‘These arrived today,’ Mrs Winston explained. ‘Another eight or nine came yesterday – I’ve put them in my spare bathroom to keep them watered. And I took in her milk yesterday and this morning.’
‘You’ve tried her doorbell, I presume?’ he asked.
‘Yes, again just now. And I’ve knocked.’
Glenn knelt and peered through Cora Burstridge’s brass letterbox. He could see a large amount of post scattered on the floor. Surreptitiously, not wanting to distress Mrs Winston, he sniffed the air. There were faint traces of a smell that had become as familiar as it was unwelcome to him; it made his stomach heave and gave him an instant, terrible feeling of dread. That cloying, putrid-fish smell.
He could hear flies.
He stood up, pulled out his notebook, and asked Mrs Winston a few standard questions. When had she last seen Cora Burstridge? Had she heard any noises? Did the actress have many visitors? A housekeeper?
To the last question, Mrs Winston surprised him by saying that Cora Burstridge was short of money. She had a cleaning lady who came once a week, on Fridays, for a couple of hours, that was all.
‘I’d have thought she must be a very rich lady,’ Glenn said.
‘I’m afraid not. She hadn’t worked much in the past ten years. I think she’d made a few bad investments and her last husband was a gambler.’
Glenn asked the woman if there was any other way into the flat and she directed him to the fire escape at the back. Then he persuaded her to go back inside her own flat: he didn’t want her to see what he feared he was about to see himself.
He radioed the duty uniform-section sergeant, gave him
the facts and received authorisation to force an entry. Then he checked out the fire escape, a precarious metal super-structure which led up to a solid, rusted-up door, but gave no access to any windows.
He went back to the front door of Cora Burstridge’s flat, rang the bell several times, knocked, and then, to be quite sure, called loudly through the letterbox. Nothing.
The door was secured with a fairly recent Banham deadlock and there was no point, he knew, in even considering trying to pick it. Brute force was his best option. He tried gently with his shoulder, then much less gently with his right foot. The door yielded a fraction but the lock did not give. He debated whether to radio for a unit with a portable battering ram on board, but did not want to risk missing out on this himself. Instead, he continued to hammer away with his foot.
After some moments, he became aware of other doors opening and of voices murmuring. A young man in a T-shirt and shorts came to the top of the stairs, then stopped with a look of shock when he saw Glenn, perspiring, in his grey suit.
‘Police!’ Glenn called, to reassure him.
With a look of horror, the youth fled down the stairs. Glenn made a mental note about that – he probably had drugs in his flat. Then he turned his full concentration back on the door, and kicked hard again.
Finally the lock tore away from the door frame, but the door swung open only a few inches then stopped tight against the safety chain. It had been installed well and it took several more very hard kicks before it yielded. He pushed the door shut as best he could behind him, to keep out prying eyes, then stood struggling against the smell and the nausea rising inside him. Then he pulled on the thin rubber gloves he carried in his pocket.
He was in a small hallway. Two exquisite abstract paintings of Parisian street scenes hung on one wall, and on the opposite wall were two framed playbills. Cora Burstridge and Laurence Olivier in
Time and the Conways
at the Phoenix Theatre, Charing Cross Road, and Cora Burstridge,
Anna Massey and Trevor Howard in
Lady Windermere’s Fan
at the Theatre Royal, Brighton.
In spite of his anxiety, he could not help feeling awed at being inside the home of this great actress – one of
the
great actresses. Something about it that he couldn’t pinpoint made it feel different from anywhere he had ever been before. It had an air of magic, of being in some other world, part of an exclusive club which you had to be a rich, famous celebrity to join. He was looking forward to telling his wife, Ari, tonight. She’d never believe he had been inside Cora Burstridge’s home!
Then his anxiety returned with a vengeance. Stepping carefully over the mail he walked into a large drawing room, with the curtains partially drawn. Two bluebottles were batting themselves against the window. It was furnished almost entirely in art deco. It was utterly stunning, but gave Glenn the eerie sense of being in a time warp, heightened by more old playbills and film posters, as well as framed photographs. In pride of place above the mantel-piece was a letter from the Princess Royal thanking the actress for the time and effort she had put into hosting a fund-raising evening for Save the Children.
This place was a treasure trove! So much to look at.
