Play Dead (22 page)

‘Getting him off heroin, maybe. He seems to have broken the habit once, and by all accounts he wouldn't have done that without a lot of help. That reminds me. Heroin. There's a fair amount about, but it isn't something you can just go out and buy on a one-off basis. You've got to have contacts. You might think if you've picked up any hint of that anywhere.'

She shook her head. John? This scheme which was coming to its crisis? A consignment of drugs in Romanian diplomatic baggage? That man on the trade delegation, who couldn't be met till after midnight? It didn't feel like that, and anyway Mr Firth would already have thought of it. Big Sue's Trevor … reluctantly she explained about the imbroglio at the transport café.

‘Better look into it, Bob,' he said. ‘Doesn't sound the type for this, though. It's all too fancy.'

‘Please …' said Poppy, and stopped. What was the point? Trevor would get aggressive, bluster, lie … but the missile had already struck, detonated. Now it was only a question of how far, into what innocent lives, the destruction would spread.

‘It's got to be done, I'm afraid,' said Mr Firth. ‘Well, I think that's all for the moment, and thank you very much. You may have saved us a lot of messing around. Do you want me to have your notes? If you'll just sign them they'll do as a statement. Save you hanging around.'

‘I've done that already,' said Poppy and slid the pages she had read from on to the desk.

‘Thanks,' he said. ‘And no doubt you'd like to keep the magnet, young man.'

‘Oh, no, you mustn't,' said Poppy. ‘We don't want him getting the idea he can have anything he fancies.'

‘Mine?' said Toby, vainly trying to slide the magnet and string into a non-existent pocket in the bib of his overalls.

‘Then I'll lend it to you,' said Mr Firth. ‘But I'll need it back. It's an essential piece of investigative equipment, Toby.'

‘Just a few days,' said Poppy.

‘Few days,' said Toby, getting the tone dead right, his word his bond, though his grasp of time and number was still non-existent. Sergeant Caesar accompanied them out. In the lift he grinned at Poppy.

‘Thanks for looking in,' he said.

‘I hope it was all right. I mean …'

‘What d'you mean, all right? If you'd seen how the boss perked up when he heard it was you.'

‘I expect he misses his daughters, so he enjoys playing with Toby.'

‘If that's what you want to think …'

They had reached the lobby. He held the door.

‘All right now? Be good. See you soon,' he said.

Poppy pushed home through the wintry streets. The threat of Christmas hung in the air, visible already, to Poppy's eye, in the fretful look of passers-by as they readied themselves for the meaningless but necessary rites of false jovialities and ill-considered gifts. She detested Christmas. It was one of the few things on which she saw eye to eye with her mother. They had reduced it to a minimum. You gave, say, a pair of slipper-socks and received a jumper. You lunched off roast chicken and Lyons mince pies, and shared half a bottle of cheap white wine. You listened to the Queen, and then it was over and you could go out and feed the pigs. How had she come to marry a man with Pharaonic expectations of the festival, demanding, even in middle-age, a full stocking of carefully selected knick-knacks, all wrapped in different papers, with gold-papered chocolate coins spilling out at the top and a tangerine in the toe, and then a camel train of larger gifts (yes, he would really have loved it if she'd hired a few camels and had them come jingling down the street to their door, though he'd have expected her somehow to do it out of the housekeeping money), and a monster turkey and flaming pudding and bloody holly everywhere? The one faint lightening of her inner misery was the thought that she would no longer have to worry about a Christmas present for John.

There was a message on Janet's answering machine, the harsh voice unmistakable.

‘I will call on you at nine this evening. Please be in.'

7

Do you offer food to one whom you've betrayed? The question bulked ridiculously larger than the rationally more important one of whether she should have rung Mr Firth and told him John was coming. It was, she knew, possible that John had killed two people, in order to close their mouths. It was therefore possible that he would do the same to her. She was certain that the moment he came through the door he would smell her treachery. She was going to have to tell him in any case; she couldn't keep up a whole evening of pretence. She had felt compelled, out of a kind of duty to others—to Nick, to Laura, to the dead young man, to the whole community to which she belonged—to betray him. But now that public necessity was over. Whatever happened between them now was private, their own affair. She had the right to choose, so she chose to trust him. That was that.

