Tree of Hands (19 page)

He climbed on to the horse and rocked back and forth.
The expression on his face made her smile, there was so much in it of delight, of wonder, of a sort of glee. She began to imagine the conversation that would take place between her and a policeman or policemen when she took him back. Any explanation she might give of Mopsa's behaviour and then of her own subsequent behaviour now sounded insane to her, unreal – above all, unbelievable. Why hadn't she brought Jason back as soon as she knew who he was? They would ask that. That would be one of the questions they would hammer over and over at her. And she would only be able to say it had been to stop Mopsa screaming. Looking back now, she couldn't understand herself. Perhaps it was not only Mopsa whose mind had been unbalanced . . .

There was no dialogue she could construct between herslf and the police that did not end in their charging her with abducting Jason. The facts, the evidence, were all against her. The Winterside area was known to her, she had once lived there. The car used was her car. She had recently lost her own child. And more than that. She had concealed – or so it would seem – her child's death from all her friends.

Benet gave Jason his tea, a rather special one because it was his birthday. She set him on her lap and read Beatrix Potter to him,
The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-pan
, although it was too old for him. He liked the pictures. He seemed to like them more and with a more intense enthusiasm than she thought most children of his age would. If I were his mother, she found herself thinking, I should imagine him growing up to be a painter.

His mother . . . That pretty little blonde woman, that living doll. And the thuggish boy just out of his teens she lived with. They had to have him to back. There was no doubt about that. It was not for her, Benet, to judge them and pronounce sentence. All she could do was try to ensure that once the relief of having him back was past, they didn't begin beating him again.

The bruises were almost gone, she noticed as she lifted Jason into the bath. Only a faint yellowish staining
remained at the base of his firm-fleshed rib cage. The burn hole would always be there, of course. It would be there when he was an old man. But she couldn't prove it had been made by a cigarette. And the police wouldn't want to believe it, she thought, they would rather not have the additional trouble of believing it.

She put Jason to bed and tucked him in. The white rabbit had disappeared. They had both hunted all over the house for it and now Benet began to wonder if Mopsa had inadvertently taken it back to Spain with her. She thought, she braced herself, and then she opened the toy cupboard and got James's tiger cub out and gave it to Jason. Seeing him with it hurt but not agonizingly. He accepted it happily as a substitute for the rabbit and fell asleep with one of its round golden ears stuffed in his mouth.

By this time she should have handed Jason back. Yesterday she had made a firm decision to take him to the police station by three o'clock this afternoon. She had even told herself she was
looking forward
to it. It was going to be a relief getting it over, being free of him, being alone again and responsible only for herself. She must have convinced herself then that they would accept her story of Mopsa's part in it, of Mopsa's almost total guilt. Another night must now pass before she could return him and that in itself, the fact that she had not handed him back immediately after Mopsa's departure, must further militate against her innocence.

Wandering downstairs again, walking about the basement room, alone for the first time since James had died, she knew quite suddenly that she was not going to take Jason to the police. The idea of it – realistically faced, fair and square – made her feel sick and horribly frightened. It was no good imagining conversations, anticipating ways of bringing the police round to her point of view. They weren't like that, it wouldn't be like that. Two minutes inside that police station and she would be turned into an insane criminal. And next day the newspapers would have
everything. She would have to see in print the fact of James's death.

She wouldn't do it.

It was a relief to have decided. She felt quite limp and weak with relief. Jason would not be taken to the police, there would be no excuses, confessions, explanations, for her to make. Poor mad Mopsa would not be implicated.

That did not mean Jason wasn't to be returned. Of course he must be returned to his mother, his family, his home, and as soon as possible. Benet did something rare with her. She went upstairs to the drinks cupboard and poured herself a stiff double measure of whisky. Not since the days with Edward had she drunk whisky. She sat down in the window chair with her drink and began to think out ways of returning Jason, foolproof ways that were both safe and secret.

