to wake the cat?
She’ll never hear the doorbell, thought Charlie, pressing it anyway. She stood back and stared at the house. Like the others on the street, it was an ugly red-brick semi with an entirely flat fa?ade, no bay windows to give it character. Weeds grew between the broken flagstones that led to the front door. By the side of the house, next to a drain, was a scalloped lead pot with a small dead tree in it. Charlie touched one of the branches. It crumbled between her finger and thumb.
She stepped back out on to the road and looked up at the top windows. None of the curtains were open. All were as thin as handkerchiefs, she noticed, and they’d been hung badly, so they didn’t fall straight. Some had holes in them where the fabric had decayed, been torn or burned. This was far from being the sort of house Charlie would have expected an artist to live in. She struggled to bring to mind the few facts she knew about art or artists. Vincent Van Gogh had been dirt poor. Olivia had made Charlie watch a docu-drama about him once. Admittedly, he probably wouldn’t have given a toss about the state of his curtains.
‘They can’t have called you already. I’ve only been gone five minutes.’ An angry, skinny woman with deeply ingrained wrinkles around her eyes, nose and mouth appeared beside Charlie. It looked almost as if someone had scored down the middle of her face with a Stanley knife, so pronounced were the lines. She had a caramel-coloured birthmark, the one Aidan Seed had described to Simon, and was wearing a black duffle-coat, black trousers, white trainers and a purple woolly hat that looked as if it had a lot of hair stuffed into it. Her ears, Charlie noticed, were tiny, the lobes almost non-existent-again, as Aidan had described. In her gloved hands the woman-Mary Trelease- held a packet of Marlboro reds, a red plastic lighter and what looked like a small green box.
‘They?’ Charlie asked. On first appearance, there was nothing sinister about Trelease. She dressed like someone who didn’t give a damn what she looked like. Charlie had been through similar phases.
‘The neighbours. I’ll turn it down, all right? Give me a chance.’ She sprinted off round the side of the house. Charlie followed her. It was hard to avoid hearing the song that was blasting out, the word ‘survivor’ being repeated again and again. It was a more stringent and hysterical than usual variation on the theme of he-done-me-wrong- but-I’m-still-strong. It was the sort of song Charlie would write if she could write songs, full of posturing and bravado.
After a few seconds the music stopped, though its imprint still pulsed in Charlie’s brain. She took the open kitchen door as an invitation, and was about to go inside when Mary startled her by jumping down from the doorstep on to the narrow path that adjoined the house. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Satisfied?’ She eyed Charlie contemptuously, shifting her negligible weight from one trainered foot to the other, still holding the cigarettes, lighter and green container, which Charlie now saw was a box of Twinings Peppermint tea.
‘Are you Mary Trelease?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was the song?’
‘Pardon?’
‘The song you’ve just turned off. What’s it called?’ Some people were willing to answer harmless questions; others weren’t. Charlie wanted to know which category Mary Trelease belonged to before she asked her about Aidan Seed and Ruth Bussey.
‘Is this some kind of joke? Look, if the petty arseholes at number twelve have-’
‘I’m not here about the music,’ said Charlie. ‘Though while we’re on the subject, that volume’s unacceptable at any time of day. Why leave it on so loud if you’re going out?’
Mary opened her packet of cigarettes, put one in her mouth and lit it. She didn’t offer one to Charlie. ‘If you’re not here about the music, I can guess what you are here about.’
Her voice was at odds with her surroundings. Charlie hadn’t been able to hear it properly for as long as the music had been playing. What was someone who spoke like a member of the royal family doing on the Winstanley estate? Why hadn’t Simon mentioned her accent? ‘My name’s Sergeant Zailer, Charlie Zailer. I’m part of the community policing team for this area.’
‘Zailer? The same Sergeant Zailer who was all over the news a couple of years back?’ Mary’s brown eyes were wide, avid.
