Paradise City (36 page)

And yet, there are other times when the anxiety recedes and Carol finds herself viewing the goings-on next door through a prism of disbelief, as if it really is all happening on a TV show. In these moments, a pleasant sort of detachment settles around her and she looks at proceedings with a curious tilt of the head, half-amused at the strangeness of it all, storing up the odd salacious titbit for later conversations with Vanessa, who will be satisfyingly horrified by the turn of events.

She is ashamed to admit it but Alan’s newly notorious reputation has made Carol more popular than ever. She’s never had so many phone calls – not even when Derek died. People she hasn’t heard from for years have taken to sending her emails, idly enquiring ‘how she’s keeping’ when she knows they secretly want her to dish the dirt. Connie has been calling every day, hungry for detail.

‘Have you seen they’re calling him the Southside Strangler?’ Connie had said this morning. When Connie spoke about the case, it was always with an edge to her voice, like she was trying to hide her excitement.

‘They’re not, are they? Oh that’s dreadful.’

‘It’s all over the front of the
Mail
,’ Connie said. ‘They’ve got a picture of him holding someone in a headlock. From his ex-wife apparently who says he was . . . wait, let me find it . . . that’s it, “a bully and a liar”.’

Carol fiddled with the bowl of pens by the phone then picked one out and started doodling on the notepad.

‘I’m surprised they’re assuming he strangled his victim,’ Carol said mildly. ‘As far as I know, the police haven’t made any official statement on cause of death, have they?’

She knew the effect this would have on Connie, who was a terrible gossip.

‘Well, Carol, you tell me.’

Carol left a deliberate pause. It was all about building up to the big reveal. She was embarrassed to be enjoying this. But Connie and Geoff had always been so superior – what with their conservatory extension, their Highgrove tins of tea and their framed photos of children in graduation caps – and it felt nice having the boot on the other foot for a change.

‘Hmmm. Well—’ She drops her voice. ‘I did overhear the police talking about strangulation—’

‘
Did
you?’

‘Yes. Just yesterday this was. Perhaps the press have got hold of it.’

‘I wouldn’t put it past them.’

‘But they’re trying to keep things quiet at the moment. They don’t want the newspapers interfering with the investigation.’

Carol has acquired a new vocabulary of late, picking up phrases used on the other side of the garden fence with ease. She likes the way these new-found words make her sound professional and unruffled. The police have been very good about keeping her informed. Most days, they’ll pop round and check that she’s all right. Her favourite is a woman called DCI Jennifer Lagan who wears plain clothes and uses Carol’s name a lot when she talks. Jennifer Lagan has a calming manner and steady blue eyes. A name-badge hangs round her neck with a photo of her in dated clothes and a different haircut. She looks younger in the picture. In person, she has a tired face and there are faint lines around her lips. Carol has seen her smoking a cigarette from the lounge window. Normally, she doesn’t approve of women who smoke, but Jennifer Lagan does it in a way that suggests the intake of nicotine is absolutely necessary in order to conduct police business effectively.

‘Have they found him yet?’ Connie asked. ‘Or is he still . . . at large?’

‘Still at large. They’re tracing his mobile phone, things like that.’

‘Oh Carol, that must be terrifying for you.’

‘A bit,’ she said, but in truth the police had been very reassuring and an officer was stationed at her front doorstep twenty-four hours a day in case Alan tried to make contact. Then there were all the TV crews at the end of the road. In many respects, as DCI Lagan pointed out, Lebanon Gardens was probably the safest address in the country.

‘Do they know who it is yet? The body, I mean,’ Connie said, lowering her voice.

Carol hesitated. She had heard a murmur of a name, when she was upstairs in the bathroom and the window just happened to be open, but she wasn’t sure it was right to share this with Connie just yet. She wasn’t certain she’d heard it correctly. And it was the kind of name that, if she’d heard it right, would be of considerable interest to the media. Connie could be very indiscreet.

