Laying the Ghost (12 page)

‘The trouble with life, Eleanor, is that it’s like cake,’ Gillian was now saying as the waitress returned surprisingly quickly with a couple of large glasses of white wine. ‘If you save the icing till last, you’re too stuffed to enjoy it. You’ve been too busy concentrating on the sensible, solid bits. Then, too late, you realize the best part was the sweet, gooey filling in the middle, the bit you’d taken absolutely no notice of.’

Nell couldn’t quite work this out. Was this yet another reference to her own carelessness in not hanging on to Alex? Or was there some regret of Gillian’s own in there?

‘What exactly are you saying here? I like the metaphor, but I’m not sure how it translates. Is this about you? Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine, considering. I’m just saying. Don’t leave things too late, Eleanor.’ Gillian took a delicate sip of her wine and looked hard at Nell. She put down her glass and started fidgeting with a fork. ‘There’s something I probably should have told you. I told Alex instead and that was possibly not quite the right thing to do. It’s about that … that boy you were with for so long, back when you were young. Not a boy now, of course. No.’

Nell felt cold. ‘Patrick? What about him?’ Her voice sounded very faint and far away. She was going to hear something terrible, she knew for certain. Patrick was dead. That must be it. Oh God, this was just wonderful. She was going to be told here in a crowded restaurant, surrounded by jolly Sunday-lunch families, by couples all loved-up in post-coital smugness, by oldies gleefully absconding from the home-cooked-roast ritual, that the one person she wanted to see again more than anyone else was gone for ever.

‘… phoned, he was wondering how you were …’ Gillian’s words floated past her, joining the increasing tide of voices all around and barely separating themselves from the people at the table behind her, where they were settling a baby into a high chair and discussing mashed avocado. Don’t give it to him, Nell found herself thinking, turning to look at the infant, it’s too rich – he’ll throw up all over his cute Mini-Boden blue-spotted dungarees.

‘Can you say that again?’ she asked Gillian. ‘Did you say
Patrick
phoned? When was this?’ God, was it recently? Was he psychic?

Gillian smiled, looking strangely relieved. It occurred to Nell that this revelation must have taken some courage. Perhaps she’d thought Nell would hit her or something, for keeping the information from her, or throw a hysterical wobbler. No wonder she’d chosen to come out
with
it in such a busy, noisy, vibrant place. However furious, Nell was twenty years past hysterics and she certainly wasn’t going to clout anyone in public. That wasn’t the sort of thing women like her got into the habit of doing, despite having had a boarding-school education.

‘Oh, it was at least four, maybe five years ago!’ Gillian said. ‘It’s only since Alex went, it occurred to me, oh, he never told her. He knew, you see. I called to tell you, but Alex said you were out so I told him, thinking no more about it because he said he’d make sure you got the message. He didn’t pass it on, did he?’

‘No, he didn’t,’ Nell said, eventually – thinking, and neither did you bother to ask me if he had … ‘But that doesn’t matter now. I can’t change what Alex did or didn’t do. What did Patrick say? What did he want?’

‘Ah look – food! I should have gone for the chicken really, but this penne looks delicious!’ Gillian gave the waitress her best smile, as if the girl had personally cooked it. ‘Thank you, dear! And what pretty earrings!’ The girl smiled back uncertainly, as if she expected Gillian to add the kind of telling-off a teacher would give, something like ‘But take them off while serving food, please, those nasty big hoops and beads are germ traps …’

Nell could barely look at her lasagne. So much for stress making her hungry. Not today it didn’t.

‘Just tell me what he said,
please
. And then …’ Then
what?
She’d think of that later. It would probably be then … nothing.

‘Oh, he didn’t say much. I don’t actually know what he wanted and as you can imagine, after what he’d put you through, I wasn’t exactly thrilled to hear from him. He wouldn’t leave a number and he didn’t ask for yours. He just wanted to know if you were all right, so I told him you were fine. What else could I say?’ Gillian shrugged and now looked blank. She had turned her attention to her food, and for her the subject seemed closed. But there was one more thing … one possibility …

‘Just tell me, did he say where he was?’ Nell held her breath.

‘Oh yes, he did. He was somewhere near Oxford. The place must be crammed to the gills with old students who never quite got away. Not
in
Oxford, in his case. Somewhere nearby. Near Wallingford, I think he said. By the Thames anyway. There isn’t enough dressing on this tomato salad,’ Gillian said, looking round. The waitress with the pretty earrings smiled at her and came over. Older customers could be so generous.

