He turned back to her, saying, “Damn it. Wasn't that—” But he stopped himself.
“What?” she asked. “Who?”
“No one. Nothing.” He roused his retriever to her feet for the last few yards to their front door. “We'll talk, then?” he asked. “Tomorrow? After dinner?”
“We'll talk,” she said. “There's so much to say.”
She had very few preparations to make. She washed her face and cleaned her teeth. She combed her hair and tied a navy blue scarf round her head. She protected her lips with a colourless balm, and she put the winter lining into her raincoat to give herself more protection from the chill. Parking was always bad in London, and she didn't know how far she would have to walk in the cold and windy storm-stricken air when she finally arrived at her destination.
Raincoat on and a handbag hooked over her arm, she descended the narrow staircase. She took from the kitchen table a photograph in a plain wooden frame. It was one of a baker's dozen that she usually had arranged round the cottage. Before choosing from among them, she'd lined them up like soldiers on the table and there the rest of them remained.
She clasped this frame just beneath her bosom. She went out into the night.
Her car was parked inside a gated courtyard, in a space she rented by the month, just down the street. The courtyard was hidden by electric gates cleverly fashioned to look like part of the half-timbered buildings on either side. There was safety in this, and Eugenie liked safety. She liked the illusion of security afforded by gates and locks.
In her car—a secondhand Polo whose fan sounded like the wheezing of a terminal asthmatic—she carefully set the framed photo on the passenger seat and started the engine. She'd prepared in advance for this journey up to London, checking the Polo's oil and its tyres and topping up its petrol as soon as she'd learned the date and the place. The time had come later, and she'd balked at it at first, once she realised ten forty-five meant at night and not in the morning. But she had no leg to stand on in protesting, and she knew it, so she acquiesced. Her night vision wasn't what it once had been. But she would cope.
She hadn't counted on the rain, however. And as she left the outskirts of Henley and wound her way northwest to Marlow, she found herself clutching the steering wheel and crouching over it, half-blinded by the headlamps of oncoming cars, assailed by how the blowing rain diffracted the light in spearheads that riddled the windscreen with visual lacerations.
Things weren't much better on the M40, where cars and lorries put up sheets of spray with which the Polo's windscreen wipers could barely keep pace. The lane markings had mostly vanished beneath the standing water, and those that could be seen seemed to alternate between writhing snakelike in Eugenie's vision and side-stepping to border an entirely different traffic lane.
It wasn't until she reached the vicinity of Wormwood Scrubs that she felt she could relax the death hold she had on the steering wheel. Even then she didn't breathe with ease until she'd veered away from the motorway's sleek and sodden river of concrete and headed north in the vicinity of Maida Hill.
As soon as she could manage it, she pulled to the kerb at a darkened Sketchley's. There, she let out a lungful of air that felt as if it had been held back since she'd made the first turn into Duke Street in Henley.
She rooted in her handbag for the directions she'd written out for herself from the A to Z. Although she'd escaped the motorway unscathed, another quarter of the journey still had to be negotiated through London's labyrinthine streets.
The city at the best of times was a maze. At night it became a maze ill lit and in possession of a nearly laughable paucity of signposts. But at night in the rain it was Hades. Three false starts took Eugenie no farther than Paddington Recreation Ground before she got lost. Wisely, each time she returned the way she'd come, like a taxi driver determined to understand just where he'd made his first mistake.
So it was nearly twenty past eleven when she found the street she was looking for in northwest London. And she spent another maddening seven minutes circling round till she found a space to park.
She clasped the framed photo to her bosom again, took up her umbrella from the back seat of the car, and clambered out. The rain had finally abated, but the wind was still blowing. What few autumn leaves had remained on the trees were being wafted through the air to plaster themselves on the pavement, in the street, and against the parked cars.
