I don't know,' she said. 'I just don't know.'
Better not to know, John Blundell had decided. If he did not look in her room, which was always carefully locked – 'I must have my privacy, Daddy' – he would not know if she was there or not, could kid himself she was, hunched over some encyclopaedia or whatever it was she did. Last time he had peeked in there, when Evelyn had permitted access to the cleaning lady, he'd seen a plastic skeleton, the only adornment visible in that Spartan room, before she'd caught him looking and frozen him off with her stare. She even supervised the cleaning.
He had never really wanted to know anything intimate about her, and her eccentricities made more sense in the light of her recently confessed ambitions for a medical career. Thank God Amanda Scott had been fobbed off from searching. The sight of a small plastic skeleton in the room of a female teenager struck Blundell as a worse obscenity than a naked man. As for what was in the drawers of her locked plywood desk, he had a shrewd suspicion. There was something else of value as well as a lot of paper. She loved jewellery, and he had noticed how she hid the things she loved. Up here, she was forever writing and hiding. One day he would improve on his glimpses. Not now, later.
But he cared if someone else knew. If darling child wanted to be secretive about her own bits of rubbish, and if he wanted to tear up his wife's clothes, they would do so. Family was family. They had come here to preserve family, whatever kind of shambles this one had been for years. With the careful calculation of two whiskies down, he waited until ten o'clock, dialled the number left by Amanda Scott. He knew enough about the inside of people's houses to hazard a guess at her life-style, saw her with cold cream, cocoa, and nightie, rather liked the thought. Two birds to be shot with a single stone: avoid prying eyes on the one hand and cast a lure for a new woman on the other. Not a bad prospect, Amanda. Might at least know the value of money and be grateful. Yvonne, the bitch, only liked the best.
In the Bailey-West household, peace of a kind reigned. A single phone call from Amanda Scott, bursting with the desire to report something or other, but guarded and satisfied when Bailey had said he would hear it in full tomorrow. No information given or received.
One of their neighbours was sitting on the sofa, complaining to Helen about her children. He was amazed at the picture they made, these two disparate women, even more amused when he contrasted Helen's obdurate unclubbishness with her complete inability to close the door on a visitor. No, she would not attend a meeting, be seen dead on a committee, sign a petition, but she would listen, pour a drink, and extend a welcome, unable to resist. At home in far-off London, her phone had never stopped ringing. Bailey had been irritated by it then, but found he missed it here. Listening to the neighbour, the well-meaning but harassed mother of two, despairing over the decisions made by local school authorities, he wondered at the implications of these empire-building residents of Branston, questioned whether fresh air and keeping up with the Joneses was really an improvement over life in London.
`He does so much worse than anyone else in his class,' the neighbour was saying. She was not tearful yet, simply indignant.
Stop pushing him, then, Bailey added silently to the conversation, wishing she would go. The boy is healthy. No one else is sick. What's the problem? Push, push, push, an endless spiral of improvement. Better houses, better cars and schools, all lined with the same amount of discontent. People nagging away: it's so good now; it can't possibly be good enough. We've come quite a long way, Helen; it might be time to turn back.
Bailey regarded the visiting woman with mild eyes she found slightly unnerving. He reflected that this brave-new-worlder was trapped economically in marriage, like a state-aided couple in a slum, neither with another place to go and no money to split up. The only difference was that one couple was more affluent and lived in a different cage where the padding didn't really help.
There were plenty of murders in these situations, plenty of scope for them in cosy Branston. The upwardly mobile, striving for heaven, by some accident curtailing their choices rather than expanding them, leaving themselves no time to think. No time to see how the children thought, either. Would they prefer the posh schools or the concrete playground?
Electronic toys or cardboard boxes? He didn't know. There was no time to judge your partner. Maybe Helen had time: she did not need him in the same way he needed her.
Since his contribution to this living-room chat was not required beyond an occasional murmur, Bailey was free to think of his own day. It had been pleasant in its way, a release from supervision, reports, delegation, and listening. Superintendent Bailey trying his hand at being junior detective and legworker – that took him back a year or ten.
Getting on and off buses, amazed at how arbitrary they were, how patient their passengers all around the parish, buses that stopped at two burned-out shelters and took him to Waltham and Woodford armed with a copy of William Featherstone's photo, taken on his second arrest. 'Seen this boy, have you?' he had asked, showing the unflattering image in black and white. Odd how these new Polaroids were no improvement on the old in giving every subject the appearance of a villain. 'Yes, I seen him, guy. Often, as it happens, but he usually smiles, poor kid. Been seeing him for years, but he's grown a bit.'
Bailey had been surprised to find in William's travelling acquaintances something approaching genuine affection, at worst a mild tolerance. Perhaps in calling him 'poor boy'
Helen had seen something he had missed.
He turned in response to a nudge from her. 'Pardon?'
`Mrs Levinson was asking if we like it here,' said Helen.
Oh, we like it fine,' said Bailey. 'Lovely place.' Noting with surprise how Helen had passed that awkward question to him. Perhaps the space was not so important to her after all.
He noted that, recorded it with amusement and something like hope. Perhaps – an impossible thought in the face of the evidence – she loathed the place as much as he did.
And akin to this, a sadder conclusion: yet another day had gone by without real conversation; the weekends of life were lost so entirely by midweek.
Helen thought, I should tell him about the committal proceedings. Then she listened to his polite praise of Branston and held her tongue
CHAPTER NINE
Shops. Oxford Street filth drifting on pavements that needed rain. Judging from the sky, they were shortly to be blessed with it. Of course, no one went to Oxford Street to look at the sky. All of them looked ahead or sideways, never upward, occasionally down to see what was entangling their feet, keeping handbag in front and pockets clear.
Helen was streetwise, used to standing for hours in Marlborough or Bow Street court prosecuting queues of pickpockets, dippers in every colour with quicker fingers than Fagin's children, smiling benignly as they passed on the escalator with a wallet already gone to the one behind, netting thousands a day. She was careful in the shops, too, once versed in the Can-I-help-you? conman: urbane and immaculate on the floor of a department store otherwise devoid of helpers, assiduous in assisting with choice of scarf, jacket, tie, before offering to take those traveller's cheques, dollars, yen, Visa card, whatever you were needing change of.
Take a seat, ma'am, I'll be back shortly, and you will sit here for ever if you're waiting for me. Famous characters when not in prison. Policemen patrolling this fairground of shops for the parvenues of the cheap to the merely priceless called it simply 'the Street'. The Street was dirty, shabby, crowded, and jostling, downmarket, upmarket, middle market. No one spoke English or walked in a straight line. Rudeness was customary.
Pretend stolen goods as well as real were sold on pavements along with tacky souvenirs, overpriced fruit and dangerous toys. Shop assistants either crowded around customers like flies or studiously ignored them. Litter bins overflowed, and the three underground stations were frankly sinister. Bargains and impolite robbery were equally available. There was nothing essential to life or decent to eat within a mile, and there were bomb scares.
Helen loved it.
Nothing better for a shopping addict. She loved shops, full stop. Here her essentially serious nature took off into harmony with the frivolous world. Helen could not shop with any precision, a facet of her that irritated Bailey
