Nina Todd Has Gone

by Lesley Glaister

  In the fantasy they are both there, the brunette and the blonde: the good sister and her killer. The hair gets tangled together and − some things are best kept for the dark.

  Chapter 7

  *

  Charlie was still at work when I got in and I was glad to be alone. I threw all my clothes into the washing machine and ran a deep hot bath. I stared in the mirror and there was no difference in me that you could see − except, maybe, an extra slippery brightness to the eyes.

  I booked a table at the Mumtaz. My treat. It was actually a few days short of four months since I’d moved in, but Charlie would never know the difference.

  I ironed the dress that he liked best, dark red with pearly little buttons down to the hem, and I mixed martinis, the proper way, to surprise him. I felt like one of those American wives who greet their husband in a negligée. When he got home I put my arms round him and felt the familiar meeting of our body surfaces, the way my nose is the exact height of his shoulder, his musky end-of-a-workday smell.

  ‘I only wanted a cup of tea,’ he said, but laughed and took the chilly glass − and once he’d had a sip, perked up.

  ‘You look nice,’ he said, taking in the dress and the way I’d spiked up my hair.

  ‘I’ve booked us into the Mumtaz,’ I said.

  ‘But Dave …’

  ‘We can go to Dave’s any night,’ I said. ‘This is our anniversary. Four months since I moved in.’

  He blinked. ‘Is it?’

  ‘Hasn’t it gone quick?’

  He swilled the drink around his glass, put his fingers in to catch the olive.

  ‘I feel bad about Dave though.’

  ‘He won’t mind. We’ll go tomorrow. Maybe drag him out to the cinema or something.’

  He knocked back the drink. ‘Ring him then, will you? I’ll grab a shower.’

  But Dave didn’t answer his phone. If he had, I don’t know what. He had a very unfriendly greeting that put you on the defensive: Can’t speak now. Leave a message if you think it’s worth it. So the message I left may have been a bit brusque, but it was nothing meant.

  I hadn’t noticed before the smell of grease that hung in the air outside the Mumtaz. It was all right when you got into the red dimness and the curry smell, but the grease did catch in your throat. We ordered the Feast for Two. The tablecloth was scattered with the crumbs of someone else’s poppadum, but it didn’t matter. We ordered pints of beer and tucked into our samosas but I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘So why did you leave?’ Charlie asked, scooping up dahl with a bit of chapati.

  ‘It was just a load of rubbish,’ I said. ‘It was a waste of time and I was missing you too badly.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  I could have told him all about it, I could have made him laugh about the pert-breasted woman, but I couldn’t bring myself to say the same things to Charlie as I’d said to Rupert. The food on the table between us seemed huge and too complicated to eat, with the different colours and textures, the craggy bhajis, the snarling naans.

  At the next table there was a birthday party going on with party poppers and lots of flesh on show and raucous shrieks of laughter. I felt sorry for the quiet and dignified waiters in their attempts to get any sense out of the revellers. I watched the man with a big badge that said ‘Birthday Boy’ on it unwrap his present while his friends screamed and whooped. It was a blow-up woman. They spent the rest of the evening passing her round and trying to inflate her. There was so much noise we couldn’t talk and didn’t stay for the kulfi or a coffee. It was only nine-thirty when we left so there was still time to see Dave.

  His bedsit was in the attic of a house beside a roaring road. You had to climb over a pile of junk mail and go up three flights of stairs, holding your breath against the reek of dirty people and their dirty minds. Dave opened the door to us without a word and let us in. He’d been smoking dope and reading the I Ching, which was his way of divining the way forward. But it held him back, I said that to his face, but his face shut off to me.

  ‘Had anything to eat lately?’ Charlie said, though of course he hadn’t. Charlie went out to get him some fish and chips and some beer for us all and left me with Dave. We’d hardly spent any time, just the two of us. He continued to throw his coins, crouching on the floor and peering at his book by the light of the gas fire − the light bulbs had gone. I offered to read it out for him, just to be friendly. I stood by the window where enough streetlight came upwards for me to see. He threw the coins and it made 33 TUN, which is Retreat. I read it out to him: ‘The first line divided shows a retiring tail. The position is perilous. No movement in any direction should be made.’ This is what I mean by it holding him back.

  ‘You can’t run your life by this rubbish, Dave,’ I said again. ‘You should get out more.’

  He peered at me in his moleish way between curtains of greasy hair. He had a look of Charlie but with the features scrunched together on his face while Charlie’s is wide open.

  ‘Shall I make you a coffee?’ I offered, but on the way to the kettle I nearly fell over a bicycle pump. He had hundreds, collected since childhood. I picked it up. It was shiny green with something purple on it. ‘Nearly broke my neck,’ I said and handed it to him. He took it from me and weighed it in his hands.

  ‘Why bicycle pumps?’ I said.

  ‘Because they’re beautiful useful things,’ he said, his voice coming alive for almost the first time since I’d known him. ‘They marry simplicity of style with efficiency of action. Look,’ and he pumped it at me fiercely until I backed off. Who is to say what is beautiful and what is not?

