‘Will you come up for a cup of tea?’ She used the same words as she had the day before, hoping they would elicit the same response and that Ivan would accept.
‘I want to get down to the country before it is too late.’
The evening was over.
60
Monday, 24 January 2011
The Ram Inn on Black Lion Lane had closed early, so few customers had ventured out. Although a thaw was setting in, by nightfall the pavements had frozen and an insidious grey fog hung over the Thames and crept up the Bell Steps. The clock in the St Peter’s Church tower struck ten.
Jack had not entertained the possibility that his mother’s killer was a woman. It had not felt right, nor did it still, but it did make sense. When people had said they had not seen anyone suspicious, or noticed a stranger in the area, they meant men. Sarah Glyde was not a stranger, nor would she inspire suspicion.
The police report said it had taken strength to apply the ligature to his mother’s neck. Sarah moulded clay, she lifted heavy pieces of sculpture and wielded tools that could kill. She was strong.
Despite his cleaning, the air in the hallway stank of decay, its contents absorbing moisture, gathering dust, the wallpaper yellowing and peeling and brittle. Framed photographs of eminent Victorian ancestors were obscured by silver in the prints rising to the surface. Sarah Glyde’s home was her studio. The house was impervious to life.
Jack’s ghost-self moved on soundless feet, the clay-cutter wire spiralling in his hands. He unlatched the basement door, the box containing his mother’s clay head digging into his armpit. The basement stairs strained and flexed as he descended. At the bottom step he let his eyes grow accustomed to the hovering shapes in the half-dark. The fridge trilled and then shuddered into silence. Ethereal light from the garden called forth ogres and spectres of his childhood and evoked the spirits of animals and trees turned to stone by the White Witch. He was in a gallery of statues that wanted only his touch to bring them back to life. He turned on the light and chose the longest kitchen knife from a row on a magnetic strip. The blade was sharp.
Jack may not have been a guest in this house, but he had cleaned every inch of it. The telephone wire was clipped beneath the barred window facing on to the back garden. Jack had wiped it free of cobwebs. His hand jerked as he fitted the blade between the wire and the wall and levered out a clip. He steadied it and then prised out another clip, loosening the wire, which he severed.
There was a light in her studio.
Snow had receded from the path; he left no tracks and his footsteps were silent. The studio door creaked when he stepped inside and he was enveloped in the fuggy warmth of a calor gas stove.
‘Who’s that?’ The voice came from behind the partition. She was scared. Jack was gratified to discover she could feel fear. He brandished the knife, flashing the long silver blade to disguise the tremor in his hand. The cutter dangled from his fist; he had a choice of weaponry.
Sarah Glyde, in a stained man’s shirt and torn jeans, was seated on the stool by her work-table.
‘Oh, it’s you.’ She gave a wan smile. ‘Did you want your money? I pay the agency, they should have explained.’
She saw the knife.
Jack was intrigued at how quickly colour can drain from a face.
‘No amount of cash will cover your debt to me.’
She shrank back, crashing against the heater, the jolt opening the stove door. Jack kicked it shut. His clay head was on the table. She was working on it.
‘A good likeness.’ The clay eyes followed him as he strolled to the patio doors and confirmed they were locked.
‘I’ll pay you for being a model. This is only a rough start.’
He wanted to say: What’s the next stage – you strangle me and leave my body down there? It would be crass, the pleasure momentary.
She was allowing herself relief, Jack could see. He wanted money; that was it, she could pay him off. She was used to disposing of problems with a cheque and was making rapid calculations: would a cleaner know the going rate for an artist’s model? Could she undercut it?
She was edging closer to the telephone beside his clay head. He smiled as, the knife slicing the air, he got there first. He pressed the green button and handed it to her, in a trance she put it to her ear.
Now she was truly frightened. That was more like it.
‘I don’t keep money here. We can go to a cashpoint. I can take out five hundred at a time. I don’t have a car, we’ll have to walk, unless you… The nearest one is in King Street.’
