False Charity

by Veronica Heley

  Bea felt dizzy. She climbed on to a low stool to straighten the mirror over the mantelpiece and had to hold on to it, to prevent herself from tumbling off. ‘So you didn’t get a penny for either? Why didn’t you go to the police? No, don’t tell me. Your son-in-law wasn’t up to date with his book-keeping?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Coral, in carefully neutral tones.

  Bea surmised that he’d probably been paying the staff cash in hand without covering insurance or tax or keeping proper records. If that was the case, Coral couldn’t go to the police without getting him and herself into trouble. Bea straightened the mirror, noting to her horror that there were gashes in the wall behind it. Was this where Max and Nicole had hung their plasma television? Well, the mirror would disguise the problem for the time being.

  Coral attempted a smile. ‘I’d forgotten you could never sit still for five minutes.’

  Bea got off the stool, and sat. ‘I’m listening. What did you do then?’

  ‘I didn’t let it rest, of course. I came straight back to Max but by that time he’d got into Parliament and lost interest in the agency, and was hardly ever here. That holy terror of a woman that used to keep the books here, she’d retired, and that girl Maggie is good at polishing furniture but hopeless in the office. When I finally got to see Max he said he was sorry, he didn’t know what had gone wrong, but the agency wasn’t liable for anything other than introducing us to the client.

  ‘So I went round to the address on the charity’s letterhead and, guess what … not a sign of them there! And their telephone number was out of service.’

  ‘Ouch,’ said Bea. ‘A proper con job, and you can’t go to the police.’

  ‘Then I heard you were coming back after poor Mr Hamilton, ah well, we all have to meet our Maker some time, don’t we, and I was glad you gave yourself a bit of a holiday afterwards even if it was by yourself.

  ‘But the thing is, I’ve lost so much money that I don’t know which way to turn. I help my daughter and son-in-law out with their mortgage, you see, and I haven’t been able to pay it for four months. She, my daughter, is eight months pregnant and in a nervous state, and all my son-in-law will do is blame me for taking the job on. That’s why, the moment I heard you were on your way back, I said to myself that you’d help me even if Max has washed his hands of it. I want you to find those dodgy dealers and make them pay up.’

  Tired as she was, Bea shot up out of her chair. ‘Coral, no! I couldn’t.’

  Coral folded her arms. ‘Why not? If anyone can do it, you can.’

  ‘What? We’re not a detective agency. We don’t hunt down criminals or follow erring wives or husbands. Besides, the agency is being closed down.’

  ‘I’ll believe that when the moon turns blue.’

  ‘What?’ Bea put her hands to her head. ‘Which bit don’t you understand?’

  ‘You’ve never in your life turned your back on a job half done. How long have we known one another? Twenty years, maybe more. You and Mr Hamilton, God rest him, you’ve never let a client down.’

  ‘Oh, come off it. There’s been times when we’ve had to say we couldn’t take a case, and when things haven’t worked out quite as we’d have wanted them to.’

  ‘And were there times when Mr Hamilton asked me to do a job without vetting the client properly?’

  Well, no. Hamilton had never done that. Check, check and check again; that was his motto. Bea knew, because she’d mostly been the one to do the checking when she’d worked for the agency. If what Coral had said was true, Max had not only failed to check the credentials of the ‘charity’ but then declined all responsibility in the matter. Which pressed the ‘Ouch’ button for Bea.

  She pulled a face. ‘Listen, Coral. I’m really, really sorry, but you must know that I haven’t worked in the agency for years, and now it’s being wound up I couldn’t interfere, even if I wanted to.’

  ‘Of course you could. You know right from wrong, same as I do, and you know this is wrong. As for young Max saying the agency’s dead, well what’s that to you? Who founded it, you or him?’

  ‘Well, actually it was Hamilton who—’

  ‘Inherited it from his aunt, who’d run it with a gaggle of distressed gentlewomen. Yes, I know. He told me some wild tales about how his aunts used to carry on in those days, and didn’t we just laugh! Then you came to join him with that miserable little kid in tow, and it was you working all hours and finding good people to work for you, that’s what turned the agency into something special. So don’t tell me you couldn’t interfere now.’