‘Why are you telling me about this now?’ Nell asked, while Gillian fussed with the dressing and started adding more pepper. ‘Has it been on your conscience?’

‘Certainly not!’ her mother snapped. ‘It’s about the cake. Alex might have proved to be the sensible stodgy bit. You are now thinking – and I know you, so don’t tell me
I’m
wrong – that even though you wouldn’t have had Sebastian or Mimi or any other children, you’re thinking Patrick would have been the icing. You’d be utterly, utterly wrong. All I know is that if you
do
ever speak to him again, he’ll tell you he spoke to me. I want you to know right now that if you didn’t get the message, it’s not my fault.’

No, Nell thought. Of course not.

7

The Kiss

(The Cure)

‘OK! WELCOME EVERYBODY!
Today we’re doing home security and then following it up with some hands-on practice at getting out of tight corners. And talking of which …’

Steve jumped down from the stage and approached one of the ponytail girls who had arrived at the class late, crashing in through the door with her coat still on.

‘Sorry!’ she gasped at him, sliding her arms out of her sleeves. ‘Got caught up at work.
Ouch!
What the
fuck
…!’ Steve grasped the end of her scarf, swung her round and pulled her off balance so she fell against him. She struggled and grabbed at the scarf as it tightened round her neck. Just at the point where Nell and Hell’s Angel Mike were looking anxiously at each other, wondering
how
far he’d take this, Steve let her go. ‘Sorry, Patsy. I just wanted to demonstrate something and you came in with the perfect opportunity. It’s the way you’ve tied your scarf. What’s it called, when you make a loop like that and pull the ends through?’

‘It’s called a Fulham knot. Because the Sloaneys all used to have it,’ Abi told him.

‘That’s the one. All I can say about that is, ladies, just
don’t
. As you can see, if someone grabs the ends of the scarf and pulls, there’s absolutely no way out. It just gets tighter and tighter. Any other way of wrapping it and you’ve got a chance of unravelling yourself. But not with that one – it’s instant strangulation, no question. Scumbag sees you on the street, grabs the loose ends of your scarf, hauls you behind a bush and you’re an instant murder statistic being probed by Forensics under a white tent. Now …’ he said, returning to the stage as Patsy rubbed her neck. ‘Where was I? Oh yes. Home security.’

‘God, he’s in a cheerful mood,’ Abi whispered to Nell.

Nell grinned at her, thinking of Steve’s visit and her vision of him hiding in a cupboard. ‘He’d probably say it was just his way of showing he cares,’ she muttered back.

‘Sure, he’s all heart!’ Abi replied.

‘How many of you have a lock on your bedroom door?’ Steve asked. Only two people put their hands up, one of them Hell’s Angel Mike, who looked embarrassed.

‘It’s left over from the last people who lived there,’ he explained. ‘I never actually lock it. You don’t, do you?’

‘Well actually, yes. I do. And you should. Always,’ Steve told him. ‘Because …’

‘But what about if there’s a fire?’ Wilma interrupted.

‘I couldn’t lock the bedroom door – how would the cat get in?’ Patsy protested.

‘Or your Darren!’ one of her friends giggled. ‘He’d kick it down!’

‘OK, OK, if you’d rather talk amongst yourselves …’ Steve folded his arms like a cross schoolteacher and waited for them to settle. The buzz of conversation faded and he went on, ‘As for fire – there’s no excuse not to have smoke alarms. And a closed door is a barrier that could even save your life. I just want you to imagine … it’s the middle of the night. You hear a noise downstairs. What do you do? Do you go down and investigate?’

‘I’d send Darren,’ Patsy suggested. ‘With his baseball bat.’

‘OK, so Darren goes downstairs, probably not wearing a lot, definitely half asleep, completely vulnerable, and the burgling scumbag has a knife in his hand. One of yours, that he’s helped himself to from your cute All Men Are Bastards knife rack that you keep fully loaded with handy weapons on your kitchen worktop. Do stop me if I’m wrong …’

Patsy scowled. ‘How do you know about my knife block?’ she asked.

