The Keys to the Street (29 page)

It was a warm sultry morning, the kind of July day that threatens a storm to come. Swarms of gnats rose and fell above the surface of the lake, and from the bridge over the island the water had a fetid smell. The grass in the open areas was worn and bleached by the sun. Bean walked the dogs over the bridge and almost to the Hanover Gate. This morning the roof of the mosque was dull as an old copper pot. Watching the gambols of Boris and Marietta, he asked himself if he really wanted another big dog, a dalmatian. Big dogs were unruly and easily got out of hand. Pity they couldn’t all be like that little Gushi, who stuck close beside him and only occasionally ran off for some puppyish adventure with McBride.

A man was walking down the Broad Walk from the zoo end. Bean was quite a long way away from him. Flowerbeds and ornamental trees and fountains and urns spilling out more flowers separated them. But he would have known The Beater anywhere, at any distance, by his slouching walk, the lift of his chin, his body movements as elegant as a black man’s, the way his arms hung loosely by his sides. Bean had all the dogs on their leash by now and he approached nearer. He had no objection to being seen by The Beater and in the daylight and the warmth had lost the fears of the night.

When their eyes met The Beater’s showed not a flicker of recognition. But he was an actor, wasn’t he? Bean stared at him before turning abruptly away. How old was he? That had always been a mystery, but he must be all of thirty-five now. He turned around when he was sure The Beater wasn’t looking and took in the jeans, the denim jacket, the longish hair. Was it possible …? He had seemed clean enough but some of them
were
clean. There were hostels now where they could get showers, wash their hair.

So could The Beater have come so low as to be on the street?

Bean had no real reason to think so except that
they
did come in here and loaf about and The Beater seemed to have been wandering aimlessly. Where, after all, could he have come from and be going to? If he really was one of them maybe the Impaler would find him and he’d end up murdered and stuck on railings somewhere. Things would have been very different for The Beater if he hadn’t beaten Clitheroe quite so hard and Clitheroe had lived a little longer and changed his will.…

Marnock and the sergeant were waiting for him when he got back to York Terrace, sitting outside in their car on a double yellow line. They were a lot more polite than on previous occasions, which made Bean cocky and say in a testy tone, “What is it this time?”

They wanted him to tell them all about the man who had mugged him in the Nursemaids’ Tunnel. There was no need to go down to the station if he’d be good enough to ask them in. Was he sure the mugger had been Clancy? Was there any room for doubt over the identity of his attacker?

Bean had to rethink the whole thing. Maybe it hadn’t been Clancy. He wondered if he dare give them a description of The Beater, but he thought better of this as too dangerous and said he couldn’t remember. They stayed for nearly two hours, their politeness unflagging, and when they left they said nothing about seeing him again.

He had a Birdseye Lean Cuisine for his lunch and watched
Emmerdale
on television. After that, feeling cheerful, he told himself that nothing ventured, nothing gained. All his clients’ phone numbers were written down in the accounts book he kept. As he dialed Barker-Pryce’s number he thought, if she answers or some secretary or whatever I’ll just put the phone down. When he heard Barker-Pryce speak, his throat dried.

“Yes? Who is it?”

He managed to speak. “It’s Bean, sir. The one who walks the dogs.”

“What d’you want? Speak up.”

“I was wondering,” said Bean, his rising anger strengthening his voice, “if you’d like to see some really beautiful photographs I’ve taken of Charlie. They’re smashing, sir, I think you’d like them.”

He was well named Barker. The noise he made, a laugh presumably, was much the same sound as that coming from McBride when he put up a mandarin duck.

“That’s rich. Coming from you. You walked the animal, right? When did I give you permission to use it as a model?”

Bean drew a deep breath, expelled it, said, “Talking of models, sir, I nearly mentioned these pix the other evening when I saw you in Paddington with the young lady.”

Silence. Bean seemed to smell cigar smoke.

“I’d been buying a paper, Mr. Barker-Pryce. A newspaper. It was to read that article about the gentleman from the government and the lady in the hotel. I expect you know him, don’t you, sir?”

The voice was quieter this time, the tone more polite. “What exactly do you want?”

“Among other things, a reference, if you please, sir. For a lady with a dalmatian. I wondered if I might drop in after I’ve taken my
other
dogs for their walk. Say about five-thirty?”

19

I
t took Roman a while to find out where she lived. He felt a natural aversion to spying on her. But one Saturday, he saw her in Primrose Hill and with the utmost discretion followed her home.

He had been in a secondhand bookshop in Regent’s Park Road and there found an old work, published in 1840, called
Colburn’s Calendar of Amusements
. The bookseller only wanted two pounds for it, for it was in a ragged battered state. Roman stood in the shop doorway, reading a passage from it that touched him, that seemed to parallel in a zany, awkward way his own state.

Deep melancholy may kill lions, but not human beings. Not even the deepest grief kills them, for men have died from time to time but not of love.… He was remembering, incongruously, how when he was a boy the zoo’s telephone exchange was called Primrose and remembering too a joke about dialing Primrose 1000 and asking for Mr. Lion, when he looked up and saw her pass by on the opposite pavement.

She might not have been walking home but somehow he fancied she was. He put the book in his pocket and began to walk in the direction she was going. If she looked back, he thought, he would abandon his pursuit of her. He would give it up at once, for she must on no account be made afraid of him. How much, how infinitely much, he would have liked to read that account of the poor lion’s fate to Sally, for there seemed no one else in the world to whom he could read it or tell it and who would react with the same tender sympathy. But she was not in the world, she was nowhere, ageless, lost, with her dead children.