  Bea pushed her mop of hair back from her face. Did it need cutting again? She’d had it cut in New Zealand, but hadn’t been altogether pleased with the result. Now she was back, she must get her own hairdresser on the job.

  She said, ‘I’m tired, Coral. Bone weary and worn out. I feel like an old woman.’

  Coral edged herself off her chair, and patted Bea’s arm. ‘I know, I know. I’ve been there, done that, bought the serial rights and sold them to the BBC. I said to myself, “Bea’s maybe had the guts knocked out of her over this, and if she has, then she won’t be able to help and I won’t say anything to upset her.” But I took one look at you, and I thought, You’ve still got a backbone, somewhere inside the jelly. You get a good night’s sleep and I’ll be round in the morning to hear what you have to say, right?’

  Bea let Coral out of the front door. The road beyond was quiet, lined with cars displaying parking permits, since this was a residential parking area. Where had Max put her car? And Hamilton’s? Wait a minute, hadn’t Max said he’d take Hamilton’s car off her hands? She rubbed her forehead. She couldn’t remember, couldn’t think straight. She’d ask him about it in the morning.

  Dusk was closing in. The white stucco of the houses looked ghostly in that light. It wasn’t a very long street, but many of the tiny front gardens sported small flowering trees and there were window boxes everywhere. In this or any other light, the street looked charming. A moon showed itself over the roof opposite.

  A light glowed in the basement below. Presumably Maggie had her quarters there? Hadn’t Max said something about giving the girl a room, but that she had to be out at the end of the week? Maggie might look a figure of fun, but she knew how to clean a room. Even Coral had said that. So tomorrow, if Bea could stand Maggie’s bossy ways, the girl could help her get the furniture back the way she liked it.

  Tomorrow she’d think about what Coral had said. Not tonight. Anyway, what Coral wanted was quite out of the question. It was a nuisance not having the house to herself, but in a few days’ time the girl would be gone and Bea could relax.

  She went into the big reception room, and looked around her. It didn’t look like her room at the moment, with this and that missing, and all the sympathy cards on the mantelpiece. She must look through them sometime.

  She and Hamilton had spent most of their evenings in this room. Latterly Hamilton hadn’t enjoyed big social events because of his slight but increasing deafness, so they’d mostly stayed in, she watching television or reading, and he playing patience. He’d played on a baize-covered table – now missing – in the window with real cards, not on a computer. He’d said there was something soothing about laying the cards out one on top of another, occupying the top of his mind while underneath his subconscious dealt with any problems that happened to be around. Oh, she was going to miss him so much.

  She stood looking out over the darkening garden for a while. A moving light in the sky was not a falling star, but yet another plane making its way to land at Heathrow Airport. A breeze ruffled the leaves on the tree and above it rose the graceful spire of St Mary Abbot’s church, a pale finger pointing upwards into the night sky.

  She shut and locked first the windows and then the burglar-proof grille inside, turned off the lights in the kitchen and sitting room and set the burglar alarm. Now to get her luggage up to her bedroom. She dragged the cases out from under the stairs and stopped. They w
ere too heavy for her to haul up to the first floor. The flight back from New Zealand was taking its toll. She consulted her watch to see what time it was, but couldn’t focus on it.

  She would leave the cases where they were, take a shower and fall into bed. If she couldn’t find a nightdress then she’d do without.

  She reached her bedroom at last and with thankfulness saw that Nicole had put clean linen on the king-size bed. Don’t think about Hamilton dying in a hospital bed far away. Don’t think about the lonely cemetery in which he now lay, on the other side of the world.

  The en suite bathroom had been cleaned, and fresh towels laid out. Thank you, Nicole. She wondered whether Max and Nicole had enjoyed sleeping in this big bedroom. She hoped they had. There was a trace of a powdery scent in the air; Nicole’s. Bea hefted up one of the sash windows as far as the burglar lock would allow. The scent would soon go. Nicole had even thought of putting a small posy of flowers in a vase on the dressing table.

  Bea decided to rescue her own toiletries from her luggage in the morning. At that moment she became aware of music filtering down from the floor above. Not jazz, not pop. A string quartet? Suddenly it was muted.

