An abbreviated address, but one he had learnt by heart. He stood completely still, swayed by a torrent of anger. The girl lived with them, was theirs. They would have known all along who she was: Richard, Sarah, too. That was why Richard had befriended him. That was why Sarah took him in. That was why she was here. To hide what they both knew.
He felt sick, turned towards Edwin. Sarah was beside him, ignoring the smell and the sobs and the slime of him. She was pressed against him, arms round his neck, his arms round her waist, hooked into the belt of her perfect, soaked, discoloured trousers, and she was embracing him, warming him, like a lover. C’mon, Edwin, she was crooning. Get warm. Come with me, and he was clutching to her, pulling her hair, almost dragging her down if she had not been, subtly, stronger. This way, Ed, this way, this way. They’ll come back. Big boy Edwin. Fuck the bastards, come with me. He clutched like a limpet and let her lead, back over the rocks, stumbling and crying. She managed him like a puppeteer, carrying his shirt, and the dead chick raven wrapped inside. She was as filthy as he was, by now.
John found himself stumbling after. Full of overpowering disgust. How could she? If Edwin had wanted to kiss her, she would have let him. He slobbered; they were half carrying one another, lightweight, she was, until they were beyond the tide and facing the valley above. Stumbling on behind, John choked on disgust.
‘Help me,’ Sarah said. ‘He’s ill.’
He shook his head.
The sun had declined and the wind grew as they got to the top of the cliff. The sweet nothings of the sea resumed and nothing else could be heard, except her crooning voice. Edwin and she, joined at their slim hips, entwined, he trailing behind. Edwin needed warmth and she supplied it.
She had lost that fancy rainproof, but her feet stood firm. She found the car first. Stood, with him clasped like a limpet, holding on, locked into her body, like a corpse in rigor mortis. John caught up. The fresh breeze made his thick hair stand on end. He was so angry, speech seemed impossible. Angrier, because she was probably right. There might have been no other way to move him. She had done what he could not, in common humanity, but she had lied.
‘You bitch!’
The body locked into hers shivered less, the skin clammy, where he touched to feel for the pulse.
‘You knew all the time who she was. Did she belong to you? Or Richard? Did you come here to hide what he’d done? She was yours. She came from your house. Did you send her away? Was she Richard’s?’
She tried to shake her head, but Edwin’s fist was somehow locked in her hair. She did not seem to mind. It did not seem to limit her capacity for calm speech, and made him despise her even more.
‘You’ve got some of that wrong, Doc, you really have. Start the car, and get some heat. Otherwise he’ll die. He’s only a man and he’s sick. And we need him alive, Doc, we really do.’
Her eyes were colder than ice. He had never noticed the colour, remembered warmth. Ice chips.
He started the car and got a blanket from the back.
Watched them in the rear-view mirror as he drove back to town. She still held Edwin, calming him. Reacting only to grief.
He wondered at her. She would have done that for any man. Whoever he was; whatever he had done.
It was a strange sensation, to be holding a man, like a lover. Steven could not remember ever having done it before. The fierce huggings of boys on a playing field had never been for him. He was always the loner, the one with the funny hand who climbed instead, never one for touching. And now he was seeing himself in the mirror, embracing a man who might have been his father, with feeling. There was such a contrast between this and his last embrace, it made him blush.
First, embrace the naked wife, and then the fully clothed husband, but this was not an amorous embrace. Steven had been following her in to say goodbye, when he had seen Richard, clinging to the desk with his legs buckling beneath him, caught him beneath the armpits, lowered him to the ground and knelt behind him, pressing the man’s head between his knees. Lilian was kneeling, patting her husband’s hand and begging him to respond. Fritz stood above them, wringing his hands.
‘I think it might be stroke, Mr Steven. He had one before. Why did they hit him? Not hit hard.’
Richard stirred, making small protesting sounds.
‘I don’t know why anyone should hit him. Can you call an ambulance and the police?’
