Helga's Web (21 page)

He got into the car, dropped the box of chocolates onto the seat beside him. He looked at them, then suddenly smiled.

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He would give them to Josie. She would get them only by default, but even so he felt better for the thought. If today was the day for goodbyes, it could also be the day for a new start. He might even ask Josie about the seasons.

Helga looked at her broken nail, then felt suddenly squeamish as she saw the sliver of skin and the blood under it. Still breathing heavily from exertion and anger, she stumbled into the bathroom and thrust her hand under a tap. She leant on the basin, her hand still under the tap as if she were trying to staunch a gush of her own blood instead of washing off the tiny streak of Norma Helidon’s, and stared at herself in the mirror. There was a slight bruise on her cheek where the other woman had hit her and the collar of the green silk dressing gown had been ripped. I could have killed her! she told her reflection; then all at once her anger went and she was afraid. Afraid of herself and the web she had created.

She had known from the start that the blackmail she had planned would not be easy. Men, even weak men, did not give away large sums of money without some sort of fight; especially self-made men like Walter Helidon and Leslie Gibson. She knew of the mercilessness that lay behind the acquisition of wealth: charity never paid dividends of riches. She had expected to see the worst side of Walter Helidon’s nature; but she had not expected the venomous opposition that Norma Helidon had shown. Walter’s wife, the society matron, the queen of the charities, had come here this afternoon and shown all the alley-cat spirit of the girls Helga had once seen brawling on the Reeperbahn.

“Walter’s been here, hasn’t he, Miss Brand? I saw him down at the car park. No, we didn’t speak to each other,” she had said as she had seen Helga’s questioning look. “He didn’t see me. He looked as if he weren’t seeing anything. I just

hope he gets home safely,” she added, and for a moment her voice softened; it contrasted strangely with the harsh note that had been in her voice from the moment she had entered the flat. Then the harshness came back, as if she could not control it: “I’m sure you wouldn’t want him hurt. Or has he paid you the money?”

Helga leaned against the sideboard, drawing her gown tighter about her. Norma Helidon had sat down as soon as she had entered the flat, as if her legs had been able to carry her only this far and had then run out of strength; but she sat on the edge of the chair, her knees close together, her gloved hands clutching her handbag so tightly that the cream leather of it was dented. She had taken off the sunglasses she had been wearing and there was a pinched dark look to her eyes as if she were in pain.

“Why did you come, Mrs. Helidon?”

Norma ignored the question. “Has Walter paid you the money?”

Helga hesitated: how much would Walter confide in his wife? Then she shook her head, deciding that from here on it would pay her to be nothing but honest and frank. After all she was selling them only the truth. “Not yet. He is coming back tomorrow with it. He is being very reasonable.”

“He’s being stupid,” Norma said flatly, a wifely opinion without malice. “He has been stupid all along, getting mixed up with a girl like you.”

“Whose fault was that?” Helga couldn’t keep the malice out of her own voice. Though she had never looked for a husband, had, with reservations, always enjoyed what her own life had brought her, there had always been part of her, the inheritance of Lutheran puritanism from her mother, that had envied the security of the woman who had a husband. “You should have been a better wife to him.”

“I’ve always been a good wife to him.”

“You didn’t give him what he wanted—”

“What you gave him, you mean?” She glared at Helga, voluptuous in the green silk, and became aware of her own body with the breasts that had begun to sag, the stomach that protruded when released from its expensive girdle, the buttocks with their dimpled porridge look. Oh God, she thought, they always have youth on their side. Why couldn’t Walter have fallen for an older woman? But knew the question was foolish even as she asked it of herself. “Giving him perverted sex—”

Helga smiled. All these wives were the same: any sex a man got outside his marriage bed had to be perverted. Walter had certainly had a fundamental approach to sex when she had first met him, an attitude that reduced the act to a simple athletic exercise: he seemed to look upon it as a test of his stamina and she had half-expected him to get out of bed and mark up his score on the wall, as if he were playing darts. She had had to teach him a lot, but what they had indulged in each Monday and Thursday had been nothing to the experiments she had been expected to perform, and had loathed, in her days in Hamburg. “It wasn’t perverted, Mrs. Helidon, except to a perverted mind. A man is entitled to having it more than once or twice on a Sunday morning. Sex is more important than the Sunday Telegraph.”