The fair-haired girl, the Irene Adler girl, crossed the road ahead of him and then Albert Road and made her way into the park by way of St. Mark’s Bridge, over the Outer Circle and into the Broad Walk. She hadn’t once looked back. But why would she? She wasn’t Lot’s wife, leaving the Cities of the Plain, or Orpheus hoping Eurydice followed on behind. The walk was shady here, much overhung by trees, chestnuts and planes in heavy leaf. The two wolves, penned behind double wire fences, explored and sniffed their territory like dogs. He saw her turn to look at them but not pause. She took the first of the two left-hand paths that led to the Gloucester Gate.

He had been making his nightly home in the Grotto for nearly three weeks now, the longest time he had spent in any one place. And all the while, it seemed, she had been quite near him, for she had crossed the Outer Circle and was leading him along Albany Street. Park Village West. If she went in there she must live there,
for it was a crescent, leading nowhere but back to that northbound artery. It was quiet, a bower of trees and flowers, green, scented, but the leaves a little dusty, for this after all was near the heart of London.

She hadn’t once looked back, but she did so at the gate of a pretty Italianate house, and seeing him, not knowing that he had been behind her all the way from Primrose Hill, lifted up her hand and waved.

Only a woman in a million, he thought, would say hello to me, smile at me, and when there had been some hellos and smiles, wave to me. And he wondered if he should stay a while to see if her brother came home, but it might be hours, the brother might be in there now, and he turned away, opening his book and reading it as he walked along.

•   •   •

Someone had come and boarded up his windows. Hob didn’t know who because he had been out most of the day, trying to get what he wanted out of the bunch of stony-hearted people he knew or was related to. He got home late, spaced out and low on the pediatric Valium syrup, which was all he’d been able to get out of his half-sister. It didn’t do much for him beyond making him sleepy so that at least he was too tired to feel all the intensity of a state.

He’d first gone for help to his half-sister’s boyfriend. This man, the father of her youngest child, made crack himself by mixing cocaine and bicarbonate of soda and baking the resultant paste in a microwave. He offered it to Hob at ten percent less than its street value, or he said it was ten percent, Hob couldn’t work it out. But Hob had already handed over all his giro money to Lew under the Chinese trees and he was skint. The boyfriend shrugged and said too bad. His half-sister took pity on him, or more likely wanted him out of the house, and said she’d got a bottle of the kids’ Valium he could
have. They were supposed to have it in their bottles but she and the boyfriend found whiskey more effective.

After that he proceeded to his cousin’s place in one of the blocks off Lisson Grove. The cousin and two of his mates were sitting in front of a hard-core video smoking weed. They passed the joint to Hob more or less as a matter of course, but none of them would give him any money or even lend him any. The cousin said he knew a man he’d met in a pub that might want a job done and he told Hob where he might find this man, giving him a funny look when he saw him swigging out of a kid’s medicine bottle.

The pediatric Valium tasted very sweet and of something that brought back Hob’s childhood. He couldn’t think what it was and he was too sleepy to think much anyway. He hung about the newsagent’s the man used for a long while, bought a couple of scratch cards, getting nothing up of course but a couple of Walker’s Crisps and two diet Cokes. Then he sat on a seat outside on the pavement, but no one came along who remotely fitted his cousin’s description. Fruit drops, that was what it was. It came back to him suddenly as he was trudging home, fruit drops that syrup tasted of, what his mother’s nan called boiled sugars. His first stepfather used to buy them for him after he’d given him a harder clout than usual.

He was looking up high, to the top of the next block, Blackwater House, to see where the kid had stood when he’d dropped the rock on the old man, which was why he didn’t notice the windows till he was almost at the door. Raw planks of wood were nailed up over all his front windows, the two in the living room and the one in the bedroom. It was a warm night and inside the flat it was hot like an oven. He sat on the settee and laid his head on one of the Mickey Mouse scatter cushions.

When the lights in the flats opposite and the lights in the car park went out it would be black as pitch in here. As it was, only thin lines of light, orange-colored, slipped through the cracks between the
boards. It would be as bad in the bedroom. Hob drank more Valium syrup to put himself out and he must have spilled some on the floor, for he was aware in his sleep and his half-sleep of the mice at his feet, licking it up.

•   •   •

“We could live here,” Mary said, “when the time comes for me to leave Charlotte Cottage.”

She and Leo were in Frederica Jago’s house, big, turreted, late-Victorian red brick, in an overgrown rather dark garden. Mary had not visited it since her grandmother’s funeral and the meeting there with Alistair and Mr. Edwards. It was stuffy and airless; she felt she should go about opening windows, but as soon as she came through the front door she had been lethargic and reluctant to take any positive steps. The place was filled with her grandmother. It was not a new feeling, it was how everyone felt in her circumstances, but all the time she expected the dead woman to walk in, to smile, to speak, to hold out her arms.

“I grew up here. It seems forbidding now but it didn’t then. I remember being proud of living in such a
distinguished
house and I think I used to boast about it at school. I must have been a horrid child.”

Leo had been silent ever since they came through the front door. Normally, he would have reacted to that last statement of hers, refuted it at once, and she even wondered if she had said it for that reason: to hear him tell her she could never have been horrid. She was growing hungry for praise from him. But he said nothing, only shrugged lightly. She took him upstairs, going from room to room. In one she opened a dressing table drawer, but the scent that came from it, vanilla and roses, was so much the essence of her grandmother that she drew back with a little cry.