The Sweetest Poison

by Jane Renshaw

  She shook her head and, very lightly, put her lips to his cheek.

  When she was thirty-four

  18

  She didn’t really need a hair cut but she loved the pampering, especially this bit, relaxing back on the chair at the sink while Karim massaged conditioner into her scalp. Getting your hair washed at the hairdresser’s used to be an ordeal, sitting with your head tilted back at such an unnatural angle at the sink that you felt your neck was never going to recover, muscles screaming in pain after about two seconds, the worst of it being that you knew you had to hold the position for the next five minutes, minimum.

  But now they had state-of-the-art chairs that were more like beds, and specially designed sinks that let you, somehow, lie flat as gentle fingers moved in your hair.

  ‘This conditioner’s jojoba and… I want to say aubergine?’ A pause while Karim presumably consulted the bottle. ‘Ha ha, no, it’s argan. Argan. What’s argan? Smells nice though?’

  ‘Mm.’ It was sometimes hard to work out when Karim was asking you a question.

  His fingers moved on her scalp. ‘Hard day at work hmm Helen?’

  ‘Mm,’ was all she could say again, already half asleep.

  Most hairdressers would have kept talking at this point, but Karim just went on massaging her head with slow, deliberate, soothing circular motions of his fingertips.

  Karim maybe wasn’t the best hairdresser in the world, and sometimes she ended up having to even up the levels on either side of her face with nail scissors, but he was so nice.

  She was only vaguely aware of what was going on around her – girls laughing, the beat of some dance track on the music system, someone walking past and shouting: ‘Milk and one sugar, yeah?’

  The receptionist saying, ‘That’s great then, we’ll see you Tuesday next week at two-thirty’ and a low man’s voice saying something in reply.

  And then, as the dance track ended, in the sudden quiet she heard it.

  A cough.

  Or not a cough, exactly. A nervous tic, Fiona Kerr had called it.

  In another time, and another world.

  Cough-cough cough.

  She shot upright in the chair, wet hair slapping the towel on her shoulders, water dripping down her neck inside it. The reception counter wasn’t visible from here – there were high mirrors in the way, with people seated in front of them and various hairdressers standing wielding combs and scissors and hairdryers over their heads.

  The air was thick with the smells of perfumed product, hot hair and coffee, and she felt suddenly sick, her pulse loud in her ears.

  Could it be?

  Could it actually be?

  ‘Oh, you okay?’ she heard Karim say behind her.

  She swung her legs off the chair, seemingly in slow motion, and next thing she found herself standing in the gap in the run of mirrors down the middle of the salon. A man in a suit was walking away from her to the door.

  Middle height, with a broad head on a strong neck, and collar-length brown hair.

  She had frozen. She couldn’t make herself yell out, or go after him, or go back to her bag for her phone. How could she call 999 anyway? What would she say?

  There’s a man coughing.

  He opened the door and stepped out onto the pavement and turned to the right. She couldn’t see his face as he turned because of the huge photograph of the sullen model, hair fanned around her head, that took up almost that whole window, and now he was out of sight completely.

  Karim had his hand on her arm. ‘Helen, you okay?’

  As if his touch had woken her from one of those dreams where you can’t move, one of those nightmares, she nodded and made for the door. ‘I just need to –’

  A cold wind whipped at her wet hair. The pavement was busy, mainly with purposeful people striding along in their workwear – which in this part of Edinburgh meant suits for men and sombre tailored outfits for women.

  He couldn’t do anything to her, could he, with all these people around?

  She started to walk, to run, along past the hardware shop and the florist’s, all the time scanning around her and behind, expecting any minute that he’d suddenly appear out of nowhere and grab her, pull her into a doorway, into a car –

  She would scream if he did that. She’d sit down on the pavement so he couldn’t pull her anywhere, and scream until all these suits had no choice but to take notice and stop him. Grab him. Make a citizen’s arrest and call the police.

  Where was he?

  So many suits, but none of these men was him.

  He couldn’t just have vanished.

  No.

  There he was.

  He was standing on the traffic island by the Canonmills clock, standing quite still, and looking right at her.

  A wide face. Heavy brows and chin. Deep-set eyes –

  Then he turned his head to look across the street, and she saw his profile.

  The nose was pointed; aquiline. And the build was wrong too – that thick neck, and muscular shoulders and torso.

  It’s just some random person.

  He turned his head again and she realised he wasn’t looking at her at all, he was looking past her up the road, at the cars coming towards him, waiting for a break in the stop-start of the rush hour traffic.

  She turned away and walked slowly back up the pavement like an old woman, each step a conscious effort, each breath not deep enough, as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of her body and she couldn’t replace it fast enough, she couldn’t get it to her brain fast enough for it to be able to function.

  Karim was standing in the doorway of Medusa in his tight jeans and winkle-pickers. As she approached he shook his head at her as a mother might at a naughty child. ‘Helen, Helen, where you off to, eh? Is it not bloody Baltic out here?’ He reached out to fuss with the towel around her neck.

