The Keys to the Street (30 page)

In the big bay window of the master bedroom she turned to him
and laid her head against his shoulder. “Leo, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong.”

“I’m sure there is. Do you hate the place? We don’t have to live here. I don’t even know that I want to. There’s something retrograde about choosing to live in the house where one was brought up.”

He screwed up his eyes. He said, as if with an effort, “Your wealth. I suppose it’s only now that I’m realizing how rich you are. This place has brought it home to me.”

“I told you.”

“I know. Now I’m seeing for myself.”

She had no heart for the rest of the house and led him downstairs and back into Frederica’s drawing room. He was looking all the while warily about him. She saw his eyes take in the pictures, the glass, the porcelain, and linger on a tall French clock in a case of brass and glass that began at that moment to strike four.

“If you’d known,” she said fearfully, “when first we’d met, would you have still wanted to know me? I mean, would you have pursued it? Or would you just have said thanks and maybe we’ll run into each other again one day?”

He paused. It was a long pause. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t answer that.”

Her heart seemed to fall through her body, sliding down in a sluice of coldness. “But you thought at first Charlotte Cottage was mine. When you first heard from me you had my address as Charlotte Cottage.”

“Yes, and I was mightily relieved, I can tell you, when I found out it wasn’t yours.”

“But what can I do? I can’t give it all away. And, Leo, I don’t want to. I want somewhere nice for us to live. I want us to live as we please and you not necessarily have to go on working for your brother—unless you want to, I mean. I want to buy a car, I haven’t
even got a car and nor have you.” She found she was talking wildly. “I can buy us a smaller place, a flat, a little house.”

She put out her hand to touch his but it remained unresponsive. The memory that came back to her was always there but usually suppressed, buried under layers of pleasanter things.

“Why did you leave me that day in Covent Garden?”

He turned uncomprehending eyes. “What?”

“We were out together. It was the second, the third, time we went out together, and you suddenly said you had to go, you had to meet your brother, and you said good-bye and walked away.”

“I suppose I had to meet my brother.”

Some inner cautious voice told her not to pursue it. She stood up. “Let’s go.”

Outside it was very dark. Clouds had been gathering all afternoon and now thunder rumbled from beyond Hampstead and Highgate like distant explosions. Coming here, he had held her hand, but now he walked apart from her, his head down, sullen as she had never seen him. After a moment or two he said lifelessly, almost regretfully, “I love you.”

Until then he had never quite said it.

The words themselves were gratifying. Perhaps they always were, no matter who said them. Suddenly she was uncertain, she thought she loved him, she loved being with him, she loved their lovemaking, but could she answer him in the way he would want her to? What made her suddenly doubt? A certain sulky childishness because he had difficulty in coping with the difference in their incomes?

They were in a taxi, silent again, and home in Charlotte Cottage before he said another word. By then the storm was full-blown, the lightning splitting a sky of huge black thunderclouds, the rain beating down all the flowers in Park Village gardens. She had put the lights on, it was like a winter evening. Gushi, terrified, hid under the sofa, his cold nose pressed against her ankles. It was the kind of
weather when you could take it for granted Bean wasn’t coming. Leo said suddenly, in an uncharacteristic outburst, “I can’t bear that man, whatshisname, Alistair, writing to you that you’re going to live together, you’re going to buy a place together.”

“But we’re not. I’ve told you, all that’s over.”

“He wants to marry you, doesn’t he?”

“Perhaps. I don’t want to marry him.”

A thunder crash seemed to rock the house. Gushi whimpered. She got down on her knees and did her best to stroke his chrysanthemum head, reaching under the sofa.

“Will you marry
me?
”

She turned her head. It was ridiculous to be on all fours.

“Did you really say that?”

“I really did.” He looked almost shamefaced. His face was her face when she was awkward or embarrassed.

“Leo, I’m older than you. We’ve known each other for less than two months. And—” she couldn’t resist “—I’m rich.” She saw him wince. “We can live together, we’re going to do that. We can get to know each other.”

“We do know each other.” He got down onto the floor beside her and held her shoulders. His eyes were very near hers. “We are part of each other’s bodies, and not just in the way all lovers are, but in a special way. You are my bones, Mary. You are my blood. Who else could we marry? Don’t you see that after what we’ve been to each other, it would be wrong for us ever to marry anyone else?”

She felt a little faint. She shook her head, on and on.

“Marry me, Mary, before he can marry you. Marry me now.”

“Leo, you know we see eye to eye in most things, but this is—isn’t it a bit ridiculous? I do want to be with you, I do want to live with you as soon as I can leave here, but why does it have to be marriage? One day, yes. Maybe in two or three years’ time. When we know what we both really want.”

He said very quietly, “There may not be two or three years.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think I’m going to live very long.”

It was as if she had put out her hand, expecting to encounter warmth, and had felt, instead, ice. She had been practical, prudent, and she could see he was deadly serious.

“What do you mean?”

There was fear in his voice now. “Just what I say.”

The ice was touching her spine, sliding down. “Have they told you that? Have they told you at the hospital?”

“Let’s say,” he said, “they won’t answer when I ask. I had a checkup on Wednesday.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“I would have if there’d been a—a favorable outcome. I shall be all right for a while. They talked about a while.”

She said breathlessly, “Another transplant?”

“You would do that for me a second time?”

“If necessary. Of course I would.”

There was a wild look in his eyes she had never seen before.

“I never thought you’d do that. I never considered it.” He seemed disproportionately distressed. It was as if she had said something that might change his life and his plans, as indeed this might, but not pleasurably, not in a way to be entirely desired. “I wish I’d known,” he said, half to himself, and then, “You’d do that?”

