The Elephant Girl (Choc Lit) (9 page)

‘One of those little three-wheeler thingies?’

‘Almost. It has four wheels, though. It’s even got advertising on the sides.’

‘Yeah?’ She cocked her head to one side, gently mocking. ‘What does it say?’

‘Vinyl Destination.’

‘Really?’ She laughed and shook her head. ‘No, it’s all right. I’ve moved around a lot recently, so I don’t have much.’

Part truth, and partly an excuse, Jason thought. Maybe she had been asked to leave from her previous address, and he could guess the reason. Maybe she didn’t want him to run into her old flatmates in case they bad-mouthed her. Keeping him at arm’s length made sense.

This child’s death would weigh heavily on her conscience. It would for anyone, unless they were made of stone, so he hadn’t pressed her when she confided in him on the landing. Instead he’d suggested going back to the kitchen for a cup of coffee to give her some space. His was a policy of one step at a time. When she was ready to talk, he’d listen, but he wouldn’t force any details out of her.

Her caginess and the way she’d looked away, then met his gaze full on as if challenging him told him something else too. A part of her story was a lie, or at least an interpretation of the truth. At this stage it hardly mattered. He’d find out the truth eventually.

He remembered what Neil had pointed out.
You don’t get that kind of tan in this country.
One thing he was pretty certain of: you didn’t get it in prison either.

This was the piece he had the most trouble fitting into the puzzle, because who would say they had been inside if they hadn’t? It was an odd thing to do. Most ex-offenders would put it off for as long as possible because of prejudice and mistrust in the generally-law-abiding public. And if she’d lied about prison, was the bit about the child also a lie?

It takes one to know one, he thought. Most people would back away when they were up against someone who clearly couldn’t be trusted, but he wasn’t about to because he understood it. Hadn’t he always been vague and skirted around the issue of who his father was and how he made his money?

He saw her to the door and held it open for her. As she passed him, he got a whiff of her perfume, something fresh and floral and strangely at odds with the heavy sadness surrounding her. He liked her scent, and when she brushed against him by accident, a thrill ran through him. He caught her eyes for a nano-second, felt the attraction connecting them by an invisible string. She was the first to look away, but he spotted the faint smile and wondered if the nearness had affected her the same way.

Watching from the top step as she headed back to the main road, he thought of a silly game he used to play with his school mates.

If she turns around, she’s interested.

Her stiff shoulders and self-conscious way of walking told him she knew he was watching her. When she never looked back, he couldn’t say for sure whether this was sheer bloody-mindedness on her part, or whether she truly wasn’t interested in him.

Which was probably just as well if they were to live under the same roof.

Closing the worm-eaten front door, he smiled grimly. She was a total mystery, and he was the idiot walking right into the snare, eyes wide shut. It couldn’t be helped. He had to get to the bottom of it, to satisfy his own curiosity and because she looked like she could do with having someone on her side. After all, he had to practice what he’d preached to Charlie, that everyone deserved a second chance.

Then why did he have this peculiar feeling that a second chance, in the strictest sense of the word, wasn’t what she was seeking?

He returned to the kitchen where Charlie was washing up the mugs. Grabbing a tea towel, he began to dry the crockery.

Charlie handed him a mug dripping with suds. ‘Do you like her?’

‘She seems all right,’ he replied non-committally.

‘She didn’t say where they locked her up.’

‘I’m not sure she was. Does it matter?’

Charlie shrugged and rinsed the last mug. ‘I can’t put my finger on it – and you can say what you like – but I smell trouble.’

Jason laughed. ‘Please don’t let that overactive imagination of yours run away with you. I think she’ll be quite nice to have around.’

‘You’re not getting it.’ Charlie wrung out the sponge and dried her hands. ‘I don’t mean us, or the house. It’s just that you have such a big heart, Jase. I meant trouble for
you
.’

Helen felt his gaze scorching the back of her neck. She nearly turned around but the thought of what she might see stopped her. He’d sensed that zing between them as much as she had, a feeling that had been there at the market too and which was a complication she could do without.

Why did he have to be so damn nice?

Everything screamed at her that moving in was a bad idea, but Jason’s house was cheap and convenient for her purposes, and she was only staying long enough to complete her task.

