Dark Corners: A Novel (6 page)

‘I don’t remember,’ Carl said, but Una pursued the matter exhaustively. Who was the aunt? How would they find her? How long would it take?

While she talked, Carl sat eating everything that was left. It was a change for him to think about Stacey from a different aspect, not from the point of view of her death and whose fault it was. He also remembered where Stacey had kept her spare set of keys, though he was sure they wouldn’t be there any longer.

Una lived in Gloucester Avenue in Camden, which was not far from Primrose Hill Road but some way from the part of it where Stacey’s flat was. On a whim, he made a detour on his way home and, looking up at what had been Stacey’s windows, saw a faint light on. Someone was in there. Perhaps a solicitor? An estate agent? At twenty minutes to ten at night? It wasn’t his business. He had come to check on the keys in the recycling cupboard.

There was no one about. He shifted the recycling bin a few inches, surprised to find it half full of newspapers and packaging. The keys were there all right, underneath the floor brick. Suppose he went up in the lift and let himself into the flat – he had never done so in the past – and found Stacey in there, not as she had been in recent months, but a slim and beautiful ghost, waiting for him, waiting to accuse him of killing her.

Don’t be a fool, he said to himself as he made his way out on to Chalk Farm Road, where the pubs were spilling out and noisy crowds sat at the tables on the pavement.

TOM MILSOM GOT
off the number 98 bus at Marble Arch and, having walked a few yards to the top of Park Lane, hopped on to the 414. It was amazing how you could get on and off buses and on again all for free. Well, not really free; you’d paid for it in taxes all your life. But he wondered if there was any other capital city in the world where, so long as you were over sixty, you could ride on any bus without paying. He felt a surge of affection for his country, so cruelly maligned by many people. The words of the hymn came into his head, ‘I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above’, and tears pricked the back of his eyes, but they were tears of warmth and love.

He went to the upper level. Most people of his age didn’t, but you saw so much from the top of a bus, especially when charging down the sloping part of Park Lane. He looked down at the Dorchester and Grosvenor House and the beautiful houses that remained, and there, walking along the pavement, was his next-door neighbour Mrs Grenville, holding the hand of a man who wasn’t her husband. Tom thought it should have been a woman observing this bit of scandal; gossip was wasted on him.

It was three in the afternoon, and the bus was three-quarters empty as it made its way down into Knightsbridge. To his surprise, it stopped right outside Harrods. No use to him, he thought. He might as well stay on and go to the bus’s destination, Putney Bridge. There was bound to be another bus waiting there for him, one he had never been on before, never even heard of, and if it didn’t take him all the way home, it would take him somewhere he could pick up a number 98 or even a 6, which passed the end of Mamhead Drive.

Carl was forcing himself to write three or four paragraphs every day, but now as he read his new pages, he admitted to himself that they weren’t very good. The prose was laboured, heavy, lifeless, the obvious result of pushing himself. But it’s about a philosopher, he thought, it’s bound not to have the witty lightness of
Death’s Door
. Perhaps he should look on his efforts as a practice run, a trial exercise to get himself back into novelist mode? He produced a few more lines and interrupted himself by remembering that today was the last of the month and tomorrow the first of July, rent day. Of course the rent wouldn’t come; it never now came the day before, though apologies sometimes did.

So he wasn’t surprised when Dermot tapped at his door. Letting him in, he awaited the excuses. But there were no excuses, only smiles and the handover of a brown envelope.

‘What’s this, then?’

‘Your rent, Carl. What else?’

‘You never pay me the day before,’ said Carl, ‘or the day itself, come to that.’ He opened the envelope and took out the so-desirable purple notes. ‘Still, I’m not complaining.’

‘Look at it this way. It may be the first time, but it may also be the last.’

‘You don’t mean you’re leaving?’

‘Oh, no. No, no.’

Dermot gave Carl another of his ghastly smiles, the yellow blotches on his teeth looking worse than usual. Carl noticed that a large pustule had appeared on his chin. He listened to him mounting the stairs, and then asked himself what that had meant. That stuff about Dermot’s payment being the last.

It meant nothing, he told himself. Dermot thought he was being funny. Put it out of your head. It was nonsense.