In one corner of the room was a writing desk on which an answering-machine winked furiously. As he went over to it, he saw a note, weighted down by a Lalique deco mermaid, written in blue ink, in a shaky hand. It said: ‘I can no longer look at myself in the mirror.’ There was no signature.
Glenn read the words several times, and now, suddenly, it wasn’t nausea he was struggling against: it was tears. The crackle of his radio brought him back into the real world.
‘Charlie Hotel One-Four-Four?’
He pressed his microphone switch. ‘Charlie Hotel One-Four-Four.’
It was his own section sergeant. ‘Glenn, could you attend a container that’s been tampered with at Aldrington Wharf at the harbour?’
‘I’m at Cora Burstridge’s flat. I think I could be here a while.’
‘She going to show you some of her movies?’ his sergeant bantered.
‘I don’t think so,’ Glenn replied, grimly.
He went back into the hallway and walked along a narrow passage. The stench was getting stronger and the sound of flies more intense. The smell seemed to alter the density of the air itself, to weigh it down.
Don’t breathe in, you are breathing death itself
.
He slowed his pace as he approached a door that was ajar at the end.
He stopped outside it. The room was in darkness, but he knew she must be in there. Sliding his hand past the door frame, he found the light switch, pressed it and pushed the door wide open.
The room filled with light from a large art-deco chandelier and matching wall sconces. Flock wallpaper. Fluffy slippers on the white carpeted floor. A solitary figure was lying in the massive bed, face turned away from him, something shiny covering her hair that he thought might be a shower cap. Flies hovered above the bed, and there were more on the curtains. Her arms lay outstretched in front of her, above the bedclothes, her hands sticking out of the sleeves of her pink satin dressing gown. Even from over here, by the door, he could see the tips of her fingers had turned mauve.
Taking a breath, despite the appalling stench, he walked past the dressing table, with a mirror completely bordered in light bulbs, around to the other side of the bed to see her face.
And that was when he lost it.
It wasn’t a shower cap over her hair, it was a Waitrose grocery bag over her entire head, clamped tightly around her neck by her dressing gown sash tied, clumsily, in a bow.
With his gloved hands he undid it and pulled up the bag to expose her face. As he did so, a cloud of bluebottles exploded around him. He stared down in numbed shock. Her mouth was open, as if in a frozen scream of agony. Most of her face was bluish black. Maggots crawled over what remained of her lips and in what was left of her eyes.
He turned away in shock, gagging.
No, Cora, no, no, no. Why did you do this? Oh, sweet Jesus, why did you have to do this?
Later she would tell her friend, Sandy, that she had been wrong about him all these weeks, this man who always came to her checkout counter and stared at her so strangely. He wasn’t Liam Neeson at all!
Well, it wasn’t totally improbable that he
might
have been. She’d had Patsy Kensit in only a fortnight ago. And Liz Hurley a few months back. And she wasn’t sure but she
thought
it had been Billy Connolly just before Easter. Loads of stars came in here, to Safeways in the King’s Road, but for some reason they always seemed to go to other checkouts, not to hers.
But now she looked up and there he was, this man she was convinced was Liam Neeson (but he always paid cash so she couldn’t get his name from his credit card) was smiling at her. He was wearing a yellow polo shirt buttoned to the neck, and a brown Armani jacket.
‘Hello, Tracey!’ he said, as usual.
And, as usual, she blushed. People did sometimes say her name, it was easy enough to read it off her lapel badge, but this man’s voice was something else, it was a dreamy English voice and he said
Tracey
in a very special way. And suddenly she couldn’t remember whether Liam Neeson was English or American.
‘I’m making Bahian crab soup,’ he said, and gestured to the
incredibly
neat line of foodstuffs that waited on the far side of the
NEXT CUSTOMER PLEASE
! sign. It looked like he had laid everything out using a ruler or something. ‘I’m making it for my girlfriend.’
He liked the way she nodded at him in acknowledgement that he had a girlfriend, that he wasn’t a sad loner trying to
chat her up. It felt good saying that he had a girlfriend. Suddenly he felt like a normal human being.
‘Have you ever had Bahian crab soup?’ he asked.
She wrinkled her face in distaste, hitting the button to start the conveyor moving. ‘Don’t like crab very much – don’t like the way they look.’
‘My mother didn’t like crab either,’ he said. ‘She hated crab. She would never allow a crab in the house. Not even
tinned
crab.’
