The Saint Zita Society (15 page)

‘Here’s Mummy, Thomas,’ said Rabia. ‘Say hello to Mummy.’

She was perhaps a formidable sight to any small child with her five-inch-heel knee boots, miniskirt, faux-leopard jacket and streaming blonde hair. The little boy reacted promptly enough. Screaming, ‘Rab, Rab,’ he turned to Rabia and threw himself into her arms.

‘Oh my God, what’s wrong with the child?’ Lucy got to her feet with difficulty, looking bewildered rather than cross, but Rabia was terrified. How would a mother feel if her child seemed to prefer another woman to herself? Of course Thomas couldn’t really, all children love their mother best, it only looked that way. But suppose Lucy was so hurt and angry, as she might well be, that she would think getting rid of the nanny was her only course?

It was only a single moment of horror. Lucy said, ‘Come and sit down a moment, darling. I want to ask you something. I think of you as the expert, you see.’

They sat at the table, Rabia having quietened Thomas with a mug of chocolate milk and a Jammie Dodger. ‘Do you think it terribly important for children to have their father living with them?’

‘It is what I have always been used to in my community.’

‘I suppose it is. But then you’ve been used to arranged marriages and praying God knows how many times a day, haven’t you?’

Rabia felt able to say nothing, only to smile.

‘A father would never get custody, would he?’

Rabia said she was sorry but she didn’t know what this meant.

‘If there was a divorce, the mother would always get the children, wouldn’t she?’

Momentarily plunged back into fear, Rabia said Lucy would have to ask a lawyer. She wanted to ask if the Stills were
going to have a divorce but she dared not. Lucy thanked her and went away, taking no more notice of Thomas. In need of instant comfort, Rabia seized Thomas and hugged him tightly, covering the front of her black gown with smears of jam and chocolate milk. She still hadn’t decided what to do with the silver cigarette case.

Downstairs, Montserrat had come home from buying a pair of black leather boots from Marks & Spencer and found an envelope pushed under her front door. Inside was a cheque for three hundred and fifty pounds drawn on Coutts Bank to Montserrat Tresser and signed P. Q. Still.

‘I wonder what the Q stands for,’ she said aloud.

No note was inside the envelope. She didn’t exactly expect him to have thanked her for driving him around to dispose of a body but he might have written something, maybe a few cryptic words acknowledging unspecified help. That was it then, was it? There was to be no more. Lucy’s conduct was to be overlooked, they were together again and all was well. She poured herself the dregs of the whisky she and he had shared on Friday night. The boots looked rather less attractive than they had in the shop. She had bought them because they were a lot like Lucy’s but Lucy’s came from Céline and cost eight hundred pounds. She knew because she’d seen them advertised in the
Sunday Times Style
magazine.

The tap on the door at seven woke her. She had fallen asleep from boredom, nothing to do and whisky. It must be Ciaran except that he had no key and couldn’t get in. She opened the door. Preston stood there.

He came in and spoke to her as if they had known each other for years and years. No greeting, no ‘How are you?’ ‘I’ve told Lucy I want a divorce.’

The logistics of it concerned her more than the law, the personalities or the emotions involved. ‘Where will you go?’

‘I expect I’ll take a flat somewhere near. I’ll need to see the kids.’

‘Is there anything in the paper about Rad?’

‘It’s too soon.’

‘I suppose it is,’ she said. ‘It’s not as if he had a wife or a girlfriend to miss him.’

But there, on the following morning, she saw she was wrong. The tabloids, the ones that are called ‘red top’ and never ‘quality’, all carried a front-page story by a woman called Rocksana Castelli who said she was Rad Sothern’s ‘partner’ and had been sharing his flat in Montagu Square for the past year. The photograph looked a lot like Lucy Still, same emaciated body, long skinny legs and blonde hair, but about ten years younger. Miss Castelli, Montserrat read, had last seen Rad at the flat on Friday afternoon before she left to visit her mother in Hornsey. They had had a disagreement so she hadn’t been much disturbed when he didn’t return that night. On Saturday she phoned him twice on his mobile and got an answer but no one spoke. It was yesterday, Monday, that she thought things were serious and she told the police.