‘No,’ she said. There was a disappointed sigh on the other end of the line. To appease her, Carol lowered her voice and added, ‘Apparently the body was
very
badly decayed.’

An intake of breath.

‘Well,’ Connie said, appetite temporarily sated. ‘Well,’ she said again.

‘Anyway, Connie, I’d best be off. I’ve not had a chance to do any of my chores today.’

She looked down at her doodle and saw that she’d drawn a flower, growing out of a patch of soil. The whole conversation now seemed wildly inappropriate.

‘Of course, Carol, of course, just . . . let me know if there are any developments.’ Then, almost as an afterthought, ‘Look after yourself, dear. It must be taking its toll on you as well.’

Is it taking its toll? Carol wonders as she walks slowly round to the strawberry pots with the watering can. The odd thing was that the discovery of a body underneath Alan’s flower bed had made her feel curiously alive. It had brought it home to her that life could take sudden and unexpected turns. Derek’s death had been cruel and unfair, but it had also been a long-drawn-out process and she had had time to accustom herself to the idea, if not the reality, of his eventual absence. It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that a man of his age would die of cancer.

By contrast, the poor girl next door (because she’d overheard that it was a girl, a young woman in fact) shouldn’t, in any natural scheme of things, have died when she did and she certainly shouldn’t have lost her life in the most brutal way, at the hands of another person. Thinking of it like this, Carol feels almost lucky to have survived so long. She would never have wished to stumble across a decomposed body in her neighbour’s flower bed, of course not, but given that she had, the unexpected by-product of this discovery seems to be a temporary lifting of her gloom.

Cheaper than therapy, she mutters and she asks herself, not for the first time, if some of the policewomen’s defensive callousness has started to rub off on her. She’s always fancied herself as a detective, to be honest. She’d never missed an episode of
Cagney &
Lacey
when it was on and she’d watched
Prime Suspect
, too, although the Helen Mirren character was a bit too foul-mouthed for her to relax in front of the television – she was always bracing herself for the next f-word.

The voices on the other side of the fence have become muted. Carol thinks they have moved into the big white tent the police erected over Alan’s garden to stop the media taking photographs from helicopters overhead. Carol can still make out a snatched word here and there – ‘DNA swabs’, ‘forensics’ – and the odd squall of laughter. Gallows humour, she supposes.

And in the midst of this, a clear slice of imagery rises unbidden in Carol’s mind. A woman gasping, earth stuffed tightly into her mouth, great clods of it sticking in her throat so that she can’t breathe. Hair wound round her neck like a noose. The woman’s hands scrabbling uselessly at the soil, trying desperately to dig out a chink of light, an air-hole, anything to see the sky, and all the time someone is pushing her down, his hands pressing on her chest and her neck, until all her veins are squeezed dry. In Carol’s imagination, the woman is blonde and frail and pretty, with big blue innocent eyes, and her doll-like quality makes everything worse so that Carol starts to feel light-headed and sick and also ashamed of herself, of her inability to help whoever it was, of the fact that she is capable of gossiping to Connie about what happened.

Sometimes it takes her like this: a flash of terror when she least expects it. In the garden, Carol bends gingerly, trying to stop the gentle spinning motion of her head, and she sets the watering can down by the herb planter on the patio. A mechanical sound has started up next door, like the juddering thud of a roadside digger. What could they have found now? She feels faint.

She manages to open the door back into the kitchen and then stumbles up the step, righting herself just before she falls. Her heart is beating arrhythmically. She can feel it stuttering inside her chest. She draws out a chair and sits on it at the table, regulating her breathing. Her greatest fear is of falling at home when she is on her own, breaking a bone and being unable to move for days until she is discovered, weeks later, dead of dehydration and neglect. She wonders about getting one of those red panic buttons she keeps seeing in the free catalogues pushed through her letterbox – the ones with automatic bird-feeders, embroidered draught-excluders and thermal slipper linings; all the humiliating paraphernalia invented exclusively to make money out of gullible OAPs.

