Dark Corners: A Novel (8 page)

But what about that chap who lived in the top half of what she had heard from Stacey was Carl’s house? Lizzie liked walking through the mews, imagining what it would be like to live there. One time she’d seen that chap come out of the front door. This was before she’d started at the school and when she’d been doing old Miss Phillips’s typing. Imagine being called ‘Miss’ in this day and age! One day Lizzie had to take Miss Phillips’s pooch, a very fat pug, to the vet’s and there was that chap from Falcon Mews on reception. Was he a vet, then? No matter; she would think of a reason to go into the clinic and ask him whether by any chance he knew if Carl now owned a flat in Pinetree Court.

Lizzie was going out to dinner with a new man. She’d met him at a coffee bar near Stacey’s flat. He seemed posh, promising, though she couldn’t yet call him her boyfriend. His name was Swithin Campbell. She was meeting him at Delaunay’s in the West End, and afterwards he would bring her back here in a taxi and she would ask him in for coffee or something out of one of those exotic bottles of Stacey’s. She had never before met anyone called Swithin; she had only heard of it in connection with St Swithin’s Day. Sometime in July it was, and if it rained that day (it always did), it would keep on raining for forty days, or so her father said.

Lizzie never went to hairdressers. She had thick, glossy caramel-coloured hair that only needed washing. She put on what she judged to be Stacey’s best dress, more a gown than a dress, and in a gorgeous blue-green colour. It was called teal, Lizzie thought, and the neckline was encrusted with what looked like turquoises. She had bought nail varnish in the same colour on the way back from the playgroup but decided against it. Men only liked red varnish.

At ten to seven, she went downstairs to walk to Chalk Farm tube station. She was trying not to spend money on taxis.

Tom Milsom had had a lovely day, down to Holborn on the number 98, lunch in a nice pub where they served very good fish and chips, then back on the 139, which didn’t go where he thought it would, but dropped him outside a tube station that happened to be on the Jubilee line. The train took him to Willesden Green. Then it was just a short walk to Mamhead Drive.

Dot had wanted to come with him, but he had put her off, he hoped not unkindly. He said she would be bored, but the truth was that he enjoyed his bus trips so much, he wanted to keep them to himself. He didn’t want to talk but to look and, he supposed, to learn, to discover how little he really knew of London. Now he
was
learning, and that was something she wouldn’t understand. She and Lizzie tended to laugh at this new interest of his, but to him it wasn’t funny. It was marvellous, and very serious.

Next week he would be more ambitious. He could take the number 6 to halfway down the Edgware Road, then get on the 7. Lizzie had once told him that she went on that bus to the Portobello Road. It was such a trendy place to go to that he hadn’t liked to tell her he had never been there, that he barely knew where it was. The number 7 bus driver would, though.

‘You’re very quiet,’ Dot said when he got in. ‘Thinking about your exciting trip, are you? I’ll come with you one of these days.’

‘No you won’t,’ Tom said hastily. ‘You don’t get your pass till you’re sixty.’

The following day he took the number 16 to Victoria. The building works going on around the bus station, the chaos and the crowds, even though it was only half past three in the afternoon, made him resolve not to come here again until the underground improvement works were finished.

Coming home, he got on the 16, which went to Cricklewood Broadway, from where he could transfer to one of the three routes that would take him to Willesden. But at the Edgware Road stop, a big burly man got on, slapped his pass on to the card reader and shouted out when it didn’t beep. The driver took the card from him and read it; it was out of date and he told the fat man he would need to renew it. The queue getting on the bus began muttering angrily. The man with the out-of-date pass shouted insults at the driver, calling him a black bastard. That was enough. The driver said to get off, everyone must get off because he was calling the police. The man with the out-of-date pass yelled that he wasn’t getting off, and the driver said good, that suited him. Tom escaped through the exit in the middle of the bus and walked the short distance to the next stop, where he got on the number 6.

He smiled. When he got home, he would tell Dorothy about the row on the bus. She always enjoyed a bit of a fight so long as no one came to blows.

For once, as Lizzie put it to herself, she hadn’t drunk very much, just a gin and tonic and two small glasses of wine the whole evening. She wanted to make a good impression on Swithin, and she noticed how little he drank.