It was extraordinary how people fixed on the more prosaic facts of life at times like these. She still had the temerity to lie: oh yes, she had a car.
The blade rat-tat-tatted against the worktop as Jack’s grip on the handle lessened. Intent on finding the murderer, he had not considered the logistics of his revenge. Like Stella, he hated mess.
Glyde’s hands fluttered over the head as if by destroying it she might destroy him. Suddenly Jack understood that this was true. If she smashed the clay piece on the tiled floor he would be nothing.
‘I don’t want your money.’ He spoke in a weary voice.
He took the box from under his arm and placed it on the table. Gently taking out Kate’s head, he positioned it next to his and stood before the two faces. They were indistinguishable.
Sarah Glyde backed as far as she could go, stopping by the wall that abutted the Bell Steps.
The heads had identical bone structures: a straight nose with a lump below the bridge and square chins and wide mouths and full lips over which played the ghost of a smile. The gender difference was not apparent beyond a thickness of neck and an Adam’s apple on the newer sculpture.
The real difference was in the mastery of the clay: over the decades the artist had developed a deeper relationship with her material. The first head had the strained perfection of a younger and less confident sculptor: she had cut and smeared, pushed and pummelled to achieve verisimilitude and technically it was exceptional, but it lacked a soul. The clay for Jack’s head had been moulded at its maker’s behest: coaxed and massaged to her will. While Jack’s jawline was sharper than his mother’s, it was fashioned with a lighter feel.
Sarah dropped the handset. It hit the table, bounced to the floor and chips of plastic flew across the tiles. The casing lay at Jack’s feet, the light still glowing.
‘She was beautiful,’ she whispered. ‘She had seen my advert for pottery classes in the newspaper but didn’t want to join a group. She insisted she was musical, not artistic. She commissioned me to make her likeness as a surprise. We had several sessions: I sketched her first. Her son had to come with her so I gave him clay to keep him busy. He didn’t make soldiers or sausages like most kids; he created a half-naked woman with folded arms. I recognized the statue by Karel Vogel beside the Great West Road. He had paid attention to what he saw; it was an incredible likeness. We fired it.’ She was talking to Kate’s head. ‘I don’t think she realized how talented he was. She was astonished.’
Sarah bent over his mother, her palms tenderly cupping the face, not making contact, echoing its shape with butterfly movements. She went on: ‘I saw you in the street. I wanted you to model for me, but before I could get your attention, you had gone. When you appeared on my doorstep with your boss I thought you were a ghost. I worked from photographs and memory, but I was certain I had been here before. I knew the planes of your face, the way the light plays on your cheekbones. I knew you.’
‘Why did you kill her?’
Jack had asked his mother’s murderer this question as he watched Miss Thoroughgood chalk up sums on the blackboard, as he walked London according to the street atlas, as he drove his train beneath London. When he was with the Leaning Woman.
Sarah Glyde was as tall as Jack. He remembered his mother as tall, but in the case notes he read she was five foot six inches. He was six foot. If his mummy were here, he would tower over her. Sarah Glyde had easily overpowered h
er.
For years he had scoured the streets for the monster he would capture and slay. This wiry woman in her fifties with a grip of steel was that monster. Sarah Glyde’s head was cadaverous in the angled light; a bluish vein pulsated on her forehead, her hair escaped in coiling springs from a careless bun. Her bones would snap with a mild blow. The knife would slice into her with little resistance and she would feel a cold pain and look, uncomprehending, at the quiet pumping stream.
Jack swallowed hard.
For a moment he longed for her to hold him, to grip his throat, squeeze down on his neck and, as she had made a head identical to Katherine Rokesmith’s, by killing him she would reunite him with her.
You killed my mummy.
He had dreamed of uttering these words. He had spoken them into the night, whispered them in spare rooms, from rooftops, in tool cupboards in the homes of his Hosts. Yet faced with the mind like his own, Jack’s lips were as immobile as clay.
