Blind Date (13 page)

“Milk? Sugar? You could do with a new tin opener. In fact the kitchen stuff could do with an update. I gather from this little lot that cooking has never been much of a priority.”

“You wouldn't have to be a detective. When are you leaving? I could call you a taxi.” Smoke curled from her cigarette. The light in here was blinding: it struck him as odd to be inside a room so light and yet so enclosed. You would have to stand on a chair in order to look out and even then the view through leadened panes and wavy glass would be imperfect. Perhaps that was what she wanted; height above the world and no view of it. A tower not of ivory, but of cold stone.

“It's all right,” he said. “I've got a car, of sorts. Hidden wealth, you see. But no friends in high places.”

“Plenty in low places, I imagine,” she said, sharply. “Don't mess with me, Joe-without-credentials. I may be disabled, mentally and physically, but I used to be a police officer. More people apart with my teeth. Friends and enemies in high places, see?”

“And I
used to be a medical student,” Joe responded. “Only, I turned out to be more interested in anatomy than health. So that if you wished to tear me apart, I could tell you exactly how to do it with the greatest economy of energy. Or keep up a helpful running commentary while you performed. Like a butcher with a trainee.”

She shuddered, a trembling of disgust.

He had not wanted to frighten her, but this total absence of fear unnerved him even more. Last night, a tremulous terror; this morning an icy and articulate distance clad in an almost friendly veneer. He could placate fear; he was accustomed to his large size creating a kind of reverence and respect, and found himself a little piqued that she did not seem to see in daylight the contrast between his size and her frailty. Such is vanity, but what could he do to re-establish the authority his bulk demanded, even among men? Roar?

“What are you going to do?” she asked. “Roar?”

Another spiral of cigarette smoke rose towards the distance of the ceiling. He watched it, doggedly, wondering what happened to smoke when it disappeared.

“I phoned Father Flynn,” Elisabeth went on in her flat monotone. “He gets up early, which is more than can be said for some. Established you are what you say you are, cleaner of the parish. He says you turned up for some exhibition, said you were a friend and asked for a job. Medical student to cleaner, eh? I'm glad your career path is upwardly mobile.”

She did not add that Flynn's breathless reference had been glowing. Or that it had sounded so wistful. “Lovely big man,” Flynn had said, “came in with some others having an exhibition, as I remember, and never left: so kind of you to let him stay. An old friend, is he?” Nor did Elisabeth mention how her own fury at this outrageous intrusion was tempered by a sense of the ridiculous. Five in the morning, with the first sign of light, had seen her creeping up the stone steps to the clock chamber, clutching the key to that door, which she found in the cutlery drawer. Five past five, if only the clock had kept a record, had seen her leaving. She could not, even in her parlous state, feel fear for a creature so blithely dead to the world, clad in boots and nightshirt, with arms crossed behind head. So she had locked him in as a precaution until she could speak to Reverend Flynn, after which she was not inclined to let him out, but had still relented and crept back up again before he woke, and turned the key the other way. He was not so clever after all: he was arrogant. And the knowledge that she could so effectively have immobilized him turned the tables, whatever those were. She had won a battle for power without the other protagonist even knowing he had been engaged in it. The stupid man slept like a log.

He had none
of the wariness of a thief, she had thought, although she mistrusted her judgement on that, as she did on everything, and there was something familiar about him, not the face but the voice, which had also diminished the fear into something smaller. I could have stabbed you, handcuffed you, at least locked you up, she told him, silently. And I detest long hair on a man, even hair as clean and shiny as yours. I don't like men unless they resemble little boys like Matthew, which they only do in sleep. Otherwise, a man was a snake. Or a slug, leaving a trail of slime which clung to the clothes and transferred itself to the skin.

“Could you give me a day or two to remove my gear?” he was asking. “I can move myself pronto, but property takes longer.”

“What property?”

“Oh …
a coupla cameras. Things like that.”

She nodded, oddly enjoying herself.