Number Thirty-two was the house she wanted, and Eugenie saw that it would be far up the street, on the other side. She walked up the pavement for twenty-five yards. At that hour the houses she passed were mostly unlit, and if she hadn't been nervous enough about the coming interview, her state of anxiety was heightened by the darkness and by what her active imagination was telling her could be hidden there. So she decided to be careful, as a woman alone in a city on a rainy night in late autumn ought to be careful. She ventured off the pavement and proceeded on her way in the middle of the road, where she would have advance warning should anyone want to attack her.
She thought it unlikely. It was a decent neighbourhood. Still, she knew the value of caution, so she was grateful when the lights swept over her, telling her that a vehicle had turned into the street behind her. It was coming along slowly, the way she herself had come and doing what she herself had been doing, looking for that most precious of London commodities: a place to park. She turned, stepped back against the nearest vehicle, and waited for the car to pass her. But as she did so, it pulled to one side and blinked its lights, telling her that the way was hers.
Ah, she'd been mistaken, she thought, resettling her umbrella against her shoulder and going on her way. The car wasn't waiting for a parking space at all, but rather for someone to come out of the house in front of which it sat. She gave a quick glance over her shoulder when she reached this conclusion, and as if the unknown driver was reading her thoughts, the car's horn beeped once abruptly, like a parent who'd come calling for an unresponsive child.
Eugenie continued walking. She counted the house numbers as she passed. She saw Number Ten and Number Twelve. She'd gone barely six houses from her own car when the steady light behind her shifted, then went out altogether.
Odd, she thought. You can't just park in the street like that. And thinking this, she began to turn. Which was, as it happened, not the worst of her mistakes.
Bright lights blazed on. She was instantly blinded. Blinded, she froze as the hunted often do.
An engine roared and tyres wailed against the roadway.
When she was hit, her body flew up, her arms flung wide, and her picture frame shot up like a rocket into the cold night air.
2
J. W. PITCHLEY, AKA TongueMan, had experienced an excellent evening. He'd broken Rule One—never suggest meeting anyone with whom one has engaged in cybersex—but it had all worked out, proving to him yet again that his instincts for picking fruit past its prime but all the juicier for having hung disregarded on the tree so long were as finely honed as a surgical tool.
Humility and honesty forced him to admit that it hadn't been that much of a risk, however. Any woman who called herself CreamPants was as good as advertising what she wanted, and if he'd had any doubts about that, five meetings on-line that had had him coming into his Calvin Klein jockeys without the slightest handshake of the organ on his part should have set his mind at rest. Unlike his four other current cyberlovers—whose spelling skill was, alas, often as limited as their imaginations—CreamPants had a capacity for fantasy that cooked his brain and a natural ability to express that fantasy that stiffened his cock like a divining rod the moment she logged on the net.
Creamy here, she would write. R U rdy 4 it, Tongue?
Oh my. Oh yes. He always was.
So he'd taken the metaphorical plunge himself this time instead of waiting for his cyberspondent to do so. This was wildly out of character for him. Usually, he played along cooperatively, always there at the other end of on-line encounters when one of his lovers want
ed action but never venturing into the arena of embodiment unless or until his partner suggested it. Following this pattern, he'd successfully transformed exactly twenty-seven Super Highway encounters into twenty-seven intensely satisfying trysts at the Comfort Inn on Cromwell Road—a wise and cautious distance from his own neighbourhood and night-clerked by an Asian gentleman whose memory for faces took a far back seat to his abiding passion for videos of old BBC costume dramas. Thus, only once had he found himself the victim of a practical cyberjoke, agreeing to meet a lover called DoMeHard and discovering two spotty-faced twelve-year-olds dressed like the Kray brothers waiting for him instead. No matter, though. He'd sorted them out quick enough and he was fairly certain they'd not be trying that little caper on-line again.
But CreamPants had got to him. R U rdy 4 it? She had him wondering almost from the first if she could do in person what she could do with words.
That was always the question, wasn't it? And anticipating, fantasising, and securing the answer were part of the fun.
