A Place of Safety

by Natasha Cooper

  Oh, shit, he thought as he hovered naked, covered in smuts, and indecisive on the stairs. What if they lifted the letter-box flap to peer inside the house? Could they see him from here? For a second he felt some of the old panic returning, then remembered the rules of vision and perspective. No one was going to be able to look up the stairs through a flap as low in the front door as his. One more ring sounded, then silence, then at last the flap of the letter box. He watched a small piece of white paper fluttering down and heard retreating footsteps.

  ‘The smoke,’ he muttered. ‘Could he have seen the smoke?’

  Even if he had, whoever ‘he’ was, he might think it came from the boiler. As soon as Toby was sure there was no one ready to whip up the flap just as he was bending down to collect the note, he went to see what it was.

  There was no envelope. He didn’t pick it up because he wasn’t sure when he planned to be known to be back in the house. But it was easy to see it was from Henry. Toby would have known those emphatic, confident black letters anywhere. On the side that lay uppermost, he could read:

  ‘ … and she’s worried, Toby. She asked me to come and talk to you. She said you assaulted Trish Maguire at the school play. I know Trish well, Toby, so you have embarrassed me as well as Margaret. What has been going on to make you behave like this? Please phone as soon as you get in. We need to talk.’

  Well fuck you, Henry, he thought. You can’t expect me to come running just because you’re embarrassed.

  This was going to need some careful working out, he realized. Someone might easily have seen him come in this evening, so he’d better leave via the garage and quickly so that he could claim to have gone out before Henry arrived. On the other hand, it would be awful to run into Henry in one of the surrounding streets now. And he wasn’t ready to go out yet in any case. He still had the inflammable parts of the umbrella to burn, then he had to collect the ash in an airtight bag, then he had to clean the fireplace and then he had to clean himself. No, he couldn’t go out yet.

  If there were ever any questions, he’d have to say he’d taken some strong painkillers to deal with a stress-induced headache after the scene at the school and fallen too deeply asleep to hear the front-door bell. They might well believe that, especially if he did take some pills to show up in any blood test.

  Up in the bathroom, he found the Co-dydramol Margaret had been prescribed after her fibroids operation and took two, before speeding up his search for the hacksaw. If the pills were likely to make him sleepy, he wanted to have all the tricky parts of the job done before they acted. There was no sign of the hacksaw, but he did find a Stanley knife. That made reasonably quick work of the wooden shaft of the umbrella, and the two pieces he ended up with fitted neatly on top of his small fire. They burned well, too. Now it was just the nylon.

  That was so thin he didn’t think it would need cutting up like the heavy overcoat so he dumped the whole lot on top of the fire, only to see the sodding stuff melt.

  His courage deserted him. For a hideous second he thought he could hear laughter, but it was only the wind in the chimney. Wind! If there were wind strong enough to make that kind of noise, it would probably blow away the fog. He had to get this done before the fog went and the next driver passing by found Ben’s body.

  Burning nylon smelled disgusting, Toby discovered, as well as leaving sticky evidence all over your fireplace. He didn’t know what to do. There was another tea chest in the cellar. The pills were beginning to work, too, and he felt his mind blurring. Not yet, he screamed in silence. Hang on a bit longer.

  He scraped his thighs as he clambered upstairs with the second tea chest. It hurt, and he knew he was oozing blood. But he got the box in pieces without too much more damage, except to the same torn hangnail he’d ripped when he’d rushed over to the garage in case Ben had locked Mer in it. Still, the wood did help the fire flare up and start to deal with the nylon, even though the smell of that was still horrible. He’d have to clean the fireplace, too. But it would have to be cold for that. His eyes kept closing. Damn! Why had he had to be so clever with the pills?

  The wind laughed in the chimney again. He couldn’t sit on the clients’ sofa to wait for the fire to finish its work and then cool down or he’d have to start cutting up the sofa cover to burn it and the evidence it held, and the whole cycle would go on for ever. The only place he could rest was the bath, where water would wash away any clues he might have had left on his skin.

