by Toby Faber
Twisting around in her seat, Laurie directed a question to Jess instead. ‘I’ve been wondering how you managed to hide from those men when they arrived. I mean, didn’t they check your bed?’
‘Hid underneath it, didn’t I?’
Wasn’t it lucky they hadn’t checked more closely, when they realised the bed had been slept in? Laurie considered asking Jess for her opinion, but then realised something else. ‘So you didn’t need to hear that scream? You already knew something was wrong.’
‘Well, it certainly gave me a sense of urgency.’ Jess smiled. Then her eyes shut, signalling an end to the conversation. Soon afterwards, a gentle snore indicated that she was using the opportunity to catch up on lost sleep. Clearly her afternoon nap had not been enough. Dad must be tired too, Laurie reflected. She really should be talking to him, to help him stay awake.
Monday, 10 August – 8 p.m.
Laurie opened her eyes just as the car came to a halt. How long had she been asleep? Long enough to feel as if someone had stuffed cotton wool into her brain. ‘Where are we?’ she asked through a yawn that turned into a stretch.
‘Outside the Penningtons’ house,’ Dad replied. ‘Look.’
Laurie looked. There they were, back on the same suburban road that she remembered from a few days before. The half-light of dusk made it seem even quieter. No car passed. The only signs of life were the faint sound of a lawnmower engine and the lights in various houses.
‘Spooky, isn’t it?’ Jess’s voice from the back seat put words to Laurie’s thoughts.
They got out of the car and looked up at the house. Upstairs, one set of curtains had been drawn, but no light leaked out around them, or from any other window. Dad went up to the door and rang the bell, with the air of somebody who knew he had to try, but displaying no sense of expectation as he stood with his back to the door, looking around.
‘She could be in the garden.’ Laurie suggested, remembering their last visit. ‘Perhaps that’s her mowing the lawn.’
Dad frowned at that but said nothing as Laurie walked round to the side of the house in the direction of the engine noise. It sounded like quite a big machine. Did these gardens really have large enough lawns to make it worth using a ride-on mower? Laurie rounded the corner of the house and peered through the gate that blocked access to a side passage. No, the engine noise was not coming from the back of the house. In fact, it seemed to have got fainter. And it was no lawnmower. During all the time they’d been there, its note hadn’t changed. Laurie could feel a small lump starting to form in her stomach as she turned around and walked back to the front of the house. Jess was standing there, in front of the garage. That was where the sound was coming from, and Jess was reaching out for the door handle.
‘No!’ Laurie shouted, with such force that Jess visibly jumped and Dad came running round from the front door. ‘Don’t touch anything.’
With dreadful, awful clarity, Laurie knew what was behind that door. When she’d thought about killing herself, in that period of self-obsessed torment after Mum died, that had been how she planned to do it: just sit in the car, fire up the engine and go to sleep. What could be easier? Had it only been the lack of a garage that had stopped her? Inside this one, Laurie knew, lay the slumped body of Margaret Pennington, her skin cherry-red with carbon monoxide poisoning.
When had they put her there? If the engine was still running, it could not have been that long ago. Laurie thought back to the message record they’d found on the mobile, the one sent the previous afternoon, around the time Dad and Jess were off on their picnic. That would make it a bit more than a day ago. Was that possible? They could have been with Margaret when they got the call from Paul that sent them down to Somerset that night. The noise behind that door was the evidence of what would have happened to her and Dad if it hadn’t been for Jess. And somewhere in the house, Laurie suspected, the computer would be logged onto a website with messages confirming what the police already knew: that this was a suicide.
Laurie wasn’t sure about the coherence of the explanation she offered Dad and Jess, standing there outside the garage door, but it was good enough for Dad at least. He nodded thoughtfully. ‘All too plausible, I’m afraid. I don’t suppose the car uses that much fuel while it’s in neutral.’ Then his emotions caught up with him. ‘The bastards!’
‘But why?’ Jess asked. ‘Why would they want to kill …wozzername?’ She seemed to be frowning with the effort required to speak.
