Destroy Unopened

by Anabel Donald

  ‘I don’t think so. More because she feels guilty, and it’s easier if she doesn’t have to name his wife or her husband, who I think she loves, the husband I mean but possibly the wife too. Close friends or family, trust me.’

  ‘Hilary’s got sisters. And Robbie’s brother’s married.’

  ‘Not a bad place to start. Other things to look for, the son went to boarding school – Alan noticed that, actually his notes aren’t bad—’

  ‘I haven’t had time to read them—’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll tell you his as well as mine, but there aren’t that many anyway, not real facts. She doesn’t half go on about her feelings. And she quotes a lot.’

  ‘Is that surprising?’

  Polly grimaced. ‘It is and it isn’t. What kind of professor was Robbie?’

  ‘Historical Geography. Medieval drainage and irrigation.’

  ‘Then I suppose she’s something literary. Writer, teacher—’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because she’s a smart cookie, I think. Skilful. I get the impression she’s keeping him ticking over, keeping him interested, and the feeling/literary bit would tie in if he was that way inclined, but if he’s into sewers, I suppose that must be her . . .’

  ‘I don’t think it’s the sewer kind of drainage.’

  ‘Whatever. It’s not culture, is it, and the letters are culture which I’d assumed they shared.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Hang on a minute.’ I fetched my list from the action board. ‘This is what I’ve got so far. The woman is now at least in her late forties.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The son is twenty-four, with a birthday in the first half of the year.’ Polly nodded me on. ‘He has an older sister, at least two years older.’

  She hesitated. ‘There’s something odd about the sister.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I wonder if she’s handicapped. There aren’t many mentions of her – nothing about her at school, but quite a lot about the son at school.’

  ‘She might assume her lover’d be more interested in his own son than in her daughter.’

  ‘Could be . . . It’s hard to pin down, but there’s something . . . a sort of indulgence, when she writes about her.’ Polly started riffling through the pile of letters, then stopped. ‘I’ll find it later. Just put, query handicapped, and go on.’

  ‘The woman was in Rome in August 1970.’ Nod. ‘She lives with her husband.’ Nod. ‘The letters seem to change in the last few years, but you haven’t got that far, so you wouldn’t know. And that’s all I had.’

  ‘Add the son who went to boarding school when he was thirteen, and the friend/family bit for the woman, and her maybe being a writer or a teacher of English. Listen, Alex, I’ve got to go and get ready soon, I’m going out tonight, I told you, but I’ve photocopied the letters and can I take a set, cos I haven’t finished them and I’ll probably have more ideas on the ones I’ve read, there are things floating round in the back of my mind I haven’t pinned down yet, and also can I show them around a bit this evening, I can’t give your client’s name away however much I drink, because I don’t know it?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Who’re you going to be with?’

  ‘The girls. In their time, Other Women every one.’

  The girls were models from the agency Polly had worked for More than ten years ago they’d agreed to a reunion dinner every year; so far they’d kept the tradition going, although the original group was depleted by one suicide and one overdose, and only one was still a model.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning before I go anyway, my plane isn’t till the afternoon, so I’m off now, kiss kiss, look after yourself at Rillington Place, I hope the Arthur Fishburn thing is all right, I’m sorry for interfering, but I did mean it for the best . . .’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Without her, the flat settled back into quiet with a sigh of relief, or perhaps that was me. It was six o’clock: I had two hours before going over to keep my appointment with James Hobbs. Two hours sorting-out time.

  I turned up the thermostat, opened the windows to get rid of the Polly-perfume, expensive and musky, which I didn’t usually mind but now was making me queasy, settled down on the sofa with the telephone, and called my old school friend Michelle. She lives with her two kids in the council tower block where I grew up when I wasn’t in care.

  She’s always in – she’s been agoraphobic since she was raped at thirteen – and she spends a lot of time on the phone, so I wasn’t surprised to get the engaged tone.

  I tried Nick’s mobile. Still out of service. I tried her Oxford professor. Still no reply. I called in to my office phone and picked up the three messages.