She makes a mental note to ask Vanessa about the panic button. Vanessa will know what to do. Carol has been relying on her daughter more of late. It has stolen up on her, this reliance. She still isn’t used to the idea that Vanessa can be a capable and responsible adult.

It is while she is sitting at the table, calming herself down and thinking about putting the kettle on, that there is a knock on the door. The knock is loud and startling, three sharp rat-a-tats and immediately, Carol senses that it is not a friend or anyone she knows. They wouldn’t knock like that, she thinks. In fact, they wouldn’t knock at all – there’s a perfectly good doorbell right there. As if the person outside has heard her, the doorbell chimes almost instantly.

Ding-dong.

‘Coming,’ Carol says uselessly, her voice muffled and quiet so that whoever is on the other side of the door is bound not to hear her. She takes a while getting down the hallway and just as she has reached the end of the banister and is resting one hand on the wood to steady herself, she sees the letterbox flap open and feels the sucking-in of a gust of outside wind. She has time to notice a pair of beady eyes before it flaps shut again.

‘I said I’m coming,’ Carol grumbles. Honestly. No patience. It’s probably another of the detectives from next door, wanting to ask the same old questions over again.

But when she undoes the safety lock and opens the door, she sees she was wrong. A small woman wearing smart grey trousers and a sleeveless blouse that shows off firmly toned biceps is standing on her doorstep. The woman’s shoulder-length hair is shot through with streaks of blonde, tucked under in a way that suggests it has been professionally blow-dried. Almost as soon as Carol has taken in the impressive neatness of her appearance, she is enveloped by a cloud of heady scent: vanilla, tuberose, a muskiness like incense. Expensive perfume, she thinks, so definitely not a police officer.

‘Yes?’ Carol says, keeping the door half-closed.

‘Mrs Hetherington?’ the woman says, her face blank.

‘Yes.’

The woman smiles broadly and the entire shape of her face changes and becomes softer, warmer, more inviting.

‘Hello there. I’m Cathy Dennen from the
Sunday Tribune
.’

Cathy Dennen holds out her hand, limply like a packet of wilted spinach. Carol takes it without thinking and shakes it.

‘I see,’ she says in clipped tones. She glances behind Cathy Dennen’s shoulder to the garden gate where the police officer is meant to be. He must have gone on a tea break, she thinks.

‘I’ve said all I want to say.’

She doesn’t mean to be impolite, but really there is a limit. Ever since the forensics team moved in three days ago, there has been a steady trickle of newspaper journalists and television reporters making their way up the garden path desperate for fresh clues as to what Alan was like.

On the first day, she had been cordial but fairly non-committal to the reporters, saying simply that he had seemed a nice and fairly quiet man. Her words had been splashed across the
Wandsworth Guardian
the next day: ‘His neighbour, Mrs Carol Hetherington, 68, said: “He kept himself to himself. We never had any trouble from him.”’

Which she was fairly certain she’d never said. At least not in those exact words. After that, she stopped giving quotes. It was true what they said about the press: you couldn’t trust them.

Now, there was a police cordon at the bottom of Lebanon Gardens and, on the other side, a bank of white satellite vans bearing the logos of various TV stations. She watched them sometimes, under the guise of tidying up her small patch of lawn at the front: reporters with shiny teeth and bouffant hair jostling for space for live two-way broadcasts every hour, on the hour, attempting to talk at a slightly louder level than the person beside them.

And now – this woman. Carol looks her up and down. Cathy Dennen continues to smile. She’s better dressed than the average journalist, Carol thinks, and her prejudices begin to shift imperceptibly under the surface like tectonic plates.

‘I appreciate that,’ Cathy says. ‘And I’m so sorry to bother you at what must be a’ – she nods her head ever so slightly towards Number 12 – ‘tricky time. I just wondered if I could have a quick chat with you?’

‘What about?’ Carol asks. How on earth had Cathy Dennen made it through the police cordon? She must have been very ingenious to get past them, Carol thinks. Again, her respect for the woman on her doorstep rises infinitesimally.