He had seemed at their first meeting an intelligent man, but he hadn’t much conversation, and long silences fell. She tried to fill the gaps by telling him about her father’s bus rides, making his small adventures as amusing as she could, but he appeared to have no sense of humour. Like most of her friends, Lizzie believed that if a man took you out for an expensive dinner in a place such as this one, he would expect you to have sex with him afterwards. Of course you didn’t necessarily have to. She looked across the table at him and smiled mysteriously. He began talking about the Scottish referendum.

Taking her home in a taxi, he accepted her invitation to come in for coffee. She had only once tried Stacey’s espresso machine and looked forward to using it again. She wanted to see the impression it made on him. She wasn’t disappointed.

‘You own this place, do you?’

Those were almost his first words as he walked into the living room. She said she did.

‘At current prices it must be worth close on a million.’

‘Not quite that,’ she said and went to make the coffee. When she came back, he was looking at Stacey’s paintings of tropical birds and examining a table of pale yellow wood with a grey inlay. Lizzie didn’t much like it; it was the kind of thing her mother would have called too modern.

‘Is it a ——?’ Swithin uttered a name that sounded like a town in Slovakia.

‘Oh yes. It was very pricey.’ She knew she shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t the sort of word to use in connection with valuable furniture. ‘I didn’t buy it, my mother did.’

He gave her a strange look. They drank their coffee and he talked about house prices. When he had emptied his cup, she expected him to move towards her along the sofa, but he got up instead. ‘Very good coffee,’ he said.

There was nothing to say to that. He gave her a kiss, a light peck on the cheek, and quickly departed.

In the weeks she had been in Pinetree Court, few callers had come to the door. The post, what there was of it, was deposited in the boxes in the entrance hall. Meters were read in cupboards outside and by the front doors. So when the doorbell rang the following morning, Lizzie jumped. She wasn’t going to answer it or even guess who it might be. It rang again. It will ring twice, she thought, and then they’ll give up and go away.

The sound of a key turning in the lock brought a cold shiver. She waited in the little hallway as a man she recognised as the concierge stepped into the flat. With him was a tall, very handsome man of about her own age whom she vaguely recognised.

‘Who might you be?’ said the concierge.

Lizzie did her best to make her voice bold. ‘I’m a friend of Miss Warren’s. I’m looking after the place.’

‘Miss Warren passed away some time ago. The apartment is now about to be occupied by this gentleman, Mr Weatherspoon.’

Of course. That was who it was. Aunt Yvonne’s son.

‘Hi, Gervaise,’ said Lizzie.

‘Well, if it isn’t little Lizzie,’ said Gervaise Weatherspoon. ‘How did you get in?’

‘I’ve had a key for
years
,’ she said.

It was plain the concierge didn’t believe her, something Lizzie resented, as for once what she said was more or less true. ‘I’ll have that key, thank you, miss, and then we’ll say no more about it,’ he said.

She gave him the key meekly because she had just remembered she didn’t need it. The other one, the one in the floor of the recycling cupboard, was known to her and her alone. She favoured Gervaise with a radiant smile. ‘Will you be living here?’

‘One day,’ he said with a smile to match hers. ‘First I’ll be going on an archaeological visit to Cambodia and Laos.’

Gervaise asked for Lizzie’s phone number so she could give him details of the flat’s phone and energy suppliers. The concierge looked disgruntled: he could help Mr Weatherspoon with that, he said. But Lizzie took no notice and wrote down her mobile number and the landline at the Kilburn flat. Gervaise’s request had given her an idea, and done her a power of good. Never mind that she was going to be an hour late for school.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ she promised.

Lizzie packed every bag she could find in the flat. Seeing no reason to leave any of Stacey’s clothes behind, she stuffed them into suitcases from Louis Vuitton, Marks & Spencer and Selfridges. Then she phoned for a taxi.

While she was waiting for it, there came a knock at the door. Of course she thought it was the taxi, but no, it was the concierge, with an enormous bunch of white lilies, feathery gypsophila and pink rosebuds. The card accompanying it was addressed to ‘Darling Liz’ with love from Swithin. Liz indeed. No one had ever called her that.

