The Other Woman’s House (39 page)

‘Basil Lambert-Wall was wrong about Bowskill being the guy that fitted his burglar alarm – we know that. But what if he was right about seeing him? What if seeing Kit Bowskill is strongly associated in his mind with the day he got a new burglar alarm? What if something
else
happened that same day, and the professor's confusing the two things? Think about it – it's got to be! Why else would he be so sure Kit Bowskill had fitted his alarm when he hadn't?'

Because he's old and doddery and just plain wrong?
Charlie didn't bother to say it out loud. When Simon was like this, there was no point talking to him.

She heard a click, then the line went dead.
Dismissed
. It was Professor Sir Basil's turn to have his evening interrupted, poor old sod. It struck Charlie as odd that she knew what was about to happen to him and he had no idea. She hoped he wasn't asleep.

Sighing, she pressed play on the remote control and stretched out on the sofa to watch the rest of her film. Alice Fancourt could wait until tomorrow. If Simon could have a guiding principle, Charlie could too: people who ended phone calls without saying goodbye didn't deserve to have their errands attended to immediately.

‘Sam.' Kate Kombothekra took the phone out of her husband's hands and put it down on the coffee table between them. She was wearing her yellow pyjamas, holding a roll of cling-film in one hand. ‘I need your attention for five seconds. Think you can manage it?'

‘Sorry.'

‘Did you remember to get paper for the printer?'

‘No. Sorry. I'll do it tomorrow.'

‘Did you ring the council?'

‘Was I supposed to?'

‘Yes. To ask about skip hire, get some quotes…'

‘Oh, right. No. Sorry.'

Kate sighed. ‘All right, just one more question, and only because I'm desperate to hear a “yes”: would it be fair to assume that you've neglected to do all four things you promised you'd do today?'

‘That was Connie Bowskill on the phone,' Sam told her. ‘She wants me to ask Grint for Jackie Napier's number.' Not an unreasonable request, in the circumstances.

‘Oh, not this again!' Kate whacked the cling-film rhythmically against the palm of her left hand in what would surely have qualified as a threatening gesture had the weapon been less innocuously domestic. ‘Forget Connie Bowskill. Come and help me get the boys' stuff ready for tomorrow. I've nearly finished the packed lunches – if you could dig out their big rucksacks from the cellar. The camouflagey ones, you know.' Kate performed a mime: a seated person springing up from a chair and breaking into a run.

Sam didn't move. ‘She's staying at the Garden House,' he said. ‘Same hotel as Selina Gane.' He wasn't sure why the idea of the two women in such close proximity disturbed him. Was he worried Connie might do something? No. She wasn't violent. Desperate, though. Much of the violence Sam had encountered over the years had been born of desperation.

He was fighting the urge to ring Grint and tell him to go to the hotel. And do what, once he got there? It was crazy. So was not wanting Connie to talk to Jackie Napier. Sam didn't like to think of himself as a control freak – the sort of person who made decisions on other people's behalf and justified it on the grounds that it was for their own good. He could easily have told Connie that Jackie worked for Lancing Damisz, that there was no need for him to bother Grint – Connie could contact Jackie via her work if she wanted to speak to her. It was natural that Connie should want to be put in touch with the only person in the world who would believe her for sure, the woman who'd seen exactly what she'd seen. In her shoes, Sam would also want to compare notes, go over details. So why were his instincts telling him to do everything he could to keep the two women apart?

He couldn't stop thinking about something Jackie Napier
had said when he'd interviewed her, about the woman who pretended to be Selina Gane and put 11 Bentley Grove on the market.
She knew all she had to do was talk about people not looking like they do in their passports. If she made me think about all those other people, she wouldn't have to convince me – I'd do all the work myself. It's one of those things everyone says, isn't it? “He looks nothing like his passport photo, I'm surprised he's ever allowed back into the country.”

Had Sam misremembered? No, he was fairly sure that was what she'd said.

He opened his mouth to ask Kate if he was imagining problems that didn't exist, but she had already left the room.

‘Pick a number between one and thirty-nine.'

‘Sixteen,' said Simon. His and Charlie's wedding anniversary.

Professor Sir Basil Lambert-Wall dragged his index finger along the books on the shelf closest to him, counting them off one by one. When he got to the sixteenth, he worked it loose from the row, hooked his walking stick over the back of the nearest chair and proceeded to try and take hold of the bulky hardback with both hands. Simon stepped forward to help, regretting the sentimentality that had led him to pick what was undoubtedly the heaviest book on the shelf –
The Whisperers
, it was called. The subtitle was
Private Life in Stalin's Russia
.

‘Stay where you are!' the professor barked. His voice was large and powerful for a man so small. ‘I can manage perfectly well.' He made a series of huffing noises as he circumnavigated the chair and sat down in it. More huffing as he adjusted the book on his lap.

Simon watched the effort, trying not to wince, hoping
Lambert-Wall's tiny wrists wouldn't snap. He berated himself for not having guessed what the old man had in mind; if he had, he'd have gone for skinny number fifteen,
Maxims of La Rochefoucauld
. There was no shortage of books to choose from: every wall was covered. There were shelves above the door, above and below both windows – all full. In between the two armchairs and the sofa were three piles of magazines. One was topped with an issue of
The Economist
, another with something called
PN Review
. The third was supporting two empty mugs. Simon couldn't see the name of the journal beneath them; it had a picture of the Statue of Liberty in one corner.

