Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (36 page)

She wrapped the knife in newspaper, inserted it into a plastic bag and strapped it against her leg. With no idea of where she was going, she left the house and walked up the street to Harrow Road. It was a fine, sunny evening and a lot of people were about. But not in the vicinity of the seat by the flower bed which was cordoned off with blue-and-white crime tape. Minty, who had never seen this sort of thing before, supposed it was something to do with the council clearing up the flower bed, getting rid of all that filthy greasy paper and the fried fish skins and chocolate bar wrappers. It was time it was done. People lived like pigs.

An 18 bus came and she got on it. At the Edgware Road crossing she got off and changed onto a 6 that took her to Marble Arch, and there a number 12. At Westminster, though she had no idea where she was, she could see the sparkle of sun on the river. She walked toward it. The traffic was heavy and the crowds huge. Most of the people were young, a lot younger than herself. They surged, but sluggishly, along the pavements, taking photographs of the tall buildings, stopping to stare over the parapet of the bridge. She’d thought, when first she saw that flash of water, that she could drop the knife into the river, but now she was near it she saw how difficult that would be. And it might be against the law. Minty was always threatened by two disasters when she thought of breaking the law. One was the loss of her job and the other that it would cost her money. Also, lately, she’d been very conscious of people thinking there was something odd about her. Looking at her as if she weren’t normal. Laf and Sonovia had looked at her that way when she’d talked to Mrs. Lewis in the Underground. Of course they couldn’t see Mrs. Lewis, she’d known that. They hadn’t been able to see Jock. It was a well-known fact that some people couldn’t see ghosts. But that was no reason to treat a person as if she were mad. If she went onto that bridge and dropped a long, funny-shaped parcel over and into the water, that was what onlookers would think, that she was odd, crazy, mad.

She wandered along in a westerly direction where the crowd had thinned to not more than a couple of people going into the Atrium and a couple more waiting on the steps of Millbank Tower. It wouldn’t do to get lost. She must stick close to a bus route. At Lambeth Bridge she turned up Horseferry Road. Traffic was dense but the pavements were deserted. Finding herself quite alone and unwatched beside a litter bin, Minty dropped the knife into it and walked quickly away toward the bus stop.

That evening, while Minty was roving Westminster, the police in Kensal Green caught two boys climbing through a window into an abandoned shop. Once it had sold crystals and flower remedies and substances used in ayurvedic massage, but business had never been good and it had closed forever more than a year ago. The windows at the front had been boarded up and so had the door at the back. This led to a little yard enclosed by a high wall, the rear of the house in the street behind, and a temporary structure of chipboard, corrugated iron, and two doors from a demolished house. Although the only access to this yard was by way of a narrow alley blocked by a locked gate, it was full of rubbish, cans and broken bottles, newspapers and crisp bags. Across the back doorway itself a board had been nailed diagonally with another pinned across it, but a small window had been left unboarded and had long since been smashed. The only law-abiding tenant among twelve in the house behind had seen the boys climb in through this window and had phoned the police.

They were children, both under ten. When the two officers found them they were upstairs in a dark little hole of a room where they had lit a candle and spread a brightly colored crocheted shawl on the floor. This served both as something to sit on and keep them off the rough and splintery wood floor, and as a tablecloth. Laid out on it, as for a picnic, were a can of Fanta, two cans of Coke, two cheeseburgers, two packs of cigarettes, two apples, and a box of Belgian chocolates. Although still warm outside, it was cold in here, and the younger of the boys had wrapped a woolly scarf round his neck. Neither officer recognized it but one of them remembered that a long red scarf was missing from the holdall found beside the dead woman. It had been such a feature of Eileen Dring’s habitual winter dressing that a lot of people identified her by it. They took the boys out of the house and back to their homes.

At first neither would say where he lived. A difficulty was that the police are not permitted to question children below the age of sixteen except in the presence of a parent or guardian. Eventually, after a lot of nudging and kicking from his friend, one of them gave his name and address and then, rather defiantly, the name and address of the other. Home for Kieran Goodall was half a housing association house in College Park and for Dillon Bennett a flat in a block on a council estate on the banks of the Grand Union Canal. No one was at home when they reached the street at the intersection of Scrubbs Lane with Harrow Road, but Kieran, aged nearly nine, had a key. The place was dirty, untidy, and furnished with grocers’ boxes, two ancient leather armchairs, and a card table. It smelled of marijuana; the centimeter-long stubs of two joints, still transfixed by clips, lay in a saucer. The woman officer stayed with Kieran while the man phoned for assistance and then drove Dillon home.

Two more officers from Violent Crimes were waiting for him when he got to Kensal Road. Dillon’s mother was in and with her were her teenage boyfriend, her fourteen-year-old daughter, two other men in their twenties, and a child of perhaps eighteen months. Everyone but the baby was drinking gin with beer chasers and the men were playing cards. Ms. Bennett was rather the worse for drink but she agreed to accompany Dillon and the officers into the bedroom he shared—when he slept there—with his sister, the baby, and a brother, aged thirteen, who was out.

Dillon, who hadn’t said a word in the car and had left what talking there was to Kieran, answered the first questions that were put to him with “Don’t know” and “Don’t remember.” But when asked what he and Kieran had done with the knife, he shouted loudly enough to make everyone jump that they’d dropped it down a drain.