Taking the flowers with her, she removed the extra key from underneath the brick in the floor of the recycling cupboard and put it in her handbag. Then she stacked the luggage on the pavement to wait for the taxi to take her to Kilburn.

RENT DAY, THE
last day of the month, had gone past. By 2 August, Carl knew he wouldn’t be paid.

He wasn’t yet destitute. The second instalment of the advance he had received on publication of
Death’s Door
had taught him to be careful, if not frugal, and though nearly all of that had gone, he had saved a little more from the July rent that had come in. He probably had as much as four hundred pounds in his current account. But if Dermot’s August rent failed to appear – and plainly it was not going to – the demand for council tax did.
City of Westminster
it said across the top of the letter, and underneath that, the sum. He could pay it in instalments, of course, but was that much help?

That afternoon, he sat down at the computer, went to the document called
Sacred Spirits
.doc, and read with mounting disgust what he had written. It was hopeless, useless. Tinkering with it was a waste of time. After staring at the text in despair, he deleted all ten pages. He must forget this philosophy theme, this learned stuff he was obviously useless at, and think seriously of something he could do, like a sequel to
Death’s Door
. If that wasn’t feasible, he could create a new detective, a woman, perhaps. He would begin by making a list of characters, looking up names online and finding new ones in the surname dictionary.

But his heart wasn’t in it. All his heart could do was sink. He missed Nicola so much. Her old flatmates had found room for her. She was gone. And there was Dermot. Suppose he really did stay in the flat and never paid the rent again? Perhaps Carl could tell him to leave because he wanted to sell the house. But he knew this wouldn’t work. Dermot would refuse to go.

There was another course to follow. Force him to pay the rent and leave him to do his worst. Dermot would no doubt tell this woman Yvonne Weatherspoon the tale of Carl’s ‘medicaments’ and the sale of the DNP to Stacey. And why should it stop there? Dermot might not lead an involved and widespread social life, but he met a lot of people. He talked (chatted, he would call it) to a host of pet-owners, for example. He would carry out his threat to go to that newspaper that sold widely in Hampstead and Highgate. He would say he had a story for them and go to their office to give an interview. He might even approach one of the tabloids, the
Sun
, say, or the
Mail
. Stacey was known to the public. It would be a juicy story: ‘Author Kills Actress’. Carl would never have a serious literary career again.

He was making himself feel sick. He leaned over his desk, putting his head in his hands, but this did nothing to help. He ran, choking, into the kitchen and threw up into the sink.

The footsteps behind him could only be Dermot’s. Carl kept his head bent, ran the cold tap, switched on the waste disposal unit, hoping the noise would drive his tenant away. It didn’t.

‘You’re not very well, are you?’ Dermot used his deeply concerned voice. To Carl it sounded as if he was enjoying himself. ‘Don’t you think you should see your doctor? I’ll come with you if you like.’

‘Go away. You’re ruining my life.’

‘No, no,’ said Dermot. ‘It’s you who’s doing that.’

Carl drank some water from the tap. He wiped his mouth on the tea cloth.

Dermot said, ‘I came down to ask you if you would like to go out for a drink. Maybe something to eat as well?’

This was an instance when to respond with ‘Are you joking?’ was a genuine question.

‘No,’ Dermot said. ‘I thought it would be a good idea to get to know each other better.’

Carl said, ‘I don’t want to know you better. I don’t want to know you at all. I want you out of my life. Now go away, please. Please go away.’

When Dermot had gone, Carl sat down at the kitchen table, found Nicola’s mother’s number on his phone’s list of contacts and rang it. There was no answer. He remembered his own mother telling him that there was a time not so long ago when your name didn’t come up when you made a call. The person you called didn’t know who it was, so they had to answer. As things were now, Nicola might be sitting in her mother’s house, also in a kitchen for all he knew, and deliberately not answering because she could see ‘Carl’ on the screen. He thought, I don’t even know where her house is. Aylesbury, I think, but I don’t know the address.

As he was leaving, the postman brought ten copies of Carl’s book. When he’d originally been shown the jacket design he hadn’t liked it, but had accepted the corpse and the blood and the weeping woman. It looked no better now under the bright-coloured glaze, and he dumped the box on the hall table and left it there. A moment in time that should have been glorious – the delivery of copies of his first published book – was just a disappointment, like everything else in his life.