  Staggering a little, he let himself into the bathroom, remembering to pull down the blind before he switched on the light. He flung a whole handful of Margaret’s latest scented granules into the hot water and got in after them. They crunched under his bum and he realized he should have given them time to dissolve. Too bad. He’d needed to lie down.

  At last, he thought as he slid down the bath until even his chin was submerged in hot water. With the sweet-smelling steam washing the burning-nylon smell from his nostrils and his back and legs stretched out, he leaned his head back against the tiled shelf behind the bath and let his eyes close. It would only be for a minute or two.

  Chapter 23

  1920

  Helen could count the pieces of coal she had left now, and the sight of the eighteen lumps terrified her. She’d had to light the fire again tonight because Ivan had felt like a marble statue in a winter garden when she’d touched him. But the eighteen lumps wouldn’t last for many more days, even if she had a fire only when he absolutely had to get warm.

  She’d heard nothing from Jean-Pierre since he’d said goodbye outside the station in France, laid his hand against her belly and said:

  ‘Call him Ivan. It sounds good in both the languages, and he will belong to both our countries.’

  ‘And if the baby’s a girl?’ she’d said, coquettish as any adoring new wife, who could be confident of having her husband around to look after her and their child. Now she hated the silly innocent credulous fool she’d been.

  ‘Then call her Caroline. That works well, too. And whatever happens, you must take care of yourself, Helene. I will come as soon as I can, but it may take some time. I have asked Thomas to bring you money to the house and I will send more whenever you need it. Wait for me, Helene.’

  He’d kissed her and she’d waited as she’d promised him. It was true Thomas had come with money, twice. There had been great wedges of notes, pounds and francs, as though Jean-Pierre had just sent over everything he could lay his hands on. When she’d counted the first batch, she’d had the first intimation that he might not be expecting to join her for years. There had been nearly four hundred pounds. The second delivery had been less, not much more than one hundred. But it was long gone now.

  She had never had any way of getting in touch with Thomas, or known what his other name might be, and she had no address for Jean-Pierre, except the house of the curé, who had married them. She had tried writing to Jean-Pierre there, but had no reply, except a note from the curé in spiky French handwriting.

  He had answered her covering letter with the news that he had not seen her husband since she had left France and had only his old address, from which letters were now being returned. The cure promised to keep her letter behind the clock in the salon until Jean-Pierre should reappear. For all she knew it was there still.

  Ivan coughed. It was just a small cough, but it was enough to distract her. Not tonight, she begged in silence. No choking fit tonight. Please. I’m too tired to cope with that, too.

  If Jean-Pierre didn’t come soon, she would have to find work and she didn’t know how. Nursing was the only thing she knew and she had already had to leave the service because of her marriage. She had broken her contract and had been left in no doubt by the sister who’d received her confession that she had transgressed in every possible way. Not only had she married without leave, but she was much too far gone in her pregnancy to have waited until her wedding night, which put her beyond the pale. And to cap it all, she had married a Frenchman.


  But someone in London must need a nurse, experienced, willing to do anything for only enough pay to feed herself and her child. That was the next difficulty. She had a child and no one to care for him while she worked.

  There was her family, of course, living only three or four miles to the west in Kensington. But she wasn’t going to them unless she had no alternative whatsoever. Ivan coughed again. This time the cough was followed by the terrifying whooping gasp that told her no one had listened to her silent prayers.

  This punishment was far worse than anything she deserved: having to watch her son battle for breath in pain and terror. It didn’t matter that she was so hungry she sometimes felt that her insides must be eating themselves or that she was always cold except when she held Ivan in her arms. The only thing that mattered now was to calm herself enough to give him the confidence he needed to breathe. She fought herself until she knew she could help him, then bent to pick him up out of his small bed.

  He tensed in her arms, hardly breathing, as her whole mind was split apart by the thought she’d been trying to ignore: what if Jean-Pierre were dead?