Richard was mumbling, trying to move, a strong man, fighting demons and unconsciousness.
‘Police?’ Fritz repeated.
‘Yes.’ Steven saw Mrs Fritz, hovering near Fritz, and the girl, both in coats as if newly returned. Mrs Fritz was shaking her head. Steven was somehow in charge and did not know what to do. Tried to think what Sarah would have done, and do that. Hold on, tight.
‘Look, hide the girl downstairs, if you like . . . but we must call the police.’
‘I want to get Richard home,’ Lilian said. ‘That’s what he would want. Not an ambulance. Get him home, where I can look after him, then call the police.’
What would Sarah do? Get the man home, call ambulance and police, in that order.
Fritz and Steven carried Richard into the lift. They made a seat for him by plaiting their hands and he hung between them with his arms round their shoulders. He was heavy and cooperative, and Fritz was surprisingly strong, saying thank God the lift works today. On the third floor the door to the Beaumont flat was open and the worst part of the journey was down the long corridor, where the flower pictures hung askew and the ornaments had been knocked to the floor. Lilian stopped by the phone. He could hear her voice, calmly asking for the doctor. Passing the kitchen, he could see doors hanging open, things strewn on the floor, as if it had been ransacked in a hasty search. The bedroom at the end was littered with clothes torn out of the wardrobe. They lowered Richard on to the bed. His colour returned. He opened his eyes and attempted to smile, looking straight into Steven’s eyes.
‘Only a rabbit punch,’ he said. ‘And things are only things. Are the women all right?’
Fritz was panting hard, looking round, less concerned with the casualty than with the mess. ‘What mess. Those bastards, they look everywhere for her. They call her it. They keep saying to me, where is it? I say, she no here. Bastards.’
Richard had a mesmerising smile. Steven found himself smiling back, taking hold of his hand. Then Richard spoke.
‘Bet . . . better go,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
‘Yes, better go, Steven,’ Fritz echoed. ‘Before police come.’
‘Yes,’ Lilian said. ‘Better go.’
He was redundant. He did not want to go and, no, he did not want to wait and greet the police.
‘Can you get Sarah?’ Lilian was asking Fritz, quietly. ‘Please.’
‘She no here,’ Fritz said. ‘We manage, don’t worry.’
Steven went. Out of the door, pausing to look at the mess of the living room, which could have been worse. Then ran downstairs to Sarah’s flat. Again, the door stood open. The wonderful picture of the looming cow had been slashed with the swipe of a blade. Quickly he looked round the rest of the place, trying to imprint it on his memory, since he might not be back for a while. Mess, here, but not serious damage: they had been searching for it, the aim had not been to destroy; the damage and mess was the result of haste and anger. Even the cow could be mended, a clean cut with something sharp, no problem, but the shaky bit was when he thought where else the blade could have gone. Into flesh. Sarah’s flesh, if she had been here, but she had not. Lilian’s flesh, if she had come home sooner. He was ashamed as much as angry, to be thinking of himself. Needs must. Had he remembered, yesterday morning, to take away the climbing gear? Yes, he had: there had been a lot to carry and stash in the office, he remembered that. Check: Sarah’s bedroom, no, nothing of his there, except shirts. She was good to him, his sister. Now, where had she hidden that painting? Richard Beaumont’s painting, was it here? The mess was superficial, but nasty. The shame came back but th
ere was no time to examine it. They had been looking for an it, instead of looking for her. There was no time to look. He did not want to be part of it, did not want to be questioned by the police, and nor did anyone else want it for him. Because he knew what they had been looking for. And it was not she, it was IT.
Steven felt treacherous as he escaped from his sister’s home, slipped downstairs and out. She should, after all, have known never to ask him to do anything. She would cope; she always did.
