one-hit wonder (19 page)

There was a smell in here—a sort of stale smell. Nothing gut churning, just the whiff of bedclothes a couple of weeks past their wash date. It smelled like the bedroom of a teenage boy. It
was
the bedroom of a teenage boy. There were socks on the floor, trainers under the bed, CDs out of their cases, dirty mugs on the TV. Ana pulled open drawers and found several more pairs of unsophisticated underpants plus various items of male clothing of the casual and unfashionable variety—old T-shirts, unbranded jeans, shapeless jumpers.

She fiddled with the bed a bit, pressing levers, until it suddenly boinged upright and scared her half to death. “Jesus,” she muttered, clutching her heart. The evidence was mounting up very rapidly. The wheelchair ramp, the weird bath, the lift, and the hydraulic bed—who lives in a house like this, indeed?

She sat down on the bed and went through the bedside drawer. An empty spectacle case. A dead fly. A calculator. A CD-Rom. There were books piled on top of the unit, books like
Conspiracy Theories
—
Secrecy and Power in America, The
Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We
Must,
and
Apollo 12: The NASA Mission Reports.

In the cabinet underneath were textbooks with titles like
Elementary Linear Algebra with Applications, Schaum’s
Mathematical Handbook of Formulas and Tables,
and
Applied
Linear Statistical Models.
A few notebooks underneath were full of scribbled algebra that looked too technical and complicated even to bother flicking through. And there at the bottom sat a school exercise book with a typed label attached that nearly made Ana gasp out loud: Zander Roper, Form 5L.

Zander.

The same Zander Bee had written a song for.

He wasn’t a man at all. He was a child. She grasped the exercise book to her chest and ran downstairs.

All three of them sat blankly in the living room, surrounded by an assortment of disparate and eclectic objects. It felt like they were playing some very surreal, very somber parlor game. Even Lol was quiet for once.

Lol had found some bird-spotting handbooks that had been well thumbed, a pair of binoculars, a whole heap of prescription drugs, a pile of plastic sheets, and another set of notebooks covered in algebra. And Flint had collected some watercolors, painted directly into a pad of cartridge paper, watercolors of the garden, the view, the cottage, and Bee.

Bee sunbathing on a deckchair, Bee at the kitchen table, Bee asleep in front of the fire.

“Jesus,” said Lol, picking one up, “these are just beautiful.

Just absolutely beautiful.”

She let it drop to the floor and held her head in her hands, sighing loudly. “Well,” she said, “it’s all crystal-fucking-clear now, isn’t it? Bee spent every weekend for the last three years with an incontinent, bird-watching mathematician called Zander who had a crush on Gillian Anderson and could paint like Michelangelo. Oh—and she wrote a love song for him, too. Of course. It all makes perfect fucking sense. It’s as clear as the fucking North Circular in rush hour . . . Jesus . . .”

“D’you think . . . ?” began Ana, about to form the most obvious of all possible questions.

“Don’t even go there, Ana,” said Lol, using her hands to demonstrate her confusion. “I don’t even want to think about it. If this Zander kid was her son, then it throws the last fifteen years of my life into complete mayhem. If she had a kid and didn’t tell me, then nothing in the world makes sense anymore. . . .”

Flint got to his feet and stretched. Bits of his huge body audibly cracked, and Lol winced. “And where are you off to?” Flint was reaching for his car keys.

“The pub.”

Lol rolled her eyes. “Oh—that’s typical, that is. We’ve come all the way down to Broadstairs, we’ve found out that our best friend was living a secret bloody life, we’ve got all this stuff to do, and you’re going to the fucking pub!” Flint rolled his eyes back at Lol. “How about you just stop talking, just for a second, and think. Just for once, Tate.”

“All right, Lennard. I’ve stopped. I’m thinking. And—er—

sorry, but nowt’s come to me. Just the fact that you’re like a fucking dehydrated homing pigeon when it comes to the boozer.”

Flint sighed. “It’s a Sunday lunchtime. This is a small village. And what do people who live in small villages do on Sunday lunchtimes?”

Ana nodded and smiled. “They go to the pub.”

“Exactly, Ana—they go to the pub. And what else do people who live in small villages do?”

“Have sex with their sisters,” sneered Lol.

“Apart from that.”

“Their dogs?”

