‘Why are you doing this?’
He looked sharply at her.
‘You can’t stand it when people break the rules, can you, Jane? But only the little rules. Suzy can sleep with another woman’s husband so long as she doesn’t drink red wine with fish. That’s it, isn’t it?’
Hard to know how to play that one for the best. Nothing fancy. Just a tear or two and a broken whisper.
‘She’s my friend, Johnny.’ Was she?
Piece of cake. He took her hand.
‘I know. I know. I’m sorry. Why won’t you let me take care of you?’
Buildings had caretakers. Men with overalls and buckets keeping everything tidy and disinfected and locked up securely after dark. Why would a girl want taking care of?
Johnny paid the bill while the girls tripped outside and bundled into the back of the borrowed Volvo, their frilly petticoats bunched up around them like a pair of matching dollies packed in tissue paper. Henry, by now in a bad mood, had remembered he ought to phone the wife and tell her he was staying at his club after a late business meeting (she’d get his lawyer’s letter on Monday). He refused to be trussed back into the passenger seat and insisted on walking back to the flat on his own. It took the drunken Johnny so long to figure out the safety strap that Henry had already disappeared upstairs to ring Penelope by the time they eventually pulled into the forecourt.
Penelope was on the phone to her sister in Cirencester. No, she didn’t think there was Another Woman as such, no one serious anyway, but Henry was at that very difficult age. Her sister hooked the phone into her right shoulder and reached for her copy of Vogue. Henry listened to the engaged signal for a few furious seconds then dialled again, pulling the sitting-room curtain back to see what the other three were up to down below.
Suzy was in the mood for a test drive.
‘Johnny, darling.’ Darling. Fucking cheek. ‘You did say Janey and I could have a spot of practice while you still had the car?’
Johnny chucked the keys over his shoulder then staggered out of the driver’s seat, propped himself up against the wall by the entrance and lit one of Henry’s half coronas.
The girls climbed into the front of the car.
‘Once round Berkeley Square and back,’ cried Suzy.
‘Drive carefully!’
‘We will, darling! Very carefully indeed. Safety belts and everything.’
The red car roared back down the forecourt and reversed blindly into the side road and off into Curzon Street. There wasn’t much traffic around (most of Mayfair was in the country for the weekend) and a couple of minutes later the car was zooming back round the flowerbed in front of the main entrance. Henry peered out of the fifth-floor window as the two girls danced round the car, sitting on the bonnet and posing pertly like dolly birds at a motor show. One of them waved up at him – he couldn’t tell which – before they climbed back in on opposite sides and roared off again for another run round the block.
Johnny was starting to nod off against the wall but he was woken by the sound of tyre on tarmac as the speeding car pulled off Curzon Street a second time and back into the home straight. His bleary eyes looked up at the two dark heads above the goofy round headlights, at the gleaming chrome of the radiator, picturing the damage about to be done to the brake linings, waiting for the moment when the engine stalled to a halt once more.
The moment never came. Instead a ton of Swedish engineering carried right on accelerating into the wall where he stood, squashing his lower body like a wasp on a window pane.
Part Three
Chapter 24
Your allure is a science. Take control of your
movements. Make them slow. Make them
graceful. Monitor every pose, every gesture,
so that nothing is ever left to chance.
The policemen were quite chummy first off, sitting the pair of them down on a settee by the main door and telling them not to worry. The central heating went off at eleven and it was freezing in the foyer. There was an old paraffin stove behind the porter’s desk but its heat didn’t seem to reach any further than his knees.
One of the upholstery pins on the settee had torn a tiny hole in Jane’s stocking and she could feel the ladder tickling its way up the side of her leg every time she moved.
When the ambulance men had finished outside one of them came over and asked if they were all right and was either of them a relation? He stank of disinfectant. That and the smell of floor polish and the dusty spray of plastic carnations in the vase on the front desk made Jane feel like she was in hospital. He asked again if either of them had been hurt in the crash.