Montserrat wondered if Lucy had seen it. Quite a shock for her if she had. Would it be a wise move to see June? The severe weather warning put out the night before had resulted in no more than a light breeze and a drizzle. She ventured across the road with the
Sun
in her hand only to meet June halfway there with the
Daily Mail
. That Rad had a live-in girlfriend interested June more than his disappearance.

‘I always knew he couldn’t have been going out with you.’

‘I never said he was,’ said Montserrat.

‘That must have been her that phoned. I heard it ring but of course I didn’t answer it. I don’t know how to work those contraptions.’

‘I’m going in, I’m getting wet,’ said Montserrat, putting the
Sun
over her head and retreating to the area stairs.

The only way to initiate the next stage of the drama, thought June, was to phone the police. On the real phone, of course. Eventually she was put on to a Detective Sergeant Freud. ‘Mr Sothern spends a lot of time here with us. That is, the Princess and myself. The Princess is a great admirer of his medical serial. He was here having a drink with us last Friday evening.’

‘Where did he go when he left you?’

‘That I couldn’t say,’ June said virtuously. ‘It was no business of mine.’

Sergeant Freud said he would send someone round to number 6 Hexam Place. She had a few minutes or perhaps a few hours in which to decide whether to mention Rad’s apparent connection with number 7 opposite. She had rather liked the look of the girl in the photograph, a pretty girl with lovely colouring and a shy gentle expression. No need to cause her further upset by telling the police about Montserrat. The Princess couldn’t understand how an episode and not a repeat of
Avalon Clinic
could be shown when Rad had disappeared but she watched it just the same.

Jimmy dropped Dr Jefferson off, got into a queue of traffic, sat in the butter-coloured Lexus and phoned Thea, pouring out love words from a full heart and reminding her of the raptures of the previous night. A policeman moved him along and he drove back to Hexam Place where he had arranged to meet her in the Dugong. Thea had an early edition of the
Evening Standard
.

‘This stuff is so sordid,’ said Jimmy when she insisted on showing him a photograph of Rocksana Castelli in a bikini by the side of a swimming pool, Rad Sothern half submerged in the water.

‘He was seeing someone at number 7.’

‘Mr Still’s place?’

‘Well, he wasn’t seeing Mr Still,’ said Thea. ‘He isn’t gay. And it wasn’t Montserrat, that I do know. Maybe it was Zinnia.’

‘Can’t we forget these squalid people, sweetheart? Let’s go back to your place.’

‘OK, if you want,’ said Thea.

A
fter lunch, when it was time for Lord Studley to take his seat on the coalition front bench for prayers, Henry drove Oceane and her friend to Sloane Street to go shopping in Prada and its ilk. They kept him waiting outside so long that he had to evade traffic wardens by driving round and round Lowndes Square. Their conversation on the way back was of such a lubricious nature, punctuated by little screams and breathless gasps, that he wouldn’t have been surprised if, on arriving at Hexam Place, they had proposed a threesome before he went to fetch Lord Studley. But nothing like that happened and, having left the Beemer on the residents’ parking, he went up the road to fetch the
Evening Standard
.

Montserrat was in the newsagent’s. This later edition had a photograph of Rad Sothern and Rocksana Castelli toasting each with champagne in a club. The headline said,
ROCK IN TEARS FOR RAD
.

‘I bet he never said a word about her.’

‘I barely knew him,’ said Montserrat.

Henry spotted the plain-clothes officer going up the steps to number 6. He’d know one of them anywhere. Why did they bother to disguise themselves? June had been waiting for him for hours. If he didn’t hurry up, she was thinking, she’d have to postpone the extraordinary general meeting of the Saint Zita Society scheduled for 7 p.m. Then the doorbell
rang. DC Rickards looked about eighteen but even people in their thirties and forties looked eighteen to her.

He appeared to believe that the Princess was a member of the royal family and seemed overawed by her. Gussie set up a furious barking and had to be shut in the kitchen. ‘This is Mr Sothern’s mobile telephone,’ said June. ‘Should I have reported it to someone?’

‘Just us,’ said DC Rickards. ‘You did quite right. Mr Sothern your grandson, is he?’

‘Certainly not. I’m an unmarried woman. He’s my great-nephew.’ She had already told DS Freud about Friday evening’s drink and that she didn’t know where Rad went after he left number 6. To reveal that she had never previously heard of his girlfriend would have betrayed an ignorance of Rad’s private life and make him appear less of an intimate friend and kinsman than she would have this young man believe, so she said what a lovely girl Rocksana was and how fond of her were the Princess and herself. ‘She must be out of her mind with worry.’