Back in College Park reinforcements had turned up. They and the woman officer and Kieran waited. They were unable to talk to him and he said nothing to them. In silence they wondered. Was it possible that these two children had killed Eileen Dring for a shawl, a scarf, a can of drink, and £140?

It was Laf’s birthday and the whole family was gathered in Syringa Road. Julianna was there, her university term having just ended, and Corinne had come over with her new boyfriend. Daniel and Lauren had brought their daughter, Sorrel, and brought, too, the welcome news that Lauren was pregnant. The Wilsons’ youngest child, Florian the musician, would look in some time after supper.

A question of some importance to them was whether or not Minty should be invited. For the sake of everyone’s working hours, the party had to be in the evening. Minty would be at home.

“I thought it was supposed to be just family,” Sonovia had said.

“I think of Minty as family.”

“If I didn’t know you inside out, Lafcadio Wilson, I’d sometimes think you fancied Minty.”

Laf was shocked. A man with a rigid moral code, he was horrified by even the fringes of adultery. His biggest nightmare (after untimely death) was that one of his children should be divorced. A bit premature, as Sonovia always said, since so far only one of them was married. “Don’t you be disgusting,” he said severely. “You know how I hate that kind of talk.”

Sonovia always realized when she’d gone too far. She said rather huffily, “It’s your birthday. You do as you like. Maybe you’d like to ask Gertrude Pierce as well.”

Not deigning to reply, Laf went next door with the paper and invited Minty to his party.

She responded in her usual way, without enthusiasm, without saying thank you: “All right.”

“It’ll be just the family but we think of you as family, Minty.”

She nodded. It was as if, he thought, she accepted these things as her right. But she offered him a cup of tea and the kind of biscuit that brought the adjective
clean
into his mind, it was so pale, thin, and dry. Rather like Minty herself, in fact. It had worried him in the past that she seemed to see things that weren’t there and to talk to unseen people. Now she was calm, like an ordinary person. And when she arrived at the party she was the same, saying a cheerful “Hello” to everyone, helping herself, if cautiously, to food from Sonovia’s lavish buffet, and when Florian turned up an hour earlier than anyone expected, greeting him with “You are a stranger. Haven’t seen you for a long time.”

The conversation turned to the murder of Eileen Dring. Laf had known it would and hoped it wouldn’t. He refused to take part in it and thought his children ought to have known better than to speculate about one rumor that the chief suspects were a married couple in West Hampstead, and another that two young kids were responsible. He deflected Daniel away from it by reverting to the problem he’d first raised with Sonovia weeks before. Ever since then he’d been thinking of it on and off without coming to any conclusion. “Suppose you killed someone without knowing it was wrong? I mean, suppose you—had a sort of delusion that someone wasn’t what they are but was—well, Hitler or Pol Pot, someone like that, and you killed them. Would that be wrong or wouldn’t it?”

“What’s brought this on, Dad?”

Why did one’s children, better educated than oneself, always ask that question if one ever dared say something out of the ordinary? Why did they always expect their parents to be mindless idiots? “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately.”

“Did he know what he was doing,” asked Corinne, “and if he did, did he know it was wrong?”

“Eh?” Laf said.

“It’s a sort of test applied to defendants.”

“But is it wrong?”

“These days a psychiatrist would be called to examine him. And if he hadn’t known what he was doing they’d put him away somewhere in a hospital for the criminally insane. I’d have thought you knew that, Dad. You’re a police officer.”

Exasperated, Laf said, “I do know it. I’m not asking if he’d have committed a crime. I know about crime. I’m asking if what he did would be
wrong.
What they used to call a sin. Morally wrong.”

His younger daughter, attracted by something more interesting than the conversation her mother had been having with Minty on the subject of spray starches, had been listening. He turned to her. “You’re doing philosophy at university, Julianna. You ought to know the answer. Would it be wrong?”

“That’s not philosophy, Dad. That’s ethics.”

“Okay, but would it be wrong? Would it be a sin?”

Julianna looked as if the word embarrassed her. “I don’t know about sin. You’d have to know you were doing something against your moral code for it to be wrong. I mean, an Aztec who sacrificed a child to please his god would think he was doing right because it would be in accordance with his moral code, but the Catholic conquistador would know it was wrong because it was against his.”

“So there’s no such things as absolute wrong? It just depends on when and where you live?”

“Well, and on whether or not you’re schizophrenic, I should think,” said Daniel.

It was to everyone’s surprise that Minty spoke. “Murder’s wrong,” she said loudly. “It’s always wrong. It’s taking away someone’s life. You can’t get round that.”

“If there was ever a gloomy subject for a birthday party,” said Sonovia, “this crowns it all. Open another bottle of wine, for goodness’ sake, Laf.” She was at the window, where she’d moved when everyone converged on Laf and his problem in ethics. “Minty,” she exclaimed. “Look at this. There’s an ambulance next door. It must be for Mr. Kroot.”

Though midsummer, it was quite dark by now and raining, but they all crowded to the window to see the paramedics come out, not with a stretcher, but a wheelchair in which the old man sat, a blanket over his knees and another over his head.

“Heart attack or stroke,” said Sonovia. “Take your pick. It could be either.”