‘I don’t know him,’ she said. ‘It was Rebecca I knew. Rebecca Neave that I was at school with. He was her boy friend. That’s all I know, what I saw on telly and in the papers.’

  It took him a little while to digest this, to understand the meaning of what she had said and to draw inferences. He wondered later if she had noticed how he had turned pale. He felt the blood drawn from his face and a goosepimpling. It was something like faintness too. He held on to the back of one of Fee’s dining chairs. Darren came up to Fee and said he was off and kissed her.

  Fee had gone into the kitchen. She came back drying her hands on a piece of kitchen roll. ‘Why did you want to know all that about Martin Hunt?’

  He lied. Senta had taught him how and he could lie almost without a qualm. ‘Someone told me he’d been killed in a car crash.’

  Fee wasn’t interested. ‘I don’t think so. We’d have heard.’ She disappeared again, came back wearing a cotton jacket. ‘I’ve got to go to work, Phil. You coming? Oh, I nearly forgot. Mum phoned and told me Flora was back. I don’t really know what she meant. I mean she just said Flora had come back as if she’d walked in of her own accord or something.’

  They went downstairs, out into the street and the white sunlight. Philip didn’t have to lie this time. ‘I happened to find her. I thought Mum would like her back so I – I got her back.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say? Mum thinks it’s a miracle. She thinks Flora just walked in and set herself up on that bit of concrete.’

  ‘I’m sure she doesn’t really,’ Philip said abstractedly. ‘Anyway I’ll explain.’

  Fee looked curiously at him as they parted. ‘Did you come all the way over here at this hour just to ask me about a fellow you didn’t even know you’d heard of?’

  He was rehearsing some kind of explanation for Christine. It took his mind off more pressing concerns. It stopped him thinking about what he knew he must at some time confront. He would tell his mother that he had in fact known for a long time that Arnham no longer possessed Flora, that Flora was sold. He, Philip, had been advertising for her, had at last found her and brought her back as a surprise for Christine. The opportunity of giving a real performance of this farrago of inventions was denied him.

  Cheryl had locked herself in her room. A white-faced Christine came up to Philip before he had even let himself into the house, before he had taken his key from the lock, came up to him and threw her arms round him. He held her shoulders, tried to speak calmly.

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Oh, Phil, the police have been here. They brought Cheryl back and they searched the house.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He got her to sit down. She was shaking and he held her hand tightly. She spoke in a breathless gasping way. ‘She was caught shoplifting. Only a bottle of perfume but she had, she had . . .’ Christine stopped, took a breath, began again, ‘. . . she had – other things in her bag. They took her to the police station and charged her or whatever it is they do and then they brought her home. There was a woman detective sergeant and a young man who was the constable.’ Hysteria took hold of her and she broke into sobbing laughter. ‘I thought it was so strange that way round, it seemed so funny in the midst of all that – that awfulness!’

  He felt helpless. ‘What’s going to happen to her?’

  ‘She has to come up in court tomorrow morning.’ Christine said it calmly enough, coldly almost, until the sobs caught her again and she gave a cry of misery, clamping her hand over her mouth.

  20

  SHE WAS IN her room with the door locked. Philip knocked at the door and rattled the handle. She told him to go away.

  ‘Cheryl, I only want to say Mum and I will come to court with you.’

  There was silence. He repeated what he had said.

  ‘If you do that I won’t go. I’ll run away.’

  ‘Aren’t you being a bit stupid?’

  ‘It’s my business,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing to do with you. I don’t want you there hearing what they say.’

  As he went downstairs he heard her unlock the bedroom door but she didn’t come out. He wondered why the police had let her come home. Christine, seeming to read his thoughts, said, ‘She can lock herself in, Phil, but we can’t lock her in, can we?’

