The Crimson Rooms (39 page)

“I thought you wanted to put me in my place, I thought . . .”

His second kiss was the merest brush of the lips, feather-light. He whispered, “I am falling in love with you. Will you believe that? Would you please not argue this one point?”

“How can we . . . ?”

I felt the unknown bulk of his body against mine, the texture, the shape of his tie and shirt buttons as he kissed me again. He seemed to me an expert but then who had I to compare him with, apart from the boy under the canal bridge and my would-be lover at the War Office? Their ghosts were present, in the shade, and Stella’s, and even my brother James’s, but then the astonishing intimacy of his kiss blotted them all out and I was just Evelyn Gifford kissing Nicholas Thorne among trees in a lane between wheat fields, with his arms drawing me closer and my hand on his upper back, and my hat pushed off as he caressed my hair and neck.

After a few minutes, he pulled me deeper into the hedge so that we were a little hidden from the lane. This time our hats and jackets were flung down and I was drawn up under him, my back arching over his arm, his hand on my chin and his kisses dark and beautiful. I felt them as a tearing inside me, as if a strip of membrane had been ripped from throat to thigh and I clung to his warm, strong neck for fear of dissolving altogether.

I drew back at last, but he whispered: “Don’t say anything. We won’t say a thing. I don’t know what this means. I can’t think. This has happened and can’t be undone.”

He kissed me again and smiled into my stunned eyes, and solemnly, in between kisses, tucked strands of hair behind my ears. Then I put on my hat and we walked sedately away, although my hand was tightly clasped in his. As we neared the town, we separated and by the time a hay cart lumbered past, followed by an impatient motorist, I wore my jacket and he was decorously ahead of me. Gradually we entered the bustle of the little town and found that the rest of the world was still as it had always been, that cabbages and plums were displayed outside a greengrocer’s and that the baker’s window, this late in the day, was almost empty, except for a cottage loaf and three tea cakes. At the Queen’s Head, where Stephen had his two or three pints after leaving Stella on the hillside, dead or alive, we stared, standing so close that Nicholas’s elbow touched my upper arm, at the redbrick, large-windowed pub, shuttered against the heat of the afternoon. And then we turned up the lane leading to the church, where he had left his car, passing the wide-open doors of ancient cottages and the shrouded windows and shut doors of much grander houses.

I wouldn’t let him take me home. Instead, he agreed to leave me at Ruislip Station, where I would catch a Metropolitan Line train. The engine started easily and he drove, as he performed everything else, with casual competence. “Tell me what you are thinking,” he said as we left the enclosed lanes of the town.

“I’m trying not to think anything.”

He kissed my palm. The car was very hot but he didn’t unfasten the roof. I sat, butter-soft, helpless, my hands folded on my lap, turning from time to time to convince myself he was there, the side of his mouth quirked up as he drove, a little hunched forward by the low roof of the car. The smell of the Ford, leather and oil and polished wood, seeped indelibly into my memory of that afternoon.

At the station, he sat beside me on a bench at the far end of the platform, waiting for the train. “You’re so quiet,” he said.

“Be grateful.”

“But I’m not grateful. I like your words. All of them.”

I laughed. Our hands lay on the bench. He drew the tip of his index finger along the inner side of my wrist as the boy Peter had once done.

The lines sang, the train was coming. “I’ll speak to Sylvia.” He squeezed my hand, then kissed my cheek. “I’ll write to you.”

I stepped into the train and took a window seat. There he stood on the platform. Nicholas. I put my hand on the window, one last gesture before he disappeared. His eyes were full of shock and tenderness and longing, as mine must have been. The train drew out of the station; I fell back against the hard seat and closed my eyes. I had no substance, was simply a parcel of light.

O
n Wednesday, Mother invited me
to help her deadhead in the garden, where she took the unprecedented step of asking me to meet her for lunch next day. I was so taken aback that I thought she must have got wind of the fact that I’d been kissing someone else’s fiancé and wanted to put a stop to it. Then she added: “Let’s meet in the Lyons you keep talking about, where your murder victim worked. I’d like to see for myself.”

“I thought you hated that sort of thing.”

She wouldn’t meet my eye but made savage snips at a dogwood. “Life would be so much easier if you didn’t argue all the time, Evelyn.” And then she hissed: “I want to talk to you about Meredith somewhere away from the house.”