THE PHOTOGRAPHS IN
the estate agents' windows were of all kinds of houses, from listed Grade One Georgian to 1980s studio open-plan. Terence looked at the pictures and the specifications underneath them, noting prices. He hadn't known quite how costly houses in Hampstead were and his investigation was starting to make him feel slightly, though not disagreeably, sick.

One more agent in Heath Street remained to be examined. Terence made his way down as far as the corner of Church Row and stood with his face close up to the glass. He didn't intend to go in. It was better to do these things by phone. It had been an educational morning, but as he walked back up the winding hill, he wondered if he hadn't undertaken these researches less because they were necessary than to put off still further the first fateful step.

Nearly a week had passed since he had found the deeds for 5 Spring Close. Since then he had thought of very little else but his plan, and short of Freda coming home suddenly or some agent or soliticor personally knowing John Phipps (or knowing he was dead) or the neighbours getting wise (how could they?), he didn't see how it could go wrong. But he was scared stiff. What scared him was that it seemed so simple, a real walkover once things got moving, that it couldn't happen, there must be a flaw somewhere. It couldn't be that easy to get hold of – what? A hundred thousand pounds? A hundred and fifty?

Both Jessica and Freda were regular users of Valium. Jessica took one every morning to start the day. Terence had removed a hundred in a container when he left.

‘It's cheaper than drink,' frugal Freda used to say. She
had left him nearly two hundred. He was amply supplied and they didn't seem to go off, in spite of what doctors and chemists said. He took two with half a glass of water and on second thoughts added some of Freda's Chivas Regal. It made him shudder, he had never been much of a drinker.

The estate agent he had chosen answered the phone promptly. He was put on to a Mr Sawyer. Mr Sawyer's accent was very much like his own, north London born and schooled, overlaid (when the speaker remembered) with some mimicry of television announcers' diction. Terence had rehearsed his opening line over and over. He had found himself muttering it in his sleep. Now he uttered it aloud into the phone:

‘I should like to put my house on the market.'

The sum Sawyer named as the asking price was a hundred and forty thousand pounds or, in estate agent's parlance, a hundred and thirty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-five.

‘When would it be convenient to come and measure up, Mr Phipps?'

‘Measure up?'

‘We like to take measurements of the rooms for our specifications. And perhaps a photograph. Of course I'm familiar with the property. A very nice property indeed.'

‘How about this afternoon?'

‘Wonderful. Three? Three-thirty?'

Three o'clock was fixed. Get it over with, thought Terence. He had never thought much about the neighbours before. When, for instance, he used to bring Freda's car in at two in the morning, give the accelerator a final flip, get out and bang the door, the neighbours might not have existed for him. He looked out of the middle one of the three narrow windows. A thin worn-looking woman with white hair was planting something, bulbs probably, round the trunk of the catalpa tree which grew in the middle of the courtyard. She looked the nosy kind but there was nothing he could do about her. Suppose she or any of them
saw Sawyer taking a photograph? Even if they knew who Sawyer was, they would only think Freda was selling her house. They might not even know she had gone away.

The only danger would be in someone hearing Sawyer call him Phipps. Terence made up his mind not to let this happen. Now he had taken the first step, he felt less nervous. What had he done, after all? He had committed himself to nothing, he could always withdraw, change his mind. As for being called Phipps, he might easily be a cousin of the late John Howard. A young cousin. John Howard had died at the age of fifty-one, Terence had noted from his death certificate.

Sawyer turned up on time, in fact two minutes early. Before he could make too much of a song and dance on the doorstep about how lovely and tasteful this little enclave was, Terence got him inside by saying to shut the front door, he thought he had a cold coming.

‘The market,' said Sawyer, on his knees with the tape measure, ‘is, so to speak, moribund.'

It sounded like a word he had just learned. Terence supposed it meant ‘improving' or some such thing. The afternoon's proceedings had an unreal feel to them.