‘We’re both fine,’ insisted Suzy in her very best hockey-captain tones, ‘completely unscathed.’
Unless you counted the bruised feeling across the chest from those rotten safety straps, thought Jane, but she said nothing.
‘Your hand’s like ice.’
He walked back to the desk to say something to one of the patrol-car policemen then drove away in the ambulance. No need for the siren.
The nosey old bitch on the ground floor had been woken up by the crash but she’d missed the ambulance coming and going because of the time it took to get her curlers out and change into her best housecoat (quilted nylon, much too long on her). She said they ought to have hot, sweet tea, like in the Blitz. It wasn’t proper tea, though. It was that perfumed gnat’s piss they all pretended to like. Very friendly all of a sudden but she served it in the kitchen china just the same and she didn’t offer any to the policemen.
One of them came over. Did either of them know the deceased and where did his family reside? Reside. Pillock. Then he went back over to the porter’s desk to arrange for some poor sod from the Putney branch to wake Old Mother Hullavington with the glad tidings.
‘What the bloody hell happened to Henry?’ whispered Jane.
Henry had been watching the whole thing from the sitting-room window upstairs while he was trying to get through to the wife. Once he’d seen the girls safely out of the car he sloped off down the fire escape to the garage where he kept the Bentley. The A30 was clean as a whistle and he was back in Virginia Water by midnight. Penelope was alone in the house when he got back, having waited up with a bottle of Cointreau. Penelope wanted to know what time he called this so he called it half past ten – just in case he needed an alibi.
The phone on the desk rang while the policemen were outside inspecting the front of the Volvo. Jim the porter answered it, nodded and yes-sirred a few times then signalled to Suzy who had started to cry. Whoever it was didn’t have a lot to say and she was back on the settee before the policemen had even noticed her get up.
‘Was that him?’ whispered Jane.
‘He wasn’t here, all right? He’ll sort everything out.’ Suzy spoke very quietly, without moving her lips.
It was all shaping up like a tragic accident – Careless Driving at a pinch – until the police started taking statements from people and Jim the porter told them he’d seen the car deliberately accelerate into the wall. Thanks, Jim. And then the other nosey old bitch – the one who had the flat on the other side of the main door where the crash was – went and stuck her oar in. Mrs Kowalski, her name was. Foreign.
Mrs Kowalski had seen the whole bloody thing and she’d tottered out into the front hall and started shooting her mouth off. She had a ginger wig stuck on all anyhow and a white space at the front of her head where her face ought to have been: no eyebrows; no eyelashes; no cheeks; no lips. Without Max Factor there was nobody there. They took her statement over by the porter’s desk but she was stone deaf so you could hear every word. Young women in motor cars at all hours driving. Decent people asleep. And not the first time flat fifty-two a nuisance made. The policeman’s ears pricked up. What flat number did she say? He finished taking her statement and was just nipping out to have a word with the radio bloke in the police car when he heard the clang of a tin pail on the tarmac outside. While he’d been busy with Mrs K, J
im the porter had wandered off to his little glory hole under the main stairs to get a mop and a bucket and a bottle of Jeyes Fluid and had calmly trotted outside to wash all that mess off the stonework. What was his game? More to the point, what were the CID going to say?
The CID pulled up a few minutes later in a shiny black Humber. The detective sergeant had a few words with the constable then strolled over to the settee. Carefully combed hair, dandruff (if allowed to run riot, dandruff can even lead to baldness), shiny blue suit. Married. He even smelled married: a nasty mixture of pipe tobacco and cough sweets and meat pie. Jane tried to picture the wife: a carrot-topped, pear-shaped, apple-cheeked housewife in a floral apron and K Skips baking bloody biscuits in Barnet.
Something about the magic number fifty-two had got them talking about accompanying them down to the station. No charge or anything. No taking down and using in evidence or any of that Dixon of Dock Green malarkey but they didn’t seem to have much choice about it just the same.
Suzy looked down at her blue velvet and then up at the copper.