  The first was an offer of work, the second Pauline Eyre again, could I get back to her please, the third Arthur Fishburn. He sounded his full age, older than he’d looked, and he wasn’t comfortable with answering machines.

  ‘Oh – er – this is a message for Alex Tanner, sent at . . . wait a mo . . . five thirty on Friday, that’s five thirty p.m., seventeen thirty I mean. This is a message to say that as requested by Miss Straker, I think that was the name, I’ve informed the SIO, that is the Senior Investigating Officer from the Met, that is the Metropolitan Police, and also at the SIO’s request the receiver at the Major Incident Room in Notting Hill Police Station of the suspicions expressed concerning a tenant of the flats in Bartlett Close formerly Rillington Place in connection with the on-going investigation into the murders of young women perpetrated in or about Notting Hill, that being all the information available to me. Oh, this is Arthur, Arthur Fishburn, formerly police constable Arthur Fishburn, retired. I think that’s it . . . Oh, if I can be of any further help—’

  The machine had cut him off.

  I wondered if anyone in the Met would listen to anything Arthur said. I wouldn’t, in their place, particularly since he couldn’t give a source. But the first part of my work for Hilary Lucas was done.

  I re-dialled Michelle. This time she answered, swamped by a background of gunshots and screams. ‘Alex, hi, will you turn that down Warren, I won’t tell you again – TURN IT DOWN!’ The gunshots died away and a door slammed. ‘OK, I can hear you now – he’s off to sulk.’ ‘How’re the kids?’ ‘They’re kids, what can I say? Going through a stage, know what I mean? How’re you? Going to come over and see me? Bring Thai. I’ve got into Thai. More subtle than Indian and spicier than Chinese. I’ve even tried cooking it but the shopping’s hard to get, round here, or so Mick says but I’m not sure I believe him, lazy bugger.’ Mick was her latest man and he’d not only lasted for a whole year but he also had a job, as far as I knew the only man in the tower block who did, though most of the women were employed. ‘I’ve been thinking about you all this week,’ she went on. ‘Warren’s made a guy. Do you remember our guys?’

  When she said it, I remembered. For years she and I had been a team. Primary school, comprehensive school, we’d sat together, spent breaks together, covered each other’s backs. Often I’d eaten tea at her place, either because my mother’d been out of it – she was schizophrenic then, now she’s got Alzheimer’s – or when I escaped from the current foster parents. I could still taste her mother’s fry-ups. They were never good exactly, but they were comforting and familiar and she’d been generous to me. Looking back, I realized just how generous.

  Shell and I had made a good profit on the guys. We’d had a five-year run, eight to thirteen. After the rape she’d quit. I’d gone on alone, because I could look younger than my age and I liked the money, and I hadn’t minded doing things alone. I couldn’t swear to it that I’d given her a share, even though she was too scared to go out and I’d done all the work. I hoped I had.

  ‘Of course I remember,’ I said. ‘We made over eighty quid one year.’

  ‘It was a good laugh, wasn’t it?’

  ‘A great laugh. Good times.’

  Pause. I don’t know what she was thinking, but I thought about th
e disaster of her life, and the purely joyous bubbly sound of her long-ago giggle.

  ‘I’ll come and see you soon, but things are hectic at the minute . . .’ I waited, briefly, for her to ask me what I wanted, then realized with an embarrassed shock that she was probably the only person I knew who I regularly rang up when I didn’t want something. ‘I need advice,’ I said.

  ‘From me? Gerrover! Since when have you listened to me, Smarty?’

  ‘I’m listening now.’

  ‘OK,’ she said seriously. ‘I’m listening too. Get it out, c’mon.’

  ‘Yesterday and today, I can’t concentrate. I feel sick. I’m sensitive to smells. I’m drinking milk, and I hate milk.’

  ‘Peeing a lot?’

  ‘Not that I’ve noticed.’

  ‘Nipples?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Ha bloody ha. Sounds as if you’re in the club, love.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘Go down the chemist, get yourself a test, give it a try tomorrow morning. You trying for this, were you?’

  ‘Absolutely not. I’m on the pill. And we use condoms.’