A quick trip back to her hotel in Earl’s Court to collect her bags, and she was installed in the magnolia-painted room in time to eat a Caribbean takeaway by herself.

Then she tried to make herself at home. She covered the bed with a blanket from India, hung a couple of posters and put her knick-knacks on the mantelpiece. Her statue of the Hindu god Shiva she placed on the desk, then she hung her clothes in the wardrobe. They barely took up half the space.

One day, she promised herself, when she’d got over the hurdle Fay represented, her life would be normal, and she’d have all those lovely useless things which cluttered up the lives of average people.

Slipping across the landing to the bathroom with her toothbrush, she noticed the light from underneath Fay’s door and tiptoed closer to put her ear to the door. She could hear music, faintly, but wasn’t sure whether Fay was in there or not. Tempted by the proximity to her mother’s murderer, and by curiosity, she put her hand on the door handle, but pulled back when she caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye.

Lee the Mugger, as she now thought of him, had come up the stairs without a sound and was standing right behind her, eyeing her curiously.

‘Hi,’ she said, heart thudding wildly.

‘Hnh.’

He continued to the top floor without a backwards glance. She stared after him, thinking that there must be someone up there, among the gods, watching her and rolling on the floor with laughter. Even she had trouble explaining how she’d ended up sandwiched between a murderer, a stuttering street thug, and an infuriating do-gooder. Plus whatever it was Charlie had done.

You couldn’t make it up.

It surprised her how quickly she settled in. Charlie turned out to be easy to get along with, and Jason worked at his music stall and then did jobs around the house. Helen offered to help, and he set her the task of clearing out some of the kitchen cabinets which he was planning to replace with new ones.

‘Where do you want the stuff?’ she asked.

‘Just put it all in those boxes over there. We’ll sort it out later when the new cupboards are up.’ He indicated a stack of cardboard boxes by the back door and sent her another of those smiles which did peculiar things to her insides.

This could get complicated. Really complicated.

As for the others in the house, Lee would, to Charlie’s immense irritation, turn up only at dinner time to scoop some food on his plate and take it to his room.

Fay was okay, if a bit reserved. Helen wondered if whatever had caused her to kill a friend wasn’t still lurking beneath the surface, but there was no sign of it. Still, no one ever completely knew what went on inside other people, so she kept an eye on her.

When she wasn’t helping Jason, she hung out with Charlie, mainly watching TV, and when Charlie wasn’t around either, she’d stand outside Fay’s door listening for sounds from behind it. Joe had been right, the pull of revenge was just too strong to resist. She just didn’t know how to go about it.

At the same time she wanted to hear Fay’s version of events first. Except Fay kept herself to herself. Everything was definitely more complex than she’d expected. It didn’t help that she was beginning to like her.

She had to do something to take her mind off things.

Recalling what Aggie had said about getting a job at the auction house, Helen rang the offices of Ransome & Daughters expecting short shrift, but was instead given an appointment with her aunt Letitia two days later.

She dressed carefully for the interview. Letitia was always so elegant, but the best Helen could come up with was a white blouse of Indian cotton and a layered skirt in the most sombre shade she could find. As for shoes, it had turned cold again lately, and she had to rely on her trusted Doc Martens.

Charlie whistled when Helen entered the kitchen.

‘Going anywhere nice?’

‘Job interview. Of sorts. At an auction house.’

‘Of sorts?’

‘Well, you know. I’m hoping they won’t mind me not having any experience of the trade.’ The lie slipped off her tongue easily enough. Too easily, but she doubted the personal connection and her part-ownership of the company would go down well with Charlie.

‘Lucky you. I haven’t had much luck finding a job. Everywhere I go, they take one look at my record and all my piercings, and then they suddenly don’t need me any more.’ Charlie pushed a brown teapot across the table. ‘Here, I just made it.’

Helen poured a cup. ‘Shouldn’t I be paying something towards food and drink? Or does it come out of the rent money?’

‘Don’t worry about it. Fay comes around with the kitty tin once a fortnight. It used to be my job, but Jason gave it to Fay when she moved in.’

‘Why?’

