The Accomplice

by The Accomplice (retail) (epub)

  But I didn’t sleep. I already knew. I must have known the instant it happened that Alek was dead. The warm dampness of his breath on my fingers failed. The flicker of his heart under my hand had stopped.

  But I didn’t believe it. It was impossible that it should happen. We lay there for hours and he didn’t move; there was no whimper, no movement, and when we rose from the grave, when at last it was over, I carried out Alek’s body.

  Part Fifteen

  ZITA

  27

  “When do you go back to Moscow?” Zita asked Xenia. They were standing in Yevgenia’s drawing room on the edge of departure. Only Yevgenia sat, as usual, in her chair, looking out over the garden. Even Tom, strapped in his chair, was turning his head restlessly to indicate his desire to be off. Xenia was leaving the room as Zita spoke and did not reply until she returned from the kitchen with two pills on a saucer and a glass of water which she offered to Yevgenia.

  “In a month,” she said.

  “Two weeks,” Yevgenia corrected her.

  “Two weeks? Yes, it is. I had not realized how long I had been in Woodham already.” She shook a jar of pills which she held in her hand. “We shall have to order some more of these next week, but there are enough of them for now.” She put them down on the little side table. “I’ll leave them there for you.”

  Zita watched Xenia making preparations to leave for the day, arranging things within Yevgenia’s reach with an impatient briskness. It was evident she was longing to go. Yet their little exchange about returning to Moscow suggested it was Yevgenia rather than Xenia who was waiting most eagerly for the moment of final departure.

  “What time are they coming?” Yevgenia asked. “Xenia is going out for the day with Al and Rosie,” she said in explanation to Zita. “Will they have time to come in for some coffee? What will you do about lunch?”

  “I expect we go to a pub,” said Xenia. She was kneeling down to look Tom in the face, blotting the drool of saliva from his chin, so she avoided Yevgenia’s eyes. “But it’s just Al. Rosie couldn’t come.”

  “Rosie won’t be with you?”

  Xenia did not reply, concentrating on Tom. From outside came the sound of a car door slamming. Before the bell rang, Xenia had already risen and left the room.

  Zita stroked Tom’s silken head before taking the handles of the wheel chair. “Is there anything else?” she asked. “Apart from the books to be collected from the bookshop?”

  “Yes, Zita, my dear. Will you wait for a moment? I think Xenia will just be going.” From the hall they could hear little exclamations from Xenia, Al’s voice mumbling in reply. Xenia reappeared in the doorway.

  “We’re going then, Mrs Loftus, goodbye.”

  Yevgenia spoke, not turning her head, “Where is Al? Is he not coming to say good morning?”

  Xenia laughed. “I think he was hoping you would not ask to see him.” She sounded unaffectedly amused, unguilty. Zita had sensed the disapproval in Yevgenia when she had understood that Xenia’s expedition was to be undertaken without Rosie and immediately assumed that Al’s reluctance to present himself stemmed from a consciousness of guilt. When Al entered she realized she had been reading too much into the situation. Al’s embarrassment was explained at once by his appearance.

  Yevgenia did not turn, waiting for Al to move forward into her view. Zita was astonished into silence and only Tom reacted at first, the contortions of his face and hacking laugh startling Yevgenia into turning her head.

  “Al,” she said. Then, seeing him, “Good lord, whatever have you done?”

  “He has cut his hair; he has cut his hair,” Xenia's voice was gleeful.

  The women all gazed at him.

  Al said crossly, “There’s no need for you to laugh like that, Tom.”

  “I’m sorry, Al,” Yevgenia said. “It is most unfair of us. I can quite see why you wanted to escape with Xenia, unseen.”

  “You look very fine, Al,” Xenia said. “Much better.”

  “Better?” said Yevgenia. “Very fine, perhaps, not necessarily better. I was always very admiring of your mane of hair, Al. Now we must stop discussing your appearance. It is very bad form. If you were a woman, of course, it would be different; you would enjoy it.”

