A Murder in Mayfair (28 page)

“I think the best thing is for you to come home with me, Tony.”.

His habitually unfocused eyes became sharp with fear.

“No. She can get in there.”

I shook my head decisively.

“She can't. You said so yourself. I've had the locks changed, and bolts put on.”

“She could get in if she really wanted to. You don't know her. She can get in anywhere.”

“But she can get at you if you go back on the streets.”

“At me. But in your flat she'd have both of us.”

I could see after a minute or two of to-ing and fro-ing that there was no chance of persuasion.

“I wonder if we could go to my old girlfriend's,” I said. “Does she know about my girlfriend?”

Tony shook his head.

“No. Says you haven't got one. Sneers about that.”

So I rang Susan, explained about Tony and how wrong I'd been about him, and she agreed at once to put us both up. “Safer for you, too,” she said. I felt an overwhelming urge of gratitude to her for her common sense and compassion. There are not many women who would take in a mentally disturbed man she didn't know without question. We were driven to Chiswick in a police car, and it was promised that a general eye would be kept on her flat. More could not be afforded, but more was probably not needed.

Tony took to Susan at once. By the time we got there she had a shepherd's pie in the oven. It was so late I found I wasn't hungry, but Tony ate greedily. Susan opened some tinned fruit, and that was equally acceptable. “I'm hungry, but I'm used to that,” Tony explained. He asked for tea afterward, had several cups, and talked about his friends among the dossers. By mutual unspoken agreement we kept him off the subject of his mother. I'd told Susan over the phone that she terrified him. By midnight Susan had found him a pair of my old pajamas still in the flat, and he'd gone to bed in the spare room. His breathing was regular and very noisy, as if he had serious sinus problems, but we took it as an audible sign of returning confidence.

We slept together that night, the first time in nearly two years. I'm not sure how it happened, but I do know I didn't ask and she didn't invite me. It happened because somehow we had got back on to that wavelength of understanding we had been on when we had first come together. I know too that it felt good and was good.

F
or the next ten days I stayed at Susan's flat. It was a bit messy, having to tell the national party apparatus, the constituency people, and the ministry too that my address and telephone number were temporarily changed. It seemed to give them a warrant for the surveillance of my private life. However Margaret Stevens for one expressed pleasure when I told her that I was back with my girlfriend.

“Good for you to have a proper home life,” she said.

Against all the odds, in spite of all her experience of marital breakdowns and sexual hoo-ha in the lives of her political masters, and against a backdrop of media guffaws about the Foreign Secretary's private life, she still believed in domestic bliss as the proper basis for a political career. It was the only time I knew that sensible woman to come to a conclusion that was totally contradicted by all the available evidence.

Tony stayed at the flat with us. He never went out, was scared to, so we shopped for him and bought shirts, underwear, casual trousers, toiletries. I was at work all day and into the evening, so for long periods he was alone in the flat. We got the impression that then he was happiest—in his own space, doing his own thing, going at his own pace. He hardly ever watched television,
but he read, disliking anything exciting or disturbing, happy when he chanced to find in Susan's collection the sort of book where people in the country went about old routines, made mildly humorous conversations, were as close to their animals as to other humans.

We didn't look for miracles, but over the days we felt we saw very gradually an increase in his confidence, a new sense of something approaching well-being. He talked to Susan more easily than he talked to me. When they were alone in the flat he told her about life on the streets, the characters he'd known there. He never talked about his adoptive parents or his real mother, and Susan took care never to allude to them in the most indirect manner. She found out he could cook a little, and encouraged him to learn new things. He liked thinking he could do something to, as he put it, “pay us back.” When I came back at night he gave me the sort of quiet I needed after a hard day at the office and in the House. I think he did this from a sort of awe, regarding me as a Great Man. Susan was similarly considerate, but suffered from no such delusion.

