Gold Digger (11 page)

She got up to rattle the fire, shoving on another log, sparking it back to longer life. The fire had been dead by the time she called the ambulance. It took hours for this fire to die. She had done nothing to revive or warm her wedded husband; she had let the fire go out. That would be remembered.
All she had to do was contaminate the food.

He cleared his throat and reached forward for her to light his cigarette. There was nothing seductive about her action, but it was still intimate. She was all sharp angles, shrill, comforting, charming and graceless, all at the same time. Distracting.

‘Well,’ he said, more cheerfully than he felt, wishing she had more of a sense of the dangerous pathways ahead, wanting to spare her and yet wanting to shake her with his own sense of dread. ‘The house is beautiful and you should do what he wanted to do, to the letter. It would be helpful if you were the model of good behaviour in the meantime. A demure and grieving widow, perhaps. A connoisseur, leading a gentle life. That kind of thing. No loud noises.’

She shook her head, smiling.

‘The inventory? Haven’t we forgotten to look in the basement?’

She clapped a hand to her brow. ‘So we have, I forgot, but you know there’s nothing much in there. Too damp, too cold, too … this time of year. The sea comes through from underneath, you see, sometimes.’

There were stone steps leading down from the heavy door inside the snug room. Raymond did not want to go but knew he must, for the sake of duty as well as curiosity. He hated the dark and longed for the light upstairs. She was fooling him, leaving this until last, but then again, maybe she wasn’t. The lights were fused, she said; she had taken a torch which swept
round the vaulted ceilings of what was once a wine cellar, with arched alcoves in glorious patterns of brick in pale, russet stone. There were wine racks and rubbish, boxes and baskets, cardboard containers, tidily stacked, and to his inner ear, a faint shuffling sound, as if of someone breathing. The floor at the furthest end away from the inside steps sloped upwards towards the steel shutters leading into the yard.

‘You can hear the sea down here,’ Di said. ‘And there were mice and rats and things, but I think they’ve gone now.’

Again, half lost in admiration of the room itself, Raymond asked a question.

‘The late Mrs Porteous … did she know this house well?’

The torch wavered alarmingly in the large space. Even a claustrophobic could function here.

‘Thomas said so. She would have known it when his parents lived here and they came to visit. She hated it and hated bringing the children, but admired it, too, when it was never as valuable as it is now. She had no idea then that Thomas would inherit it. Yes, she must have known it, but probably not well. I only know what Thomas told me. There’s been changes since.’

He was accepting stray pieces of unverifiable information in the dark and he wondered why he had asked. He knew Christina Porteous had visited Thomas in this house before her death, to plead for money: he was unsure if Di knew, or how much she knew of that unstable, poisonous woman. Raymond needed no encouragement to go back upstairs as fast as his legs could carry him. He hated mice and the very thought of rats unnerved him so he went back upstairs, sat back and accepted coffee, again experiencing the strange sense of comfort she offered. Excellent coffee, as it happened. He was particular about that, took a sip and shuddered with
the thrill of it, sipping it like an old lady who had never tasted the taste before, and looked at his watch. A train would go at fifteen minutes past the hour and he had time for the next, if he went now, resisting the comfort and the urge to stay. He heaved himself to his feet, sat down again, remembering there was more to discuss.

‘Look Di, you’ve got to make your own last will and testament, and make it soon. Thomas said so. I’ve got a draft, setting up a trust. I know it might seem ridiculous at your age, but it’s got to be done. He was very keen about that.’

‘Yes. He knew very well that if anything happened to me, and I died without making a will, my father would claim as my only relative. So, yes, it better be done soon, and publicly. So that he has less of an incentive than he already does to kill me.’

She said it so calmly, he almost choked.

‘Your father? You’d better explain this to me, Di. Thomas never did.’

‘Perhaps because he didn’t want to shock you,’ Di said, calmly. ‘Or force you to consider the violent propensities of his wife’s parent.’ Sometimes her speech had the modulations of Thomas and his dedication to precision, so that she sounded like an echo of a scholarly brain.