  Far from enjoying the admiration and commentary, Al was looking sheepish. His thick tail tied back with a twisted strand had gone and his hair was cut short all over his head. Zita, looking at the pale vulnerable skin at the back of his neck beneath the sharp edge of the newly shorn hair, saw that it had been very expertly and expensively cut. This was not a sudden impulse; or if it had been it had been an impulse to have the hair cut properly, not to hack it off with nail scissors.

  “What does Rosie think of it?” Zita asked. “No, don’t tell me. Yevgenia is right. We have talked too much about your hair. Yes, yes, Tom, we’re going very shortly.”

  Xenia and Al left, Xenia calling out as she closed the door, “I shall be late, Mrs Loftus, so I shall see you in the morning.”

  The sound of Rosie’s car manoeuvring in the drive filled the silence between Yevgenia and Zita when they had gone. The car reversed, moved forward, reversed again. There was a grinding of gears. Tom was shaken with laughter again. The air was filled with comments that neither could make now Al was no longer there. Yevgenia reached down for a large envelope propped against the legs of her chair.

  “Zita, I want you to take charge of this. You know I have been making tapes of my memories of my life before I married. I wish I could have written it down because writing makes you form your thoughts better. When you speak, your mind just jumps from one thing to the next without any proper framework. But with hands like mine I couldn’t hope to write. I have finished saying what I can and now I want to give it away. Will you keep it for me?”

  “Surely. I’ll put it with all your records in the office. What do you want done with it?”

  “You mean when I’m dead? I’m not sure. I don’t want anyone to hear them for the time being. When I’ve gone, you can listen to them, if you think they would be interesting. It has to be you, because they’re partly in Russian.”

  Zita spent the rest of the day with Tom. She pushed him into town to the toyshop, where he spent some birthday money from Valentina, and then on to the bookshop where she collected the biographies that Yevgenia had ordered and Tom chose a book on dinosaurs. She made Tom’s lunch and the two of them endured the long and troublesome process of feeding. Tom resisted food, particularly Zita’s, and her lovingly created concoctions were regularly spat onto the floor or ejected in a stream over his chin. Zita lacked Lynne’s careless skill in spooning something in when Tom was least expecting it and in catching what he spurted out. They needed a rest from one another after this. Zita put Tom in his chair, semi-reclined, in the garden to have a nap. Although he rarely slept in the afternoons, he was willing to spend an hour watching the leaves against the sky or listening to the small sounds of the garden or absorbed in whatever went on inside his head in those long periods when no one provided amusement or activity for him.

  Zita sat down at her desk for an hour’s domestic administration. At the back of her mind was the thought of Yevgenia’s tapes which might hold the explanation of many things, but which were not to be heard until she was dead. Later, she went out to collect Tom and to prepare for swimming at the Centre. She found him lying intently watching the hedge between her garden and Yevgenia’s.

  “What have you been looking at, Tom?” she asked. Conversation with Tom was one-sided if he did not have his computer and its synthetic voice with him. You supplied the answers to your own questions and carried on as if Tom had replied. He eye-pointed the hedge.

  “Did you see squirrels today? The big one with the ratty tail?” She waited for him to cast his eyes upwards which was his normal method of affirmation. Instead he closed his lids.

  “What about the big pigeon, you know, the fat pigeon who eats all the bird seed in the winter. Was he here today?” He closed his e
yes again. In denial his delicate, distorted face always looked as if he were exasperated at the stupidity of the world that could not follow his silent, incommunicable reasoning. She knelt down on the grass beside him. “OK, it’s a quiz; I have to guess what you saw. You saw the blackbirds, father, mother and grown-up-daughter-still-living-at-home, hunting worms. No? I’m doing my best. It was Hector.” This was a neighbour’s cat who fastidiously chose other people’s gardens in which to deposit his faeces. “No, all right. You’ll have to give me a clue.”

  Tom opened his mouth to produce a jerky braying. Lynne was much better than Zita at interpreting the sounds that he made. “A person?” she said doubtfully. “Good lord, did someone come? I didn’t hear anything. Really?”

