Tree of Hands (24 page)

As they were on their way down, he took a look out of one of the slit windows that lit the staircase. The policemen had gone inside number one but the front door still stood open. Terence didn't like it. He wanted Mrs Goldschmidt to go. She moved slowly and languidly ahead of him, trailing her hand down the banisters, once looking back over her shoulder to give him a vague wistful smile. In the hall, by the statue with a hole for a head, she stood making notes on a pad in large backward-sloping writing.

‘Oh, I forgot my coat. I left it upstairs.'

She would go up to fetch it, he thought, and then call him and then . . .

‘I'll get it for you.'

He leaped for the stairs. The bedroom window showed him the two policemen on the narrow stone terrace outside the front door of number three in conversation with the woman who lived there. He grabbed the pink leather coat. Downstairs again, he held the coat for her, actually took hold of her right arm and pushed it into the sleeve opening. It took all the meagre courage he had to open the front door. The policemen were outside, about three yards away, staring at the door and now at him.

His throat closed up and his heart took a painful leap towards the middle of his chest. Somehow they had got on to him. Someone, one of those neighbours perhaps, had seen the house was up for sale, was a friend of Sawyer's, had had a letter from Freda . . . Mrs Goldschmidt went slowly out of the door, down the steps, extending her swan neck, vaguely smiling. He realized the police weren't going to move or speak until she was out of the way. That was
their brand of tact. As if he cared! It could have been her who put them on to him for all he knew.

She turned back once. ‘Well, goodbye for now and thank you so much.'

Don't call me Phipps, he screamed silently, don't call me Phipps!

‘I may be in touch. I may want to come back.'

It sounded inexorable, it sounded like a dour threat. He had nothing to say and couldn't have spoken if he had wanted to. His voice would have been a reedy pipe. She walked past the policemen as if they weren't there or were mere furnishings of the courtyard, additional trees or urns, and backed with tiny slow steps across the paving to gaze at the house she had just left. It was only when she turned away once more, smiling with unparted lips in Terence's direction, began on her measured stroll towards the arch, that the policemen moved. They walked up the steps and the older one, ruddy and fair-haired in a flapping raincoat with dangling belt, said in a low conversational tone to Terence: ‘Mr Wand? Mr Terence Wand?'

Terence nodded. He felt as limp as a leaf. The front door closed with a soft dainty little click. They were looking round Freda's hall, at the statues, the Modigliani copy, the black spaniel carpet, the way policemen always do look as if they themselves were condemned by an ungrateful society forever to live in pre-war council houses. Terence opened the double glass doors into the living room. He wished he hadn't eaten those cornflakes, that boiled egg and that croissant for breakfast because he was sure that any moment now he was going to have to make an excuse and go away to be sick.

They walked in. They stood looking curiously about them as if they too had come with a view to buying the house. Just as Terence was trying to frame the words that would get him out of there and into the bathroom, the younger one said, ‘Jason Stratford, Mr Wand. Young Jason Stratford. That's why we've come to see you.'

For a moment the name meant nothing to Terence. It
was shock only insofar as it was utterly distant from what he had expected.

‘May we sit down?'

Again Terence nodded. He didn't sit down. He was holding himself still and tense because he was afraid he might retch if he moved.

‘You'll be aware of course that young Jason is missing. I don't reckon there's many people unaware of that now. Am I right in thinking you're a personal friend of his mother, Mrs Carol Stratford?'

Relief hit Terence like a soft warm pillow pushed into his face. He could hardly breathe for it. Whatever this might be about it was nothing to do with fraudulent schemes to sell Freda Phipps's house. He wondered if he could speak but was still afraid to try.

‘According to our information there's a possibility you're Jason Stratford's father.'

If anything could have fetched a voice out of Terence it was this. It came very shrilly.

‘Me?'

They didn't say anything. They went on looking at him, though not in an unfriendly way.

‘Did she tell you that?' said Terence, articulate again and gruff-voiced with indignation.

