Unchained Melanie (11 page)

‘Jesus. What the buggery’s going on?’ Roger felt
sickened, outraged. It was like suddenly meeting a much-loved old friend who’d become wasted and raddled with disease. Where was the clematis he and Mel had chosen together? The roses with wittily appropriate names they’d given each other on anniversaries, the long lavender hedge that had been back-breaking to clip into shape each autumn and the lawn with the struggling beige patch where it had never recovered from being under Rosa’s sandpit? He felt sad, full of impotent anger towards Mel. She was destroying such a huge part of their life together.

‘She said she doesn’t want to do mowing, or weeding or pruning any more,’ Max explained. ‘She said it’s chuck-out and makeover time, and to be honest I think she was right.’

‘Right? What would you know about it?’ Roger turned on him, wanting to smack his fist into the placid, good-looking face and do it the same kind of serious damage that Max had done to his garden.

‘Palms, bananas, some bamboo, pebbles, that kind of thing.’ The man seemed oblivious to Roger’s fury. ‘That’s what we’re going for.’

We? Roger had had enough.

‘I’m leaving. Just tell her I was here.’

He stalked off back into the house, shaking with rage.

‘Oh, and by the way, congratulations!’ Max shouted after him.

‘On?’

‘The baby of course and the new wife. Mel told me! Nice one!’

Melanie did not intend to tell Cherry about Neil. Cherry would be ‘disappointed’ in her. She’d feel sorry
for her, thinking, wrongly, that she’d grasped at a chance for quick sex in the hope that it would lead to something, a relationship, snatched-at company for a few hopeful dates, even. She didn’t want her thinking that because it wasn’t even close to being true. She’d had sex with Neil because, as with climbers and Everest, he was there and she wanted to know what it was like, this casual no-responsibility sex business.

Mel wasn’t surprised to hear Cherry shouting ‘Who is it?’ from inside the door. It wasn’t that Cherry was terrified of being ambushed by a mugger the moment she let the chain off, it was simply more than likely that she’d got wet hair wound up in a towel or no mascara on.

‘It’s me. Melanie. Please let me in and give me coffee!’

‘Oh. Mel. Well, OK.’ That sounded a bit grudging, Mel thought, wondering if she should just make an immediate excuse, change her mind and go home.

‘You should have rung!’ Cherry opened the door and smiled. ‘Come into the sitting room, I’ll bring you coffee and cake.’ Cherry pushed the sitting-room door open and almost hurled Mel onto the long blue velvet sofa.

‘What’s wrong with the kitchen? I’ve hardly ever been in here.’

‘Oh, nothing! Bit of a state, that’s all, I was just working on something and it’s all over the place.’ Cherry’s hands were indeed freshly paint-splashed. If they hadn’t been, Mel would have suspected she’d got hidden in the kitchen the kind of lover that might be a touch embarrassing to introduce to friends: a hired stud perhaps, or a beefy female biker. Whatever paint she was using smelled peculiar too, there was a sharp
acetic whiff in the air that reminded Mel of dead things in the school biology lab. Cherry shut the door firmly on her guest, leaving Mel’s curiosity to rise like boiling milk. She’d give her a few minutes to feel secure and then pounce.

‘So what kind of cake have you got?’ Having given Cherry a mere thirty seconds, Mel wandered into the kitchen on the pretext of seeking food.

‘Wow, look what’s come in!’ Mel stopped still in the doorway and pointed. On the table, right in the middle of Cherry’s scattered paint tubes and brushes, sat a small grey squirrel clutching a walnut.

‘What? You weren’t supposed . . .’ Cherry, who was dealing with the kettle and had her back to the creature, turned, looking flustered.

‘Ssh! You’ll scare it out!’ Mel whispered. The squirrel hadn’t moved, literally frightened rigid, she assumed.

‘Er . . . you weren’t supposed to come in here.’ Cherry banged the kettle down on the worktop (the precious pale green granite one that had taken six weeks to deliver).

The squirrel still hadn’t moved. Mel crept nearer. On the drawing pad in front of the creature its portrait was half-completed, every minute variation in fur colour and texture faithfully copied, the tiny curved claws immaculately duplicated on the page. ‘Hell’s teeth, Cherry, it’s a stuffed one!’ she shrieked, having put out a tentative finger and touched its cold stiff paw.

‘Mmm. Not exactly.’ Cherry was looking furtive. ‘It’s not quite stuffed, not unless you count the coat hanger. I didn’t want you to know about this – no-one’s supposed to see.’