DC Rickards made no comment. ‘Do you know if Mr Sothern was on friendly terms with other residents of Hexam Place?’

Quick thinking brought June to say that she thought not but that everyone must have recognised him when he called at number 6 owing to his being the famous face of Mr Fortescue. DC Rickards thanked her and said to her surprise that she had been very helpful.

She had half an hour in which to give the Princess a stiff drink, make her a plate of smoked salmon and scrambled egg, walk Gussie round the block and take herself across the road to the Dugong for the Saint Zita Society meeting. Henry, Richard, Zinnia and Thea were already there but not Jimmy. Jimmy was sitting in the butter-coloured Lexus on the
consultants’ parking at University College Hospital in the Euston Road. It was probably the first time since he had worked for Simon Jefferson that he had been kept waiting while his employer carried out life-saving treatment on a six-year-old. He was trying to write a poem to Thea but finding it more difficult than he expected.

The Saint Zita meeting had been called specially (not much more than a week after the previous one) to discuss the response from Westminster City Council to the second letter about the bags of dog excrement. The ‘clean streets’ enterprise wrote that they would continue to remove all waste from the streets but, in the light of recession, economy and ‘the general tightening of belts’ could take no specific steps to curb canine waste litter. June made her little speech and threw the meeting open for opinions and discussion, but it quickly deteriorated into the favoured topic of the evening, the disappearance of Rad Sothern.

‘If he doesn’t turn up,’ said Zinnia, ‘if he’s like
dead
and they can’t do any more recording, do you think they’ll have to kill Mr Fortescue?’

A
ll her life since she had come to London with her father when she was small Rabia had judged the ways of those she called British Christians as very strange. Often very wicked. Their morality, or lack of it, shocked her deeply. It had begun to worry her that Thomas, so good, so sweet, so innocent and pure, must grow up among people to whom chastity meant little and marital infidelity was common. There was nothing she could do, it was not her business – all that she knew – but it worried her.

Now the household itself where she worked was to be disrupted by a breach between the parents. She knew it, she had seen it. Shouts that were still perfectly audible behind the closed bedroom door began it, the obscenities that had dreadful meanings. Pain hurt her physically when she saw Thomas’s face crumple at the hateful words, when the tears splashed down his cheeks and he put out his arms for his Rabia. Then Mr Still moved out of that beautiful big bedroom with its two pairs of long windows, its cherubs on the ceilings, its silk-curtained bed, and took himself up to the top of the house above the nursery floor where he made a bedroom and a bathroom and study his own domain.

‘They’ve actually separated,’ said Montserrat, ‘except that they’re still living under the same roof. There’ll be a divorce.’

‘What will become of the poor children?’

‘If it wasn’t for them the whole thing could be over in a matter of weeks. But it can’t be a quickie when there are kids. Lucy will get custody of course.’

Rabia thought that would be a terrible shame and she remembered how Thomas had turned away from his mother and come to her, but she said nothing. Just the same, she thought it no harm to tell Montserrat that Mr Still came up (down these days) to the nursery at every opportunity he got to ask about his children’s health.

‘It’s no exaggeration to say that the whole country is searching for Rad Sothern. I do wonder what’s happened to him. What do you think?’

Rabia didn’t know what to think. But she did wonder if she should tell the police that, in addition to arguments between Lucy and Mr Still, she had once heard the voice of Mr Fortescue on the floor below.
Avalon Clinic
was one of the few programmes she watched. Thomas was asleep by the time it came on and Rabia liked sitting with the girls to see it. It was about healing people and doing good. That familiar voice might mean Rad Sothern had been in this house several times. Montserrat might know. She would ask Montserrat before she told the police, of whom she was rather afraid. She took another look at the silver cigarette case, wondering once more what to do about it.

Montserrat was indignant at Rabia’s suggestion. She must be mistaken. It was possible that Lucy and Mr Still met Rad at one of the Princess’s parties but they would never have had reason to invite him to number 7. No, Rabia was wrong. She might have heard Rad’s voice on television but it was an actor’s voice, Montserrat said earnestly, a disguised voice, suitable for an upper-class top-flight consultant, nothing like his normal tone which, frankly, was nearer Estuary English.