But that ‘no, no’ rang out and echoed in his head. He looked again at the contents of the envelope. Perhaps there were twice as many notes this month? But he had counted them the first time and there were not. He wanted to get back to
Sacred Spirits
, but concentration was impossible.

‘Oh, no. No, no’ surely meant that Dermot wasn’t giving up his flat. It had been a very firm denial. Suddenly Carl saw that, firm or not, it had nothing to do with the contents of the envelope being Dermot’s last payment. He had plainly said it might be the last. Could he have meant instead that at the end of next month, there would be no envelope and no money? He couldn’t mean that. A tenant had to pay his rent. He would have to ask Dermot what he had meant. He couldn’t go another four weeks with the suspense of not knowing.

But a week went by without Carl doing anything about it. From his living room window he saw Dermot going off to work, and on the Sunday morning leaving for church. Some respite from the nagging anxiety came with the idea that Dermot had only meant that this was the last time the twelve hundred pounds would be paid in cash, and that in future he intended to pay by cheque or direct debit. The relief lasted only a few minutes. If he had meant that, he would have said so.

Carl had rarely been to the top floor since Dermot had arrived. Now he determined to go up and ask for an explanation of their last bizarre exchange. What had it meant? Ten days had passed since he had encountered Dermot. Almost never in the course of their association – you couldn’t call it a friendship – had as much as ten days gone by without their seeing each other, even if only on the stairs.

He left it another two days. There was still no sign of Dermot. But he wasn’t ill and confined to bed, and he hadn’t done a moonlight flit. Carl could occasionally hear footfalls on the bare boards of the top-floor flat, and once a burst of religious music indicated that Dermot’s front door was open. On the third day after he had come to his decision, he climbed the top flight and thumped on the door

‘Goodness me,’ said Dermot from inside. ‘Whatever’s wrong? Has something happened?’

‘Just open the door, will you?’

The door came open, but slowly, rather reluctantly, as if it had been bolted on the inside. There had never been bolts on that door before Dermot came. From the kitchen came a strong smell of sausages and bacon frying. Stepping back to let Carl come in, Dermot said in the pleasantest, friendliest tone he had ever heard from him, ‘Now I do hope there isn’t going to be trouble, Carl. We have had such an amicable relationship up till now.’

‘I just want you to tell me something.’

‘If I can. You know I always bend over backwards to keep a peaceful atmosphere. Now what can I tell you? No, wait, let me make us a nice cup of coffee.’

‘I don’t want any bloody coffee,’ said Carl. ‘I want you to tell me what you meant when you handed me the last lot of rent. You said it was the first time and it might be the last. I said, “You’re not leaving, are you?” and you said, “Oh, no. No, no.”’

Dermot smiled his ghastly smile, said, ‘Let me just pop into the kitchenette while I turn off the burner.’ He came back still smiling. ‘There, sorry about that. I couldn’t have my lunch ruined, could I? Yes, back to our last conversation. I don’t quite see where I went wrong. I said I wasn’t leaving, and I’m not. Does that satisfy you? Not leaving. Staying. Happy again?’

Carl felt rage rising inside him. Dermot was playing with him. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but we have an agreement, signed by both of us, and witnessed. Right? And that agreement states that you pay me a certain sum each month while you occupy this flat. Right again?’

Dermot had put a spoonful of instant coffee into each of two mugs and picked up the electric kettle. Through a window in the side of the kettle Carl could see the water boiling. Dermot held it very close to Carl’s face, and Carl flinched, jerking his chair back. Smiling, Dermot poured water on to the coffee.

‘Ah, but don’t you remember who the witness was? I do. It was Stacey Warren. A sheet of paper taken out of your printer, written on by you and witnessed by a woman who’s now passed away. Valueless, I’d say, wouldn’t you?’ Dermot took a gulp of the strong black coffee he had made. It would have choked Carl but it had almost no effect on the other man. ‘So yes, I’m staying, but I’d say it’s probable I’ll never pay you rent again.’

‘But you can’t live here rent-free.’