Next morning, Breen and I
drove to Wormwood Scrubs to interview Wheeler. Breen’s shoulders were hunched as if he carried a great burden. “The man is as good as hung unless we can save him from having to plead in the first place. Or unless you can work a feminine magic, Miss Gifford, and get something more out of him today. Wolfe has left no stone unturned to find the origins of that wretched statue but it’s proved to be trickier than we’d hoped. She is one of a limited edition of fifty, French, imported last November and bought by a number of so-called exclusive dealers and stores—you’re perhaps not aware, in Maida Vale, that these sorts of pseudo-classical figures are terribly in vogue at the moment. The damnable thing is that Harrods, for instance, had three, and a few were sent out of London to Edinburgh, York, and Birmingham. So it will be impossible to track down her purchaser with any degree of certainty unless we have some idea of his age or what he looks like. I’ve set Wolfe to making matches with Carole Mangan’s list but it’s a thankless task to expect a shop assistant to remember a purchaser who might at some date have bought a bronze, and to pick him out of the motley crew she describes. Always assuming, and it’s quite a leap, that it’s someone on the list who gave Stella the dancer.”

“And the missing night, the cloakroom ticket?”

“We have no proof that any of these things are connected, or are significant. I’m afraid I lean toward Miss Drake’s view of the type of thing Stella might have been up to. But in any case all this is pointing toward a motive for Wheeler, not an alternative culprit.”

We were silent as the cab stuttered along the Harrow Road, but then, having encouraged me to think the worst, Breen, exactly as if manipulating a bench of magistrates, turned the tables. “Don’t look quite so despondent, Miss Gifford, I happen to think it’s worth persevering, if only we have enough time. In my experience, the truth has a habit of bubbling to the surface like gas in a swamp. Truth has its own imperative, I find. Thanks to you we know something very significant: that Stella did indeed have a benefactor who could afford to spend more than fifty pounds on a statue.”

“And whoever it was, it was a thoughtless present,” I said. “Of all the things he might have bought, like clothes or jewelry—Stella would have loved jewelry—he chose something useless, the kind of present suitable for someone who already has everything, unlike Stella, who had virtually nothing. And a naked dancer? How was she supposed to explain that away to her husband?”

“Miss Gifford”—he leaned forward—“it was a clever present, don’t you think? Exclusive enough to turn a poor girl’s head but not so rare that the purchaser could easily be traced. And suggestive . . . Do you know what I think? That it’s the sort of gift a man might buy if he wanted to put ideas into a girl’s head.”

“Ideas?”

“If Miss Drake is right—or at least is thinking along the right lines—ideas were indeed put into the girl’s head. With disastrous consequences.”

The cab was warm, though the windows were pulled down. We were static behind a tram and the air was fumy. All in all, the conversation was far too personal for my liking. Surely Breen must see my bubble of joy; surely he must know that I had been reconstituted by love. That morning, a letter had been delivered to Clivedon Hall Gardens, addressed in a hand that made me tremble. I had snatched it from the breakfast table and put it in my pocket to open on the way to work, leaving the crowded bus five stops early so that I might read it without someone looking over my shoulder.

The letter was in my pocket; I felt the corner of the envelope against my thigh. So yes, I knew all about the ideas that a beloved man might put in a girl’s head. I knew that in some circumstances body and soul were pitched toward one goal. Surely Breen could tell that I was molten with expectation?

“To give a girl a present like that suggests a relationship that has already become intimate,” he said, “or perhaps one in which intimacy is being denied. We know that Stella liked dancing. In that light, the bronze is both flattering and quite shocking.”

“Don’t you think, Mr. Breen,” I said, “that such a man, knowing Stella has been murdered, must be wondering whether there is some danger of the police finding the bronze dancer and asking awkward questions? He must be very worried.”

“My thoughts exactly. But I have concluded, on the contrary, that he probably feels quite easy. He couldn’t have known that Wheeler would have the good fortune to be represented by the excellent firm of Breen and Balcombe. The police missed the dancer after all and we’re only pursuing that particular trail because you were observant enough to notice her.”

Mr. Breen, meanwhile, had changed tack completely and was addressing the Marchant case. “We have received a letter, Miss Gifford, from your friends Mrs. Sanders and Mrs. Marchant, requesting an interview. They have drawn up a petition, it seems, to have the children returned.”

“Should we meet with them?”

“
You
should, of course. They need to know it’s going to be a long and tortuous process. And you should draft a letter of apology to Miss Buckley, at the same time requesting a meeting with appropriate members of the board to discuss the future of the children. Meanwhile, I’ll get Wolfe to follow up a few leads, make some connections, see if he can find someone who has a lever on a board member. If he’s right and the home is intransigent, we will need to apply pressure on many fronts.”