“I’ve just said so. Leo, it’s nothing to the donor, nothing but an anesthetic and that’s quite safe if you’re strong and healthy.”

She put her arms round him. She felt a pulse drumming in his neck, his heart beating steadily but fast. Her mind wasn’t made up but she knew she was about to act as if it were.

“If you need another transplant, who better to have it from than your wife?”

20

B
efore going to St. Andrew’s Place, Bean called in at the chemist and picked up the ten enlargements he had had made. Expensive but worth it. The dog photographs, Charlie sniffing noses with McBride, Charlie in pursuit of a goose, Charlie reclining elegantly on sunlit grass, he had in a cardboard folder and he slipped one of the enlargements in with them. The others he locked up in Maurice Clitheroe’s safe.

His newfound power led him to ask James Barker-Pryce not to light another cigar while talking to him. It was bringing on the asthma he thought he had left behind him twenty years ago. They had gone into a small office or study with a view from its long window of the Royal College of Physicians. On the desk was a stack of writing paper with House of Commons printed on it in green and a picture of a gridiron thing that Bean thought meant it was the property of the government. The cigar was left behind, smoldering in an ashtray in the hall.

He opened the cardboard folder and displayed two photographs of Charlie and then the enlargement. Barker-Pryce snatched it up. “I have others, sir,” Bean said.

Barker-Pryce didn’t even look at the shots of Charlie. Some of these people weren’t fit to keep a dog. He picked up his dark green Mont Blanc fountain pen in khaki-stained fingers and wrote a reference on that same crested writing paper. His handwriting was not what Bean would have expected, being small and clear and perfectly legible. Over his shoulder, Bean could read desirable words: “reliable,”
“a true animal-lover,” “unfailingly punctual.”

“I’ve made other arrangements for Charlie,” Barker-Pryce said in almost the tone he would have used to a neighbor or an honorable friend in the Commons. “I can’t see my way to revoking those, if you understand me. But I’d like these pictures of my retriever.”

The money was there, all ready and prepared. It was placed in his hand, the notes lined up against the edges of the envelope with the reference in it. Bean didn’t count them, he could tell it was a hundred pounds. With an awful attempt at a conspiratorial grin, a squeezing shut of the eyes, a lifting of that thick hairy upper lip to expose teeth of the same shade and shape as the mahogany beading on the desk, Barker-Pryce said, “Buy yourself a few videos instead of the newspaper, eh?”

Bean did speak then. “I’ll call again in a week’s time.” He’d dropped the “sir.” He left the pictures where they were, the one of Charlie and the goose uppermost. The expression on Barker-Pryce’s face was frightening, so he stopped looking at it. What those girls went through! No wonder they’d never let a john kiss them.

Charlie burst out of one of the rooms at the back and came boisterously up to him in the hall. Poor innocent creature, thought Bean. He touched the retriever perfunctorily on the head the way Queen Victoria’s dad might have patted one of the dogs at Sidmouth. Barker-Pryce didn’t say another word but stood in the study doorway, looking at him. Bean pulled the front door closed.

Mrs. Sellers and her dalmatian lived in Park Square, which would be convenient, being more or less on the way from the Cornells’ to Lisl Pring’s. The dalmatian (called Spots, “not Spot, please,” said Mrs. Sellers) was obedient and docile and she took a fancy to Bean from the moment he entered the flat. The interview went well and it looked as if Bean would soon add another dog to his charges. The reference on House of Commons paper made an awesome impression on her but didn’t stop her asking for a second one.

Miss Jago at Charlotte Cottage was the sort who when she said
she’d do a thing, did it. Except that she hadn’t. And he’d already twice reminded her of her promise. He noticed most things about his clients and it didn’t escape him that Miss Jago had an engagement ring on her left hand. Not much of a ring, Victorian rubbish of nine-carat gold and tourmalines you could pick up for forty quid at Camden Lock. One of the numerous men she entertained was presumably going to make an honest woman of her. He wondered—for he was always on the lookout for a means of money-making—if Sir Stewart and Lady Blackburn-Norris knew, if they would mind, if she had told them. Would she be marrying soon? Would she bring hubby to live
here?
Was there anything in it for him?

More pressing was the matter of his reference. Having hesitated as to whether or not he wanted another dog and a big dog at that, he now desperately wanted Spots. He told himself he needed the increase to his income walking Spots would bring. Besides, it irked him, Mrs. Sellers doubtless believing by this time that no one else was willing to vouch for him.

Twenty-three days had elapsed between the first murder and the second and now it was just twenty-three days since the second murder. Bean expected a third at any minute. He believed in psychopaths ruled by the phases of the moon, cycles of madness, blood lust regulated by multiples of seven, give or take a little. So there should be another one at any time.

He was sure the police believed in it too. That was why they were so jumpy and so polite. He had stopped reading the papers, but the television had a program about fixated killers, killers with a mission or an obsession, and there was a psychiatrist on it—probably the one who analyzed Pharaoh’s madness—talking about murderers who killed prostitutes or nuns or almost anyone so long as they could be put into a category.

The twenty-third day went by and the twenty-fourth and none of the homeless or the jacks men or the beggars got killed. Whoever it was doing it had probably gone off somewhere else, Bean thought,
gone up north, they always went up north for some reason. He often speculated about The Beater and wondered if he ought to say something to the police next time they paid him a visit. They had been back twice since asking him about the mugger in the tunnel and he had begun seriously thinking of himself as their adviser, as genuinely helping them with their inquiries. But what could he say? That The Beater could act anything, pretend to be anything he wanted? A sadist or, doubtless, a respectable citizen?