  She stiffened. Was that Maggie up there? But, wasn’t Maggie still working downstairs in the basement?

  Perhaps the girl had crept up the stairs after her? If so, Bea could ask her to help by bringing up at least one of her suitcases.

  Bea had already shucked off her shoes, so she went up the stairs to the top floor without making a noise. It wasn’t that she’d meant to startle Maggie; it was just how it happened.

  On the top floor there were three doors. Here Max had once held sway. The room at the front of the house had been his bedroom, and the room behind had been set aside for games, with model railways on the floor at first, computers and a drum kit later. The third door led to the second bathroom.

  Bea opened the door to the front bedroom and a strange man leaped to his feet in alarm.

  ‘Who …? What …?’

  He gaped. He was young enough to be her son. No, her grandson. A student, perhaps? Overly thin and undersized. Brown eyes wide with anxiety. Dark hair that grew in a whorl at the back of his head and probably never stayed down. Not old enough to shave? Scrupulously clean, sweatshirt and jeans a trifle too large for him, bare feet.

  She blinked. ‘Are you a burglar?’ Which sounded absurd, even to herself.

  He made an inarticulate noise. He looked terrified.

  This was the larger of the two rooms on the top floor, with windows overlooking the street. The room was furnished much as Max had left it except that a computer now rested on the desk next to a television set, and there was a microwave oven and kettle on a stand nearby. Plus the room was far tidier than it had ever been when Max had been living in it.

  Footsteps came up the stairs and Maggie entered, bearing a foil-covered frozen meal. She took in the situation and gave an unconvincing laugh, which was far too loud and grated on the ear. ‘I can explain.’

  Bea said, ‘Does he live here, too?’

  ‘Sort of. He’s been helping me out with the agency work, and he doesn’t have anywhere else to go.’

  ‘Max didn’t mention him. Does Max know he’s here?’

  ‘I told Max he was my boyfriend, which he’s not, of course. Just a waif and stray.’

  ‘You can’t be both a waif and a stray,’ said Bea, over-tired. ‘One or the other. Does he have a name?’

  The boy gibbered, so Maggie helped him out. ‘Oliver Ingram. He’s an idiot. Mostly.’ She spoke in the dispassionate tones of an elder sister referring to a subnormal younger brother.

  Bea couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘I’ll explain in the morning,’ said Maggie, talking to Bea now in much the same tone as she’d referred to the boy. ‘Now don’t you worry about a thing, Mrs Abbot. You get yourself to bed and I’ll bring you up a nice cup of tea in the morning.’

  Bea stifled an impulse to tear Maggie off a strip for speaking to her as if she were a small child, and then another one to laugh. ‘Is Oliver strong enough to bring up my suitcases? They’re too heavy for me.’

  ‘We’ll do it between us,’ said Maggie. She turned to the boy and said, ‘And don’t you play that loud music of yours any more. Use your ear-phones, like I told you.’ She caught Bea’s eye and said, ‘Teenagers!’ with another of her unconvincing, braying laughs.

  Oliver gave an impression of a nodding puppet, but managed to haul one of Bea’s suitcases up the stairs and deposit it in her room without banging into the banisters or dropping them on his bare feet. Maggie carted the other case up with the minimum of effort. Obviously there were some muscles in that sinewy frame of hers.

  Bea disinterred her toilet things and a nightdress, had a hasty shower and tumbled into bed. Before she turned out the light, she picked up a book Hamilton had left behind by mistake. It had a soft leather cover with his initials on it in gold, and he’d used it so much that some of the leaves were loose. He’d missed it on their first night away but she’d bought him another. He’d grumbled that the print in the new one was too small, but he’d used it right to the end. It had been buried with him.

  It comforted her a little to hold his book in her hands, a book he’d read every day of his life. It seemed to bring him closer. She didn’t bother to open it. Besides, she’d left her reading glasses somewhere. Where was her second pair, the ones she used for reading in bed?

  What was the prayer her mother had always said over her, as she tucked her up in bed at night? ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, guardian angels round me keep …’ Bea couldn’t remember the rest of it. At one time, when she was maybe seven or eight, she’d had bad dreams about a grey monster. Her mother had taught her another prayer which had worked well at the time. ‘Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, guard the bed that I lie on.’