‘See what? That you’ve got a dead squirrel in to
paint? What’s wrong with that?’ Mel assumed she’d found it in a junk shop. There was something else she’d seen, though. ‘Er, what’s the thing with the coat hanger?’

‘Well, it wouldn’t sit up, even though it’s crammed with formaldehyde – there’s hardly an inch I haven’t injected. So it’s got a wire hanger up its bum.’ Cherry clattered around with the coffee equipment, refusing to meet Melanie’s eyes.

Mel laughed, sounding slightly manic. This all sounded like the sort of ghastly torture that she’d invent for one of Tina Keen’s more gruesome dead victims.

‘Injected?’ she queried. ‘
You
injected it?’

‘I bought a big bottle of the stuff a couple of years back, and I get diabetic syringes. I get through a lot of needles, coming up against bones.’

‘Yeah, well you would . . . But where did you get the squirrel?’ Mel asked, imagining a bizarre Bloomsbury shop that supplied artists’ models of any species on demand.

‘It was by the A3, quite close to the Asda at Roehampton,’ Cherry admitted shamefacedly. ‘And don’t you dare tell anyone, especially Sarah. I’d never hear the last.’

‘Roadkill. Hmm.’ Mel accepted the mug of coffee Cherry handed her, but wondered about its chemical content. Wasn’t formaldehyde hugely poisonous? Cherry’s hands were still all painty. And she might have handled the squirrel, bending it and shoving it into position. She decided she could do without the cake.

‘How else do you think I draw these creatures so accurately?’ Cherry was defensive now. ‘Did you think I copied them from a book?’

‘I suppose that was exactly what I did think, if I thought at all,’ Mel admitted. ‘What else have you got?’

Cherry looked a bit shifty. ‘Actually, I’ve got a lovely badger, in perfect nick, not a mark on it. I put it in a bag in the freezer but a fuse went while I was out and I’m going to have to chuck him out. Unless . . .’

‘In the freezer? Next to your prawns and peas and pizzas?’

‘Look, when you live by yourself you can do exactly what you like! I haven’t got anyone here who gives a flying toss whether I’ve got a freezer full of caviare or carrion, so what does it matter? Anyway he’s in a bag.’

‘Oh.’ Mel looked at Cherry, who was smiling at her in a horribly hopeful sort of way. ‘Cherry, what did you mean by “unless”?’

‘Well, I just wondered, seeing as no-one’s going to be poking about in your freezer either, if you might just take him home and find a bit of room for him in yours. Please? Just till I’ve defrosted and got mine going again?’

Mel pulled a face. ‘Ugh, Chezza, but it’s a dead animal!’

‘So’s a leg of lamb.’

‘A leg of lamb doesn’t come with fur and eyes and teeth.’

‘You don’t have to look at him, oh please, Mel, I’ll never get another one as good as this.’

Mel wavered. Cherry looked almost mad with eagerness. She could swear even the rather cloudy eyes of the squirrel on the table were staring at her, willing her to say yes.

‘And no-one need ever know,’ Cherry went on.

‘OK, but only for a couple of days, right?’ Mel
reluctantly agreed. The thing would have to come home in the car with her. She hoped it had been thoroughly disinfected. Suppose it had fleas?

Recklessly she went on, because somehow she couldn’t stop herself, ‘And you don’t tell people that last night in the old school sickroom I had sex with my old geography teacher on top of a lot of abandoned school reports, OK?’

‘Oh Mel, you didn’t!’ It was Cherry’s turn to look satisfyingly horrified.

‘I did. Because that’s another of those things that we single folks can get away with. I really wanted to try free-range sex as opposed to the battery variety that coupley-types have.’

‘You don’t mean that, Mel, you’re not really that hard.’

‘I do and I am – well, I thought I was. Actually it was a bit of an experiment, to tell the truth, and I don’t think it’s something I’ll be going in for. But at least now I know that, rather than wondering. Don’t mention it to Sarah if you happen to run into her, OK? Or my mother. Now I’m divorced I think she considers I’ve been granted my virginity back again.’

‘But why? I mean why did you do it?’

Melanie shrugged. ‘Well, we just sort of started off and kind of carried on because it was all going pretty fine and before we knew it, we . . . er . . . He had a funny look on his face.’

‘God, Mel, do I need to know this?’

‘Probably not. It was as if he couldn’t quite believe what was happening and half-expected me to call a halt any second. I must have looked exactly the same. There were people just the other side of the door – that gave it an edge.’

Cherry was, as predicted, looking disappointed. ‘So you’ll be seeing him again?’

‘Possibly. I don’t know. Only as a friend if I do. He’s got my number but I’m not going into a state of teenage heartbreak waiting for a call. I’m not looking for a relationship.’