‘I have a father who is rather a bad man,’ Di said, matter of factly. ‘A sort of undertaker, outside of the law. About whom I know rather too much for his comfort. Still alive, as far as I know. The last thing he ever said to me was to wish me dead. He’s lived away for a long, long while, haven’t seen him for years. A decade, at least. So, no worries, hey? And anyway, he’s not a murderer and Thomas thought of everything.’

The speech has lost its careful intonation.

‘Good Lord,’ Raymond said, faintly, thinking to himself that maybe this was a little over the top, not to say creative
and stress-related. It had already occurred to him that Di was in danger, for the simple reason that the hiring of an assassin was a far cheaper expedient than the expensive business of contesting a will. He had known those who had contemplated it, but it did not happen in polite society. Edward would have thought of it: Edward had contacts, but not that kind. And now there was this other string. A homicidally inclined father, dear God, what overdramatic nonsense. It made him suspect her all over again. What was it Edward had said about Di’s father? Something and nothing. It was all too much.

‘The will,’ he said. ‘I’ll get on with it, shall I? Because in any event, Di, you’re a bit of a hostage to fortune without one.’

He meant, even if your father exists, and is not a phantom of your own making.

‘Yes,’ she said, like someone shaking herself awake. ‘Yes, but I would like to bury my husband first. I can’t make a will until Thomas is buried. And I wish Saul would come.’

Saul, Saul, always Saul, who knew about paintings and might have much to gain. Raymond felt an unreasonable flash of jealousy. Saul, the Dealer, the Interface, a man with whom Thomas had hatched contingency plans before he died, not shared with his lawyer who ran errands.

‘I expect he’ll arrive,’ Raymond said, brusquely. ‘I’d better go, Di. Just keep a low profile, will you? They may send their own envoy. I’m liaison, but if they try a direct approach, let me know. They’ll certainly try the back door as well as the front. They have access to the London flat, they always have. We need an inventory there, too. Are you planning to check it out, or do you want me to do that?’

‘No, I’ll go, I need to. Safe journey. I’d let you out through the front door, only it’s stuck.’

Mice and rats in the basement, Raymond remembered on the train. Something rattling around among all the boxes; things covered with canvas, no smell of damp, never mind. His stomach was full and his mind was empty. Di would win, and they would have a good fight, if only she played fair and looked demure. If only there was not another lover and she didn’t blow it all sky-high.
If
she didn’t fill the house with undesirables;
if
she hadn’t killed him. En route home, he remembered with guilt the haste of his departure, his willingness to believe that she would be fine, wondered quite how lonely she must be, how tough she seemed and how soft she might be. He had failed to remark on the boarded-up window, awaiting repair, failed to embrace her and wish her well and entirely forgotten the inventory. What kind of man was this father? Why wasn’t she more afraid?

Maybe she was not afraid, because as Thomas had said,
she has no malice in her, she doesn’t understand it. I don’t know why, but that’s her blind spot.

D
iana Porteous was certainly afraid; temporarily fearless, because the worst had happened and Thomas had been taken away from his house. One thing she had learned long since: that the person who looked afraid was always the first target. Man kicked the animal who cowered. Her father taught her that. She counted her fears and put them in order.

Fear of locked doors and confined spaces …
and alongside that, for the moment, the great fear that she would not be capable of fulfilling the enormous trust that had been placed in her. That she would not Honour Him. That she would not be able to show him how much she loved him.

After Raymond had gone, Di went back downstairs to the
cellar, turning the lights on as she went, not apologising to herself for lying about the fuse. There was more to the cellar than Raymond could ever have seen, deep alcoves at the back with raised floors, snug places like berths in a ship and between them, a door to a further room. The door was rusted shut and there was a chest of drawers in front of it, raised on blocks against the now dry floor. The chest held blankets. Di peered into the first alcove, finding some small traces of occupation, not recent. She left the chocolate and the bottles of water on top of the chest of drawers. To feed the mice, or the cat, of course. To feed anyone who needed shelter here. It was a place of last resort, always had been, always would be, whatever else was here.

