Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

Her cross tone set him off sniveling. Neither child had made any comment on the policeman’s visit, for which Zillah supposed she should be thankful. She was praying she’d heard the last of him and of Jerry. Perhaps, on the next visit he’d threatened, he’d only want to talk to Jims. Bigamy, she thought, when she was home again getting the children’s tea, bigamy. Why had that policeman asked her for the date of her divorce? But even though Jerry had been alive when she married Jims, she reminded herself, he was dead now. He’d died within two months of the wedding. Hold on to that, she said to herself, hold on to that, you haven’t got two husbands, you had two for only a few weeks. You can’t be a bigamist when you’ve only one husband.

At nine-thirty that night the police phoned. They wanted her to identify the dead man and would send a car to fetch her. Tomorrow morning at nine? Too frightened to protest, she phoned Mrs. Peacock. Could she come in the morning and look after the children while she went out?

“On a Sunday?” said Mrs. Peacock in an icy tone.

“It’s business. Very important business.” Zillah didn’t want to tell her she was off to identify a corpse in a mortuary. “I’ll pay you double.”

“Yes, I’m afraid you’ll have to.”

Eugenie, who had come out from her bedroom in her nightdress and overheard this, said in nearly as cold a voice, “Don’t you ever want to stay at home and look after us?”

The police officer was a woman, plain-clothed. She looked about Zillah’s own age and rather like one of those women detectives in TV dramas, tall, thin, with long blond hair and a classical profile, but her voice was an unpleasant near-cockney, high-pitched and brisk. She sat in the back of the car with Zillah, who had dressed herself soberly for this solemn occasion in a black suit and white blouse. On the way to the mortuary there was no conversation between them.

Zillah had never seen a dead body before. Feeling queasy, she saw that Jerry looked more like a waxwork of himself than a real person no longer alive.

“Is that your former husband, Jeffrey Leach?”

“Yes, that’s Jerry.”

The woman, who was a detective inspector, asked Zillah, in her strident, uncompromising tone as they left the mortuary and walked across a yard to the police station, why she called the dead man that.

“He was usually known as Jerry. Some people called him Jeff and his mother called him Jock. On account of his second name being John, you know.”

The detective inspector looked as if she didn’t know. She took Zillah into an office, functionally furnished, and asked her to sit down on the opposite side of the desk from her own. Her dislike was palpable, seeming to beam out of her in waves. “Did you write this, Mrs. Melcombe-Smith?”

She passed across the desk a sheet of paper with writing on it. If Zillah hadn’t been sitting down, she thought she’d have fainted. It was the letter she’d written to Jerry begging him not to reappear and, above all, not to brand her a bigamist. Her head was swimming too much for her to read it. Had she used the word “bigamist”? Had she? She couldn’t remember. She closed her eyes, opened them again, and made the sort of effort of will she was seldom called upon to attempt. A deep breath, and she managed to read the letter. Dear Jerry, she had written,

I am writing to you to beg you not to come back, to really go away and disappear out of my life. You did write that letter telling me you were dead, and though I didn’t believe that, I thought you meant me to act as if you were. Please do that. Please. I thought you were not fond of the children because you did not want to see them for months and months. If you want to see them sometimes we could arrange that. I could bring them somewhere to you. Jerry, I will do anything if you will only not try to see me or come here and please, please, don’t use that word about me. It frightens me, it really does. You must believe I don’t wish you any harm but rather the reverse. I just want to get on with my life, so please, if you have any pity for me, stay away.

Yours, Z

“Did you write it?” the detective inspector repeated.

“I may have.”

“Well, Mrs. Melcombe-Smith, there aren’t many women with first names that begin with Z, are there? A few Zoes maybe. I can’t say I’ve ever met a Zuleika but I believe there are some about.”

“Bigamist” wasn’t in the letter and nor was “bigamy.” It didn’t exactly reveal anything, it was quite discreet. “I wrote it,” Zillah said.

“To what address? The envelope is not in our possession.”

“I don’t remember. Yes, maybe-it was somewhere in NW6.” She might as well tell her the rest. “He’s been living with a woman called Fiona. She works in a bank.”

“You were very anxious never to see Mr. Leach again. What did you mean, ‘to act as if’ he was dead?”

“I don’t know,” Zillah said in a small voice. “I don’t remember.”

“You write that you were frightened. Had he ever abused you?”

Zillah shook her head. She supposed she must look frightened now. “If you mean did he hit me, no, he never did.”

“What was the word you didn’t like him using? Some insult, was it? Some term of abuse? Bitch or cow, something of that kind?”

“Oh, yes, that was what it was.”

“Which one.”

“He called me a cow.”

“Ah. A frightening word, cow. That will be all for now, Mrs. Melcombe-Smith. We’ll call in the morning and see your husband.”

Much as he disliked Jerry Leach on the few occasions he’d spoken to him, he’d rather fancied him and thought he’d detected an answering gleam in Jerry’s eye, for Jims was one of those gay men who believe that all men are secretly gay at heart. This, then, as he said to himself when Zillah told him, was a turn-up for the books. But he couldn’t see how it would affect him and Zillah, Jerry being a thing of the past in his life and hers. That the dead man had also been the father of Eugenie and Jordan didn’t at the time cross his mind. Family relationships meant very little to him. But when he’d walked into the flat in Abbey Gardens Mansions just after one, he was quite shocked by Zillah’s haggard face and shaking hands.

“The police are coming back tomorrow morning. They want to talk to you.”

“Me? Why me?”

“He wanted to know where I was on Friday afternoon when Jerry was killed. He’ll want to know where you were.”

Michelle identified the photograph in the Sunday paper as that of Jeff Leigh. Hatred, or something approaching it, confers much the same powers of acute observation as love. When she saw that face, younger, the features smudged and cloudy, she nevertheless knew who it belonged to and heard again that voice saying, “Little and Large, Michelle, Little and Large. Stoking the boilers, Michelle?” He was holding a baby in his arms and for some reason that made her shiver.

To tell Fiona? Matthew phoned the police first. He said he thought Jeffrey John Leach, so-called, was really Jeffrey Leigh, the man who’d been the partner of his neighbor. His wife had identified him from a newspaper photograph. Where did he live, they wanted to know. When Matthew said West Hampstead they were interested. They’d come. Would 4 P.M. suit him?

Then Michelle went next door to tell Fiona what they feared, what they more than feared, and that the police were coming.

Chapter 17