She changed her mind several times about food, but in the end ate supper by herself, early, and saw that there was enough for him, unprepared, if he wanted it.

He smelt nothing. He kissed her briefly, not apparently noticing her unresponsiveness, looked at his watch and said, ‘Sorry. May we see the headlines?'

She switched the TV on and just caught them. The pound was falling. There had been an enormous protest in Leipzig, and another in Prague. Cecil Parkinson had launched a sale of personalised number-­plates. Lord Aldington in the witness-box. As she was about to switch off he said ‘No. Please.'

They watched the stuff about the pound in silence, and then the Eastern Bloc protests. The crowds seemed unimaginable, their joint life, their channelled excitement and purpose. The thrill of being alive in these days broke for the moment through Poppy's misery and apprehension. But then Romania. Shots of a grey man ranting, rehearsed ovations. A six-hour speech it said, and a rule of iron still …

‘Thank you,' he said. ‘Amazing. Amazing. People here have no idea what it means. He hasn't a hope. The whole system is going to come apart. All of it.'

The room throbbed with energies. He was part of those crowds on those roaring streets. It seemed to take him time to realise that she wasn't as involved.

‘You don't feel it?' he said.

‘Yes, of course … I'm afraid I've got something to tell you. I don't know if you've heard about the death of one of the nannies. She's called Laura.'

‘Yes.'

‘It looks as if somebody tried to make it look like suicide, but it wasn't. The same with the young man in the park. Laura knew him. It's all connected. I've told the police everything I know.'

He laid his hands on his thighs and stared for a while at their backs.

‘Everything?'

‘Yes. About you being followed, and not wanting the police to know, and then pretending it didn't matter. And what you told me about what you were doing. And Constantin.'

He continued to gaze at his hands.

‘I'm sorry. I had to,' she said.

‘Is there anyone here?'

‘What do you mean? No. This is between us. Only …'

She hadn't intended to tell him about the anonymous calls, thinking he would misunderstand her reasons. Now she had to.

‘… So at first I thought that you must have been followed again, or perhaps the flat was bugged. Happening just after you'd been, you see.'

‘You've looked?'

‘I tried to, but I wouldn't know where. Anyway I'm almost sure now it must have been Laura making a lucky guess. She didn't know you'd been again. Only, if I'm wrong …'

‘We'll assume you are right. In any case it's too late to matter.'

‘Have you had any?'

‘Clara normally answers the telephone, and we are ex-directory.'

‘Peony would have told the nannies your number.'

‘This is all irrelevant. I came this evening to talk to you about what you could safely say about this woman's death, but as I say I was too late. Tell me, do you believe I am a murderer?'

‘No. But I think Constantin might be, and you might protect him.'

‘Constantin has two younger sisters. His parents are dead and he has the full family responsibility for them. They are under close watch by the Securitate, and he knows what will happen to them if he doesn't obey his orders to the letter. I was in the same position myself, until Natalie died.'

‘Would he kill someone if they told him?'

‘Probably.'

‘Would you have?'

‘While Natalie was alive, you mean? No. I knew she would have chosen to suffer herself, rather than that.'

‘Were you really in Geneva two nights ago? When Laura died?'

He looked her in the eye. His face had not changed, but she felt, as she had in the pizza restaurant at their last meeting, that he had for the moment removed his mask—not for her sake, of course, but for Natalie's, the dead woman whom she so inadequately resembled.

‘I was not in England,' he said.

‘Was Constantin with you?'

The doorbell rang.

‘Better answer it,' he said, rising.

With a hammering heart Poppy switched on the porch light, slid the chain into place and opened the door the few inches it allowed. The threat was not any of those she had imagined. Mrs Capstone stood on the doormat, holding her face to the light so that she could be recognised. Every glistening wave of her hair was in place.

