Requiem (74 page)

But his car wasn’t outside, there was no answer to her ring. She crossed the street and looked up at his windows. During his creative phases he had been known to ignore the doorbell, but tonight there were no seams of light showing through the blinds. Back in the Metro, she swore and hit her palm against the wheel. She thrust the key into the ignition and twisted it brutally. The engine turned with an agonized shudder and failed to start. With each attempt, the turns became progressively more half-hearted until the engine lapsed into silence, leaving only the tortuous whine and click of the starter motor.

She sat back and laughed emptily. She was past any other reaction.

Three lads from a nearby pub gave the car a push, but the engine refused to show the slightest spark, and, thanking her helpers, she abandoned the Metro in a meter bay and took a taxi.

The stairway leading to her flat was spattered with dust and debris that crunched noisily underfoot. Inside, the builders had moved the furniture round again, but this time, as if to make up for their previous lapse, had draped almost everything with plastic dustsheets, so that only the rugs had caught the splashes of plaster from the new ceiling.

Mess or no mess, it was still home. Within minutes, she had set up the small table in front of her old red armchair by the gas fire. While she waited for the water to heat in the cistern, she sat down to call Mrs Bell. She dialled the number then, jamming her finger on the rest, cut the line before it had a chance to ring. Mrs Bell could wait. The care order wouldn’t be heard for a week, nothing could be done for Adrian tonight.

There was time for six Jaffa cakes and two glasses of wine before the water was hot. When at last she sank into the bath, armed with a fresh glass, her mind felt dazzlingly, dangerously lucid.

There was no doubt: Simon was the traitor. Oh, maybe not in the way she had first thought. Conspiracy and bribery weren’t really his style: it was impossible to imagine Simon lowering himself to dealing direct with the opposition. No, it was much more likely that he had trapped himself into an error of judgement. He was egotistical enough to believe he could weave his way effortlessly through his web of contacts, sufficiently vain to think his judgement infallible. He had probably exchanged the information on Nick for something else, had probably used it to impress his editor, and come unstuck. Of course he’d never admit to it, not even to the slightest possibility. Even during the best of their relationship, Simon had not been able to admit to anything so prosaic as leaving a ring around the bath.

Illuminated by the wine, she saw everything with absolute clarity. Simon had been using her, manipulating her in that dry unemotional way of his. He had looked down on her from his intellectual pedestal, poured scorn on her ideas, then sold her short. Realizing this, she felt a wild irrational anger at all the food and creative support she had provided for him.

She slid down in the water and wet her hair. When she came up again, it was with a compulsive desire to tell him to his face. ‘Ha!’ she cackled aloud, and heard the drink singing in her voice.

After the traumas and confusions of the day, retaliation was a good clear-cut emotion, something nice and straightforward one could get one’s teeth into, and wrapped in her old dressing gown in front of the fire, she dwelt lovingly and voraciously on the idea.

She was, she supposed, quite drunk – the bottle, she noted with some amazement, was empty: a whole bottle, for God’s sake. But if the clarity of her mind was fading, it was compensated by an almost euphoric determination.

She lifted the phone.

Either Simon wasn’t answering or he was still out, because his machine clicked on at the second ring. Drawing breath, she started on her little speech.

In case he’d been in Mongolia, she gave him the news of the fire and the daubed animal rights slogans. Then, her head singing with wine, her heart lurching with harsh excitement, she gave him her new version of events. The police had already established it wasn’t animal rights campaigners, she declared, knew it had just been a front. Oh, they might not have the complete evidence to nail the real culprits, but they soon would. Then Morton-Kreiger would have to dig their way out of
that
one! As for the laboratory itself, well – no one was giving up, she said, and certainly not Nick Mackenzie. There were already plans for a new laboratory. She heard herself give a brief bray of triumph, a raucous discordant laugh. She had meant to stop there, but her voice took off, self-propelled, swollen with wine, and she heard herself saying there was more, much more – an immense scandal involving cooked data on Silveron. Picturing the disbelief in Simon’s face, just
seeing
how he would be taking this, she said she had the hard evidence right
here
. And what was more she had someone in a key position who could verify it, back it up all the way. Then the lid would blow right off the whole rotten business. End of Morton-Kreiger. Pumph! But there’d be no story until the time was right – until
she
decided it was right – then she’d go public – though she would not, she implied rather subtly, bring the story to
him
.

She rang off with a brief sense of triumph. The feeling of release was soon overshadowed by a sense of futility. What had that proved? What had that done? Simon would merely think her stupid and drunk. And he would be right.

She woke once in the middle of the night, sprawled awkwardly across the chair, in a muck sweat from the fire which was still on at full blast. Switching it off, she lurched across the room, opened a window and burrowed under the plastic sheets onto the unmade bed. After a succession of nightmares peopled by men in white coats and arsonists working in full technicolour, she woke again at dawn, her mouth thick, her head clogged with EEC-approved wine additives. Getting up to fetch water, she passed the empty wine bottle, saw the phone.

In the cold light, she felt a sudden regret.

N
ICK FELT SOMETHING
brush against his shoulder and woke with a lurch that sent his heart racing. In the instant before his memory came plunging back, he felt an upsurge of panic, a stab of something that almost overwhelmed him.

Then Susan spoke.

‘Did I wake you? Oh, my love – I’m sorry.’ She moved against his back and stroked his arm. He could feel the contours of her body, soft and bony, firm and warm.

He lay still for a moment, absorbing the sensation of female flesh against his, feeling a quaking relief at not, for once, waking alone.

He grappled for his watch in the semi-darkness and couldn’t find it. ‘What time is it?’

