acid smell. With the heel of his shoe he pressed down on the edge of a flagstone beside the foot scraper and a broken corner of it lifted, and she saw the dull gleam of two keys on a key ring underneath.
The mist had penetrated the hall, and a faint swathe of it hung motionless like ectoplasm on the stairs. They climbed in silence to the second floor. Phoebe had trod these stairs countless times, but suddenly she felt like an intruder. She had not noticed before how worn the carpet was along the outer edge of each step or how the stair rods were tarnished, and missing at intervals. At the door to April’s flat they hesitated, exchanging a look. Jimmy rapped softly with his knuckles. They waited a moment, but no sound came from within. “Well?” he whispered. “Shall we risk it?”
The harsh sound of the key gouging into the lock made her flinch.
She did not know what she had expected to find inside, but of course there was nothing amiss, or nothing that she could see, anyway. April was not the tidiest person in the world, and the clutter in the place was familiar, and reassuring: how could anything really bad have happened to someone who had washed those nylons and left them draped there over the fireguard in front of the grate? And look at that cup and saucer on the coffee table- the rim of the cup marked with a crescent of scarlet lipstick- and that half-consumed packet of Marietta biscuits, so ordinary, so homely. All the same, there was something unignorable in the atmosphere, something tensed and watchful and sullen, as if their presence were being registered, and resented.
“Now what?” she said.
Jimmy was squinting suspiciously about the room, as usual playing the hard-bitten reporter; in a moment he would have his notebook and his pencil out. Phoebe could not remember exactly where she had met Jimmy, or when. It was strange; she seemed to have known him an impossibly long time, yet she knew almost nothing about him; she was not even sure where he lived. He was garrulous, and talked tirelessly on every subject except himself. She wondered at the fact that April had let him know about the door key under the stone. Had others been let in on this arrangement? It struck her that if she was the only one that April had not told, perhaps it was not so strange that her friend had stopped calling her; perhaps April did not think of her as a friend at all, only an acquaintance to be taken up or dropped according to whim. If that was the case, she did not need to be so concerned. She was beginning to feel enjoyably aggrieved, but then it occurred to her that Jimmy, whom April had told about the key and therefore must consider a true intimate, had not heard from her either, nor had anyone else in their circle, so far as she knew.
As if he had read her thoughts- sometimes he showed an uncanny knack of clairvoyance-he asked her now: “How well do you think you know her? April, I mean.”
They were standing in the middle of the room. It was cold, she still had her scarf wound round her throat, and although her hands were thrust deep in the pockets of her coat she could feel the chill tips of her fingers tingling. “As well as anyone, I think,” she said. “Or thought I did. We used to talk nearly every day, you know. That’s why I was worried not to hear from her in the first place.” He was still glancing about, nodding, and gnawing his upper lip at one corner. “What about you?” she asked.
“She was always a good contact.”
“A contact? “
“At the hospital. If there was a story going, some high-up knocking someone down when he was drunk or a suicide that was covered up, I could always depend on April to slip me the details.”
Phoebe stared. “April told you about things like that?” It was hardly credible. The April that she knew, that she had thought she knew, surely would not pass that kind of information to a reporter, even one who was her friend.
“It wasn’t anything confidential she was giving out,” Jimmy said defensively. “A call to her would save me time, that’s all. You don’t know what it’s like, working to deadlines.” It was not attractive, that whining, hard-done-by tone that he fell into sometimes. He walked to the window and stood looking out. Even from the back he had a vexed, resentful aspect. She knew of old how quick he was to take umbrage, she had seen it happen so often.
“You realize,” she said, “we’ve been talking about her all this time in the past tense?”
He turned, and they looked at each other.
“There’s the bedroom,” Jimmy said. “We haven’t looked there.”
They went in. The untidiness here was worse than in the living room. The wardrobe doors were open wide, the clothes inside crowded together and pulled about anyhow. Intimate items of clothing lay crumpled on the floor where they had been stepped out of and forgotten about. An old black Remington typewriter stood on a desk in the corner, and all around it were piled textbooks and papers and bulging ring binders, almost covering up the telephone, an old-fashioned model with a metal winder on the side for connecting up to the operator. There was a cup there, too, containing the dried and cracked dregs of coffee that even yet gave off a faint, bitter aroma. April was a coffee addict and drank it all day long, half the night, too, if she was on a late shift. Phoebe stood and looked about. She felt she must not touch anything, convinced that if she did, the thing she touched would crumble under her fingers; suddenly everything was breakable here. The smell of the week-old coffee, and of other things- face powder, dust, slept-in bed-clothes-that mingled, stale smell that bedrooms always have, made her feel nauseous.
Strangely, the bed was made, and to a hospital standard of neatness, the blanket and the sheets tucked in all round and the pillow as flat and smooth as a bank of snow.
Jimmy spoke behind her. “Look at this.” A narrow plywood door with louvered panels led into the tiny, windowless bathroom. He was in there, bending over the hand basin. He looked over his shoulder at her, and even as she came forward she felt herself wanting to hang back. The hand basin was yellowed with age and had stains the color of verdigris under each of the two taps. Jimmy was pointing to a faint, narrow, brownish streak that ran from the overflow slot at the back almost to the plug hole. “That,” he said, “is blood.”
They stood and stared, hardly breathing. But was it so remarkable, after all, a tiny bit of blood, in a bathroom? Yet to Phoebe it was as if an innocuously smiling person had turned to her and opened a palm to show her something dreadful. She was feeling definitely sick now. Images from the past teemed in her mind, flickering as in an old newsreel. A car on a snowy headland and a young man with a knife. An old man, mute and furious, lying on a narrow bed between two tall windows. A silver-haired figure impaled, still twitching, on black railings. She would have to sit down, but where, on what? Anything she leaned her weight on might open under her and release horrors. She felt as if her innards were turning to liquid, and suddenly she had a piercing headache and seemed to be staring into an impenetrable red fog. Then, unaccountably, she was half sitting, half lying in the bathroom doorway with the louvered door at her back, and one of her shoes had come off, and Jimmy was squatting beside her, holding her hand.
“Are you all right?” he asked anxiously.
Was she? She still had that piercing headache, as if a red-hot wire had been pushed in through the center of her forehead. “I’m sorry,” she said, or tried to say. “I must have-I must-”
“You fainted,” Jimmy said. He was looking at her closely, with what seemed to her a faintly skeptical light, as if he half suspected her swoon had been a pretense, a bit of attention-seeking histrionics.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
She struggled up and stumbled forward on her knees and huddled over the lavatory bowl with her hands braced on the seat. Her stomach heaved, but nothing happened save a dry retching. When had she eaten last? For a moment she could not remember. She drew back and sat down suddenly on the floor, her legs folding themselves awkwardly under her.
Jimmy went out to make tea in the alcove next to the living room that passed for a kitchen, from where she heard him filling the kettle and taking crockery out of the cupboard. She wanted to lie down on the bed but could not bring herself to do it- it was April’s bed, after all, and besides, the severity with which it had been made up was forbidding- and instead sat on the chair in front of the piled-high desk, shaking a little still, with a hand to her face. The pain behind her forehead had spread downwards and was pressing now on the backs of her eyes. “The milk was off,” Jimmy said, setting a cup and its saucer before her on the desk. “There’s plenty of sugar, though. I put in three spoonfuls.”
She sipped the scalding, bittersweet tea and tried to smile. “I feel a fool,” she said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever fainted before.” She looked at Jimmy over the steaming rim of the cup. He was standing before her with his hands in the pockets of his trousers, his head on one side, watching her. He was still wearing that smelly raincoat. “What shall we do?” she said.
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