‘Well, no, Mr Wand. We're not able to divulge our source of information but I think I can tell you who it wasn't and it wasn't Mrs Stratford.'

Terence didn't believe him. It would be just like Carol to tell them that. No doubt she was shielding Jason's true father because the guy was up to something shady or really had got the boy. It could be almost anything with Carol, she was very devious. He could see what they were up to. They'd called on the neighbours to find out if any of them had seen a strange child about.

‘I didn't know the kid existed,' he said. ‘That is, not until I saw on TV about him being missing.'

They continued to look polite, impassive. Terence could
tell that the bigger fair one was wondering why he had been so nervous if he had nothing to hide.

‘I don't suppose you'd object if we had a look over the house, would you?'

What a way to put it! The younger one said it was a nice place he'd got here. Terence didn't object, he knew that would be very unwise, but he went upstairs behind them. In the bathroom off the master bedroom they found Teresa's eyeliner pencil lying on the glass top of the vanitory unit.

‘Married, now, are you, Mr Wand?'

Terence shook his head. He didn't explain. The younger one's eyes shifted as if this only confirmed the likelihood of Terence's having bastards he didn't know about all over the place. Terence felt an increasing grievance against Carol Stratford. He'd make it his business to have a word with Carol over this.

The policemen didn't exactly search. They just looked into all the rooms. They asked to see his passport which gave him a dreadful pang for a moment in case they had powers to confiscate it. But they handed it back without a word and soon after that they went. Terence took two Valium and poured himself a very stiff whisky. He sat down with his drink and asked himself seriously if he was going to have the stamina to carry things through. Not was it worth it. He knew very well it was worth almost anything to get his hands on £130,000. Not was it worth it, but could he stand the pace?

Terence knew himself. He had the rare quality of knowing himself quite well. The agony of the morning had brought him fresh self-knowledge. His fear had been so great and also so prolonged that he wondered now why he hadn't had a heart attack or fallen down in a fit. If he reacted like that because two policemen called on him, how would his body and his nerves behave when he had to sign that contract, receive that huge sum of money, draw it from the bank and escape with it? How would he stand up
to things while, with the money in a bag in his hand, he had to get to an airport and board a plane?

Suppose he dropped dead of fear?

Might it not be wiser, after all, to opt for the thirteen thousand odd of the deposit money and call it a day? Take Goldschmidt's cheque and vanish? Goldschmidt's cheque . . . A chilly tremor ran through Terence. He set his glass down.

This was something he hadn't though of, something he had entirely neglected to think of. Goldschmidt's – or his firm of solicitors' – cheque would be drawn to John H. Phipps and would certainly be a crossed cheque. He, Terence, would therefore have to pay it into John Phipps's bank account. But he didn't have a bank account, he didn't exist.

There was nothing to stop Terence going to, say, the Midland in West End Lane and opening an account in the name of John Howard Phipps except that they would want a reference. They would want someone else, preferably an account holder with the same bank, if not the same branch, to vouch for him that he was a suitable, respectable and credit-worthy person. As John Phipps. He knew all about it. Jessica had opened an account for him at the Anglian-Victoria in the Market Place in Hampstead Garden Suburb and had of course herself been his referee.

Who was there in the world prepared to say that Terence Wand, posing as John Phipps, was respectable and trustworthy? Come to that, who was there prepared to tell a bank Terence Wand was John Phipps?

No one. There was no one he could take on as an accomplice. To do so would necessarily mean sharing the £132,000, splitting it down the middle in fact. He would rather forgo it all than do that, he thought, far rather.

A little snow had fallen during the night. It lay like a thin patchy sheet of gauze on roofs and the tops of cars but where commuters and the postman had already trodden
were wet brown footprints. A steady
drip-drip-drip
came from the house eaves. Over the Heath a grey mist hung.

When he had finished his breakfast, Jason sat on the floor drawing. He drew a picture of the xylophone and crayoned all the notes in in appropriate colours. It was a very good drawing indeed for a two-year-old, Benet thought; you could easily see what it was supposed to be.