  Charlie came back with the beer and Dave’s supper and also a light bulb, which Dave wouldn’t let him screw in overhead but only into a lamp with a thick wicker shade. The light sieved through in slivers on the walls. There was only one armchair. Charlie sat in it and I perched on the arm while Dave, who preferred a squatting posture, picked at his cod and chips.

  ‘Been keeping your appointments?’ Charlie asked him but Dave’s mouth was full. ‘Been doing any painting?’ This was a stupid question, he hadn’t painted for years, but it was just Charlie trying to get some sort of conversation going. Sitting in the squalor of Dave’s bedsit, I got a sudden vision of white tablecloths and candlelight and blinked it hard away. How could I have done that? The light made wavery patterns on my dress and Charlie’s hand, resting on my knee. I took his hand and squeezed it.

  ‘Fancy the pictures tomorrow?’ I said to Dave.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Or maybe a drink. Get you out of here.’

  But he only shrugged.

  ‘I’m worried,’ Charlie said, as we walked up the hill towards our home. ‘He’s getting worse. He only eats if I take something round. Could you pop in tomorrow night, make sure he’s OK?’

  ‘You saw his reaction.’

  ‘But you could try,’ Charlie said.

  ‘You should stop him doing that I Ching,’ I said.

  When we got in, I showered but couldn’t wash deep enough to feel that I was clean. Charlie was waiting when I got into bed.

  ‘Four months, hey,’ he said and we kissed.

  ‘Why have you got this on?’ he said, kneeling up to pull my nightie over my head but I tugged it back down.

  ‘I feel a bit offish,’ I said.

  ‘Dodgy curry?’

  ‘Dunno. Just … can we just …’

  And so we lay in each other’s arms, his heart beating against mine, and I felt his body soften into the heaviness of sleep while I stayed wide awake.

  Chapter 8

  ~

  After Gideon, she’d have sex with almost anyone. She became known as a slag but she didn’t care. It was something to be known as. It was better than nothing. With a pair of strong arms round her she felt grounded, even safe, amidst the different sets of foster parents, the spells in children’s homes. The changes were not her fault. It was just the way the cookie crumbled. Some c
ase-worker put that phrase into her head and it made her life seem not much more than a trail of crumbs.

  But when she was fifteen, life changed. This was her chance and she knew it. She was fostered by a pair of doctors − Joan and Roger Merriam − and taken to live in Felixstowe − away from her whorish reputation − in a big house near the sea. The doctors gave her their grown-up daughter’s room. They let her choose new wallpaper and curtains. She had her own view of the long front garden: a lawn and flowerbeds, a gravel path, a monkey-puzzle tree.

  The doctors paid good money to send her to a private school; told her repeatedly how bright she was, how pretty. ‘The world can be your oyster,’ they liked to say. They helped her choose her GCSE subjects and even talked about university. Joan went to school functions, discussing her progress with the teachers, seeming to care as much as if she was their own. But she was bright enough to know that she was a project, something like a rescue dog. They were liberal and charitable and though she was grateful it annoyed her sometimes. But she knew she must take this rope she had been flung.

  She was bright and she was pretty and before long she had a boyfriend. Jeffrey Stern was the son of some friends of the Merriams, a couple of retired professors. He was not good-looking and there was no competition; she would never have expected a good-looking boy to take her seriously. He was seventeen, tall and stooped; with hair the colour and texture of old rope. He played the piano and had the longest fingers she had ever seen. His glasses were perpetually smeared but the eyes behind them were sweet hazelnuts, the way he looked at her soft and shy and she wasn’t used to that. She wasn’t used to the touch of gentle, tentative fingers, the soft experiments of his kisses.

  The first time he kissed her they were in the kitchen washing up after a Sunday lunch. He’d been drying the same glass for a couple of minutes gabbling something about Bartók and then he’d lunged at her, the kiss missing her lips at first until she turned her head and let him have her mouth. The glass had dropped from his hand and smashed. After the kiss, they’d stood looking at the shiny curves of broken glass and he’d said, ‘I hope that’s all right with you.’

  She’d smiled and leant up to him for another kiss. And she’d done something she’d been itching to do ever since they met − remove his glasses from his nose, breathe on them and rub them clean.

  They went to the cinema together and his hand snaked across the back of her seat and cupped her shoulder. The innocence of it made her want to howl. They walked on the beach and he gave her his hand when she jumped off the breakwaters on to the crunchy shingle. They kissed in the salty shadows between the beach-huts until their lips were chapped, his specs clutched in her hand, and always she would clean them before she let him have them back.

  Chapter 9

  ^

  Stopped shaving soon as I left home, let my hair get long, a disguise for the preliminary stages. After a couple of months I took a job as a milkman. One thing I’ve learned since leaving home is how innocent I’ve been re the cost of living. Life is steep. Couldn’t afford to eat into my reserves before I’d got her in my sights. Also I needed something to get me up of a morning, get me out and about, and the advantage of the milk round was that it left the afternoons free for my enquiries.