‘May I come in?' she said.

What do you do? Slam the door? Go out and confront her on the doorstep? Have hysterics? Poppy fumbled the chain free and let her in.

‘Is my husband here?' said Mrs Capstone, chilly but formal—the chair of some local committee calling on a disruptive member to persuade her to resign, for the good of the cause.

‘Yes. Come in.'

Poppy opened the living-room door for her. John was standing by the mantelpiece with his hands in his jacket pockets. He was armoured again, formidable but not perturbed. Amused, if anything.

‘Hello, my dear,' he said. ‘Mrs Tasker has just accused me of being a murderer.'

Mrs Capstone swung to Poppy, her anger now in the open.

‘Then it is you who have been making these stupid calls,' she said.

‘What calls? … Oh … You've been having them too? No. Really …'

Her voice trailed off under the glare of disbelief. ‘And you and my husband are lovers.'

‘Are we … I mean … I don't …'

Poppy turned to John for help and realised that he seemed to be enjoying the confrontation. He had the look of a child who has done something unspeakable, deliberately, in order to become the centre of attention, and isn't remotely embarrassed or ashamed but interested, pleased, stimulated. Derek was like that sometimes.

‘This isn't a game!' Poppy snapped.

His eyebrows rose an Olympian, unforgivable fraction. Poppy controlled her fury and returned to Mrs Capstone.

‘Your husband and I have made love, once,' she enunciated. ‘I don't think it's going to happen again. It wasn't very important to either of us, and it isn't important at all now, in fact it's meaningless compared to what else has been happening.'

‘It is not meaningless to me.'

‘I'm sorry. I can't help that. But there've been two murders …'

‘John. Is she quite mad?'

‘Far from it. There may well have been two murders. There are indications to make Mrs Tasker believe that I, or Constantin, or both of us in collaboration, may have been involved. Mrs Tasker has told everything she knows to the police. They have already asked to see me.'

He was still enjoying himself, for God's sake! Or was he winding Mrs Capstone up, for his own reasons? If so, she didn't respond in the usual way.

‘I see,' she said slowly. ‘This is that friend of Peony's, in Barnsley Square? And the man in the play centre, I suppose. What are we going to do? Presumably this will be in the media almost at once. I must know where I stand.'

Her egocentricity was almost heroic. Anger, outrage, betrayal could all be laid aside, at least for the moment, to counter the threat to her career. First things first. What should she say to the journalists?

‘Almost inevitably,' said John. ‘The police will probably tell them, and to judge by your anonymous calls there are others who seem to know more than we'd like. What did she say to you?'

‘I thought she was mad. She said all sorts of things. That you were a murderer, that you and my brother had been importing drugs …'

‘Jeremy?'

‘She said your brother-in-law, but as far as I know Jeremy's the only one you've got. She said you were using Deborah as cover for an affair for someone with grandchildren of her own, someone connected with the play centre, and who was really secretly working for the prospective Labour candidate. The calls were ridiculous rigmaroles, and naturally I paid little attention, though I already had a feeling that you'd started another affair. Then you called this evening to say you'd be late, and I was sure. I'd been paying your Access bill, and I'd noticed the cost of your concert tickets had doubled. I remembered that Mrs Tasker had expressed an interest in music. I thought I would come and see.'

He actually laughed, that peasant laugh of his, seeing the whole thing as comic opera, the philanderer caught in the wardrobe. Mrs Capstone too seemed to be deriving real satisfaction from her position, not of course the weakness of the wronged wife, but the dominance of the unmasker of deceit. How could they, Poppy wondered, increasingly angry, as though Poppy herself, and dead Laura, and all that had happened was no more than a fresh load of corn into the mysterious mill of their relationship?

‘Apart from Jeremy she seems to have been remarkably well informed,' said John.

‘Nonsense,' said Mrs Capstone. ‘She was … You are working for the Labour candidate, Mrs Tasker?'

‘No. Yes. No. I mean, she's my daughter-in-law and I look after her son. She does pay me, but …'