Pleasure and a Calling (24 page)

‘It sounds like a case for detectives,’ I said with a stiff grin. ‘But I have been thinking. Consider this. What if the repossession men simply
followed
Mr Sharp to the Cooksons’, waited until he had left the car and then attempted to seize it. Then, if you can imagine … a quite furious Mr Sharp comes rushing out, an argument ensues, it turns into a struggle which leaves poor Mr Sharp dead on the ground. What are they to do? They panic. There’s no one around, so they carry Mr Sharp’s body into the Cooksons’ garden, ring their
own
office, pretending to be Mr Sharp, and then the office rings
them
to give them the location of the car. The two men empty Mr Sharp’s pockets to make it look like a robbery – or because they can’t resist the sight of cash – and clear off with the car. Job done!’

The officers listened patiently (perhaps they had already thought of all this and discounted it, though it seemed to me at least as plausible as Mrs Sharp being the killer), then the senior man asked quietly, ‘What makes you think Mr Sharp’s wallet was missing?’

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. ‘Did I read it in the paper?’

Neither of them blinked.

I searched my mind for an answer. ‘No, of course,’ I said at last. ‘It was Mrs Sharp who told me the wallet was missing. Along with other items. I think she mentioned his bags were gone. And his phone?’

‘Mrs Sharp.’

‘Yes. I’m selling her house.’

The older man looked weary. ‘So you are, sir.’

The younger one now asked, with a hint of sarcasm, if there was anything else I might remember about the day in question.

I pondered again. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I’m pretty sure we have it all covered.’

I breathed out slowly as I watched them leave in their car.

I could barely sleep that night. I closed my eyes and saw the stony faces of the two detectives. My stomach churned. Everything was slipping away – the town, my business, Abigail. I woke up in a sweat.

It was a crazy thing to do, but next morning I walked the short distance to Warninck’s. There she was, the woman I’d spoken to a few weeks before, serving at the counter. I recognized her immediately, though, again, I doubt that I’d have been able to place her if she’d walked into my office or if I’d seen her in a bar. And there was no way I could have described her to someone. But isn’t that how memory works? Doesn’t it all depend on context – recall and recognition not quite being the same thing? That’s what I was gambling on. I made one or two passes of the counter, then wandered into her line of vision, lingering as I browsed the ‘New This Week’ titles and the ‘Staff Choices’ and the bestsellers on the table. Perhaps it was a risk to speak to her, but my intuition argued otherwise. First, what was the alternative? To sneak around town in fear of discovery? And second, I told
myself, how better to avert suspicion than to come right out and, as Mr Mower always advised, look her in the eye and
dare
her to picture me – an affable but not especially memorable man in the tweedy guise of a country-town professional – beating lively, clever, trendy Dr Sharp to death with a golf club?

I frowned and sighed at one book after another until she came over and asked if she could help.

‘Holiday reading, I’m afraid. Any ideas for a long flight?’

‘Oh, lots. Are you going far?’

‘The Seychelles. For the diving.’

‘How fabulous,’ she said, friendly, but with an undertow of briskness that hinted at other fish waiting to be fried. There was no sense that she detected my true position in relation to water sports or indeed foreign travel (let alone murder), and she simply suggested a couple of beach thrillers. We went back to the counter, where she popped my purchases into an environment-friendly bag and wished me a good day.

There would have been some upset in the shop in the wake of Sharp’s death. Brows would have been furrowed when the police arrived trawling for information. Right now, though, this woman had showed no sign that her mind was occupied with anything more than a routine exchange of money for goods. If pressed, she might dimly remember having seen me before, but that was probably true of most of her customers – a good many of whom might have attended one of Sharp’s events and afterwards spoken at greater length than I about it. In fact, thinking about it, our conversation on the day in question had been primarily about finding a book, just as this conversation had. She had offered to order it for me and suggested the library might have it, as she probably did every day of the week for someone without necessarily remembering the colour of their
eyes, or whether they were bald, for the purposes of an artist’s impression or police identikit. True, I had made flattering mention of her literary evenings, but only in passing. It was she who had brought up the name of Dr Sharp; she who had eagerly dug out his card – unreservedly proud of Warninck’s association with a Cambridge lecturer – and, holding it at arm’s length, had read out his name and position as if welcoming the United States ambassador himself to the London Ritz on the occasion of the British Independent Bookstore Federation’s annual black-tie gala dinner and ball.

There was relief here, but needless to say it could not last.

I
N ALL OTHER MOMENTS
my heart was sick for Abigail. She was not to be seen at the library. I imagined her closeted at home in shock, unable or unwilling to declare herself to the police. Twice after dark I drove past her house and saw a light in the upper window. I didn’t dare stop. I thought with cold fear of the younger, suspicious detective silently following in an unmarked car, or dogging my footsteps around town.