  Tom was enjoying himself. He cast up his eyes and brayed again. Zita looked even more surprised. “Running? Then it couldn’t have been Yevgenia in her garden. Did Lynne come? Then I give up. I can’t possibly guess. You’ll have to tell me when you’re in your chair.”

  She took him inside and transferred him to his electric-powered wheel chair and pushed it out to the minivan. He was working the head switches on his computer, but she did not look at what he was writing. She had just settled in the driving seat, started the engine and was turning the minivan into the road, when Tom’s voice simulator, a huge bass voice like the Commandatore from the last act of Don Giovanni, blasted out, “Xenia.”

  “Tom, don’t do that when I’m driving,” Zita shrieked irritably. “Or switch to one of your other voices; you know that one always gives me a horrible fright. I could have driven off the road.”

  For a Saturday afternoon in August the pool at the Centre was curiously empty. Everyone must be on holiday, Zita thought. Tom, as always, loved the pool; buoyed up by his rubber ring, he could propel himself forward and the feeling of lightness and freedom bestowed by the water always pleased him. In the evening he was tired and happy, falling asleep over his supper and allowing himself to be put to bed early.

  Zita still had the books which she had collected to deliver to Yevgenia and now with Tom asleep she picked them up from the table in the hall and let herself out of the house. A suburban peace hung over her as she walked from her own garden to Yevgenia’s. It was so quiet that, although it was not yet fully dark, all the inhabitants of the area might have been already in bed and asleep, or dead. It was an elderly neighbourhood. No children shouted from the nearby gardens; no battered sports cars revved in the driveways. Faintly, from some distance, she could hear the whirr of a mower. There was no car in Yevgenia’s drive and no lights visible within the house. Xenia must still be out with Al, for if she were back she would have turned them on. What had Tom meant by blaring out Xenia’s name in the car?

  Zita rang the bell in case Xenia was in and to warn Yevgenia she was there, then tried the handle of the front door. It was locked. She walked round the house to the back garden and saw that Yevgenia must be sitting in the dark: no light lay over the terrace from the drawing room.

  The last rays of the sun shone on the great sliding panes of glass, not penetrating, making a broad, flaming foil sheet out of them. She walked to the corner of the terrace to try to push back the doors; then, as she peered in, she saw that she still could not see. It was as if she were looking into the murky waters of an uncleaned aquarium in which a faint current carried the turbid liquid in a light, smoky movement.

  Smoke, smoke. She tore at the doors. The handle which released the catch would not move; it was locked from within. She ran from the terrace towards the kitchen door; it, too, resisted her. She ran back down the drive towards her own house to find Yevgenia’s keys. She scrabbled in the drawer of the table in the hall, telling herself that Yevgenia was certainly out; she must be out. But she did not wait to telephone for help from home; she raced back as fast as she could. As soon as she unlocked the front door an acrid smell filled her nostrils, burning her throat. She pushed open the door of the drawing room and, like a wall of water from a broken dam, a black wave engulfed her, blinding her, gagging her. As she staggered back, she saw little red crocus flowers springing up on the ground through the black mist.

  28

  Tom, normally so sensitive to light and dark, noise and silence, emotion of every kind, slept tranquilly through everything, the sirens and the flashing lights in the road, the arrival of the ambulance, of Dr Flowers, of Lynne, of Xenia, of the stretcher bearers. Neither the telephone calls nor the strange voices within the house made any impression on him that night. Zita, switching in and out of consciousness as if someone else was in charge of the remote control and was manically and arbitrarily swapping from channel to channel, kept repeating his name, “Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom.”

  “He’s all right,” she was told. “Don’t worry. He’s all right. Lynne’s here. Xenia’s here. He’ll be all right.”

  Tom was her first thought as she struggled back to life next day. Light filtered through her half-open lids and with it memory. Without moving, she opened her eyes; she could see the carpet of her own bedroom and a pair of thin knees: Xenia.

  “Tom?” she said.

  “He’s all right. Lynne’s taking him for a walk. How are you?”

  “Yevgenia?”