  He shook his head. Christine had never told them what to do, constrained them, only left them to themselves and loved them. In Cheryl’s case at any rate, that apparently hadn’t been enough. He stood with Christine in the kitchen, drinking the tea she had made, and they heard Cheryl let herself out of the front door. For once she let herself out quietly. The door closed with a soft click. Christine made a whimpering sound. Philip knew that if he had said that he was going to Senta as usual, that he would be out all the evening and half the night, she wouldn’t have protested. Now, letting Senta know he wasn’t coming, no longer seemed of importance. Instead he felt how relieved he would be if this evening might be the start of a lifelong separation from her, if all that might become his past. But even as he caught at this hope he recalled her love for him.

  ‘Do you think she’ll come back?’ Christine asked him.

  For a moment he didn’t know who she meant. ‘Cheryl? I don’t know. I hope so.’

  He was out in the garden when the phone rang. It was dusk and he had taken Hardy as far as Lochleven Gardens and back, coming in the back way. Light from the kitchen window fell on the figure of Flora which cast a long black shadow on the grass. A stream of whitish-grey bird excrement had dried on one of her arms. Christine opened the window and called to him that Senta was on the phone.

  ‘Why haven’t you come?’

  ‘I can’t come tonight, Senta.’ He told her about Cheryl, adding that he couldn’t leave his mother. ‘It’s not possible to phone you, you know that,’ he said as if he had tried.

  ‘I love you. I don’t want to be here without you. Philip, you’re going to come and live here with me, aren’t you? When are you going to come?’

  He could hear Rita and Jacopo’s music in the background. ‘I don’t know. We have to talk.’

  There was terror in her voice. ‘Why do we have to talk? Talk about what?’

  ‘Senta, I’ll come tomorrow. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ I’ll tell you it’s over, he thought, I’m leaving you. I’ll never see you again after tomorrow.

  When he had put the receiver back he began thinking of those people, women mostly, who lived with or loved someone they suspected of being a murderer. He was a man and he knew the woman he loved had done murder, but it came to the same thing. It astonished him that such people could ever consider giving the suspected person up to the police, ‘shopping’ them, but he was equally surprised that they could want to continue the association. Once, at a party, he had played a game where you had to say what a person would have to do to stop you loving or even liking them, wanting to know them. And he had said something silly, facetious, about being put off someone because they didn’t clean their teeth often enough. He knew better now. His love for Senta had melted away when he knew she was responsible for Myerson’s death.

  Just before midnight Cheryl came back. Philip was sitting up waiting for her, hoping she would come. He had made Christine go to bed. He ran out into the hall when he heard her key in the lock and caught her crossing the hall.

  ‘I only want to say I won’t try to come to court with you if that’s what you want.’

  ‘The police are coming for me.’ she said dully. ‘They’re coming in a car at nine-thirty.’

  ‘You must tell them about the fruit machines.’ As he spoke he felt what a stupid term it was, a frivolity in tragedy. ‘You will tell them, won’t you? They’ll do something to help you.’

  She didn’t answer him. With a strange gesture, she pulled out the pocket linings of her jeans to show they were empty. She threw out of her jacket pockets a hal-fused tube of peppermints, a ten-pence piece. ‘That’s all I’ve got in the world. That’s my lot. It’ll be best if I go to prison, won’t it?’

  He didn’t see her in the morning but went off to work before she was up. In the afternoon he phoned Christine to be told Cheryl had received a suspended sentence. If she committed another offence she would go to prison for six months. She was at home with Christine now and Fee had taken the afternoon off and was with them. He began preparing himself for the ordeal before him. Tomorrow it would all be over, he would have done it, he would have broken with Senta and a new phase of life, empty and cold, would stretch before him.

  Would he ever be able to forget what she had done and that he had loved her? It might grow faint and vague but it would always be there. A man had lost his life because of her. Before that, someone else had died because of her. She would kill others as time went on. She was made that way, she was mad. For all the rest of his life he would be marked by it, he thought. Even if he never spoke to her again, never saw her, it would scar him.

  Seeing her was something he was fully resolved on. After all, he had prepared the way. He had told her they had to talk and the fear in her voice showed him she went some way to guessing what he had to say. He would tell her all the truth, that he hated violence and violent death. Even talking or reading about these things was a horror to him. He would tell her how knowing what she had done had destroyed his love for her or, rather, that he now saw her as a different person, she wasn’t the girl he had loved, that girl was illusory.