He'd worked very hard to bring CreamPants round to suggesting that they meet. He climbed to new and dizzying heights of descriptive licentiousness with the woman. To develop more ideas in the carnal vein, he'd spent six hours over a fortnight browsing through the paraphernalia of pleasure in those windowless shops in Brewer Street. And when he finally found himself spending his daily commute into the City wrapped up in lustful visions of their sated bodies inextricably twined on the hideously hued counterpane of a Comfort Inn bed—this, instead of reading the Financial Times, that daily staple of his career—he knew that he had to take action.
So Want it 4 real? he'd finally written to her. R U rdy 4 a rsk?
She'd been ready.
He made the suggestion that he always made when his cy-berlovers requested a meeting: drinks at the Valley of Kings, easy enough to find, just a few steps away from Sainsbury's on Cromwell Road. She could come by car, by taxi, by bus, or by tube. And if upon first sight they found they didn't actually appeal to each other … just a quick martini in the bar and no regrets, okay?
The Valley of Kings possessed the same priceless quality as the Comfort Inn. Like the vast majority of service-oriented businesses in London, its waiters spoke virtually no English and to them every English person looked alike. He'd taken all twenty-seven of his cy-berencounters to the Valley of Kings without the maître d', the waiters, or the bartender so much as blinking an eyelash in recognition of him, so he was confident that he could take CreamPants there as well without any of its employees betraying him.
He'd known who she was the moment she walked into the restaurant's saffron-scented bar. And he was gratified to see that yet again he'd somehow instinctively known who and what she would be. Fifty-five years old if she was a day, well-scrubbed, and wearing just the right amount of scent, she wasn't some slag out on the pull. She wasn't a Mile End shag bag trying to better herself or a Scouse-come-south in the hope of finding a bloke who'd raise her standard of living. She was instead exactly what he'd assumed that she'd be: a lonely divorcée whose kids were grown up and who was facing the prospect of being called Gran about ten years sooner than she wanted. She was eager to prove to herself that she still had a modicum of sex appeal despite the lines on her face and her incipient jowls. And never mind that he had his own reasons for choosing her despite the dozen years of difference between their ages. He was happy enough to supply her with the validation that she required.
Such validation took place in Room 109, first floor, perhaps ten yards away from the roar of traffic. Being on the street—a request he always made sotto voce prior to securing the room key—obviated the necessity of staying the night. It would be impossible for anyone in possession of normal hearing actually to sleep in any of the rooms that faced Cromwell Road. And since spending the night with a cy-berlover was the last activity on his mind, being able to say “God, what a din” at one point or another usually sufficed as prelude to a gentlemanly exit.
So everything had gone according to plan: drinks had segued into a confession of physical attraction which had led to a stroll to the Comfort Inn, where vigorous coupling had resulted in mutual satisfaction. In person CreamPants—whose real name she coyly refused to reveal—was only slightly less imaginative than she was on the keyboard. Once all the sexual permutations, positions, and possibilities had been thoroughly explored between them, they fell away from each other, slick with sweat and other bodily fluids, and listened to the roar of lorries grinding up and down the A4.
“God, what a din,” he groaned. “I should have thought of a better spot than this. We'll never sleep.”
“Oh.” She took her cue. “Not to worry. I can't stay anyway.”
“You can't?” Pained.
A smile. “I hadn't actually planned on it. After all, there was always the chance that you and I wouldn't have made the same sort of connection in person as we did on the net. You know.”
How he did. The only question now as he drove home was, What next? They'd gone at it like beavers for two solid hours, and they'd both enjoyed themselves immensely. They'd parted with promises made on both sides of “staying in touch” but there had been ever so slight an undercurrent in CreamPants' farewell embrace that belied her casual words and suggested to him that the course of wisdom called for steering clear of her for a time.
Which was ultimately, after a long, aimless drive in the rain for sexual decompression, what he decided to do.
He yawned as he turned into his street. He'd have an excellent night's doss after his exertions of the evening. There was nothing like spirited sex with a relative stranger of advancing years to set one up for slumber.
He squinted through the windscreen as the wipers lulled him with their steady rhythm. He cruised up the incline and flicked on the indicator for his driveway—more out of habit than necessity—and was thinking about how much longer it would be before LadyFire and EatMe each suggested a meeting, when he saw the heap of sodden garments lying next to a late-model Calibra.