She had dressed Jason in clothes she had bought for him, not James's. She picked the labels out in case they were clues. Jason wore blue velvet-corded dungarees with a blue-and-white striped tee shirt and a sweater in natural undyed wool. He had fawn socks and brown leather lace-up half-boots. Benet sat him on her lap to put his coat on, a brown tweed coat with hood and toggle buttons, lined in Black Watch tartan. She was rather worried about that coat. She had bought it in Hampstead, in an exclusive expensive shop, and she and Jason had been in there for a long time while he tried coats on. Would the woman remember her? The point was, she really did want him to have that coat. He had to leave the rocking horse and the xylophone and the drawing things behind but she wanted him to keep that warm winter coat.

He liked riding in the car so much he was never any trouble. She wondered how he would react when they came to Lordship Avenue, if he would remember. And would he remember this house in the Vale of Peace? Not to tell people now, of course, that was not what she meant. He had nowhere near the required command of speech. But one day when he was grown-up, would he, if he came to Hampstead and perhaps walked up from South End Green or down from Heath Street, have a sense of
déjà vu
? Would he think, I have been here before? And if they had told him of that six-week-long lacuna in his life, would he then ask himself if he had spent it here?

She had very little real apprehension that she herself was in danger. She was not the kind of person the police would suspect. If they had questioned women known to have lost a child, they would already have come to her. There could
not be so many. No, they had either neglected to take this step or else considered her so unlikely – the well-known, well-off young writer who probably didn't know where Lordship Avenue was – as to be beyond suspicion. So if she had been beyond suspicion while Jason was missing surely she would continue to be so once he was found.

At red traffic lights she looked over her shoulder as she always did to speak to him.

‘All right, Jay?'

‘White,' he said. ‘Snow.'

‘It's going fast but there'll be some more and you can make a snowman.'

‘Snowman,' said Jason, liking the word. ‘Snowman, snowman.'

She began to speak her thoughts aloud to him.

‘I'm going to take you into the public library in Lordship Avenue, Jay, the branch called Winterside. You may have been in there before with your mother or – or Barry? I remember the library. I used to go in there a lot when I lived in Winterside Road. There's a children's section with chairs set round a table. I'm going to sit you on one of those chairs and get you a book to look at from the shelf and then I'm going to leave you there. But first I'm going to pin a label on your coat that says who you are. I've done a label with “This is Jason Stratford” on it.'

‘Coat,' said Jason. ‘Jay's coat.'

‘That's right, pinned on to Jay's coat. And when they see you're on your own, the people in the library will read the label and know who you are and fetch your mother.'

And the police, she thought. She tried to imagine it all, the hue and cry, but somehow she couldn't. With Jason's return the world ended.

‘Mummy,' said Jason in a pleasant conversational tone. ‘Mummy.'

She drove eastwards along Rudyard Gardens, looking for a place to park. Parking had got a lot worse since the days when she had lived there. There were double yellow lines all the way along Lordship Avenue now. She didn't want
to be too far away from the library. Winterside Road itself might do, only there was no entry to Winterside from Lordship Avenue. She had to make a long detour, coming into Winterside Road from Canal Street, passing Woodhouse's garage and the house where they had had the attic flat. There was a parking space almost outside the garage but suppose Tom Woodhouse were there and were to come out and see her?

The pollarded plane trees were a hideous sight at this time of the year, their trunks like old bones. The heavy grey sky looked full of snow. She had first met Edward during a snowy winter, and it had been a cold hard winter, spring rather, when she had parted from him. They had been living in Tufnell Park and it was he who had left and found himself a flat or room somewhere round here. Brownswood Common Lane? Brownswood Dale? She couldn't remember and he wasn't there now anyway. The address he had left her was Kentish Town. He had told her he hated her, she was hard as nails, that they had never been suited to each other, and then had done one of his about-faces, tried to get her into his arms and make her promise to go back to him, to marry him.