  Toby dreamed of icebergs banging into him as he drifted on a collapsing raft in an icy sea. His foot hit the taps and his head sank into the water as he woke. Spluttering, he fought his way to the surface of the bath again. His finger ends were a pale-yellowish mass of wrinkles, and his member was shrivelled almost to nothing against the coarse dark hair between his thighs.

  Horrified to see that there was pale-grey light bulging round the edges of the blind, he pushed himself up against the sides of the bath, feeling even colder as the frigid water cascaded off his body, and grabbed a towel. Even that was cold. The heating wouldn’t come on again until seven-thirty. He rubbed his body hard, wincing in spite of the friction-induced warmth, and stepped out on the bath mat, carefully shaking each foot over the sinking bathwater before he risked wetting the mat.

  Margaret’s dark-green towelling dressing gown hung on the back of the door. He pulled it round himself, glad for once that she was so much broader than he, and pattered down to the office and the fire. It was safely out, although the vile, throat-rasping smell of burning nylon still hung all over the room. He put one clean hand against the sticky black side of the grate. Good, that was cold, too. Now all he had to do was clean up. He looked at the clock. Six-forty. He had nearly two hours before Mrs Pegg, the daily, was likely to appear. That should be enough to get the place clean enough to show no signs of what he’d been doing.

  But it wasn’t quite. He was still on his knees, still wearing Margaret’s dressing gown, and scrubbing at the hearth when he heard the sound of a key in the lock. He mustn’t be found here. The place now smelled of bleach rather than burned nylon. He’d just have to hope that Mrs Pegg would have breathed in so many of her own cleaning fluids on the way up to the first floor that she wouldn’t notice. He scrabbled together all the cloths he’d been using and piled them into the black bag he’d brought up with him. Holding the skirts of the dressing gown together in one hand and grasping the neck of the black bag in the other, he crept out of the room and upstairs to dress.

  There was a cheval mirror on the top landing. In its reflection he saw a figure so exotically bizarre that he stopped in fascination. The dark-green towelling, which looked so good on Margaret with her dark-red hair and white skin, turned him sallow. There were black smuts all over his face and his hair stood up on end, as though an electric current had been run through him. His eyes were red-rimmed and there were strange new lines in his skin, as though someone had taken a metal grid and pressed it deep into his flesh.

  He’d have to have another bath and quickly. Keeping well away from the banisters, he called down:

  ‘Mrs Pegg?’

  ‘No. It’s Jo.’

  He peered through the open door of the boys’ bedroom and saw sleety rain spattering the window. The fog had gone, though.

  ‘I slept late,’ he shouted down the stairs. ‘I’m just going to have a bath. Do you need anything from me just yet?’

  ‘I can cope. I’ll deal with the post first. Would you like me to make you some coffee?’

  ‘No. Don’t worry about that,’ he said, surprised by the ordinariness of her voice. ‘I’ll have some later. Mrs Pegg should be here by now. She’s very late. See to her when she comes, will you?’

  ‘OK.’

  The water was hot again as it gushed out of the tap, and so was the towel rail. He’d been cleaning for nearly three hours. No wonder he looked extraordinary. His back was aching and his fingers felt as though someone had rubbed them all over with wire wool. He didn’t know how a woman like Mrs Pegg bore it. She must be well over sixty, and this was what she did all day. She must be strong as a horse.

  He got into the bath and started washing, sinking down under the surface to get all the smuts out of his hair, and scouring every millimetre of his skin with the obsessive care of a surgeon in a hospital ridden with flesh-eating bacteria. Halfway through, he heard the front-door bell ring, but Jo could deal with that. He had to get clean.

  Dried and dressed, he bundled the black bag full of rags into a second bag and thrust it under the bed, along with the two plastic carriers of umbrella spokes and spoke-ends. As soon as Jo and Mrs Pegg had gone, he’d disguise those in some way, maybe inside a briefcase, and get them safely out of the house. And then, no one, even if they’d found a way to suspect him of having something to do with Ben’s death, would be able to prove it.