  But week by week, nothing happened and I could see I’d have to up my strategy. Looked in the Yellow Pages for detectives and found hundreds of them offering all sorts − absentee searches; marital decoys; bugging; surveillance − some of them quite dodgy or at least what I’d call underhand. ‘Don’t Get Your Hands Dirty,’ one said with a sinister ring. I chose a firm with a discreet logo and no outrageous claims.

  Mrs Chivers didn’t look the part − I wasn’t expecting a woman, for starters. When I went in the office I thought she was the secretary. There were flowers on the desk and a calendar with kittens on the wall. I was expecting to be shown through but she got straight down to it asking me to outline my request. Private investigator not detective, she soon put me straight on that point. She looked more like a head mistress. Grey hair neat to her head like a swimming cap, business-like approach, handshake almost like a man’s. I showed her the newspaper photo of Karen, the famous ‘angelic’ one.

  ‘How long has she been in the city?’ she asked.

  ‘Since October, as far as I know.’

  ‘You say she’s using an alias? Any ideas?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You should have come at once, when she was still a stranger in town,’ she said and I felt stupid then because of course she was right. What had I been thinking, expecting to manage this on my own?

  ‘Before I proceed with this case,’ she said, ‘I must be assured that if I locate this person it will not lead to the committing of any crime.’

  ‘Nothing like that.’

  She pressed her lips together and gave me a dubious look. ‘And confidentiality is assured in both directions?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Five hundred pounds,’ she said, ‘two fifty up front, the balance when you get results.’

  I took out the money. I had it in cash, which seemed more fitting than a cheque. As I peeled off the notes I couldn’t help feeling it was money down the drain.

  ‘Call back in a fortnight,’ she said.

  It was time to get serious and into role. Rupert would be charming and suave in his style of dress but a bit vulnerable too, something about the eyes. When I was thirteen, after the thing with the girl who’d been Isobel’s friend had happened (and got blown out of all proportion), I was sent to a specialist school where they did drama therapy. And that’s when my talent came out. Role play − be a victim was the main one − and also the school plays. I learned lines easily but it was more than that. It’s simple, a trick, to turn a role on and off, just pretend hard enough to be another person, hard enough to see through their eyes, feel through their skin and know the voice growing in them, and you are them, as long as you stay in control. What they call staying in role. I can’t see what the fuss is all about. I was lead in every school play till I left. And then, in the best performance of my life, I was Rupert.

  Chapter 10

  *

  On Monday morning there was a package waiting for me on my desk. I picked it up and gave it a shake − something light. I peeled off the brown paper and found a box with the logo of the Astoria embossed on it in gold. Inside the box, in a nest of tissue, was a white bear. The fur was shaggy and the paws were velvet brown. It squinted up at me with eyes like apple pips. Out of the box came a vague smell of fridge that made me shiver.

  Christine came in and stopped to balance against my desk while she changed her shoes.

  ‘Aaah … isn’t he cute?’ She picked it up and I heard its stuffing rustle.

  ‘Have it,’ I said.

  ‘I couldn’t!’

  ‘I don’t want it.’

  ‘Why not? He’s so cute.’ She snuggled it up to her cheek.

  ‘I’m not into toys.’

  ‘Where’s he from?’

  ‘Free gift,’ I said. ‘I’m only going to chuck it.’

  ‘Oh she can’t do that, can she,’ she said in a diddums voice. ‘I’ll call you Mr Snowy and you can live on my desk. Ta.’ She smiled. ‘My horoscope said look out for an unexpected gift. Just goes to show, doesn’t it? What are you again?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Like, I’m a Gemini?’

  ‘Got to see Gary,’ I said and bolted for the Ladies’.

  An hour or so later, as I was working through a pile of order forms, the phone rang and I picked it up and said the usual: ‘Green’s Robotics. Nina speaking, how may I help you?’

  There was a silence. I waited, tapping my pen, and repeated the greeting.

  ‘Don’t you like him?’ said the voice.

  At the inside of my wrist I could see the blue flicker of my pulse.

  I had to clear my throat. ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘What then?’ He waited. ‘You want to draw a line under it,
is that it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was a mistake.’

  ‘A mistake is when you forget to post a letter or miss a bus,’ he said. ‘Not this.’

  Christine’s face appeared from behind her computer, eyes wide.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I’ve got work to do.’

  ‘Meet me.’

  ‘No.’

  I put the phone down. The palm of my hand was wet and I wiped it on my skirt.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said to Christine. She gave a sarcastic chuckle and went back to her keyboard. I could see the white smudge of fur propped up on her desk. The big hand of the wall clock, always three minutes fast, jerked forward.

  ‘So how’s your self-esteem now then?’ she said after a while. ‘What did you do? What was the hotel like?’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  ‘Just OK?’

  ‘Just OK.’

  ‘I bet Gary gave you a bollocking?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘He was pissed off that you left before the end. I said you should of sent me and he said maybe I should of.’

  ‘You’re right. He should have,’ I said. I got up and went back to the Ladies’. I ran my hands under the cold tap, squirted out a worm of soap and rubbed it into suds, watching my face in the mirror. I roared my hands under the drier and flattened down my hair. It needed a cut and the pale roots were growing through. I keep it short and dark. Charlie’s hair is longer than mine. He’s the one with the curls.