He sighed. Wasn't society crumbling round his ears? Beneath a thin protection of their epidermis, people were becoming little more than pigs. After all, why on earth should anyone drop his jumble at Oxfam when he could just as easily toss it into the street? It was pathetic.
He was about to drive past, when a flash of white within the mass of soaked material caught his eye. He glanced over. A rain-drenched sock, a tattered scarf, a limp collection of women's knickers? What?
But then he saw. His foot plunged wildly on the brake.
The white, he realised, belonged to a hand, a wrist, and a short length of arm which itself protruded from the black of a coat. Part of a mannequin, he thought resolutely to still the hammering of his heart. Someone's pea-brained idea of a joke. It's too short to be a person, anyway. And there're no legs or head. Just that arm.
But he lowered his window in spite of these reassuring conclusions. His face spattered with the rain, he peered at the shapeless form on the ground. And then he saw the rest.
There were legs. There was a head as well. It merely hadn't seemed so upon an initial glance through the rain-streaked window because the head was bowed deeply into the coat as if in prayer and the legs were tucked completely under the Calibra.
Heart attack, he thought in spite of what his eyes told him otherwise. Aneurysm. Stroke.
Only what were the legs doing under that car? Under it, when the only possible explanation for that was …
He snatched up his mobile and punched in triple nine.
DCI Eric Leach's body was screaming flu. He ached everywhere it was possible to ache. He was sweaty on the head, the face, and the chest; he had the chills. He should have phoned in ill when he first started feeling like crap in a basket. He should have gone to bed. There, he would have gleaned a double benefit. He would have caught up on the sleep he'd been missing since trying to reorganise his life post-divorce; he would have had an excuse when the phone call came through at midnight. Instead, here he
was dragging his sorry shivering bum from an inadequately furnished flat into the cold, the wind, and the rain, where he was no doubt risking double pneumonia.
Live and learn, DCI Leach thought wearily. Next time he got married, he'd damn well stay married.
He saw the blue flashing lights of police vehicles as he made his final left turn. The hour was drawing on towards twenty past twelve, but the rising road in front of him was as bright as midday. Someone had hooked up floodlights, and these were complemented by the lightning-bolt hiccups of the forensic photographer.
The activity outside their houses had gathered a hefty collection of gawkers, but they were being held back by the crime scene tape that had been strung along the length of the street on both sides. Additional tape as well as barriers blocked the road at either end. Behind these, press photographers had already gathered, those vampires of the radio waves who continuously tuned in to the Met's frequency in the hope of learning that fresh blood was available somewhere.
DCI Leach thumbed a Strepsil out of its packet. He left his car behind an ambulance whose waterproof-shrouded attendants were lounging against its front bumper, drinking coffee from Thermos lids in an unhurried fashion that indicated which one of their services was going to be required. Leach nodded at them as he hunched his shoulders against the rain. He showed his warrant card to the gangling young PC who was in charge of keeping the press at bay, and he stepped past the barrier and approached the collection of professionals who were gathered round a saloon car halfway up the street.
He heard snatches of neighbourhood conversation as he wearily trudged up the slight incline. Most of it was murmured in the reverential tones employed by those who understood how impartial the reaper was when he sauntered by to do his grim business. But there was also the occasional ill-considered complaint about the confusion that ensued when a sudden death in the open demanded police examination. And when one of those complaints was spoken in just the sort of pinched-nose I-smell-something-decidedly-unpleasant-and-it's-you tone that Leach detested, he turned on his heel. He stalked in the direction of the protest, which was concluding with the phrase “… one's sleep being disturbed for no apparent reason other than to satisfy the baser inclinations of the tabloid photographers” and found its source, a helmet-haired ghoul with her entire life savings invested in a plastic surgery job that needed redoing. She was saying, “If one's council taxes cannot protect one from this sort of thing—” when Leach cut her off by speaking to the nearest constable guarding the scene.
A Traitor to Memory Page 5