‘Widow’s pension,’ Laurie replied shortly. She felt a bit light-headed, as if she still hadn’t properly woken up from the nap she’d been having in the car. ‘She told us so herself. She got half her husband’s pension.’ At least, that was what she wanted to say. She wasn’t sure it had come out right. She shook her head, trying to get rid of the pain she could feel starting to spread out from behind her eyes. And what was Jess doing? Suddenly, it was hard to focus on her, but she seemed to be sitting down. Was she tired too?
Dad was shouting. What? Move? He was grabbing Jess – pulling her along. If he wasn’t careful, he’d rip her dress. She wouldn’t like that. Why wasn’t she stopping him? ‘Dad—’ Laurie started to say, but that wasn’t coming out right either. And what was the ground doing? She couldn’t get a fix on it. It seemed awfully close.
‘I’m sorry.’ Dad was saying. ‘I should have guessed, or at least made sure we were careful. I never would have thought there could be dangerous concentrations outside the garage. I mean, carbon monoxide’s lighter than air. It should have just dispersed.’
Laurie looked around. She had presumably been awake for a while. Dad was certainly behaving as though she had been, but she couldn’t for a moment have said for how long. Anyway, here she was, on the ground next to Jess, sitting against Dad’s car, looking back towards the Penningtons’ house and still hearing the noise of an engine. Perhaps it was the headache that had woken her? It had the sort of throbbing intensity she remembered from those hangovers back in Cambridge. A low moan from beside her indicated that Jess felt much the same.
‘You’ll be all right,’ Dad said, with less certainty than Laurie would have liked. She looked at the palms of her hands. Did they have a pinkish tinge to them?
‘Deep breaths: that’s the thing,’ Laurie heard herself saying. ‘That and plenty of water. Is there a bottle in the car?’ She gulped down liquid and sucked in air, thrusting the bottle into Jess’s face to make her do the same. As her head gradually cleared another pain came to the fore; the whole of her left side ached. She must have fallen on it. Jess had a cut above her eye, presumably from being dragged along the ground. Dad, on the other hand, looked unscathed. ‘I don’t understand.’ Laurie began. ‘Why weren’t you affected?’
‘You were there a bit longer than me. And I’m bigger. Perhaps you were just in the wrong place. Do you feel up to getting in the car?’
‘But we can’t just leave. Margaret Pennington’s in there.’
‘I thought I’d phone the fire brigade from that telephone box; at least they’ll have breathing equipment, although I’m very much afraid they’ll be too late for her. Apart from that, the best we can do is make sure we’re not too late for anyone else.’
*
Whatever Dad said to the operator, it was enough for a fire engine to arrive ten minutes later. He had already moved the car a discreet distance away. The three of them sat inside and watched for long enough to see figures emerge with their features obscured by gas masks, before Dad put the car in gear and set off.
Laurie and Jess sat together in the back, making the most of the air that rushed in through the open windows. It was too loud to speak. So Laurie used the time to think. Too late for anyone else? What had Dad meant by that? Margaret Pennington’s killers weren’t going to be committing any more murders dressed up as suicide; Jess had seen to that. Paul was the only source of danger now; surely he was the sort of person who employed others to do his dirty work? And with any luck he didn’t even know yet that he was
now missing two assassins. As far as he was concerned, he had ordered several murders and had got away with it.
At some point, however, perhaps when they failed to make further contact, Paul would realise that his henchmen – Laurie grimaced as she thought of the word – that his henchmen had themselves been killed. From that it would be a short step to working out that Laurie was still alive. He would want to tie up that particular loose end. Laurie’s smile ended in a little shudder as she followed the train of thought to its inevitable conclusion. Had Dad got there already? He was presumably in as much danger as she was. If anyone was ‘anyone else’, it was her and Dad. And, her musing continued, if Dad and Jess had phoned the police last night, as they should have done, then they would be in no danger at all. Would Dad be thinking that too?
Laurie looked out of the window. Dad was parking the car, but not in a street she recognised. That was sensible. What if Paul was already watching the flat? But where were they?
