Dark Corners: A Novel (3 page)

‘Did your dad use it?’

‘He can’t have. He was so thin he was practically a skeleton.’

She took the package from his hand and looked at it. ‘DNP,’ she said. ‘Dinitrophenol. One hundred capsules.’ Then she read the instructions and looked at the price marked on the package. One hundred pounds.

Carl took the bag from her and replaced it on the shelf, but not at the back.

‘I could order some online,’ she said. ‘But – well, you’ve already got these. Would you sell me fifty?’

Sell
them? He knew he should just give them to her, but the hotel he and Nicola had stayed in in Fowey had been pricey, the restaurants they had visited in various other Cornish resorts as expensive as London – the kind they never went to in London – and the holiday, though the costs had been shared with Nicola, far more expensive than he had expected. Fifty pounds for these pills wasn’t all that much, but it would be a help. And Stacey could afford it; well, she certainly could if she lost that weight and kept her sitcom job.

‘OK,’ he said, as he counted fifty out into a tooth mug and handed her the packet with the fifty remaining in it.

He went downstairs, realising as he did so that Dermot was closing the front door on his way out. Could he have heard his conversation with Stacey as he came down the stairs? Perhaps. But what did it matter if he had?

By now Stacey had finished her make-up and joined him. They were going up the road to Raoul’s in Clifton Road. Outside on the pavement she handed over the fifty pounds.

He forgot about the transaction, not least because Nicola had moved in and he wondered why they had waited so long; it had been two years since Jonathan had first introduced them. But his novel wasn’t going well and he had reached a stage in which he struggled to produce two or three paragraphs a day. Nicola asked about it, and he always said everything was fine. He had no idea why this writer’s block had arisen.

May was a fine warm month in London, and because staring at his computer was useless and unprofitable, Carl had taken to going out in the late morning while Nicola was at work and picking up a copy of the
Evening Standard
. He chose the
Standard
rather than any other daily paper because it was free.

He stared at today’s front page. There, in full colour, was a three-column photograph of Stacey. She looked beautiful, not smiling, but in a soulful pose, her long, thick blonde hair draped about her shoulders in a theatrical head shot. Described as twenty-four years old, with her face familiar from her starring role in
Station Road
, she had been found dead in her Primrose Hill flat by a friend who had a key. Police said foul play was not suspected.

It couldn’t be – but it must be. Carl broke into a sweat. The phone was ringing as he let himself into the house. It was his mother, Una.

‘Oh darling, have you seen the news about poor Stacey?’

‘It’s in the
Standard
.’

‘She was so lovely before she put on all that weight. There was a time when I thought you might marry her.’

His mother belonged to a generation where women always thought in terms of marriage. Useless to tell her, though he often had, that even girls seldom thought about marriage any more. The subject only came up when they became pregnant, and often not even then.

‘Well, I can’t marry her now, can I? She’s dead.’

‘Oh
darling
.’

‘We were friends,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’

His mother’s words hardly penetrated as he thought about Stacey. He couldn’t believe she was dead. She had eaten for comfort, he supposed. Her addiction to food had been the opposite of anorexia. When there was food around, especially butter and cheese and ham and fruit cake and anything in a rich sauce, she would declare that she mustn’t touch the stuff, she shouldn’t dream of touching it, but she couldn’t resist. And as he watched her grow larger, visibly it seemed, increasing each time he saw her, he stopped seeing her, only going over to her flat in Pinetree Court, Primrose Hill, when she begged him not to desert her, please, please to come. And then it seemed to him that she stuffed down food in front of him to annoy. Of course, that couldn’t have been her motive, but it seemed like it, especially when mayonnaise dribbled down her chin, fragments of carrot cake or macaroons stuck all over a close-fitting angora sweater, and her once beautiful breasts were transformed into vast mounds of sticky cake crumbs.

They had never been lovers but they had been best friends. Now she was gone.

‘A man and a woman can’t be friends,’ said his mother. ‘I wonder if that’s what was wrong, that she ate for comfort.’

‘You mean if I’d married her she’d have stopped eating?’