“Cameras? The typical equipment of a cleaner. What are you, a spy?”

“Wouldn't mind, if only it paid. A little industrial espionage wouldn't come amiss, if anyone would have me. Freelance photography of shop fronts and parish cleaning keeps a small wolf from the door, but not the larger variety.”

He looked like a wolf, she decided. The hirsute kind who should have eaten Little Red Riding Hood and choked on the cloak.

“No wolves at my front door,” Elisabeth said.

“Flynn would not approve of un-Christian conduct on any day before Sunday,” Joe said.

Flynn wanted him to stay. Flynn had been told a pack of lies and was halfway in love, she decided. She wanted him to go. Do not take on a large man full-frontal, he had said. She moved to her tidy bed, still puffing on the cigarette, and fumbled under the pillow. Then she held aloft a camera in her left arm, the strong arm which could conduct an orchestra. All he could see in the big, light room with the sun coming through the windows, was his Leica, held above her head.

“Don't know anything about cameras,” she said, with a note of something slightly apologetic in her voice. “Except that they break.”

“I can open tins,” Joe said, desperately. It was not the best camera, only his favourite.

“Go,” she said, flatly.

“Tomorrow?” He was half on his feet, ready to lunge, but she was far, far away.

“Now.”

He did not move. She let the camera drop and it fell with a sickening sound. Not crunch, but thump. The sort of sound which could make someone pick it up, shake it and hope it was well, knowing it was not. He went.

P
atsy came
round on the Sunday evening. There was a man, weeding the ground round the side. About time, she thought, wondering how Lizzie could ever live here, wanting to keep the visit short and even shorter when Lizzie toyed with the wine instead of drinking it.

“Are you worried about something, Liz?” What a stupid question. This sullen friend was still seriously injured, looked half-starved, was unemployed and for the time being unemployable.

“Worry? I'm never quite sure what worry is. I looked it up, once. The dictionary says it is a troubled state of mind, arising from the frets and cares of life. Or, alternatively, the act of biting and shaking an animal so as to injure and kill it. No, I'm rejecting worry as being pointless, but I have, in the secondary meaning, been worried.” Oh God; she still did that. Took refuge in words, went off on tangents, anything to avoid speaking clearly.

“Why did you leave the police, Liz? You never really explained.” She never really explained anything, Patsy remembered in a fresh wave of irritation. She wanted a breakdown of some sort: she wanted Lizzie in tears, but Elisabeth remained so calm, and Patsy left, still in daylight without any explanations. “Don't come down,” she said, “I'll be careful to close the door behind me.” Coming out into the dusk and walking up the side of the church which she did not like to leave at night, Patsy felt faintly treacherous, again. It seemed wrong to leave Elisabeth alone, although that was clearly what she wanted. Yes, she had a phone, with answer machine, the only sound which really pentrated up and down in that tower; yes, she could get to a local shop; yes she had enough to entertain her; but it still seemed wrong. Then, coming towards her from the direction of her own car in the road, Patsy saw a man, his face obscured by a huge bunch of flowers.

She turned
and watched him place them by the door of the tower, and then rather than stare, she started her car and left. She did not wait to see him go in.

Ahha. That was why Lizzie had left her family. That was why she was less than rapturous in her welcomes. It was a case of
cherchez l'homme
, just like that time when she had been incommunicado for six months, when she had been so bloody mysterious. That would have been a man, too. Elisabeth was not alone after all.

Patsy herself was the only one alone.

No-one had bought her flowers in a long time. They thought she could buy her own.

How did you make someone love you?

D
arkness. It was odd that Elisabeth should find herself pacing the floor, talking to herself as she might have talked to the stranger. Imagining there was that large, strange man, listening intently.

