Liz stopped suddenly and stood still. Her mother ran a nursery garden, but you didn’t need her knowledge to see what was wrong. No one prunes roses in August – not bush roses, that was for sure. The man had been a fake. Whatever he was, he wasn’t a gardener.
She wondered what to do. Looking back, she saw that she was barely a hundred yards from the house. Ought she to ring the police? She paused. Better to go back herself, right now, before he’d sloped off, and see what he was really up to.
She hesitated, since if he wasn’t a gardener, then he couldn’t be up to anything good. But she made her mind up to ignore her apprehension, and started half-running towards the little house. When she got to the gate she saw the front door was wide open. She slowed only momentarily, then walked quickly inside, calling out ‘hello’ loudly as she entered.
Silence. She stood in the small hallway next to a living room remarkable for its lived-in drabness. Through the door she could see a television perched on a MDF cabinet in one corner, covered by a thick layer of dust. Along the far wall sat a shabby, stained sofa badly in need of reupholstering. The low coffee table in front of it was covered with newspapers and magazines. Never mind the gardener, thought Liz, Marcham should get himself a cleaner.
Directly ahead of her the short hall led to a closed door. She walked up to it, quietly turned the knob and pushed it open. She was looking into a small, square kitchen. Dirty dishes sat in the sink; an open box of cereal stood on the pine table in the middle of the room. Beyond were two more doors, one also closed, the other open and leading to a bedroom. She walked across the kitchen and, peering in, saw a brass bed, neatly made. On the bedside table there was a dog-eared copy of
Then she heard the noise. Something being moved, or pushed, the sound of wood sliding, coming from the room next door. Retreating to the kitchen, she looked around for something to defend herself with. Not a knife, she thought; facing a stronger man, she might find a knife turned against her. But there was a heavy frying pan on the stove. Grabbing its handle, she moved to the closed door and opened it cautiously. She was just in time to see a man drop from the back window.
‘Stop!’ she shouted, knowing he wouldn’t, and by the time she got to the window, the man was scaling the low wall that separated the rear garden from Hampstead Heath. All she got was a glimpse of his shoes. Slip-ons, still shiny.
Her pulse racing, she put the frying pan down and looked around the room, which was a small study – the bedroom must be next door. In contrast to the squalid sitting room, the study was tidy and well organised. Books lined two of the walls, neatly arranged, and a small antique bureau sat next to the window, its lid down to double as a writing surface. On it sat a closed laptop computer, a digital tape recorder the size of a cigarette lighter, an A4-sized notebook, and three HB pencils, sharpened and aligned in a row. The arsenal of a professional writer.
She examined the tape recorder, but it was empty. Noticing a pile of file folders on the bookcase, she extracted the top one, which lay askew across the neat stack. She read its label with sudden interest.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
Liz jumped at the sudden noise behind her. She turned and found a middle-aged man in jeans and a white shirt standing in the doorway. He was tall and he was very angry – an accomplice of the burglar she’d just surprised? Liz looked quickly around, but the frying pan was out of reach.
It seemed best to take the initiative; maybe she could catch him off-guard long enough to get past him. ‘Who are you?’ she demanded.
‘My name’s Marcham. Now perhaps you’ll tell me just what the hell you’re doing in my house?’
FIFTEEN
Sophie Margolis sat in the kitchen of her large Highgate house, thinking of her mother-in-law. For once, Sophie had time on her hands, a cup of coffee in front of her, and Hannah for the moment out of the way – the attentive granny, walking little Zack on the Heath.
Sophie had always liked Hannah, but she reflected how little she really knew about her. For one thing Saul had always got in the way – Hannah’s former husband, a bullying missile of a man who mistook pugnacity for energy, monopolised attention and had done his best to undermine everyone around him. Not least David, his son, Sophie’s husband, whose gentleness had so attracted her, and still did. In the end Hannah had called ‘time’ on Saul. It had been a contested divorce, a fiery business, full of animosity. Had it wounded Hannah? Not to all appearances, thought Sophie. She was full of enthusiasm about her new life in Israel; acting in fact as though she was only just beginning to live life to the full.
A pair of blue tits was picking greenfly off the roses. Sophie got off her stool to watch them and to cast an eye at the pram containing her latest offspring.
There was something, though, about Hannah – something not so much worrying as puzzling. When she’d first arrived in London it had been hard to get her out of the house on her own. She’d gone with Sophie and David to the theatre, to dinner with a few friends, that was all. But now there seemed to be a man in the picture. Where had he come from? Sophie had first spotted the two together when she had been pushing the buggy down Highgate High Street and to her great surprise her mother-in-law had emerged from a coffee shop in the company of a male at least twenty years her junior – attractive, too. There had been no attempt at concealment. Hannah came straight up and introduced her companion – Danny Kollek from the Israeli Embassy. And from there it had taken off. It soon transpired that Hannah was seeing a lot of Mr Kollek. They went to concerts, to restaurants, sometimes for walks and once, amazingly, to the zoo.
Well, thought Sophie, resuming her stool and running her eye over the
They were on the Heath by the dog pond, taking turns to push the baby in the buggy, when she broached the subject. The sun had moved from behind the clouds, warming the air, and Sophie took off her pullover, feeling frumpy in an old T-shirt and jeans. Hannah was dressed casually too, but smartly – in linen trousers and a silk shirt.
Sophie remarked, as if by the way, ‘What exactly does your friend Danny do at the Israeli Embassy?’
Hannah gave a small smile. ‘He’s a trade attache. Not very senior, but he’s still quite young.’
‘So he’s just a friend?’
‘Yes. What else would he be? I have my vanity, my dear, but it doesn’t extend to toy boys. I’m sure he’s not interested in me in that way. And if you’re thinking it’s my money he’s after, you can relax. He seems perfectly well off, and besides, he doesn’t know I have money of my own. No, I think it’s just that he’s lonely over here; English people aren’t always that welcoming, present company excepted. And Israelis aren’t very popular anywhere these days. He and I just get on well – we both love music, for one thing.’
Sophie knew she should have been relieved by this, but in fact it only made her more suspicious. It simply didn’t make sense to her that Kollek would want to spend so much time with a woman twenty years older, especially if he had none of a gigolo’s objectives in mind. Yet how could she put this to Hannah, without causing offence? It would be too insulting to insist that he must be pursuing a hidden agenda, rather than mere friendship.
It niggled at her for several days, until now, staring idly out as the blue tits were joined by a couple of blackbirds, she felt she had to act. In the old days, when she was still working, she would have been able to do some digging herself, but as a Highgate housewife, she felt powerless. Hang on, she thought, there must be