Norma flushed, a mixture of anger and embarrassment. “He really talked about me, didn’t he? Oh my God, discussing me with a trollop like you—!” Her gloved hand went to the double strand of pearls she wore, as if words were stuck in her throat behind them.

Helga snapped, “Only once—that was all he ever talked about you! We had other things to do—to talk about. I didn’t give him just sex—I listened to him, gave him an audience. When did you last do that? What do you want, Mrs. Helidon? To ask me to give him up?”

Norma Helidon nodded, her hand still at her throat.

“For nothing?” Helga shook her head angrily. “I’m giving

him up—but not for nothing! You—he and you—you have to pay for all the boredom I have had for two years—” She was suddenly finding reasons for her extortion: she had been acting the role of his wife while his real wife had been engrossed in her social activities: she became almost self-righteous, the blackmailer who had all at once found she was not so sinful. “If it hadn’t been for me, it would’have been someone worse —at least I have been discreet—you owe me for that—”

“I cant let him pay you—” Norma’s voice was hoarse now, a croak. “It would be buying him back from you—”

Helga took a step forward, leant down till her face was close to the other woman’s. “That’s for him to decide. He will not be paying for himself—he will be paying for you. And perhaps he will not think you are worth twenty thousand dollars—”

It was then that Norma hit her. The gloved hand came up in a sudden involuntary blow; Helga saw the look of hatred in Norma’s eyes even before she felt the pain in her own cheek. She grabbed at the strands of pearls, cursing obscenely in German; then Norma clutched her by the collar of the dressing gown and she heard the silk rip. In a moment they were wrestling, swaying together in the middle of the room to a slow rhythm like women without male partners at a tea dance. Norma’s handbag and sunglasses had fallen on the floor; then the strands of pearls followed them, individual pearls slipping.off the strings and scattering about the carpet like white dried peas. Helga continued to curse in German as she fought, but Norma struggled silently, the only sound coming out of her being an occasional great sob. An airliner went overhead as it headed down towards the airport south of the city; its jets coned into the one great scream that filled the room like the fury of the women who fought there. They did not move from the spot where they had first grappled; each of them stood with her feet firmly planted in the carpet. Then abruptly they broke apart, as if the horror of what they

were doing had suddenly stepped between them like a referee. Norma dropped to her knees. She knelt there, her head hung on her breast, and now the sobs were coming out of her in awful tearing gasps. Helga staggered back, leaned against the door that led to the kitchen.

“Get out! Get out!”

Norma did not look at her. She lifted her head for just a moment and took a deep rasping breath; then she got down on her hands and knees and, still sobbing, like some huge lumbering dog in pain, she began to crawl about the carpet. Helga, still recovering from the struggle, her gaze still blurred by her exertion, stared at the other woman in puzzled shock: had she gone out of her mind? Then she saw the gloved hands fumbling with the scattered pearls. Norma crawled around, still making the awful sounds deep in her throat, picking up every pearl she could find. Helga stared fascinated, unable to move even when Norma came crawling across the floor to pick up a pearl beside her foot.

Then slowly, the sobs subsiding, Norma got to her feet. She looked around for her handbag and sunglasses, picked them up and put on the glasses. Then without a word she stumbled to the front door, opened it and went out, one hand clutching the pearls to her breast as if she were trying to hold in her life’s blood.

Helga straightened up, moved quickly to the door, closed it and locked it. She went back into the living room, looked at her hands and then saw the blood and the sliver of skin under her nail.

She was in the bathroom when she heard the door buzzer ring. She turned off the tap and waited. It rang again, but she did not move. She did not want to have to face Norma Helidon again so soon. She had just witnessed the destruction of another woman and she was frightened and sickened by what she had done. And frightened and sickened by the thought that if they had continued to fight she would have

killed Norma Helidon. When she had looked in the bathroom mirror she had looked deeper into herself than ever before and had seen the abyss of darkness there that she had never suspected.