Out in the air, with the sunlight of a spring evening, after he had walked fast and was two blocks away, he stopped abruptly, veered left into a pub and got a drink. Whisky, treble, which he took to the window that looked on to the street corner, and sipped, looking out. He was recalling the cunning, friendly eyes of Lilian’s husband, and tried to eradicate the impression that they already knew one another. Richard’s face was superimposed on Lilian’s face, backed by the strange impression that his sweet smile was the smile of one thief to another. The man would be all right, oh God, he hoped so. Such eyes, full of zing.
On the third sip of whisky, the rest of the day came back and his skin tingled. He straightened his spine and caught his own reflection in the window, smiling. A long, long day, an even longer twenty-four hours, and there he was, with his pale face flushed with happiness.
He cradled the whisky in his damaged hand. Made no difference in love, Lilian said, and Lilian knew. Love’s love. He looked at his odd hand and loved it. It made him what he was, this teeny-weeny disability, because that was what had set him apart, made him determined to excel, to climb. Made him demented, made him strive. Made Lilian pity him enough to make love to him, although it had not been pity, not in the end. God bless that missing finger.
He drained the glass, and wanted another. Wanted everything, ravenously hungry. There was absolutely nothing wrong with him in any department, except, perhaps, a few skewed morals. Otherwise, he was simply an overachiever. He had it all. And so much to do.
All he needed now was a home.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Please take your litter home with you
Mess. Mess was the most constant factor of life. There was always a mess. You could hide and avoid it for so long, but it was always there. It was best to revel in it. Reflected in the mirror of the foyer, Sarah felt like a piece of litter.
‘Where you been, Fortune?’
‘Looking for Minty, Fritz.’
‘You been away all night, Sarah, and all morning. We had trouble here, big trouble, yesterday.’ He looked at his watch, examining the evidence that it was the middle of the day after. ‘Chinese go berserk. They are rampaging. Policemen up top. Your apartment, a mess. Looking for her but they don’t find. Rampage, kept saying where is it.’
He leant forward, confidentially, gleefully. ‘But they’ve gone, Sarah, yes, gone for good. Take everything, leave mess.’
‘I heard. I phoned. Everyone phoned me. Even my brother. You told me, remember.’
Fritz seemed triumphant, a man who had acquitted himself nobly; surprisingly nonchalant, as if disaster suited him and the only thing on which he could concentrate today was the fact that something good had come out of something bad. A good day for Fritz was simply a day that was better in some material aspect than the day before. It made her wonder what things Fritz had witnessed in his other life to make him as sanguine as this, so that whatever happened he went back to mournful cheerfulness as soon as one day declared itself an improvement on the last.
‘Mr Beaumont still in bed,’ Fritz continued, as if she knew all about that as well. ‘He was very good and very brave, and so was I.’ She rather wished he would go back to repeating everything from the very beginning, the way he usually did. ‘He wants to see you. Everybody wants to see you,’ he added with a touch of jealousy, indicating that she would never be forgiven for not being there.
‘I went looking for Minty, and Minty’s dead, Fritz.’
He nodded, unemotionally, although with tears in his eyes. The tears of resignation, life would go on. It was as if he had anticipated it, or had already absorbed it and moved on to deal with the consequences. Again, she wondered about his other life and the pragmatic fatalism it had created, and then she thought that perhaps they were similar and his approach was not so far from her own. They would deal with the present, and the past, however recent, would assume its proportion of life. It was why one buried the dead: to finalise and move on. There was always someone left behind who had greater need.
‘Yes, I think so, too. Mr Beaumont think so, too. Her sister think so. She already knows, in her heart. You come down later. We gotta talk about her. Can’t lose both of them, OK?’
She turned away, turned back.
‘What exactly have we agreed to tell the police, Fritz? What’s the story?’ He shrugged.
‘What story? Keep it simple. Chinese have servant who escapes. They go mad, looking for her, we dunno why they panic. Maybe think she go to police. We don’t know nothing. I don’t know nothing. Maybe they are thieves. Police very happy, anyway. You go up. They tell you.’
‘Does the lift work today?’
‘Oh, yes.’