  Very comforting thoughts, those. But not much help now. Bea wasn’t sure she believed in guardian angels nowadays, or indeed believed in anything much. Hamilton had held strong beliefs. She wished, how she wished, that she could share his certainty about a God who loved her and was prepared to die for her.

  She lay there, longing for sleep and fearing that it would elude her, as it had eluded her every night since Hamilton died. Hours passed, and still she could not sleep, but stared into the darkness.

  Wednesday, morning

  It was past two in the morning, but they were used to being up into the small hours and showed no signs of strain. All three had changed into T-shirts and jeans. The night was warm. They wouldn’t need jackets.

  Wearing gloves, Richie searched the body, relieving it of all identity, including mobile phone, keys, wallet and watch. Also the silver bracelet on the left wrist.

  The two men bundled the body into the shower curtain, and checked the time.

  There were only ten flats in the block, with parking below. The street outside saw very little traffic at night. It was one of the main reasons they’d chosen the place.

  ‘Ready?’ said Lena. The two men nodded and bent to pick up the body. Lena followed them out of the flat, carrying the rug in a bin bag. They would make it look like a robbery. Everyone would think the man had gone looking for talent on Hampstead Heath, fallen in with the wrong crowd, got mugged and left for dead. End of story.

  Three

  Wednesday, morning

  Bea woke to find it was broad daylight. She was surprised to find that she had actually fallen asleep for a while. She still felt draggingly tired, but told herself to stop whingeing and get on with the day.

  Someone was bustling around the room. A mug of tea had been placed on her bedside table. The tea was in a china mug in a saucer with a lid on it to keep the contents hot. Now that was a good start to the morning.

  ‘Don’t you bother about anything, Mrs Abbot,’ said Maggie, bossy as ever. The girl was now clad in a short lime green tunic which assaulted the eye. Where did she get her clothes from? ‘I’ve unpacked as best I can, but I’m
afraid there isn’t any space in the dressing room so I couldn’t hang anything up except behind the door. I expect you’ll want most of your things washed or dry-cleaned. It’s always the same after a holiday, isn’t it?’ And she gave another of her grating laughs.

  Bea propped herself up in bed and sipped tea, trying to focus. ‘That’s kind of you, Maggie. Are you looking for a job as a housekeeper?’

  ‘Oh, no. That’s not what I want out of life at all. Max did say that he might be able to find me another job in an office if I made myself useful to you, but I wouldn’t want to work as a housekeeper; no way.’

  Bea thrust her hands back through her hair and shook her head to settle it. ‘You could have fooled me. It was you who put clean sheets on the bed and cleaned the bathroom, wasn’t it? Not Nicole.’

  The girl made a dismissive movement with her hands. ‘Well, Mrs Abbot was busy moving out. She said she didn’t have the time to do it herself, so I said to her that you shouldn’t have to come back after such a journey and find the place in a mess, and she said I could do it, couldn’t I? So I did. I like everything neat and tidy around me.’

  Bea edged herself off the bed and opened the door to her dressing room, which had been fitted out with cupboards and wardrobe space to hold all her and her husband’s clothes. She couldn’t get in because racks of Nicole’s clothes, suitcases, and cardboard boxes had been packed shoulder-high into the space. Bea’s disbelieving eye identified a plasma screen television, stereo, and other necessities for everyday life in the moneyed classes. ‘What on earth …?’

  Arms akimbo, Maggie nodded. ‘I told Mrs Abbot you wouldn’t be pleased, but she said there was no point taking her stuff away for such a short time.’

  Did Nicole imagine that she was going to take over the house? But … too many conflicting thoughts collided in Bea’s head. Her chief emotion was fury. How dare Nicole think she could casually take over Bea’s home, when nothing, absolutely nothing, had been decided as to its future! Yes, Max had mentioned in one of his phone calls that perhaps she might sell the house to him when she moved, but she hadn’t said yea or nay. She’d promised to think about it and had then put the whole thing out of her mind. It was too soon to make decisions about her future.