‘Don’t be silly, Carl.’

He imagined himself married to Stacey and walking along Sutherland Avenue beside her, an increasingly ridiculous sight. He was very thin, which had nothing to do with what he ate or didn’t eat and everything to do with his thin mother and thin father.

He sat down in front of the computer and touched the tiny switch with its blue light. The screen showed him its usual picture, a green hill and a purple mountain behind it. Dermot had once come in just after he had switched it on and started singing some hymn about a green hill far away without a city wall. Now every time Carl saw the screen he thought about that stupid hymn and sometimes even began humming it. He had meant to move the mouse on to
Sacred Spirits
.doc and try to get back into his novel, but instead he went to the internet, telling himself he had never checked on those yellow capsules he had sold Stacey. The little arrow hovered over Google. He typed in the letters DNP, but went no further. He was afraid.

Shutting his eyes – he didn’t want to know, not yet, maybe never – he shifted the cursor to exit.

FOUR DAYS BEFORE
Carl read the story of Stacey’s death, Lizzie Milsom entered Stacey’s flat. It was very imprudent to leave the keys to one’s home outside the property, and quite difficult to do so when the property was a flat. Still, it was something Stacey Warren did and a good many of her friends knew about it.

There were four flats in Pinetree Court, all with different-coloured front doors. The door to the ground-floor flat was blue, while those to the first- and second-floor flats were yellow and green respectively. A staircase went down to the basement flat, where Stacey had told Lizzie the front door was red. Stacey lived on the first floor; she secreted her two keys on a single ring inside the cupboard underneath the flight of steps that led up to the front door. The cupboard, which had no lock, held the four tenants’ waste bins, and there was a loose brick in the floor. Beneath the loose brick, in the hollow space, were Stacey’s spare keys.

Because Stacey had told her she would be out that morning, Lizzie Milsom lifted up the loose brick and helped herself to the keys. She then went into the entrance hall, and went up the stairs to the first floor. Once outside Stacey’s flat, she stood still and listened. Silence. All the occupants would be out at work. What she intended to do was find some small object of no great value, an item such as a piece of pottery or a paperweight or a ballpoint pen – the kind of thing a friend might give you for a Christmas present – and take it away with her, having first substituted another valueless object in its place. The latter she had brought with her: a black and white plastic napkin ring. Doing this – and she often did it – gave her a sense of power. People thought their lives were private and safe, but they were not.

She inserted the key in Stacey’s yellow front door and let herself in.

Lizzie wasn’t beautiful, but she was the kind of girl people called attractive without specifying who they were attractive to. She had lovely blonde hair, thick and long, large innocent brown eyes and pretty hands with nails she kept nice with different-coloured varnish that was never allowed to chip. Her figure was good. She would have liked to dress well but couldn’t afford it.

She and Stacey had known each other for years. Their parents’ homes had been so near each other that they had walked together to their Brondesbury school, which was just down the road. This wasn’t the first time Lizzie had been in Stacey’s flat, but it was the first illicit visit. She searched through the living areas, looking for some trinket or useless article, and after a while decided on a small diary, unused and three years out of date but with Stacey’s name printed inside the front cover. The napkin ring was substituted and the diary went into Lizzie’s bag.

The rooms in Stacey’s flat were large. That is, the living room was large and Lizzie assumed the bedroom was too. She devoted half an hour or so to exploring and searching through cupboards and drawers. She had no intention of taking anything else, and what she had taken she would bring back. But she was more inquisitive than most people, and once in a place that wasn’t hers was consumed with curiosity. She was also a consummate liar. In the unlikely event of someone entering the place she was exploring, she was always ready with the excuse – she called it a reason – that the owner had asked her to check that she or he had turned off the gas or not left the iron on.