Well you see, I've made yet another mistake with Patsy. I love her dearly in the full knowledge of what she is. But as soon as I saw her, I knew I wasn't ready to face her, even though I asked for the chance. And all because at that one point in my life, when nothing else mattered but catching that bastard killer I pretended to be her. I took her name and her background, turning myself into another person, bolder and more attractive, the sort who can seduce men. Make them love her. I lied. Took her name in vain, and lied. She went to the bookshelf and dragged a manuscript from the back. There was a suspicious lack of dust about the shelves. She read from the pages.

“There
can be no doubt that the accused was the subject of deliberate and sustained entrapment by this anonymous policewoman, and that thereafter his responses, including the expression of his fantasies, were the subject of subtle manipulation designed to extract a confession. Behaviour which betrays not merely excessive zeal, but a substantial attempt to incriminate a suspect by positive and deceptive conduct of the grossest kind.”

She put down the manuscript, feeling that all-too-familiar shame. There was nothing of which to be proud, no leeway in the words. The only saving grace in the whole debacle was the fact that her family had never known: they had applauded the efforts of an anonymous woman and never needed to know who that was. The judge's only kindness was to agree to that.

Entrapment of the
grossest kind
. She nodded. So that was what she had done. Assumed another persona, a gross one. She had hardly done justice to Patsy as a role model. She had stalked a man. In one way, killed him. So it was only fair that life and the real Patsy would exact a revenge.

E
lisabeth saw the
flowers when she emerged, early on Monday morning. There were pale yellow roses among foliage, the stalks wrapped into a waterfilled polythene bag, as if whoever had placed them there was taking precautions against their neglect. They would last for days in the shade, like that, but they were looking sad. There was a note attached which said “Sorry,” but it was the flowers themselves which startled her and made her heart pound. She had been more or less indoors since Friday evening and this was the start of a new chapter. Sod the flowers. Today she was going to make herself merge with the crowds and not feel afraid. She was going to find her brave identity.

She had beaten the rush hour, but still the crowds pressed, giving her the sensation of standing beneath a wall which was about to fall. The escalator down into the Underground surrounded her with breathless warmth; she wanted to put her hands in front of her face and clear it away like cobwebs. She stood on the platform with the cleaners and early risers from a dozen industries and tried to look normal while longing for the colder days when a scarf would hide her wasted neck. The angle of her head gave her such a perverted view of everything. Looking at a poster, she could only see the snarling face of the villain in the new movie, never the blue eyes of the heroine. She read the advertisements from the bottom to the top, finding in each that they ended with a lie and began with a half-truth. On the train, she looked down like everyone else, then looked up, impressed at how easily everyone managed to avoid each other's eyes. She had what she wanted after all. Anonymity. They were all ugly people; she could ride along with them and no-one would notice. She got off the train at Charing Cross, walked up and through the main concourse of the railway station. What was it her father had said?
You have lost your eye for beauty … lose that you lose everything
.

The first
surge of the commuter crowd was beginning. They loped through the barrier like a pack of dogs as she sidestepped her way into daylight and walked down a street to the river.

The street was dirty, and outside the shops, litter awaited collection. It was one of those streets which had moved from sleazy to scruffy. This too, was what she had wanted. A street where people plodded without pausing, always en route to somewhere else. And then there was the river.

Elisabeth walked by the water, then leaned over the parapet and looked at it. Water was always poetic, but this, at full tide, brown and boiling, was angrier than the sea. It could carry a body for miles and it was poisonous. It lured the unwary by the promise of pleasure: it would be the star of the millennium. In November there would be fireworks reflected in the water, as there was the first time she had met Jack here. Lured him.

From
the middle parapet, at a later date, the fool had jumped.

H
azel did not notice the river as she crossed it at Blackfriars. She regarded all that water beneath the bridge, heaving away, with indifference. Londoners were a filthy lot, chucking rubbish in the water for about three hundred years, and on a warm grey day like this, it showed. A churning river making its way to God knows where from the devil knows what, behaving as if Monday was the worst day of the week, which it was not, as far as she was concerned. She saw most mornings through a haze, but today, she had a different attitude. Marginally different, anyway.