‘I think we missed tea,’ she laughed. The bed shook slightly as she put on the bedside light. ‘Five thirty.’ Her head came back against his shoulder. ‘Were you dreaming, poor love? You were twitching and muttering so much, I didn’t know whether to wake you. I didn’t sleep. I always feel dreadful if I sleep in the afternoons – an absolute beast for the rest of the day.’ Her hand came down his arm, following it round to his chest, weaving her fingers through his. ‘Poor love – a nasty dream?’

He murmured, ‘Not so good,’ which was true, though he couldn’t remember the details. Then, because he didn’t want to set too depressing a tone, he said: ‘I was being chased by a herd of reporters – or something like that.’

‘Oh, those stories! I know you don’t believe me – when I got here today I could almost
see
you thinking that I was only saying it to make you feel better – but they really
weren’t
that bad, you know. Not bad at all! None of them said
anything
as remotely terrible as what you were worrying about last night.’ She pushed herself up on one elbow. ‘Honestly, they were
kind
, darling.’ She put her cheek against his, and he caught the scent of her rather overpowering perfume. ‘They
like
you, the press, they really do!’

He almost laughed. They may have been kind on one level – no one had openly called him an animal experimenter or an out-and-out hypocrite – but there wasn’t a single newspaper which hadn’t linked the story with Alusha’s mysterious ‘poisoning’, and suggested, openly or not so openly, that he was involved in some sort of vendetta. And of course the tabloids had been unable to resist rehashing some of the more titillating evidence from the fatal accident inquiry. Yes, they may have been obliging on the surface, but they were still merciless about the past. He had been bracing himself for a frontal assault, only to find that they had stolen up on him from behind and taken him by surprise. Like old wounds, the memories had reopened painfully.

Susan tugged gently at his shoulder, and he rolled halfway onto his back. Leaning over him, she kissed him on the mouth, a fond lingering kiss. Then she smiled the broad contented smile she had been giving him ever since she’d arrived that afternoon. Whether it was the excitement of sneaking out through the garage at three that morning disguised with a scarf and old raincoat of the housekeeper’s that appealed to her, or the rapid development of their relationship, he didn’t want to guess. It wasn’t that he exactly regretted starting this affair – although he wasn’t entirely sure about that yet – but he rather wished it hadn’t happened at this particular moment, when he was feeling besieged again; he wished he’d had more time to think it over.

But then it was the very fact that he was besieged that had made him turn to her. And perhaps it wasn’t such a bad decision. He’d forgotten what a luxury it was to have someone to talk to, someone who wasn’t otherwise involved in his life, someone who’d never known Alusha. He’d had the occasional relationship or near-relationship over the last few months – all brief, all highly unsatisfactory, all wanting what he wouldn’t or couldn’t give. Susan, by comparison, was undemanding. Well, so far. And though the arrangement, with its secrecy and lack of commitment, was far from ideal, it would do for now.

‘What about a short break?’ she suggested soothingly. ‘Get away for a while. Somewhere you can relax.’

‘I would, but I need to work.’

‘But your European tour – surely you deserve some time off before all that?’

‘No – you see, I
want
to work. There’s something I have to finish.’

‘Can’t you work abroad?’

He sat up and stretched. ‘Difficult.’ He rubbed his face. ‘I need a studio.’

‘Oh.’

Her hands pushed up his back and started massaging his shoulders. The feel of hands on his skin … He closed his eyes.

‘And where do you have to go to find a studio?’

He’d been thinking about that, but it was only now that he realized he had made up his mind. ‘Scotland.’

‘
Scotland
. Not to …? But I thought – ’ She checked herself and gave a small exclamation, as if to tick herself off for straying into forbidden territory. She was good like that; she never delved too far. ‘Well, if it’ll make you happy …’

Happy? What he felt when he worked was too obsessive for that, but it was a contentment of sorts, and, most important of all, a form of oblivion. Before going on the Arizona dry-out his mind had refused to wrap itself round anything even vaguely creative, but now it was showing definite signs of life. He’d spent a few evenings in a borrowed studio in London trying to push the choral piece forward, but though the familiar slow-burning excitement had begun to simmer away in his brain again, he knew there was only one place where he could really work.

Exhibiting her talents as a masseuse, Susan pushed her thumbs into the pressure points either side of his spine on a level with his shoulder blades. He winced at the perfect blend of pleasure and pain.

‘Does all this work mean I won’t get a decision out of you on the main guest suite?’ she said in mock reproval. ‘It was between the peach and the eau de nil, remember.’

He couldn’t remember what eau de nil was when it was at home. ‘You’d better decide,’ he said. ‘You’re rather good at that.’ Coughing, he reached for a cigarette. Smoking too much again.

‘When will you go to Scotland?’ she asked lightly.

He was suddenly able to make up his mind about that too. ‘Tomorrow.’

Her hands paused. ‘So soon? Oh.
Oh
.’ She kissed his back. ‘Wish I could come too,’ she added in an undertone, and there was a hint of reproach in her voice that he’d not heard before. Then, in her cheerful tone: ‘I’d planned – well, I’d thought I might be able to find out about that chemical for you. What did you say it was?’

‘Silveron,’ he murmured.

‘
Silveron
,’ she repeated slowly. ‘You know – ask Tony’s people to look into it.’

He twisted round and stared at her.

She shrugged slightly, pulling the sheet a little higher over her bosom, and asked charmingly: ‘No?’

‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ That hint of reproach again. ‘But why not? That’s what Tony’s people are paid for, digging out information. They’ve nothing else to do, as far as I can gather.’

‘Won’t your husband …?’

‘Oh, don’t worry about him,’ she said with a dismissive hand. ‘He’ll agree all right.’ It occurred to Nick that the greatest single emotion she felt for her husband was scorn.