She came towards him and he lifted the knife.
‘You have made a mistake.’ She flinched from the blade. If he used the cutter he would not have to touch her, just draw the wire through her flesh, like butter.
‘You told the police you didn’t know Kate.’
‘It was her secret.’ With an unsteady hand she supported his clay cheek, refining the bone beneath the left eye. ‘They would have asked questions I could not answer. She had taken the piece away and wasn’t coming back. She never paid me and I did not want her husband to cover it, he was going through enough. Then when it was he who murdered her, there was no point.’
She began on his other cheek. Jack had not thought the head could look more like himself than it already did. His own strength seemed to ebb as, retreating from her fear, Sarah Glyde smoothed and stroked the clay.
‘I talk to her. I talk to all my pieces. I liked her. Why would I kill her?’
‘The police asked about your car?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Don’t lie.’ He would pierce her heart. Tuck the blade under the left side of her rib cage and give a firm push.
‘I couldn’t drive.’
‘A 1964 blue Ford Anglia?’
‘I don’t even know what one looks like.’
It was a while since Jack had seen someone so frightened, but any gratification he felt was dull, for she had not expressed remorse. He could not kill her until she said she was sorry.
‘What has that to do with me?’
‘It was registered in your name. After 1981 no more road tax payments made. I know a lot of facts about that year.’
‘How could that be?’ She clasped her hands under her armpits as if to warm them; the stove had gone out. Beads of perspiration glistened on her bone-pale forehead and her lower jaw quivered. She was lying.
‘S. A. I. Glyde? Sarah Annabel, Isabel, Anne, Ingrid… am I close?’
‘My initials are S. M. Glyde, Sarah Matilda and my mother’s were C. E. for Clarissa Emma. She couldn’t drive.’ She got up. ‘I did not kill Kate Rokesmith and nor did my mother. Can we stop this?’
She was hiding something, busying herself paring strips from a block, dragging the wire through the clay. He pulled up a stool and sat down at the table. The lines converged, the shapes coalesced; the air shifted. Day by day she had turned his mother into a statue.
Jack raised the blade, the fingers of his other hand curling around the clay cutter.
The clay had rolled beneath his palms, thinning as he pressed down with all the weight a four-year-old could muster. Too thin. He had bunched it up and started again until it was long and quite thin, then worked at the legs, the folded arms, the head. When he visited again she had put it out ready for him; moistened by a damp rag it was soft. When the Lady was finished she had got a box for him to take her home in.
His mummy had said he could not keep it. Their visits were a secret.
‘I had no reason to want her dead,’ Sarah repeated, addressing the heads. ‘If I had been here, in my studio, I might have saved her. If she had cried out, I might have heard. In the summer I hear people down there. But I was at my brother’s and when I got back, it was pandemonium. The streets and the river were teeming with police. There was even a helicopter. I had to argue to get into my house.’
‘You told the police you were at the dentist.’
‘My brother is a dentist. Antony has always done my teeth.’
Jack was floating somewhere on the other side of the space. Only the heads had substance.
‘For God’s sake, not like that!’ Tony cradled the ripped box as if it were a hamster that he loved and Jonathan saw that although Tony made a fuss of him, he did not like him. He had supposed until then that all grown-ups liked children.
Uncle Tony.
His mobile phone rang. He checked the screen. Sarah Glyde lunged at a bodkin on the table and he thrust the blade at her; catching the bodkin, he sent it skittering over the wood. She crashed against the French doors and slumped to the floor.
He put his fingers to his lips and answered the phone, the blade poised. If it were him he would still shout for help.
‘Is that Jack Harmon?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Jackie here at Clean Slate. I’m sorry to bother you so late. Stella’s not picking up on her mobile or at home. She said she was going to see you – is she there?’ The words filled his ear. Jack tapped the table with the point of the blade, making nicks in the wood.
‘She’s not,’ he replied pleasantly.