  But how was he to handle her love for him?

  Joley was among the men and women in the queue at the Mother Teresa Centre. Philip superstitiously noted his presence there. He had been saying to himself, as he approached Tarsus Street, that if he saw Joley he would go in and speak to Senta, if not, he would leave it and drive home. The old man with his barrow and his plastic carrier cushions constituted a sign which Joley reinforced himself by waving to Philip as he passed.

  Philip parked the car. He sat at the wheel for a long time, thinking about her, remembering how he had used to rush up the steps and into the house, as often as not in too much of a hurry to lock the car behind him. And there had been the time when she took his keys away and he had thought of breaking in, so great was his misery and his longing for her. Why was it impossible to put his mind and his feelings back into that time? She was still the same girl really, she looked and sounded the same. Surely he could go into the house and down the basement stairs and into that room and take her in his arms and forget?

  He started the car and turned round and drove home. He didn’t know whether he was being weak or strong, purposeful or cowardly. Cheryl was out, Christine was out. He later came to know they were out together, had gone to Fee and Darren’s with Aubrey Pelham. The phone began ringing at eight and he let it ring. It rang nine times between eight and nine. At nine o’clock he put the little dog on the lead and walked him two or three miles about the streets. Of course he imagined the phone ringing while he was out and he imagined her in the dirty sour-smelling hall at Tarsus Street, dialling, dialling. He thought of how it had been for him when she had expelled him from the house and he had tried to phone her.

  The phone was ringing as he came in. He picked up the receiver. It was as if he suddenly understood he couldn’t avoid answering the phone for the rest of his life. She was incoherent, sobbing into the phone, drawing breath to cry to him: ‘I saw you in the street. I saw the car. You turned away and left me.’

  ‘I know. I couldn’t come in.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you? Why?’

  ‘You know why, Senta. It’s over. We can’t see each other again. It’s better never to see each other. You can go back to your life and I’ll start mine again.’

  She said in a small still voice, suddenly calm, ‘I haven’t any life except with you.’

  ‘Look, we only knew each other for three months. It’s nothing out of a lifetime. We’ll forget each other.’

  ‘I love you, Philip. You said you loved me. I must see you, you must come here.’

  ‘It won’t do any good. It won’t make any difference.’ He said goodnight to her and put the phone down.

  It rang again almost immediately and he answered it. He knew he would always answer it now. ‘I must see you. I can’t live without you.’

  ‘What’s the use of it, Senta?’

  ‘Is it Martin Hunt? Is it because of him? Philip, I’m not making this up, this is for real, the uttermost absolute truth. I never slept with him, I only went out with him once. He didn’t want me, he wanted that girl. He wanted her more than me.’

  ‘It isn’t that, Senta,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing to do with that.’

  As if he hadn’t spoken she went on feverishly, ‘That’s why the police never came near me. Because they didn’t know. They didn’t know I even knew him. Isn’t that proof? Isn’t it?’

  What sort of a woman was she that she thought a man would mind more about a sexual relationship than an act of murder?

  ‘Senta,’ he said, ‘I won’t end this without seeing you again, I won’t do that. I promise. That would be cowardly. I promise I won’t do it. I’ll see you and we’ll end it.’

  ‘Philip, if I said I’d never done it, if I said I’d made it all up?’

  ‘I know it’s only the little things you tell lies about, Senta.’

  She didn’t phone again. He lay in bed sleepless for hours. Among other things, he missed her physical presence, but when he thought how he had made love to someone who had killed a man in cold blood, when he relived that, he had to get up and go to the bathroom to be sick. Suppose she killed herself? He suddenly thought how unsurprised he would have been had she suggested a suicide pact. That would have been like her. Dying together, going on hand-in-hand to some glorious after-life, Ares and Aphrodite, immortals in white robes . . .

