The Water Room (5 page)

‘They stopped making it in the 1950s,’ Longbright admitted, hiding her hands. ‘I have to get it mixed at a theatrical suppliers.’ No one had ever noticed before.

‘How unusual. Can I get you anything? Presumably you don’t drink alcohol on duty, and this lad doesn’t look as if he’s old enough.’ Now it was Bimsley’s turn to be embarrassed. ‘I didn’t really know the old lady—it
is
the old lady you’re asking about? But I did run a few errands for her. She couldn’t get out. Her brother had bought her one of those little motorized cart-things, but she wouldn’t use it. I can’t imagine why, they only do about eight miles an hour.’ The tinge of hysteria in her prattle bothered Longbright, who made another mental note:
this one spends too much time alone, and needs to impress upon others that everything is fine.

‘When did you last run an errand for her?’

Heather Allen tucked a glazed lock of auburn hair beneath the towel as she thought. ‘Before the weekend, it must have been Friday, she told me she needed some bread.’

‘How?’

‘What do you mean?’ Mrs Allen looked alarmed.

‘How did she tell you? Did you call on her?’

‘Oh no, nothing like that. It was a beautiful day, she was standing at the back door and we spoke.’

‘She didn’t say anything else? Other than asking you to get her some shopping?’

‘No, well—no, I mean. No. I’m sure she didn’t.’

Longbright sensed something. ‘For example, she didn’t say she was worried about anything? Didn’t seem to have anything pressing on her mind?’

‘Well, that sort of depends.’ Mrs Allen appeared to have been manoeuvred to the lounge wall. Longbright stepped back, wary of her tendency to be aggressive.

‘On what?’ she asked.

‘I mean, there had been the letters. I presume you’ve been told about those.’

‘Perhaps you should tell me.’

‘It’s really none of my business.’ Mrs Allen’s voice rose as her sense of panic increased.

‘Anything you say will be treated with the utmost confidence,’ assured Bimsley.

‘It seemed so childish—not to her, obviously—some racist notes had been put through her letterbox. It’s not the sort of thing you expect any more.’

‘How do you know about it?’

‘I’ve no idea. I suppose she must have told me, or maybe one of the neighbours, but I can’t remember when. I never saw them.’

‘She didn’t know who’d sent them?’

‘I don’t suppose so. I mean, she didn’t know anyone.’

‘Perhaps you would inform us if any other details come to you.’ Longbright produced another business card, but knew that the unit was unlikely to receive a call. Some people had an instinctive distrust of the police that no amount of goodwill could alter. She enjoyed seeing in people’s homes, though. The décor in this one was far too cool and impersonal, especially for a woman who favoured leopardskin.

‘Come on, you,’ she told Bimsley as they headed out into the rain. ‘Let’s get back. Notes and impressions.’

‘I don’t do impressions. And I thought you took the notes.’

‘Mr Bryant wants to see what you can do.’

‘Nobody can read my writing,’ Bimsley protested, narrowly missing a tree.

‘James Joyce had the same problem. You’ll manage.’

Arthur Bryant knew far too much about London.

It had been his specialist subject since he was a small boy, because it represented a convergence of so many appealingly arcane topics. Over the years he had become a repository of useless information. He remembered what had happened in the Blind Beggar (Ronnie Kray shot Big George Cornell three times in the head) and where balding Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie had been left dead in his Ford Zephyr (St Marychurch Street, Rotherhithe), how a Marks & Spencer tycoon had survived being shot by Carlos the Jackal in Queen’s Grove (the bullet bounced off his teeth), and where you could get a decent treacle tart (the Orangery, Kensington Palace). He knew that Mahatma Gandhi had stayed in Bow, Karl Marx in Dean Street, Ford Madox Brown in Kentish Town, that Oswald Mosley had been attacked in Ridley Road before it became a market, that Notting Hill had once housed a racecourse, that the London Dolphinarium had existed in Oxford Street in the seventies, and that Tubby Isaacs’ seafood stall was still open for business in Aldgate. For some reason, he also recalled that John Steed’s mews flat in
The Avengers
was actually in Duchess Mews, W1. Not that any of this knowledge did him much good. Quite the reverse, really; the sheer weight of it wore him out.

But Bryant wasn’t tired, even though it was nearly midnight. He sometimes took a short nap in the afternoon but hardly ever slept before two in the morning, and always rose at six. Sleeplessness had come with age; fear of dying without lasting achievement kept him awake.