‘I left her a message. It’s not like Stella not to return calls. If you know where she is…’
‘What’s the message?’
Sarah Glyde was quaking, hugging her knees. She looked defeated; he knew the signs. Now that she was penitent, he imagined soothing her. It was his Achilles heel that he wanted to take care of his Hosts.
‘A man called Colin rang. He may be a plasterer. I’m relying on guesswork because the line was terrible. I think now he said “teeth” and I’ve been going over it and I think it must be a dentist. It might be a referral. We have one dentist on our books, as you know, but he’s called Ivan, so it’s not him. Never mind, I suppose it can wait until the morning.’
Afterwards Jack slipped the telephone into his pocket. Signs were all around him, like a game of Patience falling into place.
‘What was your brother’s name?’
‘Antony.’
‘Do you ever call him Tony?’ The answer was nudging him before she spoke. He too was shaking.
‘No.’ She was staring past Jack and he looked quickly around but there was no one there. ‘Some people do, it depends when they knew him.’
‘Tony Glyde?’
‘Antony was my mother’s son from her first husband who died in a plane he was piloting back from France. It went down in the sea off Shoreham. His name was Challoner. He was a dentist too. Really Antony’s my half-brother.’
The words were lost in a rush of white sound. A woman with a dog vanishing amongst the trees.
‘…I want to call him Flyte but that’s the Waugh novel, and anyway that was the second husband…’
The room reeled, the clay heads tipped crazily in urgent conference, skulls crashing. Someone was shouting. His throat hurt because it was his own voice.
‘No. No. No.’
The wall was cold on his forehead. He felt a hand on his shoulder.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Is he buried in a village called Bishopstone?’ Jack walked towards the heads. Sarah Glyde encircled them with her arms. She was not fearful for herself.
‘How did you know?’
‘Does he… do you, have a brother called Ivan?’
‘That’s Antony’s third name. Simon Antony Ivan Challoner. Bit of a mouthful – in the family we’ve always called him Antony. At work he prefers Ivan. What about him?’
‘I clean for him,’ Jack muttered. For once he could not marshal facts.
‘He told me he d
idn’t have a cleaner.’
‘You saw him on the day of the murder.’ Jack was trying to keep to the point. ‘What’s the address of Challoner’s surgery?’ He knew the answer.
‘Two hundred and forty-two Kew Gardens Terrace.’
Two hundred and forty-two. His set number the day Stella boarded his train and the number on the last page of the A–Z. Nothing is a waste of time; everything leads somewhere.
‘I had an eleven o’ clock appointment with Antony. I did tell the police. He wasn’t working; he never does on Mondays. He gave me a filling. I remember because he caught my gum and made it bleed. Peculiar slip for he never makes mistakes.’
‘The time was wrong.’
‘What time?’
‘What happened when you got there?’
Sarah Glyde addressed his mother’s sculpture. ‘He didn’t answer the door, but I had his key so I let myself in and sat in the waiting room. It’s silly, but I didn’t feel I could go upstairs to his flat. He’s a private man. He used to hate it if I went into his room when we were young – as you know I still can’t. I read a magazine.’
‘How long for?’
‘It felt like an age. I was about to go when he arrived. So maybe about forty-five minutes? It wasn’t like him to be late either.’
‘Why was he late? Did he say?’
‘Neither of us mentioned it. I supposed it was my fault. I’m absent-minded. Antony never gets appointments wrong. As I said, he never makes mistakes.’ The last words were spoken with less conviction.
‘We now know that the murder could have happened at least three-quarters of an hour earlier.’
Jack gripped the table to stop himself from falling. Neither of them had noticed that he had put down the knife.
‘How was your brother?’
The light in the bulb burned out with a ping. Moonlight gave the studio the appearance of a negative image.
‘He was flustered and irritable and forgot to give me an injection.’
They did not move; statues both.
‘Where is Ivan Challoner now?’
Imperceptibly she shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
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