“They gossip, Tate. They gossip. Someone’s bound to have seen something, to know something. So—are you coming?” Lol sighed and got to her feet. “Yeah yeah. All right. Let’s do it. But remember—we are going to get seriously stared at.

The whole pub
will
fall silent the minute we walk in, every person
will
turn around and fix us with an impassive gaze designed to scare us out of town, and the only sound we hear
will
be the ticking of the clock over the bar. We are not only strangers, but we are three very, very tall strangers who are going to turn up in a stretch limo with tinted windows. And one of us is black. They’re going to assume we’re gangsters and call out the sheriff. OK?”

Flint and Ana nodded.

“OK, then. Let’s go.”

There were three pubs in the village, which threw them a bit. Two of them were restaurant pubs, with full car parks and children running around in beer gardens, so they headed for the Bleak House, a small cream pub with curtained windows. Flint pulled the Mercedes up on the sidewalk and a few passing villagers stopped and watched with interest.

“See,” hissed Lol, “and we haven’t even gotten out the pigging car yet. Oh bugger, I wish I was wearing something else.” She fiddled with her thin cotton top, pulling it down over her midriff, and slid her sunglasses from her head to her nose.

Ana looked at her with surprise. She was nervous. Fearless, loudmouthed, extrovert Lol was nervous.

She caught Ana looking at her. “What?”

“Nothing,” said Ana, “nothing. It’s just that I’ve never seen you look so—uncomfortable before. I didn’t think you were bothered what people thought of you.”

“Yeah, well. I’m not. Not in London, anyhow. It’s small towns. I hate ‘em.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “I dunno. I suppose it’s because I come from a small town.”

“But I thought you were from Leeds?”

“Yeah—from a small town just outside Leeds. It were bad enough being black there. But being black and skinny and nearly six feet tall. It were hell.”

“Really?” asked Ana in wonder. She found it hard to imagine that Lol could ever have felt anything but confident and beautiful.

“Oh aye. I got loads of shit.”

“What sort of shit?”

“Oh, you know. Kids. Comments. Being shouted at on the street. That sort of thing.”

Ana nodded. “I get it, too,” she whispered. “Comments.

Stares.”

Stares.”

“Yeah,” said Lol, “I could see that in you when I first met you. I could see
me
in you when I first met you.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Well—I wasn’t always so blinkin’ gorgeous, you know. I mean—those contact lenses aren’t just for show—I’m half blind wi’out them, and when I first left home I used to wear these glasses like paperweights, and I had this flippin’ great Afro that I used to scrape back in a ponytail. And makeup!

You should have seen the state of me. I used to go to Woolie’s and buy all that white-girl makeup, all blue eyeliner and that, trying to make myself look like Lady Di—

and pink blusher! Bright fucking pink, it was. I didn’t really know who the hell I was then. And then I came down to London and I fitted in. I could be whatever and whoever the hell I wanted to be. That’s why I love London so much. In London I can
be.
D’you see what I mean? I can look as freaky as I like and there’s always going to be someone looking freakier. I can be as loud as I like and there’ll always be someone louder. I can be tall as I like and there’ll always be someone taller. On the other hand, there’ll always be someone richer, prettier, happier, and nicer, too. But nobody gives a shit anyway. The only true currency in London, Ana, is celebrity. The only thing that makes one Londoner look at another Londoner with any interest is celebrity. And even then they try to pretend to be unimpressed. Try to pretend they haven’t noticed them. But out here”—she turned and looked through the window—“anyone who’s different in any way is a sort of celebrity. Gets talked about, stared at, bothered. And I hate it. I really hate it.”

“Any chance of you two getting out of this car anytime today?” said Flint, his enormous head appearing at the window.

Lol took a deep breath and turned to Ana and smiled.

“Pretend you’re Madonna—that’s what I always try to do—

pretend to be Madonna, then it dun’t matter about the staring.”

Sure enough, everyone in the pub did stop talking when they walked in. But then, there were only four people in there and it didn’t look like they’d been talking to each other anyway. The barmaid, a young girl of about eighteen, looked up at them with interest as they approached. Her expression told them that she didn’t see the three “strangers” as a threat but as an opportunity for something unusual to happen. And her face perked up even more when Flint opened his mouth and flashed her one of his electric smiles.

“Hiya!” she beamed, her steamed-pudding breasts swelling visibly under a tight Lycra vest inscribed with the golden word “Angel.” “What can I get you?”