Dad answered the unspoken question. ‘We’re in Finchley. This is where I left the car last week; it’s about a twenty-minute walk to the Tube, I’m afraid. Anywhere nearer and we’d be in a residents’ parking zone.’
Finchley? Laurie had never even considered before where Dad left the car on his rare visits to London. The realisation made her uncomfortable – guilty at this proof of the extent to which she had been so wrapped up in herself. He must have been to fetch it while she was at the library on Friday, so that they were ready to leave when she eventually came home. Well, the walk to the Tube would give them time to talk.
‘I don’t think we should go back to the flat,’ she began. ‘I’d feel safer if we just lost ourselves in London, at least until we work out if Paul really is Dominic Sanderson.’
‘And how do you suggest we do that?’ Jess asked. ‘Go up to Sanderson’s receptionist, show her the picture and ask if she recognises him?’
‘It’s an idea,’ Laurie countered. ‘How about if we watch the office and see if he comes out? That would give us a pretty good indication.’
‘We’d get more specific data,’ Dad said mildly, ‘if we could watch Dominic Sanderson’s own front door.’
‘You mean find his home address?’ Laurie stopped to think. ‘Well, perhaps I can think of an idea for that. He is a company director, after all. She got out her phone.
Laurie’s original thought came to nothing. The Companies House filing for Sanderson Recruitment listed all its directors, of course – that was a legal requirement – but it gave the same service address for all of them: 28 Great Portland Street, W1, the location, it seemed clear, of the company’s head office. Briefly, Laurie wondered if they should revert to their original idea, stake out the building and see who came out. She looked at her watch: coming up to nine o’clock; not much likelihood that anyone would still be working that late.
Nevertheless, it was not a fruitless search. It also showed that Dominic Sanderson was director of another company: 74 FS Ltd. That company had a registered address of 74 Fitzwilliam Street, Surrey CR4. Of its four directors, three were shown as living at that address; only the elusive Mr Sanderson seemed to be based at Great Portland Street. She showed it to Dad and Jess.
‘Looks to me like a freehold ownership company,’ Jess volunteered.
‘What?’
‘It’s the same for me. When I bought the flat I got a share in the company that owns the freehold of the house. Bet you didn’t know I was a company director.’ Jess preened herself. ‘So you’re saying these four people each have a flat in 74 Fitzwilliam Street, in CR4? That doesn’t make sense. At least, I don’t think Paul can be Dominic.’ Laurie could feel the relief rushing through her as she spoke. She’d wronged him. He hadn’t sent those thugs down to Dad’s house. There was some other explanation.
‘Why?’ Dad was looking at her, reading the signs.
‘Well, CR4 must be Croydon, isn’t it? Paul lives in north London. It’s how we met …’ Laurie tailed off, trying to think if she had any definitive proof that Paul had been telling the truth. Of course, that second meeting, the one where they’d gone on to coffee, of course it must have been staged. Paul would have had to pretend he lived in north London for it to make sense.
‘I’ll tell you what I think is odd,’ Dad interjected, relieving Laurie of the need to justify herself further. ‘Why should a man who owns a reasonably big company be living in a flat in Croydon? I mean, I realise Sanderson Recruitment isn’t doing that well, but even so, surely he’d be able to afford something a bit bigger than that.’
‘Not if he’s divorced.’ Laurie said dully, all her earlier elation vanished. ‘Paul said he was – two kids living with their mum in Oxfordshire. I wonder if that’s something he was telling the truth about.’
‘OK. Here’s the plan.’ Dad was taking charge now. ‘We’ll all go and find some hotel now – get a good night’s sleep. In the morning, Jess and I will go and watch Dominic Sanderson’s front door.’ He held up a hand to ward off the objection Laurie was dying to make. ‘You can’t go. If he sees you and recognises you then it’s all for nothing. Thanks to that photograph you took, we at least know what the man calling himself Paul Collingwood looks like. If we see him coming out of 74 Fitzwilliam Street then that’s good enough for me. We’ll go to the police. There may be a bit of unpleasantness about why we didn’t report things the moment we could, but we’ll just have to weather that. I’ll take responsibility.’