I had been neglecting my constituency, though they knew of my “mugging” and understood, or thought they did, why they were seeing less of me. On the first weekend in December I decided I had to fulfill my promise to myself to continue being a good constituency MP even though I was now a minister. In the ordinary course of events Susan might have come with me, as she often had in the past, but we both agreed she had to stay with Tony. I drove up on Friday morning, had lunch with my agent, and met with other party notables in the afternoon. I managed to have a quiet word with George Eakin, and brought him broadly up to date. What I told him worried him.

“So there's someone out there, who's apparently your mother, yet is out to get you?”

“She's an old woman—a bit mental,” I said.

“And that makes it better? And she's not old—not if she was in her early twenties when she had you. So what have you done about extra security?” I hemmed and hawed, and he regarded me with a mixture of fear and contempt. “Well, if you've done nothing, I'll have to. I'll be ringing you up tonight to see you're all right.”

I shrugged and nodded. After that I visited my father in the nursing home, but the months since the election had seen him steadily declining, and he barely recognized me. The only thing I could do for him was sit by his bed and hold his hand. I was back in the old family home in Connaught Avenue by seven, preparing for a “surgery” the next day and wondering whether to have a takeaway for supper or just rustle up something on toast.

There was nothing much on television. The British are so good at making television programs that nobody has noticed the sharp decline in the content. Vacuity certainly ruled that Friday night. I had all my old LPs though, many of them unplayed since I'd gone up to Cambridge. I put on Sir Adrian Boult conducting Schubert. I'd seen him once as a child in Birmingham, and loved the way his puppet-on-a-string gestures produced such tremendous results.

It was in a pause before the last movement that I heard a noise from upstairs. Something had been dropped on the linoleum floor.

My reaction, I admit, was unwise. I should have ignored it, convinced the intruder I hadn't heard it, then gone out to phone 999 perfectly casually, as if I were ringing up a friend. Instead I instinctively reached over to turn off the gramophone, then darted out into the hall where the phone was.

“Get back in there.”

The voice, plummy yet harsh, came from the top of the stairs. I sensed a shape there in the darkness, could dimly see
legs. I was on the point of dialing 999 anyway, but reconsidered. If she had a gun it might be the last thing I would do. I withdrew my hand from the phone, turned, and went back into the sitting room, feeling like a dog withdrawing from a fight. My mind was numb, and before I could plan out even a sketch of possible action, footsteps came tumbling down the stairs. I retreated farther into the room.

It was the face I saw first. The hall was lit by wall lamps, and one just beside the sitting room door illumined it. The face was raddled, the cheeks all faded pouches, but the lips were newly painted with a gash of scarlet for a mouth, and the whole was haloed by a mop of dyed red hair, the curls seeming out of control, like a shrubbery gone wild. Below the face were slack chins, and below that a body that was a heavy mass of flesh. But it was what that bulging mass was clad in that was the most grotesque sight: a shiny satin frock, something that must have been enormously sexy a quarter of a century ago, now many sizes too small for her, emphasizing her grossness and restricting her movements.

My mother had brought her wardrobe with her.

As I looked at her the gash of red in the center of her face expanded into a horrible smile of anticipated and longed-for revenge. To drive home the desire, her hand came round from behind her back: in it was a fearsome knife—the sort of knife a professional chef would use: long, razor-sharp, deadly. As she pointed it in my direction she saw my eyes widen, and her smile became still more full of relish.

“Yes. Not a toy knife this time. A real slicer. You'll feel this going in, won't you?”

The accent was genteel: a chilling, ruling-class tone with not a trace of Australian left. I started toward her, but the knife hand sprung forward, and when I hesitated she gestured commandingly toward my father's old chair. I sank back in it gratefully,
as if given a reprieve and an opportunity. She read my thoughts, or imagined she did.

“Oh, you haven't reached your time yet. That would be too easy. Relax. It will come. I am a woman who makes things happen. All you can do is wait for what's coming.”

The arrogance of her voice, tinged with madness, unnerved me. Anything I could say would have sounded feeble, but perhaps not quite as feeble as what I did say.

