The Four Last Things

by Taylor, Andrew

  Supporting himself on the table, Eddie struggled to his feet. Angel had told him to have some tea. The teapot and the milk were on the worktop near the kettle. He crossed the room with enormous caution, like a man walking on ice which might be too thin to bear his weight. Not bothering to boil the kettle again, he filled up his mug with lukewarm tea.

  Angel was a stickler for tidiness, just as Thelma had been. Eddie closed the carton of milk and opened the refrigerator to put it away. In order to put the milk inside, he had to move the moussaka which Angel had brought up from the basement. It was a supermarket meal for two, in a flat foil container enclosed by a cardboard sleeve. Eddie noticed a red dot no bigger than a squashed ant on the side of the sleeve. He touched it with a fingertip. The red smeared against the pale-blue background of the cardboard. A speck of blood from the moussaka? Poor dead lamb. Or perhaps Angel had pricked her finger like the princess in the fairy story.

  As he staggered upstairs, Eddie wondered why Angel had gone out so early. The Jiffy bag suggested she was going to the post office; a packet that size would need weighing. Wasn’t there a twenty-four-hour post office in central London, somewhere near Leicester Square? But why the urgency? Why not wait until their local post office opened? Perhaps it was something to do with one of her clients. Eddie knew that Angel sometimes did extra jobs for them, little tasks that were paid in cash, that did not attract the commission from Mrs Hawley-Minton.

  At six o’clock on a Monday morning?

  Eddie shook his head, trying to clear simultaneously his headache and his confusion. It didn’t matter. Angel was a very private person, who liked to keep the different compartments of her life separate from one another.

  He reached the landing. His bed looked very inviting through the open door of his room. But he hesitated on the threshold. What would he do if Lucy woke up? It was all very well for Angel to say that Lucy would sleep through, but what if she didn’t? Children were notoriously unpredictable. He should have thought of the possibility before Angel left. Angel should have thought of it.

  Eddie crossed the landing and pushed open the door of Angel’s room. Although he was doing it for the best of motives, going into her room seemed almost sacrilegious. He remembered Thelma, who had so much liked to pry among Angel’s things: he wasn’t like that.

  The room smelled of Angel. As he had expected, everything was very tidy. The bed had been made. The horizontal surfaces were empty of clutter. The doors of Mr Reynolds’s fitted wardrobes were closed.

  The receiving unit of the intercom was plugged into the socket nearest to the single bed. Eddie pulled it out. He was sure that Angel would understand. Angel was scathing about adults who did not look after the children in their care.

  Eddie turned to leave. At that instant it occurred to him that the intercom was useless. True, if Lucy woke up, he would hear her cries, but he would not be able to get into the basement to comfort her. Angel had the key. It was on the same ring as her keys to the van and the front door.

  Eddie leant against the wall, grateful for its coolness against the warmth of his cheek. It was very worrying. If Lucy woke up, he could go downstairs and try to talk to her through the door. But the door was soundproofed, so communication would not be easy. Besides, what good would talking through a door do to a frightened child?

  A possible solution occurred to him. Mr Reynolds had given Angel two keys when he fitted the five-lever lock on the basement door. As far as Eddie knew, she had taken only one of them with her.

  He looked around the room, wondering where Angel would keep spare keys. She was the sort of person for whom everything has its place. It should be possible to work out the key’s location from first principles.

  At that moment he heard a vehicle drawing up outside the house. The engine sounded like the van’s. He scuttled to the window and peered down to the street below. To his relief, it was the red Ford Escort belonging to the quarrelsome young couple next door. But the incident had shaken him, physically as well as emotionally. Angel might come back at any time. Her movements were unpredictable. It would be terrible if she caught him poking around in her room. His legs felt weak, partly because of the fever and partly at the thought of her reaction.

  Eddie abandoned the search and went into his own room and plugged the intercom into one of the sockets. He wasn’t well. He needed to sleep. It wasn’t fair that when he was ill he should have so much to worry about. He half-lay and half-sat on the bed and sipped the tea, which by now was tepid. Angel had been kind to him this morning, which was such a relief after yesterday. He shied away from the memory of her lunging at Lucy with the scissors. He had never seen Angel like that before, even with naughty little Suki. Lucy’s special.