Steve tapped his nose. ‘Man’s intuition,’ he told her. ‘Some of us have it, believe it or not. So there we are. Your Darren’s now lying on the floor covered in blood and no use to anyone. If you’re lucky, Scumbag does a runner and leaves you with nothing more than a dead boyfriend to clear up. If you’re not – and remember he’s now got nothing to lose – well, he’s halfway up the stairs and you’re under the duvet playing dead, rehearsing for the real thing, which will be any time soon.’

Everyone was listening closely now. Nell felt slightly chilled by the picture he’d presented, and yet a bit sceptical too. How likely was this to happen? You heard about it on the news, this kind of thing, but entirely because it
was
news. It was surely an incredibly rare worst-case scenario if ever there was one.

‘So let’s rewind a bit,’ Steve said. ‘Let’s say you’ve taken on board what I’m saying here and you’ve got a lock on your bedroom door and you’re lying in bed hearing the noise downstairs. You stay where you are, don’t you, and you phone the police?’

‘How do they get in?’ Abi asked, pertly. ‘You’re locked in your bedroom but you’ve got to let them in.’

‘Exactly.’ He grinned, looking pleased with himself. ‘When you go to bed at night, you take a glass of water with you, right?’

‘Right,’ Abi agreed reluctantly, ‘No, make that a last gin and tonic,’ she muttered.

‘And your handbag … and your keys. Please tell me you take your keys?’ Steve looked mildly despairing.

‘I don’t take any of those things,’ Nell admitted. ‘The keys stay on the hook in the hallway, my cash and stuff is wherever I’ve left it and if I take a glass of water I wake in the night to the sound of the cat lapping it.’

Why had she said all that? Nobody needed to know this. She put it down to having barely spoken all day. She’d concentrated hard on mixing paints, experimenting with colour. Cobalt blue, dulled down with Payne’s grey, seemed to work well for the cabbage leaves, mixed with varying amounts of yellow ochre, then the veins added by drawing across the wet paint with a scalpel … you really didn’t want anyone around chatting and being a distraction for that bit. It could have all gone horribly wrong, but the cabbage was now finished and quite glorious with its colourful selection of terrible diseases and infestations.

‘So that’s kind and sportingly generous,’ Steve was saying. ‘You leave everything conveniently at ground level so when Scumbag’s got your stuff together, he can load it into
your
car and take that as well. For the police – or fire brigade, if it comes to that, because it could save time and your life – what you need to do,’ Steve explained patiently, as if they were nine-year-olds of limited intelligence, ‘is to keep a spare front-door key in the bedroom in case the police need to get in. You don’t just hurl it out of
the
window to them in the dark, either. You keep it in something that’s easy to see, a white sock, a pillowcase, anything so they’re not blindly scrabbling on your front path, looking for a means of getting in.’

‘Um … and all this time,’ Mike was looking puzzled, ‘the scum— the intruder can’t hear any of this going on and is still hanging about disconnecting your telly, with the police car’s blue light on the go outside and them crashing about among your flowers and shouting up at your window …’ There was a ripple of giggling.

‘Always one smartarse.’ Steve shook his head. ‘Trust me, go home and think about it. You’ll work it out for yourselves later – you’ll decide I’m right. One more word on this: spyholes. No point fitting a good strong lock on the bedroom door if you then let in any friendly-sounding voice that comes knocking. He might not be who he says he is. You need a proper spyglass in the bedroom door. Cheap to install, any good DIYer can do it. Ladies, if you have doubts about wielding a Black & Decker, just give me a call and I’ll be round!’

‘I don’t think so,’ Abi whispered to Nell. ‘I wouldn’t trust a man who was so into chains and locks, would you?’

Nell giggled. ‘He’d be a risky date. I wouldn’t want to go back to his, that’s for sure. You might never escape.’

All the same, she felt impressed. Steve
was
right – most of this added up to top tips for a safe night’s sleep, even if she now felt that actually getting to sleep at all was going
to
be both perilous and extremely hard to do. Every creak on the stairs, every rattle of Pablo’s cat flap, each scrape of the lilac tree’s branches against the windows would have her reaching for the phone. Perhaps until she’d fitted locks, spyware and a dozen or two sturdy chains, she and Mimi should barricade themselves into her bedroom at night with a selection of house keys lined up in Mimi’s school games socks, ready for the various emergency services.

‘Right – that’s enough theory,’ Steve was saying. ‘Now watch carefully: I’m going to show you something simple but effective. I need a volunteer – Mike, you’ll do. Just come at me and grab my left arm.’