Charlie sent Helen a direct look. ‘I’m a thief. I’d steal from my own granny, or so they said at the juvie. Trouble is, I don’t have a granny. Or anyone else.’

‘I’m sure that’s not why he asked Fay to take over.’

‘It doesn’t bother you?’

‘I don’t have anything worth taking, except these.’ Helen showed Charlie her mother’s elephant pendant and the silver amulet Mamaji had given her, then tucked them back inside her blouse. She ignored the voice in her head which reminded her about the two hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds a year she was supposed to get. It was just too unreal, and she hadn’t really taken it in yet. Besides, she wanted to make her own way in life before accepting handouts from her family.

‘I don’t steal from friends.’

‘I wouldn’t have shown them to you if I thought otherwise.’ Helen sipped her tea. It was scalding hot and bitter, just the way she liked it. ‘So, you don’t have any relatives at all?’

‘Me going to prison wasn’t part of my parents’ plan, so they’d rather pretend I don’t exist. The people that matter live in this house. Even that bastard Lee.’ Charlie looked at her fingernails which were bitten to the quick.

‘Why don’t you like him?’ Helen didn’t like him much either, especially not the way he crept about silently and popped up when you least expected him to.

Charlie scowled. ‘Because he could do so much more with his life. Unlike me. Because of what I did.’

‘Why unlike you?’ What had Charlie done?

‘I ran with a bad group, right. A gang of girls. We’d hang around on street corners after school, you know, just being a general nuisance. There was this one girl we liked to pick on. She had some sort of facial deformity, and we just didn’t give her a break. Then … one day she killed herself. That’s when I flipped because I realised what I’d done. Ruined the life of another person. And why? Because I was bored, didn’t care about other people’s feelings. Didn’t have any prospects.’

Helen digested this in shocked silence. The dead girl could have been her. Almost was her, except she knew she was stronger. And Charlie was taking all the blame on her shoulders, which was unfair because there was a whole group of them.

‘It wasn’t just you,’ she said.

‘I had a choice, I could’ve said no.’ Charlie shrugged, as if she wasn’t sure about that herself. ‘So, I decided I was going to make good some of the harm that I’d done. I took a college course in computing and got a job working for HM Revenue & Customs. Then I made sure her family got a big tax rebate.’

Another person who thought money could make up for everything. ‘How?’

‘Oh, it was a piece of cake, but of course it all got found out because these people really were too good to be true and they queried it, the silly bastards. Then I got sent down for hacking the system, and I knew there was no justice in life. It should’ve been manslaughter.’

‘You didn’t kill her.’

‘I almost did.’ Charlie looked at her fingernails, then back at Helen with a grin. ‘I hope you still like me.’

The joke was skin deep. Helen felt it, and Charlie knew it. ‘Of course I do. I’m glad you told me.’ It was still a shock, though.

‘Yeah,’ mumbled Charlie with a far-away look in her eyes.

‘And what about Fay?’ said Helen.

‘Fay’s a good person. Believe me, if she could wave a magic wand and turn back the clock, she would. She suffers daily. She just doesn’t show it. Anyway, what do you know about what Fay’s done? She hardly ever talks about it.’

‘Nothing, really.’

‘I care about the people here,’ said Charlie, chewing her thumbnail. ‘That goes for Lee as well, but he’s just too bloody stupid for his own good. He never learns. He’s been in and out of prison like a yo-yo. The time he’s lived here is the longest he’s been straight, but I don’t expect it to last. With a face and a body like his there’s so much more he could do with his life, and this is as far as his imagination stretches? That really gets to me!’

‘Yes, I can see that.’

Charlie stopped gnawing on her finger and laughed. ‘I’m glad you moved in. I haven’t had a real friend in years.’

A warm feeling fanned out inside Helen’s chest. Me neither, she thought. Smiling back, she was about to say something when the kitchen door opened. She tensed, and so did Charlie, but Charlie relaxed when she saw it was Fay. Helen didn’t.

‘There’s tea in the pot,’ said Charlie.

‘Ta.’ Fay was wearing a threadbare towelling dressing gown, and her grey hair lay flat against her skull. Her hand shook as she poured.