  ‘Sorry,’ she gulped. It felt so good to have this kind man pat her shoulders and guide her back to the chair at the sink. She slumped back down on it, still gasping air. ‘I thought… that was someone… I used to know. But… it wasn’t.’

  ‘Let’s get you warmed up huh? My God your head is like a block of ice, Helen – what were you thinking eh? What were you thinking?’

  She laid her head back against the porcelain and as Karim’s hands smoothed her hair back from her forehead, and she felt the nozzle of the hose thing press against her scalp and a gush of soft warm water run down over it, her breathing finally slowed. Her heart rate slowed. Her brain clunked back into gear.

  Just some random person.

  ‘Old boyfriend huh?’

  ‘No.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I just thought it was – someone I used to know.’

  19

  Karim always insisted on using hair straighteners to flatten her bouncy mane, no matter how often she hinted that she didn’t think it suited her to have her hair flat and limp against her head. Now she just let him get on with it. Who cared what her hair looked like anyway?

  Nevertheless, she told herself she was stopping at the darkened window of the now closed hardware shop to check it out. But rather than examining her own reflection superimposed on the displays of latches and doorknobs, she was watching the people passing behind her. Studying each face.

  Stop it.

  It was just some random person.

  It wasn’t Rob Beattie.

  Rob Beattie wasn’t about to loom up in the window behind her like something from a horror film, grinning maniacally, hands lifted, claw-like, above her ruthlessly straightened hair.

  She had her phone tucked into her palm as usual, three nines already tapped in, thumb just touching the call key, ready to press it in an instant. Last time it had been a jogger coming up behind her suddenly at the green man, and the police had traced her through her Vodaphone account and said she was lucky they weren’t cautioning her for wasting their time – one false alarm too many, apparently.

  She had promised to stop.

  But it was getting da
rk. Once she was on Warriston Road there would be fewer pedestrians, fewer people she could scream at for help if need be. That was the one downside of her new flat. She’d been attracted to it by the fact that it wasn’t overlooked, as her previous flat had been, by tenements across the street where anyone could be hiding behind a window watching. Warriston Road was narrow and one-way, snaking along the Water of Leith, with just a wall and the river opposite her flat and, on the other bank, a line of mature willows and sycamores shading gardens which she regularly scanned with binoculars.

  She crossed over at the roundabout and stopped at the Warriston Road corner, checking the people in view: a mother with two little girls in matching pale blue coats, two tall thin men in suits, a fat man in a grubby yellow tabard with reflective stripes on it, a group of teenagers in school uniform.

  The yellow tabard man was heading down into Warriston Road.

  Good.

  She always waited for company, as she thought of it, before leaving the bustle of the roundabout for the relative isolation of her road. She followed close behind tabard man – so close that at one point he turned and looked at her. She avoided his eye, pretending to be absorbed in the three nines on the screen of her phone.

  The whoosh of the unseen river in spate drowned out the noise from the traffic on Canonmills Bridge. At the door of her building, she checked behind her again before unlocking the door, slipping inside and shoving it shut against the resistance of the self-closing mechanism. She made sure the Yale had snibbed by pulling on the big cold metal handle screwed to this side of the door next to the laminated notice she’d taped there:

  Please make sure the door has locked behind you. Thanks!

  She didn’t go straight up the stone stairs; instead, she made herself brave the dim dustiness of the dark little passage under them. This ended in a solid old door that gave onto the communal garden.

  She made sure it was locked, that both the Yale and the mortice were engaged. The big old key for the mortice was kept on a hook on the wall, which wasn’t the most secure arrangement, but when she’d suggested an alternative system with a key safe to Mrs Cunningham, the neighbour she’d decided was most likely to go for it, Mrs Cunningham had laughed and said ‘What on earth would be the point of that? You young people would always be forgetting the combination and have to come knocking on my door for it.’

  She hurried back along the passage and up the stairs. There was a window on the little half-landing that looked over the garden, with its square of lawn and flowerbeds and line of old brick sheds. She stopped and scanned it, the gathering shadows under the flowering currant and the lilac, the grass an odd yellow colour in the city glow, before ascending to the first floor.

  Her flat was on the left, its dark blue door the original Victorian one constructed of close-grained old pitch pine more than two inches thick. But before opening it she ran quickly up the final flight to check the top landing.

  It was empty and silent, lemon-yellow walls bright and stark in the fluorescent glow of the stair light.

  No one lurking.

  She ran back down the stairs to her own door, transferring the phone to her left hand and drawing her keys from the compartment inside her bag. There were three locks to open – two deadbolt mortices and the Yale. She always did them in the same order – first the top mortice, then the bottom one, then, obviously, the Yale.

  And then she was in, the door shoved shut behind her on the Yale. If someone was coming after you, the Yale was good because you could just slam the door shut and it would lock itself.