  He tried to distract himself by thinking of Christmas. It was not much more than three weeks away now. He hoped Lucy would still be with them for Christmas. It would be wonderful to share such an exciting day with her. He would make a list in his mind of the presents he might buy her.

  It was true that none of the other children had stayed as long as that – a fortnight was the norm. But Lucy’s special.

  He lay back and closed his eyes. The intercom hissed and crackled, a comforting background noise, like the creaks and murmurs of a gas fire. Eddie drifted towards sleep. He was almost there when a wail emerged from the intercom.

  ‘Mummy …’

  Eddie swung his legs from under the duvet and stood up. He waited, holding his breath as though there were a danger of Lucy hearing him. Perhaps she would slip back asleep.

  ‘Mummy … I’m thirsty.’

  Eddie waited, hoping. But Lucy did not go back to sleep. Soon she began to cry. It was a little after seven-thirty.

  The crying continued as Eddie pulled on his dressing gown and pushed his feet into his slippers. His breathing was fast and shallow. He went back to Angel’s bedroom. In desperation, he pulled out drawers and opened wardrobe doors. Lucy’s crying continued, more faintly because further away, and this made it worse. Distance lent a malign enchantment: it left more room for the imagination to play.

  In the end it was not so very difficult to find the key. Angel hadn’t hidden it at all. Why should she? This was her home. He found it, along with other duplicates, in the top left-hand drawer of the chest. The black japanned box was there, too, the one that had contained Angela Wharton’s passport. The keys had been wedged between it and a bundle of letters.

  Eddie lifted out the ring. It held a complete set of their keys – house, car, back bedroom, basement and a smaller one which he assumed belonged to the chest freezer.

  The crying changed gear – it became louder, sharper, higher in pitch; the sobs increased in frequency, too, as if fuelled by panic. Nobody wants me, nobody loves me, they’ll leave me here all alone until I die.

  With the crying filling his head, Eddie stumbled down the stairs, at one point almost falling. His hand was shaking so much that he found it difficult to push the key into the lock.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he called, fearing that Lucy would not be able to hear him. ‘I’m coming.’

  At last the door opened. The bed was empty. His heart seemed to lurch. The night light was so faint that he could hardly see a thing. He brushed his hand against the switch and the overhead light came on. Lucy was curled up in the Victorian armchair with Jimmy in one hand and Mrs Wump in the other. She wasn’t crying now. His appearance had shocked her into silence. She stared up at him with huge eyes, which in this light and from this angle looked black.

  ‘Now what’s all this, Lucy?’ Eddie clattered down the stairs, knelt by her chair and put his arms round the tiny body. ‘It’s all right now. I’m here.’

  She burrowed into him. ‘I want to go home. I want Mummy. I want –’

  ‘Hush. Do you want a drink?’

  ‘No,’ Lucy wailed. ‘I want to go home. I want –’

  ‘Soon,’ Eddie heard himself saying. ‘You’ll go home to Mummy soon. But you have to be a good girl.’

&nbs
p; Lucy’s breath smelt stale. Her eyes were partly gummed up with sleep. She yawned.

  ‘Angel won’t be pleased if she finds you out of bed.’ Angel would be even less pleased, Eddie suspected, if she found him down here. ‘Why don’t you snuggle under your duvet again?’

  ‘I don’t want to. I’m not tired.’

  Eddie lifted her up and laid her down in the bed. She did not resist and her body was still heavy and uncoordinated.

  ‘Don’t go. Don’t leave me alone.’

  ‘I won’t.’ Eddie sat down in the Victorian armchair and passed Mrs Wump and Jimmy to Lucy. ‘Now, you go to sleep.’

  To his surprise, she did. Within five minutes she was fast asleep again. The medication was still affecting her. Eddie waited for a moment, just to make sure, before standing up.

  The chair creaked when he moved, and Lucy opened her eyes.