‘The police station? Like this?’
Her voice had gone very Darjeeling all of a sudden and she’d tried to turn the charm up a notch or two, pursing her lips and batting her eyelashes down (to the frock) and back up again (to the detective) but those strokes didn’t cut much ice when your mascara was all down your face and you’d left most of your lipstick on the rim of a teacup. Jane surreptitiously wiped her lipstick on to a crusty old paper hanky she found in her jacket pocket. Crusty with what?
The policeman obviously hadn’t heard of dressing for the occasion.
‘Don’t try to be funny, miss. Just you go along with the sergeant here. We’ll take the other young lady in the Humber, Wilkins.’ It was Wilkins who had told Johnny Hullavington that the ambulance was on its way as his life’s blood trickled neatly down a nearby drain.
They might not let them change into formal daywear but they couldn’t very well refuse to let them go to the bloody toilet. Mrs Kowalski’s toilet. Suzy was gone nearly twelve minutes – time to put a whole new face on – but it wasn’t the brightest idea she’d ever had. Mrs Kowalski only had a thirty-watt bulb in her bathroom and the thick peachy powder and Plum Crazy lipstick were much too after six. And she’d got lipstick on her teeth.
Jane was in and out in half the time. She peeled off her eyelashes and left them in the soap dish then washed off what was left of her make-up. No sense looking like a slag. She quickly took Sergio’s bracelet off and looped it round the middle of her bra. Might give the filth the wrong idea. When she came out Mrs K was hovering in the hallway with a pair of rubber gloves and a bottle of Parazone, ready to disinfect the toilet seat. Cheek.
Chapter 25
Constant vigilance is required to form
and maintain pleasant facial habits.
There were a few drunks lurching pleasantly out of clubs in Curzon Street and Berkeley Square but there were no cars about and they got to Savile Row in about five minutes. They drove in round the back entrance and the uniformed man marched them along the gloss-painted corridors and up the stairs to the first floor.
Everyone was shouting and carrying on and a tone-deaf tramp was belting out ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ from a faraway cell. It was obviously rush hour: tarts; pimps; poofs; toughs and one very drunk, very disorderly old bag with no front teeth and a greasy tweed skirt. She squinted cross-eyed at the pair of them in their French pleats and French navy.
‘Fuck me! If it isn’t the lady with the alligator purse!’
A big hello from an old soak like her didn’t do them any favours with the filth. Not exactly a character witness.
‘Friend of yours?’
They fingerprinted them both then put them in separate rooms. Jane’s had a bench against the wall and a table and chairs in the middle. She sat down on one of the chairs. The green paint, the smell of bleach and cabbage and the tiny shrivelled brains of chewing gum under the rim of the table made it a lot like being back at school.
There was a window in the room but it was so close to the wall of the office block behind that no light at all could get in and the ailing fluorescent striplight buzzed away day and night. It was hot and stuffy but she didn’t take off her mink – might get nicked. They left her there for over an hour before the detective came back and started asking questions while a hatchet-faced old dyke in a blue serge dress and one of those upside-down nurse’s-outfit watches sat in as silent chaperone.
Had she been driving the car? No, she was not driving the bloody car. How long had she known the deceased? How fast had the car been going? Did she possess a current driving licence? Did she know it was an offence to drive a car without a licence?
‘I wasn’t driving.’
Soothing suddenly. They knew it was an accident. Foot on the accelerator rather than the brake? Happens all the time. The jury would understand. Careless driving. Driving without a licence. First offence? There’d be a fine, obviously. But prison was unlikely. Six months tops.
‘I wasn’t driving.’
It was like talking to your bloody self.
They tried a different tack. What had she seen exactly? How did Johnny look when the Volvo hit him? Jane’s fingernails picked silently at the little brains under the table. She had a mental snapshot of the funny, confused expression as those Dior-blue eyes looked up from his scrounged cigar to the oncoming car. She remembered the softish, queasy feeling as they slammed into the wall and the jerk of pain as the strap thingy dug into her shoulder. She rubbed at the bruise.
