of course, she was,” she muttered. “Only this time she kept her hands in her pockets. Until she had time to take them off.”

She had let him read her mother's letter. Or had it been lying there when he arrived? The contents of it gave him the impression of two like minds, running in parallel lines. It was a shocking letter, showing such bloody-minded unhappiness, and all the more appalling for its rigid self-control.

“Could it be,” he ventured slowly, “that someone told Mrs. Smythe about your father's mythical treasure trove? The good old family legend?”

“Now who would do that?”

“Your father, showing
off to a woman who liked him and talked to him, shared his interests where no-one else did. Your mother, when he was dead or dying. Wasn't there a time when both of them trusted her?”

“Emma,” Elisabeth murmured. “Emma, you big-mouthed fool.”

“Emma, the saint who befriended everybody.”

“Ah,” said Elisabeth, knocking back the wine, a pink flush appearing in her cheeks beneath the unfamiliar make-up, “drink is a terrible thing. Give me more.”