Longbright had printed out the Balaklava Street interviews from her Internet-gizmo and had thoughtfully left a hard copy on his desk, knowing that he would work into the night. In return, he had left a pink rose—her favourite, named after the fifties singer Alma Cogan—on her newly erected desk for the morning.

He studied the names before him and rubbed at the bags beneath his eyes. Seven residents interviewed out of ten in the street, two more from the gardens beyond the house, a statement from the brother, no strangers or unusual occurrences seen on Sunday night, all a bit of a dead end. The old lady had no friends, and apparently no enemies beyond the writer of the racist notes only Mrs Allen seemed to have heard about. Finch had been over the body and found nothing except the skull contusion, too small to have caused any damage, and a throat full of dirty water, not from a clean London tap but some other murkier source, hopefully to be pinpointed when the sample had returned from analysis. What other source could there be? Something ingested against her will? Rainwater? It made no sense. He lit his pipe, almost feeling guilty that the No Smoking sign had been pointedly re-pinned above his desk, and tried to imagine what had happened.

Suppose . . .

Suppose Benjamin Singh had found his sister drowned in her bath? It happened to small children with depressing regularity, and the elderly could often behave like children. The bathroom was downstairs, along with the kitchen and dining room, below the road at the front, but level with the garden at the back. What if Benjamin had come down the stairs calling for her, had panicked upon seeing her body and pulled her out, dressing her and leaving her in her chair? Shock and grief caused strange behaviour. He might be too embarrassed to admit what he had done. But no, there would have been wrinkling in the skin. Suppose she had been upstairs, soaking her swollen feet, and had gone down to empty the foot-spa—she could have slipped, hitting her head on the stairs, and, in an admittedly awkward fall, drowned in the little bath. Her brother wouldn’t have wanted her to be seen like that. He could have taken the bath away and emptied it before tidying it up. Perhaps he hadn’t mentioned it because he knew he would be in trouble for moving the body.

It was an unlikely explanation, and yet it vaguely made sense. Because, acting on May’s suggestion, Bimsley had found such a foot-spa downstairs, stowed in a cupboard. Finch had already suggested that the case wouldn’t go to jury, who were limited to three verdicts: accidental death, unlawful killing or an open verdict.

He thought about calling May for advice but decided against it.
You rely too heavily on John,
he told himself.
He’s younger than you, the man still has a life outside of the unit—you don’t. You’re getting too old to do the work, you’re just refusing to give it up.
But retirement meant sitting at home as the world passed by his window, creeping to the high street and forcing conversations on uninterested teenaged shop-helpers, or—God forbid—listening to litanies of illness from his peers. He had no children, no family to speak of, no savings, nothing left except his job. The women he had loved were dead. Nathalie, the fiancée he had worshipped and lost, long gone. He admired the enthusiasm of the young, their energy and freedom, but the young rarely reciprocated with friendship. They exercised an unconscious ageism that had been placed upon them by the world’s all-conquering emphasis on youth. The elderly embarrassed them, bored them, failed to match the frenetic pace of their own lives. Elders weren’t respected in English-speaking countries, they were merely taking up room.

Bryant had a feeling that the answer to discovering satisfaction in his late years was connected with doing good, perhaps teaching—but how could you teach instinct? Instinct told him that something terrible had befallen Mrs Singh, but there was no proof, and until he had that there was no case. This evening, a racial-harassment officer from Camden Council had checked in with Mr Singh. She wanted to know if his sister had really been sent anonymous letters, or if she had been subjected to any kind of racial abuse. Benjamin had called Bryant in a state of mortification. If such letters had existed, Ruth would have burned them out of shame. Camden Council should never have been told; didn’t he realize that some matters were private? They had lived their entire lives in England, this was their home, why on earth would anyone even think they were different?

Bryant’s renowned insensitivity to the anguish of crime victims had created an enduring reputation for rudeness, but he could exercise restraint, even finesse, when required to do so. They had chatted for half an hour, two men of similar ages and opinions, and Bryant had closed by promising to take Benjamin to a lecture on Wiccan literature at the new British Library next week. What remained unspoken between them was any resolution concerning Ruth Singh’s inexplicable demise.