‘You chose well,' said the professor once he'd got his breath back. ‘
The Whisperers
is an unusually excellent book. Now, pick a number between one and six hundred and fifty-six.' He flicked through the pages.

‘You're sure I'm not keeping you up?' Simon asked. It was the red towelling dressing gown that was making him feel guilty, the grey striped pyjamas, the sallow tubes of calf protruding from the brown slippers. Didn't necessarily mean bedtime, though; Lambert-Wall had been wearing the same outfit last time Simon had called round, at midday.

‘It's not even ten o'clock,' said the old man, making Simon feel like a fussy over-protective parent. ‘I sleep between four and nine. And I write between eleven and a quarter to four, so as long as we'll be finished by eleven…?' He glanced towards the digital clock on the windowsill, then raised his eyebrows at Simon, who nodded. ‘Good. So – a number?'

‘Eleven.'

The professor laughed. ‘Page eleven it is. And now…a number between one and thirty-four, please.'

‘Twenty-two.' Charlie's birthday.

‘Excellent. And finally, a number between one and…thirty-four.'

‘Twelve.' Simon's birthday. He didn't see how his choices could reveal anything about him that he wouldn't want a stranger to know.

‘Ah. Sorry.' The professor frowned. ‘You can't have the twelfth word on the twenty-second line, I'm afraid. It's “Trotsky”. Proper nouns are not eligible.'

‘I'll go for eleven again,' said Simon, too curious to be impatient. What was the point of this game?

‘You've chosen the word “life”.' Lambert-Wall smiled. ‘A very impressive result – the best in a long while.' He slapped the book shut, placed it on the beige carpet by his feet. Simon thought about Selina Gane's beige carpet next door, with the Christmas tree stain in one corner. Had the developers fitted all the houses with the same carpet when they'd built them? From the outside, they had a generic look: one design, multiplied by thirty-odd. Simon found himself staring at the three magazine towers in front of him. Imagined moving them to reveal three round scarlet stains, each the shape of a human head. He told himself to get a grip.

Basil Lambert-Wall had hauled himself out of his chair and was hobbling, without the help of his stick, towards a free-standing desk in front of the window that had many paperweights on it but no loose paper. When he arrived at his destination, he picked up a lidless pen and wrote something in a notebook that lay open. His back to Simon, he said, ‘You're a man of discernment and a force for good in the world. And you had a question you wanted to ask me. Please go ahead.'

Simon was confused. Had the professor struggled over to his desk in order to record the outcome of his peculiar test?
Simon would have liked to study the contents of the notebook in detail. As always when someone paid him a compliment, he was tempted to argue. ‘Life' had been his second choice. He'd picked ‘Trotsky' first time round – an enthusiastic mass murderer. What did that say about him? On what grounds were proper nouns disqualified?

‘The day you had your new burglar alarm fitted – Tuesday 29 June.'

‘How do you know that was the date?' the professor asked.

‘You told me, last time we spoke. Safesound Alarms confirmed it.'

‘You checked up on me?'

‘I check everything,' Simon told him. ‘Always.'

‘If I told you a precise date, that means I must have looked it up in my diary.'

‘You did.'

‘Then there was no need to check.' Lambert-Wall lowered himself into his chair, then rose again to adjust his dressing gown.

Simon waited until he was settled. ‘Never mind the date. I want you to think back to that day. You had your new alarm fitted. Was there anything else going on that you remember, anything that happened at roughly the same time?'

‘Yes.' The old man blinked several times in quick succession. It was disconcerting to watch – as if someone was messing around with his eyelid controls. ‘I read an exceptional book –
People of the Lie
by M Scott Peck. It offers the best definition of human evil that I've ever come across.'

Simon pictured a two-word text, the two words being ‘Giles' and ‘Proust'. ‘Anything else?' he asked.

‘Yes. I ate something called a “tian” for my lunch. I had and
still have no idea what a tian is, but it tasted delicious. It was cylindrical. I liked the look of it in the shop, so I thought I'd give it a try. Oh, I went to the shop, of course – the supermarket.'

‘On the day your burglar alarm was fitted?'

Lambert-Wall nodded. ‘My daughter took me, in the morning, to Waitrose. She takes me every Tuesday morning. She'd like me to shop online, but I resist.'

Simon nodded. This was getting him nowhere. ‘So you read
People of the Lie
, had lunch, went shopping…'

‘Yes, though not in that order. I napped in the afternoon, as I always do – one o'clock to four o'clock. Oh, and one of my neighbours was rude to me, which spoilt what would otherwise have been a rather pleasant day.'

‘Which neighbour?'

The professor pointed towards the window. ‘One of the men who lives in the house opposite,' he said. ‘He's usually the soul of politeness, which was why I was surprised. He and his wife had bought new curtains, and they were carrying them into the house. She'd had to lower the back seats of her car to fit them all in. I wandered over to have a chat, intending to make a remark on the subject of the coincidence – new curtains, new burglar alarm. Not terribly compelling, I grant you, but no doubt it would have led on to matters of greater interest. His reaction was entirely uncalled for.'