Sarah went straight up to the top floor. Height lifted sadness, and she was bone-achingly tired. The spare room in the doctor’s house had not been conducive to sleep, and nor had Edwin’s story, told as she held his hand, and later repeated. That part of the story was finished. This was merely the subplot, the other, final chapters, in which she was playing her usual walk-on, walkoff part.
On the top floor, an open door led into a huge room, in a mess. Brilliant sunlight hit her eyes from a bank of tall windows and the air was alive with dancing motes of dust. It was a splendid room, suitable for a grand champagne reception or an exhibition, but instead it contained empty packing cases, rolled-up carpet, heaps of wrapping, old files and papers, a defunct computer screen and two women police officers sifting through mess. It was a room in which people had squatted, planned, recycled, packed and unpacked, using only the floor and the packing cases for furniture. A room which demanded the presence of an admiring crowd, but used as a makeshift warehouse. There were ugly marks where things had been shoved against walls; the dust was as thick as mist. It was irrelevant to think of the best room in the building being wasted in such a way, when a featureless cellar would have served the same purpose, but Sarah did think it, admiring the proportions of the place and the light. It had its own magnificence, should have been a happy room, never hidden; instead it was a room for transit and impermanence, currently occupied by the two women, cheerfully sifting and cataloguing what looked like mess. Clearing the stable after the horse had bolted, but happy enough.
‘It’s always us women left with the mess,’ Sarah said, introducing herself.
‘At least it’s interesting mess,’ one of them said. ‘We’ve got quite a haul here.’
She wiped dusty hands on her trousers, looking critically at Sarah’s crumpled, grubby clothes.
‘You’re the lawyer from downstairs, right? Heard about you.’
Sarah looked around the room. Her innocence and amazement were unfeigned. The woman was chatty. Nothing to hide, here; not any more.
‘They were never very friendly, these people,’ Sarah said, carefully. ‘We never really knew who they were, or what they did, but why did they go so suddenly?’
‘Search me. The girl hopped it and upset them. We reckon they were getting near the end of the scam, anyway. Left dozens of passports and stuff to show what it was, maps, plans, the lot. This girl does a runner down a drainpipe and they panic in case she might blow the whistle, I guess. They were importing illegals from four or five points down the south coast. There’s big money in that and that was one part of the operation. Smuggling people and drugs. Get the people lousy jobs, make ‘em pay and then launder the money. This was the laundry end. That’s what it looks like. Turning it into legit art works and porcelain to flog in China and Europe. Good stuff, too. A factory for turning bad m
oney into good assets. Respectable address, nice, quiet people. Who would think it? Clever.’
‘I suppose it was several thousand per immigrant.’
‘Yup. Something like that. Bastards.’
‘Will you catch them?’
‘We might.’
The woman looked at her shrewdly, after remembering to be suspicious, and reassured by the scruffy clothes relaxed again. Sarah did look so very ordinary, like someone who had been for a walk with a dog.
‘Er, you weren’t here. We’ve been hoping you’d come back. Why was it they searched your place, do you think? Yours and the Beaumonts’, no one else?’
Sarah shrugged her shoulders and pulled a face.
‘I don’t know. Because we’re the ones with balconies out the back in a straight line with theirs? The two flats where the girl might have got in, instead of going all the way down? Because they thought we had something to steal?’ She shook her head. ‘I think it might be because Mr Beaumont and me, well, we’re more friendly than most, which isn’t saying much by the way. I probably mean nosy. We talk to people. Maybe they thought one of us had hidden the girl.’
‘Did you know the girl who got out?’
‘Two girls,’ Sarah corrected. ‘No, I didn’t know the second. She’d only been here five minutes. Mr Fritz heard her, but thought he was mistaken. We were only just wondering if there was anything we should do. Was she a girl? Could have been a boy.’
‘Pity about that. A girl, yeah, she left stuff. Cos she could be very helpful. We might be able to do her a good deal, if she was helpful. Might know other parts of the scam. We could see her right. And we were wondering what she took.’
‘Took?’
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