  She turned the keys in the mortice locks and slid the two chains into place. Lionel thought this was taking things too far. ‘What if you were trapped inside and the fire brigade had to force entry?’ he’d said, last time he and Mum were up and had to wait ‘an age’ at the door while she unlocked and unchained it. She had shrugged and said breezily, ‘I guess I’d burn to death,’ and that had prompted one of Lionel’s looks at Mum.

  She wondered what Mum had told him.

  Had she told him about what had happened at her last flat? It would have sounded so ridiculous. To sell up and move just because someone kept banging on your door. But it had happened five times. Five times, all late at night. By the time she’d got to the door and put her ear against it (she hadn’t even had a peephole then!), there had been no one there. Or at least no more sounds of anyone. Someone could have been standing right on the other side of the door, waiting for her to open it.

  Probably just kids, the police had said. Or the students upstairs, drunk.

  The students had denied it, though, and she’d believed them, because she was pretty sure it was Rob. She couldn’t explain how she could be sure, of course – not to the police and certainly not to Mum. But it hadn’t just been kids or students messing around. There had been such violence in that bang bang bang bang bang on her door, such anger, such… yes, such hatred.

  She had known it was him.

  She had known he had found her.

  But he wouldn’t make his move at once – oh no. He’d have fun torturing her first. Banging on her door, shouting at her along a dark street – she was sure that had been him too, back in November, when she’d been walking home from work on a dark evening – she’d had to stay late to help Eilidh with a report – and suddenly someone in the street behind her had shouted:

  ‘Hello! Hello! Hello!’

  She hadn’t even turned round to look. She’d just run.

  Security at her old flat had been laughable. She’d often found the door to the street propped open by the students or tradesmen, and the garden door left unlocked.

  Here was much better. The flats were all tiny, so no students. No kids. A Neighbourhood Watch sign on the lamp post outside, and a nosy pensioner in the flat downstairs who seemed to monitor every coming and going.

  In the living room, she set her bag down on the countertop that separated off the kitchenette area from the rest of the room and went to the sink.

  She was still holding her phone.

  She put it down on the counter next to her bag. In the sink were her breakfast cereal bowl and spoon and mug. She tipped the cloudy water out of the cereal bowl and rinsed it under the tap, swishing the water round with the little washing up brush. Then she washed the spoon and the mug, and filled the kettle, and while it boiled she went to the window and opened it and breathed in the cold spring air.

  The front of the flat looked over the Water of Leith to the trees at the foot of the gardens opposite, their skeleton outlines now just starting to come into bud. She loved those trees. She liked to sit on the sofa and look at them. Sometimes a squirrel would run along a branch.

  No squirrels today. And no one lurking on the pavement across the road. No one on the banks of the river or in the gardens.

  The little one-way road was a rat run, and because it was one-way, people felt entitled to speed round the bend – never mind any pedestrians who might be crossing. There was a pavement on the opposite side of the road, but none on this side. The short path from the main door led straight out into the road. Mrs Cunningham in the ground-floor flat was always saying it was an accident waiting to happen, her little eyes bright with anticipation, implying that, now that the problem had been brought to Helen’s attention, it would be her fault if someone was run over.

  But Helen liked to stand and look down at the cars whizzing by, cutting off access to the building, meaning that anyone wanting to approach had to stand on the opposite pavement, making themselves very visible, before diving across the road. It wasn’t possible to sneak up on the building in its shadow because of no pavement and the dangerous bend.

  When Mum and Lionel were last up, Mrs Cunningham had waylaid Lionel, and now he was always asking whether Helen had got on to the Council yet about the road safety issues. He didn’t see why she and Mrs Cunningham couldn’t form a pressure group to lobby for speed bumps. Helen had tried to explain that Mrs Cunningham didn’t want speed bumps, she just
liked moaning on about the lack of them, but Lionel probably thought she was being facetious.

  When the kettle started to bubble, she turned back into the room and allowed herself a glance at the laptop. It sat behind the sofa on the big desk in the corner of the room. She’d bought the desk for £30 from the junk shop up the road. Well, it called itself an antique shop, but it just sold junk like the desk, with its mottled top and shoogly back leg.

  In order to maintain some sort of grip on normality she’d had to impose a ban – no switching on the laptop until seven o’clock at the earliest.

  And it was only six twenty-eight.

  Her work colleagues would be in The Dome by now, letting the good times roll. In a couple of hours Stuart Gourlay would be recounting his ex-wife’s latest insanity, and Marc would be laughing like a maniac. And Eilidh and Susan’s bitching would have reached the hysterical cackling stage.

  She should be with them, having fun normal-person style. Sooking up to Stuart. If Eilidh really was getting promoted, that would be the Section Head position up for grabs, and she should probably make an effort to pretend she enjoyed her colleagues’ company. But she just couldn’t bring herself. And why should she put herself through it, why should she have to stay out late and come home on her own when there’d probably be no one around and she couldn’t trust the taxi driver to wait until she’d got inside and flashed the lights?