‘I think I can,’ said Dermot very calmly. ‘Shall I tell you why? It’s DNP. Dinitrophenol. I think you should know that while I’m a believer, a pretty strict follower of the Christian faith, a churchgoer, as you may have noticed, I haven’t any of what some people call honour. Now I know you had a cabinetful of DNP. It came from your dad, I heard you say, and I had a good scrounge round through all his medication. If you didn’t want that happening you should have locked your bathroom door. The first time there were a hundred capsules, the second time fifty. You sold fifty of those poisonous pills to Stacey Warren, didn’t you? As a matter of fact, I was passing your open bathroom door when the transaction – the sale, I mean – took place.’

Carl would have expected someone in his situation to turn white. They did in books. In his own book. Conversely, his face had flushed, and he could feel the skin burning.

‘It’s not against the law. It’s not. You can’t make it against the law,’ he said in a tremulous voice, a voice that didn’t sound like his own,

Without a word, Dermot got up and walked out of the room. He was back quickly, carrying a page cut from the
Guardian
. ‘You want to read that. You can keep it. I’ve got copies.’

Killed by DNP
,
the line under the pictures said, photographs of a girl and a young man and a number of yellow capsules. The police believed that the man had given the pills to the girl with the specific intention of killing her. He had used DNP as a poison. Carl read in the article that the drug could kill even if doses of it had been safely taken previously. One woman had taken it for two years before she died. Another’s death had been mysterious until tests found that the pills by her bed were DNP. The drug was available online, and selling it wasn’t against the law, but it could too easily be lethal. Two MPs had expressed concern, and one said it might be helpful to have DNP brought under the Misuse of Drugs Act.

Carl laid down the paper. He was sweating and could feel the drops of perspiration on his upper lip. ‘This means nothing. The drug is not illegal.’

‘So you’re not worried,’ said Dermot. ‘In two weeks’ time I pay your rent and you won’t mind if I chat to a few people about what you did. Fifty pills. That’s a lot. More than enough to kill. Perhaps you intended her to die? And what about your reputation as a brilliant young writer, such a promising new talent?’

Carl stood up. ‘So you want to chat to people about me? That’s rich. And who are these people?’

‘Sit down a minute. There’s the press, of course. The anonymous tip here and there. And I’ve been doing my homework. Stacey Warren had an aunt, and this aunt has a son and a daughter. As it happens, I know the aunt quite well. Mrs Yvonne Weatherspoon was devoted to Stacey, and had her to stay when her parents died. She brings her cat to the clinic where I work, and it would be the easiest thing in the world to have a little chat with her about poor Stacey’s death. In fact she’s due to bring the cat in for her shots tomorrow.’

Carl knew very well that you should never say ‘How dare you?’ to anyone, least of all someone who was threatening you. It sounded ridiculous. But he did say it. ‘How dare you threaten me, you blackmailer?’

But Dermot seemed very calm and in command of the situation. ‘I’ve been threatening you for the past ten minutes, as you very well know. I can’t threaten you with police arrest. But it’s nasty stuff, isn’t it? Mrs Weatherspoon is a very strong-minded woman – do they still use that expression? You probably know better than I do. A strong character is what I mean. Once she knows where poor Stacey got the DNP, she will, as they say, take it further. The
Hampstead and Highgate Express
, for a start, and maybe that paper that operates around Muswell Hill? They may even send their photographer round to get a picture of you. Stacey was well known. You’re a novelist. The gossip columns will love it.’

‘I don’t want to talk any more about it,’ said Carl. ‘You have to pay the rent and that’s all there is to it.’

He was barely out of the room when he heard his tenant putting the coffee cups in the sink and tipping the contents of the frying pan on to a plate.

Without that rent, what was he going to live on? It would take him months, if not years, to finish
Sacred Spirits
, and already he had no confidence in his work. But this was all hypothetical. He would have his rent and let that criminal bastard, that blackmailer, do his worst. He would ignore him. He would get back to his writing.

This brave stance buoyed Carl for a while. But when he sat down at the computer again, he found that nothing would come. All he wrote, without really knowing that he was doing so, were the words that kept running in a continuous loop through his head:
it’s not against the law, it’s not against the law, it’s not against the law.