The rush of relief was so strong it was almost physical. The constricting nature of the anxiety Laurie had been feeling all day only became clear when it was released. At last Dad was going to do the right thing. What might the consequences be? Hours of police interviews at the very least, but they could manage that. They’d just have to tell the truth. Ah yes, the truth – could Dad really take responsibility? It was Jess who’d killed them, who had started the process of clean-up even before untying Dad and Laurie. And Laurie too, was hardly blameless, erasing evidence with nail-varnish remover. There must be some crime like unlawful disposal of a body. As she thought about it, Laurie’s feeling of relief began to recede. Why should Dad take the blame for something that had, in the end, started with her own stupidity?
Jess interrupted the train of thought. ‘It wasn’t you on your own, David, not by a long chalk.’
‘No,’ Laurie agreed, ‘we’ll all have to take responsibility.’ She took the photograph of Paul out of her back pocket and handed it over. ‘There he is. I don’t mind if I never look at him again.’
Dad took the printout and put it in his wallet without even unfolding it. Laurie loved him for that, as for so many things.
Tuesday, 11 August – 6.15 a.m.
Laurie woke to sunlight. For a moment, she didn’t know where she was. She opened her eyes and looked around: of course, the Ibis Hotel by Euston station. The bed beside her was empty. Come to think of it, she vaguely remembered Dad dropping in at some unearthly hour to collect Jess, for her to join him on the long journey down to Morden at the end of the Northern line, where Fitzwilliam Street turned out to be. They must be long gone by now, sitting opposite that front door, waiting for it to reveal its secrets. Perhaps they’d already seen Paul and were on their way back? She’d better get up. It already felt like they were doing her dirty work for her; if they came back to find her still in bed, that really would be too much.
There was a mini kettle in the room. Laurie put it on to boil while she had a shower, and drank the instant coffee that resulted even before she had got dressed. The bitter taste it left behind was nothing that a quick brush of the teeth could not put right. That was when she noticed the clock, blinking away at the bottom of the television: 6.37.
Vaguely embarrassed at the way a few seconds’ panic had deprived her of an extra hour in bed, Laurie considered her options. She was awake now, that much was for certain; returning to bed held no attraction, nor did the idea of watching breakfast television until Dad and Jess returned. It would be good to get out and about,
to have a bit of a wander on streets that should still be relatively empty. That sunlight was too good to waste.
Until she was standing outside, Laurie had not really thought about where she was. Then it struck her. Drummond Street; the Indian restaurant where she and Paul had gone for their first proper date was just around the corner. In the other direction were the bike racks where she’d first met him. If she decided to pop into Euston itself for another coffee, she’d probably end up in the coffee shop where she had found herself falling for him. Was that what different parts of north London would be to her now? Memory joggers of times when she’d thought herself happy? Two weeks ago she had gloried in the realisation that Hampstead Heath was practically on her doorstep. Would she ever be able to enjoy it again? She had to get away from here. More than that, she had to correct her memory of the man who was Paul from north London. If he was Dominic Sanderson from Morden, then so be it, but she had to see him again, to know him for what he was.
Twenty minutes’ walk brought Laurie to Great Portland Street. Number 28 turned out to be a tall, narrow office block that had clearly seen better days. According to the column of doorbells beside the entry buzzer, Sanderson Recruitment occupied the third and fourth floors. A little bit of mischief within Laurie urged her to press a button and see what happened, but some residual common sense put paid to that. Besides, who would be there at seven in the morning? She needed to find some place in which she could wait and watch this entrance without being seen. The text she was expecting any moment from Dad would give plenty of warning when Dominic Sanderson was on his way.
Laurie looked across the road. The plate windows of a Starbucks caught her eye. It occupied a prime corner location, and had, Laurie could see even from here, an upstairs seating area. One of those sofas should provide her with the perfect vantage point. And the coffee would at least be better than the instant sludge with which she had started the day.