“Watch this,” whispered Lol, nudging Ana in the ribs,

“Flint’s about to switch it on. Pass me a bucket. . . .”

“I’ll have a pint of Export please and my two friends here will have . . .” He turned to Lol and Ana and raised his eyebrows at them, Roger Moore-style.

“Same please,” said Ana.

“Vodka and cranberry, please,” said Lol, adopting a strange, Joanna Lumley-esque accent.

“Oh. Sorry. We haven’t got cranberry”—the girl’s face

“Oh. Sorry. We haven’t got cranberry”—the girl’s face blanched with the disappointment of not having cranberry and then brightened slightly—“we’ve got blackcurrant, though.”

“What—blackcurrant
juice
?”

“Yes. No. I’m not sure. I’ll just ask.”

She scuttled away then and Flint gave Lol a stern glance.

“Oi—Scary Spice—leave the poor girl alone.”

“Sorry Mr. Flint, sir,” said Lol, stifling a giggle and nudging Ana in the ribs again.

“Angel—is that your name?” Flint pointed at her top.

Lol raised her eyebrows at Ana.

The barmaid giggled and started pouring a pint. “Nah,” she beamed, “my name’s Louise. But my friends call me Lou.”

“So—Lou—are you a local?”

“ ’Fraid so,” she sighed, “I’ve lived here all my life.”

“Bit dull, is it?”

“You could say that, yeah.” She placed a full pint on the bar and started pouring another one. “It’s like
Night of the Living
Dead
round here sometimes.”

“And what do you do? Around here? Anything going on?”

“Nah. Nothing. The only action is up on the seafront, but even that’s pretty nonexistent.”

“So if anything unusual was to happen in the area, you’d notice?”

“Oh yeah. Definitely.”

Flint beamed at the barmaid again, and Ana saw her cheeks flame scarlet.

“You could be just the girl I’m looking for, then.”

“Oh yeah?” She laughed and her blush increased.

“Yeah. We’re looking for some information. About the cottage down on Broad Lane.”

“Hark at Inspector Morse,” whispered Lol into Ana’s ear, stifling another giggle.

“Which cottage is that, then?”

“The pink one. The pink one with the motorbike outside.”

“Oh yeah. Yeah—I know the one. That’s 5.85 for the drinks, please.”

Flint passed her a tenner. Ana noticed that he deliberately brushed the side of her hand with his fingertips as he handed it over and she noticed that Lou almost visibly jumped, like she’d just had an electric shock.

“D’you know anything about it? The cottage.” She shrugged and slammed the cash register shut. “Like what?”

“Like who lived there?”

Lou rested her elbows on the top of the bar and put her face in her hands, looking up at Flint with wide eyes, her sun-burned breasts quivering urgently. She grinned up at him.

“Are you coppers?” she asked.

“Nah,” grinned Flint, taking a big macho slurp of his lager and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, his eyes glued to Louise the whole time. “Look. Lou.” He leaned down toward her so that their noses were almost touching.

Ana noticed that Louise stopped breathing. “Are you any good at keeping secrets?”

She nodded, her eyes widening by the second.

“Look. Our friend. Well—she died last month.”

“Look. Our friend. Well—she died last month.”

“Oh God—I’m really sorry.” Lou clutched her heart with her hand.

“Yeah. Thanks. And the thing is that since she died, we found out some really weird things about her.”

“Oh yeah?” If Lou’s eyes had opened any wider, her eyelids would have slipped irretrievably behind her eyeballs.

“And one of them was that she owned that cottage. The pink one.”

“Oh right. You mean the woman with the black hair and the motorbike?”

“Yeah. That’s the one. Did you know her?”

“No. She wasn’t around all that often. Only at the weekends, I think. Mrs. Wills—that was her name.”

“That’s my mum’s name,” Ana whispered in Lol’s ear.

“And who did she used to stay with?”

“What d’you mean?”

“I mean—when she was there, in the cottage. Do you know who stayed with her?”

Lou shrugged. “I never saw anyone. There was an ambulance there sometimes, though.”

“An ambulance?”

“Yeah. You know. One of those like they take old people about in. Not like an emergency ambulance or anything.”

“Like they might take disabled people about in, you mean?”

“Yeah. That’s right.”