The thought nagged at Bryant: the old lady hardly ever went outside, so why had she been dressed for an expedition? And if she had voluntarily ingested some foreign matter, how would Benjamin react to being told that his closest surviving relative had committed suicide?

The front doors were tightly closed on Balaklava Street. His job would be to prise them open.

5

OPPORTUNITY

Their third fight in three days.

She knew why it was happening, but was powerless to prevent it. Kallie Owen pulled another plastic carrier bag from the tines of the checkout bay and piled in the last of the groceries, carefully placing the eggs on top. In the doorway of Somerfield, Paul fumed and paced, cigarette smoke curling from beneath the raised hood of his parka. He was a placid man, but the situation was getting them both down.

After living together in the cramped Swiss Cottage flat for eight months, they had fallen out with the landlord over rising rent and his inability to carry out essential repairs. Exercising their rights as tenants, they had asked the council to mediate, and the situation had been resolved in their favour. As a consequence, the landlord, an otherwise affable Greek Cypriot with a string of properties in Green Lanes, wanted them out, and had given them notice to quit within a month, citing his decision to subdivide and renovate the building. Paul was refusing to pay rent, claiming a breach of the tenants’ agreement. Kallie just wanted to leave. The latest argument was about where they would go, and if they would even go together.

Paul flicked his cigarette into the road and came in to help her with the bags. He became claustrophobic and sulky in busy supermarkets, and had returned only to make a point. ‘You know if we move any nearer, she’ll come around every five minutes to check on you,’ he warned. ‘It’s bad enough at the moment, all that business about “I was just passing.” She doesn’t know anyone who lives near us.’

Kallie’s mother lived in a small flat behind the Holloway Road. She didn’t approve of her daughter living with a man like Paul, who kept odd hours and had a job she didn’t understand. She visited Kallie less to check on her welfare than to assuage her own loneliness.

‘I’m not getting drawn into this again, Paul. We need to buy a place and put down some roots. I’m fed up with moving around. Three flats in four years, it’s got to the point where I hardly bother to unpack the boxes. And the King’s Cross idea—’

‘King’s Cross would have gone up in value.’

‘Meanwhile we’d have been stepping over crackheads to get to our front door.’

‘Come on, Kallie, buying somewhere decent around here would take more money than we’ve got. You know we’d have to move further out.’

This is the point where you don’t mention his lack of commitment,
she told herself.
This is where you change the subject to looking for a bus.

‘You hate the idea of settling down,’ she heard herself say. ‘You think you’ll never have a chance to do all the things you planned to do when you were eighteen.’

‘That’s bullshit. We’re going to have a baby, that’s commitment, isn’t it?’

The baby thing. Kallie coloured and ducked her head. She knew that at some point she would have to own up to the truth. Why had she told him she was pregnant? What part of that particular overstatement could have turned in her favour? True, her period had been late, they had been out for a rare dinner, she’d drunk too much wine, and Paul had talked about his father with such admiration in his voice that she had taken it as a coded message about parenthood. In the euphoria of the moment, she had told him that her home test was positive. She was ready to have a baby, they would make one a few days later and she really would be pregnant. The desire was there on both sides, all she had needed to do was make it happen. Sensing that he was ready, even if he hadn’t said as much, she stopped her contraception and calculated the right time. She planned the best sexual position for maximum fertilization, and their lovemaking had taken on an intriguing edge of urgency.

But nothing had happened. Now she was stuck with a lie, and time was passing fast. She had never expected to welcome his insensitivity to gynaecological matters. Luckily, he couldn’t tell the difference between a uterus and a U-bend. It was all just plumbing. He already had her pegged as a dreamer, a fantasist. Now he would be able to call her a liar.

‘Great, that’s all we need.’ Paul set down the bags and tipped up the hood of his jacket as it began to rain hard. ‘Look at the bus queue. I hate this bloody country—the rain, the roadworks, the sheer bloody incompetence, everyone looking so miserable all the time, rattling between the shops and the pub as if they were on rails, and now the summer’s gone, there’s just months of bloody rain to look forward to.’

She nearly said
then you should have travelled when you had the chance,
but this time she caught the words before they could escape her lips. She knew he regretted working through his gap year, not going around the world as his brother had, and now the baby story was backfiring on her, trapping him, pushing them further away from each other.

When they arrived back at their third-floor flat, they found that the front-door lock had been changed. Paul went downstairs to see the landlord and lost his temper, while Kallie sat on the gloomy landing surrounded by her shopping bags, trying to stay calm. As the shouting continued, the police were called.