‘Tell me about your evening. How many drinks did you have?’
She answered very slowly. A bit tipsy. A tiny bit slow on the uptake. Mr Hullavington was drinking Nwee. Nwee something. But Jane had wanted Whywine. Always Whywine with fish. Not too slurred. Her accent was edging steadily down the A3, mouth slightly ajar, a bit of a wobble to the head, letting her chin stroke the collar of her mutation mink.
Wouldn’t she like to give Mum and Dad a ring? Let them know where she was? The detective came into sharper focus when she filled her eyes with tears. He had really bad skin.
‘They died. I moved up to London.’
As usual, nobody thought to ask for dates.
How long had she known her fiancé? Turned out he’d been having a word with old Mrs Whatsit down in Putney so that suddenly a run-of-the-mill Death by Dangerous Driving was shaping up into a nice little murder inquiry.
‘He wasn’t my fiancé.’ She gave the word a tiny lick of French polish. The way Suzy always said it.
Oh yes he was.
Oh no he wasn’t.
‘Oh yes he was. Your flatmate says he was.’
Did she now? Thank you, Suzy.
And then he pulled a small green leather box out of his pocket. There was a dark stain on one side.
‘This was found on the deceased.’
The detective flicked the box open with his bitten thumb and held it out to her, tilting it from side to side, trying his best to make the stones twinkle in the dead fluorescent light, as if offering her three thousand a year plus five bedrooms and a garage in Putney.
Jane stared at the ring with its dirty blue and white stones. It would go nicely with the bracelet. Gin was good for cleaning jewellery.
Doreen’s engagement ring was very cheap-looking. A nine-carat Princess setting for a dull ruby and two tiny chips of rose-cut diamond. They’d had one just like it in the window of the pawnshop in Croydon. You could see it wasn’t worth two bob but Doreen always wore it swivelled to the inside of her hand just the same – in case somebody took a fancy to it. She used to twitch it round by flicking it with her little finger which always had scratches on the knuckle from the crudely-made claws holding the stones.
Carol’s was no better. ‘Illusion-setting solitaire’, she called it, but there was more setting than diamond with shiny white metal bits all round the crappy little tenth of a carat to make it look flashier than it was.
Johnny�
�s ring wasn’t like that. A bit old-fashioned but good stones. His mother’s probably – her mother’s even. Jane glanced down at the ringless fingers in her lap, unconsciously fanning them out to imagine sapphires against the navy grosgrain, but the effect was spoilt by a big blob of fingerprinting ink under one of her Persian Pink nails. She’d need turps to get that off. Fingerprints, honestly. Blue-satin evening gloves and a red velvet steering wheel cosy and the berks were looking for fingerprints.
So. Had she and her fiancé quarrelled? He wasn’t her bloody fiancé, how many more times? He obviously didn’t believe her. She’d met the mother? Yes. Seen the house? (He knew those big houses in Putney.) A twopenny-halfpenny mannequin like her wasn’t going to turn down a public-school meal ticket like John Frederick Hullavington. Of course she bloody said Yes. What had the row been about? Had she ever driven a left-hand drive before? Left-hand what? A foreign car. A car where the steering wheel was on the left-hand side. She looked dimly back at him. Where was it supposed to be?
They left her on her own for a while and she put her head down on the table. She woke up when the door clicked open again and she looked up at the man who came in. Her face was flushed with sleep and her wristwatch had left a funny pattern on her cheek. It was a new policeman: not married; smarter suit; posher voice; better barber. Jane swivelled slightly in the chair so that the ladder in her stocking wouldn’t show.
He was a Detective Inspector – sounded like two jobs. He sat down opposite, eyeing her up, but she couldn’t hear any clarinets playing. He didn’t swallow hard or check his tie. Nothing. Without her face on she was invisible – like Mrs Kowalski. Being old must be like this.
‘So. What is a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’
A Vision of Loveliness Page 24