  “No.”

  “What happened?”

  “I think they are going to ask you that.”

  “No, to me.”

  “Smoke inhalation. Is that what they call it? Dr Flowers tried to take you to hospital, but there was no bed. So he left you here. He’s coming now. He said you would be all right.”

  Zita closed her eyes. “I’d like to see Tom.”

  “I’ll get Lynne to bring him to you as soon as they are back.”

  Dr Flowers came first. Zita was already up and dressed, brushing her hair in front of the mirror, when he came in.

  “I’m later than I meant to be. I had to drop Laura at church. You’re all right then? How do you feel?”

  He was a small, slight man, looking at all times rather like a tough Irish jockey, even more so in his Sunday dress of tight yellow corduroy trousers worn with a green jacket and waistcoat. Thick fine hair, now going grey, stuck straight out from his forehead like a boy’s fringe and beneath it his long wispy eyebrows quivered like antennae, sensitive to every feeling released into the atmosphere by the pain and distress around him. They knew each other well. Zita, never sick herself, consulted him constantly about Tom.

  “My chest hurts a bit.”

  “That’s normal after what you breathed in.”

  “My hair smells disgusting, of smoke. I must wash it. Was it a cigarette?”

  “Must have been. The fire brigade are next door again now. They think a lighted cigarette fell down into her chair and smouldered there for hours. She must have fallen asleep. She’ll have died from smoke inhalation. She’ll have known nothing; no pain.” Dr Flowers broke off his account to examine her. Zita obediently breathed in and out on command while she absorbed this news.

  “By the way,” he said as he put away his stethoscope. “Have you got the son’s phone number in Italy? Xenia told us last night that he was away on holiday. So the family hasn’t been informed yet.”

  “I can get it. I’ll let them know. I’ll have to speak to Marcus in any case. Let’s go and find some coffee. I feel drugged.”

  “You are, or you were. I gave you something last night. You were still trying to organize the world from a state of semi-consciousness. So I put you out and called Lynne. Then Xenia came home, and I brought her round here.”

  In the kitchen she saw that someone – Xenia, undoubtedly, for Lynne would never have thought of it – had laid breakfast for her, a cloth, with a plate, a bowl, a cup and saucer. No wonder Naomi and Marcus adored having her with them.

  “And when I opened the door, the flames…”

  “They probably burst out for the first time at that moment, with the rush of oxygen.”

  “So I did the worst possible thing?” Her head ached. She poured out their coffee. Xenia ha
d found a honeycomb, butter, yoghurt, a loaf, but Zita could not eat.

  “The police’ll want to speak to you. It’s all very straightforward, but I imagine there’ll be an inquest.” Zita leaned her head on one hand. “You’re lucky it isn’t a double inquest. How you managed to escape serious burns yourself, I don’t know.”

  She looked at the palms of her hands in surprise that she had been at risk.

  “I threw the rug on the flames. I didn’t go near them myself.”

  “Then you picked Yevgenia up and carried her out.”

  “I’m used to picking people up.” But pulling Yevgenia out of her chair hadn’t been like picking Tom up. She was a tall woman, though not heavily built. Zita had put her hands in her armpits, in the way that she lifted Tom, and once she had pulled her forward the point of balance had shifted so violently that they had toppled together to the floor. The fall had probably saved them – her – for there was enough air at floor level to allow her to breathe, choking and gasping, as she crawled backwards, pulling Yevgenia’s body by the armpits as she went. They had reached the fresh air and, leaving Yevgenia on the ground by the front door, she had returned within, this time making for the kitchen and shutting the door behind her. The air here was tainted but not consumed by smoke and she was able to call for an ambulance and the fire brigade, before the fumes overwhelmed her. So they had come and rescued her and not Yevgenia, who was already safe in death.

  “I’m ashamed,” she said. “I did everything wrong. I’m afraid one doesn’t think clearly at such a time.”

  “No harm came of it. The firemen said you should have phoned and waited for them to come. But I can’t see you standing outside for fifteen minutes when you know there is someone inside a burning house.”