  The fine weather came back next day. He woke up to early hot sunshine, a bright band of light across his pillow from the window where he had neglected to draw the curtains. A sparrow sat on Flora’s outstretched hand. There was dew thick on the grass and the long densely blue shadows. It was a dream, he thought, all of it was a dream. Flora has always stood there, she was never removed to other owners, other gardens. Fee still lives here. I never met Senta. The murders didn’t happen, I dreamed them. I dreamed Senta.

  Downstairs the woman called Moorehead had arrived to have her hair permed. It was the first perm Christine had done for several weeks. The rotten egg smell, seeping everywhere and making breakfast impossible, evoked earlier times, the time before Senta. It helped to keep the illusion going. He made a pot of tea and gave a cup to Mrs Moorehead and Christine said what a treat it was for two old women to have a young man wait on them. Mrs Moorehead bristled up and Philip knew that when the perm was done and she was leaving she would tell Christine it was against her principles to tip the boss.

  Cheryl came down. It was months since she had been up so early. She sat at the kitchen table drinking tea. Philip sensed that she wanted to catch him alone and borrow money from him. He escaped before she got the chance.

  The car was going into the garage today to have the new radio put in. He left it there and was given a promise it would be ready by three. On the way back to Head Office he bought a newspaper. The evening paper had just come on to the streets and the front page headline told of a man charged with the murder of John Crucifer. Philip walked along reading the story. There was little to it but the basic facts. The alleged killer was Crucifer’s own nephew, an unemployed welder, Trevor Crucifer, aged twenty-five.

  It was extraordinary the feeling Philip had, as if he had finally and absolutely been exonerated. Someone else had killed the man and it was known. Officialdom and authority knew it. It was as if his own stupid ill-considered confession had never been made. It seemed to set him free of guilt as his own knowledge of his innocence never could. Suppose he were to open the paper and on an inside page find that Harold Myerson’s true killer had also been found? That Senta’s involvement was illusory and everything she had told him the result only of a series of coincidences and circumstantial parallels?

  Roy sat in his office with the air conditioning turned off and the windows open. A letter had been passed to him from the managing director. It was from Mrs Ripple and listed seven separate faults she had found in her new bathroom.

  ‘I’m without a car till three,’ Philip said.

  ‘Then you’d better take mine.’

  Roy said the keys were in the pocket of his jacket which was hanging up in Lucy’s room. As Philip went into the room the phone began to ring. Lucy wasn’t there so he answered it. A voice asked if Mr Wardman was expected in that day.

  ‘This is Philip Wardman speaking.’

  ‘Oh, good morning, Mr Wardman. I’m a police officer. Detective Sergeant Gates, CID.’

  They had offered to come to him at home or at work but Philip said, quite truthfully, that he had to go to Chigwell anyway. Gates had given him some idea of what it was about. He thought about it, turning it over and over in his mind, as he drove Roy’s car through the lumbering congestion of London’s eastern suburbs.

  ‘We’re making enquiries about a missing statue, Mr Wardman. Well, a stolen statue.’

  Briefly he had been aghast, stricken silent. But Gates hadn’t been hectoring or accusatory. He had spoken to Philip as to a potentially helpful witness, one of those who genuinely help the police in their enquiries. Philip had several times been in the area – wasn’t that a fact? The district of Chigwell Row, that is, from which the statue had disappeared. If they could come and talk to him or alternatively he could spare the time to come in and answer a few questions. . . .

  At the wheel of Roy’s car, the windows wide open, the sun shining, Philip told himself that was literally all they wanted, him to tell them if he had seen any suspicious persons in the neighbourhood. It occurred to him quite suddenly that Flora must be valuable, really valuable. That brought him a sense of chill. He thought of his job. But they didn’t know, they couldn’t know.

  Gates had someone with him who introduced himself as a detective inspector. Philip thought this was rather a high-ranking officer to be deployed on an enquiry into the theft of a garden ornament. The inspector’s name was Morris. He said, ‘We’ve asked you to come here as the result of a rather interesting coincidence. I understand your young sister has been in a spot of trouble?’

 

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