“I’ll pass these on to PC Delingbole. Perhaps he can reunite them with their owners.”
“Oh, don’t be so spiteful!” Alison said. “What did Mart ever do to you? He’s been kicked out of any place he could call home. There’s no evil in him. He isn’t the sort to cut a woman up and leave her in a dirty van.”
Colette stared at her. “I don’t think you ought to go to Aldershot,” she said. “I think you ought to have a lie- down.” She ducked out of the Balmoral, and stood on the lawn. “I have to tell you, Alison, that I am very disturbed at your behaviour lately. I think we may have to reconsider the terms of our arrangement. I’m finding it increasingly untenable.”
“And where will you go?” Alison jeered. “Are you going to live in a shed as well?”
“That’s my business. Keep your voice down. We don’t want Michelle out here.”
“I wouldn’t mind. She could be a witness. You were down and out when I met you, Colette.”
“Hardly that. I had a very good career. I was regarded as a highflyer, let me tell you.”
Alison turned and walked into the house. “Yes, but psychically, you were down and out.”
On the way to Mrs. Etchells’s house, they did not speak. They drove through Pirbright—by the village green, by the pond fringed with rushes and yellow iris—through the black-shaded woodlands of the A324, where bars of light flashed through the treetops to rap the knuckles of Colette’s tiny fists clenched on the wheel: by the ferny verges and towering hedges, by deep-roofed homesteads of mellow timbers and old stock brick, the sprinklers rotating on their velvet lawns, the coo of wood pigeons in their chimney stacks, the sweet smells of lavender and beeswax wafting from linen press, commode, and etagere. If I walked out on her now, Colette thought, then with what I have got saved I could just about put a deposit on a Beatty, though to be frank I’d like somewhere with a bit more nightlife than Admiral Drive. If I can’t live here where the rich people live I’d like to live on a tube line, and then I could go out to a club with my friends and we could get wrecked on a Friday like we used to, and go home with men we hardly knew, and sneak off in the mornings when only the milk trucks are out and the birds are singing. But I suppose I’m old now, she thought, if I had any friends they’d all have kids by now, they’d be too old for clubbing, they’d be too grown-up, in fact it would be their kids that would be going out, and they’d be sitting at home with their gardening manuals. And I have grown up without anyone noticing. I went home with Gavin once, or rather I pressed the lift button to his hotel floor, and when I tapped at his door he looked through his spyhole and he liked what he saw—but would anybody like me now? As the first straggle of the settlement of Ash appeared—some rotting sixties in-fill, and the sway-walled cottages by the old church—she felt penetrated by a cold hopelessness, which the prospect before her did nothing to soothe.
Much of the district had been razed; there were vast intersections, grassy roundabouts as large as public parks, signs leading to industrial estates. “Next right,” Al said. Only yards from the main road, the townscape dwindled to a more domestic scale. “That’s new.” She indicated the Kebab Centre, the Tanning Salon. “Slow down. Right again.” Between the 1910 villas some new-build terraces were squeezed, bright blue plastic sheeting where their window glass would be. On a wire fence hung a pictorial sign that showed a wider, higher, loftier, and airier version of the building it fronted: LAUREL MEWS, it said. MOVE IN TODAY FOR NINETY-NINE POUNDS.
“How do they do that?” Al said, and Colette said, “They offer to pay your stamp duty, your surveyor’s fees, all that, but they just stick it on the asking price and then they tie you into a mortgage deal they’ve picked out, you think you’re getting something for nothing but they’ve got a hand in your pocket at every turn.”
“They want their pound of flesh,” Al said. “Pity. Because I thought I could buy one for Mart. You’d think he’d be safe, in a mews. He could keep that sheeting over the windows, so nobody could see in.”
Colette hooted. “Mart? Are you serious? Nobody would give Mart a mortgage. They wouldn’t let him near the place.”
They were almost there: she recognized the dwarf wall, its plaster peeling, the stunted hedge made mostly of bare twigs. Mandy had pulled her smart little soft-top off the road, almost blocking the front door. Gemma had given Cara a lift, and she and Silvana were parked in the road, bumper-to-bumper.
“You want to watch that,” Silvana said, indicating Mandy’s car. “In a neighbourhood like this.”
“I know,” Mandy said. “That’s why I pulled as close as I could.”
“So where do you live, that’s so special?” Colette asked Silvana. “Somewhere with security dogs?”
Mandy said, trying to ease relations, “You look nice, Colette. Have you had your hair done? That’s a nice amulet, Cara.”
“It’s real silver, I’m selling them,” Cara said promptly. “Shall I send you one? Postage and packing free.”
“What does it do?”
“Sod-all,” said Silvana. “Silver, my arse. I had one off her. It makes a dirty mark round your neck, like a pencil mark, looks as if somebody’s put a dotted line round for snipping your head off.”
Colette said, “I’m surprised anyone notices it. Against your natural deep tan.”
Silvana put the key in the door. Alison’s heart squeezed small inside her chest.
“You nerved yourself, love,” said Mandy in a low voice. “Well done.” She squeezed Al’s hand. Al winced as the lucky opals bit into her flesh.
“Sorry,” Mandy whispered.
“Oh, Mand, I wish I could tell you the half of it.” I wish I had an amulet, she thought, I wish I had a charm against the stirring air.
They stepped in. The room felt damp. “Christ,” Silvana said, “where’s her furniture gone?”
Alison looked around. “No milk money. No clock.”
In the front parlour, nothing was left but a square of patterned carpet that didn’t quite meet the sides of the room, and an armchair hopelessly unsprung. Silvana wrenched open the cupboard by the fireplace; it was empty, but a powerful smell of mould rushed out of it. In the kitchen—where they had expected to find the crumbs of Mrs. Etchells’s last teatime—there was nothing to find but a teapot, unemptied, on the sink. Alison lifted the lid; a single teabag was sunk in brown watery depths.
“I think it’s obvious what’s happened here,” Gemma said. “I believe if we inspect the windows at the back we’ll find signs of forced entry.” Her voice faded as she walked down the passage to the scullery.