She passed an interesting twenty minutes investigating Stacey’s desk drawers, where she found a wad of twenty-pound notes, a bunch of leaflets advertising weight-loss remedies, an unpaid electricity bill and an envelope containing photographs of a naked Stacey taken in the days before she got fat. Lizzie told herself she wasn’t a thief and helped herself to only two twenty-pound notes while anyone without principles would have taken the lot. She proceeded to the kitchen, found a half-full bottle of Campari in the fridge, which was otherwise empty of food and drink, and took a swig from it. It made her choke and she wondered what it could have been diluted with. Stacey had a lovely big bathroom, large enough to accommodate an elliptical cross-trainer and a rowing machine. ‘She doesn’t get much use out of them,’ said Lizzie aloud.

She nearly gave the bedroom a miss. She wasn’t interested in sorting through Stacey’s underwear or trying out her moisturiser. But the Campari had gone to her head and she thought a lie-down might be a good idea. She opened the bedroom door and stopped short. Stacey, in a lacy nightdress and velvet dressing gown, lay on her back on the floor beside her emperor-size bed. A small plastic packet, empty of whatever it had contained, was beside her, and a glass of what was possibly water. Pale yellow capsules were scattered across the pale yellow carpet.

Lizzie knew Stacey was dead, though she couldn’t have said how she knew. She didn’t scream. Privately she believed that women who screamed when they saw or found a dead body only did it for effect. They could easily have controlled themselves. She made no noise at all.

She knelt down on the floor and felt for Stacey’s pulse. But she didn’t need that; she only needed the coldness of the skin on her face and the icy dampness of her hands to know that Stacey had been there for a long time, probably since the evening before. She also knew that she had to call the police, or maybe an ambulance, and that now Stacey was dead she really needed no explanation for being in the flat. It would only be a tiny bit awkward. She tapped out 999 on her mobile, and the speed with which it was answered amazed her.

‘Police,’ she said when presented with options. ‘I’ve just found my best friend dead.’

Stacey wasn’t her best friend, but a small lie was necessary. She would have felt cheated if she had told anything in the region of the truth. Saying she had come into the flat with her own set of keys, keys that Stacey had given her, was only a way of supporting the best-friend statement. She mustn’t overdo it.

The operator asked her if she would stay in the flat until the police arrived, and she said of course. She sat down, because in spite of her bravado, she felt quite shocked and afraid that she might fall if she stayed standing up. While she waited for the policeman and perhaps others to come, she replaced the diary in the living room and took back her napkin ring. Best do that – suppose they found her DNA on it?

Alone with her thoughts and feeling stronger, Lizzie sat in an armchair in the living room and wondered what would happen to the flat. It had been Stacey’s own, free of mortgage, bought with an inheritance from her parents. Stacey had been proud of her financial independence, certain she could carry on with her acting, with big parts in TV serials, once she had lost weight. Her parents had died in a car crash on the M25 when Stacey was at university. She had been staying with her aunt Yvonne Weatherspoon and her aunt’s children when the accident happened, and remained with them throughout her time at university. Lizzie wondered if she should phone Yvonne to tell her about Stacey’s death, but thought better (or worse) of it. Let the police do that. She didn’t have her number, and although she knew Stacey’s aunt slightly, she had never got on with her.

In contrast to Stacey, Lizzie lived in a rented bedsit in Iverson Road, Kilburn. The rent was very high for what it was and the place was small, damp and in dire need of redecoration. She thought about it while she sat in Stacey’s flat, and thought too how little she wanted to return to it. Her job as a teaching assistant at a private school paid very badly, although it had its advantages. To be able to walk to work was one of them, and a free lunch was another. She wasn’t supposed to have a free lunch, or indeed any lunch at school at all, but there was no one to notice her eating from one or more of the many untouched plates she removed from the children’s cafeteria. She also ate an evening meal at her parents’ once a week, not because she wanted to, but bearing in mind – never for a moment forgetting – that her father paid half her rent. Well, her father
and
her mother, her mother told her she should say, though Lizzie couldn’t see why, as her mother didn’t work, or wasn’t, as she preferred to put it, a wage-earner. A breadwinner, said her father, who had been, until he retired, quite well-off.

Lizzie was thinking rather wistfully of the shepherd’s pie and queen of puddings her mother would serve up tonight, when the doorbell rang.