  ‘Determined little sod, then. Takes after his mum. But you better read the instructions on the test, the pill may do something to it . . . You all right, Alex?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  ‘I’m really pleased,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’ll come back to me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ll find out. When’re you going to tell your mum? How is she? Still in hospital?’

  ‘How do you expect her to be? She hasn’t made sense for years. She doesn’t even recognize me. Of course she’s still in hospital,’ I said irritably.

  ‘You’ve still got to tell her if you test positive,’ said Michelle coaxingly. ‘It stands to reason. You’ve got to tell your mum.’

  I didn’t argue. When she says ‘it stands to reason’, she means the exact opposite: that reason is nowhere, but that deep feeling or conventional belief is involved and that nothing will move her. She’d said, ‘it stands to reason’ that she’d be safer if she never went out. I’ve often tried to persuade her to get help for her agoraphobia. I still try, off and on.

  We talked for another ten minutes but I’d switched off.

  I’d known I was pregnant just before Polly left. It hadn’t been a thought process, the putting together of clues – such obvious clues. It had been a fraction of a second’s shift from total ignorance to total certainty. Talking to Michelle had just been a way of acknowledging it, the beginning of a long road of female confidences and obstetrical gossip, the kind of thing I’d spent my life avoiding because wombs are boring. I just hoped my own womb would be a page turner.

  Abortion wasn’t an option. It was Barty’s child, he wanted children, we were due to be married anyway, and I wanted children.

  Some of the time, I wanted children. Some of the time I didn’t. But now I edited out the thoughts about not wanting children, same as, when the child came, I’d edit my words.

  I’d stop taking the pill, I’d carry a supply of dry biscuits for the sickness (Michelle’s advice), I’d tell Barty when I had independent confirmation.

  Meanwhile, if I could, I wouldn’t think about it, who unless I was very unlucky wasn’t an it but was a him. Or her. I had work to do, and with any luck my brain would stay on-line enough to do it. But right now, I suddenly realized I needed to sleep. An hour’s nap, that’s what I wanted. That’s what my womb wanted, I supposed, because unpregnant Alex never took naps.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was well dark by seven thirty, and as I walked through the streets to Bartlett Close I remembered, with a slight frisson between my shoulder blades, Arthur Fishburn’s insistence that it was dangerous to walk alone in the Notting Hil streets. It wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t. And it was typical of the over-protective, wanting to make himself important, Arthur to say that. But all the same I didn’t feel easy, possibly because I was now walking for two, and I crossed over the road once because there were some particularly threatening footsteps behind me. But once you start worrying about that kind of thing you become a prisoner in your own house, waiting for someone to go out with you. It was inconceivable. In England’s climate there are large stretches of the year where if you only went out in bright daylight you’d hardly be able to go out at all, and I wasn’t going to give way to that.

  I took a roundabout way through the rest of the estate to check on Jonno and Solange. I saw them both; both involved with doorstep conversations. Neither of them saw me, and that was fine. I’d get their reports tomorrow morning.

  Bartlett Close was quiet. On the estate there had been people and lights. In Bartlett Close, with only one building, there was silence, and thin gleams of light escaping from around the rims of the curtain of the top flat. The rest of the block was in darkness.

  I went up the steps, pressed the buzzer marked Hobbs, and identified myself to the intercom crackle. There was no verbal response, but the door swung open in front of me. In the streetlights I could see a hallway crammed with bicycles, and the timed switch for the hall light, which I pressed and pressed without result.

  ‘Doesn’t work,’ called a flat voice from the top of the stairs which I could only dimly see at the back of the hallway. ‘Must get around to fixing it. There’s a torch on the table to your right.’

  I saw the torch, put it on and headed up the stairs. The beam of light gave a spooky air to a perfectly normal hall, I thought, impatient with myself I felt a dread which was absolutely unwarranted by anything that was happening. And it couldn’t be Rillington Place. I wasn’t sensitive to atmosphere, and I didn’t believe in ghosts: not the malevolent ghost of the necrophiliac Christie, nor the pathetic ghost of the half-witted Evans, nor the even more pathetic ghosts of the murdered women and the toddler child.

