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.
“She used to be married to a policeman,” Cara explained.
“Did she?”
“But you know how it is. She got involved in his work. She tried to help out. You do, don’t you? But she got strangled once too often. She lived through the Yorkshire Ripper, she had all sorts of hoaxers coming through, she used to report them to his seniors but it didn’t stop her having to walk about all day with an axe in her head. She gave him an ultimatum, get out of the CID, or we’re history.”
“I suppose he wouldn’t quit,” Colette said.
“So he was history.” Al sounded awed.
“She left him, moved down south, never looked back.”
“She must be older than she says, if she was married when it was the Yorkshire Ripper.”
“We’re all older than we say.” Gemma was back. “And some of us, my dears, are older than we know. The windows are intact. They must have got in upstairs. The back door is locked.”
“Funny, to come in upstairs, if you’re going to make off with the furniture,” Colette said.
Alison said, “Colette is nothing if not logical.” She called out, “Pikey Pete? You bin in here?” She dropped her voice. “He’s part of a gang that used to run about round here, Mrs. Etchells knew them all. He’s what you call a totter, collects old furniture, pots and pans, anything of that sort.”
“And he’s in Spirit, is he?” Gemma said. She laughed. “That explains it, then. Still, I’ve never seen such a wholesale teleportation of anybody’s goods, have you?”
“It’s a shame,” Al said. “It’s just plain greedy, that’s what it is. There are people earthside could have used the things she had. Such as nutmeg graters. Toby jugs. Decorative pin cushions with all the pins still in. She had a coffee table with a glass top and a repeat motif of the Beatles underneath, printed on wallpaper—it must have been an heirloom. She had original Pyrex oven dishes with pictures of carrots and onions on the side. She had a Spanish lady with a flouncy skirt that you sat on top of your spare loo roll. I used to run to her house when I wanted to go to the toilet because there was always some bloke wanking in ours. Though God knows why they were wanking because my mum and her friend Gloria was always ready to give them hand relief.”
Mandy put an arm around her. “Shh, lovey. Not easy for you. But we all had it rough.”
Alison scrubbed the tears out of her eyes. Pikey Paul was crying in the bare corner of the room. “It was me what gave her that Spanish lady,” he said. “I won it on a shooting stall in Southport on the pleasure beach. I’d a lift all the way from Ormskirk and down the East Lancs Road, and then I had the malfortune to be picked up by a chap in a truck called Aitkenside, which was the origin of the sad connection between my fambly and yours.”
“I’m sorry, Pikey Paul,” Alison said. “I do sincerely apologize.”
“I carried it all the way down the country wrapped in a cloth, and Aitkenside he would say, what’s that you’ve got between your legs, employing the utmost ambiguity, till finally he made a dive for it. So I held it out of the way, the dolly, above my head while Aitkenside had his way, for I wasn’t about to get Dolly spoiled, and I had a good inkling as to his nature, for those men’s men they are all the same.”
“Oh, I do agree,” said Alison.
“For it is all they can think of, those men’s men, rifling about in a boy’s tight little matador pants till they can find his wherewithal. But still and all it was worth it. You should have seen Irene smile, when I gave her the presentation. Oh, Paul, she said, is that dolly all for me? I never told her of the perils I’d been assaulted with. Well,