  ‘I want a drink.’

  It was a delaying tactic, Eddie thought. The red beaker was still beside the bed. He picked it up and discovered that it was empty.

  ‘I’ll fetch you some more water.’

  ‘I want Ribena.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Eddie said weakly.

  He opened the door of the freezer room. It smelled faintly of cooking. He found Ribena in the cupboard over the sink and refilled the mug. He took it back to Lucy, only to find that she had fallen asleep again.

  He left the drink by the bed and returned to the freezer room to put back the Ribena bottle in the cupboard. Angel need never know that he had come down here. He noticed that there was a bowl on the draining board and a knife, fork and spoon in the rack. They had special cutlery for the children, but these were the normal adult size. For some reason, Angel must have eaten breakfast down here.

  On the other hand, there was nothing for her to eat. Usually she had muesli for breakfast, or sometimes bread or toast. In any case, why had she needed a fork? The problem niggled at him. On impulse, he unlocked the freezer and opened the lid.

  He hadn’t seen inside the freezer since it was new and empty. There were three compartments, two of them filled with shop-bought frozen meals in bright packaging. The third compartment was full of uncooked meat, which surprised Eddie because Angel did not believe in wasting time in cooking and preferred convenience foods. The meat was packed in polythene freezer bags, some transparent, others white and opaque. The cuts varied considerably in size and shape. Some were large enough for a substantial Sunday joint. It was not easy to see exactly what the packages contained, because they were frosted with ice. Some of the cuts looked rather bony. Angel had labelled the packages. Eddie took out one of the smaller ones.

  The label said, in Angel’s small, neat writing, ‘S – July ‘95’. The meat was in one of the transparent bags. Eddie held it in his hands and felt the cold seeping into his fingers. Sausages? Spare ribs?

  I’m feverish. I’m dreaming.

  The whiteness of bone gleamed at one end of the package. The ends looked sharp and jagged. S, Eddie thought: S for Suki. A shudder ran through his body. His fingers went limp. His hands fell to his sides. The other, smaller pair of hands fell back into the freezer.

  11

  ‘For there are certain tempers of body, which, matcht with an humorous depravity of mind, do hatch and produce vitiosities, whose newness and monstrosity of nature admits no name …’

  Religio Medici, II, 7

  Sally thought that Michael was going to hit the man. He accosted them early on Monday morning as they left Oliver’s house on their way to Paradise Gardens.

  ‘Now look,’ said Frank Howell, smiling his battered-cherub smile. ‘It’s not like I’m a stranger, is it? You and Mrs Appleyard know me. And these things work both ways.’

  Sally moved forward, inserting her body as a barrier between the journalist and Michael. ‘We’re in a hurry, Mr Howell. Perhaps we can talk later.’

  ‘How did you know where to find us?’ Michael demanded as he unlocked the driver’s door of the Rover.

  ‘Ways and means.’ Howell tried the effect of a smile. ‘Just doing my job.’

  ‘It must have been Derek Cutter,’ Sally said, her voice suddenly bitter. Howell’s eyelashes flickered. ‘I gave him the phone number when I talked to him yesterday.’

  Michael threw himself into the car and started the engine. Sally climbed into the front passenger seat. Howell, the perfect gentleman, held the door for her.

  ‘Remember, Mrs Appleyard, it’s a two-way process. Maybe there’s things I know that you don’t.’

  Michael let out the clutch and Howell hurriedly slammed the door.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Sally sensed the blood rushing to her face.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Michael said. ‘Bloody ghoul.’

  After that they drove in silence. Damn Michael for mentioning ghouls. Sally tried to persuade herself that she was being unreasonable. How could he be expected to know that in Muslim legend a ghoul was an evil demon that ate human bodies, particularly stolen corpses or children?

  There had been an accident in Fortis Green Road and the traffic slowed to a standstill. As they waited in the queue, Michael fidgeted in his seat, his eyes darting from side to side, looking for non-existent side streets, searching for ways of escape.

  ‘I’ll call Maxham. Can I have the mobile?’