  At the top of the stairs was light from the opened door, and the young man who’d spoken to me. When I reached the top he was still standing on the small landing, blocking the doorway, and we were standing closer than I liked, ‘Can we go in?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, leading me into the living room. He was a very ordinary-looking young man, about five foot ten, with an unremarkable face, collar-length dark-brown hair untidily brushed back from a high forehead, and pale-blue eyes behind a pair of glasses which had once had elegant metal designer frames but were now held together at the bridge and the sides by what looked like insulating tape. He was dressed for comfort and warmth: shapeless brown corduroy trousers, check flannel shirt, thick, once cream, now beige, Arran sweater. The building was chilly: I wished I had a sweater too, even though I don’t normally feel the cold.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘You’re Alex Tanner? I’m James Hobbs, except I’m known as Jack, but that’s old stuff unless you’re into cricket. He was a batsman. Call me Jack, if you like, everyone does. Take your coat?’

  ‘No thanks.’ I huddled into my leather jacket and looked around the room.

  It was oblong, quite big, quite tidy, and had been converted from light industrial to residential with the mean features of a low-budget building: low ceilings, poky windows, a central light fitting with three high-powered bulbs and no shade. The walls were still unplastered breeze-block, painted magnolia, the paint partly worn through where someone had scrubbed off the inevitable grubby marks round the light switches. Magnolia gloss woodwork, sparkling clean, even on the doors. Posters Blu-Tacked to the wall, about 50 per cent well-known and modernish works of art, 50 per cent female actresses and singers. The art was all powerful, nothing pretty: Guernica, The Scream, plenty of abstracts. Cheap DIY bookcases crammed mostly with paperback thrillers; two sofas, not matching, with covers so old that the original floral pattern had faded and worn to yellowy beige. A desk with a computer. A wall rack with a music system, big speakers, hundreds of CDs. Not a speak of dust anywhere, that I could see, but apart from that the room was unremarkabl
e, like its tenant.

  ‘So what do you think?’ said Hobbs.

  ‘Very nice,’ I said.

  ‘Is it?’ he said, looking round as if for the first time. ‘It does me because I don’t really notice where I live – it’s the workshop that goes with it I need, really. D’you want a drink? Or d’you want to work? Measure the noise level, or something?’ His unexpressive, unsmiling face was as flat as his voice. Not hostile, not welcoming. If I hadn’t felt so spooked I’d have liked him, I thought. I like direct, practical people.

  ‘A drink would be good,’ I said.

  ‘Lager do you?’

  ‘Great.’

  He vanished back into the hall, presumably on the way to the kitchen. I sat on one of the sofas. Ouch. No springs. I went much further down than I expected and cracked my chin on my knee.

  ‘Here.’ He was standing right in front of me, and I hadn’t heard him come back. I jumped, as much as it was possible to jump when I was effectively enveloped by the exhausted sofa. He didn’t seem to notice, just kept standing there offering me the glass. His hands were big, strong-looking, discoloured, not as if they hadn’t been washed enough but as if they were ingrained with some dark substances that he worked with, day in, day out. I also caught a whiff of an acrid, unfamiliar smell. Paint or something – maybe he was an artist.

  I took the glass and tried to drink from it, then noticed that the liquid was juddering, nearly spilling over. My hand must be trembling, I thought, lowering the glass gingerly.

  ‘Train,’ he said. ‘Give it a minute.’

  Then I noticed the noise. It wasn’t so much loud as all-pervasive, an elemental experience shaking the sofa and the room and the building. ‘Is that the Hammersmith and City line?’ I said.

  ‘Yep. About every seven minutes. It does knock off between midnight and six, though, and you get used to it. Crap building, in my view. The flats should have been soundproofed. Still could be, of course.’ He sat down on the sofa opposite, sipped his drink and looked at me, expressionless.

  I felt rattled. I wanted to be out of there, and the more direct I was, the quicker it would be. ‘Sorry to be so nervous,’ I said. ‘I reckon it’s age. I’ve been most peculiar since I turned thirty, but you wouldn’t know about that of course.’