  That reminded him that someone must have found the body by now, so he switched on the radio. Too late. He was listening to Woman’s Hour. He’d have to wait until the eleven o’clock news.

  Now, he thought, I’m not the madman in the dressing gown, or the killer of Ben Smithlock. I am Toby Fullwell, connoisseur, director and employer. Time to do my stuff.

  As he went downstairs, he thought of Noel Coward at the end of The Italian Job, processing down the gaol stairs to the cheers of all the cons lining the landings, and took on some of his regality.

  ‘Morning, Jo. I’m sorry I wasn’t ready when you came. Anything interesting in the post?’

  ‘Not really. A few bills. Oh, and an MP wants to bring a party of constituents round the gallery next month. What do you feel about that?’

  ‘Depends on the MP.’ Toby laughed. He was going to be OK. Life would continue, and get better every day. ‘Is it one of the civilized ones?’

  Jo handed him the letter and he was pleased to see that it was indeed from one of the most civilized of them all, John Flanagan. They’d met at one of Henry Buxford’s dinners. What could be a more perfect beginning to his new life? Toby reached for the phone to ring the number of the House of Commons. He was a player at last.

  ‘Are you sure you’re up to school today, David?’

  ‘Yes.’ He sounded irritable. Trish didn’t know what to do. His shell was firmly back in place, but now that she had seen the screaming, weeping vulnerability it hid, she feared it even more.

  He obviously hadn’t slept well, and his eyes were still swollen, but he sounded cheerfully teasing when he said: ‘And you should be in chambers by now.’

  ‘You’re right about that.’ She knew she was frowning from the sensation of tightness above her nose and made herself smile instead. The last thing she wanted was for him to think she was angry with him. ‘You’ve got the number there and my mobile, so if you need anything, just—’

  ‘I won’t.’ He bit back something else, coughed and looked at the floor. ‘I just want to be ordinary, Trish.’

  ‘Good for you,’ she said, feeling inadequate in the extreme.

  George had gone home to his own house in Fulham last night, under protest, which was probably just as well. If he’d been there, Trish would have tried to involve him, and this had to be the boy’s decision.

  He looked at her from under his lashes and produced a valiant approximation of a smile. ‘It’s the last day of term, Trish. I can’t miss it. And we’ve got rowing pr
actice in the gym, too. You know I like that.’

  Trish nodded, also knowing how hard he was working to reassure her. ‘All right. But promise that if you don’t feel well, or anything—’

  ‘I promise. And you must, too.’

  ‘Yes.’ She knew that Nicky would take him all the way to school and that Hester More would ensure that he was safe all day. He’d shown no signs of drowsiness or dizziness, or even headache, and he hadn’t been sick, so it didn’t seem likely that Toby’s tremendous slap across his face had done him any physical harm. ‘I’ll pick you up this afternoon. Have a good day.’

  ‘And you, Trish,’ he said. ‘Nicky said she’d be here in a few minutes, and I’ll be fine till then.’

  Trish was going to be late as it was, so she made him promise not to open the front door to anyone until Nicky had arrived and then ran.

  Once on Blackfriars Bridge, she felt the full force of the wind. It blew the ends of her hair sharply into her eyes and picked up puddles of dirty rainwater to fling against her tights, as well as pushing her briefcase hard against her calves. Head down, she kept up a good pace until she was back between the buildings of New Bridge Street. The blast weakened at once.

  Steve caught her on her way into chambers with the news that Antony wanted her and that there had been a delivery of flowers, which he’d put in her room.

  ‘Could you tell Antony I’m just dropping off my things and I’ll be with him in a sec?’ she called, needing to wipe herself down and comb her hair before she saw anyone else.

  The first thing she saw as she opened the door to her little room was an artfully simple dark-wicker handleless basket, planted with white orchids and silky olive-green moss. In the shabbiness of her room the arrangement looked as glamorous as a Fabergé jewel, and nearly as artificial. Stroking one petal and finding it was real, she ripped open the thick envelope to read: