Paradise City (43 page)

‘Don’t you have a girlfriend?’ she taps out with her thumbs. Then, as it looks a bit bald, she adds in a single kiss. Not two, because she’s a sucker for power-play. She hits ‘send’ before she has second thoughts.

He texts back straight away.

‘Not any more. Drink? Tonight? xx’

She says yes.

Carol

She isn’t sure how it becomes a regular thing. All Carol knows is that she has begun to rely on his visits and, more than that, to look forward to them. She measures out her weeks in anticipation of the doorbell ringing and seeing his now-familiar outline picked out against the frosted glass. A few times, she has rushed to the front door and found Vanessa and Archie standing there and she has been ashamed to feel a jab of disappointment, where previously there would have been straightforward happiness at the prospect of spending time with her grandson.

He never tells her when he’s coming. She’s told him that he doesn’t need to, that he can pop in any time and just to send her a text an hour or so beforehand to check that she’s in. She doesn’t want him to have a wasted journey, even though he reassures her he has a chauffeur and it’s really no trouble and that he likes the journey from Kensington, that he finds it relaxing, that he wouldn’t mind waiting till she got back from wherever it was she might have gone.

‘You can’t just stand on the doorstep,’ she protested.

‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘You’d be recognised,’ she said before she could stop herself, and then she saw the sadness surge into him and that shaded look he sometimes got and she was reminded, all over again, he had been to places she could never have access to. Places she wouldn’t want to go, even if she could.

‘You’re probably right,’ he said and since then, he had texted an hour or two in advance of showing up. Carol made sure she always had the kettle filled and ready to go. He wasn’t one for biscuits but he had a penchant for Soreen Malt Loaf, which came in a yellow packet and was so dense it felt like a brick every time she picked it up and put it in her shopping basket. She had tried it once and thought it was chewy and bland. It stuck to her teeth like wet plaster but he loved it, especially when she sliced it and spread it with butter. Said it reminded him of his childhood.

It had all started the week after the police confirmed Ada Pink’s identity. The press had gone berserk. Her phone rang so many times during the day that she disconnected it. Mercifully, they had stopped knocking at her door, ever since Cathy Dennen of the
Tribune
sneaked in and went on to print a breathlessly worded interview on the day Ada Pink’s remains were officially identified. The police had stepped up security outside Carol’s front gate and made sure no one went on a tea break without first getting a replacement to stand in for them. She felt trapped. She used to go for a daily walk, just to stretch her legs and get some fresh air, but these days it was impossible to venture outside without being peppered with questions everywhere she went.

Human curiosity was insatiable, she learned, to such an extent that the local residents, and Connie in particular, seemed to forget there was a human tragedy involved. Even Vanessa wanted to pump her for details about what Alan was like and she has run out of things to say. She doesn’t want to talk about him any more. She wants to forget Alan ever existed.

Carol still thinks of him as Alan. The evil murderer they’re talking about on the TV news exists as a separate entity in her head. It is the only way she can cope.

Out of everyone, only Milton and Archie seem to understand. She knows it’s stupid to believe cats are capable of human feeling, but Milton genuinely appears to intuit when Carol needs comfort, sidling up to her and weaving between her legs, pressing his soft fur against her calf muscles before leaping up onto her lap, purring gently while she strokes him, allowing the peaceful rhythm of it to soothe her. She has started talking to the cat out loud. At times, she worries she’s losing her marbles but then she reassures herself that it’s probably a step forward from talking to Derek’s photo on her bedside table. After everything that has happened, she finds she can handle the truth of Derek’s absence a bit better. She has grown accustomed to living her life around it, even if the hole in her heart will never entirely close over.

Archie, meanwhile, is solicitous and sweet. He chatters happily about school and coming third in the 800 metres on his sports day and the new Star Trek film that he was going to see at the IMAX in 3D for a friend’s birthday. He was, thought Carol, turning into a lovely young man. None of that teenage sullenness she’d braced herself for. At least not yet.

And then, of course, there was Howard.

The first time she met Howard Pink had been almost two months ago, in the midst of that mad, surreal time, when the police had asked if she’d mind talking to ‘the father of the deceased’. For days, Sir Howard’s tense, sunken face had been all over the news. For years before that, she had flicked past his photograph in the newspapers, not giving the multi-millionaire businessman so much as a second thought. She had seen him once on television and thought he came across as pompous and a bit flash.

But after Ada’s discovery, his physical presence had shrivelled. Looking at him during the subsequent press conference, when a silky-looking spokesman had read out a pre-prepared statement on his behalf, it seemed as though Sir Howard had been deflated, as if the air had been left to leak out of him so that all that was left were baggy pouches of skin and the startlingly blue-black crescents under his eyes.

She had felt so sorry for him – a man whom she previously believed she had little in common with. She, like him, was the parent of an only child. Carol shuddered to think what she would have done if it had been Vanessa . . . she left the thought unexpressed. So when the police asked, she didn’t hesitate. She said that yes, of course he could come round. Carol wasn’t sure she could give him anything that would be of much help but if he wanted to meet her, she told DCI Lagan, she would do her best to answer any questions he might have.

He came to her house on a Wednesday afternoon. She remembers the time because she’d just been listening to the afternoon play on Radio 4 with Milton on her lap. It was a bad play, she recalls. One of those new writing jobs where they got someone you’d never heard of to riff on one of that week’s news stories and then employed a series of British actors who tried to put on American accents and make clip-clopping sounds with coconut shells to suggest horses riding into the distance.

This time, she was listening to the afternoon play to take her mind off the nerves. She’d never entertained a millionaire before, after all. Did they eat the same things as the rest of us or was it all caviar and oysters covered in gold leaf? She’d read a story a while back about a banker who’d spent his entire £250,000 bonus on champagne at a fancy nightclub. At the time, Carol had been more shocked by the size of the bonus than by the fact he’d blown it all on something called Cristal.

‘Honestly, Mum,’ Vanessa had said. ‘That’s not even a big one. Most of these guys get a million-pound bonus like that—’ and she’d clicked her fingers to emphasise the point. ‘It’s what got us into this mess. That and sub-prime mortgages.’

Carol was fairly certain that Sir Howard Pink must have got a few bonuses in his time. She wasn’t sure what he’d make of her Charles and Di biscuit tin. She had, however, managed to buy some paper doilies in Waitrose and had made a pretty arrangement of biscuits on one of her best plates. She’d covered the dining-room table with an embroidered linen cloth inherited from Derek’s mother and she had put a bright vase of freesias at its centre. Looking at the display, she felt as prepared as she could be.

When the bell rang, her heart gave a little thud. She pushed herself up off the chair and Milton gave a disgruntled yelp as he leapt to the floor.

‘Sorry, puss,’ she muttered, drawing her cardigan tighter. She was wearing her best skirt, a pale blue blouse with pearl buttons and a smart cashmere wrap Vanessa had given her for Christmas. It was murder to wash so she only wore it on special occasions. Looking at herself in the mirror above the fireplace, she thought she scrubbed up all right.

When she opened the door, he was looking out at the street and, when he turned round, he was holding a bunch of flowers. She noticed they were freesias – exactly the same colour as the ones she had put in the dining room – but they were in a bigger, more elaborate bunch, the kind that had a bubble of water contained within the cellophane and lots of paper ribbons, like coloured straw.

‘These are for you,’ he said solemnly.

‘Thank you,’ she said, taking them from him. They weighed a ton.

He was taller than she’d imagined from television. Tall and beautifully dressed. His raincoat had a checked lining and when she took it from him, she saw that he was in an impeccably pressed suit with a lavender handkerchief poking out of the top pocket. His shoes were freshly polished. Even if she hadn’t known he was rich, it would have been easy to guess.

‘Please come through,’ Carol said, suddenly feeling awkward and slightly ashamed of the squashed proportions of her house. She noticed for the first time the meanness of the windows, the way they hardly let in any natural light, and her gaze rested for a moment on the worn patch of her carpet, where the synthetic threads were showing through like a bald patch.

‘You’ve got a lovely house,’ Sir Howard said and he waited for her to show him where to sit. She gestured to a chair. He sat down and looked too big for it: a giant on doll’s house furniture. ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me.’

‘Not at all, Sir Howard, I . . .’

‘Please call me Howard.’ His voice was rough around the edges. He almost dropped his ‘H’ and then stopped himself, just in time. She recognised this because she did it herself. Carol had spent so many years trying to sound just a little bit posher than she actually was that it came to her automatically. It was only when confronted with the same desire for self-improvement in others that she saw it reflected in herself. It wasn’t a snobbish thing. It was simply a wish to get on in life. Not to be dismissed on first impressions. It had been important for their generation. It was different nowadays, with all those regional accents you heard on television, almost as if they were making a point.

‘Howard, then,’ she said, pouring the tea that had been sitting underneath a cosy, keeping warm in readiness for his arrival. ‘I’m just not sure I can help you.’

He started to open his mouth but she raised a hand to stop him.

‘I just want to say, before anything else, how sorry I am for your loss.’ Carol had been building herself up to that all day. She had thought carefully about the right words to use. ‘As a mother of a girl myself, I can only imagine what you must be going through as parents. You have my deepest condolences.’

He nodded, twice in quick succession, then slumped forward in the chair, shoulders sagging. He propped his elbows on the table. Neither of them said anything and the strange thing was that the silence didn’t feel uncomfortable. It felt entirely as it should be.

‘Thank you, Mrs . . .’

‘Carol.’

‘Thank you. That means a lot. You’d be surprised how many people don’t say it. Don’t say anything, really, because they don’t know how. They’re . . . embarrassed. They’d cross the street to avoid me.’

‘I’m sure that’s not true.’

He picked up his cup of tea and lifted it to his lips while holding the saucer. Lovely manners, Carol thought approvingly.

‘It is.’ He sighed. ‘In a way, it’s a relief knowing she’s not alive. Isn’t that a terrible thing to say?’

Carol waited. She sensed he needed her to be silent.

‘And then I catch myself thinking that and I hate myself for it. Because I let her down as a dad. And I’m still letting her down by even having those thoughts. And then sometimes, at night, I have these visions . . . these horrible visions of her and what she must’ve been through, how she must have fought . . .’

He put the cup down.

‘What was she thinking then?’ he said, the words thickening in his throat. ‘What went through her mind?’

Carol pushed the plate of biscuits towards him. It was her default action when things got difficult. Howard didn’t notice.

‘I don’t need answers from you, Carol. I just need . . .’ He searched for the right word. ‘I need a bit of
peace
. I need to know what he was like. I need to know the worst so that I don’t have to imagine it any more.’

He stared at her, baleful, the corners of his mouth slipping into deep wrinkled grooves on each side of his face. It came to her, for the first time, what it meant to be grief-stricken: literally to be struck by an outside force, slammed by the unexpected strength of it.

‘Do you understand?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. And she did.

The first few visits ran along similar lines. Howard would come in, take off his coat, sit down in his too-small chair and start, immediately, to talk. Carol listened. It became, he said, like therapy.

‘But cheaper,’ Carol joked.

‘Yes.’ Howard smiled – the first time she had seen him smile. ‘Definitely cheaper.’

He had a lot of questions about Alan which she tried her best to answer. What did he tell her about his past? Did Carol ever get a bad feeling about him? Would she ever have suspected? Was he the kind of man to have been violent? Would he have tortured Ada? Would he have raped her?