Charlie nodded, struggling to contain her discomfort. Most people weren’t quite so open about it. Most people shuffled and looked away, as Malcolm Fenton had, and their awkwardness made her forget, for a second, her own pain and humiliation. I should have resigned two years ago, she thought. All her allies, the people who had told her she’d done nothing wrong and advised her to brazen it out, had done her a disservice. For two years, Charlie had felt as if she’d been in hiding in public; if there was a trickier professional situation to be in, she couldn’t imagine what it might be.
‘Community policing,’ said Mary, smiling vaguely. ‘Does that mean they demoted you?’
‘I transferred. By choice.’
‘It was just after I moved to Spilling when it was in the papers, ’ said Mary. ‘Made me wonder what sort of area I’d moved to, but I don’t think there have been any policing scandals since, have there?’ She smiled. ‘You’re a one- off.’ Seeing Charlie flustered and at a loss, she added, ‘Don’t worry, it makes no odds to me. You’ll have had your reasons, no doubt.’
‘No doubt,’ said Charlie brusquely, ‘and obviously I’m not here to talk about that.’
‘Well, you’ve picked the wrong house if your visit’s community-related. You won’t find much of a community round here. And, such as it is, I’m not part of it. I’m an outsider who drinks funny tea.’ Mary waved the green Twinings box at Charlie. ‘You should have seen their faces in the corner shop when I asked them to stock it. Anyone would have thought I was proposing to drink babies’ blood.’ She raised her cigarette to her thin lips. Her index and middle fingers were stained a dark yellow, almost brown.
‘No, it’s you I want,’ Charlie told her.
‘Then I know why.’ The response was smooth and instantaneous. ‘You’re here to ask me about a man I don’t know. A man called Aidan Seed. DC Christopher Gibbs came on Friday for the same reason, and DC Simon Waterhouse on Saturday. Unlike you, they didn’t pull bits off my tree.’
‘I didn’t… The tree’s dead,’ said Charlie.
‘Taking its pulse, were you? If dried flowers can be beautiful, why can’t dried trees? I like my garden. I like my dead tree, and its pot. Look at this.’ She led Charlie over to the wall that separated her house from the one next to it. There was something protruding from one of the cracks that looked like a green rose, but with petals that were oddly rubbery, almost cactus-like, pink-edged. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ said Mary. ‘It’s called a sempervivum. It’s not there by accident or neglect. Someone planted it so that it would grow out of the wall, but you could easily mistake it for a weed. I’m sure you did.’
‘Can I come in for a few minutes?’ Charlie asked, feeling as if she’d lost any potential advantage she might have had. She wished she was in her office, ‘helping’ Counsellor Geoff Vesey to draft his letter and questionnaire-writing them for him, in other words. Vesey was Chair of the Culver Valley Police Authority, an organisation that monitored, among other things, public confidence in the police. Charlie’s confidence in him was zero; the man couldn’t even come up with a list of questions on his own.
‘You can come in, but only because I’m not working,’ said Mary. ‘If I were busy, I’d ask you to leave. I’m a painter.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘But you know that already. I’m sure you know all about me.’ In spite of what she’d said, she was still blocking the entrance to the house with her narrow body.
‘You didn’t let Chris Gibbs in,’ said Charlie. ‘You nearly didn’t let Simon Waterhouse in.’
‘Because I was working on a painting, one I stayed up all night to finish. As soon as I’ve got rid of you, I’ll be going to bed. Anyway, that’s why the song was on so loud, if you care: I was celebrating. Do you have a favourite song?’
It was ridiculous not to want to answer. ‘ “Trespass” by Limited Sympathy.’
‘The song that was on before-that’s mine.’
Charlie wasn’t going to ask again what it was.
‘ “Survivor” by Destiny’s Child,’ said Mary in a brittle voice, like a pupil forced to hand over a treasured forbidden item to her teacher. As she spoke, the lines on her face rearranged themselves, criss-crossing around her mouth. Charlie had heard that excessively thin people aged more severely than plumper ones, but even so… ‘I could tell you what I love about it, but I don’t suppose you’re interested. I suppose you’re one of those people who only puts on a CD if you’ve got guests for dinner, with the volume down so low that nobody can hear it.’
‘I don’t do that, actually,’ said Charlie. ‘I don’t rupture my neighbours’ eardrums, either.’