She didn’t understand how it could have all gone wrong so quickly. She had been modelling and making a decent living, but after her twenty-fifth birthday the work was harder to come by, and she found herself being downgraded from style magazines to catalogue jobs as the unsubtle ageism of her career made itself felt. Paul worked in the A&R department of a record company that was going through a rough patch. The era of superclubs and celebrity DJs was over, and there was a possibility that he would be made redundant. Nothing was quite as easy as it had been when they first met, and she hated the effect it was having on them, a gentle but persistent dragging at the edges of their life that robbed them of small pleasures, making laughter less easy to come by. Paul was two years younger, and had developed the annoying habit of treating her like an older woman, expecting her to sort out his problems.

On the evening of the Sunday they were locked out of their flat, they went to stay with Paul’s brother in Edgware, and after two weeks of sleeping on his expensive and uncomfortable designer leather couch, with Paul sinking into a kind of stupefied silence, Kallie decided to take matters into her own hands before something irreparable occurred between them. She went to see her former schoolfriend for advice. Heather Allen was nuts, everyone knew that, but she was ambitious and decisive and always had answers. She owned a nice house and had made a successful marriage; there were worse people to ask.

‘Who died?’ Kallie asked as Heather ushered her into the hall of number 6, Balaklava Street.

‘Oh, the funeral car. Not many flowers, are there?’ Heather peered out of the front door. ‘Shame. I wondered what the noise was. The old lady next door passed away. We hardly ever saw her, to be honest. She couldn’t go out. Her brother always came around with her groceries, and he’s no spring chicken. Come into the kitchen. I’ve been baking.’

Kallie found it hard to imagine her former classmate tackling anything domestic, but followed her.

‘Well, I was attempting to bake because of all these bloody cookery programmes you see on telly, but I couldn’t keep up with the recipe. Some cockney superchef was rushing all over the kitchen tipping things into measuring jugs, and I didn’t have half the ingredients I was supposed to have, so I started making substitutions, then he was going “Lovely jubbly” and waving saucepans over high flames and I totally lost track. God, he’s annoying. Nice arse, though. You can try a piece, but I wouldn’t.’ She shoved the tray of flattened, blackened chocolate sponge to one side and tore open a Waitrose cheesecake. ‘Don’t sit there, use the stool, otherwise you’ll get cat hairs all over you. Cleo somehow manages to get white hairs on dark items and vice versa, it’s the only talent she has. A legacy from George. My God, you’re so thin. Is that a diet or bulimia? I take it you’re still modelling.’

‘I was supposed to be working today, but I threw a sickie,’ Kallie admitted. ‘I don’t do it very often, God knows we need the money, but things were getting on top of me, and I wasn’t in the mood to stand around in thermal underwear smiling like an idiot for five hours. They said I could pick up again on Monday. We’ve been kicked out of Swiss Cottage.’

‘That awful little flat? A blessing, surely?’ Heather never appeared to think before she spoke. She reboiled the kettle, grabbed milk and, more oddly, sugar from the fridge, and started rinsing cups. Whenever Kallie thought of her friend, she imagined her doing three or four things at once. The kitchen was so immaculately tidy that it looked like a studio set. Heather possessed the kind of nervous energy that made everyone else feel tired. There was too much unused power inside her. She was competitive in a way that only women who were never taken seriously could be. Consequently, her enthusiasm was ferocious and slightly unnerving.

‘I only agreed to rent the place with Paul because it was near his office. Unfortunately the landlord had other ideas. We’re sleeping in Neil’s lounge, and I think I’m really starting to bug his girlfriend. She comes in first thing in the morning and slams about in the kitchen, sighing a lot. Plus I don’t like the way Neil looks at me when I’m in my pants.’

‘Well,
Paul
.’ Heather tapped crimson nails on the breakfast counter while she waited for the kettle. ‘It’s admirable that you’ve stuck by him, of course. He’s never really been able to hold down a job very long, has he? Not much of an attention span. Funny how women always see the long term, while men struggle to concentrate on the next twenty-four hours.’ Heather and Paul had a history of antipathy toward one another. It was the main reason why Kallie hadn’t seen anything of her in the last two years.