She went back upstairs to the best room in the house. Turned on the computer automatically. They had written to one another, Thomas and she, even when they were in the same room. The day had turned dark and the interminable rain began again. There would have been more visitors after his death, surely, if it were not for the rain. No use to blame the rain, she blamed no one. She lit the fire, sat in Thomas’s chair and dreamed.

No one had come to see her, because no one trusted her and she trusted no one even though she was known in the town; she had gone about, to Monica in the hairdresser’s. Monica knew how her hair had thinned. Di tried to predict what Gayle, Beatrice and Edward would do.

How easy it would be to undermine her if they knew how.

Not late. Keep on writing.

Goodnight, Madame de Belleroche. When can I grieve?

Not yet.

There was a banging at the door.

R
aymond Forrest was on the ugly station platform, waiting for the high-speed train, watching it slink into the station. Then he heard footsteps and saw a rumpled man running towards him.

‘Listen,’ the man was yelling. ‘Fucking listen, will you? Come back, they’re going to fucking arrest her. It’ll kill her. I saw the car from the pier, someone told me.’

‘What? Can’t hear you.’

The shabby man was shouting over the peep, peep, peep of the opening train doors, and he was pointing at the mobile phone he carried in one hand, as if it was the fountain of all wisdom and explained what he was saying. He was red and sweating. He clutched Raymond’s coat sleeve; Raymond brushed him off. The man’s hands dropped to his sides, defeated. The train breathed its desire to depart. Raymond stepped inside as the doors closed. A case of mistaken identity, surely.

Jones stood on the platform.
Fucking lawyers, fucking bastards, hate the cunts.
Then he ran out to the taxi office. Got back to Di’s house, just as they got going. Just in time. Fucking bastards.

He remembered a screaming child he had rescued from a cellar.

And Di, behind bars.

J
ones had the picture in his mind from many years before.

A dirty girl, huddled in the corner of a cell, with her fingers stuck in her ears against the noise. The prevailing colour is dirty yellow. Nobody arrives.

He went round the back. The car was still there. He was shouting before he burst in, even though shouting made everything worse. His fucking police contact had given him the right information about the fucking search warrant, but the wrong time. They were supposed to come tomorrow with the warrant, give him time to warn her. Not like this, with him watching from the pier with his binoculars, seeing the lawyer walk away and thinking he’d go and tell her then, until he saw the police car nosing round, unsure of the address, and he knew what they were after, and then he’d run in the wrong direction, panting up to the station to fetch back the Brief who’d have the right words, wasting time. He hated fucking lawyers.

The back of the old schoolhouse was milling with police,
all of them kids and none of them old enough to be mates of his. Someone should have had the sense to ask him first, like the older ones would have done. No one used to question anyone in this town without consulting Jones. Di was as white as a sheet, standing there, holding on to a chair and looking like shit. Two uniforms stood by the door, shuffling. It was true, then, what Jones had heard on his mobile phone. Diana Porteous was not only under suspicion, she was being taken in. Fuckit. That little claustrophobic beast was being put in the frame again.

Who, fucking who? Surely it wasn’t him, telling them that she had waited for two hours? No, no, it would have been that young one who was there, and the doctor they called and the fact that it was obvious he was cooling and the fact that she looked like shit, but who the fuck had put the sting on her now?

‘Who the fuck are you?’ Jones bellowed, full of his own forgotten authority.

‘Got a warrant to search for evidence. Information received of suspicious death in this house.’

‘What? You fucking joking, boy, what information? Not at liberty to say are you? The fuck you aren’t. So an old man died here last week, is all. You search every house where someone dies with their name already on God’s waiting list, you’ll be busy in this town, I tell you.’

A search warrant, not an arrest warrant. What does it cover? Kitchen equipment, foodstuffs … are you serious? Why? You’re going to take her away without a warrant for her arrest and leave these bastards to search the house without even knowing what the hell they’re looking for?

‘Mrs Porteous has agreed to assist us with our Enquiries. She’s agreed to go with us.’