“What do you want?”

She laughed, contemptuously, as if my cliché was symptomatic of the quality of my mind.

“Nothing you can give me and still live,” she said. She poked her horrible face forward, its ravenous eyes glinting.
“I want your death.”

I worked hard to regain my habitual coolness, to treat her as I would treat any other disturbed person I might encounter.

“You've been working up to my death for some time,” I said, my voice emerging, against the odds, as calm and matter-of-fact. She seemed flattered.

“Yes, I have. Have you felt it? That nice, satisfying, upward curve toward
that.
At what point did you sense where it was to end? First there were little pinpricks, humorous gestures, then a brick thrown, then a stab wound. . . . Finally there will be that slashing attack that will leave you gasping and bleeding and dying.”

“That will leave a great hole in your life. Nothing left to live for.”

Her eyes glinted. She had faced that.

“I will find something. Someone. But you had to be first. I've been meditating it for months. Everything leads up to your death, so it has to be. It's the end of your road. You'll die in the boring little suburban dump those boring little suburban people brought you to.”

“Maybe boring people make rather good parents. I've no quarrel with what you did when I was born.”

For reply she shrugged her fat shoulders, bursting out of their shiny prison. Whether or not I had a quarrel with her, her gesture said, was quite immaterial.

“Why?” I asked. She laughed.

“For being born,” she said.

Argument with such a proposition seemed useless, but the conversation had to be prolonged.

“You haven't killed Tony.”

“Pits?” She sneered, revealing brilliant white teeth, the only good sound things left in her body. “Pits is hardly worth killing. An afterthought, something that popped out unexpectedly and made a bit of money for me. Someone who has a life that's hardly worth snuffing out. I shall need Pits after—”

She looked at me, greedy relish again lighting up her eyes.

“If you can find him,” I said.

That brought her up short for a moment.

“I thought you must have spirited him away somewhere. I haven't seen him in any of his usual haunts.” She brandished her murderous weapon and laughed. “I shall find him! No one can hide from me.”

The madness was becoming more manifest by the second. Being confronted by homicidal lunacy must be one of the most unnerving experiences possible. You know that reasoned argument can have no effect, but it is almost impossible to think up an alternative to it. In desperation I tried surprise.

“Sir John has managed to hide from you pretty effectively,” I said. The effect was extraordinary. For a moment I thought she was going to kill me there and then. The body stiffened, the hand gripped the knife more firmly. Everything spoke of outrage, that I should know such a fact.

“He's alive?”

I raised my eyebrows.

“I thought you knew everything.”

Her mouth twisted with rage.

“Where? Where is he living?”

“Somewhere safe from you.”

“Tell me where your father is!”

My heart thumping I tried a trick. I swung my eyes round to the picture of my parents on the sideboard, and her eye involuntarily followed them. But I was saved from springing and wrestling with her by the phone ringing. I sat back in the chair, my heart thumping, grateful not to have been a dead hero. Surely that was George?

“Shall I answer it?”

She shook her head.

“Do you think I'm a fool? Do you think I'm mad? People have—but they've learned. And don't play games about who your father is.”

“That's
my father,” I insisted. “I'm sure you're aware he is in a nursing home.”

“I'm not talking about him. I'm talking about your real father. The man whose prick made you.”

“How nicely you put it! By the way I've never understood how you came to get pregnant.”

She spat on the carpet.

“I told him I couldn't have children, after a botched abortion I'd had in Sydney. The abortion was true, the rest wasn't. I made out it was the tragedy of my life.”

“I see. So I don't have to feel I was unwanted.”

Her eyes widened in scorn.

“I didn't
want
you! I had other plans. I was going to be a person to reckon with—as I became! Oh no, you were just a counter. I would have used you if I'd wanted him to marry me. I was in a situation full of possibilities and I didn't want to make
up my mind till I had a full hand of cards. I knew I could get rid of you if I decided I could do better.”