She waited another five minutes, but there was not another buzzing from the front door. She dried her hands, went out to the living room, got her sewing basket and moved to a chair. She slipped out of her dressing gown, fingering the torn collar, and was standing in the nude when the door buzzer rang again. She hesitated, then slipped on the gown again. She did not want another scene with Norma Helidon, but it was obvious the woman was not going to go away. New neighbours had moved in next door and Helga was enough of a hausfrau to know that one way of avoiding involvement with neighbours was to give them nothing to gossip about. The best thing to do was to let Norma Helidon in and see what else she had to say.

She moved to the door, opened it, then stared in puzzlement at the man in the orange shirt who stood there. She had seen him before, but for the moment she could not remember where or when. Then recognition came, and with it shock; this was the man who, in an indirect way, had triggered off her decision to get home to Germany before Christmas. Suddenly afraid, she tried to slam the door.

But Bixby was already pushing it back against her, was grinning widely round the matchstick stuck between his teeth.

Friday, December 13

Malone saw the calendar as soon as he opened his eyes in the morning. He knew what his mother would have done as soon as she had opened her eyes: an extra Hail Mary would have been said to ward off the Devil and the saints would have been told to get off their tails and keep a sharp eye out today for sinners like herself. Well, I’d welcome the Devil this morning, he thought, if he brought along with him the feller who killed Helga Brand. There were times when, if the murder had not been too brutal or disgusting, he enjoyed the actual detective work. A lot of it might be dull routine stuff where you plodded from point to point, but at the end of each day there was a certain satisfaction: you had advanced from where you had started in the morning and you had done it from your own reasoning and, he admitted, sometimes your own guesswork. It was the putting together of a jigsaw puz- zle, only in your case it was played for keeps and there were no prizes. No cop in his right mind ever considered a mur- derer a prize. But this Brand case was one he was not enjoy- ing, one that filled him with a sense of unease. Yet he could not explain why. Maybe it was the Irish in him, the pessi- mism of the Celt who would never really enjoy Heaven when he made it because he would know by what narrow margin he had missed the alternative; the pessimism that made an intelligent, unsuperstitious man scowl at a date on a calendar.

The phone rang and he reached for it wearily: why couldn’t Russ Clements wait till he got to the office? But it was Lisa and at once he smiled and sat up. “Are you up, darling?” she asked.

There had been girls he had known to whom he could have given a crude answer to that one; but not to Lisa. They were uninhibited in their talk when in bed together, but she was a lady over the phone. Also, he was learning about himself as he learned about her. “Darling, what’s the matter? How long have you been awake? Are you ill or something?”

“I was just thinking, that’s all. How long does it take to become a gentleman?”

“Longer than it takes to become a lady, I’m afraid. Gentlemen are born, ladies can be manufactured.”

“Where’d you get that little gem of cynicism—some PR release?” He thought about it for a moment, then said, “Maybe you’re right. But it cuts me out.”

“No, darling, it doesn’t. You’re a gentleman. You may not recognize yourself as one, but you are. Women look for different things from what a man looks for in a gentleman.”

  “Such as?”

“What sort of conversation is this at this time of morning? I’m in my bra and pants, trying to get ready for the office—”

“Just the time to discuss with a man whether he’s a gentleman or not. Go on.”

“Well—” Her voice was disjointed for a moment, as if she might be struggling into a dress. “Well, a man judges a gentleman by the way he reacts to society as a whole. A woman judges him by the way he reacts to her. Or anyway this woman does.”

What a wonderful girl! She knew just how to make a man get up and face Friday, the 13th. “I love you, Dutchy.”

“I wondered.” Another pause, heavy with breathing.

“What are you doing? You got another gentleman there with you?”

“I’m trying to do up my zip. You didn’t call me last night.”

“I didn’t get in till ten-thirty. We worked late—” He had left the office at eight o’clock, but, too tired to come home and cook something for himself, had gone out for a meal with Russ Clements at the Leagues Club. They had stayed on there drinking, neither of them getting anywhere near drunk but just enjoying the relaxation and isolation from what had occupied them since early that morning. It had been eleven-thirty, not ten-thirty, when he had finally got home. Much too late to ring a girl with excuses why you had not called her earlier, especially a girl who could smell beer on your breath even over the phone. No beery gentleman would call a girl at that hour. “What’s the matter? Our date’s on tonight, isn’t it?”