‘I don’t mind crab paste,’ Tracey said. ‘In sandwiches.’
A large bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice arrived first at the till. She slid it past the bar-code reader, reached down and gave Thomas Lamark a fistful of plastic bags. Then she slid four avocados through, followed by a pack of English tomatoes.
‘English are the best,’ he said. ‘Some of the imported tomatoes get irradiated to kill the bacteria. Did you know that?’
Tracey shook her head.
‘You have to be careful with radiation, Tracey. It can mess up your genes. Are you concerned about radiation?’
She glanced upwards warily as if checking she wasn’t being irradiated by some unseen machine. ‘I like English tomatoes too,’ she said.
Then the crabs arrived, but they were in a white plastic bag and she couldn’t see the creatures inside it. All the same, she still shuddered as she held the wet fish department’s coded label up to the bar-code scanner.
Thomas watched the checkout girl. He felt sorry for her. And she reminded him, in her looks and perky demeanour, of his girlfriend at medical school, a nursing student. Liz. And he remembered how he had squirmed when he had brought Liz home to meet his mother, and his mother had made him realise all the things that were wrong with her.
There was so much wrong with this poor girl. She was such a thin little thing with fluffy blonde hair and a face that was pretty but vacant, and her teeth weren’t that great, crooked and not well kept. Last week he’d noticed she’d had a ladder in her tights. The week before, the collar of her
blouse had been badly frayed. ‘Did you read that Cora Burstridge died?’ he asked her.
‘Cora who?’
‘The actress. Cora Burstridge. It was in the papers this morning.’
She shook her head blankly, and passed a carton of free-range eggs through the scanner, then she tilted her head and opened her mouth. ‘She the one who won an award, Monday?’
‘The BAFTA award.’
‘Oh, right, her. She died? Poor thing.’ She gave a little nervous laugh. ‘Not fair is it, to get an award and then die?’
Four mangoes trundled along to the end of the conveyor.
‘Did you like Gloria Lamark’s films?’
‘Who?’
‘Gloria Lamark,’ he said quietly.
‘Never heard of her,’ she said.
She continued logging the groceries in silence, then helped him to bag them. Then, to her surprise, he handed her a credit card to pay for the groceries. On it was the name Dr Terence Goel.
While she was waiting for the slip to print out, Thomas took his coin out of his pocket and tossed it.
‘Heads or tails?’ he asked her.
She looked at him in surprise, then shrugged and said, ‘Tails.’
He palmed the coin, then checked it. It was tails. He put the coin back into his pocket. ‘You are lucky, Tracey. This is your lucky day!’
He pulled a slim white envelope from his pocket and handed it to her. ‘I want you to have this. Put it away, open it later.’
Surprised and embarrassed, she took it clumsily and thrust it onto the shelf beneath the cash register. ‘Wh-what is it?’
‘Open it later!’
He signed the credit-card slip, loaded his groceries back into his trolley and wheeled it along to the exit doors.
She watched him go. No one else appeared at her
checkout, so she was able to continue watching him.
Terence Goel
. Not Liam Neeson. What was in the envelope? He stood on the kerb with his plastic bags and hailed a taxi.
Liam Neeson would probably have had a chauffeur, she thought.
She glanced over her shoulder. No one was approaching or paying her any attention. As the taxi drove off, she looked at the envelope. Her name,
Tracey
, was handwritten on the outside.
She opened the envelope. Inside she was shocked to find four £50 banknotes; they were folded inside an unsigned handwritten note on plain paper, which said:
Thank you for always smiling at me so nicely, it is a great act of kindness. This is for you to buy some new things for yourself. There is not enough kindness in the world.
From the street, number 14 Provost Avenue was nothing special – a modest detached 1930s house, with a suburban mock-Tudor façade, looking much like all the others in the quiet, suburban backwater of Barnes in south-west London, just a few hundred yards from the Thames, and only a couple of miles from Michael’s consulting room at the Sheen Park Hospital. But the conventional interior had been ripped away, and replaced with split-level flooring dividing the living area into three spaces. One, where Amanda sat now, while Michael was busy in the kitchen, had chairs arranged for talking, another had a sprawling semi-circular sofa for watching television, and the third, a steel Philippe Starck dining suite. The divide between the spaces was dominated by a mutant Swiss cheese plant that looked like it ate triffids for breakfast.