by this time he confidently expected that the sale of Elizabeth Cherry's jewellery would make him a rich man. It was all there, safe in the backpack he had carted from one end of Notting Hill to the other and up to College Park. Once more he intended to carry it, this time across north London to Holloway and Poltimore Road. Then he remembered the foreign money. There was a place down the Portobello, for some reason called 'cambio', someone had told him exchanged money. Did that mean they'd change this stuff into real pounds? It did. He was amazed, as much as anything because he had guessed right. They gave him just under three hundred pounds for the notes in the three plastic bags.
Now, at the tube station, there was no need to lower himself to the ground and wriggle, snake-like, under those two grey padded doors which only opened when a ticket was inserted in the slot or touched to the circular pad. He had money and he felt quite virtuous when he spoke to the man behind the ticket window. The machine was too complicated for him. The house in Poltimore Road was found without trouble. It was in a street a lot like Uncle Gib's but not smartened up so much and like Uncle Gib's it had no doorbell, only a knocker. Lance knocked. A very thin dark girl answered and when Lance asked for Mr Crown, said, oh, you must mean Lew, and that he was away on his holidays. He'd gone to Corsica and wouldn't be back till Sunday week. Lance had no choice but to return to College Park and his nan's flat. It was a blow but things weren't as bad as they might have been.
By the time his nan came home he had packed up the jewellery in newspaper and two plastic bags, securing the lot with elastic bands. The postmen dropped elastic bands all over the streets when they'd delivered the letters, so finding a couple of them wasn't a problem. Worse than chewing gum, his nan said it was. He handed her the package he'd made and asked her to look after it for him while he found somewhere to stay. This request seemed to touch her heart for she smiled for almost the first time since he'd arrived and said she was sorry to turn him out. She might be sorry but she didn't stay he could stop on. The package would be safe with her, she promised, and she didn't ask what it was.
The two of them were watching World Athletics Highlights from Osaka, when the police came. His nan didn't want to switch off but they told her to in no uncertain terms. 'In case you're wondering how your uncle is,' the detective sergeant said, 'in case you've been worrying, he suffered a serious trauma but he's on the mend. He's staying with some very caring friends of his who know how to look after him.'
'There's no need to be sarcastic,' said his nan.
They ignored her.
'Poor old boy,' said the detective constable unnecessarily. 'Now maybe you'd like to tell us where you were between 11 p.m. and 1.30 a.m. on Tuesday night. Tuesday, 14 August, that is, through to Wednesday, 15 August.'
'Out,' said Lance, his mouth drying and his throat constricting.
'Pardon? Would you repeat that?'
'I was out.'
'Out where?'
'I was walking around.' He said it slowly and carefully.
'Around where?' said the detective sergeant.
Lance said he couldn't remember. He'd been into a pub. When they asked which pub he said he couldn't remember that either. Pressed to remember, he said he thought it might have been in Westbourne Park Road. He still couldn't guess what they were getting at and the most important thing to him was to keep them from finding out that he'd been breaking into a house in Pembridge Villas. Suppose they searched his nan's place and found that jewellery? Any minute now he expected them to say they'd like to search, they'd get a warrant and all that stuff you heard on the telly. But they didn't. They asked him why he had said Uncle Gib's house wanted destroying.
'It's a shithole, innit?' he said. 'It's a tip.'
'So you did say it? You wanted to destroy it?'
'I never said that.' Lance was getting seriously alarmed.
'Maybe you didn't say you resented Mr Lupescu having the top flat.'
'Well, it wasn't fair, was it? Him coming over here from some foreign place and getting the best bit of the house.'
His nan was looking more and more uneasy. 'I don't reckon you want to say any more off your own bat, Lance.' An inveterate viewer of
'Good idea,' said the detective sergeant nastily. 'He can do that when we get him down the station. Which is like now.'
Lance was so relieved that they didn't mention the old woman in Pembridge Villas or ask his nan to show them the package of jewellery, which he had been convinced they must suspect her of having, that he settled quite happily into the back of the car in which he was driven to Notting Hill police station. The lawyer they found for him was a very nice young lady who didn't look old enough to be a qualified solicitor.
The questioning began again. It went on for hours and Lance expected to hear those fateful words, so often light-heartedly listened to on TV, about anything he said being repeated in court. But in the middle of the night they released him on police bail.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Keeping an eye on Elizabeth Cherry's house, Susan Cox let herself in on Thursday morning and went dutifully from room to room. But her mind wasn't on what she was doing. She was thinking about the Notting Hill Carnival, due to begin on the coming Saturday and continue until the Monday evening. Its route this year was down Great Western Road from Westbourne Park Station, along Westbourne Grove and up Ladbroke Grove, a U-shape which would take in the Portobello Road but not enter it. The nearest it would pass to Pembridge Villas was when it sang and danced and rocked and rapped down Chepstow Road, but stragglers from it often strayed into these quiet sequestered streets and Susan feared for the small pieces of statuary in her front garden and the flowers in Elizabeth's. At one previous carnival a dancer in white satin with feathered angel's wings and a man dressed like Captain Hook had picked all the dahlias, and sat on the wall and rapped some lines of a current hit. Susan felt it incumbent upon her to stop that happening again, especially while Elizabeth was away.
It was a cool, pale-grey day, dry and windless. Because there was no wind and the curtains hung straight in their regular pleats, she failed to see that there was no glass in one of the dining-room windows. Lance had been an apt pupil of Dwayne's and had cut cleanly. She saw the buddleia and bamboo in Elizabeth's garden, as she always did, without noticing the lack of an intervening pane. The kitchen seemed just as she had found it two days before apart from an odour of not very fresh tomato. It was unlike Elizabeth to have thrown into the bin a soup can without first rinsing it but perhaps she had been in a hurry. After more than a week it would, of course, smell unpleasant. Wrinkling her nose, Susan removed it, still inside its bin liner, and took it home with her to be washed and put conscientiously in the recycling.
Making his preparations for the end, Joel now lived in as near to total darkness as is possible in a flat in the middle of London. No longer did light come through the glass pane in his front door. He had covered it up with a sheet of cardboard fixed to the frame with drawing pins. But there were lamps outside in the street that never went out. After the wettest, dullest, cloudiest summer since records began, the sun had begun to shine by day and the moon by night. Absolute darkness was impossible. Besides, his eyes had grown accustomed to the dark. Like a cat, he could find his way from room to room almost as easily as if the place had been brightly lit.
Noreen too had grown used to the way he lived. She came only three nights a week now and, to please him, brought with her a padded draught excluder in the shape of a snake, green and yellow with a forked tongue, which she laid along the bottom of her bedroom door. As well as draughts, it excluded the light from her bedside lamp. Linda no longer came. He couldn't understand why she was afraid of him and his home but she was. He had said nothing about her absence to Ella or his mother or Miss Crane. As for his father, no doubt he paid the bills without noticing or caring.
He had accumulated a quantity of sleeping pills. The hospital dispensary had provided him with a supply, some of which he had never taken. Linda had told him she needed pills if she was to get any sleep under his roof and on her last visit she had been so nervous that she had left hers behind. When she came round for them next day he