Cherry shuddered. ‘No. Absolutely not. We’re far better off without all that. You and I must go out together somewhere soon, just the two of us. I’ve had a couple of private view invitations that look interesting.’

‘OK, that’ll be great. Call me, let me know when.’ Mel sensed that Cherry was hauling her back into line, pointing her towards a far more suitable occupation for the untethered woman than a crazed session of spontaneous sex. Obviously there was a set of behaviour rules for Cherry’s type of man-free singledom that she hadn’t yet read. She was pretty sure she didn’t want to.

Melanie drove home with Cherry’s badger in the car boot, all wrapped up for decency’s sake in a large Harrods bag. She prayed as she drove that it wouldn’t turn out to be the day there’d been a massive bank robbery in the area and the police had set up road blocks to search every car for ill-gotten loot. On the other hand, it could be quite fun . . .

Gwen Thomas packed just enough for three or four days. That should be long enough to give Howard the fright of his life and make him realize she meant business. She wasn’t going to share her husband with a bunch of lewd and naked women, even if they did only exist between the glossy pages of a magazine. It was them or her – and frankly it shouldn’t be much of a contest. Howard would come to his senses fast enough: these paper women weren’t going to pop round and cook him a proper shepherd’s pie.

He hadn’t even had the grace to look embarrassed. Not so much as a hint of an apology or a stumbling explanation or excuse. He’d just brazened it out and had a go at her for snooping under the mattress. How exactly, she’d like to know, could going about your usual household duties be snooping?

‘Can’t a man have a bit of privacy?’ he’d demanded, grabbing the magazine from her hands and storming out to the garden shed. He probably had a huge collection of the filthy things out there. They could be stacked high, the pages going clammy in the damp air, hidden under last year’s growbags. She’d have to tell
Melanie the entire shaming truth now, because Melanie would never believe Gwen would walk out over Howard drinking a couple of pints on a daily basis. She didn’t want Vanessa to know though, definitely not. Melanie had a lot more experience of the real world and she did write very peculiar books, so her imagined world experience was much broader than most people’s, too.

Vanessa lived a dolls’ house existence, every day the same, all her family neat, good and perfectly behaved. She had a proper, tidy husband (though hadn’t Howard been like that for most of his life? Hadn’t her own life been a dolls’ house one?), with unquestioning regular habits, who took himself off out of the way, as men should, at eight each morning and didn’t come home till after six. And the children gave no trouble at all. They had excellent school reports, shown to her dutifully at the end of each July. Though she had noticed you never got a peep out of Theresa and William, not unless you asked them something direct like how’s school, and even then they’d just smile as if it almost hurt and say ‘Fine, Gran,’ nothing extra volunteered. Blood from stones. You didn’t know what they liked or who their friends were; they didn’t babble on about some unseen Gracie or Holly the way Rosa always had. It would be quiet at Melanie’s without Rosa, but it would give her a chance to think.

She could hear a car on the gravel outside – her minicab had arrived. She checked her purse – she wasn’t used to being a taxi passenger and didn’t want to fumble around in search of the right amount. As she heard the driver’s steps approaching the front door she took a final look around her kitchen. The pink rubber gloves were on the draining board, lying folded
together like a pair of sad empty hands. She hoped Howard would notice and think them poignant. Somehow she doubted it.

Mel was making Tina Keen feel queasy in the mortuary. It was the smell that got to the hard-bitten detective every time – the formaldehyde, the disinfectant, all the chemical aromas that didn’t quite cover the creeping process of slow decomposition. It didn’t matter how perfectly chilled the staff kept the corpses, Tina’s nose, that could expertly identify Calvin Klein’s Escape in a party-full of scented women, always picked up the tiniest underlying hint of rot. Mel’s visit to Cherry’s kitchen had been a useful reminder of the way the acrid scent permeated the air and made your eyes watery. It caught in the back of your throat in a way that made you long for fresh clean air to choke out the stench. It couldn’t be doing Cherry’s lungs any good.

Melanie stopped typing and went to look out of the window. Writing this section of the book, she was even making herself feel a bit sick. The mutilated young prostitute who had been discovered beneath the café stairs had over twenty stab wounds. Blood would have spurted all over the killer, so she had to find some way of getting him (or her?) off the street and well away without being seen. The killer had planned this, it wasn’t a random act, so he’d have been wearing something over his clothes, something that could be taken off quickly, rolled up and shoved into a bag to be burned or dropped into a bin later; a boiler suit, maybe, or some kind of overalls – possibly even the kind of apron a mortuary attendant might wear. Now that was a thought . . .