I yearned for my hard billet in the loft, hemmed in by her mother’s old furniture, Abigail below, her warmth and murmurings rising through the house. In my dreams I returned there, my face pressed to the wooden floor, running my finger between the parallel grooves I had cut there until all dissolved and my ghost mingled with hers as she went about her daily business – swabbing the yellow kitchen lino, retuning her quiet radio, inking the milky pages of her notebook with lilac adjectives, emerging towelled and pink from the steamy bathroom. There she was on the bed slowly painting her perfect toenails, a tear on her cheek. Everything I ever wanted was there. It was a perfect summit of wishes, all I had struggled for. The key to her house
burned in my hand. I have often had to be patient, learned to take pleasure in the increments of deferred reward. But having tasted this one rare thing – this narcotic distillation of all wants – and then see it snatched away by cruel circumstance? Five days I’d been given and now this! My every impulse strained against caution, fought with good sense. These were hours made bearable only by the vivid conviction that the dawn would break eventually on that elusive sixth day, and that more days would surely follow. My mind floated heavenwards on a fantasy of unending days with Abigail, our spirits entwined, she stirring innocently, I unseen and unseeing, a pulsing life lodged in the fabric of her mother’s house in Raistrick Road, inhaling and exhaling behind the walls, beneath the eaves, beneath the floorboards. I was almost numbed by desire, forgetful of the danger that it could all end in an instant, that the whole thing might slide and dislodge and collapse to reveal some fiery hell – or that when the abyss cracked open, I would simply find myself walking towards it.

It was a full month after Sharp’s body had been identified that I picked up the phone and heard the voice of a young woman. We had dropped one of our leaflets through her door, she was saying. She had a house she wanted to sell. It was Abigail.

My thoughts were confused – a surge of panic at the sound of her voice and then another at the thought of her selling up and leaving. But here also surely was hope of fresh opportunities. Just to hear her speak seemed to herald brightness and possibility. How could it not?

It was as much as I could do to form the words necessary to arrange a time to call, and within an hour we were sitting opposite each other in her mother’s heavy patterned armchairs. Leading me from room to room (though of course I already knew every inch of the place), she looked unwell – her eye sockets
dark with worry, her arms folded as she walked, pulling her thin green cardigan around her body like a shroud. Sharp’s matching holdalls had disappeared, perhaps hauled to the town dump. I pictured a nervous, disconsolate Abigail there among the hulking battered skips, perhaps climbing the metal steps alongside Mrs Sharp, the two of them ridding themselves of this murdered man’s mortal trace, unwitting sisters in wretchedness.

‘And would you be looking to buy in the area?’ I heard myself ask.

‘No,’ she said. ‘My mother died last year. This was her house. I’ll be moving out of town.’

My heart sank. This was about Sharp, of course – her loss, but perhaps too the fear of being implicated in a police investigation. I wondered if she had revised her view of him in the wake of stories that had been circulating – his appetite for spending his wife’s money, his suspected involvement with Mrs Cookson, herself now the subject of fresh gossip regarding an affair with one of the GPs in a practice adjoining one of her pharmacies.

I followed Abigail out to the modest back garden. ‘It’s not much,’ she said, ‘but there’s a lock-up in the street behind.’ She unbolted a gate and we exited on to a muddy cul-de-sac, lined on one side with old-fashioned garages with painted doors, each with a number. ‘The green one’s ours. Mine, rather.’ She unlocked it and stood back. It was dark inside. ‘You expect it to be damp, but it’s not,’ she said, walking in and running a hand over the upturned furniture and unwanted household items. ‘To tell you the truth, I’d like a quick sale.’

I could have reached out and touched her hair.

‘Don’t you worry,’ I said. ‘We’ll soon have things rolling.’

She smiled and looked at me for the first time. It was unnerving, after all this time, to be speaking like this. To be this close.

Again, I couldn’t sleep that night, but now it was Abigail who was restored to my dreams, pushing out bad thoughts. The next morning I sought her out in the library. She was rearranging a display in the children’s area. ‘Oh, hello,’ I said in my surprised voice.

‘We meet again,’ she said, straightening up and holding a picture book across her breasts.

‘Amazing!’ I beamed. ‘So … do you work here? Of course you do, what am I saying?’ I laughed and apologized for wasting her time. ‘I just popped in to make sure our ads are in the paper – and the right way up!’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘Is that usually a problem?’

‘You’d be surprised.’ I stood for a moment longer, looking at her. She had freckles along the top of her nose. ‘Anyway, I thought I’d say hello.’

‘Of course,’ she said, smiling. ‘And hello to you.’

Later I waited for her in the park, beneath the trees, far from the path. Approaching one of the benches, she dismounted and carefully laid the cycle on its side in the grass. Now she searched her pack, then sat on the bench and began to write in a notebook. I could barely watch.

The next afternoon, I returned to her house to take photographs. We had coffee and went through the paperwork. She was returning to her old flat in London, she told me now. Initially she had been tempted to settle here in town, but things hadn’t quite worked out. ‘It’s not quite me,’ she said.

‘That’s a pity,’ I said. ‘I imagine London is rather more exciting.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ she said.

She smelled divine.

I asked about fixtures and fittings. She asked if I knew a man
with a van for hire. ‘I have a houseful of rubbish I need to get rid of – my mother’s mainly. I’m told there’s a massive charity depot on the way to Wodestringham that recycles and sends stuff to Africa. I don’t have a car. I don’t actually drive.’

‘Why don’t you let me help you? We have a van. I have spare time.’

I felt my heart pause mid-beat. This was crazy.

‘Is that part of the service?’

‘Non-drivers only.’

She laughed. ‘I suppose Sunday would be out of the question?’

‘What better day for a good deed. Ten o’clock too early?’