‘If you’re determined to make it work with him, I don’t know why you don’t buy somewhere and have done with it.’ Heather poured tea, dispensed biscuits, laid out coasters, cleaned the sink. ‘It was the best thing George and I ever did, getting this place.’

‘How is he?’

‘Oh,’ she waved the thought away, ‘working all the hours God sends, making an absolute fortune, but still travelling too much to enjoy it, and it’s no fun for me, pottering about with female pals. You get too well known at Harvey Nicks and the staff start to look at you with pity. I suppose it could be worse, I could be a golf widow.’

‘Where is George now?’

‘In Vancouver for a week. He asked if I wanted him to bring anything back. I said Vancouver, don’t bother. We mostly communicate by email these days. Listen, you’ll get another place together and things will calm down between you. Moving is stressful, particularly when you do it as often—’

‘I told him I was pregnant.’

If Heather was surprised, she didn’t show it. ‘And you’re not?’

‘No, we’d talked about it, and then we went out to the Italian place in Kentish Town—’

‘
Pane e Vino
? The lovely one with all the garlic?’

‘And I had a bottle of Soave and got a bit carried away. I thought we really might go for it later, but he ate too much and just wanted to sleep. I left it too long to tell him the truth and now he’s expecting me to start traipsing to the doctor. He doesn’t really want a baby—he says he does but now I can see it in his eyes. He thinks it’ll tie him down and he’ll never go travelling like Neil did, and he’ll have to be a grown-up for ever, and I don’t know, it’s all getting screwed up.’

‘You can’t work out your life when you’re sleeping on someone’s couch,’ said Heather. ‘That’s the first thing you have to change.’

‘You were so lucky, getting this house. A cobbled street, it’s like something out of a fifties black and white film.’

‘I know. It’s all a bit
faux
-shabby, but we really do have a milkman, a paperboy, a knife-grinder, a rag-and-bone man, ice-cream vans in the summer. Men take their shirts off and mend their cars in the street, as if they’re reliving their childhoods. The woman opposite still washes her front step. Some mornings you half expect Norman Wisdom to walk past with a ladder. We even have our own tramp, a proper old rambly one with a limp and a beard, not a Lithuanian with a sleeping bag. And you’d be surprised how cheap it still is around here. Urban chic, you see, much more bang for your buck than any
pied-à-terre
in Kensington, and we still have the cottage in Norfolk—not that I’ll go there alone, because who wants to be surrounded by nothing but scenery? There’s only so many times you can go for a walk. Here, we’re sandwiched between two dreadful council estates, and of course there are no decent schools, not that I’ll ever have children. But it’s quiet and we all have gardens. Not quite Eden, given the number of stabbings you get near the Tube.’

Heather lowered her mug. ‘You know, you should go after the old lady’s place. You’ve always wanted a garden. I suppose it will be put on the market now, and some developer will snap it up. She’s been there for years, so it would probably need a lot of work, which is good because the asking price will be lower.’

‘Won’t her brother want to live there now?’

‘I don’t suppose he’d be happy about climbing the stairs. These houses are quite small, but they’re arranged on three floors.’

Kallie refused to allow herself the indulgence of such a fantasy. ‘There’s no point in dreaming, I wouldn’t be able to afford it.’

‘You’ll never know if you don’t ask.’ Heather had that determined and slightly crazy look in her eyes that Kallie remembered from their school days. It always used to envelop her whenever she decided to adopt someone else’s problem as a challenge. ‘Tell you what, I’ll ask for you. I do know the brother, after all. Let’s see if he’s there right now.’

‘Heather, he’s burying his sister. You can’t badger someone on a day like this.’

‘Opportunity is not a lengthy visitor, ever hear that? If we don’t ask, someone else will. Come on, don’t be such a wuss.’

‘I can’t, it’s her funeral. It’s wrong.’

‘Look, I’ll just pay my condolences and ask if he’s going to move in—stay here until I get back.’

As usual, Heather led the way. She always had, since they were eleven and nine. Heather, in trouble for stealing from the art-supplies cupboard, Kallie, the shy one who took the blame and never told. Heather, charging across roads and walking along the railway lines, Kallie stranded imploringly at the kerb or beside the track, waiting with clenched lips and downcast eyes. Heather with the lies of a demon, playing terrible games with older boys, Kallie with the heart of an angel, being terribly earnest. Men and money had driven them apart, but perhaps it was time to be friends again.