  ‘I left it at Oliver’s,’ Sally lied, her muscles tensing at the thought of yet another confrontation between Michael and Maxham.

  Michael glowered at her. Sally felt sick with guilt. She opened her mouth to confess the lie, but at that moment the traffic began to move. Neither of them spoke again until they reached the North Circular.

  ‘We’ve had a purple Peugeot 205 on our tail since Muswell Hill.’

  ‘It’s following us?’ asked Sally. ‘You sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m not sure. All I know is, it’s been two or three cars behind us since then.’

  Sally turned round and tried without success to see the driver’s face. ‘Do you think Maxham’s got someone keeping an eye on us?’

  ‘I doubt it. He must be stretched enough as it is.’ Michael overtook a lorry and, fifty yards behind them, the Peugeot pulled out to overtake as well. ‘Unless he still suspects that we did it. That I did it.’

  ‘Michael. Please don’t.’

  ‘Get the number.’

  Sally opened her handbag and took out an old envelope and a pen. Michael became increasingly irritable as she struggled to read the licence plate of the Peugeot, which promptly ducked, perhaps intentionally, behind the cover afforded by the vehicles between them. She managed it in the end and then wished that there was something else she could do other than listen to her thoughts. Any job was better than none.

  To distract herself from the ghoul within, Sally took out the A-Z road atlas. She turned to the index. There were three Paradise Roads and one each of Paradise Gardens, Paradise Passage, Paradise Place, Paradise Street and Paradise Walk. Paradise Gardens was the only scrap of heaven in north-west London. She wondered who had chosen the names and why. Probably nothing more significant than someone’s sales technique: buy one of these houses and have an earthly foretaste of the joys to come. Tears filled her eyes. It was a cruel place to choose, a typical refinement, all of a piece with yesterday’s discovery at St Michael’s, Beauclerk Place.

  ‘What was the message, exactly?’ she asked Michael.

  ‘That Lucy Appleyard was in forty-three Paradise Gardens. The message was repeated once. It was received just before eight o’clock. They recorded it automatically. Maxham said they traced the call to a public telephone in Golders Green.’

  ‘It wasn’t much more than eight-forty-five when he phoned us.’

  Michael changed gear unnecessarily. A moment later he said, ‘The caller said one other thing: Not just her tights this time.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So the call wasn’t a hoax. They’ve not released the fact that Lucy’s tights were found.’

  Paradise Gardens was a little over
a mile west of Kensal Vale, a long, curving road of red brick terraced houses, perhaps ninety years old. Many of the houses were boarded up. Two police cars and an unmarked van were parked at the far end of the road.

  ‘It’s not Lucy,’ Michael said. ‘Just remember that. While there’s life, there’s hope.’

  Sally stared through her window at two children, perhaps ten, who should have been at school and who were instead sitting on the wing of a car and sharing a companionable cigarette. ‘If there’s life.’

  ‘God help me, I sometimes find myself hoping that there isn’t.’

  ‘Just so it could be all over?’

  He nodded. ‘For her. For us, too.’

  ‘It’s awful. Everything’s changing because of this. You. Me. Everything.’

  She was about to tell him of her lie about the phone. But he gave her no chance.

  ‘We have to face it,’ he said. ‘Nothing will ever be the same again. Whatever happens. You can never go back. I found that out a long time ago.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Sally asked.

  ‘When I was a kid I was mixed up in a murder case.’

  ‘What?’ The word emerged as a gasp, as though someone had punched her in the stomach. ‘Why did you never tell me?’

  Michael drew up behind a police car. One of the two uniformed policemen on the pavement moved towards them.

  ‘Because of Uncle David,’ Michael said. ‘At the time I promised him … He and his family were involved much more than I was. And in the early days I wasn’t sure how you’d react. Then I thought, least said, soonest mended. All this – what’s happening to Lucy – it’s like a punishment.’

  ‘Darling.’

  He looked at her, and she saw the tears in his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, but it was too late – the constable had come round the car and was bending down to Michael’s window. Michael turned away to speak to him, leaving Sally to grapple with unanswered questions. David’s family?