‘Townhouses,' said Sawyer, ‘are by no means easy to sell at this moment in time, but these, of course, are in a class of their own. Describing this as a townhouse at all might give a false impression. Careful handling will be in order. I shall have to put my thinking cap on. May I ask if you've found somewhere else?'

‘Pardon?'

‘I mean are you in the process of purchasing a new property?'

‘You needn't worry about that. I'm going abroad. And I want a quick sale. I don't want to hang about.'

He asked Sawyer if he'd mind seeing himself out and then he ran upstairs and watched the photograph being taken. As far as he could tell, no one else was watching. Sawyer put his camera away and strolled off under the archway that led into older, cobbled regions of Hampstead.

Terence didn't expect any developments for a week or two, but two days later, as he was plucking up courage to go up to Heath Street and see if the photograph was in Steiner & Wildwood's window and how he felt about that if it was, Sawyer phoned to say a Mr and Mrs Pym would like to see over the house. Would in an hour's time suit him?

Freda had done her own housework. She said it gave her something to occupy herself and she didn't like cleaners in the place. In a way Terence was glad of that. A cleaner would have taken a keen interest in everything he was doing, would have gossiped, might even have written letters to Martinique. But he had also rather taken it for granted that the house was clean and stayed that way by magic. No one had laid a duster on it for nearly a fortnight and it wasn't looking its best. Still it was too late to worry about that. He took two Valium and was feeling quite serene by the time the Pyms arrived.

They didn't stay long. When they found the garden was approximately the same size as the smallest bedroom, they lost interest. But it was a start. Terence got out the vacuum cleaner, found some dusters and cleaned up. He hooked a cobweb off one of the red girders and polished the discus thrower. It was the first time in his life he had attempted house cleaning but he didn't find it difficult. It would even be a way of making a living if all else failed, he thought.

The photograph Sawyer had taken wasn't in Steiner & Wildwood's window. They must have used it only to stick on the forms with measurements and whatnot that they gave prospective buyers. This comforted him. He would have felt very exposed if that photograph had been there staring at everyone who went past.

Ever since Freda went away, he had been living a hermit's existence, so that evening he broke out and went to an old haunt of his, Smithy's in Maida Vale, where he had sometimes gone with Jessica and where you could drink all night. In Smithy's he picked up a girl called Teresa and told her his name was John Phipps. She went home with
him in a taxi and was deeply impressed by the house. In fact she was overwhelmed and kept on saying he hadn't seemed that sort of fella. They were still in bed next morning when Sawyer phoned. A Mrs Goldschmidt would like to come and see the house at 2.00 p.m.

That gave him time to get rid of Teresa. He caught her taking a note of Freda's phone number from the disc in the middle of the dial, but it didn't seem important. He swallowed two Valium once she was out of the way and another at one-thirty. Mrs Goldschmidt was late, and by the time the doorbell rang, he had almost given her up. He made himself go slowly to the door, keep her waiting for a change.

She was an extremely good-looking woman, of the same type as Carol Stratford, but there was as much difference in class and style between her and Carol as Sawyer had said there was between 5 Spring Close and your average townhouse. She had very short, back-swept blond hair, a pale, gleaming tan and her mouth was like a cross-section of a ripe strawberry. She wore a pale grey suede coat, primrose leather boots and a long primrose scarf. Such as she, Terence thought, were never to be found being assisted out of Daimlers at crematorium steps.

He had no experience of buying or selling houses but he knew by instinct or telepathy that she would want to buy this one. It wasn't that she said much as he led her from room to room, she hardly spoke at all, but she took a long time, she was thorough, sometimes she nodded to herself in a satisfied way. It was three-thirty by the time she had finished, the worst time of day to offer anyone a drink and he didn't feel like making her a cup of tea. Tea-making hardly fitted in with his 5 Spring Close image. In a way it was a pity she so obviously liked the house. It put paid to any ideas he had about using that image to get to know her better.